I pause before answering. Not because I’m torn for choice, but because I don’t know quite what to say. I do know what I’d like to say:

“I’m sorry, ‘cheated?’ You understand why I ‘cheated?’ I don’t think so, Major.

“So I spent some time flirting with you while we served on the Normandy. That is, if listening to you recount how you white-knighted some girl in biotic school by killing your teacher is considered flirting. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like the bastard pretty much deserved it, but whoa. I mean, I watched the slaughtering of my entire family on Mindoir, then watched my entire Alliance unit get devoured by a thresher maw on Akuze, but I never accidentally broke a dude’s neck over a boy I liked. That’s some hardcore darkness you’ve got swirling around inside you, buddy!

“Yes, there was also the night before Ilos, and I’m not going to take anything away from that. Our ragged band of brothers was heading into an uncertain future, and you and I managed a sweet, if brief, moment of connection before it all went down. As if enough hadn’t already gone down. Between almost having to shoot Wrex and losing Ash on Virmire, I was barely holding on. You were there for me, and I was there for you. We’ll always have Ilos.

It was good, but it wasn’t THAT good.

“Then I defeated Saren and saved the Citadel. Do you remember what happened after that? A Collector ship attacked the Normandy, ripped a hole in its side, and I got spaced. And DIED. I died, Kaidan. Dead. Suffocated in space, where no one could hear me scream. Not that I could, due to that whole suffocating thing. But thanks to Cerberus (I know, I know, you’re not a huge fan), I was rebuilt as a regular Bionic Woman and woke back up — two years later.

“And I’ll never forget our reunion on Horizon. Your dramatic entrance from behind those crates, touting me as the savior of the Citadel and a living legend. The awkward hug. Your accusations that I was showing up after two years and acting like nothing happened. Your petulant whining that you thought we had something, something real.

“‘Thinking you were dead tore me apart,’ you said. ‘How could you put me through that?’

“Uh, I was dead, then unconscious for two years? Then I woke up to some serious shit going down, what with those Collectors abducting people from colonies all over the galaxy? Like they did right before you got all up in my face, on the very ground we were standing upon? Believe it or not, things aren’t always about you?

“So all this talk of cheating and the ‘I still love you,’ stuff? We spent one night together, sweetie. Then you (rightfully) assumed I was dead. Then, and I can’t stress this enough, two years went by. I hate to be all Ross about this, but I think we were on a break, at the very least. A reasonable person would assume all bets were off. But like I said, I never accidentally broke a dude’s neck over a boy I liked.

“What do I want? I want you to shoot what I tell you to shoot, or lift the baddies up into the air so I can shoot them. I want you to quit being such a dummy. I want you to stop acting like a sixth grader facing rejection for the first time. I want you to get it together, Alenko.”

I don’t say this. I don’t say any of it. I opt for the kinder, simpler, “I’m sorry Kaidan, but we should just keep it professional.”

Then you make me pay for the lunch you invited me to.

You know what? Garrus is way better in the sack anyway.

He’s a better dancer, too.

—

Sara Clemens is an ad copywriter for a book publisher, so every single day she pretends she’s in an episode of Mad Men. You can follow her on twitter at @TheSaraClemens, and find all the things she’s ever written for the internet at saraclemens.com.

Linda Belcher of Bob’s Burgers

If I could only pick one TV mama to be my very own, it would have to be Linda Belcher. With big flippy hair, a penchant for sing-narrating everything she’s thinking, and a flair for the dramatic, this burger joint matriarch could very well be my genetic mother (I might be part cartoon). Linda is fantastic and refreshing because she’s so dorkily proud of her kids even and especially when they are doing or saying what others would deem troubling or strange. Tina’s writing erotic fiction about her peers? Linda excitedly responds to the “artsy fartsy” creativity of this hobby exclaiming, “Freaky friend fiction, all right!” When her attempt at producing dinner theatre in the restaurant is poorly reviewed — the set looks like children made it — rather than taking a negative critique negatively, she’s bursting with pride. It was made by children! Her children!

