Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Tuesday, October 09, 2007)

So, there’s someone new on Facebook who wants to be your friend, but you’re not sure how you know them. No worries! Facebook reminds you:

10. Shalayla wants to be your friend. Hint: You were married to her for six years.

9. Bryan wants to be your friend. Hint: You stole his girlfriend in college and he’s always hated you, but he needs the friend count.

8. Rosie wants to be your friend. Hint: She gave you chlamydia when you were twenty-two.

7. Stanley wants to be your friend. Hint: You enjoyed his film “A Clockwork Orange.”

6. Master-Blaster wants to be your friend. Hint: You tried to chop his head off with a battle axe while suspended on long elastic cables in the Thunderdome.

5. Becca wants to be your friend: Hint: You sired her 10 years ago outside of wedlock.

4. Dad wants to be your friend. Hint: It’s your estranged dad, and he wants to be your friend.

3. Alberto wants to be your friend. Hint: He brought you up on ethics charges.

2. Mike wants to be your friend. Hint: He’s a casual acquaintance who has never been friendly before and who has no reason to be friendly now, unless he just wants something.

1. Henry wants to be your friend. Hint: You were both part of a Dionysian ritualistic murder club at your Vermont college where you killed that old man in the woods and then tried to cover it up by pushing your co-conspirator Bunny off a cliff.

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2 CBS
TV Movie: “Twelve Angry Whites”

4 NBC
America’s Got Autism

5 ABC
A New Vehicle For That Actor Who Was In That Much Better HBO Show

7 Fox
A new reality show from the makers of American Idol: “Who Will Be The Next Great American Band to Sign Over All Their Publishing Rights to Fox?”

9 CW
America’s Next Top Model: This week, the girls must show their poise while interrogating members of Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and wearing wigs made of salad.

12 Univision
Si, Hombre … Si

13 PBS
Ken Burns Pretty Much Owns This Space Now

18 TNT
We run “Law & Order” reruns so often, that we must start every episode with a disclaimer that Jerry Orbach is no longer alive.

19 HBO
Short Documentary: The Making of Something That’s Not As Good As The Sopranos

20 MTV
Hey, Lard Ass!

21 VH-1
An Interview With a Classic ’60s Rock Star Brought To You By Antipsychotic Drug Thorazine

22 Cinemax
Prohibited Issuings

23 Showtime
The Whiny, Mumbling Pot Dealer

24 E! Entertainment Television
Our Official Countdown of the 20 Most Prevalent Celebrity Diseases and Pathogens

25 Animal Planet
Animal Cops Entrap Gay Panda Ling-Ling in a Minneapolis Airport Bathroom

27 HBO2
The Fantastic Four

28 We
How To Trash Your Wedding Planner’s Name On the Internet

29 Do-It-Yourself
They Don’t Build Brick Shithouses Like They Used To

30 Discovery Health
They Don’t Build Birth Canals Like They Used To

31 Fox News
The John Wayne Gacy Factor

32 Hallmark
Sarah, Tall And Dilated

33 Discovery
Mythbusters use sophisticated fluid mechanics techniques to see if they can knock obstreperous dwarf comedian Chuy into a dunk tank.

34 The Prayer Network
God Gave Me Life

35 Lifetime
Hormone Replacement Therapy Gave Me Life

37 Sundance
Environmental Month Continues With the Documentary, “We Love Our Town Made of Shit”

38 CNN
Larry King and Jenny McCarthy seem to have been talking at cross purposes for 10 minutes and are no longer even having the same discussion. As best I can tell, they’re either talking about Autism Spectrum Disorders or whoopee cushions.

39 Court TV
Forensic Files: The mouse and duct tape blew this case wide open.

40 Spike TV
A Wide and Arbitrary Bunch of Things You Can Slide Around In

42 Food Network
Touch My Leek

(Originally posted Oct. 3, 2007)

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2 CBS
Place Idiotic Military Themed Show Here

4 ABC
Dancing with the Crips

5 NBC
Israel and Palestine decide to settle their differences by seeing who can lose the most weight on “The Biggest Loser”

7 Fox
‘Bones’ Ups the Ante With Extensive 3-D Endoscopic Footage of Foreign Body Retrievals

8 CW
Beauty and the Bed Wetter

20 BET Black Entertainment Television
“Dat Shit’s Da Hype!” A.K.A. “Continuing To Be In Denial That Rap Music Has Not Been Co-Opted Utterly And That It Is No Longer Threatening”

17 The History Channel
Modern Marvels presents cryogenic … oh for Chrissakes, why do you even call it “The History Channel” anymore? Can’t we just stop this charade?

