Earlier tonight, staring at the gaping void that is the Wednesday 8:00 PM time slot, I made a choice. I watched The Price is Right. There he was! Drew Carey! Asking people penetrating questions such as: "So, how much do you think this can of beans is?" I love America.

(Please don't eat canned beans.)

The producers of The Price is Right were smart in that they have preserved nearly every embarrassing, half-assed aspect of the show, from the "Come on down!" hucksterism and hysteria to the bemused contempt of the host: Drew Carey treated most of the adrenalized contestants much like a cruise hypnotist treats the mooks he yanks from the crowd that he's about to force to act like homosexual construction workers. Carey seemed momentarily vitalized by the sudden appearance of a contestant wearing a Bernie Kosar jersey--he very nearly came within shouting distance of actual charm--before settling torpidly back into his colossal suit, like a hermit crab wearily withdrawing into a discarded Ding-Dong wrapper.

When I was a younger fellow, I had an unearthly love for game shows. I do not know why, apart from humanity's seemingly bottomless appreciation for these polyester spectacles. Wikipedia gives 197 pages of virtual ink to American game shows alone (out of 248 possible); I didn't have the heart or the intestines to even see what including the Brits would tot up to.

There was nothing I loved more as a kid than, when staying home sick (or in the summers) waking up to gargle joyously with a potent cocktail of daytime game shows.

(Apart, of course, from Saturday morning cartoons, but even then, I'm not sure. For one thing, I have way too many memories of the fucking Macy's Day Parade ruining everything. There I'd be sitting, at 7:00 AM, nearly in tears, as I saw a giant Pluto float fill my tiny TV screen. FUCK YOU, Macy's Day Parade. That was always the worst day of the year for me. "Look, it's a big Snoopy float!" my mom once said, trying to cheer me up. "You like Snoopy." "Not today!" I shrieked. She gave up and told me that the Smurfs would be back next Saturday. I was unmoved. I hated the Smurfs. Then a Smurf float went by on TV at the fucking parade, and I retreated into autism until I was old enough to smoke and legitimately practice sneering.)

But game shows! And not to get all 'mudgy on you all, but back in the day? THEY WERE GAME SHOWS. Sort of. At least they weren't botulism vectors like Deal or No Deal, which dares to ask the question "Can you count to 26?" Here were some of my favorites.

The Joker's Wild

Joker! JOKER! JOKER!

This one is probably the earliest I remember, almost certainly because of the completely Mephistophelean appearance and demeanor of the host, Jack Barry. It welded all the tedium and dumb luck of slot machines with all the tedium and dumb luck of general trivia questions, and even better, when contestants missed a question, Jack Barry would explode into a cloud of stinging insects and eat his eyes right on camera. Winners were simply allowed to sob emptily as God turned his face away from them; it was a real sinner's game show.

Sale of the Century

I don't remember a lot about this one except again for the host, the diabolical asshole Jim Perry, who would periodically haggle with the contestants over the opportunity to "buy" prizes like robots that juggled dog turds. A surreally unctious douchebag, Jim Perry set the bar high for all future game show hosts to come. The show itself is also a sobering historical document: at the beginning of the show, each contestant had twenty bucks to spend. Awesome. Twenty bucks. That's like getting the opportunity to check your tire pressure at Conoco today.

(On edit . . . does Conoco even still exist? I think I hear my joints gabbling.)

The $(X) Pyramid

Oh, you all remember this; it long ago passed into the Emersonian Oversoul. A relative of the hoary Password game, this one paired B-list celebrities with fools from the crowd you attempted to get your partner to say a word or short phrase without using that word or any variants. I can't tell you how many hours I spent shouting out helpful clues for Michael J. Fox as he attempted to induce his partner to say things like "furburger" or "Morey Amsterdam."

Famously, the big prize money came at the endgame, which was basically the same thing only more restrictive. When (rarely) the contestant actually won, viewers would thrill to the sight of the ageless, ossified Dick Clark rushing over to perch on the back of the winner's chair and ecstatically shit onto the contestant's hair.

Press Your Luck

Another American classic, and another American classic TV hero, host Peter Tomarken, a charmless, witless haircut whose notable character trait was his sadistic good cheer displayed whenever one of the contestants hit a "Whammy," thereby losing all of their accumulated monies and causing some truly primitive animated shenanigans to take place, which featured things like the unfortunate Whammy being assaulted with hooks or date-raped or some such, and all the while Tomarken would be chanting things like "Guess you fucked it!" or "Pulled off your dick-skin there, didn't you!?" This show was really marketed mostly towards self-harming epileptics.

Name That Tune

"I can name that tune in one note."

Nobody can name any tune in one note. FUCK YOU, NAME THAT TUNE.

This wasn't a show for a young kid; they always played fucking garbage like Marvin Hamlisch. The producers probably got a little sweaty when they felt like being nervy and dared to plunk out seven notes of "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Game shows are by definition hopelessly square, but Name That Tune was nearly a hypercube of curdled lameness.

The Hollywood Squares

I don't really have to summarize any of these, do I? They're almost all culture roadmarkers. Anyway, this wasn't even really a favorite of mine except for Paul Lynde, who for years I figured was a brilliantly inventive comic improvisor. "He is so funny!" I would screech at my parents, who would trade worried looks. "Wayland Flowers and Madam aren't nearly as funny," I'd solemnly proclaim. My parents traded a new set of looks, ones that said, "Well, at least he doesn't like bad queeny puppet acts."

I really didn't figure out for a long time that those fucking fools were being fed their zinger lines. And by then, Peter Marshall had left, so who cared? Also, I eventually had sex with women, which cheered up my parents. Sorry, gays! Seriously, you didn't want me lurking around anyway.

Tic Tac Dough

Another tic-tac-toe-inspired game (obviously), also salted with moronically easy trivia elements. Notable mostly for the immaculately lacquered host Wink Martindale (who, seemingly unchanged, now shills for Orbitz). I really only remember this show because my father once called him "Stink Fartindale," which I considered the finest example of comedy ever dreamed up by man.

Clearly, I still do.

This Sunday was our fifth wedding anniversary! And you know what the fifth means: wood. Yes, it is the wood anniversary. Do you know how many jokes I had to stifle? Erectile dysfunction can really kill a "wood" joke.