Ms. Belcher is a cool, kooky, sweet, funny mom who loves everything her kids make and do. A bastion of support, jokes, and cuddles, she can be a little over-the-top motherly, but ultimately I admire that she’s so incredibly hard to disappoint. She showers her family of weirdies with respect and accolades that ring perfectly silly and genuine and she does so without asking them to be better. Instead, she can be counted on to accept them and celebrate them as they are. Now, that’s all kinds of “all right!”

Here’s Linda kissing her porcelain collection of babies. Imagine what she’s like with her real kids!

Lorelai Gilmore of Gilmore Girls

Now, I avoided Gilmore Girls like the plague for a long while when it was on the air. It looked like a sappy, stupid mother-daughter fantasy land where mom and kid are best pals who share all their secrets over root beer and pizza. Well, yeah. Okay, Stars Hollow is pretty much a fantasy place and the Lorelais are definitely fantasy women, but once you get past all your cynical Sally stuff (How can they eat junk all the time and never gain weight? How can they watch all the TV and movies and still have time to read Finnegan’s Wake? How could a real mom be that awesome?) you fall in love with the fantasy.

When Lorelai is being a “drag” of a parent it’s often because she’s pushing Rory to be more daring — wear a two piece bathing suit, sneak out of the house. Mama Gilmore does anything and everything to provide for her girl; she supplies Lorelai Junior with all the books, warmth, junk food, and cable channels that a growing woman needs. With a ton of femme knowledge that far surpasses regular mom tricks like “smudge some lipstick on your cheekies!,” Lorelai has all the fashion know-how to make a blah cardigan look like a fetching, but not trying too hard, signature piece. When it comes down to it, L.G. is just your typical total knockout, monied teen mom, who leaves the lap of luxury to live life by her own standards and provide for her daughter in the quaintest most pop culturally saturated existence possible. She knows everything from Muppets to Monet, the Go-Gos to Grey Gardens, and just about any of her spit-fire dialogue is incredibly quotable. I’m not ashamed to say it (anymore), I’d love to be a Gilmore Girl.

Lorelai on motherhood.

Sophia Petrillo of The Golden Girls

I’ve been watching and LOVING The Golden Girls since I was a kid. So, maybe I didn’t get why Rose accidentally buying extra large condoms (and then the grocery guy announcing it for a price check) was hilarious, but everything else translated well, and I’m pretty sure I get that condom joke, now, thank you very much. Even as a girl, I identified with Dorothy (do with that what you will) but you wouldn’t need to be a Dortothy to love her mom, Sophia, and envy their awesomely sarcastic and loving relationship.

Sophia is the perfect little old lady. That grandma shuffle? That wicker bag? A great listener, an old school classic storyteller (“Picture it — Sicily…), and the comedic timing and blunt brashness of Don Rickles. Sassy, sexy, and fun, this lil’ mama is just as comfortable volunteering caring for sickies at the hospital as painting the town red with Mr. Burt Reynolds. She’s the kind of mom who you’d actually want to shack up with you and your best buds, and she’s the kind of mom who will continue to love her “pussycat” daughter with all her wicked little Italian heart. . . even if that daughter has sent her to “the home” at least once before. That’s amore!

A favorite Sophia and Dorothy moment. Why isn’t this MY life?!

Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development

Her? Really? Her? Well, no. I don’t want her to be my mom, but I think she’s really funny. She’s all yours, Baby Buster.

“I don’t care for Gob.”

Mama’s cuttin’ loose!

—

Ana Holguin writes PopHeart for The Idler.

Sometimes I don’t know what to watch on Netflix. Sometimes I’ve just had enough of watching Doctor Who and Upstairs, Downstairs and even Paul Newman. Sometimes I just want to see something I haven’t seen before.

So what do I do? I turn to Netflix to see what it can suggest for me. It magically delivers movies right to my television. Surely it can peer into my brain and have its algorithms magically intuit what I want to discover.

Here’s what Netflix is telling me:

Since I recently watched Doctor Who, I will want to watch My Little Pony. No, no I won’t. But when I tweeted my surprise at that recommendation (which then got retweeted a few times) I learned that maybe yes, yes I do. According to one tweeter, there’s a high correlation between Who fans and bronies. In fact, that tweeter hunted down a number of other folks tweeting about My Little Pony to explain to them that Doctor Who fans and Star Trek fans and My Little Pony fans are all one and the same. I’m not sure any of us were convinced.

