The Trashiest, Most Satisfying Show of the Summer

I just watched the most satisfying television season finale I've seen in a long time. It paid off long story arcs, it had surprises, it had romance, it had betrayal, it had reversals, and like the all best dramas, every revelation was at once completely surprising, and totally made organic sense. I refer, of course, to Bachelor Pad 3.

I have made a few embarrassing admissions in this space. I confessed to having quit drinking because of multiple bedwetting incidents. I revealed that I once plotted the murder of my roommate's dog. I admitted to almost burning down a cabana at the best destination wedding ever. But I am really genuinely embarrassed to reveal this, because I could feel my own standards lowering with each commercial break, but at the same time I feel a need to scream what a great piece of entertainment I just witnessed, the same as I felt when I was the only person I knew watching Homeland last season.

First: What is Bachelor Pad 3? (Other than the greatest reality show ever?) It is the third season of the trashy, (more) exploitative stepcousin of The Bachelor franchise, filmed at the same opulent Los Angeles mansion used for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. (You can't let a place like that sit vacant, with no trashy reality shows filming in it, for more than a few weeks -- that's just dollars and sense.) Like The Bachelor/ette, it is a competition, but unlike The Bachelor/ette, the grand prize is not a wedding engagement that will go south faster than cheese left in the sun -- it's $250,000, which should last at least a couple of weeks longer.

The contestants are already familiar to the audience, because it is composed entirely of past Bachelor/ette hopefuls, a gene pool characterized by a willingness to do almost anything on camera, including but not limited to:

a) proposing marriage

b) using the word "bro" more than three times in one sentence

c) declaring undying love ten minutes after meeting

d) open disdain of clothing that might obstruct the camera's view of one's rigorously maintained abs

e) Listing "VIP Cocktail Waitress" or "Data Destruction Manager" or (my favorite) "Luxury Brand Consultant" as your actual occupation, right under your name and face, on national network TV

The genius of Bachelor Pad is that while the object of the game is to win money -- not to pretend to fall in love -- the game is structured to encourage and then exploit the relationships that always blossom when you put 16 under-30 tanning enthusiasts in a big house with a pool, a hot tub, 24 cameramen, and ten cases of liquor (per person). Everyone is expected to pick an opposite-sex partner, who they are not required to (but in nearly all cases immediately do) sleep with, to compete against the other teams for the money. There is a ridiculous, Double Dare-esque challenge each week, and the winners are both immune from being eliminated in that week's voting. Since the contestants (as opposed to the audience) vote each other off the show, alliances are formed, hollow promises are exchanged freely, and bald-faced lies are currency.

There is an alarming amount of discussion as to who does or does not "deserve" to be on the show: it is Bachelor Pad's version of The Bachelor/ette's contestants constantly accusing each other of not being on the show "for the right reasons." I don't understand what they're arguing about -- from what I could see of these people, each and every one of them "deserved" to be lied to, double crossed, sexually humiliated, revealed to be genuinely stupid in a spelling bee, run through a totally demeaning hot fudge sundae obstacle course, and made to sing completely off-key to a packed house.

A few different story threads came together to make this season so enormously satisfying. The first was the game of musical chairs conducted by a lunkhead named Chris, who only a couple weeks before Bachelor Pad had just made it to the final "hometown" round of The Bachelorette only to be dumped (and then take it as badly as any contestant ever has). Emily, the bachelorette, as well as all the ladies on Bachelor Pad, mentioned how handsome Chris was every time they ever said anything about him ever, which just goes to show how bad I am at judging male attractiveness, because I thought he looked like what a handsome guy would see if he looked in a funhouse mirror that stretched all his features toward the center. 

Dreamboat/optical illusion Chris.

Anyway, when Chris arrived, he was quickly claimed as a partner by "VIP Cocktail Waitress" Blakely, a tall, conventionally beautiful, obviously damaged young lady (though, at 34, by far the oldest on the show) who drove Chris insane by interrupting their strategy/makeout sessions to make him swear repeated loyalty oaths and reassure her that their week-old relationship would last forever. (At some point, she also revealed she'd worked at Hooters for 13 years, which is not relevant in any real way but I still feel bears mentioning.)

Soon Chris was sneaking away from Blakely to see Jamie, a slightly less overbearing but no less insane bikini enthusiast who interrupted their makeout sessions (undiluted by strategizing, as they were not partners) to talk about nothing in particular. Blakely soon realized what was going on, and Chris continued to seperately assure both Blakely and Jamie that he would be with them until the end -- though he maneuvered to get Blakely voted off, presumably to replace her with Jamie as his partner. But Jamie got even more annoying than Blakely in short order, talking about love and babies and the future three days after he'd slept with someone who he obviously hated.

Chris shocked everyone in the house when, after winning the right to go out on a date in one of the challenges, he passed over both Jamie and Blakely for dropped a girl named Sarah, who no one had previously noticed was on the show (including the guy she slept with in the second episode) and who either lied when she told the producers to list her age as 28, or has lived her life to this point like Robert Mitchum. They hit it off spectacularly and literally got a room while Jamie told the cameras at surprising length how much faith she had in her future with Chris.

