You do realize, don't you, that today is pretty much a free day to do all sorts of horrifying, loathesome, and thoroughly inexcusable things that, one year from now, will have no actual anniversary date and thus not truly be "of record"? And that by 2012, anyone holding a grudge over the hideous violations and indiscretions and pecadilloes and wanting to memorialize them by regurgitating their details on the anniversary day, will just come off as bitter? You do recognize this, yes?

Feel free to confess your intentions here, but please be advised that in doing so, you will be making it a lot easier for those offended to find documented evidence to use against you in 2012. (Because, yes, "BISS" will be here forever.)

So, go on. Get outta here. And start taking advantage of this opportunity now. If you're in my time zone, that means you have only eight and a half hours to devise, enact, and revel in your chosen offense.

Since I know most people don't like loose ends (unless they're chubby chasers), I have decided to take a moment from biting my lower lip until it bleeds (for no reason) and playing Scrabulous (probably the reason for the lip-biting, on second thought) (competition is fierce, my friends) to settle a few pressing concerns raised in earlier entries this month.

1. In Fiction or Non-Fiction?, where I asked if a certain scenario in Whole Foods really happened, the answer is Nope. Come on!. Of 57* votes, 79% (45) were "yes" and 21% (12) were "no".

2. In Name My Shame, the answer is watch American Idol. But because no one answered correctly, I will not reveal my "favorites". (Thank you very much to those who participated — five people whom I hold in the highest and most hallowed of estimation — while those of you who did not play along may as well have kicked a puppy while holding a block of tofu hostage, or the other way around.)

3. In Exclusive! Not available on iTunes!, yes, the chord organ crowd-pleaser was indeed lovingly performed by me and painstakingly mixed to perfection by me here in my in-house studio by me.

So now you know.

Good day, good night, and thank you for the celery.

* 57 always seems like a number used to indicate a rather crazed count, e.g. "Oh, I have 57 different things on my plate today!" or Heinz 57 sauce, but I assure you this is the actual number of votes at the time of this writing. (P.S. The poll is officially closed, but I do not know how to tell it to stop accepting votes. It's like a promiscuous teenaged daughter that way.)

Dearest B,

You live just across the park from me, a 15-minute bus ride tops, and work two subway stops away. Yet in the past 1-1/2 years that I’ve lived in this apartment that places us so relatively close to each other, every attempt I’ve made to get together has been ignored. I hate to sound like our mother, who complains to ME all the time that you never call HER, but, hey, what the fuck is your problem? Are you JUST NOT THAT INTO ME? Must I remind you I’m your sister and not a date?

Blow me,

Here's a little something to get you going, keep you going, and make you want to go go go until you're too pooped to pop and too popped to poop. (Okay, so that last phrase was uncalled for, and I never use the word "poop", but screw it. Sometimes even my rules are made to broken.)

This is dedicated to Kyria, but feel free to pretend it's dedicated to you, too.

Enjoy!

... until I have something of my own to say, please enjoy this (sound required).

Hovering over the navigation (don't you love when I sound like I know what I'm talking about?) is fun enough, but the real fun is in watching the TV ad. (No matter what, though, "the stain" will never beat out the Cottenelle puppy.)

If you're loath to watch commercials because you refuse to be an unwitting pawn in the evil game of advertising or because you simply "never watch TV" in a show of highbrow hoity-toity haughtiness, then, well ... yes ... disdain's for you.

Take a flying leap, Feh-bruary.

My brother always knew when I'd been in the Raisin Bran. The box-shake above his bowl would yield a barrage of flakes but very few raisins, because already I would've picked most of them from the inner plastic bag. Oh, what joy those raisins, sugared to asphyxiation, desiccated and wrinkled far beyond the limits of a regular raisin, brought me!

Attempts to trick him, by adding fresh raisins to the flakes waiting inside the plastic bag and mixing it up with my hand, were never satisfactory. Because he, like I, was really only eating it for those tiny tiny raisins.

