And now for a segment I'd like to call "Statistics and expert analyses that will scare you!" I am joined by Dave Dufus Doe, the Nobel Prize-winning surfer and expert on today's era of soundbites. He notes that 35 percent of the people reading this article were not a minute ago and that a minute from now 65 percent more people will not be. Doe also presents evidence that today's soundbites are getting shorter and shorter, creating shorter and shorter attention spans, which contributes to the … hey, didn't I say put down the chronic? It's for your own good. Based on the evidence, today's quote of the day comes from Doe, who says "Soundbites suck!"

And now for the segment where I present you with an analogy, that wonderful literary device that you failed to do on the SAT. Magazines are to novels as pop ditties are to albums as Hi-C is to chardonnay. The loss of attention spans means that superficial entities (magazines, pop ditties, Hi-C) will come to dominate the media and our cups.

To expand, here is a sub-segment entitled, "Music and why you don't know jack about it!" Today's pop song is three to five minutes long and contains a single emotion, usually juvenile and extreme. The fact that the lyrics might be interesting doesn't change the fact that the music itself merely sticks with a single sound that gets pummeled into you ad nausea infinitum – which in Latin means "Put down the Buddha!"

You may wonder why there are no pop songs longer than five minutes. The answer is simple: the songs only deal with one emotion. After all, can you sit through movies where only happiness is portrayed? Do you eat meals of only fruit? To answer these, today's official catchphrase is "Stop using rhetorical questions!"

Real artists can create larger, longer works based on the official artistic principle of the day, "contrast." Shakespeare follows seriousness with comic relief. Beethoven follows musical violence with a catchy folk tune. Spielberg follows a bloody opening scene with scenes in quiet fields. I could go on, but I've already lost your attention.

The dwindling of attention spans means the loss of stories, characters, narratives – anything that requires you to remember something from the beginning to understand the end. That is why people like spoilers: they don't need to watch for two hours in order to figure out that Bruce Willis is actually a ghost or that Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are both Tyler Durden. That's why people love pop music: they don't have to worry about the music changing emotions in the middle of a make-out session.

And now for the virtue of the day, "Depth." Though this word can be used to describe you as a bottomless pit, I prefer to have it mean "knowing a lot about a single thing."

For example, knowing that Karlheinz Stockhausen influenced the Beatles' music and appears on the "Sergeant Peppers" album cover is slightly more in-depth than saying, "Hey, didn't that Harrison guy die or something?"

And now I end with the segment I call, "Duh!" Isn't your attention span worth more than a lifetime of pot? Aren't you glad I'm here to keep you educated? In your newfound genius, you now reply, "Stop using rhetorical questions!"