Archive for the ‘Rambling’ Category

Earlier this year I had a mini-stroke that put me in the hospital for three days. Last night I drove home through thunderstorms to find my computer hard drive had been fried to a nice toasty brown. Overall, I'd say the mini-stroke was more fun. At least then I got morphine.

If you've never lost a hard drive, the comparison isn't as odd as you might think. You're caught by surprise, shocked at the suddenness and unfairness of it. The feeling of loss, of frustration, of not being able to do everything you once took for granted; all that crashes down on you and you're left with a pounding headache and an unanswered plea to the deity of your choice.

Although in my experience, with a computer crash you tend to kick things more.

Last night I was too stunned to react. Flipped the switch a few times, listened to my hard drive go click, click, click, and gave up. Wandered listlessly around the house. Considered going my traditional computer repair route but couldn't find the hammer. Spent some time cursing creatively. Sacked out and watched six hours of network television, which is never a good thing to do if you're already depressed and looking for something to make you feel better about life. My wife tried to cheer me up but quit when I kept trying to move her around the room to get a stronger network signal.

What makes the feeling worse is the knowledge that it was preventable, the nagging suspicion that you asked for this, you idiot. You know all the stuff you're supposed to do so this doesn't happen. You should have eaten better, you should have exercised more, you should have protected your surges, you should have performed regular backups. And I work with computers for a living, which just grinds in that extra little salt-in-the-wounds annoyance. It's like being a nutritionist with scurvy.

And it's just sitting there. You know, deep in your heart, that if you manage to turn the computer on in just the right way it'll work. It usually takes 30 or 40 tries and a few more kicks to get past that stage.

I've got my software, and a lot of the things I do is online somewhere so getting all that back is no problem. I even backed some stuff up sometimes, which will be a big help if I can remember where the discs are. But the last few years of e-mail, my contact lists, my working files . . . without warning I lost a lot of my memory, leaving me grasping, confused, and in need of meds.

(I also lost my drafts for today's column, so you narrowly missed hearing my dazzling pearls of wisdom on such heady topics as CBS printing its advertising on eggs and Don Knotts' widow objecting to a proposed statue of her husband as Barney Fife. Even disasters have their upsides.)

Today the long, painful, expensive road to recovery begins. I'll start assessing my system, trying to see what still works and what doesn't. I'll seek professional help, which has its own horrors. I won't have to deal with medication, or physical therapists bending my untoned self back and forth, but I will have to suffer the PC guy who tries to retrieve my hard drive data snickering at my musical tastes and loudly asking why my collection of educational films all have "Brandi" in the filename.

I'll also have to open my computer box and move things about, which never goes well for me. You know that car commercial where it drives by and other cars crumble and fade into dust as it passes? I have that effect on computer innards. The merest glance can melt circuit boards and short wires. Easy, illustrated installations with only two instructions (1. Plug this in. 2. Smile proudly.) invariably require three frustrated tech support calls and one shameful retail exchange of the still faintly smoking component.

On the plus side, I now have a reason why I haven't responded to any of the e-mail that has been piling up in my inbox since my last system crash in 2002. And I can take the plunge and buy a whole new system, an option I was regrettably not given after my mini-stroke (probably not in my HMO).

Soon, probably by this weekend, I will have figured out what's broke. With the help of friends and extremely patient salespeople I will have fixed this computer and/or assembled a new one. I will have gone through the mind-crushingly tedious period of reloading my software, options, and preferences. I will have learned to move on despite my debilitating episode and the resulting limitations. And I will strive to calmly accept my losses, no longer frantically trying to pry open my old hard drive with a screwdriver to scoop the old files out.

I probably won't back up anything, though. I'll be too busy researching the Don Knotts statue.

Entertainment Weekly is terribly concerned about me.

It's touching, really. The little notes, the shy reminders, the e-mails. Perhaps I've forgotten? Maybe I didn't notice? They are so sorry for the intrusion but they know, with every fiber in their pages, the unbearable anguish I would surely feel were I to miss even a single issue and so they chide me, gently, affectionately, with discreet letters and whispered notices and great big honking wraparound covers with 72-point type that let people know from across the street my subscription will wither and die in just six more painfully short weeks.

I just laugh heartily and put it off another month, because that's the kind of guy I am.

It's fun to wait as long as possible to see just how far the company is willing to go to keep you signed up. I let the renewal notices stack up and measure 'em periodically against a ruler. So far EW is nowhere near the record (Science Fiction Book Club, 1982) but they're certainly presenting a respectable showing.

