Underpants On The Outside

I bought a new TV last week, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. That’s because my new TV is very, very big. The stereotypes are true; I’m a dude, and therefore I wanted as big of a TV as I could possibly fit in my apartment. I was willing to take down a wall or two, if that’s what was needed. But the process wasn’t easy; certainly not for Wonder Woman. One day I guess she’d finally had enough. She turned to me and said, “You just want a bigger TV than M [a friend of mine], don’t you?!? Why? Does that mean that your dick is somehow bigger?” I forgot to mention: we were inside a crowded Circuit City, and Wonder Woman wasn’t so much using her “inside” voice as she was her “inside a KISS concert” voice.

It was a bit embarrassing. She was kind of implying that I might need a bigger dick, which I don’t, unless she’s expecting some kind of vaginal growth spurt. But more than that, it pissed me off because she was assuming the worst about me, that I could be so base and petty. So I explained that a big-ass TV is practical because I’m thinking ahead, to the day when she and I have a family together and move into a bigger place. (I’ve found that when your girlfriend is 30 and unmarried, this rationale can pretty much be used to explain anything. I could probably get away with a pre-marital affair by calling it an “au pair audition.”)

Of course I was lying. If* we get married, have babies and buy a new place together, I’m still going to want a bigger TV. I just didn’t want to discuss my junk in the middle of Circuit City. She had me pegged exactly: having a big ol’ TV makes me feel awesome, probably as much as I would with a twelve inch moose-cock. That’s why I thought that for the rest of this post I would refer to my big-ass TV as “My Dick”.

I love My New Dick. It’s so big I could probably sleep on it if I wanted to. It’s almost seven times as long as my other dick, and don’t get me started on its girth. Yes, I DO love that My Dick is bigger than M’s, but more than that I love the way it ticks him off that mine is bigger. In fact, My Dick is bigger than just about all of my friends’, except for Ex-Roommate Kat and Jackie Treehorn. (Not only is Kat a girl, but they’re both Asian, so I guess the stereotypes aren’t true…) My friend Maverick says his is bigger, but you know how guys talk; he’s going to have to whip it out before I’m convinced.

Admittedly, when My Dick arrived, even I was a little shocked by how big it was. I was worried that it would look awkward, or even worse - that I wouldn’t be able to find someplace to put it! But it didn’t take long before I got into the swing of things, and to her credit, Wonder Woman has been VERY accommodating. She spends more time with her eyes glued to My Dick than ever before, and trust me when I say that she’s found a whole new appreciation for it.

In celebration of My New Dick, I also bought an Xbox 360 along with Halo 3. These shall be known as “My Balls,” because when you pair My New Balls with My New Dick, it is a sight to behold. Even when they’re not doing anything, they look good just sitting there; but when you turn them on, what comes out is truly amazing (though if you’re not ready for it, it can be difficult to take all of it in on your first try.)

Lastly, I don’t know if I’ll ever get over how good attractive women look when I see them on My Dick.

There. That was my best effort at discussing my new television as lewdly as possible. As regular readers might expect, I’m rather proud of myself right now, though I wouldn’t be surprised to come home tomorrow and find Wonder Woman rubbing my new TV down with bleach. I only hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.

*I imagine that people who know us find it cute to see me clinging to the delusions that any other options are still available.

Recently, I signed up for Facebook. Not to talk to my friends, of course; at this point I’m a bit old to use the Intermajig to communicate with my friends. Social networks are great when you want to tell everyone that your house is throwing a kegger, but these days  the biggest news is if one of my friends buys a couch, so it’s really okay if they’d rather just surprise me.

There’s only reason I signed up, and it’s the same reason I log on every day: online Scrabble. But my love for Scrabble goes beyond the pompous intellectual nerd-high I get from knowing that “Qi” is an alternative and acceptable spelling of the word “chi.” I developed my Scrabble soft spot years ago, when I spent a semester abroad in Israel. It was a tough time for me: I don’t speak any Hebrew, I didn’t learn much in my six weeks of language training, and on top of that, I found that Israelis could be a bit abrasive. (Read: they’re kinda pricks. Then again, I would probably be bitter too if we were constantly at war with Mexico while Canada refused to admit that we were even a country.) There’s really only one thing to do in that scenario, and that’s find a group of Americans and drink.