He was no angel, but he had his moments.
More devil than angel, my floppy-eared freak,
and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Okay, listen. This is something — a peeve, if you will (or even if you won't) — I've been sitting on way too long, like some sort of obsessive hen intent on warming her eggs till what hatches isn't a wet grayish chick that quickly morphs into a fluffy yellow one but, instead, a fresh 'n' fluffy Western omelet. The time has come for me to just let it out into the world, so I can finally free myself of its unmanageable, unwieldy burden and get on with my life. By releasing this one item into the wild, which may or may not include the blue (or periwinkle?) yonder, I am thus making the space it occupied available for another peeve, this one perhaps even bigger and better and petter.

So what is it, you ask? What is this mysterious irk that gnaws on my tolerance like a particularly persistent and ravenous termite? That makes me want to poke several holes into an offender's flesh like those poked into a baked potato pre-baking?

This: "She's nothing like what she used to be. She stopped eating scrambled Fluff for breakfast, knocked it off with the incessant scrapbooking, and took up archery! She lost 45 pounds, got herself a boyfriend, and won a tournament! She's the complete opposite! She did a 360!"

Please note that I emphasized the peeve part of the example, just so you will not think I have a problem with archery.

See, if you "do a 360", that indicates that you have come full circle. You are back at what is commonly known as Square One. If you have experienced change that makes you the complete opposite of what you were before, you "do a 180". Otherwise, sticking with "360", you are just telling the world, with gleeful self congratulations, that you are right back where you started: fat, unpopular, and without a trophy for your mantle.

... and see this with your own eyes!

Despite saying* I wouldn't ________, I'm doing it anyway.

Please fill in the blank with the source/identity of my shame.

* aloud, offline, so don't go on a feverish search through my archives

While it is true that my actions are orchestrated by a marionetteer who, when not twirling his proposterously waxed mustache in fits of gleeful villainery and laughing to the accompaniment of thunderclaps behind which, if you listen really really carefully, you'll hear an orphaned kitten mewling, it is not true that my words are held captive to the same maniacal machinations. Neither a ventriloquist nor a ghost writer is on my payroll. (However, both a charming manservant and a large animated carp with a penchant for puns are. But that, as they say, is neither here nor there.)

Sometimes, however, I plain ol' just don't want to say much. I want to sit back and listen to someone else spout and spew and flail and froth. Today is one of those times. So without further ado or adon't, I present to you an entry written by my go-to "guest blogger", the always enchanting and opinionated (and, okay, dashing) "Ds". Ds first "guest blogged" for me back in June.

*   *   *

Ds - Star Commenter and Resident Guest Blogger

Being a writer by trade (or at least I was a writer by trade until recently, when I sold my soul to a non-profit devil,) I watched the recent Hollywood Writer’s strike with great interest. No one knows better than I how hard it is to create something from nothing, and I agree that those who do so, be it with pen, brush or chisel, should be suitably compensated for their work. But three things struck me mightily during the strike that I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss here…

#1: The main sticking point of the writer’s demands was compensation for rebroadcast of their material on the Internet. Call me an old-fashioned fool, but last time I checked, the way one made money off of broadcasting your stories was through the support of advertising. There are very few business models on the Internet that work long term, and broadcasting is not among them. So unless you’re a travel company, Amazon or porn, I don’t see how you can expect to be compensated for your work. The Internet is the new Wild West, full of freethinking, free-spirited, free entertainment. Some of the things I’ve seen on YouTube are amazing, and save for their production quality and limited budgets, easily rival most of the drivel these so-called ‘professionals’ are thrusting upon us in the mainstream broadcast media.