All this is to say that Chris didn't make many friends on the show, but despite being hated by every voting member of the house with an intensity you could feel through your TV, he managed to make it to the final round because he kept winning challenges, which gave him immunity at all the key moments. He eventually had the pleasure of personally eliminating the (first) woman he scorned, Blakely (thanks to one of the show's many delightful mid-episode rule changes), but she got her own little happy ending when Tony, the affable if slightly dopey lifeboat she'd leapt to from the Viking funeral of Chris' bruised (but quickly recovering) ego, proposed to her in the finale. Despite its being the most obviously doomed union since Michael and Lisa Marie, it was still kind of sweet to see these two genuinely swept away by an unexpected romance: unexpected by Tony because he clearly thinks Blakely is the most beautiful woman on planet Earth and thus way out of his league, and unexpected by Blakely for exactly the same reason.

Running parallel with this storyline was the Passion of Michael and Rachel. Michael had actually split the $250,000 purse from Bachelor Pad 2 with his ex-fiance, who he'd spent the season trying to win back but who ran off with and later married another dude on the same season of show. Michael claimed that last time had been for the money, this year was for the honey: that after squandering the hookup possibilties of the Bachelor manse on a lost cause, this time he was going to rip through the female cast like a chainsaw. (He put it a little more delicately, but not much.)

Having won the previous season, Michael quickly asserted himself as the puppetmaster, the learned sage, the power broker in the house, telling people who to vote for, assuring the people he was maneuvering off the show that he was doing no such thing, and generally assuming the air of a bemused dictator. (Michael is one of those guys who seems way too handsome to be so intense, until the camera pulls back to show that he's about 5'3" -- then everything else about him suddenly makes sense.) He won a group date in one of the challenges, and brought three of the ladies and after making out with all of them, one at a time, on an uncrowded dance floor, he chose Rachel, the least (visibly) crazy girl in the house and thus the most attractive, to be his Puppetmaster Queen.

From that point, while everyone plotted and schemed and swore allegiance and declared war and double-dealt empty promises all around them, Michael and Rachel were content to make out on a wicker couch by the pool, pausing only so Michael could take his tongue out of Rachel's mouth long enough to tell one of his lieutenants who everyone should be voting for. It seemed they would soon cruise to victory, the cash prize, and the storybook ending all Bachelor/ette winners dream of: a four-week engagement, followed by six months of vicious tabloid backbiting.

The contestants were soon told that in the next round of voting, they'd only be voting for women, and that whichever woman was eliminated would decide on her own which man would be leaving with her. (The on-the-fly rule changes are never not awesome.) Since Chris was by this point persona non grata around the house, Michael engineered a plan to get everyone to vote for Erica (the player most obsessed with the "deserve" issue), while tipping her off that Chris was behind it, thus getting rid of Chris.

It looked like it was working -- so well that Erica confronted Chris and promised to take him down with her. Chris responded by taking her in the voting both with him and voting for someone else, so when she was eliminated she took Michael with her, leaving Rachel sobbing in the driveway, heartbroken and left without a partner.

And so it was that the other pair of finalists came together: Rachel was forced by default to team up with the only other unattached player: Erica's partner, Nick, a muscular, 6'3" bit of curly-haired beefcake that had not opened his mouth in any of the previous episodes. Rachel was despondent to be separated from her true love of the last nine days, and threatened to leave the show repeatedly, while Nick shrugged, gave her a lot of pep talks, and tried to keep her head in the game. They reached the finals by winning the final challenge, which was to perform "Sister Christian" as a duet and be judged by its authors, the founding members of Night Ranger.

A short aside on this challenge: I have always believed that even people who can't sing anything can sing something. Like "Mary Had A Little Lamb," or something by The Doors. The three couples who participated in this challenge definitively proved me wrong.

After winning the last challenge, Nick and Rachel were awarded the right to choose their opponents in the finale, and Nick had a surprisingly difficult time persuading Rachel to make the totally obvious move and choose the hated Chris and Sarah -- an obvious move because the winning couple would be decided by balloting all the eliminated players, all of whom loathed Chris. Rachel wanted to bring her best friend's team, which would have been incredibly stupid, as they were the best-liked couple in the house.

All of this brings me to the finale.



There was Tony and Blakely's engagement, as I mentioned, which was sweet, but it came paired with the revelation that Michael, despite many on-camera declarations of love and long-term intentions for Rachel, had forgotten her the moment he left the house and continued chainsawing through the female cast of Southern California. He offered some unconvincing apologies and she seemed to fully realize, right there on camera, that he was a tool when she cut him off, mid-forced apology, with a terse "We get it, Michael."

The final vote was little more than a formality; Chris tried to apologize to Blakely and Jamie for treating them like an allergy sufferer treats Kleenex, in hopes of salvaging enough votes to win, but Nick and Rachel took it in what may have been the first "landslide by default" in the history of televised democracy. 

Just before the knife went in.
Look at her: she doesn't suspect a thing.

And here's where things got really good: Nick and Rachel had one more task, which was to separately declare whether to keep or share the $250,000 prize. If they both said "share," they split it down the middle. If they both said "keep," they both got nothing and the loot would be divided among their fallen castmates. If one said "keep" and the other "share," the one who said "keep" would get it all and the one who said "share" would get bupkus.

This looked like it would also be little more than a formality, partly by precedent: both prior winning couples had shared the cash, and there was no reason to think that wouldn't happen again. Indeed, Rachel made a dramatic feint in her vote-casting speech like she might say "keep," but she didn't, because what kind of asshole would do that?