Wait! Is this on the internet? I meant that I'm as virile as a centaur! Oh, whatever, it's all too easy.

Here are some of the gifts that I lavished on my wife.

--Louisville slugger
--Cocktail muddler
--The wretched Promise Ring CD wood/water
--A seat as assessor of Wood County, West Virginia
--Fragment of the One True Cross
--Cunnilingus session from Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood

Well, not really. We're trying to travel to Europe later this year--good choice! The dollar is set to rebound any day now!--and so we didn't really go nuts for this one. But I did get her Season 1 of Deadwood, which I'm going to say counts.

But we did also have a lovely evening out. We started out our night at the Stumbling Monk, a Capitol Hill tavern that specializes in Belgian beers. It also specializes in the sort of anti-ambience that might be best characterized as a Fuddrucker's that was decorated only with things found at Goodwill. The Stumbling Monk, while having delectable beers, feels exactly like what it is: a former office supply store redecorated by a couple of schlubs who nailed some coasters to the walls and then went out to thrift stores in search of something, anything, that they might put around the place in order to cover up for the peeling paint and lack of running water. A dusty old fixed-gear bicycle presides perplexingly in an alcove that sits atop the primitive bathroom nook; next to it is a confused-looking typewriter. Nearby is one of those old boxy 70s gas heaters that seems all set to blow its payload directly out a window. For "fun," the bar stocks weathered old board games, such as Scruples--the 90s' bowdlerized answer to "I Never"--and a Scrabble game that is missing all the vowels. Needless to say, we love this place.

After that, we headed out to dinner at another Capitol Hill joint called Crave. "Two?" asked the unstoppably cheerful waitress. Her teeth were like Velamints. "We actually have reservations," said the wife. We all looked at the dining room, which had two other occupied tables. I felt sort of dumb. "Okay!" the waitress replied, and unnecessarily but enthusiastically scratched our name from the reservation tablet. She was sort of like Stalin, except that instead of executing us or forcing us into a gulag, she was going to bring us dinner.

We took our seats and ordered some wine and cheese, all of which were magnificent, and we took to idly watching the street life petri-dishing itself outside our window. Crave stands above a small theater space called CHAC, which stands for Capitol Hill Arts . . . Company? Collective? Consortium? Cocksuckers? I don't care. Anyway, there was obviously something going on down there on this Sunday evening, and whatever that something was, it involved the oddest mix of audience members I've seen in a while. There was a large constituent of the ink-and-skateboard crowd, wearing aggressively ugly clothing and fierce expressions; what was interesting was that for such an obviously anti-normals crowd, they sure did like to hug a lot. You don't often see a guy with full tattoo sleeves fist-pound another dude with a scrotum stapled to his forehead and then warmly hug each other. You also don't often see these sorts of fellows hanging out at theater venues with their mothers, but that's the only way I can explain the startling numbers of middle-aged women meekly wandering down into CHAC, clutching their purses, to witness what I could only figure was a reunion concert of the Crucifucks. The whole thing was deeply strange, but interesting to watch. It was, for all the cognitive dissonance, kind of a sweet scene.

On a cigarette break, I examined a tattered poster advertising what was going on that night: it was a night of dance performances. Well, okay. I returned back to Crave to deal with the rest of dinner and the pleasant waitress and her glinting, unsheathed teeth.

Which was happily fantastic. The wife had some gorgeous lamb chops--they were all out of braised puppies--and I had a "thick-cut" pork chop, which seemed to stretch the definition of "thick" to include "absurd." It had some glaze on it that included, ludicrously, sarsaparilla. I kept waiting for Yosemite Sam to appear tableside and ask me how my gol-durned hunk o' dang hawg was.

And naturally we ended the night at the Bar That Shall Not Be Named, where, as usual, we were treated as royalty. W., our humble bartender, fixed us our lovely drinks--I had a Vieux Carre; order that in your average bar!--and we quietly drank our nightcaps, chatting and surrounded by a pleasant hum of conversation, and warmly patted the gleaming bartop of comforting burnished wood.

It was my father's birthday today, so I gave the cantankerous old bastard a phone call. I asked how his day was going. "I went to Ernie's and had a hamburger," he said. "Now I'm playing with my guns." Golden years! Actually, he does have his fun, of a sort--he spent a few minutes explaining that even though the economy is falling into the septic tank, he's still making money. I didn't bother to tell him that I couldn't tell a money market from a cheese market, and anyway, he lost no time making it clear that I will never have to: he enjoys, in every conversation, explaining to me the various ways he is burning through any meager inheritance I might think of looking forward to. This time, it's a fishing trip that he's taking in July. He and a buddy are taking a seaplane flight somewhere into B.C. to stay in a lodge and fish the inlets. "It's going to set me back four thousand bucks!" he crowed. "So you're not getting that."

His birthday is the opposite of my birthday! I thought. It really makes me laugh, because I hate myself. And really, it is kind of funny. Anyway, we chatted about the trip a bit; he's very excited. "So you're not ocean fishing, then?" I asked. "Oh, fuck no. I'd rather fish than puke." Eminently sensible. Words of wisdom! In fact, that's what I'm putting on the grasping bastard's tombstone: "DISPLAYED INDIFFERENCE TO ESTATE PLANNING; OPPOSED TO VOMITING."

Then he mock-threatened that if the economy really tanked that he and Mom would move in with us. This was so comically inconceivable that we both shared a laugh. This is how you grow closer together with your parents: you gracefully accept the fact that as the years continue, it becomes clearer and clearer that you find each other alien and weird. It's funny!

I'm with him on the ocean fishing thing, though. Not that I've ever been ocean fishing. But I did once go whale-watching.

It was back in '94 or so that a bunch of us computer buddies--oh, all right, if you must know, there was a period in my life that I was an AOL user, and I frequented the trivia games--decided to "meet up," as we youngsters liked to call it, in "real life." And so the lot of us found ourselves all together at a hotel in San Jose.

I was working retail at the time, and it took my last cent to even get there in the first place, so when the whale-watching expedition got put together, I demurred. But a bunch of us had already gotten drunk together the night before, and, inexplicably, the others decided against all reason that they liked me, and so they paid my way--generous friends! I will never forgive you--and so I was suddenly in too.