#2: As the strike wore on and the networks expended their libraries of banked shows, they turned more and more to ‘reality’ television. I’m sorry, but as I sat their watching these shows, I often notice they have very little to do with reality. So little in fact, that if you watch the credits you’ll see titles like, “Executive Producer,” “Segment Producer,” “Reality Coach.” Seriously, Reality Coach? Last time I checked, reality just happened. And it’s often about as thrilling as a root canal without benefit of Novocain. There’s a reason only those who been frontally lobotomized can handle watching 60 minutes of C-SPAN. That’s reality television. These so-called reality shows are packaged, staged and scripted. Which means by definition that somewhere lurking in the deep dark recesses of the production studio, someone is writing at the very minimum, outlines for them. So how do they get off putting this stuff on the air, but eliminating things like awards shows? The sheer duplicitousness boggles the mind. And let’s not even talk about commercials… A lot of my friends are members of SAG/AFTRA. I’m even a member. But at no time did anyone tell us we couldn’t be writing and/or creating those multimillion-dollar spots that underwrite the Superbowl.

#3: Now the strike is over, and surprise surprise – The networks are telling us that some shows, mainly comedies, will be back on the air in as little as 10 days. The dramas are considerably harder to produce, so they’ll take 2-3 weeks. Again I ask, “Seriously?” Two weeks ago the television season through 2008 was dead and 2009 was in dire jeopardy. And then POOF!, the writers come back and everything is hunky-dorily chugging along so well that we’ll have shows back on the air in the proverbial blink of an eye. All this leads the average viewer to wonder how hard a profession this could actually be, where one could recover so quickly when we’d been told for so long that it would take so long. And I share that sentiment. What kind of quality can we expect when the networks are knocking each other over in the rush to get original material back on the air? When mediocrity is the norm, our collective expectations are lowered each time a writer or a network takes a shortcut, and the declining and fragmented audiences of both mainstream and cable media outlets support that hypothesis.

So sure, the writers are now getting a couple of extra bucks for each time their work is viewed online. But the fact remains - if the material wasn’t worth watching in the first place, who’s really getting short-changed?

I'm sorry, but I've got nothing for you today.

Fortunately, however, I have a wonderful friend who does.

Go over to Nils's place, and make sure you have your speakers on. This is totally "safe for work", except if you're unable to refrain from squealing.

Enjoy!

Please do not forget to vote.

That is all.

You really shouldn't be online now, anyway. Shouldn't you be, I don't know, like, watching "Sixty Minutes" soon and getting that sick, sick feeling in your stomach at the faintest hint of the ticking clock sound that means that the weekend is essentially over and the work week crap is almost upon you?

So go. Stop diverting yourself with my nonsense and start focusing on your dread.

(But don't leave without voting.)

Tee hee:

Best served chilled?

Given what you know of me, or what you think you know of me, based on either your perception of me via my online "persona" or your interpretation of me via my offline persimmon, tell me what you think I should rent next on Netflix. Sure, I have quite a line-up waiting in my queueueueueueueueueueueueueue (12 extra "ue"s, in case you're wondering) (it is physically impossible for me to just leave that word alone with the mere two "ue"s it was born with — in fact, even as I look at the title of this, the most exciting post in all of blogdom, my fingers linger over the keyboard and itch to crash over its keys a la syphillis-ravaged Schubert in a particularly maniacal mode, hammering out "ueueue" until I bleed from my ears and fingertips), but still, I want to know what you think I should watch. And why. So tell me. (And please don't suggest porn. Or anything with Tom Cruise. Or any combination of the two.)

I'm an orange-yellow subway seat. You don't give me credit for doing what I have to do all day. You don't consider what I go through. Ever. You don't know the trauma I endure, having to witness so many bulging buttocks doing their buttocky thing. How many gassy asses press themselves onto my surface without regard for my feelings. You know nothing of how I exist. You think I don't mind the way I spend my life. Sometimes I actually manage to get a soda spilled onto myself, just so I don't have to face another uncaring ass like yours.

My sister scampers up the tree, I struggle up, and both of us wedge ourselves in. Safe from adult eyes, we're ready to do what we came here to do.

I produce the little container from my pocket and twist off its metal lid. We sniff at the contents and deem it quite a nice scent.

