AT LARGE Fake News Tuesday: Bullock Scandal May Damage Image Of Tattooed Skanks

HOLLYWOOD (CAP) - News that Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock's husband Jesse James cheated on her with tattoo model and amateur porn star Michelle "Bombshell" McGee threatens to damage the reputation of trashy tattooed women everywhere, according to some prominent skanks.

"It's bullcrap! Now everywhere I go, people look at me like I'm some kind of nasty pig," said Tawny Chmielewski, 32, an exotic dancer from Bayone, N.J., who has tattoos of snakes, skulls and bleeding hearts covering both arms and legs and flames shooting up the side of her neck. "Even more than usual, I mean."

Chmielewski's concerns are well grounded, according to a new study out of the Pew Research Center.

"The approval rating for trashy skanks has dropped six points in the past week," noted Dr. Francis Spitznagel, who conducted a flash poll on the subject at the Pew Center. "It went from 8 percent all the way down to 2."

But Chmielewski and others like her say that just because McGee carried on an affair with the husband of America's sweetheart and took $30,000 from In Touch Weekly to dish about it doesn't mean that all women with full-body tattoos and breast implants are similarly skanky.

"I know I don't shack up with just anybody," said Chmielewski. "He has to be hot and well-endowed, and have some bitchin' tats." Asked if she would sleep with a married man, she replied, "No effin way! Well ... it kind of depends on his tats."

Fred Shambertz, editor of In Touch Weekly, also defended McGee, noting that James had indicated to the tattoo model the he and Bullock were separated. "Michelle is the victim in all this," said Shambertz. "The skanky, fake-breasted tattooed victim who got paid $30,000 to talk about her sex life."

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

Get back to me when they invent injectable chocolate

You may recall how a few years back, some people were all in a tizzy about the introduction into Massachusetts of Alcohol Without Liquor (AWOL) machines, which were devices that turn alcohol into a mist so you can inhale it. I guess it turns out they didn't have much to worry about, since AWOL bars, featuring roomfuls of hipster drinkers with airplane oxygen masks strapped over their mouths, didn't exactly take the country by storm. Apparently, people felt like it wasn't liquor if you didn't feel logy and bloated afterwards.

Well, I think some folks from Harvard have figured out how to make the whole breathable products business work: They've invented "Le Whif," which allows you to breathe such addictive pleasures as chocolate and coffee. Which, let's face it, is what we'd all have been doing with chocolate and coffee for years if it weren't for the risk of choking and drowning.

According to a press release, Le Whif – made in collaboration with ArtScience Labs – uses particle engineering to form chocolate and coffee in microscopic sizes that are small enough to become airborne, though too large to enter the lungs.

Supposedly it will quench your desires without the calories, says inventor and Harvard professor David Edwards, who noted, “This has Cambridge written all over it." Presumably alluding to the fact that if you're spotted in places like Lawrence or Brockton, Mass. inhaling your coffee through a lipstick tube, a beat-down will ensue.

COLUMN: A blanket statement on marriage

It’s common knowledge that marriage is hard work. Although not my marriage, which involves round-the-clock bliss and paradise with my lovely wife, who reads this column.

But most marriages are tough, mainly because of all the things they don’t tell you before you tie the knot. Things like the fact that your spouse may be a slob, or be more interested in the football playoffs than taking care of the kids, or lack even the most basic vestiges of common sense. OK, it’s mostly the women who don’t get told things.

And apparently there’s at least one other thing nobody warns spouses about: smells. You would think that by the time you marry somebody you’d have figured out what the person smells like, but this fails to take into account that when you first date someone, you’re on your best behavior, smell-wise. Besides, smells might be one of those things that change as you get older, like hair sprouting from places you’d previously have expected only in a David Cronenberg movie. (You know who you are.)

Which brings me to Francis Bibbo, a science teacher and inventor of the “Better Marriage Blanket.” According to a press release from Bibbo, the blanket provides ammunition against “romanticus interruptus,” which I suppose would be anything that might ruin a romantic moment between husband and wife. The best way to ensure this doesn’t happen would be to take the blanket, wrap the husband in it, and throw him in the river.