No matter how much I might want to, I will never forget this trip. The boat was about 30 feet long or so, and the sky was slate-gray as we TOOK TO THE WAVES! And it was fun! For about fifteen minutes. P. was the first to fall as we met the swells. You all know the common theme of stories like these: Uuuuup, dooooowwwn, uuuuup, dooowwn. P. went down almost instantly; he retired to the meager little cabin and lay on a bench like a discarded valise. He was about the same color, too; he moaned like an old door.

I assumed I was made of sterner stuff than that, and jauntily strode the pitching deck, occasionally jauntily falling down to relieve the growing mood of unease. M., a vivacious blonde, was the next to succumb, and she daintily donated her lunch over the side of the boat. "I feel a lot better!" she exclaimed, which earned her some glares from other passengers. I was still doing okay, but I must say I was feeling . . . off.

M.'s yarking had, of course, moved others to similar reactions, and the dominoes were now starting to fall; temporary friendships were formed among the side-by-side vomiters, with much earnest back-clapping and shoulder-massaging amongst former strangers who found sudden solidarity with the people emptying their stomachs right next to them. The passengers were also beginning to unite in the feeling that this sucked.

We hadn't seen any whales at all. The crew clearly didn't give a shit; this was par for the course.

By now, I couldn't ignore that I was being affected. It wasn't nausea, really--I'll go ahead and let you know now that I did not throw up on this trip. It was more like an all-consuming awfulness of the entire body. My head felt swollen and ached, my skin felt taut and uncomfortable, and I had an uncomfortable feeling of dissociation from my legs, as if they existed independently of my upper body. I had no idea what to do about this. I quickly realized what not to do, which was to look at anybody else. By this point, fully four-fifths of the passengers were the color of dingy underwear; many were creeping around the deck on hands and knees, supplicants to a God that either wasn't listening or, alternatively, was hugely entertained. One woman, who herself seemed to be immune to the pitching seas, was shouting at any crew member who would listen (zero) to turn the boat around, this on behalf of her stricken husband, who was red-facedly vomiting nearly continually, because of his "bad heart."

Can you puke to death? I wondered. I figured we were going to find out. Some middle-aged fellow pitched forward with such force that his eyeglasses leapt off his face and joined his last meal into the waves; he waved at them weakly and forlornly. He helplessly and touchingly rubbed his unhappy face for a moment, feeling the unfamiliar nakedness briefly, before once again leaning over to unmaw. Closest to me was another guy who wore a khaki-green rain slicker, and it wasn't until that moment that I fully realized the meaning of the phrase "turning green." He was almost literally the same color as his jacket. He looked like the villain from I Know What You Did Last Summer if here were the Gorton Fisherman and also a face-painting fan of Army football.

For my part, I had my own strategy. I couldn't stare at the waves; they just made me vertiginous. I couldn't look at anyone else; that just made me invent strained, ridiculous comparisons. Plus, they looked worse than I felt, at least the sufferers. Worse were the smug fuckers who were feeling no effects at all. They strode proudly around the deck, and we were all too weak and miserable to do the right thing, which would have been to throw them screaming overboard. So I did this: I stared.

I found a distant set of hills on the horizon from which we had set from (I told you it didn't take long for us all to go wobbly). I fixed on that set of hills. And I stared at it, and stared at it, and stared at it. I could probably draw the precise shape of that set of hills from memory to this day. Those hills were my referent for sanity. I didn't feel better for doing this; the point was, I didn't feel worse.

Eventually--we never saw any fucking whales, of course, unless someone barfed up just the right undigested Animal Cracker--the crew relented in the face of our wretched faces, and they turned back. It took us six days to return to the shore. By which I mean probably forty-five minutes. I maintained my bug-eyed watch on the hills the entire time, clutching a post on the deck like a strangler. The next day, my nerveless fingers could barely pick up a pen, not even to stab the people who had kindly paid for my whale-watching ticket.

It's helped me out a lot writing this. It really has. For one thing, I now know what I'll be putting on my father's headstone. And even better, I know what I'm putting on mine.

NEVER ONCE SAW ONE FUCKING WHALE
OPPOSED TO VOMITING
ENJOYED REFERENCES TO GORTON'S FISHERMAN

Eventually, every "comedy" writer finds himself here. It's embarrassing, but it happens to all of us. And here I am, like it or not. It's when, inevitably, you discover that you are writing about farts.

You all remember the Sedaris piece "Sassy Ass Blasts," right? Or Augusten Burroughs' "I Had Gas And Then I Drank Everything"? Even Woody Allen couldn't resist the siren call of flatulence, and that's why he made "Curse of the Jade Scorpion." (I assume that's what the movie is about, given that everyone immediately ran out of the theaters when it began to play.)

The other night, the wife and I were out at the Bar That Shall Not Be Named. Hang in here with me for a little bit while I set the scene.

We were there with some other regulars with whom we have become friendly. Friendly enough to get invited to parties to, you know, but not friendly enough to, say, swap partners. (Although one of them did relate an eye-popping story about taking two barflies home to have a fumbling threesome. Yay!) Anyway. We were all just hanging out shooting the shit, when . . . she came in.

Our bar, our precious bar, has been invaded. Her name is M., and she apparently hails from Baltimore. From what I understand, she comes from serious money. From what is also painfully clear, M. has not used this money to buy a personality, or interesting anecdotes, or a non-torturous mode of social interaction, or an ability to pick up on public cues that signal one's unwelcomeness into a personal conversation.

M. of course takes every chance she gets to intrude into our otherwise wonderfully sense-free bar talk. She also seems to have a crush on poor B., an affectless fellow who likes to drink whiskey with beer chasers and who otherwise resembles nothing so much as Droopy Dawg. On this evening, B. found himself next to M. at the bar, and then spent the next hour or so facing 180 degrees away from M. in a futile attempt to avoid her relentlessly inept advances. "I love olives," went one gambit. Nobody said anything for a while. B. tried valiantly to fold himself into his jacket, but only managed to tweak his sacrum.

M. is fireproof, you see. She is one of those people that you can actually be openly rude to, and she will blithely ignore your every futile attempt to signal your impatience with her inane prattle. More than once, she has interrupted a conversation to say something awesome such as "Say, I have feet!" or "How about magazines, you know?" and I have simply and wordlessly gotten up to go out and have a cigarette. And when I come back, she's still saying something like "And that's how I sucked off Morley Safer!" to a bar full of haunted souls helplessly staring into their drinks, mentally trying to force their way into an alternate M.-free universe.

She's so terrible that even the bartenders have commented on the M. phenomenon. In fact--I'm not making this up--W., tonight's bartender texted me just a few hours ago to tell me that she was there and that her chatter "would make your head explode." E. is another bartender at this place. Recently, he was heard to suggest to W. that he "fall on the grenade" and take her home, drunkenly fuck her, and then prodigiously shit the bed. It's this sort of hard-headed pragmatism that makes America great.

HOW DID WE GET HERE? Wasn't I writing about farts?

Oh, yes.

Back to the other night. We were all sitting around chatting, occasionally with loud, sense-free verbal blares from M., when all of a sudden . . . the odor. It crept into my nose like a clumsy thief coshing in a front door. I looked around the people surrounding me, studying their faces in that stupid way you do whenever you detect a fart, as if somebody would wear their shining fart-face proudly, or give you a gleeful thumbs-up, or could be found busily putting on a pin saying "I Totally Just Farted."

Ugh, I thought. Well, whatever. Nobody else gave any hint that they had noticed, as you do in polite company. I let it go by, and then found myself drawn into a lengthy dissertation about how M. enjoys having Scotch eggs shoved up her ass.

Time passed. And then it happened again. Another ghastly miasma enveloped our small group, and this time it was so woe-filled and dreadful that it was impossible to ignore; a few of us leaned in to one another and hissed, "Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck is that?" E., for reasons still unclear to me, thrust his face at me and whispered, "Dude, was that you?"

HEY! First of all, are you kidding? I'm a smoker, for Christ's sake. I take all of my horrible smells outside. (Short story on my recent attempt to quit: I failed spectacularly.) Second of all . . . what? I don't have a history of gastrointestinal misbehavior, sir! "You fuck wild pigs," I informed him.

So what did this have to do with M.? Nothing, probably. It occurred to me later that she was as likely a suspect as anyone, but it wasn't as if I had proof.

And that's when I formed a diabolical plan. I don't want to reveal all the details, but I'm going to be eating a lot of sausage and drinking quantities of pickle brine. And I will visit our lovely bar as usual, and let things take their course.

Someone is about to become the bulldog.

Summer's coming! And so too are summer movies, all of which are based on comic books. You know you're going to see Iron Man, right? Even though it is clearly going to be terrible? And there's another Hulk movie for some reason! Apparently, we all did something wrong, and this is our punishment. All we can do is hang our hopes on possibly awesome things such as the next installments in the Hellboy and Batman series, and happily, they both look like they might be cinemagasmic.

And if they're not, it'll all be okay. Uwe Boll is hard at work on Bughead Jughead: Riverdale Insect Blood Massacre Tit Bomb.

(Just kidding. He's actually working on Alone in the Dark II. Seriously. It's got Lance Henriksen, Michael Pare and PJ Soles! Wow.)

Let's see what's coming to the theaters in the meantime. Late April means never having to say "I'm sorry I watched these terrible movies."

88 Minutes

It's nice of the producers to let us know ahead of time exactly how long we're going to have to tolerate Al Pacino's peculiarly canine take on diction and inflection. This movie also features Leelee Sobieski, who is rapidly emerging as my Favorite Actress That Indicates Total Disaster: she was last seen (if we stretch the literal definition of that word) in In The Name of the King (Uwe! Never die) and also the indelibly deranged remake of The Wicker Man, which might have been 2006's finest comedy. I never particularly admired nor even enjoyed the work of Nic Cage, but you can say this for him: he got to punch Leelee Sobieski in the face, which in these dire times in America, is really something to aspire to.

As usual, IMDB's plot keywords tell the whole story here: Exploding Car / Female Nudity / Seaplane

Fuck it, I'll rent that.

Pathology

I love horror movies! Hey, and it has Milo Ventimiglia, who was nice and inoffensive in Heroes, even if that second season was ridiculously bad! This might be fun! I wonder why they're dumping this off in the shoulder season?

Alyssa Milano

Oh. Never mind.

Well. Okay, so it's not going to be any good. But, I mean, it's not like these guys are stupid, right? It's not like they'd make any other bizarre, campy casting choices that would torpedo this film, you know?

John de Lancie

Oh.

The producers are smart in a diabolical way. They know the movie will make ten dollars in the theaters. But when it hits DVD, it will make millions from the GenCon crowd, who will breathlessly wait for the scene when Samantha Micelli gives Q the old juicy squat.

Deception

Buzz is all around this film mainly due to rumors that Ewan MacGregor failed to wave his enormous penis around due to complaints from the notoriously nubby co-star Hugh Jackman.

HA HA! I made a dick joke.

No, seriously, I'm kind of excited about any movie that features the phrase "sex club" in its synopsis and also has Maggie Q listed in the cast. Unless it turns out that she has a giant Scottish penis, which would be just my fucking luck.

Plot Keywords: Nun / Mother Superior / Nun's Habit

HOT.

Speed Racer

Remember when Bound came out and everyone sort of gasped at these audacious fellows who dared to weld pretentious, showy cinematography with incredibly hot women fucking each other? Remember when The Matrix came out and redefined sci-fi forever by introducing turgidity and incoherence to a genre that had previously never known such concepts?

They are breaking new ground AGAIN. This existential take on the inexplicably beloved cartoon features Speed pointlessly driving in circles forever while dodging guided missiles, evil ninja motorcyclists and Chim-Chim's occasional semen blasts. It's like life.

Except this time, Spritle suffocates in the trunk. SPOILER ALERT!

Sometime last year, the wife and I got sucked into something horrible; wriggling fish trapped inside the hideous trawl nets of reality programming. (Note how I just absolved myself of any personal responsibility by adopting a passive pose in this scenario. It is of course complete bullshit, but it makes me feel better to think it so.)

