Dave on Demand: Mötley Crüel

Mötley Crüe announced this week that they were pulling out of their seemingly stalled deal with MTV to make a film of the band's 2001 memoir,

The Dirt

.

"MTV has become bogged down in its own way," bass player Nikki Sixx said. "It's a channel that used to be hip and has now actually become unhip."

OK, first things first: Mötley Crüe is back? Man, those headbangers will not die. They'll probably survive the next Ice Age. The only remnant of humanity will be Tommy Lee, chasing a bunch of penguins across an ice floe, clacking his drumsticks.

But being dismissed as "unhip" by a relic of the hair-band wars, a group fresh off an appearance on Larry King Live? That stings.

Yes, we all have reasons to resent MTV, home to some of the most obnoxious on-air personalities in the history of the medium. Take your bows Pauly Shore, Jesse Camp and Kennedy.

Certainly, it's been a long time since MTV lived up to its moniker: Music Television. Some clever executive in the '90s figured out that if you program for kids in 21/2-minute increments, it's like installing trap doors in study hall. As soon as you turn your back, the kids are going to slip away.

So, goodbye music videos and hello half-hour reality series. Now MTV is a dreary stream of reruns of shows such as Made, True Life, and My Super Sweet 16. In other words, just another sleaze-spewing cable channel.

But wait. If a passe band like Mötley Crüe judges you unhip, doesn't that very act nudge you back toward hipness? It's like one of those old brain teasers: Epimenides says all Cretans are liars. But Epimenides is a Cretan.

Did MTV just get dissed into favor? It's hard to tell these days. The culture is jumping unpredictably in five-minute increments.

Switching jerseys. For further proof that the pop world is spinning too quickly to follow, you had only to watch The Daytime Emmys on ABC (which did dismal numbers around the rest of the country, but actually performed pretty well here in Philly).

Right at the top, host Cameron Mathison explained that each of the soaps had its own table, as he stopped at the All My Children enclave to greet Ricky Paull Goldin and Beth Ehlers.

Whoa, Goldin and Ehlers? Don't you mean the Guiding Light table? No, apparently while I wasn't looking (maybe during the previous commercial) the actors jumped ship.

Oh, well, if Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen can win an NBA title in that sickening Celtics green, anything can happen.

Why doesn't he blink? ABC Family has a fun new summer series, The Middleman (Mondays, 8 p.m.), a wry sci-fi cross between Men in Black and Ghost Busters. But it's oddly cast, particularly Matt Keeslar as the hero.

I can't look at him without thinking of Chip (Jay Underwood), the teen android from those Not Quite Human Disney TV movies from the late '80s and early '90s. Keeslar not only looks like the boy robot; he acts like him, too.

Quick cures. Ever notice how drug commercials deluge us and then vanish? (Well, except for erectile dysfunction ads. They're always with us.)

Last year, it was all restless leg syndrome. Now you can't turn on a TV without seeing a fibromyalgia treatment commercial. Do diseases go in and out of fashion?

Diesel honey. I always thought Kobe Bryant was the luckiest high schooler in history when singer and actress Brandy Norwood showed up as his prom date at Lower Merion.

But it turns out Whit Wright has it all over Kobe. As seen this week on MTV's Once Upon a Prom, Wright was the guy chosen over his classmates at Hillcrest High School in Tuscaloosa, Ala., to take teen country star Taylor Swift to his formal.

I never thought a girl could emerge from a bus looking like a vision, but Swift pulled it off.