Kicking off your week with a new waste of time:The Monday Morning Cage Match.

As you may have noticed recently, I have trouble coming up with material on a Monday morning. Actually, I have trouble doing much of anything on a Monday morning other than despairing over having to return to work for another week and wondering what happened to my professional hopes and dreams, but that's neither here nor there. But I think I've found a solution to the first problem, inspired partly by the fiendish binary simplicity of Flickchart and the fact that I recently took an HTML class where I learned how to make tables: The Monday Morning Cage Match.

There's nothing complicated about the Cage Match. Basically we match up two people, places, or things that have some superficial, barely-worth-even-talking-about similarity and compare them in seven categories. Whichever one is superior in the most categories wins. If you believe in the infinite-monkeys-with-an-infinite-number-of-typewriters theorem ("Infinite Monkeys" is totally going to be the title of my movie-production company, by the way, whenever I get that started), then if we do this long enough theoretically we should be able to rank every last thing on the planet from best to worst, a la Flickchart, but I'm keeping the goals manageable for the time being (i.e. making it remotely tolerable to read on a weekly basis).

So here's the first Cage Match: "99 Problems" vs. "99 Luftballons." Do your worst; I know I did.

	"99 Problems" (Jay-Z)	"99 Luftballons" (Nena)
Subject matter	Mercenary media outlets, corrupt cops, annoying hangers-on	Nuclear armageddon
WINNER: Nena
Proof of artist's cleverness	Surprises policeman by invoking 4th-amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure	Releases balloons to confuse Cold War-era strategic-defense systems
WINNER: Jay-Z
Outcome of this brilliant plan	Vehicle searched by police dogs	Nuclear armageddon
WINNER: Nena
Sample lyric	"I got the rap patrol on the gat patrol/ Foes that wanna make sure my casket's closed/ Rap critics, they say he's 'Money-cash- hoes'/ I'm from the hood, stupid, what type of facts are those?..."	"99 knights of the air/ ride super-high-tech jet fighters/ Everyone's a superhero/ Everyone's a Captain Kirk..."
WINNER: Jay-Z
Primary negative of song	Casual use of the word "bitch"	Original version sung in German
WINNER: Jay-Z
Other hits by same artist	"Can't Knock the Hustle," "Can I Get A...", "Big Pimpin'"	None that I'm aware of
WINNER: Jay-Z
Questionable pop- cultural usage	Cookie Monster remix	Ally Sheedy dancing to it like a fucking loon in "The Breakfast Club"
WINNER: Nena

FINAL SCORE: Problems 4, Luftballons 3. Jay-Z gets additional style points by virtue of being married to Beyoncé and managing not to have started a nuclear war.