You know your community ate paint chips as a baby when it can't even get a parking lot right. Here's the recipe for a perfect parking lot: Take one parcel of land, cover in asphalt, paint lines. Then leave it alone, you're done!

The year you get your driver's license is always the year your high school messes up the parking situation — they had no idea so many juniors would be driving to school! — and I've been touchy about parking injustice ever since. There was this permit system with stickers and registration numbers, so different people could park in different spaces in different lots at different times. The inevitable daily result was that all of your available spaces were filled, plus there'd be plenty of open spaces that you couldn't use since you didn't have Alpha Level 2 Code Black privileges. I suggested an alternate system, where whoever arrived at the space first got to park there — you know, just like in every other parking lot on the planet. But I think it was less about the parking and more about the power trip, which is so egregious. I mean, I'm already driving to school in a beige 1988 Ford Taurus station wagon, how much more humiliated do I have to be?

Ever since, I've been waging a one-man protest against parking meters and their partners, the two-hour residential parking limit. I'd rather the signs just
say outright Fuck You, Commuters!

Here's how things stand right now: Last year, the daily parking rate at the train station was three dollars. The Borough Council, or whatever cranky old people make the decisions in this town, raised the price to a round $3.25 — claiming that they had to raise the price to cover increased sales taxes. Sales taxes went up 0.25% but the town council raised the parking fee by 7.6% to cover it? Someone needs a new calculator. But that happened without too much incident. Then, maybe a month ago, the train station ghosts put signs around the building that the machine outside that eats your dollar bills and shits parking tokens and change was now out of service, because the town was "in the process of selecting a new system." I don't know — I would've probably waited until the new system was installed, or being delivered, or at least chosen, before decommissioning the current system.

We have a temporary system in place. A police officer stands by the parking meters with one of those metal cash boxes, and civilians hand cash over to a cop in exchange for parking rights. I'm not saying anything unscrupulous is going on with people paying a police officer to avoid getting a ticket, but it doesn't look that good. Maybe if I slip him a twenty, he'll let me park in a handicapped space?

On March 29, the town raised the price of daily parking again, announcing that as of April 1, keeping your car in the lot for a day would cost five dollars, a healthy 54% increase... and, I guess they chose their new parking meters, because the same promulgation made clear that the fee was five bucks in quarters. For those of you doing the math at home, that's a hundred quarters a week. Video arcades don't have that many quarters. There's a part of me that's really looking forward to the first of the month, when all the daily parkers head to the bank across the street to exchange a hundred dollar bill for two thousand quarters.

Fanwood (rightfully) claims it needs the extra revenue after the governor cut the state aid available to small towns, but it turns out our town seriously overestimated the demand for inconvenient five-dollar parking, especially after consumers are already being gouged by New Jersey Transit, the Port Authority, the MTA, and oil companies. The lot, which used to be filled to capacity, now operates at about forty percent... so now the town is making less money off the lot than they were before.

This Joke Was Timely Once...

This is interesting. Listen to this: Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee just received an endorsement from Total Gym spokesman and star of the 1980 classic film The Octagon, Chuck Norris. Do we have a picture of that? Yeah. There: there's Huckabee and behind him, we've got Chuck Norris, in his business flannel. Apparently he's gonna be roundhouse kicking a moose later on. Yeah.

But I don't know. I'm not sure about this. Personally, I'm waiting to hear which candidate's getting Steven Seagal's endorsement.

You would've laughed at that two months ago.

NOTE: Joke also works with Ric Flair and Triple H (the only professional wrestler I've heard of).

If You Copy From One Source...

There's a commentary piece in the Education Life section of the Times all about cheating in college. Cheating makes Jesus cry. Back when I was in school, the old-timey educators made cheating — specifically warning us about the massive repercussions for cheating — their number one priority, even bigger than warning us about the massive repercussions for violating the school's arbitrary and ill-defined sexual harassment policy. It's a scare thing, the professors, entrenched in their "library" with "books" that need "photocopying," are faced with these new-fangled interwebs and haven't adapted yet, and we have to sit through apocalyptic, and spurious, proclamations that cheating is easier than ever and be scandalized. I became inured to this blather way back in middle school, reminded incessantly about the MLA, their ultra-pedantic citation rules, and the doom that would befall us should we separate the magazine date and page number with a comma instead of a colon or use italics (like a paper written on a post-1987 machine) instead of underlining. Besides the author, title, and page number, I usually just made up the rest of the information because I have better things to do than figure out where my copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica is published. No, I don't consider that cheating — I consider that being efficient, and who died and made the Modern Language Association the bosses of works cited anyway?