But that’s probably going too far. Turns out Bibbo is speaking specifically of protecting spouses from untoward emissions that might make things unpleasant in the boudoir. He based his blanket on military chemical suits, going on the theory that members of the military very rarely complain about how each other smell when they’re under nuclear, biological or chemical attack.

But let’s face it, the Better Marriage Blanket is a daring thing for somebody to invent, because it’s hard not to assume that Bibbo’s own marriage is a regular smell factory. One pictures Mrs. Bibbo making tearful, frantic calls to her mother, a clothespin affixed tightly to her nose, as Mr. Bibbo wanders through the house emitting wavy lines that are actually visible to infrared cameras.

But it turns out that Bibbo got the idea not from his own marriage but from his trips deer hunting, when he apparently wore a military chemical suit to keep the deer from smelling him. I imagine he cut quite a profile standing there in the woods with his bow and arrow, wearing a full-body activated carbon fabric suit designed to trap in all his smells. You could spot him by looking for the deer, squirrels and other hunters backing away verrrry slooowly.

So Bibbo eventually got the idea to turn the suit into a blanket, to be used in places where people are likely to emit odors they’d rather other people didn’t smell, like TV rooms, hospitals, planes, cruise ships, dorms and senior citizen homes, where they should probably affix them to every bare surface, like smell-absorbing wallpaper. He even foresees its use in the space shuttle, where astronauts can finally stop blaming the solid rocket boosters.

But it’s primarily for couples who want to keep their smells to themselves. “If you are going to need a blanket to stay warm, you may as well have one that absorbs odors,” Bibbo points out. No word on whether the blanket will also muffle the potential noise pollution that could accompany smells and thus spoil a romantic moment, or whether you have to deal with that the old-fashioned way, by playing “Freebird” at a high volume.

No matter what, though, I’m sure Mr. Bibbo is right that his invention will improve marriages. In fact, I recommend that every husband run right out and buy the anti-smell blanket for his wife, and present it to her on their next anniversary. And let’s hope that activated carbon fabric floats long enough for the Coast Guard to pluck him out of the river.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

AT LARGE Fake News Tuesday: Lady Gaga Video Leads Everybody To Apologize To Madonna

LOS ANGELES (CAP) - The new music video for the song Telephone, featuring Lady Gaga and Beyonce as scantily dressed, highly sexualized lesbian mass murderers, has watchdog groups and religious organizations apologizing for their criticisms of Madonna during the 1980s and '90s.

"I sort of can't believe now that I got all over Madonna's case for Dress You Up (in 1985)," said Tipper Gore, co-founder of the Parents Music Resource Center, after watching the Telephone video in slack-jawed amazement. "Say what you want about Madonna, she never crawled up the bars of a prison cell to show off her barely pixilated lady parts."

"And believe me, we watched all Madonna's videos very closely," added husband Al Gore, who said Madonna's output seemed "very quaint" compared to Telephone, which he said might even be contributing to the global luke warming epidemic. "The way this 'Ga-Ga' person and Beyonce ate that sticky bun made me feel, frankly, dirty."

The video also shows Gaga kissing a fellow inmate in the women's prison yard, gyrating down jailhouse corridors with other prisoners in bras and thong underwear, and poisoning an entire diner full of people for no apparent reason.

"And don't forget the parts where her lithe, pale body is covered by nothing but a few strands of police tape," noted Al Gore, causing Tipper to glare at him icily.

Even the Vatican, which slammed Madonna's 1989 Like A Prayer video and banned her from Vatican City after she released Erotica in 1992, is backtracking.

"Madonna is welcome back here any time," insisted Pope Benedict XVI, who watched the Telephone video on Saturday and immediately issued an order to have Lady Gaga burned at the stake, before aides reminded him the church doesn't do that any more.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

COLUMN: Welcome to your new credit card bill

Welcome to your new, improved credit card bill. As you may have heard, recently passed regulations dictate that we change certain business practices. But even though our previous methods may have been designed to wring every possible cent out of our card members, we want to make sure you know that our top priority has always been you, the interest-paying customer.

