Our household recently entered the modern age of gaming consoles.  For Christmas, Santa brought us a Wii.  Or maybe Gimpy bought it for us, my memory is a bit hazy.  Either way, my goddam arms feel as they they've been ripped from my body and used to beat the remainder of me.

And it is SO damn fun.

It's been at least 25 years since I've really been into a gaming console.  Not since the heady days of my youth, when I'd spend an entire day locked in on Atari Missle Command, striving for the holy grail - rolling it over at 999,999.  That only resulted in a lost day of my life and a flat ass. The Wii extracts a higher cost.

Seriously, I think I've injured my rotator cuff at least twice on baseball.  The batting isn't bad, but the pitching will kill you.  I might be able to take it if I were still on the low side of 30, but I'm already at retirement age for a professional pitcher.

But I keep going back for more, because it's so addicting.  It's like digital heroin.

We've gotten a few of the bigger titles, which are fun, but we keep going back to Tennis (hello, Pong).  With four controllers, all of us can get into the mix, but there's more risk for injury there.  We have a fairly small den, so four yahoos swinging wildly at thin air is a recipe for injury.  Poe has taken a controller square to the back of the head, and I have nearly lost my left hand.  Mama was the culprit both times.  Watch out for that woman - she's got a wicked swing.

There's also the Fitness program (not to be confused with Wii Fit) which scores you on a battery of three ever-changing tests to determine your "age".  My first time out resulted in an utterly deflating age of 66.  I quickly improved though and can now boast a score of 20 while rubbing on the old Flexall 454 afterward.

Seriously, if you're at all into playing games, but aren't keen on the idea of becoming (or remaining) a couch potato - get a Wii.  It'll keep you moving.  Probably to the hospital.

I am a seasoned guitar player, and I think that the twenty-plus years of plucking and fretting under my belt undoubtably contribute to my disdain for the phenomenon known as Guitar Hero. 

Make no mistake - I am a fan of electronic gaming.  I have a great deal of experience with flight simulators, racing games, first-person shooters, and the like.  And I have enjoyed them all greatly. 

But I scoff and harrumph at these wannabe-rock stars, what with their feeble, phallic, plastic, oversized joysticks, and the way they feverishly slap and beat at them, staring wide-eyed at the television, watching a multicolored stream of digital M&M's flow down the screen.

They actually have the nerve to post videos of their triumphs to YouTube, as though they have achieved something great.

My Lady Friend thinks it represents an interesting clash between my love of computers - the ultimate enabling technology - and my long-standing love of the art of music.  In a nutshell, computers enable these mouth-breathing yashcos to feel some sense of what a musician feels to play a piece of music.  In reality, it's nothing like playing a song.

Unlike a flight simulator, where the bulk of the actions involved may actually give you some sense of how to pilot an airplane, the motions and actions in Guitar Hero prepare you not the slightest fraction for how to actually play a piece of music.  Likewise, with a racing game, you can get some sense of how to successfully pilot an automobile around a track at a different speed - yet all Guitar Hero will do is teach you how to flail - meaninglessly - at a guitar.

Furthermore - it diminishes the art of playing guitar, by turning it into an objectively-measured sport.  While some may look at it that way - most musicians and music lovers will tell you there are no measurable ways of determining guitar greatness.  The greatness is measured within - from the heart.

At the end of one such GH video on YouTube was a scorecard showing "Notes Hit".  It stated that he was over 90% correct, having hit over 1000 notes.  I would point out that he was 0% correct - having hit no notes whatsoever.  Plastic buttons, yes - but not a single note.