This kind, it turns out: Nick stunned a nation of hardened, cynical reality TV veterans by keeping the whole prize for himself, gleefully (and quite correctly) explaining that no one had given him a moment's thought the whole season -- no one had even bothered to try and sway his votes one way or the other, much less seen him as a threat. He went on to remind Rachel that she'd threatened to leave three times, and that she'd spent 89% of their partnership sobbing on the phone with Michael. (In subsequent interviews, Nick has also said that he saw the last two episodes of the season the night before the finale was taped, and saw Rachel repeatedly dogging him, which tipped him off the keep/share fence.)

And this is where it transcended it genre and became the most satisfying dramatic enterprise in my recent memory, because as Rachel pouted indignantly and Nick patiently and logically explained why he didn't owe her squat, you could see it slowly dawning on the faces of all the other players that Nick was right, that he'd well and truly WON THE GAME, and that he was the first person to correctly use the word "deserve" all season. Nick didn't just win Bachelor Pad, he was the Richard Hatch of Bachelor Pad: the one who won and through winning showed everyone how the game is supposed to be played.

I seriously doubt that a team of Oscar-winning screenwriters could have come up with such an organic but still totally surprising, logical, character-driven plot, so, even though I'm still embarrassed to admit that I even watch you, my hat is off to you, Bachelor Pad. I wish they would just get rid of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and just have four seasons of Bachelor Pad a year, because this season was a definite game-changer (in the literal sense of the word), and I can't wait to see how future players approach it.

Pay Heed, Allergy Sufferers, For I Am Your King!

As the summer comes to an end, I can't help but feel sorry for the poor, desperate souls who've suffered through the season in one of two miserable states.

One: sniffling, nose red, chafed, and sore, rubbing their eyes, sneezing more often than not sneezing, spitting out the mucus that never stops running down their throats when no one's looking, constantly clearing their throats as a way to scratch the itch that said mucus creates, and walking around with one pocket full of fresh Kleenex and another pocket full of spent Kleenex (or, looking around wild-eyed for something to use as a Kleenex: napkin, paper towel, old newspaper, candy wrapper).

Or, two: shuffling around in a Sudafed/Chlor-Trimeton/Benadryl haze, feeling like your head has gained twenty pounds, ever so slightly tingling from head to toe and unable to shake the fantasy of lying down and trying to bond with your comforter at a subatomic level.

I feel this pity for the so afflicted because until a couple of years ago, I was one of you. I may well have been your king! I realize that this sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it literally and truthfully: I have never seen anyone else suffer from allergies as much as me. They handicapped me to the point of near-total paralysis. I once ruined -- not tainted, not dampened, RUINED -- a Thanksgiving dinner at my wife's uncle's house because I was so allergic to their cats my eyes swelled and turned the color of an old tomato and I couldn't stop sneezing for even ten seconds. Again: not exaggerating.

This problem goes back to when I was a kid. I guess I was about ten or so when it got bad enough that my mother took me to the doctor, who sent us to an allergist, who told us I was allergic to grass and trees. He prescribed some pills that I don't remember ever making any difference. We laughed, as a family, about the futility of a ten-year-old boy in the suburbs trying to avoid grass and trees. I wasn't laughing so much a couple of years later when I was deemed old enough to start mowing the lawn.

At first I was excited to mow the lawn. Placed in charge of a piece of dangerous, semi-heavy machinery? It felt like a rite of passage, my first true entry into grown-up responsibility. But that enthusiasm soon waned when I realized that mowing the lawn effectively meant the end of my weekend: the sneezing and the itchy eyes, ears and throat and the runny nose that began the moment I started the job would mean I'd have to spend the rest of the day (at least) hiding in the climate-controlled house -- with any luck, the sneezes would slow enough in frequency that the feeling would return to my face sometime after dinner.

I complained to my folks that I'm allergic to grass and trees, pointing to the allergist's diagnosis to bolster my case, and suggesting it might be better for my health (and maybe everyone would have an easier time hearing the TV later that night) if someone else cut the grass. My mom, ever the nurturer, drew me close and gently suggested that if I wanted, next week I could wear a surgical mask while I cut the grass.

It was around this time that I began to grow familiar with the numb dysphoria that comes with taking antihistamines by the handful. I was never relieved of lawnmowing duty, even though I have a brother who's a year and a half younger and not allergic to anything. I plan on reminding my parents of this when the time comes to choose between the modestly priced nursing home that smells like formaldehyde and medicated powder, and the more expensive one that smells like lavender. ("You can always wear a surgical mask!" I'll cheerfully point out.)

Anyway, when I grew into a young adult and moved to San Francisco, my allergy levels, which had already turned me almost completely into an avid indoorsman, began to rise even when I took refuge inside. It took me a while to realize that San Francisco, with its abundant fog and "rainy season," is, in addition to being stunningly picturesque and easily the world's best place to spend your twenties, bar none the moldiest city in America, and that in addition to grass and trees, I am deathly allergic to mold.

This harsh reality came into focus when I decided, "Hey! I've got a steady salaried job, complete with health insurance, thanks to an Internet tech bubble that will never, ever burst -- I should go to a doctor and get to the bottom of these allergies. Maybe advances have been made in allergy medications that can help me!" My wife has since confided that on our first few dates, she found it exceedingly odd that I kept a full-size box of tissues in my car, right in front of the gearshift. 

