Alternative

We've been listening to an Alt Rock station on the radio at work the last couple weeks. It's a nice break from the Top 40 stuff we'd been listening to for months before that. I don't have a problem with Top 40, but variety is nice.

• Some of the people I work with are very young. "Did they just say 'If you want to destroy my sweater'? That's a weird line.", "Who's Kurt Cobain?", "Haha, did you hear that line 'I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me'? Pretty funny.", etc.
• As 30 Seconds to Mars sings "Lost in the City of Angels...The land of a billion lights",  I stop to think. Hmm, a billion seems high, let's see the population of LA is what like 4 million? [quick search] Okay, 3.8 million, so that's [quick calculation] 263 lights per person. Definitely too high. How many lights do I have as a person? I can see 1...2...3...okay, nineteen lights from where I'm sitting. And if you count all the lights in my house, it's probably another twenty. And that's counting little lights like the little blinking light on my computer here. But a lot of those lights are shared with other people, so I can't count them as personally mine, but even if I did, that's way too low. If every person had 40 lights that would be [quick calculation] 152 million, which is way short of a billion. Oh, and I guess there are street lights and headlights, but that can't make up that big of a difference. Holy cow, how long have I been thinking about this? I should get back to work. Oh wait! Christmas lights! Okay, if you count every light on a string of Christmas lights there are way more than a billion in Los Angeles. Some of them might only be on at certain times of the year, but fine, 30 Seconds to Mars, you win this one. And really we could safely assume they mean the Greater Los Angeles Metro Area instead of the specific city limits and that has [quick search], whoa like 17 million people. Okay, so you totally win, I'm sorry I ever judged you. What was I doing again, work-wise?
• I don't understand what the term Alt Rock can possibly mean in regard to modern music. Is there any current rock band that you wouldn't label "alternative"? I can't think of any. But what's it an alternative to? The rock music of the 70s and 80s? Can you really call that alternative when the other stuff is ancient history (pop culture-wise)?