Because I’ve watched Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (a compilation of Keaton shorts, all of which are thoroughly enjoyable, especially if you’re watching them with a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old) and Gosford Park (which is way way way better than Downton Abbey in that it is smarter, funnier, subtler, and heartbreakinger), Netflix has paired them to create a category called “Crime Movies.” So based on my interest in Sherlock Jr. and Gosford Park, I will be interested in the top-rated Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (too too true, though it’s a crime movie only in the way that the other two are also not crime movies), the most popular The Lincoln Lawyer (definitely a crime movie, but while I do love Harry Bosch, I’m not a big Mickey Haller fan), as well as the Dragon Tattoo trilogy (yes! horrible violence and is-it-or-isn’t-it misogyny!), Chinatown (fill in your own joke here), Kick-Ass (I actually don’t know this one, and the description of it is not convincing me I want to), and Return of the Pink Panther (because that’s a crime movie, yessirreebob). Okay then, maybe not.

Further down the screen, Netflix recognizes that I have an interest in “witty crime movies” (true enough) based on the fact that I’ve watched — you guessed it — Sherlock Jr. and Gosford Park. This time, it suggests Arsenic and Old Lace, The Way of the Gun, How to Steal a Million, Witness for the Prosecution, Evil under the Sun, and A Night in Casablanca. Apparently witty crime movies are things made long ago, unless they involve Ryan Phillippe and Benicio del Toro, because sexy modern movie stars definitely equally witty intellect.

But if you combine Sherlock Jr with Office Space, Netflix will generate “comedies.” Some of these suggestions are spot-on. I’ve seen them and I’ve loved them. Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog will never get stale, never ever ever. Of course, I own the DVD, with all the extras, but it’s nice to know that I can watch it at work and on my phone and, well, ahem. Back to the subject at hand. The Big Lebowski was plenty enjoyable when I saw it (though, unlike many of the movie’s fans, I only saw it the once). Breakfast at Tiffany’s? Is that really a comedy? I do enjoy it, though, as long as I skip over the offensive racist parts. This Is Spinal Tap is, naturally, sheer genius (even if I can’t figure out how to get an umlaut over my n). Based on that track record, I think Netflix is right that I might enjoy The Trip, a mockumentary from Michael Winterbottom with Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden as a couple of actors on a foodie road trip across England. That’s right up my alley. And I have friends who love Louis C.K., so I’m willing to say that his Hilarious probably isn’t a far-fetched recommendation either, even though my gut tells me I won’t like it. But TEDTalks: Smart Laughs? Are you fucking kidding me? And Daniel Tosh: Completely Serious? You’d have to kill me to get me to watch those.

At least I’ll get to watch The Trip first.

—

Sarah Werner has two sons, at least one job, and too many books to read. As a result, Netflix Instant is her constant companion. She blogs about books and reading and is known to a corner of the twitterverse as @wynkenhimself.

This year, for the first time, I found myself with the free time to (theoretically) watch the entire first round, and in all honesty, I was just a bit disappointed with the experience. You may suggest that I might have felt differently had I shelled out the $4 to be able to watch all the games online instead of being limited to what was airing on CBS (I don’t have cable), or had I been watching the games with a group instead of by myself, but I say that you’re underthinking things, and in the spirit of public improvement, I offer a few suggestions on how the single greatest competition in major American sports can be made even more exciting.

1. More elimination

Where else do you get to see so many grown men crying?

Wouldn’t it be even more exciting if the field didn’t just get smaller ever round, but the game itself got smaller? You could start with full-court games in the first round, and then half-court games in the second. The sweet sixteen would be 3-on-3, and the elite eight 1-on-1. The final four would be two games of H-O-R-S-E, and the national championship would be a slam dunk contest. Awesome.

2. More surprises

Admit it. You still don't remember their name. But they killed your bracket.

