Like most of you, I spent the first 30 minutes of last week's USA-England World Cup match convinced that I was having a stroke. As it turned out, the buzzing I was hearing wasn't the result of my neurons being shut down by a burst blood vessel in my brain, but rather from a traditional South African horn called the vuvuzela. The vuvuzela is the most horrifically annoying torture device ever ...

I know a few things about apologzing. I've been married almost six years, so I've spent pretty much every day between July 25, 2004 and yesterday apologizing for something. I used to think it was my actions that caused my wife such grief, but I've learned in recent years that the main problem she has with me is my continued existence on this plane of reality. We're gonna work though it -- we've ...

During the 'Lost' finale, I tweeted the following: "So the key to the whole thing was putting a cylindrical object into a hole? #enjoyingthesubtext #lost" Okay, so not the funniest update in the world, but pretty good considering I was not only distracted by the finale itself, but I was also karate-fighting a future version of me who had traveled back in time to stop me from watching the ...

Spoiler Alert! The 'Lost' finale engages in mumbo-jumbo. Also: hocus-pocus, rigmarole, chicanery and (perhaps worst of all) gobbledygook. Last Sunday's 'Lost' contained the most shocking revelation in the show's history: that after we die, we meet our loved ones and then walk into a big, bright light. Yes! Shocking! Did you just have your mind blown?! Er... Fact is, Sunday saw the moment ...

The Internet very rarely rallies around a single cause (and even when it does, that cause is usually "famous woman in sex tape that I want to see but not pay for"). The last time that I can remember a time when the Internet was truly unified about something that didn't involve nudity was in October of 2006. That was the month that every single person on planet earth decided that they absolutely ...

This is how accustomed to being lied to the average TV watcher is: There's a genre called "reality" television that in no way reflects any kind of reality that any of us have ever lived. We're at the point where a network could air a solid half-hour of the color red and call it 'The Color Blue Show' and none of us would say a word. I'm not mad that TV lies to us -- real life is ugly! I'm not ...

Recently, fans of NBC's 'Chuck' decided to stage flash mobs as a way to raise awareness about a show that seems to spend 99% of its time on the cusp of cancellation. There are two things wrong with doing this. The first is that the solution to the ratings issues 'Chuck' has is obvious (and one that I've written to NBC about several times). California State Law prohibits me from outlining here ...

Our congress has a cute way of handling problems. Instead of actually doing anything about them, what they do is pass a Something Something Bill of Rights. For instance, when Spirit Airlines recently announced that they were going to charge for the use of overhead storage space on their airplanes (a prelude, of course, to their ultimate plan of stabbing each customer in the throat, then ...

Every culture has a coming-of-age ritual. The boys of the Amazon's Satere Mawe tribe aren't considered men until they've worn a glove filled with stinging ants. Among the American Nouveau-Riche tribe, you can't enter adulthood until a minor rap star comes to your sweet sixteen and performs for you in front of MTV cameras. Among my people, the Irish Americans, you can only achieve the full rights ...

'Treme' premiered this week, but I was traveling and couldn't watch it. My plan had been to use HBO Go, but apparently "high speed internet" in Nacogdoches, TX really is just a system of tubes in the ground. The only site I could reliably connect to was a wholesale belt-buckle emporium. Not seeing the show isn't a worry; 2010 might not have flying cars, but damned if we don't have a plethora of ...