So I went to the doctor, and he referred me to an allergist, and I told him my respiratory life story. He nodded and wrote a few things down and said, "All right, the nurse is going to come in and give you a test, to see exactly what we're dealing with here, and then we'll go from there." In comes the nurse, an attractive young woman in scrubs, not much older than myself. She explained that she would prick the back of my arm, in the shoulder/tricep area, with a variety of allergens (grass, trees, mold, cat dander, dog dander, etc. etc.), like 24 of them or so, in a grid formation. She would give the pricks a few minutes to react or not react (in the form of swelling around the puncture) -- the size of the swelling, which she'd measure by comparing it to a series of small, variously sized holes in a card, would indicate whether, and to what degree, I was allergic to each allergen.

The process was painless, and I waited ten minutes or so while the nurse attended to other patients, maybe administered some other allergy tests. I thought to myself what a strange job it must be, to give 24 pinpricks to multiple people each and every day, and to then evaluate the swelling. I guess it's like anything else, I thought -- you just get used to it until it's no big deal.

Then I heard the door open, and the nurse's clipboard clatter to the ground, as she gasped in unfeigned shock: "OH MY GOD." My condition was apparently the worst she'd ever seen -- and this was her job. All 24 punctures had swelled up bigger than her little card could measure. They'd swelled up the way Toll House cookies spread out when you cook them: they'd started out small and totally separate, but were now more like a 24-part Venn diagram.

It was soon explained that I was allergic to everything they'd tested me for. If allergy-test pinpricks were basketball players, my set of samples was the '96 Bulls, with grass, trees, and mold the Jordan, Pippen, and Rodman. The fact that my then-girlfriend now-wife and I had just moved in together in a half-basement apartment (it was the basement of a house, but the house was set into a steep hill so the back half of the basement was above ground) indicated that I would not be escaping mold anytime soon. (It wasn't until a couple of years later, when I'd moved to Brooklyn and my condition once again restricted itself to when I was outdoors, that I understood that San Francisco is, in addition to its many more charming qualities, just seven square miles of mold from which there is no escape.)

So, the doctor, who entered chuckling, "Well, Alexander! You are a very! Allergic! Young man!" recommended that I begin immunotherapy at once, and I agreed before the details were even explained to me.

Immunotherapy would ostensibly build my tolerance to all these allergens over a period of several years, and ultimately cure me of the allergies once and for all, if I followed the course of treatment: I would be issued a set of syringes and a set of vials full of allergen cocktail, and I would have to self-administer an injection to a roll of my belly fat, pinched between my fingers, twice a week. (I swear I'm not making this up.) The doctor acknowledged that sticking a needle in my own belly might make me squeamish, and that if this was the case I could bring my girlfriend (or whoever) and they'd teach her (or whoever) how to give me the injections. My then-girlfriend now-wife agreed to take on this duty, but when she got a look at what it actually entailed, she blanched and pulled the ripcord immediately. I was on my own, and so I embarked on the very strange ritual of sticking myself in the belly with a syringe twice a week. (The weirdest part wasn't the sticking in of the needle, but that a little of the medicine or whatever you'd call it always oozed out the puncture hole when I took the needle out.)

Did it work? It might have, but we'll never know because about six months later I, along with everyone else in San Francisco, lost my job when the tech bubble burst and tertiary, non-essential personnel such as the editorial staffs of money-losing websites were turned out into the street, marking the end of both my Ecstasy subsidy (that's a '90s San Francisco joke) and my health insurance, and with it, the immunotherapy.

But this story, a story of crusty shirt cuffs and ruined pillowcases and half-heard movie dialogue and very awkward (they would probably say disgusting) close encounters with the opposite sex has a happy ending, because I discovered a wonder drug that has changed my life. I want to tell you about this wonder drug because when I see other people suffering the way I used to suffer and I mention it to them, they seem not to understand that I am whispering the answer to their prayers. I am shining a light in the black wilderness.

That light is called Claritin, my friends, and I came *this close* to naming my son after it. (He was spared this fate because what I actually buy is the generic Rite-Aid version, which goes by the name of the active ingredient, Loratadine, which is obviously a girl's name.) Whereas I used to spend April through October with my sinuses tingling, clawing at my insanely itchy eyes, and teetering on the verge of 19 consecutive sneezes, while innocent bystanders went from  a patient "Bless you" to "Bless you again!" to silently staring with pity to staring with barely veiled contempt, I am now (respirationally) a normal person, suffering from neither crippling allergies nor differently-crippling allergy-medication side effects, and I have Claritin (Loratadine) to thank.

Whenever I encounter a fellow allergy sufferer, I try to tell them about the wonder drug, how it's changed my life, that they really ought to get on it. Most of the time, they just shrug and say they tried it and it didn't do anything. That's because they're doing it wrong!

Claritin (Loratadine) is not like Sudafed or Benadryl or Chlor-Trimeton. You don't take one and then see immediate, 6- or 12-hour relief (or the accompanying 6- or 12- hour low-level too-much-coffee-ish buzz that comes with it). It's more like birth control pills, or SSRIs: you take one every day, and after about two weeks, your allergy symptoms just gradually start to vanish. (I chose that word, VANISH, very carefully.)  There are no side effects that I've noticed, just an absence of misery. I don't know why this is not explained on the box, but that's the way the stuff works -- if you just take one when your nose starts running, it's not going to help.