Mostly we sat around drinking shitty wine and frying frozen French Fries in butter, which makes apple pie look about as American as borscht.  (USA! USA!) Then one day (that I don’t remember) someone brought out a Scrabble board, and from then on it was a daily exercise, usually three or four games in a sitting. If I wanted to romanticize it, I might muse how Scrabble was our way of celebrating the English language, as it cured our homesickness and provided a respite from the unease of wandering around where you don’t understand what anyone’s saying and they all have rifles. If I was a little more true to myself, I could say that we played Scrabble because there’s nothing like the moment when someone attempts to explain why ‘jizz” should totally be legal. And if I was REALLY being honest, I’d say that I loved playing Scrabble because I usually stomped the living shit out of everyone.

Unfortunately, Scrabble gets a bit harder when I’m playing against the entire 34 million unique users on Facebook. What’s that? You doubt that there’s a network-wide conspiracy to rig the games against me? Oh, well then how do you explain the following, Professor Einstein van Hawking? Currently, I have 8 active games. These are my tiles for three of them:

#1) ATIIIOAA
#2) ITEOEIIE
#3) IIOLOSI

That’s 37.5% of my games that officially qualify for “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this crap?” status, and in a serious oversight, the programmers didn’t think to include a “Slam Table With Fist, Scattering Tiles Across The Floor, Then Pour Yourself A Glass Of Wine And Pout In The Corner” button. I now feel obligated to mention that there isn’t an actual point to this post; I just want to mention it because most of my opponents are Underpants readers and I’m trying to make an excuse for why I’m losing.

If only I was playing Hawaiian Scrabble or “Scrabble: Fellatio Edition”. Then those letters would be kick ass. ATIIIOAA: The blowjob transliteration of “Attire”. 57 points!

Once again, I spend weeks in L.A. over the winter holiday and come back to find that my blog has been demoted from “ghost town” to “wasteland”. If I neglected my actual underpants the way I do with these here Underpants, I’d have scabies, a majority of the Hepatitis alphabet and an unidentified lump. Then again, while I was away I saw just about everyone who comes to this blog, except for the three or four people who I didn’t previously know, and who have probably moved on to bigger and better. (Take me back, baby! I swear, I’ve changed! I’m a new man! Those other blogs don’t mean shit to me!) I can only attempt to make up for my negligence with vigor. In other words, unlike anything in my actual underpants, this is probably going to get lengthy.

It was a great trip. I saw my nephew, who is two years old. He giggles when he farts and pays attention to people in order, according to their boob size - I agree with where he stands on a lot of the big issues. (Diego in ’08!) You know what’s interesting about two year olds? EVERYTHING. People will spend hours watching a kid do the exact same thing over and over again, a phenomenon I call the Ocean’s 11Paradox. In social situations I frequently run out of things to say, but having a baby around meant I never had to have a conversation about the weather or Britney Spears, because whenever we hit one of those pauses that is usually followed by, “So what ELSE is going on with you?” somebody would just look at the kid, who’d be putting some object into some other object in a way that would either be cute or incredibly dangerous. Or he’d fart and then say, “I fart,” and as far as I’m concerned, that’s Wilde-caliber wit, right there. (Note: There’s only one thing funnier than a fart: a fart accompanied by play-by-play. I’m going to start shouting “DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?!?” every time I rip one.)

I spent New Year’s at the Magic Castle. It’s a dinner club for magicians, which tends to inspire a chuckle or two when I say it out loud, and understandably so: It sounds like somebody’s trying to call their treehouse a VIP lounge due to its exclusive, “no girls allowed” door policy. And was it nerdy? You betcha. There were magicians all over the place, and every one looked just like your average dungeon master dressed up in a tux. Like all nerds, they tended towards the short ends of the bell curve: overweight or skinny; bald or with a shoulder-length pony tail. Even the tuxes were mostly in purples or crimsons - the standard colors of warlock cloaks.