20 E! Entertainment Television
“The Girls Next Door,” Episode 25, An Existential Quandry for Kendra: “If I’m Not Streaking Or Jumping Out of a Cake, Do I Exist Around Here?”

21 VH-1
If I Work Hard Enough, Maybe I Can Give A Blow-Job To The Aging Lead Singer of a Truly Awful ’80s Glam Band (Reality)

46 Lifetime
I Accuse Reba

47 Lifetime Movie
“No Pimp Comes Between Me And the Daughter I Carried In My Womb”

48 FX Network
They say the word “shit” so much on the Glenn Close vehicle “Damages” that they’re really just calling attention to the fact at this point that they still can’t say “fuck.”

49 The Cartoon Network
Adult Swim: “The Truly Gross Embolization of Mickey The Clot.”

50 HBO
“Tell Me You Love Me,” Episode 4, “Did I Just See That Actor’s Testicles?”

51 Spike TV
Fire Good

57 DIY
Do-It-Yourself Baby Control With Your 14-Year-Old Hosts Shayla and Tatty

59 Fox News
Roundtable Discussion: Some People Say Hillary Clinton Would Eat The Meat Of White Babies. We’re Not Saying It’s True. But You Can Make Up Your Own Mind

81 Independent Film Channel
Showing “Total Eclipse” starring Leonardo DiCaprio five times a week fails to make it a better movie.

82 Cinemax
Sex Law Firm

83 Cinemax 2
Sex Granary

84 Cinemax 3
Sex Haberdashery

101 Sundance Channel
How the Amish Will Take Over After the Big Oil Drought Starts

108 CNBC
Mad Money with Jim Cramer: Is Bear Stearns really doing that badly in the credit markets, or is Jim going into seizure? Oh my God! Put a pocket comb in his mouth and turn him on his side!

109 Headline News
Nancy Grace forgets whatever it was that had originally made her feel self-righteous after 40 seconds of shrill, nonsensical invective

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People are now worried that Congress might have gone too far in granting widespread surveillance powers to the executive branch with its most recent legislation. The implications of the law were so far reaching, that critics say many of the legislators who passed the law had not had enough time to examine its ramifications. Among the new things that the Bush administration can  likely do theoretically under the new law are:

–Look up your wife’s dress in a Wal-Mart dressing room, but not at Bergdorf Goodman’s.

—Infiltrate your book club and repeatedly suggest to the group that you read James Joyce’s unreadable classic “Ulysses.”

—Send you phishing messages saying “You’ve got a new MySpace friend” to determine if you’re making friends in Qatar and The United Arab Emirates.

—Check your business records to see if you have really saved 15% on your car insurance by switching to Geico.

—Avoid wiretapping altogether by hiring informants among your friends and neighbors in the fashion of the classic East German Stasi.

—Find out all of your buying habits by encouraging your credit card company and health insurance carriers to compile as much information about you as possible and keep it in a secret … oh, yeah … been there, done that.

—Broaden the definition of electronic surveillance to include having secret agents tail you around town in an electric car.

—Watch you closely for those $30,000 worth of calls to Saudi Arabia, because we don’t believe that anybody could really hijack your wireless carriers Verizon and T-Mobile like you said they did.

—Collect any information from you it wants as long as the real object of the investigation is someone overseas or the sales tax you’re avoiding by having your Jimmy Shoo strappy sandals shipped to a sham address in New Jersey.

—Spy on you in any way the government wants as long as you’ve already forfeited all your right to privacy by creating a MySpace Web log.

(Originally posted August 18, 2007)

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Top 10 Things We’re Just Now Learning About John F. Kennedy

10. He might have actually read “Profiles In Courage.”

9. He might have had sex with Jackie Kennedy, or even been legally married to her.

8. He might have fairly won the 1960 election against Richard Nixon.

7. He thought abortion was okay in certain circumstances, such as when the baby belonged to his mistress.

6. He was not a jelly doughnut.

5. It might have been the unnecessarily risky behavior among his family members that accounts for their repeated tragedies and not, in fact, a curse of the Greek goddess Juno.

4. He had several links to mob boss Sam Giancana, but is likely never to have gone skiing or snorkeling with him.

3. He did not succeed in killing Fidel Castro, who is alive and still wears a beard.

2. He may have rightly figured that the best way to break off a sexual relationship with a barbiturate-addicted movie star with borderline personality disorder is to have your Secret Service men scare her off.

