As if I didn’t already find President Obama annoying enough, the man interrupted my daily TMZ viewing to announce he’d signed the economic stimulus bill.

My first impression: just twenty-nine days in office and his hair already noticeably more gray. Guess losing sleep wondering how to keep all of the promises made to different voter blocs with competing interests will do that to a person.

Then I felt bad for being so superficial, so I tried paying attention. After noticing that he was stumbling far more in this speech than ever before, I couldn’t help wonder if maybe even he was having a hard time buying the line of B.S. coming out of his mouth.

In case you are one of those fortunate enough to be employed — and therefore unable to watch either TMZ or the Obama show during the day — the gist of the speech was:

Blah, blah, blah. This here plan isn’t going to fix everything. Blah, blah, blah. Don’t expect miracles. In fact, we’re not sure if it’s going to fix a damn thing at all. Blah, blah, blah. Oh, we’re already working on a second stimulus bill because we realize this one is fucked up. Blah, blah, blah. Also, anyone who doesn’t agree with me is a weenie engaging in partisan politics.

Or something like that.

Meanwhile, the Dow Jones closed -297.81, a sign that businesses aren’t buying Obama’s blather, either.

Which just goes to show that you can put frosting on a pile of shit but it is still a pile of shit.

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Hurry, they don’t last long:

Nintendo Wii console.

Wii Fit.

My latest column, Can Starbucks Really Offer “Value” With A Straight Face is up at Pajamas Media.

For those too lazy to click through and read it, the upshot is that Starbucks hopes to lure you away from McDonald’s by offering ‘value meals’ with your tall drip coffee or venti latte. Of course, you’re still going to be shelling out nearly $4 but, hey, it’ll be fun juggling that bowl of overpriced oatmeal while you’re driving!

Salma Hayek shares the wealth, proving breast really is best.

Aw, Koala love.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t want people to know how much he loves ABBA.

Yeah, a flesh-eating bug: that’s what’s wrong with Michael Jackson.

Are you wearing your e-condom yet?

These guys have some massive balls… er, nuts.

Admit it, you’ve missed Spinal Tap. And when we last heard from the hair band we figured that as long as there was sex and drugs we could do without the rock and roll. So, was it the end for them? As David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) said:

Well, I don’t really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how - what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you.

Never fear, die hard fans. Spinal Tap is going on tour.

* Yes, I know it’s an overused quote. But it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.

My latest Pajamas Media column, Who Will Raise The Octuplets’ Mom’s Kids: Taxpayers! is up. An excerpt:

Perhaps there’s a sick genius behind Nadya Suleman’s choice to have her octuplets while unmarried, unemployed, and living in her parents’ basement: that $1.5 to $3 million hospital bill won’t be her responsibility.

The winner of last week’s Caption Contest is Lee with:

Text no evil. Blog no evil. Speak no evil.

Kim has a thought-provoking piece on the Stimulapalooza:

Government can encourage or discourage the private sector. At the moment they are discouraging the private sector. Government wants to increase entitlements and increase government jobs. But if everyone is on the goverment teat with entitlements or employment, where does the money come from? Will government pay it’s employees with one hand and take from them with the other to pay the entitlements?

Go. Read.

My latest column, Batman, Smurfs, Spam and Nostalgia is up at Pajamas Media. An excerpt:

These days, nostalgia also means big business now that corporate America has begun to realize that everything old is new again. What we watch, what we eat, what we’re wearing, how we spend our free time, and where we’re doing it — our lives today don’t resemble the high-speed techno-dream once predicted by James Berry (no relation) so much as they resemble, well, our childhoods.

Looking for something to do this weekend? Check out these three free game downloads from Amazon!

• Build-a-Lot - Send the housing market through the roof as you build, buy, and sell houses in the new strategy game.
• Jewel Quest II - Join Professor Pack on the ultimate jewel matching quest across the world’s richest continent.
• The Scruffs - They need your help to save their beloved family home from being sold. Grandpa Scruff has a solution - a scavenger hunt to recover his valuable artifacts.