You can't get away with serious infractions like improper citing these days. Our education system has taken a zero-tolerance approach to "academic dishonesty," which, as a euphemism, I find just a tad dishonest in itself. At Columbia, we had to sign an honesty pledge — my professor at the time called it a Communist honesty pledge and told us not to sign it (in euphemisms, of course). And he was right, with Columbia tickling my resentment bone, working under the premise that I wasn't honorable enough to keep my eyes on my own paper. Four years of college, I may have cheated once or twice, but I can look at myself in the mirror and sincerely say that I was never academically dishonest, even leaving that inane pledge unsigned. I am thankful that I went to a school where I could not sign a piece of paper and forget about academic dishonesty, instead of one of those schools with an honor code and a student honor committee and mixed judicial boards, scrutinizing and following all your work like it's a psycho ex-lover. It's not new, but becoming more prevalent, according to the article:

Codes that define honorable behavior go back to the 1700s — the College of William and Mary in Virginia has what is believed to be the first. But they have become common policy. At Hillsdale College, in Michigan, for example, all entering freshmen must now sign an honor code. Students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, must sign a pledge on all graded academic work signifying they have received no "unauthorized" help. At Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, students are called on to report their own breaches of academic integrity as well as to confront others who violate the code.

I never really thought about loopholes for cheating before, but I'm a fan of UNC Chapel Hill's passive participle there.

I bring this whole topic up because there's another article in Education Life simply titled "V.I.P." It's about guidance counselors and how they help high-school students get into their top-choice college. I cheated — and I mean steroid injecting, insider trading level cheated — on my road to college, purchasing test prep, hiring a college consultant, taking a summer class at Columbia so I could get an insider to write me a recommendation. First SAT score was 1460, but I presented to Columbia as a 1730 fraud after about thirty Princeton Review practice tests. My consultant told me to read Growing Up by Russell Baker, and I did, just so I could tell Columbia that it was one of my favorite books. (Catcher In The Rye makes you look banal, The Crying of Lot 49 looks like you're trying too hard to impress someone.) Come to think of it, I must have had at least ten different handlers polishing me up. They did what they could, but no one advocated for me face-to-face with the Columbia admissions director. Or the admissions director at Brown, my first-choice school (Columbia was #3), or from any other school. I never even thought that they could if they wanted to (which they probably did) and had the time (which they certainly did not).

It’s a level of support taken for granted at private secondary schools, where parents paying $30,000 a year keep power counselors on speed-dial and count on their connections to admissions directors.

Christoph Guttentag, Duke’s dean for undergraduate admissions, acknowledges that admissions officers are more likely to know private-school counselors, in part because those counselors make an effort to know them. But he insists their recommendations aren’t given more weight. Two-thirds of Duke’s admittees come from public schools.

I'd like to interrupt this rant for a digression regarding that statistic: two-thirds of Duke's admittees come from public schools. Without any context, that stat is absolutely meaningless: Is that a small or large percentage? What percentage of applicants are from public schools? And, most importantly, if the admissions process were blinded (and why isn't it?), would Duke have selected the same class? I used to be naive, but these days I'm pretty confident that Christoph Guttentag dropped that number to obfuscate the fact that "their" recommendations are, in fact, given more weight, and the Times is complicit in this deception. That feels... what's the word?... dishonest.

So to get this straight: trading thousands of dollars to boost your on-paper credentials is okay. Spending hundreds of thousands for a guidance counselor who's golf buddies with the dean of admissions, that's not cheating either. But forgetting to attribute a quote demands a sentence to academia hell?

Your Dog Looks Like a Whore

I wish I could have more nice things to say about the folks at eccentricpets.com because it looks like they do some really good, important work. They're in the animal rescue business, finding homes for unwanted pets... and then dressing them up. I believe I have a new arch-enemy. Putting a raincoat on your dog when you're taking him for a slushy walk might not be too bad, but this meretricious greyhound mini-skirt or the dress for a guinea pig or hamster robs every last shred of dignity from a creature who eats its own poo. (Really, click on the link because that hamster dress needs to be seen to be believed.)

In case your poor pet didn't look ridiculous enough in the "Dazzling Doggy" mini-skirt at right, you can contact Ruth Regina at Wiggles Dog Wigs for the full-on canine tranny look. Half these dog wigs are so freaking ridiculous they couldn't even get a dog to model them. Dude, they're dogs — they already have hair and unless they're performing in a Vegas show they don't need more, and they certainly don't need it to be platinum blonde. Words fail to describe how much I wish I could lock this woman in a room for a week with all of her over-coiffed dogs.

Man, I don't even have any vitriol left for "animal communicator" Donna Velardi.

Scab

Dear American Media Conglomerates:

I generally sympathize with the working man, the Americans like myself who perform the tedious, backbreaking labor necessary to keep our great nation supplied with the coal, the industrial machinery, or the non-English speaking domestic help it needs to thrive. I'm disturbed when greedy corporations stepping on these good Christian folk, and thankful for the unions supporting our working-class as they struggle to put food on their dinner tables. But with your screenwriters on strike, and broadcasters threatening to fill the airwaves with absurd new reality show mash-ups like Are You Smarter than a Singing Midget Who Loves New York? I feel like now is a good time to compromise a few principles, step across the Writers' Guild picket line, and offer up my writing talent — just to keep television running smoothly, of course.