The only trick is that you eventually start to forget you suffer from crippling allergies, much the way people on SSRIs eventually forget they're crazy, so after a while it's easy to forget to take the pill every day, and if you go more than a couple of days without one, you start to get that familiar tingle in the nose again. I've taken to keeping my pills next to my toothbrush on the sink, where I won't fail to see them. This has become a point of contention with my wife, who feels (not unjustifiably) that a bottle of generic Rite-Aid pills at the focal point of our bathroom is an eyesore, and would prefer that I keep them in the medicine cabinet. I can usually make her back down by reminding her of the time I ruined (RUINED) Thanksgiving dinner at her uncle's.

And by the way, now that I have a back yard of my own, I made sure I never have to mow it: I filled it in with multicolored gravel.

Try Claritin!

The Soda Ban = Apartheid

I saw something pretty strange the other day on my bike ride home: an ad on the back of a Pepsi-Cola delivery truck depicting, in silhouette, a man triumphantly raising a cup, as an Olympian might hold his torch or a gladiator might hold up the severed head of his vanquished foe: in a pose of defiant triumph.

DON'T LET BUREAUCRATS TELL YOU WHAT SIZE BEVERAGE TO BUY

This refers, of course, to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to ban the sale of sodapop and other sweetened beverages in sizes larger than 16 ounces. in an effort to slow the avalanche of childhood obesity.

How dare he!

There has been a surprisingly strong public outcry in opposition of this move here in the city -- there was a hearing about it the other day, and the hearing was attended by activists with signs and everything. Yesterday the New York Times reported on a citywide poll that found two-thirds of city residents not in favor of the motion -- most of those quoted in the piece framed it as a civil rights issue, as in "who is the government to tell me how much soda I can drink?"

Well, a couple things about that: one, the government is not telling you how much soda you can drink. They are telling you that if you want to drink more than 16 ounces, you'll have to buy two. It is an effort at portion control, which studies I have not read have been said to show is one of the most effective tools we have against obesity.

People are not necessarily wrong to feel that this is a government overreach. It kind of is. I'm not sure I want to see it pass, even though I'm certain that I will sleep just fine at night if it does pass. I don't care at all one way or the other. What I find interesting about the debate on the matter is that a debate at all. Not because it's not debateable -- there are strong cases for and against, if you ask me. The fact that anyone cares enough about how much soda they're allowed to drink through one straw to protest it, to make a sign about it and carry that sign on the subway and then wave it around and shout when they get to where they're going is absolutely insane to me. 

Don't let the government take away our right 

to sell you sugared water at a 700% markup!

The country's economy is supposedly terrible (though I must say I would have no idea of that if I didn't read or watch the news). There is a presidential campaign happening, and its results are likely to have a substantial impact on the social contract between the government and its citizens. The nation's banks collapsed as a result of their own greed and recklessness, and no one (no one) has been prosecuted. There have been three firearm massacres in public places in the last six weeks. Government officials are showing shocking ignorance to the rights and basic functions of women's bodies.

And this is what people want to demonstrate about? This is what gets people off the sofa: ironically, the idea that they might have to get off the sofa more than once to slake their unquenchable thirst for demonstrably, obviously fattening beverages? I'm sure there's a perfect Woody Guthrie protest song for this occasion, it's just too bad poor Pete Seeger isn't here to sing it.

Having said that: Look. If you are an adult, and you feel like you need 32 ounces of Co-Cola to get through a movie -- and if you are such a person, I would be interested to hear your bathroom strategy -- I don't begrudge you that right. But this is not about you. It's about the kids. I spend a lot of time with a 5-year-old boy these days, and I have learned a thing or two (and been reminded of a thing or two) about the way kids are with sodas and sugary things in general.

Put simply: they are like junkies. Once they've had a taste of a Coke or a Sprite or a Dr. Pepper, they will lie, cheat, or steal to get more. Kids don't drink beer or booze, they drink sugar, and sugar, as my good friend Colin told me when his son was my son's age, is the gateway drug.

When she burps it smells like Freedom

This morning at breakfast we had an argument that we have a lot: My son protested that I hadn't poured enough milk in his cereal. He had not eaten any cereal yet; he hadn't even put his spoon in the bowl. He just looked at it and felt it didn't look like enough milk. I stood my ground and told him it was enough milk, and after a little more back-and-forth he went ahead and started eating. A few minutes later, after he'd eaten most of his Cheerios, I pointed out that there was still a good bit of milk left in the bowl.

Here's the point: kids don't do portion control. If they know they like it, there is no such thing as too much of it. My wife jokingly suggested that we fill a mixing bowl with Cheerios and milk, and the boy readily agreed to that plan.

And this is just plain Cheerios, a food he's lukewarm on at best. If I offered him a 64-ounce Coke, which would be more Coke than he has blood in his body, he wouldn't just take it, he'd run off with it and hide it somewhere. He gets this look in his eyes, when he gets a little taste of something sugary and knows there's more to be had in the vicinity: it's like a crazed raccoon or a dude on a (small-c) coke jag.

Really?

So if a kid walks up to the snack counter at the movies, or at the mall, or wherever, chances are that kid is going to order the biggest soda he can carry. As the rise of giant soda options seems to have coincided with the rise in childhood obesity in this country, it doesn't seem like a terrible idea to me to restrict that kid's portion to 120% of his actual stomach capacity.  If that seems an inconvenience to those of us who like our beverages big enough to have an undertow, well, buy a second one and slurp away with my gravest sympathies for this awful infringement on your personal rights.