But this wasn’t your average tree fort. First of all, the place was a terrific steakhouse. I had like, five different animals over the course of my meal, and they were all delicious. And the club, built into a mansion that extends several floors underground, has bars on every floor made from the type of old wood that makes you want to order a scotch, whether you like it or not. And as nerdy as the aspiring Gandalfs all were, they were by no means anti-social recluses, because they weren’t just nerds; they were REDEEMED nerds. All those dorked out years had come full circle and it was paying off in full. The ladies in that place were every bit as USDA choice as the prime rib, and you didn’t have a chance in hell with them unless you owned a cane with a gold dragon on the grip. These guys knew that they were hot shit too. They would hit on your girlfriend while you were standing right next to her, and you could only hope that he hadn’t somehow impregnated her via slight-of-nuts.

And while every wizard had some self-deprecating jokes in their act, they were immediately followed by a come-on aimed at the hottest lady in the crowd. For example: one performer (who wasn’t even a magician – he was a juggler… A JUGGLER for cryin’ out loud) had an act featuring those wooden paddle ball toys, with the ball tethered by an elastic band. Playing with one of those? Geeky. Playing with one in each hand? Buy one geek, get the next geek free. But this guy was able to get THREE going at one point: one in each hand and one jammed into the zipper of his pants, kept in motion through crotch thrusts conveniently aimed at an exotic, dark-skinned beauty in the front row. I had an epiphany at that point: during those high school years I spent playing Magic: The Gathering, not only was I dork, but I was the wrong kind of dork. I’d invested heavily on the Pets.com of nerdom.

But the best part of the trip was I got to see most of my family and friends. The only downside was a logistical one: my two sets of close friends in California live on opposite ends of the state, and as it turns out, California is pretty goddamn big as far as states go. In order to see everybody, I had to drive from LA to San Francisco and back within 48 hours; approximately six hours each way. Don’t get me wrong; it’s an incredibly entertaining drive, as long as you enjoy artichoke farms and Spanish radio. If you’re one of the unfortunate few who don’t, then it’s nothing but a long, straight highway over an irrigated desert. To illustrate just how flat and straight the road is, in college I would actually read comic books or masturbate while I was driving, just to pass the time. (Note: Comic book reading and masturbation were not simultaneous, as that would be dangerous. I mean, semen stains really cut the resale value…) One time I even jerked off to a movie playing on a laptop in the passenger seat, and I was driving a stick shift at the time. (Yes, yes, I get it. But I actually mean it – my car had a manual transmission.)

But in college I made the drive alone; this time I figured it would be much more enjoyable, because now I have a girlfriend, and that means roadhead. I know that Wonder Woman’s father occasionally reads the Underpants, and at this point he might be gnashing his teeth at the idea of his daughter giving me a bobojo, or he might not, because I’m Jewish, and most Jewish parents don’t care as long as their daughters are eating kosher. But it doesn’t really matter, because the scoreboard reads: Hours driving – 12; Bobojo’s - 0.

Turns out that being in a car makes Wonder Woman sleepy, and in twelve hours I was unable to find a position where I could get my penis to her mouth while still keeping one appendage on the gas. (My KINGDOM for some cruise control!) I gave her coffee but it didn’t help; a few miles down the road I’d casually mention, “You know what I hear goes well with coffee? My dick,” but I’d look over and she’d already be lights out. She also considers roadhead to be dangerous, but commercials for erectile medications say erections lasting for more than four hours are dangerous too, and they’re talking about some guy in a bathtub on the edge of a picturesque hill, not a frustrated motherfucker in a Toyota.

Even worse: if she didn’t trust my ability to drive while orgasming when I had both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road, she probably would have thrown a fit if she woke up and found me “interrogating the prisoner” at 90 mph. Not to say that that stopped me from doing it; I just did it LESS. But she wasn’t just not giving me roadhead; by limiting my in-transit orgasms, she was actually road-cockblocking me.

Now, I’d have to check Wikipedia to be sure, but I believe that the internationally recognized roadhead ratio is equal to one bone smooch per three hours driving. I think it’s in the Magna Carta. That means I’m living with a fugitive from justice. (Please feel free to make up your own “penal system” joke here.)