Now, we are not strangers to reality programming, a term that as we all know by now is a laughably hollow euphemism anyway. We have always enjoyed The Amazing Race, for instance, a show whose genius is largely twofold. For one thing, instead of the usual "individuals against each other" format, that show memorably traps teams of two together for hellishly unfun worldwide shriek-treks that combine the best of travel porn with the best of schadenfreude: we the viewers get to enjoy footage of exotic locales combined with the enjoyment of watching exhausted, squabbling dyads routinely fail to have time to enjoy them.

And there's the typical Bravo formula that started with Project: Runway and continued on nearly unchanged with Top Chef: assemble a team of assorted talents and then assail them and berate them and mercilessly whittle them down until, Highlander-like, there remains ONLY ONE! And then everyone goes home and hopes they were somehow memorable enough to merit some small allocation of the public's collective memory so that someday, maybe they can sell some t-shirts on HSN. Or, increasingly, simply make future appearances on these same shows. Our cultural statesman are, more and more, turning out to be grotesquely feckless entities such as Ted Allen and Rocco DiSpirito.

And you know whose fault all this is? Mine. Me and the wife. We're responsible. Because you know: I can live with Project: Runway and Top Chef. Heavily mediated by the producers as these shows are, they do seem to make skeletal, gnomic gestures at seeming to care about the (often ridiculous and mindbending) tasks assigned to the contestants. They've got a nearly charming old-school strain of Americana in them, in that by gosh, these contestants are scrappy and faceless, but if they persevere and just do their darnedest, they could, against the odds, come out on top, just like your fucking grandfather and his stories about his goddamn hat store and how for ten years he ate nothing but felt just to get by! Only, you know, compressed into twelve weeks or so. Imagine the Great Depression divided into heavily edited half-hour chunks and you have the essence of reality TV.

Or so I thought. But there's something else out there. That thing is called Hell's Kitchen, and God fucking help me, but we've been watching. It is difficult to get a handle on or make meaningful comparisons to it without traveling out into the blasted hinterlands of MTV or VH1, where awful, I-thought-they-died rock stars are holding rimjob auditions or shows like "You Can Stick Things In My Eye For $50" are happening, and I'm not prepared for that, so I just have to muddle through. This desperate, awful thing is on network TV, albeit FOX, so . . . yeah, of course it is.

Hell's Kitchen features the usual assortment of goons, trauma junkies, harridans and hairheads and their inevitable debasement at the hands of the Scottish celeb chef Gordon Ramsay, a monstrous shockheaded coprolaliac with a penchant for throwing improperly prepared food at people while also blaring hilariously accented catchphrases such as "YOU FUCKING DUNN-KEY!" and, our favorite, after tasting some ill-executed dish, "IT'S IN-ED-I-BOW!"

Hell's Kitchen is fascinating as pure theater, in some ways. It's a nearly immiscible concoction that tries to mix Grand Guignol together with Commedia dell'Arte and instead winds up being something that Artaud would have tried out had he 1. had access to editing equipment and 2. been even crazier. Like Guignol or Commedia, the show bears virtually no resemblance to reality except in the most caricatured way possible; in fact the show takes great pains to divorce itself from anything remotely reminiscent of reality at all, from the comically profane Ramsay figure to the trudging and catastrophically hopeless contestants to the pitiful put-upon Belgian maitre'd who cannot act at all to the bizarre editorial insistence that the show is actually taking place in a real restaurant. (It is, of course, shot on a soundstage.)

In tonight's episode, Ramsay decides to edumacate his luckless charges about the horrors of wasting food, and so makes them crawl through the trash from the previous episode's dinner and pick out all the rotten food. This is how perverted this show is: it's a restaurant show ostensibly about what good cooking should be, and he's got them scrounging around in spoiled meat. Anyway, after this pointless bit of ritual humiliation is over, Ramsay then continues this demented lesson by demonstrating how to filet a halibut. Then they all have a chance to desecrate a poor fish themselves, and Ramsay evaluates their skills at carving out perfect 6-ounce filets. As he judges each team's effort, and (of course) finds certain specimens wanting, what does he do with the offending filets? He throws them over his shoulder onto the floor.

This is, to me, America. It's another thing we ripped off from the Brits and then hauled over here so we didn't have to listen to them complain about it. It doesn't make any sense, either internally or outwardly. It has stock characters so we don't have to think about it too hard. Plenty of profanity. There are always, of course, a couple of chicks with big tits. It's witless and loud and wasteful and, I guess, it's exactly what we deserve.

Especially me. But I like to think Artaud would have approved.

April is upon us once more, and you know what that means: baseball! Or, more importantly: fantasy baseball! In Seattle, fantasy baseball is all we have, of course--ha ha! You see what I did there? Oh, the Mariners are going to be fine, where "fine" means "slightly less terrible than last year," which is also to say "still kind of terrible." But! We do have the advantage of being in the AL West, so even if we come in first--which we assuredly will not--it's kind of like being the smartest guy in a Dean Koontz Appreciation chat room.

But it's fantasy baseball I'm concerned with! Why bother to follow the Mariners when I personally can do horribly all on my own? And I do, every year: I'm astoundingly inept at fantasy baseball. Most of it is because I'm terrifically lazy. I don't do any player research, and so I do things like draft beet salads to play in the outfield. Then our commissioner says to me, "Skot, beet salads aren't eligible outfielders." And I'll retort, "But they are fucking delicious with some parsley and a nice vinaigrette!" And the commissioner will get that hunted look on his face and reply, "Also, all of your beet salads got lupus and went on the DL and died."

With all this in mind--my dismal laziness and ignorance; my dead, talentless beet salad outfielders; this gibbon gnawing on my neck--it is once again time to MEET MY 2008 FANTASY BASEBALL TEAM, the unlauded, unheralded and largely unknown bunch of rag-tag fuckstacks, THE TEARFUL APES!

[Lights up on a comfortable sitting room, empty. Through a handsome oaken door enters twitchy Brewers outfielder COREY HART.]

Corey Hart: Hi, everybody. It's my great honor to--

[Music cue: "Sunglasses At Night" begins playing at extremely loud volume.]

Hart: . . . I said I wasn't going to do this, you assholes.

[Music stops.]

Hart: Anyway, I thought I'd introduce you all to some of my teammates for this fantasy season. I think it's safe to say that we're all pretty darned excited. [He strikes an exaggerated MTV pose and points at the camera.] YOU ALL READY FOR THIS?

[Music cue: "People Get Ready." Hart closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose for a few seconds.]

Hart: That's not the cue . . . it's . . . Christ, where are my pills?

[Enter respected actor Alfred Molina and largely ignored Mariners shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt.]

Molina: Hello, hello! I am here to be a catcher for the fantasy monkeys! Hello! And this is my teammate, the--[he squints at a cue card]--shorts top, Yuni . . . Yun . . . Yuniky . . . John Betancourt!

Betancourt: Hey!

Molina: I AM ALFRED MOLINA!

Betancourt: You're not even supposed to be here. Where's Yadier Molina?

Hart: Actually, Yuni, we'll take Alfred.

Molina: I'VE GOT EIGHT ARMS TO CATCH FOR YOU! (Pause.) I still have my Doctor Octopus costume.

Hart: That's enough, Alfred. Hey, is that someone I hear at the door? Why, it sounds like it might be . . . Ken Griffey, Jr.!

[Enter Florida Marlins 2B Dan Uggla and Minnesota LF Jason Kubel.]

Uggla: Sorry, Junior couldn't make it. His face mysteriously caught on fire while he was eating some unbuttered rice, and then on the way to the hospital, a meteorite hit his ambulance.

Kubel: Hey, what's up? I'm a Jewish dessert.

Uggla: Uh, you're thinking of a kugel.

Kubel: My bad! I'm an exercise for the pubococcygeus muscles!

Betancourt: That's Kegels.

Kubel: I'm from Belle Fourche, South Dakota!

(Silence.)

[Enter New York Mets 3B David Wright.]

Wright: Make way for talent, bitches. Let's see what we've got he--oh my God. Who the fuck are you people?

Uggla: You can call me "Uggs." Or "Uggsly." Or you could say, "He likes to win uggsley!" It's cool with me, Mr. Wright. Some guys like to call me "Uggsey Malone," too.

Wright: Is this--is this a real team?

[Enter Carlos Quentin, faceless White Sox outfielder.]

Quentin: Hey, what's up? That hobo over there told me where to go.

Kubel: I think that's actually Brad Penny.

Quentin: Huh. Well, I gave him a dollar and he seemed pretty happy. Anyway, Frank Thomas wanted me to tell you guys that his pelvis collapsed, and thanks for the money.

Kubel: He should have done his Kubel exercises! Ha ha! Am I right, you guys?

Wright: Maybe I'm in a coma.

[Closers Francisco Rodriguez, Joe Nathan and Jason Isringhausen poke their heads through the door, Three Stooges-style.]

Closers: Hey, anyone need some saves?

Uggla: You might as well go home. You're all going to be traded away in horrible desperation deals when the rest of us all go on to the DL with idiopathic ischemic attacks.

Closers: Later!

Hart: Well, there's lots more Apes to meet, but we're out of time today! Join us next time when we meet Adrian "Belt" Beltre, who I understand owns belts, and Felix Hernandez, AKA "King Felix"! King Felix got his nickname thanks to his daunting commands while playing checkers: "WHO WANTS TO KING FELIX?!" he screams. In the meantime, this is Corey Hart, signing off and reminding you of the Tearful Apes' motto this 2008 fantasy season: NEVER SURRENDER!

[He strikes another MTV pose and points dramatically at the camera. Music cue: "Sunglasses At Night."]

Hart: You fucking assholes.

[Slow fade to black as music plays.]

This was the weekend of a monumental annual event! The child care center that the wife works at--and has for some time--held its annual fundraising evening, with several silent auctions, a raffle, and one live auction, complete with actual auctioneer. It's a massive affair, and almost all the parents show up (not to mention the large number of them who help set the thing up), and it's very important.

Naturally, over the past six or so years, I've never attended a single one. Until this year! This year, I felt I had to attend, mainly because the wife asked me to. "Some parents are starting to joke, I think, that you don't really exist," she explained.

Well, I won't stand still for accusations of nonexistence, as many state jurisdictions have come to learn. Fucking Utah. I may have done my bit for obstruction, but those fuckers damn well know I'm no bigamist. Also, that I exist. Sneaky Mormon DA. Don't get me started. (Future Skot: I just reread this paragraph, and I'm not going to delete it, even though it's a weird joke that doesn't work and doesn't make much sense. I just wanted to put that out there. Just move along.)

Anyway, so the thing was a big rubber chicken dinner affair for those stuck for the long haul; I was only expected to show up for the cocktail hour, which, you know, I'm always grudgingly up for. Also, even for Very Important Spouses of the staff, non-employees wanting catered dinners were charged $40, so fuck that. I traded in a drink ticket--because apparently, nonprofit fundraisers are run exactly like Bingo Blackout Bonanza down at the Elk's Club--for an IPA and perused the hundreds and hundreds of items up for glomming on the silent auction tables. They ranged from the sublime (6 weeks of intensive language lessons) to the ridiculous (Zune--my friend J. excitedly asked, "Was it a brown Zune?!") to the simply confusing ("Paint your own plates set!").

(Seriously, though. Paint my own plates? Who wants to do this? To what purpose? You're just going to get food all over them and then have to wash them to enjoy their pristine, painted state again, so what's the net here? You might as well auction off a piece of paper saying "Make your own bed!" There's crafts where you do things for fun and you wind up with pretty or interesting or useful things, like say knitting, and there's crafts that are simply crafts for crafts' sake, things you do to help ignore the vast existential angst that would otherwise consume your mind, like painting plates. It might have been the most depressing thing out there, except maybe for the case full of fortune cookies and the fortunes all said "You should go to the dentist.")

The live auction stuff was more interesting to read about--again, I went home long before that shit started. One family offered their coastal Spanish villa for a week to the highest bidder; all you had to do was get to Spain. The wife reports that that little dilly went for around $2500. A tidy sum! No report as to what the hopefully brown Zune went for. I assume: one hundred million dollars. It was 8 gigs! You can almost fit a Built To Spill song on there.)