One more time, to be clear: I don't care if this law passes. My relationship to it is the same as my relationship with the Mets: I'm not rooting for it, and I'm not rooting against it. I can see the logic of it, but that's as far as it goes. But if you are really upset about it, I would suggest that you a) closely examine your relationship with soda, because nothing sold in such bright-colored packaging should inspire such passion, and b) redirect your efforts to something a little more substantial, like getting Caprica uncanceled or making sure the fat guy doesn't win The Voice. 

Obama Staged The Moon Landing

A couple of nights ago Megadeth founder Dave Mustaine, last seen in the mortifying Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster groveling/mending fences with Lars Ulrich 20 years after being kicked out of the band for excessive debauchery -- quite a feat in a band once known to friends as "Alcoholica" -- made some controversial comments onstage with Megadeth in Singapore.

Behold the face of stupid

Megadeth is one of those bands that's been around forever but who no one seems to like. I am certainly no stranger to metal, but I don't think I've ever actually heard a Megadeth song. The only thing I know about them is that Mustaine started the band when he got kicked out of Metallica, and that they are credited with bringing political awareness to thrash metal, on the strength of their 1987 album Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?

I never gave much thought to what Mustaine's political point of view might be on that or any of his subsequent records. Turns out it is somewhere to the right of Timothy McVeigh. 

"My president is trying to pass a gun ban, so he's staging all of these murders," Mustaine told the crowd, and then went on to list the Aurora massacre, the Sikh temple massacre, and the "Fast & Furious" operation in Mexico as examples.

I have to wonder what Dave means by "staging." Does he mean that these murders were faked, like the moon landing? Was no one actually killed in Colorado? Or in the Sikh temple? Or maybe Dave means that the president arranged these massacres, like Bush arranged 9/11? Either way, it's clear who the bad guy is in these tragedies: President Barack Obama.   Obviously, both suggestions are insane and not even worth discussing (as are those about the moon landing and 9/11, I should add in case your sarcasm detector is low on batteries), but either way, Dave is voicing an extreme version of a common Right-wing opinion: Barack Obama has a radical secret anti-gun agenda all set up and ready to go the moment public opinion swings his way. The NRA has devoted itself for the last 20 years to screaming this message from the rooftops: The Democrats are coming to take your guns! It's the organizing principle of all the NRA's fundraising and voter turnout drives, and it's worked out great for the GOP. The thing is, there is no secret gun control agenda. It's a political nonstarter and it always has been. For a variety of reasons ranging from silly to totally legitimate, there's not a swing state in the Union that would go blue if serious gun reform on a national level were part of the Dems' platform, and any Democrat running for national office is smart enough to stay away from the issue completely. (Obama never mentioned it at all during the 2008 campaign.) Even if they'd like to, and I'm sure a lot of Democrats would, they will never, ever make any real move toward gun control. I feel as secure making this prediction as I would predicting that the sun will rise tomorrow and that the Knicks will be terrible again this year. How can I be so sure? First, because of the political reality I just described. Americans, particularly the ones who live outside big cities, love guns, and that's not going to change anytime soon. Second, because Obama, whose top adviser was once quoted as saying the administration should "never let a crisis go to waste," has not said a single word (A SINGLE WORD) about gun control, even after an obvious head case marched into a movie theater armed to the teeth with legally purchased weapons and opened fire. Nor did he say a word about it when a congresswoman was shot in the head in a parking lot. Or when a group of people were shot in their place of worship. If there was ever going to be a moment where the public might be inclined toward some gun control, we are right in the middle of it, and Obama has not (and will not, mark my words) made even a nod in that direction. The Democrats are generally a pretty pathetic bunch, in terms of strategy and messaging and purchasing suits that fit. But give them this: at least they focus their opposition on reality. They're worried that Republicans will try and privatize Social Security -- imagine for a moment how that would have worked out in the fall of 2008 when the banks collapsed -- because Republicans tried to privatize Social Security. Campaigned on it, published papers about it, and George W. Bush made it his first priority in his second term. Democrats worry that Republicans want to deregulate the banking industry, despite the clear result of lax regulation in the fall of 2008, because Republicans are out there campaigning on it right now. Democrats worry that Republicans will drive up the national debt, because they are promising reduced revenue without specifying any offsetting spending cuts. Democrats worry that Republicans want to start a war in Iran because they can't stop talking about it, and because they just did it in Iraq ten years ago. On the other hand, all of Republicans' worries about what Democrats want to do seem to be based on guesses and extrapolations and their imaginations and their nightmares, and are frequently in direct contradiction to their actual deeds: Obama's a Socialist! (A Socialist who saved the largest Capitalist enterprise in the history of this nation, General Motors.) He hates bankers and wants to put them out of business! (Prosecutions against the executives responsible for the banking crisis: zero.) He wants the Government to take over health care! (But he still bent over backward to keep the for-profit insurance model in place.) He wants to kill your grandma! He wants to give full amnesty to illegal immigrants! He wants to, he wants to, he wants to. Dear Republicans: There are genuine and substantive differences between your positions and those of the Democrats. They do not require embroidery or embellishment. For example: given the required majorities, the Democrats will raise upper-bracket tax rates from 36% to 39%. We know this because a) they've said so repeatedly and b) they've done it before (1992-2000, which we all remember as the worst economic period of the last... wait, let me check my dates.). Please do us all the favor of focusing your campaigns and your rhetoric and your misspelled signs on those real differences, so that we might have intelligent and informed debates on the issues and, with a little luck, perseverance, and goodwill, perhaps form a more perfect union. Or you can just keep making shit up. Whatever.