With that in mind, following is a governmentally required summary of some of the changes you’d notice if it were possible for a regular human to decipher a credit card agreement:

1) From now on, rate increases will apply only to new charges. It used to be when we decided to raise our interest rates for some arbitrary reason — you sent your payment 10 minutes late, we didn’t like those unicorns on your checks, we got bored, etc. — those new rates would apply to the balances you’d been accruing since before those online gambling sites you love so much even existed. Now they will apply only to charges accrued after the increase, which, fortunately for us, will still be tremendous.

2) We can no longer raise rates in the first year of a new account. This means at 12:01 on the first day of your second year, expect your rate to pop like the cork out of a champagne bottle. (We drink a lot of champagne here.)

3) Annual fees can now be no more than 25 percent of your total credit line. In a related development, congratulations! We’ve raised your credit line by 150 percent. Information about fees relative to that increase will come in a separate letter that we’re hoping you throw away without actually opening.

4) The payment due date will now be the same each month, so you’ll know exactly when your payment is late, as opposed to before when you just had a general, nagging feeling of lateness that you would try to put out of your mind. The amount by which we raise your rate when you’re late will still be chosen completely at random, though.

5) People under 21 will now need their parents’ permission before they can get a credit card. We highly recommend parents do give permission, however, so that their teens will have a credit card in case of emergency, such as a big sale at Abercrombie & Fitch. Ha ha! Just a little credit card humor there. We know there’s never a big sale at Abercrombie & Fitch.

(Please note: This company in no way endorses teens sneaking their mother’s credit card from her purse and using that card to make extensive, debt-inducing online or in-store purchases. Although that is something a teen reading this could, technically, do, and it could be weeks or even months before anybody caught on. We’re just saying.)

6) We are now required by law to tell you that if you pay only the minimum balance each month, no matter how much you owe, you will be paying us back for the rest of your life. Then, after you’re gone, we will transfer that debt to your next of kin, and so on, until our dying sun expands to hundreds of times its normal size, engulfing all the planets that surround it. Whereas if you pay an extra $2.75 each month, your balance will be paid off in about a year and a half. We were sort of counting on nobody ever figuring that out.

In conclusion, we want to assure you that, despite what you may have heard about us spending the last six months looking for loopholes, we’re here to provide the best service possible to our customers. We want to make sure that you use your credit cards in the manner they were intended: as a convenient method for making reasonable purchases, not as a vehicle to live beyond your means and accrue possibly debilitating personal debt.

Also, they made us say that.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

AT LARGE Fake News Monday: Woman Conan Followed On Twitter Offered Sitcom

HOLLYWOOD (CAP) - Sarah Killen, the woman Conan O'Brien chose at random to follow on Twitter last week, will write and produce an NBC sitcom based on her Twitter feed starting this fall.

The show, tentatively titled Lovely Button after Killen's Twitter username (@LovelyButton), will feature Danica McKellar, best known as Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years, as a woman who tweets about peanut butter and planning her wedding.

"We think Sarah's 33 tweets will make a fascinating basis for a sitcom," said NBC CEO Jeff Zucker. "She's clearly got what 18- to 49-year-old men are looking for, whatever that is."

The sitcom was originally planned to revolve around the changes in the main character's life after Conan O'Brien follows her on Twitter, but NBC had to scrap that angle after being threatened by O'Brien's attorneys.

"Apparently there's still some resentment there," admitted Zucker, who removed O'Brien from The Tonight Show after seven months to replace him with former host Jay Leno. "We sent (NBC executive) Dick Ebersol to his house to try to talk to him, but Max Weinberg came out and hit him with a timpani."

Some analysts say NBC is scrambling to compete with rival CBS, which recently announced a sitcom starring William Shatner based on the Twitter feed S--t My Dad Says, tentatively titled Oh, The Things My Dad Says!

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

COLUMN: The comic books that came in from the cold

My family and I went to an actual, real-life bookstore the other night. I like to do this every so often to support the publishing industry, given that the vast majority of my books are purchased used on eBay. You’d be amazed at how little you can pay for a book if you’re not one of those people distracted by unidentifiable stains.

Anyway, during this visit I was surprised to find an entire wall devoted to nothing but comic books. They called them “graphic novels,” but I know a comic book when I see one — I can tell by the little boxes, and the drawings of people with bodies attainable only through the unlicensed use of gamma rays.