Even so, the South and West divisions still find their #1, 3, and 4 seeds playing in the sweet sixteen, and the East has its #1, 2, and 4 seeds still alive. Eleven of the sixteen teams playing in the third round are exactly who should still be playing based on the initial seeding. Having five upstarts is great, but we can do better.

How? With a secret extra play-in round where 32 teams play for the right to face the sweet sixteen in surprise matchups! Lehigh may have beaten Duke, but can they beat, um, Oakland University? Perennial power North Carolina paired up against the University of Chicago!³

3. Total madness

People, we can make this happen.

I’m telling you, people, we are limited only by our imaginations.

—

1. Registered trademark of the NCAA

2. Even though the NCAA officially expanded the play-in game(s) from two teams to sixteen this year, and relabeled those games “the first round,” I refuse to acknowledge such a travesty until a single play-in team wins a single game in the actual tournament. Then I’ll think about it.

3. The University of Chicago doesn’t have a basketball team, you say? That’s what makes it a surprise.

—

Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav, where he is live-tweeting the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament using the #SnarkMadness hashtag.

No, my own private food desert is my apartment.

Like many people in this fine country of ours, I’m a bit heavier than I ought to be. And, again, without overstating the problem, things of late had been getting worse than better, so there are fewer impulse foods around the house. There is a strategically limited supply of dark chocolate, and cream cheese is strictly rationed. Red meat, already scarce, is gone almost entirely. There’s a solid supply of chicken breasts and ground turkey, but potato and corn chips are persona non grata.

None of these trends are entirely new to the Craig kitchen, but they have definitely become more pronounced.

Which is a good thing, although not, apparently, good enough. Because, you see, while my waistline has stopped expanding, after a good start, it’s stopped shrinking as well.

Before I lose you entirely, let me reaffirm that under no circumstances will this become a diet column. I have no interest in trading tips, debating the perfect diet, or passing any judgment on individual foods other than whether or not it makes me happy to put them in my mouth. (I do have such opinions, but like politics and religion, it is often best to keep such things to one’s self.) In the long run, my goal is to stay the same weight, and one not terribly far from the one I am now.

But I’m not there yet.

So what do I do? Well, largely, I’m going to put a bit more time in at the gym, and I’m going to work to reconcile myself to being just a little hungry all the time until I get there. And that’s the complaint of which I’m most ashamed. Too many people deal with real hunger, and I, emphatically, do not equate my position with theirs. I am, however, finding that I do not deal well with that constant gnawing urge, and I’m looking forward to being done with it.

But there are two cheap tricks that I’m going to try in order to (hopefully) give me that additional push.

First, I’m going to cut liquid calories to an absolute bare minimum. For someone who doesn’t drink water, well, almost ever, I actually do better than you might expect on this front. Most of what I drink on a day-to-day basis is aspartame sweetened powdered tea or lemonade. (Yeah, it’s Crystal Light. And yeah, it’s pink lemonade. What?) However, that Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA has 209 calories per 12 ounces. (The 90 Minute IPA has 294.) And my beer snobbery means that light beers are out of the question, so yeah, beer is kind of out until I reach my goal.

If that’s not motivation, I don’t know what is.

And second, carrots. They’re low in calories, and even better, they’re incredibly satisfying to chew. And for me, at least, when I’m hungry, that’s a huge help. Chewing carrots (or sugar-free gum) at the end of the meal has been a great trick to let my stomach catch up with my mouth. It gives my chompers something to do, and it takes my mind off food.

Mostly.

But the sooner I get there, the sooner I get to have interesting food in my house again.