Paging Dr. Google

I could have gone to pieces when my wife told me she has Parkinson's Disease. But I feel that with things like this, it's best not to overreact. To stay calm, because it's what she needs from me. It won't do either of us any good if we're both panicking. I could get emotional, I could start railing at the fates, but I've learned that it's best to stay calm when talking one's spouse out of her self-diagnosis.

Because she doesn't have Parkinson's Disease. She has a runny nose and a sore back and a headache. But thanks to the wonders of Google, she can search on those symptoms and get a whole array of possibilities. And wouldn't you know, she tends to skip right over the ones like "common cold" and "24-hour flu" and spend the next 48 hours agonizing between it being Hepatitis or Lou Gehrig's Disease.

If, as the saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, it seems in the Internet era that a lot of it is even worse. Certainly, for certain things, it's great to be able to tap into the giant hive mind that is the Internet and apply its accrued wisdom. Computer problems are the best example I can think of. I can't remember the last time I called tech support, or took my computer somewhere to fix it; I just Google whatever it's doing (or not doing), and pretty soon I've solved my problem. I rewired my whole house armed only with a pair of pliers, a quart of screw-on wire couplers, and my computer. I'm sure if I was one to work on my own car, the Internet would be an invaluable resource.

But working on cars and computers, even your own, is not the same thing as trying to figure out what's wrong with your own body. No matter how much you love your car, it's still possible -- difficult, maybe, but still possible -- to take a step back and think rationally about it. But, in the absence of the ten-year medical education and real-world experience that doctors bring to bear in an exam, and burdened instead with the natural anxiety and fear and emotion that are such an unfortunate part of the human condition, the accumulated medical learning of the last thousand years is reduced to a demented Rorschach test, where our worst mortal worries can flower into awful purple-thorned tentacles choking off all our better logical impulses.

Thus, when my wife gets a little sweaty under the blankets at night from time to time, the likely and relatively benign diagnoses of hypoglycemia, or "idiopathic hyperhidrosis" (literally, sweating for no reason) -- are immediately and automatically overlooked in favor of the much scarier early menopause. (The conception of our son put this particular worry to rest -- for a while, anyway.)

When she has a short muscle spasm, it's not just a cramp, or fatigue, or restless leg syndrome; not when Lou Gehrig's Disease and Multiple Sclerosis are at the bottom of the page. When she gets a canker sore, it's obviously Herpes, even though she's been with me for 14 years and I don't have Herpes.

There's a wide array of these medical websites, chock-full of terrifying information for the so inclined, and they are of course full of warnings and disclaimers;  Each listing of possible causes of a given symptom is prefaced by the warning that before any diagnosis can be made, a full accounting of a person's age, medical history, and family history must be analyzed by a doctor. But those warnings are like the "please drink responsibly" in tiny print at the bottom of a beer commercial depicting 400 people bouncing on a roof to terrible music and in no way drinking responsibly: that is to say, a pro forma indemnification, there only to be ignored. In the heat of a fevered (fever being the surest sign of bacterial meningitis, by the way) late-night Google session to determine the cause of one's diarrhea, cooler heads that might point to any number of innocuous causes are hard to come by -- likelier is the conclusion that acute cirrhosis of the liver has set in, and death is imminent.

I'm not exactly innocent here -- I've certainly been known to self-diagnose via Google. But where my wife will take the opportunity to confirm her worst fears (or in many cases, welcome some brand-new ones), I tend to go the other way: I've been having a lot of head rushes when I get up lately -- actually fainted a couple of times, in fact -- and when I Googled that problem I passed by "Addison's Disease" and "Multiple System Atrophy" and decided "Low Blood Pressure" must be the problem, because it's benign and there's no need to go to the doctor. Case closed!

I hope this doesn't come off as an attack on my wife, because I don't think this tendency of hers is at all unusual -- my it's-probably-nothing approach is probably the less common of the two. It's more a measure of how supremely fucked the healthcare system is in this country: Rather than go to a doctor, who in all but a few legitimately awful cases would dispel their patients' fears and send them on their way with an Advil and a few minutes' free therapy, we're all forced to try and figure this shit out ourselves. It seems better than the alternative, which is to try and navigate the primary care physician out of network referral deductible maze that is the modern HMO.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm having a hard time concentrating on writing this -- I just Googled "loss of concentration" and in only two clicks I determined that I'm in the midst of a congestive heart failure, so I'm going to sign off and try and dash off a living will real quick.

Snoop Dogg's New Record Is A Name-Changer

Snoop Doggy Dogg
Snoop Dogg
Snoop Lion

This week I saw one of the most -- I don't want to say "unbelievable" in a world where a sentient tetherball named Snooki gets paid seven figures to wobble drunkenly around the boardwalk in lucite heels, so let's go with "interesting" -- one of the most interesting pop culture developments in a few minutes: Snoop Dogg has changed his name again.

His first name change was in 1998, when, once again following the example of John Cougar Mellencamp (as has always been his wont), Snoop dropped the frivolous "Doggy" to go with the much more upright "Snoop Dogg." Now he's switched again to "Snoop Lion," which is of course a nod to his rich Jamaican heritage, which dates back to last February, when he went there to record an album.