And also because I'd fucking kill for the job these thankless little sell-out shits aren't doing. I would write for TV shows or movies gratis... I would write for the vast wasteland detritus — Zoey 101 or The Jimmy Kimmel Show or that super-sterile original programming on the ABC Family Channel — just to see my name in the credits and hear something resembling my words out of the actors' mouths. I would pay Viacom, Disney, Warner Brothers or NBC Universal to write for them. FOR CHRIST'S SAKE, ARE YOU LISTENING, STUDIOS!!!???

Not that I'm looking to screw anybody, but it's like watching professional beer tasters or racecar drivers complain about their jobs, but even more oblivious to the irony. I'd just love to watch some NBC exec march up to Tina Fey and throw her 30 Rock words back in her face, "You got into this business because you're funny, and you're weird, and you're socially retarded. And you also got into it because it pays well," and yes, I'd miss 30 Rock but the idea of Tina Fey working some shitty normal job like the rest of us suckers, like Tina Fey as a claims adjuster or Jon Stewart painting dotted lines down the freeway, is just so comically absurd — somebody ought to write it into a Saturday Night Live sketch, if the writers were actually working.

So I'll be stopping by Rockefeller Center and Viacom's headquarters in Times Square tomorrow, pushing aside the picket lines and that giant inflatable rat (I'll stick a few nails in the damn thing if that makes my proposal any more appealing), and pitching my ideas about a new comedy where a fireman and a pyromaniac share an apartment and date women who are way out of their league. Oh, oh, and I've got this one about obscenely rich, spoiled teenagers in Montana who wear skimpy clothes and have sex with each other. And one about four professional women who run their own shipbuilding yard....

Looking forward to scabbing for you!

Thanks,

Jay Harris

Men Suck!

The subway system is Seoul, South Korea is re-introducing womens-only cars, and that makes me sad for our species, as we took a giant step backwards in our thousand century evolution beyond our bestial instincts. Other cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, and Mexico City have all decided that grown-ups need to be treated like we're at the sixth-grade dance because the concept of anio means anio, or é proibido means é proibido, or na means na is too mature for us. I think this CBS News report, hosted by a hot blonde chick, about Tokyo's grabbiness problem, more or less sums up the issue in a sexual harassment video right out of the late-eighties. Shiatsu Boss in the video comes off as pretty pervy, like that really unfortunate comely woman wants a shoulder-rub after spending all night in one of those claustrophobic office-tube beds, but I'm damn impressed by the balls on those two office horndogs, ogling that dirty magazine with their co-worker right freaking there! Unproductive, lecherous, and not at all ashamed of it, like it's their biological prerogative.

Turns out that Seoul is a festering petri dish of unabashed sleaze — you know, without trying to be judgmental, except they need to complicate daily life keeping the boys and girls apart so nothing inappropriate happens. I don't even see an attitude problem here, unlike the gender-separated subway cars in Cairo or the antipodal testosterone packed cars on the Paris Metro. When big fat guys are stuffing passengers past the closing doors, there's a bit of plausible deniability — not to mention honest accidents — in the situation that some people who have no qualms about paging through porn while they're supposed to be crunching numbers might take advantage of.

If Seoul ran more frequent, emptier subways, it's not like anyone's going to complain. Other than the gropers.

Annual Halloween Rant

Of course I drive to work this morning and the trees are flowing with toilet paper, because today's the day witches and goblins come out, so naturally kids have to vandalize their neighbors' lawns. I'm not above hiding in the bushes with a garden hose, except "House" was on. Man, if Mischief Night fell on a Wednesday, I would've been so ready to ambush those little bastards. Halloween night, fifteen years ago, was when I officially became jaded, after some fucking delinquents smashed our jack-o-lanterns in the street and egged our house... and man, how I'd still love to hunt those punks down and feed their faces to my Rottweiler.

I'd never really do that, of course, because I don't have a Rottweiler.

I've never gotten together with a bunch of my drunk and/or stupid friends and TP'ed someone's house, and now I feel like I missed out on something, like a Nerf war with more cleanup and the adrenaline rush of knowing you could be caught. The other option is playing by society's rules, and what do you get out of that? Candy corn and ennui, that's what.

I was on the train into the city this morning — and the one thing that makes the rush hour trains barely tolerable is that, at least it's quiet. The weekends, you have families with screeching five-year-olds climbing over you to look out the window or teenage skater boys partying on their way into the city, but rush hour is just droll, sad grown-ups trying not to think about the work day. Which is why it's particularly irritating when there's two women, and I'm not being sexist because it's always women, clucking away really loud so you can hear their whole tiresome conversation.

So guess what happened on the train this morning! "Did you hear Shirley got herself a new job? She's at Macy's, working in the cosmetics... took Taylor to Little League but if he's not gonna show some enthusiasm... that was like that time we were in France and the waiter spilled coffee..." So the woman sitting next to me turns to the woman sitting next to her and mouths, obviously towards the talkers, "Shut up already!" and they've only been on the train for like fifteen seconds. She stuffed her iPod buds in her ears, ineffectually.