1. Lee Harvey Oswald might have killed him.

(Originally posted Aug. 17, 2007)

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I remember the night I pulled into Brooklyn. Three days before I had slung a couple of big trunks on top of my car in Texas, but was then forced to drop them off in Oklahoma with my mother because they were cutting my gas mileage in half. I remember driving across the country with my friend Carmen in the middle of August with no air conditioner. To battle the heat, Carmen decided not to talk or move. I wondered if she had died.

We stayed in fleebag hotels in Arkansas and Tennessee. Then on Aug. 15, we hit the heavy traffic going from Washington, D.C. into New York. And there was the sign that told us where we were going. It was only about 200 miles or so. I didn’t think it could be done. I never really thought it was possible to actually drive to New York. I thought you had to click your heels or something. We drove into the dead of night, over the Goethals Bridge,  the cantilever bridge spanning the Arthur Kill into Staten Island, and from the top of the span, you could see the World Trade Center already, some 10 miles off to the north. And that’s when it occured to me that things were always going to be bigger and time was always going to move a little faster from now on. And that my life would have a little more urgency. That it had a shape. A beginning and an end, and I had only so much time to make of it.

I sped across Staten Island and up across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, onto the frenetic and dilapidated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, dodging trucks and taxis as if we were engaged in some kind of bullfight, racing with them and wondering if my first night in New York might be my last on Earth, but not caring, because the entire freeway offered me the ever-looming spectacle of those green-orange lights of Manhattan. The closest thing to Oz I would ever encounter before or since, and the most beautiful view of which is under the Brooklyn Promenade near Brooklyn Heights, where the city both rises and its reflection plunges into New York harbor. Carmen and I thought we were lost, but we were not. Our last exit to Brooklyn, as the name of the book goes, was right before Queens, on McGuinness Boulevard, where my roommate Ben told me to turn off. I crawled into the very dark and pungent neighborhood of Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood in Brooklyn, tucked into the armpit of Long Island City, Queens where the two boroughs snuggle together on Newtown Creek. A neighborhood with a huge Polish population, living in clapboard houses and their sausages dangling in every other window. I slunk in the dark with my soon-to-be-towed Pontiac LeMans to the street with the yellow building I where I would live my first month in New York. There was no door buzzer. Only a stretch of copper wire dangling from the top floor of this industrial building — a building that was unairconditioned, that was deathly hot, and that was situated right next door to a sewage treatment plant, but where Ben had managed to find a cheap loft for us. I yanked the cord, heard a crash from up above, and Ben’s head popped out. “Welcome to New York,” he said.

Twelve years ago today.

(Originally posted Aug. 15, 2007)

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As reported on Yahoo and elsewhere, new studies show that women prefer feminine-looking men, who they believe will be better long-term partners.

What moral and philosophical imperatives can we take from this? I think only this elegant existential treatise: Suck it, alpha males!

But what are the macho guys out there to do while evolution rides out the clock on them? Could it be

1. Sports! They could play football, maybe. In the street.

2. Drinking! They could enjoy a potent libation at one of your favorite rathskellers. There’s football on the TV!

3. Cuckolding! Yes, they will probably be trying to sleep with the wives of their more stable male friends. They might even succeed, since women do find men with masculine features to be attractive short-term mates. Fine. But the wives will go back to the girly men. It’s science.

4. Humiliating each other! It’s more fun to relate to another guy by pulling his chest hair and Indian wrestling and lighting each other’s farts than understanding the girls and their “girl business.”

5. Invading! I don’t think I have to expound on this one.

6. Body building. A popular bonding lifestyle for alpha males both gay and straight, even if it’s only the gay men who really find it attractive. Come on, have you never picked up on that?

7. Going off in solitude to rough it and pit yourself against the vicissitudes of  cruel nature. Sounds good. Whatever keeps your mind occupied.

8. Watching Spike TV. There’s always something on.

9.  Hunting. She’ll just never get it.

10. Hiding the pain. That’s what macho guys do best. Didn’t you see “Bridges of Madison County?” Oh, right, I guess YOU didn’t.

Actually, I think stories like this are a little bogus. After all, men and women aren’t that simple anymore We live in a different time when sexual roles aren’t so rigidly defined, and when both men and women tend to be happier and better able to grow when each of them finds some balance of traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” traits within themselves, and then finds complementary traits in their partners. I think if Bruce Willises and Vin Diesels  out there are strong enough–dare I say, manly enough–to get in touch with their feminine sides, they’ll do just fine in life. And sometimes, when it’s needed, we can be alpha males, too.

(Originally posted Aug. 9, 2007)

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