I am having a bad day. Oddly enough, it has been incredibly uneventful, save for a few incendiary e-mails.

Christ. Never mind. I'm too depressed to write about it now.

Apparently McDonald's wants you to get some hot man-on-sandwich action. I'm lovin' it!

Driving home from work today, I happened to turn on NPR and hear Terry Gross interviewing James Hetfield and playing clips from ...And Justice for All. I got a good laugh from the thought of old, white people turning on NPR and hearing Metallica blasting at them.

Uh oh. If the Russians aren't careful, they'll wind up carrying little shrimp babies.

Can I just say, Alfred Molina is the worst weatherman ever.

Huh. So I guess it's true: When you sleep with someone, you're sleeping with everyone they've ever slept with. Also, the junior class of Jefferson High School.

Yep, people are idiots.

Well, I know where I'm going for vacation...

I suspect Bob & Doug McKenzie would approve.

I've seen one page, and I already know that the Museum of Bad Album Covers is the reason the Internet was invented.

"Then count us in!" chimed in Hefty Smurf, Handy Smurf, and Vanity Smurf, decked out in assless leather chaps. Hefty's and Handy's chests were neatly trimmed; Vanity's was fully waxed.

Okay, you know know what time it is. So go read the new column. I can't tell you (ahem) which movie I'm talking about this week, but the column itself is a take on the Smoking Gun website, more or less. I have to say, I'm really proud of this one...

Starting today, I am officially beginning my campaign to have Star Jones launched into the sun.

Who's with me?

Here's an odd one: Someone is suing MGM, claiming that their "widescreen" DVD releases are actually just cropped full-screen releases.

I am wracking my brain to figure out how you claim to have been damaged in some way for something like this, unless maybe you are pushing a false advertising claim. Either way, it's an odd one.

So how did Chris Rock get offered the Oscar host gig? At a press conference, producer Gil Cates explained, "Billy [Crystal] is doing a show in New York, Steve Martin is doing a movie --" Right about then, Rock interrupted, "Ellen DeGeneres has crabs. Jay Leno's got a gig. They got to the R's. Burt Reynolds said no."

Reports have it that "Jenna Bush has a new boyfriend, a 26-year-old former intern for Karl Rove."

GAH! They will have demon babies! WE MUST STOP THEM!

Johnny Carson on Democracy:

"Democracy is buying a big house you can't afford with money you don't have to impress people you wish were dead. And, unlike communism, democracy does not mean having just one ineffective political party; it means having two ineffective political parties. Democracy is welcoming people from other lands, and giving them something to hold onto -- usually a mop or a leaf blower. It means that with proper timing and scrupulous bookkeeping, anyone can die owing the government a huge amount of money. Democracy means free television, not good television, but free. And finally, democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head -- this signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle. I thank you."

Quote of the Day: "He's my father, married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law." -- Seamus Farrow, son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow.

It must be true love when you write a love letter telling someone they're "the shit."

It's worth commenting on Carson's passing, even though I know everyone already has. I can't say that I was gripped by any real deep sadness when I heard. It took a while for it to sink in, I think, because it wasn't immediately apparent why it was significant. The man had been "away" (as many are fond of putting it) for more than a decade, and the nation of TV watchers had moved on to other pursuits. Certainly, the landscape of television was very different because of him, not the least of which is the Leno/Letterman paradigm, but also his indirect responsibility for things like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. But his absence and the nearly complete change in society (at least the stuff we see on television) since he left The Tonight Show make it hard to comprehend what his passing meant in broader terms and in more specific terms, too.

I, for one, only really got a few good years of Carson-watching in before he left: I was 17 when he quit. Still, I have fond memories of the man, and even with my overdeveloped-hipster sense of humor, I recognized the presence of greatness when I saw it. I remember getting teary when he signed off that last night. (I also remember being rather unimpressed when Leno took over, but that's neither here nor there.)

But here's the thing: Carson may very well be the last big figure that everyone could agree on. He is, and I'm not exaggerating (I don't think), on the level of JFK: one of those figures that the entire country agreed on and loved. Everyone knows Carson, and everyone, it seems, has fond memories of him. Even Reagan and Clinton, popular as they were, are highly divisive figures. I have been wracking my brains to think of anyone with that sort of cross-generational appeal, and the only one I can come up with is Steve Martin, and even he doesn't have the same sort of generational penetration that Carson did. And his "replacements": Letterman? Nope. Leno? Hell no.

We've become a divided nation in so many ways. A million channels, a million late-night TV shows, a billion websites, a billion factions. Sure, 9/11 broughts all together in a brotherhood of man for a moment, but a few days later we were more factionalized than ever.

