WHERE'S THE SUBTLETY? Where's the originality? Where, in short, is the beef? It saddens me deeply to tell you that for reasons best left to television executives, HRH Britney Spears shall be returning to 'How I Met Your Mother'. This, of course, is because she appeared on the program earlier and gave them a big ratings boost. Everyone watched.

Of course they watched! They wanted to see if she'd shave her head or birth a baby right in the middle of the taping, or stand up and let her paunch dribble out of the sides of her pleather lace-up mini. And now it has been declared that she will return, since clearly what people want to see is more Britney Spears. If I were an exec, I might question whether people actually like the poor girl or whether they're just waiting to see what heinous breech of common decency she perpetrates next. I mean, that's why I'm watching! If she returns and again does nothing Louisianan, well- what's the point? They'll piss off the regular fans in exchange for thirty minutes of slightly higher ratings which will drop back to nothing when Brit-Brit (1) crawls back under the rock from whence she came, or (2) fails to deliver the crazy. Poor Doogie Howser. He's the Cassandra of his generation.

No, if you want originality you'll have to turn to the headlines, where you'll find that charming Austrian gentleman who imprisoned his daughter in the basement of his house for twenty-odd years and forced her to have his children (seven in all).

!!!!!

?!?!?!?!?

!!!! ??? !!!!

The part that really rocks you back on your heels is the information that he was in fact married to someone and had children with her... and that they all lived in the house!

?!?!??!

"Excuse me, Klaus, but you're standing in the way of the basement."
"I, um... You don't need to go down there."
"Yes, Klaus, I need some pickles. Move it."
"You can't. I... uh... I just farted down there. Sorry. I'll go get your pickles."

How does one keep that up for twenty years? Additionally, why do German-speakers turn out to be so insane? Is it the language? The weather? The genes?

At least you know you can trust Governor Shwarzenegger. Sure, he uses his basement to re-animate skeletons with the help of an Igor and some lightening bolts, but at least he's kind enough about it to take them into the daylight and call them his wife.

IT'S THE BIG day! You're excited, I'm excited- hey, who isn't getting their panties in a bunch today? Oh, you know what I'm talking about: watching the results of the Pennsylvania democratic primaries roll in! Can you stand it?!

The deal, or so I understand it, is that Hilary either wins this one or walks away a loser. Even if she wins, she has to win by more than fifty delegate votes just to stay in the game in a real way; tough, when she's polling lower every day. I was a Hilary fan before I was an Obama fan. I hate to see her like this. At the same time, Obama just seems... well, like he could win. That means a lot to me right about now.

I'm not in any way dismissing the Ron Paul enthusiasts. In fact, bless their little cotton socks. I like his spray-painted signs and presidential hair. I like libertarians. In general, they tend to be sexier than most people. But I don't see Ron Paul walking away with this one, I really don't. John McCain is not clever and a Republican (redundant). Hilary is unlikeable. Obama rhymes with Osama. Everyone's got their problems.

I ride my bike to work (and everywhere else, since my car battery died at work and my Honda is now gracefully reposing there in ghetto splendor), open the windows instead of using heat and air, and try to grow my own food in a small, one-zucchini-a-week kind of way. I don't care about gas prices and have given it up as a bad job. This is my professional opinion as a geologist/economist, you understand, not just navel-gazing; total oil supply slowly going down, demand remaining high or rising, prices will simply go up (along with profits, since it's not that much more expensive to get it out of the ground) until there's no more oil, which I give ten to twenty years. I'd draw you a graph, but... yeah. You don't care.

At any rate, I'd like to see gay people living in as much official misery every other married couple. I don't want 16-year-old girls to go to back alley coat hanger services because they can't get legal abortions. I'd like someone to, oh- I don't know- raise funding for schools. Maybe teach a little sex ed so that the question of coat hangers can be avoided entirely. Good bike paths. Health care for all kids. And that's it.

And even though I said I wouldn't, too bad:

WHEN YOU REGISTER to vote, there's a little box at the bottom of the page that says 'Sign or Make Your Mark Here'. Sign... or make your mark. Now, my first thought was that this is for people like Opie down in Packing & Shipping; Opie who can't be trusted to hold a safety pencil the right way up without nibbling on it, and who needs someone else to guide his hand for his caveman-like, scrawled 'X' (or possibly straggling squiggle). I can just hear Opie's high-pitched squeal of delight as the pencil makes a mark down the page. Pleased, he does it again and again until a new form must be retrieved to replace Opie's enthusiastic damage.

And then Opie gets to go vote.