We both take a pinch and put it between our cheek and gum, the way Rolling Stone magazine, from whose back pages we ordered it, told us.

Unfortunately it doesn’t taste as good as it smells.

We spit, scamper/struggle down, and go back home.

"Excuse me," she says, stopping her cart next to the man squatting to stock the shelves. "Where would I find the popcorn?"

"Here you go," he says, standing up and moving aside so she can see the selection.

After a moment, she says, with a frown, "I don’t see the whole wheat."

"I thought you said popcorn," he says.

"I did."

"But popcorn isn’t wheat."

"This is Whole Foods, isn’t it?" she says. "So where’s the whole wheat popcorn?"

"Popcorn isn’t –" he says with a sigh, and looks down at the floor. Then into her eyes. "We’re all out."

If they didn't want me eating their candy when I occupied their desks while they were on vacation, then they should have either eaten it all before they left, taken it with them, entrusted it to another secretary, or stored it in a locked drawer (and taken the key).

I mean, come on. Surely I wasn't the only temp who, in a fit of near-tears boredom, snooped through their drawers in search of who-knows-what and came upon the bounty of an already open bag of individually foil-wrapped chocolates. Right?

Silly trustful full-time secretaries. I hope I taught 'em a lesson!

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that someone had "tagged" me to participate in another "meme". And then, like now, I deemed it absolutely necessary to use quotation marks around those words, much as I do with all words or phrases whose use does not come naturally to me and which on some level I find irritating (at the very least) or repellent (somewhere in the middle) or full-on inexcusable (at the very most), but which, for some reason, are being foisted on me in such a manner that I am required to use them. Words such as "decaf", for example. (I'll leave it up to you to determine under which of the three levels this word falls.)

So. Without further fanfare, here are the rules of the thing:

* Link to the person that tagged you.
* Post the rules on your blog.
* Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
* Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
* Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

And here are my contributions:

1. I can handwrite backwards almost as quickly as I can forwards. Ask for a complimentary demonstration if we ever meet. (If you already know me in real life, it will cost you $10.)
2. I anthropomorphize everything. My computer monitor vigorously nods its head in recognition and agreement.
3. I cannot kill anything. Once, when I lived in Philadelphia, a roach decided to take up residence in my living room without first asking if I had any objection. Because I do not appreciate that sort of presumptuous attitude, I decided he would not be allowed to stay. Besides, as everyone knows, roaches do not use coasters and thus their coffee mugs leave unsightly and often impossible-to-remove rings on many porous surfaces. Rather than murder the roach, as someone with a less pure conscience would do, I told him, as I went upstairs to seethe, that it would be in his best interest if, by the time I came back down, he had just taken his things and left. Otherwise, I threatened, he would have to answer to me and there would, yes, be hell to pay. Fortunately the roach did not know that I cannot harm a fly, because when I finally slunk down the stairs to check on his whereabouts, he was nowhere to be found.

4. I do not read any "women's" magazines. InStyle, Mademoiselle, Glamour, and the like are all dead to me.
5. Pre-answered the other day. (See link above!)
6. When I was in elementary school, I would not eat the center of a sandwich. My favorite was peanut butter (no jelly). I would eat the crusts off first (removal of crust during the sandwich-making process is an activity I will never endorse) and then make my way toward the center. It was there that the bread would have received repeat layerings of peanut butter and thus contain the greatest concentration. Although I adored peanut butter (Jif), I did not like it in thick globs, so the center of the sandwich would remain untouched. My brother always accused me, sometimes even rather angrily, of manufacturing this behavior so that when my first album came out, that quirky tidbit could be featured in the liner notes.

Although the "rules" say that I must "tag" six people for this thing, I am not going to do that, because I cannot think of six people who would forgive me for doing so. I will just have to suffer the consequences of my maverick rule-breaking. However, I do invite you to participate in comments, but only by "sharing" six items. All other rules are to be disregarded, especially the one about linking back to me. (If you link back to me anyway, I will not think you are clever. I will, however, want to "tear you a new one".)