So while I was there, I mostly prowled around the place trying not to look like too much of a shambling fuck. I wore some natty jeans--NATTY!--along with a velvet jacket that I got at a Huggy Bear Tribute Sale down in the hobo district a couple years ago. I was gladhanded by any number of nice people, most of them women, for some reason. The dads might have all been getting crocked in preparation for some very male bidding wars and the attendant cock-waving at all. At any rate, I've never been good with names anyway, and I was soon lost among the dozens of hi-howareya-nicetameetchas and what Tom Wolfe indelibly described as "boiling teeth."

I met other people too, who were not Lemon Tarts or Social X-Rays, and whose teeth did not boil. One of those was the auctioneer. The wife introduced me to him, and he exclaimed, "Of course! I remember you from last year!"

"I thought you looked familiar!" I exclaimed. As I mentioned before, I've never gone to one of these events. There's no point in even trying to set this sort of thing right.

"He's high, right?" I whispered to the wife after he wandered off.

"I think so," she replied.

And I met someone else. I met a man . . . I wondered if I should even use his name here, because when you write a blog that is read by tens of people, you should be a little careful, you know? But then I realized that if that certain somebody has his own Wikipedia page, his personal info is already kind of out there, so what's the point? And so I can reveal this.

It TURNS OUT . . . that one of the wife's co-workers is dating a certain Mr. Garrett Wang, aka Ensign Harry Kim from the TV series "Star Trek: Voyager," possibly the least-loved entrant in the Star Trek franchise, although I have to say I'd watch it over "Enterprise," but I may have Scott Bakula issues after realizing partway through the run of "Quantum Leap" that that show was, in fact, insultingly horrible.

Anyway, as much as I wanted to give him the whole "DUDE YOU ARE HARRY KIM" business, I didn't have the heart; I just didn't want to be that guy. He seemed like a perfectly nice fellow, and I figured he had a long three hours or so of half-drunk dads strolling up to him asking if he ever got to fuck Jeri Ryan, so he didn't need any shit from me.

Besides, what could I say? How would he respond?

"DUDE YOU ARE HARRY KIM."
"Sigh. Yeah. But I never got to fuck Seven of Nine."

"So, Kate Mulgrew."
"STOP. Ugh. Let's go get some more beer."

"Let's free-associate. Tell me how you feel when I say 'CHAK-O-TAY!' "
"I . . . it was nice to meet you, but I have to go bid on a brown Zune."

I think we could have been close. I really do. Or he might have been high.

WOOOO! ST. PATRICK'S DAY! DID YOU GUYS RAGE?

With all due respect to the filthy Irish, fuck St. Patrick's Day (which the church had moved back to Saturday anyway, but nobody paid attention). It's Amateur Night, and I won't have any part of it, not even at the Bar That Shall Not Be Named; they even went and put Bushmill's shots on special for five bucks a go the whole night, and you know how many they sold? None.

No, instead they were overrun with yowling fucknecks and simpering harridans-in-waiting ordering shit like the repellent "Everybody's Irish:"

2 ounces Irish whiskey
1/4 ounce green Chartreuse
1/4 ounce green creme de menthe
Cocktail olive for garnish

Are you fucking kidding me? Would you spend time with anyone willing to put this in his mouth? (People have been saying this about Elliot Spitzer, too. HEY-O!) This is like a drink created by Gallagher specifically to be drunk only by Kobayashi.

Or how about this gem, the "Triclops," which was apparently dreamed up by Anton LaVey:

3 ounces vodka
1 ounce Sprite
Cocktail olive for garnish

This just makes me seethe. Hey, why not knock out all your teeth too! Then with a bloody grin, you can dribble your broken teeth into your drink and when you're done with your drink, you can spit your Sprite-y teeth at the other bar patrons who already hate you anyway? Then you can have a loud, toothless, unenunciated cellphone conversation about what a fucking St. Patrick's Day booze warrior you are with some horrible drunk chick in a green microskirt who is unaware of all the vaguely date-rapey guys leering at her as she adjusts her socks. Also, it's seven PM.

Fuck trying to go out on St. Patrick's Day. The wife and I stayed in and invited our friends J. and E. over for corned beef and potatoes, because I guess nobody's entirely immune to the cultural stereotype thing. Which is why we also whipped up some green milkshakes and hassled some garter snakes that were hanging around our patio.

(I know about the falsity of the snake thing. You know what I didn't know about? The Oilliphéist, the Caoránach, and the Copóg Phádraig! And I still don't, because I got bored reading the Wikipedia page. But you have to admit, those things sound hilarious.)

Dinner was set for 8:00, and was only slightly complicated by J. and E. not showing up remotely close to 8:00. It turned out that J. was kept late at work because--I'm not making this up--one of J.'s servers caught on fire. (I have since seen and can attest to the validity of his nerd papers.) Because I didn't know, I'll go ahead and ask you all: do you know what happens when a server catches on fire? J. told me what happens: a little red light blinks at you.

This is why nerds have been on the short end of the evolutionary stick for so many generations: meekness. When buildings or forests or normal humans catch on fire, they tend to ring, crackle or scream quite loudly. Then they get help, and possibly get to continue to exist! When geek-controlled things burst into flames, they just quietly wave their electronic hands around. When nerds themselves catch fire, they probably just blink frantically. It reminds me of my old sixth-grade diabetic friend Marty, who once, in the midst of experiencing a reaction in class during a particularly contentious discussion, quietly sat with his hand raised until called upon, whereupon he finally said, "I'm having a reaction."

Also, his girlfriend recently had surgery to put some metal in her hand, and now she's going to get one of those medical "get out of airport screening free" cards that says "Weird Chick Totally Has Metal In Her Hand; Don't Fuck With Her; Is Possibly A Terminator." So you know she has issues too. Why did we invite these damaged souls into our home? Nobody else will talk to us. Even so, they didn't make it over until a little before 9:00 thanks to fiery, truculent technology, but fortunately, corned beef appears to be unruinable, which you can probably say about all of your favorite boiled meats.

In all, it was a good evening, and happily unspoiled by yarking greenboys or stumbling bikini skanks. But there was, of course, one hitch. It has a minor and stupid backstory.