Here's the weird thing: this iPod lady was thinking pretty much the same thing I was thinking, and the lady next to the iPod lady was also sharing that thought. In the train car, turns out there were a lot of people staring at these two jabbering women with their conversation invading everyone's space. I fantasized about screaming, "Shut the fuck up!" at them, but, you know, I didn't. Neither did iPod lady, or anybody else — the ride to work was overcome by this crazy phenomenon where, seriously — we're the majority, we're following the tacit commute ritual, we're respectful of those around us, and we could've all easily ganged up and kicked their asses — but nobody did anything. Like we're all handicapped and our only tool left is the passive-aggressive glare.

We're all such fucking pussies.

What I've always dreamed of doing is giving that kind of behavior right back to them, like they're yammering on and I just walk in and join the conversation: "Shirley's working at Macy's? Wow, good for her, I hear you make great commissions there. Who's Shirley?" I'll never do that — thanks a lot, society, with your "rules" and "customs," but I'd love to know what would happen.

The other thing that somebody, somewhere needs to do is get the attention of one of those jackass blustering into his cell phone. Take out your own cell phone, make a call, and in a loud and clear voice: "HEY! WHAT'S UP?... I'M GOOD, TOTALLY, DUDE... YEAH, THE ONLY THING IS I'M RIGHT NEXT TO AN ASSHOLE TALKING WAY TOO LOUD ON HIS PHONE!" Click.

Scavenge

It's garbage week here in Fanwood! I don't know if you have garbage week in whatever normal place you live, but it's a semi-annual event down here. We celebrate by throwing all the old, useless crap in our homes out on the curb, so the whole town looks like it was overrun by smelly, toothless hicks. Now I'm embarrassed to say that, when I was younger, I used to dig through my neighbors' trash piles, hunting for treasure and usually coming away with a torn-up mattress housing a dust mite colony or a decades-old radio missing its antenna, and being so excited because I was actually going to make good use of other peoples' shit. Hah! All that crap just got recycled into the curbside pile for next year's garbage week.

I don't get the appeal of other people's used junk — not the antiquities, the rare stuff with real value — even used bookstores leave an unpleasant ether, the combined musk of a hundred bibliophiles' bookshelves, surrounding me. I can understand the appeal of literature for a dollar, but you bring a used book into your house and all I see is you introducing a new species of mold to the environment. But at least that's still usable; garbage week stuff is (kind of the whole point) garbage. I don't care what sort of nostalgic Victorian taste you've got — what the hell are you planning on doing with a wicker chair the cat clawed all the way through? Someone took our record player — You know how the kids today don't know what a cassette deck is? This thing plays 45's, okay? — and somebody took it. If you're scavenging for old record players, maybe you should sell your LP's and use the revenue to buy an iPod.

What really pissed me off today was some old guy picking through people's trash, then taking this termite-rotted set of dresser drawers and putting them in his Lexus. Cheap motherfucker! God gave us Ikea so that old crappy furniture could die a natural death and be reincarnated into new cheap furniture. It's the circle of life: department store, family room, guest bedroom, attic, curbside, Sweden, department store.

Fall '07 TV Watch: Chuck

This moving picture box fad has really taken off, with everybody and their mother putting up some TV criticism blog, and the Television Without Pity website expanding dramatically. TWoP has also suffered a corresponding dramatic fall in quality — like if I wanted to know what happened on last week's "Weeds" without any snarky commentary, I'd just watch "Weeds." Message to Sars and Wing Chun: I know you still think you're coasting on the fact that you watched "Dawson's Creek," only you were doing it ironically, but get over yourselves already. If you can't find anything to make fun of in "Weeds," what are you going to do with actual comedies? The only funny parts of the recaps for "The Office" are the jokes copied verbatim from "The Office."

Sadly, they'll have to do. I don't have the time to recap every episode of every show on television because not enough of you are clicking on my affiliate marketing links (more precisely, none of you) so I have to do a non-television related job.

I don't think I've been watching that much NBC over the summer, so I'm not sure why I feel like Chuck has bludgeoned into submission with the most annoying ads this side of HeadOn. I'm a little surprised to say that I like Chuck — not the show Chuck, just the protagonist Chuck. Pretty impressive comic acting job by Zachary Levi then; even Masi Oka took more than a few episodes to grow on me last season. (That sentence doesn't sound right.) Look, let's just say that creator Josh Schwartz, who's also behind The O.C. and this season's eye-candy teen drama Gossip Girl, understands nerds about as well as he understands that public defenders, even in Orange County, don't earn nearly enough to live among California's high society, and also that they generally don't adopt their troubled teen clients. I'm just saying.