—

Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

1. The Pixar Story – Really regretting that I never got around to watching this documentary about the Pixar studio since it’s not even available on DVD now. 
2. Toy Story 3 – You’re gonna have to find another movie to put on repeat for your kids. 
3. Howl’s Moving Castle – The child in all of us has grown up and gone disc-only. 
4. Gambit – Netflix thinks I’d give this movie 4.6 stars and Netflix is never wrong so I’m sure I’ll feel the disappearance of this movie I’ve never heard of as a cruel theft. 
5. Hackers – There goes my late night 90’s era Angelina Jolie nerd boner material. 
6. Let Me In – It’s lived in my instant queue for a year unwatched, now I’m going to have to rent it on DVD and leave it on top of my TV for 6 months before I get around to watching it. 
7. TRON: Legacy – TRON
8. In The Mood For Love – This romantic Korean movie is a real delight. Rent it on disc to do subs instead of dubs. Also rent it on disc because now you have no choice. 
9. Twister – A Category 5 deal failure ripped through Netflix taking this movie along with it. 
10. Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans – The loss of this movie makes today sad day for Nic Cage fans everywhere. 
11. Gnomeo & Juliet – Starz was the place to go for bad movies and even worse puns. 
12. Nine Months – A Hugh Grant vehicle that’s as predictable as it is forgettable. I’ve already forgotten it had been available on streaming. 
13. Beetlejuice – Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!  

Oops, it’s all gone now, what did I do? Sorry! 

—

Sarah Pavis is an engineer, writer, and Netflix obsessive. She writes “In the Queue” for The Idler.

Normally, eating is the highest of my priorities. Sometimes it’s even above getting dressed properly. I always eat three meals a day. If I don’t, my sugar level crashes and I become a monster whose superpower is whining and complaining about migraines, intent only on eating but also unable to decide what she wants or how to get it. My days are planned so that this monster stays penned up in her cage. But at AWP, it’s feast or famine. All my normal eating habits go straight out the window. I eat like a 10-year-old child left without a babysitter. My brain is too scrambled from the simultaneous presence of great writers and fear of looking like an idiot.

Savior of many a breakfast

Once I’m in the conference hotel, I sit in a corner behind a stray table and bend the oatmeal lid to use as a spoon. I hope no one can see me but of course someone I know will come up to say hello. I’ll have to hoist myself up from the ground to hug her. I will get oatmeal on her coat. I vow to get a portable breakfast sandwich tomorrow morning.

I hurry to the first panel and sit down in a seat at the end of one of the rows, unwinding multiple scarves and trying not to breathe too loudly. Sitting at the end of an empty row means everyone has to step over me. But I will not yield because the hurry and the oatmeal have made me sweaty, and it’s best if I keep as far away from everyone as possible.

Eat fresh. Or not.

While I climb the stairs to the next panel, I remember the peanuts. Every time I fly, I ask for peanuts and only eat one of the two little bags. It seems silly to throw it away, so I save the extra bag in my purse for some indeterminate time. I realize that NOW IS THAT TIME. Outside the conference room, I pour two salty bags of peanuts into my mouth so that the crinkly package doesn’t annoy everyone during the talk. I wash it down with a paper cup of free coffee.

By the time I’m supposed to meet up with my friends for dinner, I’m jittery and my blood sugar is so low I want to buy one of those $8 sandwiches they were selling in the lobby that were more bread than anything else. I know I’m on my way to dinner but I’m concerned I legitimately might not make it. When I get to the lobby, the caterers have gone home to their own dinners. I go back upstairs and walk from conference room to conference room, peeking in each until I find the leftovers from some reception or another. I dart in and grab a sad-looking smashed half of a brownie. To assuage my guilt and shame, I take one of their pamphlets. I never read it.

I meet my friends for dinner and we order all the courses, even though they make you pay extra for salad and bread. We order overpriced bottles of wine. We imagine ourselves a night full of telling stories with strangers, pretending we’ve read books we haven’t, and remembering why writing matters. Instead we are so full we end up in our beds early. I write myself a reminder to get a sandwich in the morning. I lose the note and fall asleep.

By the time I get home I’ll be craving fresh fruit like someone with scurvy. I’ll lay on the couch and eat apples and vow to eat like a normal human being next year. By next year I’ll forget, but I keep collecting extra bags of airplane peanuts.

—

Jill Kolongowski is a freelance writer and editor living in San Francisco. When she’s not cooking, running, or reading, she blogs at jillkolongowski.com. Follow her on Twitter at @jillkolongowski.