I already know I'll be renewing — I like EW — so the near-constant entreaties to come back and reaffirm my loyalty are just funny. It's a different thing entirely when I don't want the product or service, of course. Like the record club I finally escaped in 1984 that still sends out determined representatives to hide in my bushes, ready to sign me up again in a moment of weakness. Like the credit card that could only be canceled by traveling to a hidden valley in the Congo, defying deadly traps and mythic beasts, and bringing back the Emerald Eye of Raheesh before the month rolled over and another service charge could be added. My phone company wants my Internet business; my Internet provider wants to offer me phone service, and neither of them seems to understand the words "no," "I'm not interested," or "Seriously, I have a gun."

An even more persistent example of corporate clinginess was provided by blogger Vincent Ferrari last month when he attempted, foolishly, to cancel his unused AOL account. The recording of that attempt — long, agonizing, familiar-sounding minutes of the AOL retention rep continuing to deliver his "we-know-you-don't-really-want-to-cancel" spiel while a frustrated Ferrari was reduced to doggedly reciting "cancel my account" over and over — swept around the Internet for a few weeks and resulted in the firing of that rep, a public apology from AOL that declared this should never happen, and an avalanche of comments from people that declared it happens constantly. That's how devoted to you these companies are.

Companies love you. You're all they think about. And breakups are always rough for everyone involved.

Right now your phone service rep is lying across his or her desk, doodling hearts around your account number and hoping you'll prove your affection by signing up for more calling features. It's a true love, a lasting love, a love that can only be expressed by a 50%-or-higher retention rate.

Rather than get annoyed or frustrated, I suggest you enjoy it. I love it. It's like being the popular kid in school, in a sad, pathetic way. Suddenly everyone's after me, I'm the one they absolutely have to have, it's all about me, me, me! And my checking account, of course.

So I toy with them. I'm coy. When called, I dither about and finally say that maybe I'll renew, I just don't know… Once I even called my cellphone salesperson while I was standing in front of her competitor's booth in the mall, shamelessly flirting with a new 2-year contract, just to hear her beg me to stay. Oh, I'm a hussy, no two ways about it.

And I'm getting worse. Next time I get calls for Internet access I'm thinking of inviting the reps over to have them fight it out in my front yard, possibly with rakes. The winner, assuming one survives, can crawl inside and hook up my new service .

As long as I'm not bothered. I'll be too busy reading my Entertainment Weekly.

One would think that living in this time and place, with easy access to more stories and photos and video and recordings of everything you can think of than at any other point in history, you'd be able to really know what's going on.

Good luck with that.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but very little you see is really there. For example, people on magazine covers aren't real. Sorry. Those are reasonably attractive people who have been Photoshopped for days until every less-than-perfect pixel of the original image has been improved until the picture actually begins to glow, float over the art director's computer, and heal the sick.

Check out this demo from Forsman & Bodenfors, a Swedish graphics company, which demonstrates how magazine covers are reworked with baseball bats to the point where if you squint and hold the magazine at a certain angle you might be able to see the original girl. But probably not.

Even worse are the cover pictures that are composites of different pictures, such as when Redbook ran a photo of Julia Roberts that was actually her head from the People's Choice Awards on top of her body from the Notting Hill premiere four years previous, or the famous Kate Winslet photo from Harper's Bazaar where her head was digitally placed on the body of Queen Latifah. Fortunately no one noticed, but still.

How about pictures of things that never actually happened? December's Vanity Fair featured a group photo of veteran war correspondents on a teeming Ho Chi Minh City street which was, in fact, not nearly as teeming as all that. Peter Arnett was unable to make it so they digitally added him afterward, leading readers to wonder if Mr. Arnett has ever actually gone anywhere or if he just poses nicely.

Then there's the written reality. Recently politicians' aides were found to be "fixing" Wikipedia entries about their employers, white-washing uncomfortable facts and adding mentions of fictitious deeds and, in some cases, superpowers. Once discovered this was widely reported, but those reports have since been changed so no worries.

We already know what can be done with video. When movies like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" and "Sin City" can be shot entirely on green screen and filled in afterward, or fantastic effects like giant gorillas or rampaging armies can be created with a click of the mouse — OK, a few hundred thousands clicks of the mouse, but you see where I'm going with this — how can you trust anything you watch anymore?