Remember when I asked you to identify what you thought this is?

Well, it's this:

Diapered baby baubles are a girl's best friend

Who needs boring old diamonds from Tiffany's when she can have Baby Scorpio from The New Kids Zodiac collection by Karen Silverman?

You can find this fabulousness somewhere on East Seventh Street, between First and Second Avenues, on the north side of the street. You can only buy it, though, if you ask where I would like you to send it.

5. I'll bet you didn't know I have an Amazon WishList.

I'm not begging. Just informing, as part of a "meme" that Sass "tagged" (yes, I must surround these words by quotation marks) me for last month. I will complete the list (it calls for six items) this weekend.

Stay tuned!

The dry cleaner's son's kiss is the wettest I've ever known. His mouth, with its full lips and lovely white teeth behind them, was, until a minute ago, a joy to behold as it talked to me and laughed with me. But now? Descending, wide-open, upon my mouth, spilling saliva into it, and now, unwelcome, unaware, still probing for further entry, drool oozing in waves over my grimace, onto my shirt, as this newly revealed boy-beast slurps his way toward his own private ecstasy? No!

"I'll send you the dry-cleaning bill," I say, as I push him out the door.

My attempts to come up with something about these two signs that achieves the perfect balance of sophisticated "snark" and pedestrian "punniness" are yielding very poor results. Can you help me out?

(And yes, if you are a long-time reader, you will recognize the sign on the right from a few years ago. Back then I didn't have much to say either. Perhaps, sometimes, it is best just to say nothing at all.)

I'm voting how I'm voting because I think it's time for a dark-haired person in the White House. And no, I don't mean this one.

The only women I am interested in having as friends are those who not only never use words like "empowered", "sisterhood", or "soulmate" but sneer at them. Who would never be caught dead sitting around in a big circle, stitching quirky quilts or knitting kooky hats, sipping twig tea or chai, while wearing clunky maryjanes and whimsical socks that look like something out of Baby Gap. My friends, while not bimbos, don't see the sense in sensible shoes. They have"tits" not "breasts" and spit out "cunt" like tobacco. They buy their bedding and hats in stores. And prefer coffee.

If you ever hear me referring to a female friend as a/my "sister", you have my permission to remove my uterus by whatever means you fancy, without anaesthesia or even a tampon to clench between my teeth.

This is my promise/vow to you.

If you came here earlier and the whole "front page" was blank and as white as the driven snow (P.S. snow is so hoity-toity that it has its own driver to take it around town?) and you thought perhaps this website wonderland had been cleared out by bandits or jackals or thugs, or looted for spare parts and words, and you started wailing and tearing your hair out and cursing the so-called "gods" that you only believe exist when something extreme happens but can't be bothered with when things are just humming along nicely like a refrigerator in the dark, well, then you would be doing exactly what I did about 20 minutes ago.

But now everything's fine. Everything's back up and running — or at least trekking really really fast up a steep incline on a treadmill, which is what I'd be doing right now if only I had remembered to set my alarm last night. But instead, I missed my ride to the sweatshop, and instead found myself sweating in the privacy of my own home upon finding my site in a state of disappearance. (See, I think this situation is punishment for my failure to punish myself at the gym this morning. Everything happens, as they say, for a reason.) (And by "they" I mean this faceless mass of body parts with all the good looks of a toothy teratoma.)

So move along, move along. Come on. There's nothing to see here.

Well, now there is.

Toodles, ta, and carry on.

Test................................!

Tell me you're doing something more worthwhile with your time this evening than watching the Super Bowl. Tell me you're clipping a hangnail (as I cringe audibly at the mere thought of the accompanying "cleeeeek" of your preferred implement). Or tell me you're tearing off the hangnail with your teeth (as I flinch with what I think is a suggestion of a chill/thrill as I imagine the possibility of tiny blood dots forming near your cuticles). Or tell me you're hang-gliding. Yes, hang-gliding while reading this on some sort of hand-held hybrid GPS/browser device that I'm not quite geeky enough to know for sure even exists (but which I trust someone else, somewhat more advanced in his or her geekiness, will confirm or deny).