I thought it might be nice, this Valentine’s week, to discuss what I love about Louis.  I used my analytical super powers for this one, so don’t expect a sonnet to his freckles or his sadly tonsured crown, but an elevation of his craft.  Said elevation follows thusly:

Though his stand-up persona carries himself with a fairly typical brand of New York male bravado and “this world is fucking stupid” existentialism, C.K.’s performative work is perforated with extensive self-hatred — hatred that he links both to his biological maleness along with the hegemonic infrastructure of a society that creates men like him.

In form, he suggests that he’s the same old ornery comedian; paunchy in his black t-shirt he’s comfortably average.  Unsurprisingly, he talks about typical dude stuff, subject matter ranging from having balls and obsessing about sex and women to smoking joints and obsessing about sex and women.  In content, however, his rantings fill in this typical masculine outline with an atypical questioning of male and white privilege.  And funnily enough, it’s his portrayal of himself as abject that most caught my loving eye.

On stage and on screen (in his F/X show Louie), C.K. depicts himself as disgusted by his body — its girth, his baldness, its (in)ability to have sex.  He despises his desires — to eat, to masturbate, to acquire friendships, girlfriends.  The unique strength of his self-loathing is that, in his delivery, C.K. sounds like any unquestionably average masculine man.  The gruffness, the register of his voice, his posture, diction, and dress all suggest that as an American male he is typical.  But within the Trojan horse of normativity, bursts forth a troop of more realistic, but rarely discussed failures and sick expectations of masculinity.

Louis will lift his shirt and expose his lily white belly to the crowd, or build an entire episode of his TV show around his stupefying depression — the loneliest orgy between a man and multiple pints of Häagen-Dazs that you’ll ever see.  Our everyday dude emasculates himself through confession and this is not, as we’ve been taught, a bad thing.  Through his intensely detailed self-deprecation, C.K. creates a safety net for his audience.  Targeting himself with the heft of his ire, the viewer feels safe to laugh. Rather than appearing too academic or authoritarian in his beliefs about institutions and hegemonic power, he disarmingly deconstructs our privileged models of masculinity by sloughing them off of himself through his performances.

He says, “look at this shitty body, this shitty brain that reduces women to pussy.  Look at me, this fuck-up, this racist, this homophobe, this fat American failure.”  And he lets us look really closely.  Getting naked before us as Louis C.K. the super specific individual person, but narrated by the voice of Louis C.K. Every(dumfuck)man, he builds a powerfully uncomfortable and thus hilarious tension, one capable of complicating our notions of gender and shaking us a little freer from our socially constructed roles.

Our Everyman sounds powerful, stands-up before us like a God, but he worries about his figure like me and every woman I know, his children hurt his feelings, he wants to know how to make friends.  On Louie, he kisses women (when he gets the chance) with an ardor and desire for connection so unbelievably and pathetically palpable you just want to slap the guy — for we all know there is no joy in Louieland, but the poor sap just keeps hoping/trying.

So, yes, in all of this he is un-manned; he emerges ugly, flaccid, fat, emotional, soft, and this is human, this is real — more real than the gendered lies we cling to out of cowardice — this is Louis, my funny Valentine.

—

Ana Holguin writes PopHeart for The Idler.

February of 1998 I celebrated Valentine’s Day with my high school boyfriend with the most clichéd date in the history of clichés.  We had a romantic (read: Italian) dinner at a local eatery, I was presented with flowers and a heart shaped box full of candy, and we went to the movies to see THE MOST craptastically romantic movie that ever wooed an entire generation of adolescent girls: TITANIC

OH YEAH.

Cheesiest Valentines Day EVER. For me, anyway.  I was too young to get a marriage proposal from my true love on top of the Empire State Building after finding a ring in my champagne glass while a brass band played “All You Need is Love” with fireworks going off in the background and a fuck ton of white doves flying over our heads after an dinner where we shared a comically long spaghetti noodle while two Italian characitures serenaded us, so I settled for watching Titanic.  (This is what everyone was striving for in 1998, right?  I have no idea)

Anyway, this year I plan to top it.  Husband is in Moscow on this heartiest of days for a conference (it’s when the best miserable Russian weather is in season, really) and I’ll be home alone.

But, wait, I hear nobody say, how will you make Valentine’s Day cheesy with all sorts of love sans husband??

WITH EFFIN’ NACHOS, man!

A couple of dear friends and I are actively taking part in making Valentine’s Day cheesy  via a homemade cheese sauce and watching anything and everything romantically ridiculous on Netflix and YouTube.  I’ll miss Husband, of course, but in his absence I really can’t think of anything more cheesy and beautiful than nachos and THUMBTANIC.*

Happy Valentines Day, everyone!  I hope all your thumbs go on!

*Disclaimer: I did not discover “Thumbtanic” by myself.  I happen to be friends with some awesomely wacky people.

—

Lindsey Malta writes “Thoughtcicles” for The Idler.

1. Keep Yourself Cold and Thin 

Fat and lazy

I happened upon this tip stating that I should turn down the thermostat and keep myself cold to shiver more often and burn calories. You know what I hate being? COLD. You know what helps keep me warm and happy? The layer of blubber I have so lovingly installed in my body via the consumption of insanely delicious servings of popcorn and bacon and pie (though not all at the same time… why have I not experimented with this?!?)  Why would I want to get rid of it? 

Maybe for some people being cold makes them want to move about and stay active to keep warm, but not me.  Being cold just makes me want to get under all my warmest quilts and stay there until my chilly little nose stops running (which is one of the many reasons I will never be a mountain climber. I’d totally die up there snuggled in a crevice for a hypothermia nap). Of course, once I’m warm under my blankies I absolutely want to remain that way and will still not move.  So you know what?  No moving ever.  Room temperature could not help me lose weight, it could only exacerbate my idle tendencies.

Yes, yes, I know SCIENCE says, and technically YES, shivering burns calories but, seriously? Is my thermostat setting really what’s keeping me from fitting into my skinny jeans? Come on. ALSO, I can be in a cold room and feel uncomfortably cold long before I start shivering (thanks, bacon!), so. . . how cold are we talking here? Mountain top cold? Thanks, but eff that noise. 

2. Natural Snooki 

Snookie in the raw

Snooki looks unrecognizable without makeup on!!

Seriously?  Some poor soul had to write this up as “news”? Consult the picture she posted on her Twitter account along with the tweet: “No make up day :) and IDC.” First of all, she is SO wearing eyeliner, which means at the LEAST she’s also got foundation on, so she can just take that “IDC” (I don’t care) shit and shove it, because she SO does.  How much time did she spend applying enough makeup to make it look like she’s not wearing any?

“Am I still pretty?  Do you all still know who I am?” This picture begs of its intended audience.   
NO WE DON’T, AND WE DIDN’T MISS YOU.  Why?  Because you’re not ridiculous anymore, you’re just normal.  Normal and boring, just like us.  Which is clearly a crisis because, as Tracy Jordan says on 30 Rock, “I can’t be normal. If I’m normal, I’m boring. If I’m boring, I’m not a movie star. If I’m not a movie star, I’m poor! And poor people can’t afford to pay back the $75,000 in cash they owe Quincy Jones!”

3. Fur and Feathered Vaginas

I'd like the Don King, please

Decorate your vagina with fur and feathers! 

WHO is doing this?

WHO is liking this?

When someone goes home with a woman and gets into her pants WHO is looking for pink fur?  Feathers?  What the hell!?  Doesn’t that get. . . MESSY?  DISGUSTING?  Isn’t that kind of discovery a deal breaker? It’s glued on. Don’t wonder what kind of glue they use, just know that it’s special.  Special glue for your special area.  My brain hurts.

I’m so glad an adorable fox was slain so women with too much money can get expensive procedures done to remove their pubic hair and replace it with animal fur that will remain adhered for all of four days.  That makes a whole lot of fucking sense.  Oh, wait, especially with the pun intended, NO IT DOESN’T.

And as long as we’re on the topic. . .

4. Asian Women have Sideways Vaginas 

Alright. . . I didn’t SEE this on the Internet.  This was mentioned in conversation and I’d never heard such a ridiculous myth before, so I started searching. I refused to believe that people could really be puzzled over something this insane. 

Seriously. WHAT. THE SHIT. IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? 

I guess it’s my fault for looking.

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Lindsey Malta writes “Thoughtcicles” for The Idler.