Answer: You can't. Enjoy it. Relish the uncertainty, and question everything. Hey, try some yourself! Michela Ledwidge shot a ten-minute science fiction film called "Sanctuary," and good for her. But she's also placing all the raw materials at modfilms.com and encouraging people to make their own cut. Hours of production footage, an hour and half of sound effects and dialogue, and tons of artwork, storyboards, and photos. See what you can come up with.

In fact, I think all footage should be editable. What if I don't like the news I'm watching? What if I think the Seattle Seahawks should have won the Super Bowl? What if that dress is all wrong for that news anchor's coloring? What if I think she'd look better in a fez and flip-flops? For that matter, what if I think the Seahawks would look better in fezzes and flip-flops?

I want the power. Let me rewrite novels and plays and movies to my own liking. Let me decide when the stunt car should explode or the heroine should make her stand (or vice versa). Let me provide the commentary after the news, and do the standup on SNL. How much worse could I be?

In fact, I want to edit people. Right there, on the street. I want to walk over to some guy, click on him, and give him a better childhood and a nicer haircut. That lady should be taller, that kid should be shorter, that group over there would look cool in Viking gear. I want cheat codes for humans and real life walkthroughs! And then there's the nude patch. . .

And when I tire of screwing around with the fate of others, I want to edit me. Take out the parts I don't like, spruce up the parts I do, maybe experiment a little. I could be a 6'4" blond Adonis or an animated mongoose or a bikini babe or something, and then I could achieve my ultimate goal.

I could be on the cover of a magazine.

Valentine's Day. A name that evokes images of love, romance, moonlight, unrealistic financial burdens, emotional blackmail, and horrific gangland massacres. Ah, love!

This pink and fluffy holiday began as the ancient pagan festival of Lupercalia where Roman priests would sacrifice a goat (for fertility) and a dog (because it wouldn't stop barking). The boys of the village would then slice up the goat's hide and run through the streets, gently slapping women and crops with the bloody strips to improve the fertility of both or because by that point in the festival they really couldn't tell the difference.

But even then, the anguish inherent in Valentine's Day was exposed. The women of the village complained that the boys didn't hit them with the right bloody goat strips, or that they hit that witch Lucia Bustinia way harder than they hit her and why did they like Lucia better, was she prettier? The boys were too exhausted to answer, having been up all night frantically searching the marketplace for the last few goat strips left because they waited until the last minute.

Today the holiday has become a time to celebrate the power of your love as measured in extravagant gifts. But, despite the demands of society and Hallmark, you shouldn't feel obligated to shower your lady with chocolate-covered diamonds just to fulfill some sort of sex life maintenance fee. What she really wants is to know that you love her beyond life itself, or are willing to fake it. Here are some suggestions.

Serenade her. Actual musical ability isn't required; what's needed here is passion, devotion, and the ability to jump a fence carrying a guitar in case the police get called. If she lives in an apartment higher than the second floor you may need to choose a louder instrument with which to express your love, such as an air horn. (BLAAAT! "YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE!" BLAAAT! "MY ONLY SUNSHINE!")

Hire an investigator to get the names of all of her previous boyfriends and invite them over so she can see how much better off she is with you. Won't she be surprised to see the guy whose abusive behavior in junior high caused her to start cutting herself, or the drunken one-night hookup from Fresno she thought no one knew about?

Better yet, invite all of your old girlfriends to show how over them you are and to help reassure her that you're much happier now even if those other women might be more "beautiful" or "smart" or "sexually advantaged."

Valentine's Day is all about making her feel desired, loved, appreciated. Take the day off from work, put on a disguise, and stalk her.

For her, half the fun of the holiday is bragging to her girlfriends about what a cool, sexy, romantic man she has. You can help by sleeping with all of them so they'll know for certain exactly how lucky she is. Make sure they know that your lady can get what they're getting any time she wants.

By the same token you should be sure to look your best around her at all times. Take the money you would have wasted on flowers or dancing and buy yourself some new clothes instead, to give her the absolute best-looking date she can have. You'll need some new golf clubs, too, and maybe an iPod. But it's all for her.

Give her something unexpected that speaks of your love and eternal devotion, like a suicide pact.

Take her to a fancy restaurant and right there, in front of the other diners, get down on one knee and ask her to marry you. Every girlfriend, especially yours, dreams of this magical moment and you owe it to her to make it as dramatic and romantic as possible. You can even add that extra sense of excitement and urgency the same way car dealers and realtors do, by suggesting she might not be the only one interested. ("You wanna hurry this up? I've got someone waiting in the car.") Just make sure the ring is three sizes too small so you'll have to take it back "to be resized" and can later claim it was a hallucination brought on by bad shrimp.