It was a very depressing thought. 'Sign or Make Your Mark' pretty much has to be for the feral among us; even worse, the voting feral. But then I remembered Prince (The Artist Formerly Known As). If Prince is foolish enough to change his name to an unpronounceable glyph, surely many other Americans must be as well. It made me feel immediately better. 'Sign or Make Your Mark' is for people with symbol names, not Opie!

Not Opie.

To register to vote, or just to sign or make your own mark, go to Rock the Vote and fill in forms old school.

YOU CAN RELAX. Bush is gonna pick the Pope up at the airport today. Thank God. I know you so didn't want to go get him yourself.

I can just hear George now: "Laura! What's the flight number? No, I'm looking for my shoes- just Google it for me, will ya? Dammit, where the hell are my- Northwest!! Jesus, woman, just look it up, he's gonna be here any minute! Where the fuck are my shoes?!"

Tee hee!

LEGOS DOMINATED MY childhood. I was a collector of Legos, as much as any third child can be of any toy that costs more per square inch than hair plugs. My real breakthrough came one day when the boyfriend of an older sister decided to toss off his childish things in the pursuit of manhood, I believe at the ripe old age of sixteen. His loss was my gain, as he came to the house one day bearing an enormous tub of assorted Legos which he then gave to me.

My memory is fuzzy, but I may have peed myself.

What I do remember with remarkable clarity is sitting down with the tub and carefully sorting them out by size and color. My stepfather, an architect and- I like to think- more sympathetic to my desire to sort Legos than anyone else, had taken me to the hardware store for several plastic storage containers. Each had a multitude of tiny clear drawers intended for the separation of different kinds of nails and screws, but mine were full of perfectly sorted Legos.

When it was done, I liked to take a few days just to admire things, and this was my downfall: invariably, another sibling would steal the cases and build something enormous, using up everything in the drawers and often leaving a small trail of one-bumps leading back to the offender's bedroom. Their defense was always that it was so easy to play Legos when they were so nicely sorted, to which I invariably yelled back that I knew that, that's why I had done it.

I'd re-sort and find a better hiding place. And I did actually play with them, instead of just sorting them like a loony. I remember one Father's Day in particular, when I must have had less than nothing to do, creating a Lego card for my stepdad. It used the largest flat board I had, and from the side looked like just a Lego village. Seen from the top, though, the little trees and bushes read 'HAPPY' and the buildings made up the word 'FATHER'S'. The 'DAY' was spelled out by tiny Lego people, all of them raising a teensy plastic goblet in salute.

With four children in the house and busy, professional parents, we were almost always left to entertain ourselves. We only got an original Nintendo (that's right, the NES) one Christmas when I was almost eighteen, and we'd never had electronic toys, with the exception of a hand-crank printing press one of my sisters had gotten for a birthday (there's one episode of the Simpsons where Bart gets his hands on such a device and prints a newspaper with the headline 'Todd Smells'; that typified our level of journalism). Anyway, we were much more resourceful about our entertainment as a result. One sister and I built elaborate clay houses in the backyard mud which we populated by stick people with families and complex, Days Of Our Lives-style dramas; we biked around the neighborhood from sunrise to sunset; we roller-skated through the living room.

In hindsight, it probably all drove my mother crazy. It probably would have been heaven to her to have us to sit quietly in front of the TV blowing up aliens-- although, thinking back now, she never let us watch more than an hour of TV at one time. It's a shame that video games today are so great. When you think of all the funny, silly, dangerous, and above all imaginative things we could be doing instead of sitting in front of a computer screen... well, it's enough to make you want to stop reading blogs and go run through a sprinkler.

MY FRIEND OMAR began a McMuffin/McGriddle (sorry, McGriddles!) controversy in the comments which now has progressed into full-blown posting, if only because as I was researching the McGriddles phenomenon I came across some truly fascinating bits of information. Basically, he questioned if Dr. McMuffin loved the McGriddles as an homage to his original genius, or would he have shunned it like a red-headed stepchild?

Naturally I had to find out more about the McGriddles (I've never actually eaten one), and became instantly exposed to the deep, bizarre world of breakfast sandwiches.

In direct competition with McDonalds' original McMuffin is the Burger King Croissanwich- however, the technical spelling is actually "Croissan'Wich". I find this immensely pleasing, as they have followed to the letter (no pun intended) the rules of grammar which are so often abused in your fast-food chains. You put an apostrophe wherever you remove a letter when creating a contraction (the way "I'm" replaces "I am", and the much-maligned "they are" becomes "they're"- not "their", as so many people would have you believe). As BK is removing the '-d' from "sandwich" and the '-t' from "croissant" simultaneously, they've actually stuck in a very neat and correct apostophe. I salute you, King of Burgers.