I can’t say exactly how I feel about comic books being given such prominence in legitimate bookstores, though. I know when I was a kid, finding your favorite comics was a challenge. They were such an afterthought that most drugstores were more likely to have those magazines on the top shelf wrapped in brown paper than they were to have comic books. (I never found out what was in those magazines, but I suspect it was articles about adult topics, like escrow.)

As I recall, it took me years to find a regular supplier: I finally discovered that Kurtz’s Stationery in my little hometown of Carmel, N.Y. had one whole shelf devoted to comics, nestled in the back of the store among the tobacco products. I use the term “back” loosely, since a grown adult could walk the entire length of the store in about four strides; if you were 10 and sprinting breathlessly toward the comics, it probably took about six.

The width of the single aisle would have been a tight squeeze for most modern air travelers — there was barely enough room to fit a single customer and the ever-present owner (Mr. Kurtz, I presume), an ancient man in giant horn-rimmed glasses and flannel hunting shirt, perched on a stool behind the penny candy bin. The store’s been closed for years, but somehow I picture him still there, silently waiting for someone to just try to pocket a Tootsie Roll without him noticing.

It was an interesting sensation being in Kurtz’s. What it lacked in space it easily made up for in utility — not an inch of wall space was unused, its shelves stacked to the ceiling with magazines and newspapers of all sizes and stripes. On a particularly dim day, walking in gave you a distinct feeling of having burrowed into a newsstand from the bottom up.

The store was on the route to the deli where my father bought bagels every Sunday, so we worked out a system; he would drop me off on his way, and I’d have approximately 12 minutes to flip through every new title and make my purchase before he pulled up on his way back. That probably sounds like plenty of time, but not when you only have $2 and have to narrow it down to five comics when there are at least 10 you want.

So who got left out? The Fantastic Four? Ghost Rider? Daredevil? Certainly not Spider-Man, and he probably had three or four different titles devoted to him at that point. (I could name them all, but I don’t want the bullies from my elementary school to track me down and give me wedgies. With Facebook I think that’s possible.)

Which brings me to my concerns over my bookstore visit. Back then, I think part of the joy of reading comics was that the effort you put into finding them made you feel like you were part of an exclusive club. A club full of slightly chubby, nearsighted boys obsessed about whether it would be cooler to have super strength or be able to walk through walls, but a club nonetheless.

Finding them in a major bookstore, so easily accessible, seems to take some of the fun out of it. Sure, I enjoyed reading them for their entertainment and educational value — for instance, from “Savage Sword of Conan” I learned that there was a period in our history where women wore nothing but metal bikinis — but I think my fondest memories are of tracking the comics down, whether lucked upon at random or during my regular Sunday run. I even thought about buying a few the other night, just for old time’s sake.

Not in the bookstore, of course. I’m sure I could find them much cheaper on eBay.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

AT LARGE Fake News Tuesday: Governments Say World Definitely Not Ending, Nuh-uh

WASHINGTON (CAP) - The U.S. government has joined with other nations from around the globe to state that the world is not coming to an end, despite the unprecedented weather and earthquake incidents of recent months.

"The idea that the world is ending is, frankly, uh ... ludicrous," said President Barack Obama, speaking from Air Force One, surrounded by his family and closest advisors. "Everything is going along, uh, just the way it usually does."

Obama's staff was on the presidential plane for a "change of pace," said the president, and definitely not because they were heading to a secret rendezvous area to board a fleet of high-tech "arks."

"No matter what you read on TMZ," he added.

Governments of other nations corroborated Obama's assertions. In England, Ben Bradshaw, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, addressed reporters to confirm that people had nothing to worry about.

"Pish-posh, everything's fine," said Bradshaw, speaking from the office of Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing St. in London. "World coming to an end - nonsense." He then poured himself a glass of water, spilling most of it onto the prime minister's desk as his hands shook uncontrollably.

Asked where the prime minister was, and the royal family, and the 20-plus other secretaries and ministers in Brown's cabinet, Bradshaw responded, "What's that? Oh, out for a stroll, I suppose. Not headed to a secret rendezvous area, I can tell you that."