Despite Schwartz's best efforts to cram every single geek, nerd, dork, and doofus stereotype from the mid-eighties into Chuck, Levi tends (okay, sometimes tends) to transcend the material and also transcend his irritating, horny, and naturally greasy best friend Morgan, played by Joshua Gomez with significantly less subtlety. Gomez is more or less Fogell from Superbad, but what's funny for a high school kid with a litany of hidden insecurities is incredibly irritating when it's played for laughs by a grown-up with facial hair and zero self-awareness. I'd seriously rather watch the HeadOn commercial than listen to Gomez forcing a line. Hint: if you're watching the pilot, you can mute the TV whenever he's in a scene and you won't miss anything.

The rest of the cast does the sort of perfunctory job you expect from people playing the straight man in a spy-comedy series. Yvonne Strzechowski is extremely watchable and gratuitously in her underwear for a couple of scenes; Adam Baldwin continues to remind me of an animatronic in the Hall of Presidents. Whatever. Levi absolutely owns the show; it thrives when Chuck knows that he's good at being a nerd, like the scenes when he's talking with Sarah on their date or the brief scene when he's running through the hotel fountain instead of around it, and it dies a painful sputtering death when he gets into dense Urkel territory.

As you know from the commercials, Chuck accidentally downloads a bunch of government secrets... INTO HIS BRAIN!!!! Huh? In a pilot that's half exposition, no one's even going to take a stab at explaining that one. Naturally, evil government types try to capture and/or help him, and I would just like to say about the U.S. government. First, please invest in a damn firewall, so our nuclear secrets don't accidentally get sent to some kid browsing the net for porn? And second, is being an anonymous secret agent in an anonymous suit and tie a civil service job or something? Every show, there's always just like one person in the CIA who's competent at their job and a bunch of nincompoops waiting to get their asses kicked. As a matter of national security, we need a training course for new recruits, because one day, our agent who knows what the hell they're doing is going to come down with the flu, and the next thing you know, we're all speaking Russian and our nation's capital is Putingrad.

I bet you're wondering how this plot can become even more absurd. Well, our agents Blonde Chick No Longer in Her Underwear and Poor Man's Duane "The Rock" Johnson (...or is The Rock the poor man's Adam Baldwin? I don't know.) have to track down Chuck because.... I know what you're thinking. They need to track him down because he has all these secrets in his head and they need to make sure he doesn't share them with, like, Iran. Cause that makes sense, right? Well, that's not exactly the reason — you see, he has the only copy of all these secrets in his head. That's right, our government was too lazy to go to Best Buy and purchase a memory stick so they could back up only our most important national secrets. What if someone spilled coffee on the Ultra-Secret Computer, or the hard disk crashed after one too many games of Minesweeper? God, you should always have a backup! But now, if our government wants to know where an Serbian evildoer planted a bomb, they need to ask Chuck.

Chuck becomes an unlikely spy and has to go into all these dangerous situations that he's comically unprepared for. It's not particularly clear why, since he's not all that useful, aside from being a human reference desk, and if Blonde Chick and Poor Man's The Rock need to know something, well... it's not like he doesn't have a phone or anything. But then we wouldn't have a show; instead we'd have a somewhat amusing misfit nerd who I'd actually want to watch.

I'll keep up with Chuck, although I said that when Jake 2.0 came out and I gave up on that after two episodes. That's a pretty bad omen for Chuck, since they're exactly the same show. And The Lone Gunmen before that. What I'd really like to see is Chuck without the supporting cast and the show going into full-on quirky mode. The pilot's directed by this guy McG, who also directed the first Charlie's Angels movie and therefore doesn't want anybody knowing his real name. He's an artistic coward, making both a half-assed action show and a half-assed comedy. Someone like Bryan Fuller or Joss Whedon could probably get the balance right and make the show fun to watch instead of a crapshoot between lame setpieces. The final verdict on Chuck is: if they changed everything about the show, it would be good.

Meet BlingH2O

Hey, frivolous rich people! Are you looking for a way to stand out, to let the other mansions on the block know just who has the most money to throw away? Sure, you could buy a faster plane than the neighbors, or a larger yacht, but in my admittedly impoverished, humble opinion, the most brilliant way to announce to Page Six, "Nobody is gaudier than I am!" is by purchasing a case of (yes, this is real) BlingH2O, at forty dollars for 750 milliliters, the world's most expensive bottled water. That's a hundred bucks for one of those plastic Coke bottles full of something that literally falls from the sky. Now that's ostentation!

By the way, Coca-Cola, or Coke, is something we poor people drink when we've run out of Dom Perignon and Grey Goose.

Among the many healing powers of BlingH2O are the ability to get the lower half of this anonymous bikini model to talk to you.

But the best thing about BlingH2O is that it's fungible. I mean, it's not like BlingH2O comes with an extra hydrogen atom in every molecule or anything. So you could amuse yourself by, say, throwing a party with your wealthy friends and promising them BlingH2O but secretly switching it with Poland Spring instead. When I become rich, I'm totally gonna do that.

My last video for YouTube

Click on the link above if you need some context here. --Ed.

Mouth stretches to warm up.

I'm proud of my smooth legs. How dare you mock them! I wear short shorts so I can show them off... same reason you do, LisaNova.