The point is that it's not expensive gifts she really wants, no matter what she says. She wants attention and affection, which, as it turns out, is amazingly cheap.

And if that doesn't work, sometimes the old-fashioned ways are best: break out the bloody goat strips. Ah, love!

Are you surrounded at all times by all your favorite music? Is your home theater system powerful enough to interfere with the navigation of passing airliners? Is there a constant hum around your body due to the number of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Internet-enabled flat screen plasma devices located about your person?

Do you, in fact, have enough cool stuff?

Never fear, little technophile. There's plenty more on the way, as witnessed by the goggle-eyed attendees of last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and this week's Macworld in San Francisco. If you can somehow afford it you can now do, apparently, anything. Here's some of the highlights of these exciting conventions.

– Microsoft's founder Bill Gates kicked things off by launching his brand new Vista operating system that incorporates cutting edge innovations pioneered by Apple a few years ago. Meanwhile, Apple founder Steve Jobs bragged that Macs would soon be using blindingly fast Intel chips, just like Microsoft already has. Gates then stuck out his tongue at Jobs and hurled a promotional Microsoft messenger bag at Jobs' head. Jobs followed up with a folding chair, and celebrity spokespeople Robin Williams and Ellen DeGeneres were forced to use the fire hoses on the two corporate leaders amidst cheering crowds and the tune of "Rock You Like a Hurricane." Emergency personnel were summoned from where they had been attending to the wounded during the Google/Yahoo throwdown. Stocks for all companies involved rose approximately six points.

– To compete with the unstoppable, inexplicable juggernaut that is the iPod, Brookpond Labs has created Gimme(TM), an MP3 player that automatically senses and remotely rips and collects any and all music anywhere in your vicinity including your CD collection, your neighbor's CD collection, any and all music files on your computer, the song your mom is humming, and the song playing in that commercial you can never remember the name of. At the end of the month you're invoiced for the licensing fees of whatever your Gimme(TM) has nabbed, so you may want to keep it turned off around music stores and concerts.

– Since there is absolutely no good reason why you should ever have to miss a second of television SumSang gives you the T-Bowl TV(TM), a 27" flat panel plasma humidity-resistant TV with built in towel rack and paper dispenser that fits on the wall in your bathroom.

– But even with the T-Bowl, TiVo, DVRs, and plain old-fashioned, hand-cranked VCRs you still might possibly be accidentally exposed to a few milliseconds of a show you don't like, and we can't have that. Check out the new KillIttNow(TM) television subscription service that allows you to voice your displeasure with the touch of a button. When enough "kill" votes are tallied the offending show will immediately be canceled, its performers scattered o'er the land, and its Emmys will be distributed to other shows.

– Live TV delivered to your front seat monitor, roof-mounted antennas that receive high-speed Internet, and GPSs that take you by the hand are all ready to help you take your mind and attention off all that boring driving.

– In the fight between Blu-ray and HD-DVD for the future of your DVD player, it has been announced that you personally will lose. Not only will the new standard DVD format, whichever one it is, be totally better than anything you've ever seen, even in dreams, the new mandatory player for it will be utterly incompatible with every DVD you've ever bought before and will actually melt old-format DVDs within proximity.

– In a surprise announcement, the SumSang Corporation revealed that while everyone in the world was asleep last night operatives broke into their houses, apartments, and hovels and installed SmartieChips(TM) inside every living human being's head. SmartieChips(TM) not only provide instant nonstop high-speed Internet access to your brain, they can also stream every song every recorded or thought of, receive local broadcasts and premium cable channels, schedule your life for the next 20 years (or more, with plugins), allow you to make wireless phone calls to anyone (living or dead) just by thinking about it, have enough storage capacity to contain everything, and take high-res photos of anything you blink at, for a small monthly subscription fee and a very large service plan for the resulting cancer.

All that and more await you! Until next year, when they just get silly.

Welcome to a new experiment in humor columning: the wikicolumn. This revolutionary approach to communal wackiness is based on the [trendy] [rumor-mongering] free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows its articles to be edited by anyone in the world with results that are often very educational indeed, if not necessarily on the original topic.