Tell me you're doing anything but watching the Super Bowl, and I will add you to my list of people I don't necessarily have to scorn. At least for that reason.

And if you tell me you're watching Puppy Bowl IV and can't tear your eyes away, you will super bowl me over.

So, what's it going to be?

You know, you're wrong about me. I know what you say behind my back or even in front of my face in these weird languages that I know you make up just to talk about me. You say I'm one of these New Yorkers who says stuff like, "Oh, I never go above 14th Street" and looks down her nose (and don't think I don't hear you calling it "Jewy") (you would add "schnoz" to that, too, if only you were sure that it meant "nose" and not "putz") at people whose entry into the city involves a bridge or tunnel and mutters, "Fuckin' bridge and tunnelers", or, in an economy of syllablage because I'm too cool to exert myself more than is absolutely necessary, "Effin' B 'n' Ts", with the same sort of disdain ordinarily reserved for remarks about tourists or the poorly dressed (which often are one and the same).

True, I think this city is the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas and even their tuxedos and bikinis. True, I think if you can make it here you can make it anywhere but why the hell would you want to leave. True, I love this city with a Woody Allen ferocity. But I still know that there are some truly fabulous things you'll miss if you take the attitude that if it's not here, it's just not worth it. And especially not worth travelling for, except if your mode of transportation doesn't require you to avail yourself of a bridge or tunnel and you can fly at the drop of your hideous newsboy hat to Paris or Milan or Tokyo or whatever other city you think is even more beeskneesier than this one.

So now I present to you one of the best reasons to leave this city. One of the best reasons to not rent but actually buy a car. Which is this:

Pacific Rim Wrap
(Click to enlarge, to provoke salivation)

Ordinarily I turn up my schnoz (not having a putz, that is) at the mere mention of a "wrap", so when my boyfriend ordered this at Blue Sage Grill in Southampton, Pennsylvania, two weeks ago, I thought I'd have to tell him, "It's been nice knowing you, fella, but I'm taking the next barge to Breakuptown, U.S.A., population YOU." (And here you thought I was going to say, "Our relationship is a wrap, chump." See? You don't know me as well as you think you do.) But this one? This wrap was music to my mouth! Oh! I mean, seriously, Oh!

So "O(h)!" that I almost recreated the scene I can't stand from When Harry Met Sally. You know the one.

If you're ever anywhere near the area, or even if you're not, I suggest, from the bottom of my stomach, that you get you and yours over to Blue Sage Grill. (And if you think I haven't already tittered and twittered over the word "rim" in the name of the wrap, you really don't know me at all.)

Okay, so I'm going to spell this out for you, in whatever the equivalent of "loud and clear" is when something is merely read and not actually uttered (unless you're reading this aloud, which you are free to do within the confines of your own home but which you must pay me a royalty for if you read them in an acting class or on stage), so we can all move on and live our lives and I don't have to carry, deep inside my viscera and soul, the disdain and resentment that have been residing there, where they are progressing from mere back burner simmering to full-on front burner boiling.

Here goes: In playing Scrabulous, you should not be permitted to use words that seemingly never existed before the advent of the game or its ancestor, Scrabble. The only words permitted should be those that you can use or have heard in an ordinary day that doesn't involve you being abducted by aliens who, while probing you in places that secretly thrill you, also injected you with a vocabulary that has yet to be unveiled on this planet. So please please please, kindly refrain from dragging your tiles to form such eye-rolling blatherskite as KLAXONNERAIT or PROSPONDICOUS or EXCRASCONDONE.

Especially since I just made up two of them.

P.S. I must confess to using QI, but only because I saw it included in the list of acceptable two-letter words, when I was checking to see if IQ was. (It was not.)