Some months ago, Budweiser had the astonishingly shitty idea of teaming up with Clamato to release this . . . beverage that they called "Chelada," a perversion of a perfectly fine Southwest/Mexican drink tradition of leavening shitty lager with tomato juice, lime and salt in order to create a refreshing summer drink (I swear this is true). And when it came out, J. managed to sneak a can of it into my fridge as a joke; when I discovered the offending thing, I swore to him that I would make him drink it.

This was the night. I pulled out the giant can--24 deathless ounces--and squinted apprehensively at the label, which, yes, was still trumpeting the good sense of this collison of Budweiser and Clamato. With a coroner's clinical eye, I examined the "nutritional information" boxlet, and encountered this terrifying fragment: "Contains shellfish/clams." I clouted J. about the head and torso and wept at our fate.

I poured the stuff into a couple of glasses; pinkish and wan, it looked like poorly oxygenated blood, or perhaps a pleural effusion. It bore virtually no head whatsoever, the carbonation presumably overcome by the angry, imprisoned shellfish/clam zombies. Even pouring it was dispiriting, like watching suicides falling from tall buildings. We smelled our samples and were not encouraged: it was a hellishly chemical lime nose that seemed to grouchily throw punches at the only other olfactory note, which was a sickly tomatoesque sweetness. Finally, we took a sip.

This was possibly as close to the American tradition of St. Patrick's Day that we got that evening. For one brief horrifying moment, J. and I drank an alcoholic beverage that was, for all intents and purposes, like drinking pure, unadulterated malignity. For a mere moment, we were as one with all of those douchebags out there in all of those Stygian Irish bars, drinking the undrinkable.

Then we poured the noxious horror out and poured ourselves some white wine.

You know what we haven't done for a while? Prejudged movies! It is, of course, one of my very favorite times of the prejudging year: just before summer, a legendary dumping ground for unloved and underfunded projects that only got greenlighted because some frowsy flack gobbled some flap-handed, excitable producer a few years ago.

The usual note for those unfamiliar with the format: These are movies that are coming out soon that I have no intention of seeing, but unfortunately probably will someday on cable. They are almost always movies that I have decided ahead of time are undoubtedly horrid based on IMDB, any ads or trailers available, or simply by their titles or cast members or, really, anything else. They may contain spoilers--often inadvertent--because I have also decided that due to their speculative and subjective wretchedness, such niggling details could not possibly make a difference in terms of these drain-circling films' possible enjoyability.

Never Back Down

For one thing, fuck that. If I have learned anything in this life, it is this: frequently back down. Disagreement at the office? Back down! Wife upset with you? Back down! It's really just easier.

Clearly Djimon Hounsou agrees with me, as this two-time Oscar nominee is now capitulating to his agent's agonized pleas for monthly paychecks. (I know this is unfair. He also recently did Blood Diamond, a movie that everyone pretended to see and which carried the ghost of respectability, but he's also been in laughable turkeys such as Eragon, Constantine, and, my favorite, the risible The Island.)

IMDB PLOT OUTLINE: At his new high school, a rebellious teen (Faris) is lured into an underground fight club, where he finds a mentor in a mixed martial arts veteran (Hounsou).

I think it's fair to say that we all know somebody from high school who had a similar experience. For me, my mentor was Hunkle, whose skin color was different from mine, and taught me valuable lessons about fasting and shitting into colanders to examine the contents of my frantically confused intestines, which he would then examine in order to divine my future.

"You will one day write reviews of horrible movies that you have never seen," he told me gnomishly one day, rattling around some marbles in my colander. We never spoke again.

Horton Hears A Who!

Skot hears the anguished screams of unlucky parents! I do love Hollywood's complete lack of concern for history in these sorts of things; Jim Carrey voices Horton here, and his last kiddie flick voice work was for the unilaterally reviled How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Leaving that stinking disaster aside (and which, yeah, probably made millions anyway), Mr. Carrey hasn't exactly been knocking them out of the park for the adults either: The Number 23 is aptly titled in that it is exactly 21 spots down the list of "things more unpleasant than number 2, i.e. human feces," and Fun With Dick and Jane was, after a court judgment, released on DVD under the alternate title We Make No Claims As To Your Filmic Experience With Dick and Jane.

Carrey has his work cut out for him, however: Jonah Hill is also doing voice work for this movie, and it's going to be a tough call as to who can be more fucking irritating even while not actually appearing onscreen. I think the kid has a shot, if he can be heard over Steve Carell, who, in addition for being known for being loud as hell, also manages, in the way of all the best voice actors, to always sound exactly like Steve Carell, which makes him a sensible choice for a vocal performance.

Sleepwalking

IMDB PLOT OUTLINE: The drama follows an 11-year-old girl's struggle to come to terms with her mother's abandonment.

RUN! RUN EVERYBODY!

Charlize Theron ... Joleen
Dennis Hopper ... Mr. Reedy
Woody Harrelson ... Randall

YOU HAVE TO RUN FASTER! IT'S RIGHT BEHIND YOU!

Sample dialogue: James: [to Tara] My whole life I feel like I've been sleepwalking. But you helped me. You woke me up.

You didn't run fast enough. Now you're dead. Nice work, stupid.

BONUS IMDB NONSENSE: "If you enjoyed this title, our database also recommends: Shaft."

Drillbit Taylor

In three years, every film produced in Hollywood will be written by Judd Apatow, one of Judd Apatow's friends, or someone who is holding a screwdriver to Judd Apatow's throat. I really can't wait for Elizabeth: The Fingerbanging, where Cate Blanchett succumbs to the fumbling digital advances of Seth Rogen, who then spends 94 agonizing minutes rummaging around in her immaculate bustle.

IMDB TAGLINE: You get what you pay for.

Ah! So they're only charging fifty cents to go see this. Well, that's nice.

Superhero Movie

I'm not sure what's left to say about this pestilential series of alleged satires. I guess I'll just mean-spiritedly rag on some of the principals and call it a fucking night.

Craig Mazin, writer and director: Appeared as a contestant on "Win Ben Stein's Money" (1997). He didn't win.

Craig Bierko, actor: Was originally cast as Chandler in "Friends" but turned down the role and was replaced by Matthew Perry.

Leslie Nielsen, Van Helsing to comedy: Is entirely horrible. Born in 1926, is unfortunately also apparently immortal.

Djimon Hounsou, actor: Not in this movie. Don't back down, Djimon.