The Execu-Lux reclining office chair from Staples wasn't designed for flaunting my assets. STAPLES IS SO STUPID!!!!! DUMB STAPLES! DUMB-PLES!

You guys are probably all wondering...

You guys are my fans! You adore me!

You guys are probably all wondering: How come Jay isn't with a post in days and days and days?

You're all lost in the wilderness without me. The freaking wilderness!

Well, did you...? Not crying is hard. Here is why. This is the reason. Why. I'veNotPostedInManyManyDays. Here's why.

I point and indict you. You, bastards!... Wait, lemme hold on: Do I curse in these things? When I'm angry?

I was terrified. Terrified! I write and write and let you bask in my legs — AND THERE'S NOTHING SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE ABOUT A SCRAWNY HALF-MAN SHOWING A LITTLE (a lot of) LEG IN AMERICA — and all I get is critikisms. You guys totally suck!

Really, let's not encourage this kid. --Ed.

Is critikisms a word?

Critikisms IS a real word! Look it up! HereI LookedItUpAnd AndItSays Right Here RightInTheDictionary "Critikisms:" Noun. IsARealWord! I know I'm gonna get a bunch of critikisms from you. I just know! I know you're counting and watching me, all the playa-haters out there.

I heard "playa-haters" on a Smosh video once. Do I have the street cred to use the words "playa-haters?" Yes, yes I do. My critikizers will laugh at me, but I'll get back at them with my magikal webkam.

Neither he, nor the super-caucasians in Smosh, have the street cred to borrow language from Hank Williams, let alone black slang. And no, they've never questioned themselves. --Ed.

Jay, you have so many posts! Six-hundred, and five-hundred ninety-nine aren't funny!

Sorry. --Ed.

Five-hundred ninety-nine are funny! Maybe you're not funny! MaybeIt'sBecauseYou'reStupid!

My fans can sympathize. LisaNova and GreenTeaGirlie and Todd2556 and RedEmerald22 don't understand, cause they talk to YouTube but they're not funny. They're dumb. Dumbdumbdumb.

People will say: You've wasted your time, Jay. Go outside, Jay. I know people are gonna say that, because I have lots of posts. Sleep with a hooker, Jay, that's what you should do with all your posts!

GreenTeaGirlie had a crush on me once.

I know so many people will say I'm stupid. I'm ugly. I'm spastic. I'm in perpetual puberty.

We made a sex video. I'll put it on YouTube and take that Jeremy from school. I'M NOT GAY! YOU'RE GAY!

There is no sex in the sex video. Sexuality remains in question. --Ed.

THAT IS THE KIND OF POOP THAT I HAVE TO DEAL WITH!

Guess I don't curse.

THATISTHEKINDOF POOP THATIHAVETODEALWITH!

GreeTeaGirlie is totally into that.

I'll give you a minute to read the title. A whole minute. You read slow, becausae you're dumb. You're a dumb-reader.

....

.... find that video ....

....

.... remind them that time's running out ....

....

People suck! Here I am writing posts and people are so rude! I'm trying to share my life here, and what do I get from you people. What do you want? What do you want from me!?

Demonstration time, baby!

I'll tell you what you want from me. You want me to fall off my chair! YouWantMeTo BreakMySexyLegs! I'LL GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT!

The Execu-Lux from Dumb-ples doesn't maintain a steady weight distribution. When you stand up on it. They should have to have a warning label. Dumb-ples! They're so dumb!

Maybe this kid's an actor and he's putting on some subversive sketch comedy, making him an Andy Kaufman-type genius. But I really think he'll be shooting up a post office sometime in the next five years or so. --Ed.

You got what you wanted! Are you happy?

They're happy. Those jerks. But guess what....

I put pillows on the floor. Ha ha ha ha ha! Me: one. Playa-haters: zero. Yeah, sorry to rain on your parades...

Say something cool, say something cool...

...of MISCHIEF!

Nailed it. That one's gonna spread across the internets.

[Random outburst. Not real words.]

I can't believe people! I'm putting my grade-A material out on YouTube and there you are: let's trash it. Let's ruin it. Let's turn it into a running joke. I AM NOT A RUNNING JOKE! This is me! This is reality!

They can't handle it.

You can't handle it!

They can handle it. --Ed.

My last post. I want to thank the nice people, the fans, the friends, the people who only laughed at me behind my back, and yeah... I just, I have a confession to make: Ian Doebber's trumpet solo was at least a few measures long. I was exaggerating for dramatic effect.

Now I'm about to cry.

He's always about to cry. --Ed.

It's a relief, getting that off my chest. And here's another confession I think you deserve to hear: My underpants situation, from back in May. Solved with a toaster oven, NotAMicrowave.

[Montage of posts.]

At least ten people must be heartbroken. Now, just wait five days and then: my triumphant comeback!

Yes, he came out of retirement in five days, beating Jay-Z's previous record of a week. --Ed.