But I digress. The Croissan'Wich has many variations, like the McMomo and the McGriddlesss. The plain-jane Croissan'Wich is a trifling 32 grams of fat- just a bit over your daily recommended intake, so you might need to bulk it up with the double Croissan'Wich. The double Croissan'Wich, with ham and bacon or double sausage, your choice, has a staggering 51 grams of fat. The only higher-fat things on the menu are the BK Triple Stacker and Quad Stacker (54 and 68 grams of fat, respectively), and the Triple Whopper with Cheese (84 grams of fat. 84! 84!! 84!!! Christ in a bucket!!). I'm certain that's what the creepy King eats, though possibly his is people-flavored. I'm a big fan of the creepy King. The McGriddles is only 21 grams of fat, so you should really eat about forty of them in a sitting. Starbucks is actually slowly and quietly rolling out their own version of the McMuffin throughout the country, though I'm hoping their momos will at least be whole-wheat. Their normal breakfast selection leaves more than a little to be desired.

This kind of fatola is mind-boggling. It's not as though most of what's in those patties is meat, after all. Instead, much of the meat-like substitutes in those burgers and bacons and sausages are actually carrageenan, which is a red seaweed extract. Lest you go thinking this miracle gift from the sea is somehow as healthy for you as a sushi seaweed wrap, consider that carrageenans are also used in fire-fighting foam, shoe polish, and as a sexual lubricant that could very possibly inhibit the transfer of certain STDs between partners. Mmmmm. McHerpalicious.

Lastly- to get the imagined taste of carrageenen-filled muck out of my mind- as I was reading my big red gardening book on the porch yesterday (and admiring my fine container garden handiwork, which is now complete- including two blackberry bushes- the excitement!), I came across the most entertaining bit of information I've heard in a long time. I thought it was hysterical; Jason was less amused. You be the judge: Apparently the word 'avocado' comes from a Native American word, ahuacatl, meaning 'droopy testicle'.

I now dare you to ever eat an avocado again without thinking of that.

STEVE IRWIN CONTINUES to work miracles from beyond the grave. His father, Bob, has come out publically to praise his son for stopping him from commiting suicide: once, after his wife died in a car accident- Steve called his cell phone at a pivotal moment-- not to pick holes, but wouldn't you turn your cell phone off if you were really making away with yourself?-- and once after Steve's own death. Apparently, Irwin junior has been sending out healing vibes from beyond the grave. Funnily enough, the actor's many superhuman abilities were revealed only after his tragic demise (any conclusions drawn from this are slanderous, unsubstantiated, and completely correct).

Ciara is currently listening to Yeah Yeah Yeah by the Flaming Lips

LAST NIGHT, I dreamed about Barack Obama. I'm certain I'm not the only one out there doing this (including Mrs. Obama, Democrat nerds, and Barry himself). He and I were discussing campaign strategy just before his big speech in a high school gymnasium. I was helping by handing out small plastic pom-poms to the crowd (yellow for McCain supporters, green for Obama supporters, and none for Hilary; I had a very funny joke to tell people when they asked about this, but can't remember now what it was) and reminding him that John McCain probably wasn't going to show. Sadly, Obama had just missed an excellent women's ice hockey game played in the gym before his speech; luckily for us, the players fell through the ice and the ice then vanished, so there was little to do in the way of cleanup.

I don't know what the hell was up with the hockey- other than the fact that I've missed the entire NHL season this year, much to my dismay- but Obama is going to be here in Memphis today, potentially, at the Mason Temple. Today, you see, is April 3rd, 2008, forty years to the day after Martin Luther King's final speech in Memphis at the Temple ('I have been to the mountaintop!'), the day before he was assassinated not five blocks from where I now sit. McCain and Hilary are going to be here; they've already announced it, their people are downtown securing all kinds of perimeters. Obama, though, hasn't said anything at all. No confirmations. No denials. I suspect he is going to be here with bells on, not sitting in the audience like his plastic-fantastic competition, but up at the podium in the Mason Temple, giving a speech which almost certainly will contain the phrase, 'I have been to the mountaintop!'

Last night I had a long dinner with charming company, one of whom was my former stepmother. She highly recommended Obama's biography (written in 1995 and containing references to smoking dope, doing blow, and bangin' pussy) and outlined it in fascinating detail. The more I learned, the more I liked him, and I do hope he's downtown this evening getting Memphis voters all riled up about voting for him. It's a tough road; here in Tennessee, there's only the small Democratic pocket of Memphis versus The Rest Of The State. However, a large voter turnout in Memphis can- and has, notably during the Clinton elections- sway the whole pointy state away from the Republicans and into the loving embrace of democracy. We can only hope. Hope, and play ice hockey.