Jumping right over the weird incongruity of putting the words "Snoop" and "Lion" together -- a dissonance on par with "Los Angeles Lakers" and "Utah Jazz" -- everybody went right to a variation on the same joke: "I'm not sure I want to upgrade to Snoop Lion." I love operating system-based comedy!  

But performers change their names all the time these days. Puff Daddy's done it like half a dozen times, and so has Roseanne. Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and NFL wideout Chad Johnson changed his to Chad Ochocinco (Spanish for Eight Five, his jersey number, because he's a genius) and they both changed them back. And I don't think any list of silly name changes would be complete without Metta World Peace, ironically the worst cheap-shot thug in the NBA.

But none of them did what Snoop is doing, which is fundamentally changing what he does. Snoop has been doing rap -- specifically, guns/pimps/hos/Crips/Bloods West Coast gangsta rap -- since 1992, when his guest verses on Dr. Dre's The Chronic were the obvious highlight of an instant classic. His solo debut, Doggystyle, was released a year later, and is to this day one of the five best hip-hop albums ever made (for my money), if not the best. (I'm partial to the G-Funk, what can I say.)

We can argue about which is the best rap album ever -- I'm biased to the classics of the early '90s myself -- but I would contend that Snoop is the best rapper ever. His voice is a totally distinctive instrument, like Coltrane's or Eddie Van Halen's.  It only takes one word to know who you're hearing. He lays way back on the beat, which makes everything way funkier (it's no accident that Doggystyle is constructed almost entirely from P-Funk samples). And, above all, he makes it seem so, so easy. He never raises his voice, he never runs out of breath, and he never falls off the beat. There are a lot of great talent out there, but if there's a better rapper than Snoop out there, I haven't heard him. I concede, of course, that without a Dr. Dre-level producer, his records aren't that great. I haven't even heard one in years. Has he had a hit since "Drop It Like It's Hot?" What was that, like '96? (And by the way, why is "Drop It Like It's Hot" the only Snoop song club DJs ever play when it's like the eleventh best Snoop song?) Anyway, yeah, his records have been spotty since Tha Doggfather, but I'd still insist that in terms of pure microphone talent, Snoop is in a class by himself. Which is why it's so surprising that he wants to give it all up and be, of all things, a reggae artist. Yes, Snoop went to Jamaica to record his 12th rap record, but he quickly went native, and (he says) was "called by the spirit" to abandon his familiar idiom, grow some dreadlocks, smoke a massive amount of Mother Nature (though to be fair, he would have done that anyway) and make a dub reggae album. Other than Dee Dee quitting the Ramones to make the worst rap record ever, or Garth Brooks turning into Chris Gaines and making the worst emo-soft rock record ever, I can't think of any analogue to this in the music world. But I can think of one in the sports world. In 1993, after his third consecutive NBA title, and third consecutive Finals MVP, Michael Jordan retired from the Chicago Bulls, claiming that he'd lost his motivation, having reached the pinnacle of his career and having nothing left to prove. At his press conference announcing this new reggae album, Reincarnation, Snoop said much the same thing: "Rap is not a challenge to me. With no disrespect to other rappers, but they can't fuck with me in rap ... I've won every accolade you can get." These two press conferences were exactly the same, except that Snoop's smelled like a kennel that only boarded skunks.

When Jordan quit, rather than disappearing into the world of million-dollar golf skins games like everyone expected, he surprised everyone by signing a minor-league baseball contract with the Chicago White Sox and playing a season with their farm team, the Birmingham Barons. He didn't change his name, but he traded his signature number 23 for 45. Everyone thought he'd fall on his face, and while he didn't make the majors or anything, he did put in a respectable showing before returning to the NBA a year and a half later, where he promptly won three more titles, three more Finals MVPs, and two more league MVPs. One could argue (and many did) that the time away from "the game of basketball" (as Jordan insisted on calling it at all times) refreshed his love of the game and was essential to the Bulls' second three-peat.   So maybe that's what's happening with Snoop. Let's face it, Snoop is not the angry, downtrodden 22-year-old Crip that took over the rap game with "Gin and Juice" and "What's My Name." Dude has been a kajillionaire for almost 20 years now. He's neither pimping, nor strapped. If you step to him, his likeliest reaction is to step back quickly to get out of the way of his eleven bodyguards, who will soon teach you not to step to Snoop. (They may or may not teach you how to Dougie. See kids? I'm hip!) The point is this: rap is an angry young man's game, and despite his peerless microphone skills, Snoop is definitely not that. So let him go play baseball for a while. He's not so bad at it: his singsongy tenor was always somewhere between rapping and crooning anyway, and it's pretty well suited for this music. He's even kind of selling the Jamaican accent. And I would argue that this new single has the best production (if not the best material) of any record he's done since he parted ways with Dre. Dude wants to mellow out and smoke tons of weed and sing (sing) about peace and love and Jah? Who could possibly begrudge him that? More than likely though, he'll come back and headline some huge package tour with Ice Cube and Ice-T and the Tupac hologram and the Biggie hologram and the Eazy-E hologram in a couple of years. Maybe he'll even reunite with Dr. Dre for another record (if Van Halen can get back together, absolutely nothing is impossible). You can't make a big comeback if you don't leave. Let's just make sure there's no comeback after that. Nobody wants to see Snoop playing for the Washington Wizards.

Anyway, here's Snoop's new reggae single. Am I completely crazy, or is it not too bad?