There’s an easy way to gauge if you’re too old to be cool: watch the VMAs. If you find yourself saying, “Who is that person?” and “Why are they wearing that?” and “This show used to be better!” and “This is music is terrible!” then you are old and not cool. You’re also correct, but that’s another story.

Anyway, the VMAs don’t warrant paragraph form. You get bullets:

• Lady Gaga won eight awards, most of them for “Bad Romance.” It’s the biggest haul since Peter Gabriel won nine for “Sledgehammer” in 1987, and it ties the mark for second-most awards by the legendary a-ha. Oh, and she wore crazy crap. But you knew that already (inset image via).
• Chelsea Handler is not good at comedy.
• During last year’s VMAs, I joked that if you were only reading about the show on Twitter, you would have thought that Kanye West raped Taylor Swift onstage, such was the moral outrage. This year, if you listened to Swift debut her new song in which she forgives Kanye, you would think Kanye raped her onstage.
• Best New Artist: Duh, Justin Bieber. He played the drums. What a cute little lesbian.
• Kanye’s performance (video below) was pretty cool. Or not. I don’t know any more. But he sings about drinking to douchebags and assh*les, and MTV didn’t bleep assh*les, which I thought was nice. Kids may as well know that “assh*le” isn’t a big deal to say, unlike our ad partners.

Anyway, when I look back on this night, I’ll always think, “Wow, I can’t believe Alex Barron cost the Cowboys the game with that holding penalty.”

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Here’s the best part of this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” hosted by Taylor Swift: a digital short that sharply spoofs the Twilight trailers that make fat teenage goth girls all wet. And look! Taylor’s got the Kristen Stewart lip-biting thing down pat! There’s a lot to like here, from everything Bill Hader does to mummies not liking the Franks to the  wrinkle of drama we get from the rumor that the SNL host is dating New Moon star Taylor Lautner.

Other than that, “SNL” was the same as ever: kinda crappy with some highlights. I’m inclined to say it was worse than usual because I fast-forwarded through a couple sketches, but I actually liked the monologue (video below), and Weekend Update was really strong, and the cold open (Kristen Wiig as Greta van Susteren with Jason Sudeikis’s awesome Glenn Beck) was pretty good. Plus I’d like to credit the “SNL” writers for NOT basing a skit around the Kanye gag. It can’t be easy to avoid low-hanging fruit like that (funny, I often say the same thing to women while pointing at my crotch).

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Taylor Swift will host tonight’s episode of “Saturday Night Live,” and before it airs I’d like to put out a call to see if anyone knows a good bookie. I need to get odds on Kanye West making a special appearance to jokingly interrupt Swift’s monologue. It feels like money in the bank to me. In fact, if the only “Kanye” they can muster for the show is Kenan Thompson in Louis Vuitton shades, I’ll be immensely disappointed. I just don’t think they’d make non-actress Swift the host without some kind of plan to incorporate Kanye into a skit.

Of course, I’ve been wrong before, as the countless strike-throughs on this blog can attest, so feel free to heckle me in the comments section when it turns out that Kanye’s in a Buddhist monastery in Kashmir. Otherwise, consider this your open thread to discuss the episode. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon with a “What’s On Tonight” and Monday morning with highlights from “SNL.” Until then, sláinte!

Taylor Swift went on “The View” yesterday to talk about the Kanyzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Kanye said on The Jay Leno Show that he wants to apologize to Swift face-to-face for his behavior at the VMAs, and while Swift told The View she’d definitely meet with him, West has yet to reach out in an effort to apologize. Swift added she hasn’t received any phone calls or e-mails from the Kanye camp, either.

Let me be clear: Kanye was a gigantic douchebag at the VMAs. And Swift comes off here as thoughtful, pretty, and smarter than any person currently on an MTV reality show, so I sympathize. But that happened on Sunday. Today’s Wednesday, and me giving a rat’s ass about something that happened at an MTV awards show three days later is well beyond my capacity for bullsh-t. I’m more likely to care about a sandwich I ate. “That turkey and swiss last Friday? Oh yeah, now that you mention it, that was pretty good.”

When even the president of the United States is calling you a jackass, it’s a good time to go on national television and be contrite, which is exactly what Kanye West did on last night’s debut of the “The Jay Leno Show.”  The video’s below, and Kanye seems to have grasped how much America doesn’t like it when you drunkenly upstage a pretty blonde 19-year-old during her moment to shine. After obtaining a full apology from West, Leno followed up with the “What would your dead mother say about this?” question, and that’s when viewers were treated to a full 15 seconds of silence and the magic of the Kanye West Facepalm.

Thankfully, Leno doesn’t have a desk on his new show, because it allowed him to awkwardly try to console West by leaning forward and touching his leg. You have to give Kanye a little bit of credit here. It couldn’t have been easy to not say, “Hey, Jay Leno, you f-ckin’ mind? Can you not touch me while I’m thinking about my dead mother? Thanks.”

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