He then closed his eyes for about 30 seconds and muttered, "Blasted short straw," before laying his head down on the prime minister's soggy desk.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

The return of my big pen

Every so often I like to check in with my friends at yournovel.com, to see what new offerings they have in terms of personalized romance and detective novels. As you may recall, back in 2008 they put me and my wife Theresa in one, and I haven't been able to stop referring to my "baton" and my "big pen" ever since. Referring of course to ... a baton and a big pen. What? Oh, get your mind out of the gutter.

Anyway, they've got their usual interesting options in their ever-expanding repertoire, including:

• Vampire Rhapsody: "Humans unexpectedly encounter vampires." Isn't that always just how it happens?
• Paris Short Stories: "Ooh La La - 2 Short Stories set in Paris." And if there's not at least one reference to the main character's "Eiffel Tower," you can ask for your money back.
• Sandhills Fore-Play: "A golf-fantasy book." Why should Tiger have all the fun? Although if you're a true golfer, your fantasy will probably involve shooting six under par.

There's also a sequel to the detective novel I appeared in last time, and they were nice enough to send me my own personalized version. This one is called A Reunion to Die For, in which my wife (and fellow private detective) and I get snowed in at a hotel holding a class reunion, and there are crimes committed, and there are lots of scenes in hotel rooms with talk of stick shifts and tent pitching. In fact, bad double entendres must be the first thing they teach you in detective school.

I won't go into detail (a good detective doesn't kiss and tell, or any of the other things they describe me doing in this book and tell), but I will admit it's a kick. And in a detective novel, unlike in real life, like Frank Drebin I can shoot people without getting arrested.

COLUMN: Google is making us even more stupider

My son, who’s 8, recently asked me, “Dad, how does Google know everything?” I took this to mean that I’ve been entirely too transparent about the source of my vast fatherly knowledge.

At first I thought about responding the same way I do when my kids ask me where babies come from (“Do I look like a doctor?”), but instead I decided to try to explain about how Google’s advanced system of algorithms crawls a vast worldwide network of computer databases. Not that I knew that — I had to Google it.

The fact of that matter is, to the benefit of any parent ever asked by a child why the sky was blue (“Do I look like a meteorologist?”), we now live in an age where no question need remain unanswered. Remember back before the Internet, when you walked around for days trying to remember who sang that song about Oz never giving nothing to the Tin Man? How did we survive those dark times?

So you can imagine my surprise when I read recently that there are those who insist that Google, despite being an unfettered source for infinite information, is actually making us all stupid. This would explain A LOT.

According to analyst Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic Monthly, using Google-found tidbits to skim the Web is keeping us from the type of “focused reading” that sets off “intellectual vibrations,” essentially making us stupider. Of course, his theory seems predicated on a dubious premise, namely that before Google, we all used to read the Atlantic Monthly from cover to cover in order to cleanse our palates between massive Proust marathons.

Of course, if you think back to pre-Web days, you’ll recall that what we were actually doing was watching “Married With Children.” Then, when the Internet came around, we took to the “Married With Children” message boards so we could call each other wankers.

But not everyone agrees with Mr. Carr. Jamais Cascio, also writing for Atlantic Monthly, said the Google method really helps us hone our ability to find “meaning in confusion.” For instance, if you Google “Lady Gaga,” you’ll get 75 million results; rather than become paralyzed by this overload of information, you will likely learn to focus your search to, say, “pictures of Lady Gaga wearing doilies.”

By contrast, if this were 1984 and you wanted to hone in on Madonna, you’d have to sit on the edge of your bed staring at the cover of “Like a Virgin” for hours on end. Er, not me. Other people.

The controversy is part of a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which surveyed hundreds of “technology stakeholders,” according to PC World. (I can only presume these are the people with bigger, more expensive TVs than I have, which is everybody.) The stakeholders said that Google is probably not making us stupid, although I think we should take into account the possibility that it already has, and that when they’re not taking surveys, the stakeholders mostly just sit around going “Pew … Heh, that’s a funny word.”

Not that they don’t have concerns. As stakeholder and University of Pennsylvania Prof. Oscar Gandy told PC World, “the kind of Googled future that I am concerned about is the one in which my every desire is anticipated, and my every fear avoided by my guardian Google.” Which I agree would be terrible, in the same way that having a robot butler would be terrible — you know, that awesome kind of way.