Quite some time ago, I asked you to contribute a Google-related haiku and you blew my socks off with your witty submissions.

Evidently, you impressed some other folks, too. Now you’re featured at Haiku.com.

Oh, stop smiling now.
Click the link and go visit.
Then hurry back here.

Winner announced Monday!

My mother, God bless her, is one of those incurable email forwarders. Heard a funny joke? Type it down and send it to her: she’ll ensure it’s circulated to 70+ of her closest friends. Saw a great video online? She’s happy to disseminate that, too.

It’s almost as if she’s blogging; she just does it via email which guarantees her readers will see it in their InBoxes so she doesn’t have to hope they’ll stop by a blog to read whatever has tickled her fancy that day.

Despite my numerous requests — and frequent replies showing where Snopes debunked the latest scary thing someone sent her — she still sends me forwarded emails to the tune of a half-dozen a day. (This is down from three dozen, so I’m pleased.)

The chain emails are the ones that truly get to me, though. You know what I mean: some poorly formatted thing bloated with cutesy pictures and usually a prayer of some sort that you’re supposed to say to insure that God will answer all of your prayers. (Note: I know these are scams because I still don’t have a flat stomach, a heated indoor swimming pool or a pool boy to tend to either.)

And, of course, there’s always the warning against breaking the chain lest hellfire and damnation rain down on you. That’s the part which gets her, I’m certain of it: at age 73, and having just dealt with colon cancer, she’s a bit preoccupied with avoiding hellfire and damnation at this point in her life.

In fact, I’m pretty certain that most of these forwarded jokes and chain emails come from old people. Sometimes I picture a vast army of senior citizens logging on faithfully to the interwebs every day and blindly clicking “forward” on these things in the hope it’ll offset their karma.

Yesterday’s email chain letter was a hoot, though. In addition to promising that God would answer my prayers instantly (like He doesn’t already, most commonly with the answer “No”?) the email claimed that it had been unbroken since Mother Theresa started it… in 1952.

Dayum. Although I didn’t realize Mother Theresa even had a computer, the fact that she had one in 1952 is proof enough of her sainthood for me.

It’s not just the Bratz Dolls giving girls unrealistic expectations of head size… although that video is a hoot!

Lately, I’ve been on a quest to upgrade the quality of my reading material. Sure, I still consume at least three pop fiction novels per week (I buy them by the lot to save money). But at some point last year I began to suspect that, despite my immense enjoyment, a regular literary diet of suspense/thrillers was probably rotting my brain.

After reading somewhere that author William Kennedy praised One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race”, I decided that I shouldn’t miss out.

I could not possibly agree less with Kennedy. It’s not the author’s sense of the absurd which bothered me; I’m actually a fan of “magical realism” in literature. It appeals to my existentialist side.

I even appreciated, to some extent, the circularity within the novel’s structure, the most obvious of which was the getting and begetting of so many characters named Arcadio or Aureliano that I could no longer keep them straight. After all, the author emphasizes this theme through the women in the book who repeatedly observe that time wasn’t really passing, nor were lives really changing: they were merely repeating the same thing, day after day, wearing themselves out.

But, frankly, I found nothing in the book with which to connect. Sentences rambled so tangentially they often never conveyed anything at all. Paragraphs became pages. Words, at times, seemed randomly strung together. And throughout all of it I found all of the characters so dry and inconceivable (in the sense that, due to the naming confusion, I couldn’t picture a single damn one of them) that their births, deaths and tragi-comedies left me completely and utterly unmoved.

When I’d first mentioned that I was reading this book, Craig commented that “the last paragraph… is one of the best in literature”. I agree, but probably not for the same reason.

After having spent 21 nights of misery reading this book (because I’m too stubborn to quit reading any book, no matter how much I despise it), I loved that last paragraph, too… if only because it meant I was finally done with the damned thing.