And on that note… here’s to a happy new year!

As a child, I spent long hours in doctors’ offices, reading Highlights magazine. One of their features compared snapshots of two brothers, Goofus and Gallant, whose names suggest that their parents were fans of alliteration and gin. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the bit, but just in case, Gallant was the charming, well-mannered son, while Goofus was incompetent with obvious sociopathic tendencies, (which you’re asking for when you name your kid after a synonym of “moron.”) Gallant helped old ladies across the street while Goofus was too busy having unprotected sex, so kids could learn that it’s better to help old ladies across the street because unintended pregnancies cost money.

But let’s face it: Gallant was a square. This blog and its (small) community are dedicated to the saying of inappropriate things; when there’s nothing inappropriate to say, something stupid will suffice. And as I’ve learned from many of the Underpants commenters, nothing improves drivel like drivel expressed in a unusually grandiose fashion - it’s like putting butter on an Oreo. (For the record, OG’s prowess at grandiose nonsense is nothing short of masterful.)

In that spirit, I am proud to present the following quotes.  I hope they would be amusing outside of any context, but I think it adds a little oomph to point out that these were IM’s I sent to two different co-workers in less than a 24 hour span. 

“GODDAMNIT I DON’T WANT EXCUSES, I WANT HIGH-VELOCITY PLASTIC ANTHROPOMORPHIZED POTATOES!” (I wanted him to throw a Ms. Potatohead at another colleague sitting nearby, and I wasn’t going to take No for an answer.)

“Maintaining bi-species anal virginity is life’s version of a high score.” (It’s a long story.  Nevertheless, I believe it’s a sentiment we can all agree on.)

My “Employee of the Month” plaque should be arriving any minute now…

I can’t tell yet, but I either met a fraud or a miracle the other night. We took some clients out, and like a lot of advertising people they were a bunch hip-looking people in their early to mid twenties. In particular, there was one girl among them, who I would describe as “quite hot”. (Just above “pretty hot”, but not quite “excuse me for a minute I need to be alone.”)

We took them bowling, having a pretty good time, and over the course of the evening, she and I found ourselves chatting, because that’s my job, and for no other possible reason. The problem was that I had had a couple drinks, and when that happens, well, sometimes I say things that aren’t appropriate in mixed company.

That’s right: I started talking math.

Now, to most readers of this blog, “talking math” involves phrases like “X as a function of Y” and “as t approaches infinity,” so in that respect, I wasn’t talking math. But I work in advertising, where people who aren’t from the South will leave a meeting and say that they got some really good “learnings.” Any mathematical degree of difficulty higher than division and they glaze over, so when I start getting my nerd on a co-worker usually apologizes for me and tries to get me into a cab.

Sometimes I’ll shrug and mention that I used to be an engineer as some kind of excuse. In NYC, that makes me a complete novelty, and usually I receive a bemused, condescending look that I imagine calligraphers are very familiar with. But to my surprise, Quite Hot said, “Oh, I was an engineer too!” Incredulous, I asked her what kind, and she said, “Electrical!”

Like I said…a goddamn fraud.

I’m convinced this woman is a compulsive liar. Others in my office don’t exactly agree, based on two compelling arguments:

1) People typically lie to improve their image. Even a podiatrist gets the question: “What ever got you so interested in feet?” but when you tell someone you’re an electrical engineer, they’ll usually complain about some problem they’re having with their iPod.* There’s only one place on Earth where being an EE makes a girl hotter, and that’s wherever a bunch of male EE’s are hanging around. Which brings me to the second argument…

2) People usually lie to people they want to impress. Amaze a bunch of computer dorks and you join the elite ranks of the double-sided Light Saber and Linux. Congrats. I’m also not good-looking, so I don’t understand what her motivation could have been.

Nevertheless, just because I can’t figure out why she would lie doesn’t mean she wasn’t.  After all, everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a hot female electrical engineer.

Fact: I have taken a great deal of Engineering classes and I have never seen more than 10 women in the room. I’m being generous.