Carr, for his part, is sticking to his guns. “The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking,” he insists in the PC World article, and I’m assuming in his original Atlantic story as well. Although I can’t be positive, because I didn’t actually read it — I Googled it, but, well, I never clicked any of the links. I can point you to several hundred thousand fascinating pictures of Lady Gaga, though.

Gaga … Heh, that’s a funny word.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

By 2014 I should be ready for the Winter Olympics

Got the winter blahs? I highly recommend going down a mountain at a high rate of speed on your rear end. It's like skiing for people without balance or coordination. We know who we are.



Yes, those are my feet.

AT LARGE Fake News Monday: Palin Slams Down Syndrome Portrayal In 'Life Goes On'

NEW YORK (CAP) - Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is blasting the 1989-1993 ABC series Life Goes On, featuring a character, "Corky," with Down syndrome, calling its creators "heartless jerks."

"The world is full of cruel, cold-hearted people who would do such a thing," Palin said in an appearance on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor. "To show a likeable, well-adjusted character with Down syndrome on TV ... That's just wrong."

She also said she took the show as a personal affront to her and her family when she saw a rerun recently on ABC Family.

"The America I know and love is not one in which my family would have to see a show like that, which was clearly meant at a swipe at my retarded baby, Trig," she said. "Um ... and when I say retarded, like Rush Limbaugh I mean that in a satiric kinda way."

When O'Reilly asked her how she would define the term "satiric," she paused for about 30 seconds and then said, "All of 'em."

Palin's complaint comes after she and her family made an uproar over the Fox TV series Family Guy, which featured a similarly well-adjusted character with Down syndrome, voiced by an actress with the condition.

"Dude, I can't believe that's the one they decided to get worked up about," said Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who noted that in one episode during the campaign, Palin and her entire family were portrayed as "back-woods troglodytic mouth-breathers."

"One episode of 60 Minutes, I mean," he clarified, cracking himself up and high-fiving the members of his writing staff, who were gathered to work on an upcoming episode entitled Stewie Says Something Inappropriate.

"And you didn't hear Democrats complaining when we did that episode where Glen Quagmire accidentally has sex with Bill Clinton," MacFarlane noted.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

'Oh my! What seems to have happened to my bikini top?'

That's what I love about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition -- the poses are so natural.

COLUMN: Be prepared to panic, weather or not

Some years back I spent an entire Saturday running around my in-laws’ backyard chasing chickens, and not for any of the usual reasons. The forecast was for a foot of snow, and we, being humanitarians, didn’t want to spend the next day running over frozen chickens with the snowblower. Take that, Frank Perdue!

So you can imagine how I felt when we woke up to find just a razor-thin sheen of sleet on the ground. The forecast was a complete bust, even though the meteorologists had looked so sure of themselves when gesticulating wildly in front of their green screens. I guess it’s important to remember that these are very sophisticated and unpredictable weather patterns they’re interpreting, and also, their forecasts are mostly made up, like horoscopes and cattle futures.

I didn’t have any poultry to deal with last week, but I still looked fairly silly wearing my boots to work, my fists clenched tight around the barrel of my handy travel shovel, only to find a parking lot covered with a four to six inches of nothing. This, after hundreds of schools had canceled classes — you probably saw all the children out on their front lawns, throwing airballs at each other.

But even though last week’s storm didn’t materialize, it did get me thinking: Would I have been truly prepared if it had? Lord knows that as far as weather goes, Massachusetts residents seem to have convinced themselves that they’re actually in Florida and have to be concerned, at most, with a possible gecko pileup. If we don’t react to snowflakes like John Cusack reacted to Los Angeles disintegrating in “2012,” we’re not doing our jobs.

With that in mind, I’ve prepared the following “New England Storm Panic Checklist” to make sure you’re ready for the next (possibly real) storm with just the right level of abject alarm. I recommend you tick off these items the next time New England is expected to experience an onslaught of weather unlike any it’s ever seen before, except for all those other times:

1) Do you have enough milk and bread? If you don’t, it’s too late, the stores are sold out — all that’s left in the supermarket are a few bruised kiwis strewn around the prone forms of trampled stockboys. Time to resign yourself to the fact that you are going to starve to death, unless you’re lucky and happen to freeze first.