Trix Are For Kids... And Whores

This was the first time I've been grocery shopping in years, so can someone please tell me: When did breakfast cereals all become either horse feed or sugar bombs that could fuel the space shuttle? I usually wind up eating the horse feed, just so I can start the day without Mom's tired lecture on how sugar — like everything else that used to be edible — will send me to an early grave. There's really nothing better than waking up, thankful to be alive, and then slogging through a bowl of oat flakes or bran chunks or, if I can't decide between the two, multi-grain puffs. I guess a major force in the breakfast cereal market is overweight, constipated people.

But Mom's not here this week and there's no one to complain. I can eat Fruit Loops in chocolate milk and vodka, with maple syrup on top if I want. Not that I would, because I can see the morning commute where the train arrives two minutes late and I punch out the conductor. It will probably be another twenty-five years before Mom leaves me alone in the cereal aisle again — God, I hope not — so I've got to make this decision count.

And what a damn huge decision it is, all the marshmallow chocolate candy cereal I was never allowed to have. Can anyone explain how the advertising for Trix and Lucky Charms and Flintstones' Pebbles is supposed to work? I understand Frosted Flakes: "Eat this cereal, kids, and you'll magically become a basketball star." I'm sure that's totally true, as long as your Frosted Flakes are part of a healthy breakfast. But those commercials where the theme is little punk kids denying cereal from the mascot... What kind of lesson is that? "Eat this cereal, and you can be a hyperactive selfish jerk too!" It's a warning to parents: if you insist on feeding your brats breakfast, make it Grape-Nuts.

Do I get the corn puffs that promise to reduce my cholesterol, or the flakes that'll help me lose ten pounds? Or the ones with fifteen vitamins and minerals, and a hundred percent of my recommended daily allowance of riboflavin or something? The cereal with the smiling bear on the box, or the one with the smiling squirrel? Captain Crunch or Count Chocula? (Actually, we get the store brand knock-offs, so it's more like Admiral Munch versus Duke Choco-Puffs.) And aren't Cocoa Puffs and Cocoa Pebbles and Count Chocula exactly the same? Stop it already, Battle Creek! My life is complicated enough without having to suffer through your ridiculous cereal monopoly!

Hey, you know what's always good for breakfast: leftover General Tso's chicken.

Phone Scam

Regular readers know that I despise cell phone ringtones, because it's annoying enough that I have to hear you yapping away while I'm trying hard to tune the real world out — it's doesn't need the mass-manufatured bubble gum pop song of the moment as a prelude. But I'm afraid I'm going to need to capitulate to the tinny dance music industry since I got a new phone over the weekend. We still have some phones in our basement — beige, boxy things with just the twelve necessary buttons — and they indicated an incoming call with a bell-like alert. The nineties came along; apparently this was too simple for the new information age and they replaced the bell with an electronic warbling simulacrum. But that wasn't melodic enough for the American public, so we came out with Nokia Tune, which begat Crazy Frog, which begat "Ringtone 9," that irritating little samba number that's always popping up in inappropriate locations, like I'm gonna start dancing every time someone calls me. Let's just get this over with and come out with a ringtone that's Jerry Lewis saying, "I'm riiiiiiiiinggggiiiiiinnngggg!" so we'll all wind up sticking icepicks in our eardrums and finally... silence.

According to LG's website, the VX5300 comes with "15 Unique Ringtones + Vibrate & Silent Modes," which is disingenuous. I don't consider "Low Beep" and "Loud Beep" to be unique. Or ringtones, for that matter. So my options are limited to a ring at frequencies only dogs can hear; that noise Simon makes when you screw up; a wacky glissando, again ending at the dog and bat range of the hearing spectrum; a high-pitched fire alarm sound; a lullaby; "When The Saints Go Marching In," the full Dixieland mix; and the aforemetioned samba tune. Is it possible to get a ringtone that sounds like — call me a crazy here — a goddamn telephone ring!

So thank you, America, for screwing up another absolutely perfect thing.

And People Say I'm Anti-Social!!???

We need to talk about a major problem in this country: people blocking me from their Facebook pages. The other day, I ran into someone — ex-floormate from college, kind of a nice girl (at least six years ago...) — or at least I ran into what could've easily been the back of her head. What the hell, I thought. She didn't seem like the kind of person who'd bother having a Facebook page, but I wonder what she's up to. I put the super-nifty Facebook search feature to use, and since we went to the same college, I was able to see her profile. I'm like ninety to ninety-five percent sure that this isn't creepy; it's why not-Tom from MySpace (who kind of looks like George Michael Bluth) made Facebook in the first place.

Okay, it's two days later and I'm on Facebook again because it's like freaking crack. No motion on the friend request front. This happens — you people know who you are — and it's absolutely beyond comprehension to me. Let's say you're someone I went to middle school with and you get that e-mail with the subject "Jay Harris has sent you a Friend Request on Facebook." What's going through your head? "Oh, wonderful. Jay wants to be my Facebook buddy. Now I've got to click on the link, log in, and click the little "Confirm" button. That's gonna take a whole thirty seconds of my precious, precious time. We were never that close." Yeah, sorry to bother you, being all curious about what you're up to and how you're doing. How rude of me!