Fact: None of them were hot, let alone attractive, let alone what I would call “womanly.” Again, I’m being generous. (To be fair, us men didn’t exactly qualify as “manly,” either.)

School life as an EE was so female-free that in one lab the guys figured out how to work the projector. Some nights I’d walk in and find them playing Nintendo, but more often than not there would be ten to twelve guys doing lab work while hard-core pornography played on the wall. There was no way anyone with a uterus was showing up unless we ordered her from an escort service. (By the by, nothing says “awkward” like trying to design a microchip layout with a hard-on in a room full of dudes.)

I’m not saying that women aren’t smart enough for EE; my personal theory is that they just have better things to do, particularly the ones with nice asses. If I had the time and a whiteboard I could come up with a more accurate figure, but I estimate that the odds of a hot female EE are equal to what we men of science call “no-fucking-way.” You can’t argue with the math.

That’s not all. Even I can admit that I was fooled at first; I tend to believe everything attractive women say. I wasn’t convinced until we were saying our goodbyes, and everyone started doing the obligatory “we should do this again sometime” bit. I turned to her and said “yeah, we should all get together and wire some shit up; build some robots.” As she stared back at me, her face blank, I felt the cold shock of reality sink in.

See, “wiring shit up” is far different than wiring up, say, a motherboard. “Wiring shit up” means sitting around and discussing how to turn household items into a rail gun that could get a soda can up to mach 3 while taking a drink every time someone mentions Maxwell’s equations. Similarly, “build some robots” is code for “brainstorm ideas for android sex slaves, then watch Predator.” In other words, if Quite Hot had been a real EE, then there would only be two things she would enjoy more than wiring some shit up and building robots, and the other one’s a grilled cheese sandwich, if you know what I mean.

QED, people. QED.

So if you’re out there reading this, Quite Hot, say hi to the Tooth Fairy, my full head of hair, and every other myth I’ve wanted so desperately to believe in.

*Ten minutes after I wrote this, Co-Worker Jill** told me about some problem with her iPod.

**Excuse me; “Really Pretty Co-Worker Jill”***

***Doesn’t hold a candle to you, WW.

The ugly guy who looks like me is Big Brother. The vicious-looking mammal beside him is his son. According to my mom, I looked that cute when I was his age, but there is absolutely no photographic evidence to back this up. Nevertheless, if it’s true…well…he’s got about eight more years before things turn south. Sorry, kid. Welcome to the family.

While I hope he’s got his mother’s genes when it comes to preserving his good looks, I have no doubt that his predatory instincts come from his dad’s side:

You see that? You can’t teach that. You either have it or you don’t. And the men in our family have it. (I’m told by Wonder Woman that this is almost exactly how I first “made my move”, even down to the same landing spot on her scalp.) We are a carnivorous and merciless species. Frankly, I was amazed at my brother’s good fortune at getting these shots (not to mention surviving the experience); nature photographers spend years waiting to capture that kind of action. I called him to find out what sort of high-speed sports-photography settings he was using on his camera.

“I was just hitting the button manually every two seconds or so.”

Assuming an initial distance of 6 inches, (I measure everything in six-inch lengths. Wink-wink, ladies.) that means my nephew has a takedown speed of three and one-third feet per minute. It would appear the gazelles can rest easy for now; the boy isn’t so much a leopard as he is a Venus Fly Trap. Nevertheless, he should still have success hunting human females, who are mesmerized by adorability and can be lured into his open, waiting maw…

Go on in, sweetheart, he won’t hurt you…

(For those of you looking for more hard-core cute-on-cute action, go to www.twosloths.com)

There’s nothing like the morning after thanksgiving. I don’t know about everybody else, but it’s the only day of the year where I wake up in pain, confused, disoriented, and somehow positive that the one thing that can restore my equilibrium is Stove Top stuffing.

