Lumbar Support Boy doesn't know it, but he was lucky to make it to Phoenix. It took two and a half hours of him attempting to pummel his feet into my lower back before I rose over the back of my seat to growl at him, but I think his mother got the point rather quickly.Take your child's feet from out of my back or I will make a scene. Oh, and have a lovely trip, wherever you're going, eh? Don't make me ritually sacrifice your kid at cruising altitude or you'll find out just how deadly knitting needles are when they're wielded with malice aforethought.

Consider this oddity spotted recently on CNN, under the headline Male enlargement ads prompt spam rage:

"He said his firm does not send spam but blamed a rival firm which he said routes much of their unsolicited bulk e-mail through Russia and eastern Europe. Mackay said such firms gave a bad name to the penis enhancement business."

Now let's go back and reread that last sentence again, and see if anyone else in the class has the same reaction I did when I read it:

In the days that I first knew Matthew, back in the disillusioned haze of high school, he was good friends with Markus, who lived nearby. I would occasionally stay with Matthew's parents, who were by far the most intelligently daunting twosome I'd ever encountered up until that point in my life. Both of Matthew's parents worked at the nearby university; his father as a professor and his mother in some forever-undefined-to-me role in the foreign studies department. Markus, one of Matthew's closer friends, lived nearby. I had met him, but had never been introduced to his ...

"Utterly meaningless!

Everything is meaningless!"

Ecclesiastes 1:2

While most people are amazed at the sheer volume of attempted pickups I see through instant messenging systems, I'm not. Matthew describes it as being like telemarketing; men target a specific demographic over and over because someone, out there, is biting.

Those of us who read entertainment news with any degree of amusement, skepticism, or fascination have probably greeted the idea of Spike TV with either a waggle of eyebrow (or at least a waggle of tentacle). "Television for men," they say.

"So," you say (if you're me), "what portions of the male television need have not been met? What heretofore-undiscovered niche of male television programming has not already been exploited for its inherent commercial breaks?"

So, let me get this straight - instead of "French fries," they're "Freedom Fries" now because those dastardly French have the temerity to disagree with Dubya's cowboy brinksmanship disguised as foreign policy?

Freedom fries? Freedom toast?
Freedom fries? Freedom toast?
FREEDOM FRIES? FREEDOM frelling TOAST?

In case no one else in this country stops snoring and bothers to say it, let me jump around and yell a bit in the hopes that someone will hear it: