your peak was a moonwalk that occurred decades ago.
So America faces a choice: We can go the Michael route and keep living on debt and the world’s affection for our early work, or we can get our shit together like Britney Spears, put on our circus costume, and go out there and show the world we can still bring it.
—July 17, 2009
MALLOW DRAMA
New Rule: Someone must x-ray my stomach to see if the Peeps I ate on Easter are still in there, intact and completely undigested. And I’m not talking about this past Easter. I’m talking about the last time I celebrated Easter, in 1962.
M.D. PROMISES
New Rule: Sometimes it’s better to just stay sick. Doctors say they can cure some intestinal diseases by inserting a healthy person’s feces up your butt. Or, as John Travolta calls it, dating. The only thing that’s worse than this procedure is asking someone to donate. How do you bring this up on the golf course? Hey, remember that time I loaned you a hundred bucks?
MEANY BOPPER
New Rule: Fashion models must lose the disinterested sneer. That look doesn’t say “pouty mystique”; it says “I have rectal itch.” I know it sucks to be sixteen and stuck on a runway in Milan in a Versace original, but consider the outfit you could be wearing:
MEH AT WORK
New Rule: When I see one of those road signs for the Recovery Act, I should also see people in hard hats building shit. Dig a hole and fill it up with dead bodies, I don’t care. I’m just getting tired of passing these randomly placed signs while the gaping potholes shake the fillings out of my skull. It’s this kind of crap that makes me want to join the Tea Party. Then I remember I have a high school diploma, a functioning penis, and a black friend.
MEMORY LAME
New Rule: No. The only person who ever missed you is the Iraqi guy who threw the shoe.
MEXICAN’T
New Rule: If Latino immigrants want to be taken seriously, they have to stop wearing the giant hats. The civil rights marchers in the ’50s didn’t dress like Buckwheat and carry watermelons. You’re a proud immigrant demanding his rights, not the Frito Bandito.
MEXICO SHITTY
New Rule: Mexico is closed until further notice. I don’t wanna say that country is too dangerous, but the new warning to travelers is: “Don’t drink the water—use it to clean your stab wounds.” Even Mexicans are frightened of Mexico. At last weekend’s sex show in Tijuana, the girl asked the donkey to just hold her.
MILEY HIGH
New Rule: Miley Cyrus must stop wasting our time and just skip to the part where she gets pregnant, loses the baby weight, finds Jesus, gains it all back, switches to Christian rock, goes into rehab, marries her driver, plays Rizzo in Grease , and takes her shirt off in the reboot of Leprechaun, Leprechaun 2031: The Terror of the Trailer Park.
MOCK BLOCKER
New Rule: You can’t use sarcasm about people who think you’re an idiot if you’re an idiot. Britney Spears went on a sarcastic screed about people who think she needs help. Then her dress fell off, she carved a swastika into her forehead, and ran over her tits with a car. Which raises a question that’s been bothering me for some time: Can you un-masturbate to someone?
MOSH WIT
New Rule: TV networks must combine all of their cooking contests, dieting shows, and talent competitions into one huge reality show that people would truly want to see.
MOURNING WOOD
New Rule: Someone needs to explain to the eighteen-year-old Russian girl who’s dating Ron Wood that he’s not Mick Jagger. It’s an honest mistake, Ekaterina Ivanova, and you’re not the first part-time model from Moscow to make it. If you girls would just buy the CDs instead of downloading them illegally, you’d know what the Rolling Stones looked like.
MOZZARELIC
New Rule: Pizza joints must stop hanging pictures of Z-level celebrities on their walls. It doesn’t
Carol Lea Benjamin
R. K. Narayan
Harold Robbins
Yvonne Collins
Judith Arnold
Jade Archer
Steve Martini
Lee Stephen
Tara Austen Weaver
The Folk of the Faraway Tree