As an added bonus, Wonder Woman had to go to work today. I realize that that sounds mean, but please understand how much enjoyment I derive out of making fun of her. (Hi, baby! Wish you were here!) Of course I like spending time with her, but even at this point in our relationship there are activities that I enjoy that she doesn’t understand, so today I’m like Ferris Bueller, if Ferris had no desire to see or experience anything other than food-based hedonism and naps. For instance, I can positively say that if I wanted to sit around my apartment today writing a blog post while wearing nothing but a thin layer of turkey grease, I could do it! Hypothetically of course. (giggle)

Here are some of the things I was thinking about yesterday instead of all the things I’m grateful for:

Ask anyone over the age of 25 and they’ll tell you that Thanksgiving is the best day of the year, because Christmas and Channuccquah (you don’t know how to spell it either) suck once you’re responsible for buying OTHER people presents. Meanwhile everybody likes eating. I bet that every November, other countries watch and wish that they’d had American Indians in their country a couple hundred years ago. (What’s up NOW, China!?!)

If people are anything like me, there are certain elements that they require at a Thanksgiving dinner, and it’s upsetting if things aren’t right. For instance, two years ago, we went to a member of WW’s extended family. They are tremendously sweet people; sweet to a fault, in fact. They had invited vegetarians and VEGANS (for fuck’s sake…VEGANS!) and tried to be accommodating hosts, meaning that we had one good turkey and a bunch of crappy side dishes. In my opinion, Thanksgiving should be the one day of the year that it is legal to hunt vegans for sport. We left hungry. I intend to forgive them in eight more years. Yesterday, as we were walking to her parent’s house, WW informed me that we wouldn’t be having gravy and her parents don’t have cable, so, no TV. They say when you marry someone, you marry their whole family. Well, right there, you see two big reasons why I’m still not ready to marry WW. They’re nice and all, but that only counts three hundred and sixty FOUR days of the year. I think I’d actually prefer it if they were anti-Semitic. But instead of breaking up with her, I decided to make the damn gravy myself. (She’s lucky that coin landed heads-side up!) And y’know what? It was awesome. It was full of my favorite flavor: righteousness. Our love is renewed.

As much as people idealize the Thanksgivings of their childhoods, I have to say, my brother has a damn good one going with his in-laws. He married into a gigantic, close-knit family, and they understand what the holiday is all about: old-fashioned patriarchic family values. By which I mean that on Thanksgiving, men don’t do SHIT. The only thing they are responsible for is the deep-fried turkey (there are usually one or two others), meaning one guy stands outside watching it, and the rest come out to bring him a beer, let him know the score or tell him when a particularly good play was made. (If they feel up for it, they might act the play out.) Other than that, all they have to do is eat, drink, play with the kids, and wake up when the pie is ready. They don’t even clean, yet the women are all cool with it, because it’s Thanksgiving. I still haven’t figured out how they set that up; all I know is that it makes Charlie’s day at the Chocolate Factory look quaint.

Uh oh - in all this reminiscing my grease-coat has gotten dry. Time for another Thanksgiving sandwich* and gravy rub-down. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

*Turkey, stuffing, gravy and cranberry sauce…on bread. Because non-edible plates are for chumps.

It’s taken me too long to write this, but a travesty has occurred. A hero has been silenced.

I’m talking about a man who has saved Los Angeles and/or the universe from nuclear fire and chemical plagues. If the ancient Egyptians had experienced the terrors he faces in an average work day, they not only would have freed the Jews, they would have sent them on their way with gift baskets and some maps. He has been shot, stabbed, poisoned, trapped, beaten, and tasered*, and regularly goes 24 hours without taking a shit. Yet Jack Bauer has finally met the one force on Earth that can stop him. A bunch of writers.

Fox has officially postponed the next season of 24 indefinitely due to the writers’ strike. I always thought the worst thing the Writer’s Guild ever did to Jack Bauer was Audrey, and for that alone they deserved an evening in Jack Bauer’s Oubliette of Agony**. But to shut him down entirely?? Highly trained terrorists couldn’t do that. By the transitive property, that means that the Writer’s Guild is worse than terrorists. You heard it here first.