I don't know what it means. Everybody dies, and Carson, though he died somewhat before his time, was hardly a young buck. We should have been prepared for it, in many ways. It can't be a shock. The sadness I feel now, as I read countless memorials and eulogies is one of sadness for the passing of an era, though I suppose it passed a long time ago. There is simply no way to go back. Men of Johnny's and JFK's caliber don't come around often, and odds are I won't get to see anyone of their caliber in my lifetime. More than that, the country just isn't set up for that anymore. Even if a new Johnny came along, only a fraction of the people are going to follow.

Still, in spite of all the sadness, I'm left with something more. He sure made a lot of people happy, didn't he? Remarkable, really, and not such a bad legacy, I think.

If this week is any indication, then my career as a humorist may be over, if this headline is accurate...

I've been so busy that I have barely been sleeping. There's no column either, and that definitely means things have been bad. I always do my column unless I'm either dead or ralphing up a lung. On live television. Where, oh where, did my backlog of columns go?

The main cause of stress has been my job, where we were working on a proposal for the company's biggest job ever. So, you know, no pressure. I could go into more detail, but I won't. I'm just too tired to.

I am sooooo fuggin' tired.

Pamela Anderson says she turned down a chance to play the part Teri Hatcher now plays on "Desperate Housewives" because the producers told her she'd have to dye her hair brown for the role and "blond is my trademark."

Man, would that show have sucked.

New column's up (after some necessary fine-tuning). This week: Amazon critics versus I Spy. Why does everything have to be either the best ever or the worst ever? Isn't that an exhausting way to go through life?

You know, I used to do something similar to this when I was bored in my classes, only with my chair. And not so well.

It's official. I'm a genius.

This is just bizarre:

After returning from a Christmas trip to Aspen, Colorado, [actress Nicholette] Sheridan cleaned off the puppy in her swimming pool after he got himself dirty in a rose pot - and her actions gave the pooch new ideas on causing mischief. She says, "The next thing you know, he goes outside and he's right back in that pool again. Now I think he's drowning! I run naked into the cold pool. I was cleaning (my house) naked. It's (a normal thing to do) when I'm feverish... So I saved the dog, but little did I know at 12 weeks old they can swim. But you know what, I'll fall for all of his tricks because I'm madly in love with him."

I dunno. Naked cleaning the house while you're running a fever? That sounds like one of those hasty explanations ER doctors get from guys who say they "accidentally" got a lightbulb shoved up their butt...

Scientists are looking for "weird life" on Jupiter's moons. Tell you what, give me the billion dollars and you can come to my family reunion instead.

Word of the day: melismatic (adj.) A passage of several notes sung to one syllable of text, as in "Stop your fucking melismatic yowling, you untalented American Idol reject!"

Now if only they would come up with a word that describes why Enrique Iglesias sucks.

Hey, Bush administration: Need an exit strategy? How about making the enemy irresistable to gay men?

You're welcome.

BREAKING PINK FLOYD NEWS: Syd Barrett is writing an autobiography!

Unfortunately, he is writing it in the snow.

Man, I'm tired. The real problem is that I'm about to go into about two hours of meetings, and we all know how conducive those are to staying awake...

Whee.

Alan Moore doesn't rewrite.

Well, off to kill myself now...

Awww, sooooh cyoot!

I'm so excited about this that I crap myself every time I visit the site.

I've been there three times today.

This paragraph from a story on video game hacks fills me with inexplicable glee:

The first sign that some of the hacks were spreading to unwilling users came in October, in the form of a dishwasher that did nothing special, but was inexplicably named Candace on the screen. Candace began replacing the ordinary dishwasher.

I don't know why, but I laugh every time I read that.

One of the lunch specials at my usual haunts today was a spicy chicken sandwich, and, in a daring mood, I opted to try it out. It arrived at my table literally bathed in the same sort of spicy sauce they put on buffalo wings. It was pushing it to call it a sandwich, because it was so damp that it practically dared you to pick it up without getting orange nastiness on your clothes. The flavor was completely overpowered by the sauce, which burned your nostrils the same way that burning plastic does.

So the question becomes, why did I eat the entire damned thing?

Damn you, Scarlett Johansson's hand! DAAAAMN YOU!

New column's up. This week: Cowboy Curtis gets hopped up on goofballs!

Midgets invading Disneyland, nuclear weapons, monster trucks... How can this movie fail?

We have a new entry in the Best URL Ever contest.

And may your new year be Pink:

"And if you survive till two thousand and five
I hope you're exceedingly thin
For if you are stout you will have to breathe out
While the people around you breathe in"