The other option I came up with is that you guys aren't quite picking up on the whole Facebook deal. Just because you tell Facebook that we're friends doesn't mean we actually have to be friends now. It's just a dumb little computer program so you can tell people your favorite movies and show them pictures of your trip to Paris or wherever. We're not gonna start hanging out, telling each other secrets, being total BFF's... maybe, MAYBE I'll send you a little note on your birthday, and that's it. Which, correct me if I'm wrong here, is why you have a Facebook account in the first place. There's a certain logic here, and the dangling friend request lives miles outside it.

But wow, this girl from college went one better. Two days later, no friend update, so I went back to her profile and... gone! A full profile, fifty-something friends, just disappeared from Facebook. It hardly seems worth my time to verify my Occam's Razor theory here, but I believe I'm blocked from her profile. Let's go through this step by step: She got the friend request e-mail from Facebook — note, nothing special, no personal message or anything. So she logs into Facebook and the "Do you want to confirm Jay Harris as your friend?" window pops up. There's two options, "Confirm" and "Deny," and instead of clicking on "Deny" and moving on with her life, she went into the Privacy control panel, typed my name into the little search box, went through the more than 500 Jay Harrises in Facebook, found my profile, and clicked on "Block." I'm almost touched that she'd that much time on me.

I'm insecure, so I've gotta go through all the different possibilities: Did I ever burn my name into her lawn? Nope. Was I ever caught on hidden video with Chris Hansen? Don't think so. Did I call her something mean in my blog? That's a distinct possibility, but she escaped my literary wrath unscathed. I checked.

Point is, unless you've got some compelling reasons not to, stop being a jerk about and confirm your Facebook friends already. Stay tuned next week, when I tell off people who walk slowly in front of me on the sidewalk.

A Completely Impartial Review of an Expensive Toy I'll Probably Be Bored With in Less Than A Month

Just last weekend, I got around to plugging my Nintendo Wii into a television and fooling around with it. I have mixed opinions towards Wii: On one hand, it is a hell of a lot of fun, dancing around with that remote in your hand. (Note: Me dancing and me pantomiming playing tennis look more or less the same.) But at the same time, playing Wii sort of feels like exercise, and you walk away from the TV tired, sweaty, and just dying to sit your ass down on the couch and play some video games. It's an insidious little monster, that one.

My home, growing up, was a sad Nintendo-free zone. It was tragic. Instead of running home after school to immerse myself in the choose-your-own-adventures of a cartoon plumber, I was expected to do my homework and read. Books. Not interactive at all. I was totally deprived. My parents figured that video games would turn me into a spaced-out zombie, playing until my fingers fell off and my retinas burned out, trying to reach a high score and forsaking my dying social life. So now I work with computers and don't talk to people. Another successful parenting job. Let's say that I have a lot of repressed shoot-em-up energy looking for an outlet — I seriously do plan on going to a shooting range sometime before I die — but until then, twenty-first century Duck Hunt will do fine. Give it a couple of months and the whole thing will be out of my system, and I'll be onto a sports car obsession or something instead.

Maybe not, though. The Wii is a toy that can be packed with shareware and keeps on giving — at least until the remote slips out of your sweaty hand and into your TV — and I've spent enough quarters in arcades, fiddling with joysticks and slamming my fist into random buttons to be really impressed by the clever team of Japanese fun-gineers stepping out of the mold with their videogame interfaces. I can't wait for the next generation, when they actually implant the video game in your head, which would return video games to their rightful place as a boredom cure for couch potatoes when there's nothing on TV.

No idea what keeps me going to these alumni happy hours, but they bore the hell out of me. I sit. I stand. I look around, maybe someone I know will show up. It's unlikely, because I only know... let's see: one, two, three, four other alumni. I do get to observe the social dynamics of young strangers on alcohol, and I think it's amazing how quickly happy hour conversation motives go from, "I'm talking with you because..."

• "I want to sleep with you," to
• "you look like a fun person," to
• "you're standing next to me," to
• "you're alone and it's pathetic."
  

I hate rain. Well, I like rain - what I hate is New Yorkers in the rain, cause they're the hugest weather pussies ever. God spits a few droplets on us and suddenly every single awning and doorway has a clot of people huddled underneath, like the rapture's upon us and a vinyl sheet is all that's standing between them and a hail of fire. It's only water, people - not like it's sulfuric acid falling from the sky. At least not yet.

My first year in New York was filled with a parallel fear: that some some stranger would try to sneak under my umbrella to keep dry. Really. The treatment was a succession of smaller and smaller umbrellas, but thankfully I cured myself of this phobia or I'd be sloshing around the city in a poncho trying to keep midgets - well, kids I guess - from scampering under the plastic. This is why I can no longer go to Disney World and deal with the daily 2 pm monsoon.