These are men whose collective upper body strength would suggest they spent their childhoods selling Thin Mints, yet they were able to incapacitate Jack Bauer by simply not going to work. Meanwhile, Jack Bauer wouldn’t miss a day of work if his life depended on it. (I don’t mean that figuratively; Jack seriously ups his chances of dying just by going in to work in the first place. Of course, it also maximizes his opportunities to inflict pain, so he takes the bad with the good.)

If the average writer is anything like myself, he noodles around on the internet for a couple hours debating who to start on his fantasy team, starts writing around 11:30, hits a snag around a quarter to one and goes out for a burrito. Compare that to Jack Bauer, who in an average work day will be incapacitated up to fourteen times and his first eighteen to twenty plans will go horribly awry. Despite all that, he doesn’t complain about five or six bullet holes, so you certainly won’t hear him whine about “unfair shares of internet revenue.” You hear that, Writer’s Guild of America?!? Thanks to you, Jack Bauer isn’t on the job! Maybe the next nuclear bomb will go off somewhere a little more close to home than VALENCIA, and then we’ll see how much your royalty checks can protect you!

Actually, the more I think about it, the more it seems like Fox had an awfully itchy trigger finger when it came to putting 24 down like Old Yeller. I don’t even think the writers had finished thinking of clever puns for their picket signs. I see it as more of an indictment of how terrible last season was. The story was like reverse-Darwinism: the best characters were killed off, and now only the weak (or not-so-pretty…CHLOE) survive. Fox just saved themselves millions of dollars on advertising a show starring Jack Bauer, Chloe, and 526 anonymous CTU agents with very short lifespans.

There is one good side to this strike issue. Since I’ve started watching the show, I’ve struggled with the fact that Jack does more than an hour than I do in a week. Well, not this year! SUCK MY PRODUCTIVITY, BAUER!

*There’s also a tremendously stupid sounding rumor about an incident with a cougar or puma or something. Maybe a Yeti, or Jawas. I don’t know, I just remember it was stupid.

**That’s my name for Jack Bauer’s basement. I imagine it filled with all sorts of four-point restraint harnesses, handcuffs (both standard and furred; Jack likes ladies who live on the edge), blood-stained tools (sets in both English units and Metric), along with a TV and a beer fridge. Then again, that’s kinda how I imagine every room in the Bauer household.

I’m on a roll, baby! 

Today, Cracked.com has once again been kind enough to publish an article of mine: the Seven Most Terrifying Celebrity Transformations.   I cannot say enough kind things about their editorial staff; not only do they accept my work - and pay for it, the suckers! - they do quite a lot of work on it.  Their contributions are like the 90% of artificial sweeteners that make my 10% cranberry juice into an enjoyable beverage.  (For instance, they probably would have edited that simile out.)

I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of Halloween. When I was a kid it was all about the pursuit of candy and not getting beaten up, which I was really good at. I was adorable and small, which provided me with above average candy yields as well as a high power-to-weight ratio for increased acceleration (away from attackers). But at some point Halloween became focused on the pursuit of sex, right around the time when I became significantly less adorable while remaining just as small - not an advantageous combination when one is Trick or Treating for loin candy.

Now I’m not such a fan of Halloween. Don’t get me wrong; any time a vast number of women want to dress up as a Sexy Fill-in-the-Blank, I’m all for it. But the expectations are just too high. Costumes have to be clever and artistic, but I am clever or artistic too infrequently to ever be both at the same time. And if you go by the liquor ads, the only good Halloween party is one where swimsuit models dressed as nurses and kittens throw you (and your Bacardi Silver) into a pool.* Anything less and you might as well have stayed home, loser.

That being said… Halloween 2007 is going to be a good one. That’s because today I’ve been published on McSweeney’s. (You can find the article here.) I’ve already mentioned in this space how much I enjoy and respect McSweeney’s, and even though they’ve been rejecting my submissions for about two years now, my respect wasn’t in a Groucho Marx / “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” sort of way. No, McSweeney’s is awesome because they’re, like, all literary ‘n’ stuff.

What that means is that by being published there I am hereby officially “smart.” RECOGNIZE MY BRAIN SKILLS, BITCHES!***

*Later to have sex with you.**

**and your Bacardi Silver

***Sorry for using the b-word, Mom.