Wikipedia was founded in [2002] [1969] [the age of the dinosaurs] 2001 by [Bill Gates] [Jayson Blair] Jimmy Wales, who wanted to produce a vibrant, ever-growing encyclopedia that could expand and autocorrect itself by allowing anyone reading an article to [make changes] [replace it with pig latin] edit as they see fit. This, he [hypotheseized] [hypotheseed] [hypothosoosed] guessed would result in accurate and relevant articles because Jimmy Wales didn't understand people very well. Wikipedia is named after the Hawaiian word "wiki," which means literally "ha ha, wait 'til someone reads this."

There are several advantages to this format, notably the speed at which new events are updated — celebrity deaths are often posted here before the television news finds out and sometimes even before the first souvenir hospital chart shows up at eBay — and the breadth of the coverage. Experts both professional and amateur have contributed to Wikipedia, and if you know something about something your words can also become part of the permanent record of mankind's accumulated knowledge, at least until some jerk comes along and deletes it all.

While useful, Wikipedia entries are not generally considered [fun to dance to] authoritative due to the lack of peer review or [facts] [usefulness] [accuracy] provenance. But, like political spokespeople, they are still an invaluable source of information as long as you don't rely on them at all.

The wiki philosophy has not lent itself well to news-gathering or opinion, however. The Los Angeles Times recently attempted to launch wikitorials by allowing readers to make changes to their newspaper's opinion page. This ground-breaking experiment in journalism lasted about 20 minutes or approximately the length of time it took an editor to read the first readers' comments, finish throwing up, and scream into a phone.

Last week Wikipedia made the news again after a prankster changed the entry for former Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler to read that Seigenthaler was [dating Pamela Anderson] [eating a large mince pie] [dating Pamela Anderson] implicated in the JFK assassination. This revision went unnoticed for months and was only corrected after Seigenthaler happened to google the words "mince pie" and "pamela anderson" for reasons known only to himself.

So. We have a process that is inaccurate, subject to change by consensus, and potentially libelous. In short, perfect for a humor column, and so I'm changing my format.

Now the lack of adequate research which has, in all modesty, become the signature of my column will be corrected immediately. For example, in a column about MP3s I made the following statement: "Heck, let me download music in the grocery store during long lines when I'm going crazy because I can't identify which song is being butchered by Muzak." Soon afterwards I heard from Sumter Cox, Director of Corporate Communications at Muzak, Inc, who let me know that Muzak hasn't re-recorded music for over 25 years. Had I been wikified, that little gaffe could have been cleared up instantly to cover the shocking fact that I haven't stepped into an elevator in three decades. Fear of lighted buttons. You understand.

In fact, I won't even have to produce a finished column anymore. I can just type in the subject (e.g. iPods, Rob Schneider, Harry Potter predictions, etc) and you guys can funny it up to your hearts' content. Did I miss a pun? Was there a butt joke I inexplicably omitted? Stick it in there! Check this out:

Why did the [pig] [Libertarian] [collective consciousness] chicken cross the [avenue] [teamsters] road?

[To achieve enlightenment] [To save big on his auto insurance] [To replace an economy based on manual labor with one dominated by industry and machine manufacture] To get to the other side!

Ha! Hilarious! And it only took the combined effort of 137 contributors and three weeks of bickering. A new age of comedy is dawning.

Meanwhile I can use the extra time to do something more worthwhile, like making Wikipedia corrections. That place is a mess.

Pat Morita, star of the "Karate Kid" movies and a zillion other places, has died.

When I was a teenager I searched in vain for a martial arts teacher half as wise or skilled or funny as Mr. Miyagi. And while there have been some out there, none of them would teach me in exchange for household chores, so I had to make do by watching the Karate Kid movies over and over and putting "-san" behind all my friends' names in a gutteral voice, which was almost as good.

I remember him from "Happy Days." I remember him from M*A*S*H. I remember him from all the television guest spots when they needed an Asian guy and couldn't get Mako. I even remember him from "Even Cowgirls get the Blues." I remember him as kind and funny and wise in a common-sense-sounding kind of way, and I'll miss him.

Once again World Against Toys Causing Harm (W.A.T.C.H.), the helpful worrywarts of the toy industry, has issued their annual list of the most dangerous toys of the season. And once again, they have let us down.

Every year these reports alert concerned parents about playthings that can take out eyes, lodge in windpipes, or casually burst into flame during normal use. And every year I read the list and shake my head. Are we so terrified of natural selection? How are our children supposed to become strong, gain valuable survival experience, and get cool scars?

OK, maybe the hair on Animal Alley Ponies (marketed for infants) can be accidentally ingested. But so can real horse hair! And the pair of Fantastic 4 Electronic Thing Hands from Toy Biz made the list because they could cause blunt impact injuries, which I sort of thought was the selling point.

Instead of anguishing over funtastic toys that can cause, at worst, crippling physical injuries or death, why not look at the toys with the most potential for real damage? Such as these: my own Ten Most Dangerous Toys of 2005.

#1. Robosapien Jr, by Playskool. The playful antics of this funny little cybernetic fellow (which utilizes advanced 'Bump-n-Giggle' technology to dance, spin, bounce off walls, and deliver "zany sound effects" while his eyes light up) can dangerously erode a child's natural distrust of unstoppable, emotionless killer robots, a weakening that will haunt us all in the apocalyptic times to come. Watch out on Christmas morning when the signal goes out from the secret home base and our new evil metal overlords all arise to go about their dread agenda while your dazzled children ooh and ahh, the fools.

#2 Toa Vakama Hordika, by Legos Bionicles. Can cause lower back pain, eye strain, and parental alcoholism due to frustration at putting the fricking things together. Comprised of approximately 4 billion microscopic plastic parts, Bionicles add unnecessary strains on a parent's anger management skills when it is suddenly discovered that after six hours of assembly, part #2,873,449 ("Teeny Tiny Irreplaceable and Utterly Crucial Rotor Elbow Joint 3a") is missing and the yelling begins. Oh, the yelling.

#3 Pictionary, by Hasbro. Challenging picture game that, used properly, can spark hazardous competitive nature between spouses until lifelong partners who have weathered the harshest tests of perseverance imaginable together with love and dedication suddenly erupt into closed fist fights over what that stupid squiggle was supposed to be.

#4 Dropstars R/C Dodge Magnum, by Tyco. May contribute to clinical depression when your child plays with these mightily pimped dub-style rides with huge tires, light-up rims, and plug-in MP3 player action and then, years later, has to come to terms with his actual ride: an elderly Geo that belches oil and doesn't have what mechanics call a "complete" floorboard.

#5 Furbys, by Hasbro. Yes, they're still around. And, like Luv Cubs, Fur Real Friends, Care Bears, and other cuddly automatons, they teach your children the valuable, never-to-be-forgotten lesson that loving, dependable companionship requires batteries.

#6 Playmobil Pirate Flagship, by Playmobil. Despite the many small parts and real working cannons this amazingly detailed toy is mostly dangerous to my wife, Teresa, who spent several fruitless weeks tirelessly combing stores in three counties for pirate-themed toys to use as decorations in her Pirates of the Caribbean-themed party, only to find this afterward when it was too late. Now I have to rush her past it in the store or she gets twitchy.

#7 Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus: Barbie as Princess Annika, by Mattel. Delusions of unattainable ideals of feminine beauty (including measurements that would make human women fall over) and mindless drives for absurd heaps of consumer products in this and all Barbies are not adequately rooted in reality and can easily detach and become lodged in your child's brain. But Barbies have been far surpassed by –

#8 Bratz Rock Starz by MGA Entertainment. Fires inappropriate standards of adolescent dress and deportment at high velocity. There is a danger that children may be impacted with an interest in pre-teen tattoos and belly bars or "a passion for fashion" of a sort traditionally reserved for prostitutes and dead musicians. Still not nearly as bad as –

#9 Bratz Big Baby Dollz, by MGA Entertainment. Contains high levels of preschool sexuality. Confused children may become accustomed to these funkified toddler babyskanks (which display heavy makeup and teenage pop diva clothes along with their baby bottles) and may start demanding new toy lines like the Kindergarten Kollagen Kit or My First Implants.

And finally:

#10 Xbox 360, by Microsoft. Can cause severe injuries, emotional disfigurement, and death. Not for children, who face only eye strain and thumb dislocation, but for the parents trying to buy one of the cursed things. Risks include hypothermia from long midnight lines outside Best Buy, bankruptcy from paying several times the list price to anyone who even hints they can get you one, and multiple fractures from other red-eyed, sleep-deprived, desperate parents trying to get to one first.

I hope this list helps and I wish you all a happy and healthy holiday, at least until the robots come.

Debra Lafave, the 25-year-old teacher in Tampa who was accused of sexing up a 14-year-old student, pled guilty today. She'll do house arrest and probation.

The great part of the article? This quote from her attorney, towards the bottom:

Fitzgibbons said in July that plea negotiations had broken off because prosecutors insisted on prison time, which he said would be too dangerous for someone as attractive as Lafave.

Excuse me?

Pretty women go to jail all the time. Doesn't he watch Cinemax?