2) Is your snowblower in good, working order? It is? Well, why don’t you just move to Wisconsin, winter boy? We don’t need your kind around here.

3) Do you remember how to drive? If you do, there is something wrong with you: It’s not winter in New England unless you find yourself bereft of anything but the most rudimentary conception of what a car even is, much less how to drive it. But don’t worry, the minute you get behind the wheel your mind will become a complete blank, and you can immediately commence upon swearing and maneuvering other drivers into snow banks.

4) Remember that time a few weeks back, when you said to yourself that you really should get your wiper blades replaced before the next snowstorm? Um … no, me neither.

5) Do you live by the ocean? If so, proceed immediately to the nearest seawall with your rain slicker and handy point-and-shoot camera. Otherwise it will be very difficult for you to be washed out to sea by a wave the size of a Range Rover. (That’s a type of vehicle — see No. 3.)

6) Is your weatherperson gesticulating wildly? Don’t worry, he probably just got a tip on cattle futures.

That should do it, and just in time, too. There’s imaginary snow in the whimsical forecast again this week, so I recommend you begin panicking now, in case it blows out to sea before you get a chance to work up any real, mouth-foaming anxiety. And no need to thank me.

Just send milk and bread. I may need it for the chickens.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

And yet, oddly, people have yet to start taking me seriously

In the toot-my-own-horn department: Last week I received a first-place award for "Serious Columnist" from the New England Newspaper & Press Association. This is of course a great affront to all the actual serious columnists toiling away weekly at their keyboards, veritably awash in seriousness. As for me, I occasionally pen an essay that's vaguely non-humorous, and that's what they chose to honor. I'm not complaining -- I've always said, you give me a plaque, I'll hang it up. I'm not picky.

Anyway, the columns they cited were one about my grandmother, who passed away in 2008, and one on my local hometown newspaper, which passed away in 2009. You can read them here and here.

AT LARGE Fake News Monday: John Mayer Sued For $3.1 Mil By John Mayer's Unit

LOS ANGELES (CAP) - John Mayer's penis, whom the singer compared to Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke and described as "sort of like a white supremacist" in his now-infamous Playboy interview, is suing Mayer for $3.1 million, claiming defamation and emotional distress.

"My client feels he was grossly mischaracterized by Mr. Mayer," said John Mayer's penis's attorney, Alan Schwartzbaum of Greenberg, Glusker and Associates of Los Angeles. "The reality of the situation is that my client doesn't have a racist bone in his, well, you know.

"Given the opportunity, my client says he would be more than happy to associate with women of color, an opportunity denied him by Mr. Mayer," said Schwartzbaum. "He'd particularly like to know if Halle Berry is available."

The suit filed by John Mayer's penis is only the latest blow to the singer, who has come under fire from all fronts in the wake of his "raw" remarks to Playboy. For instance, his comments on former girlfriend Jessica Simpson have drawn criticism from John Mayer's mother, Margaret Mayer.

"I did not raise my son to say things like, I want to quit my life and just (expletive) snort you, or If you charged me $10,000 to (expletive) you, I would start selling all my (expletive) just to keep (expletive) you," said Margaret Mayer, reading from a prepared statement at a press conference in Bridgeport, Conn. "He is in big trouble when he comes home for Purim."

"I also think he was very unfair to his penis," added Margaret Mayer.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

What's scariest is that I think the principal was wearing the same jacket

My father just sent me an electronic photo album of old slides he had scanned into the computer, including this one, from my kindergarten graduation:



It raises all sorts of issues, such as: Why aren't any of the other kids dressed like a cross between a ringmaster and a tiny pimp? Even in 1974, was a burgundy sport coat with white piping and gold buttons and matching plaid pants and bow tie a good look for anybody? Was I secretly an Irish step dancer? Is it just sheer luck that I didn't grow up to be one of these guys? It's all very confusing.

Your offiical At Large snow-mageddon checklist

When Channel 5 here in Boston starts throwing around the phrase "snow-mageddon" on its Facebook page, you know we're in for it. Channel 5 doesn't make up words for just anything.

So with that in mind, please tick down this handy checklist to make sure you're prepared for the coming onslaught of weather unlike any New England has ever seen, except for all those other times:

1) Do you have enough milk and bread? If you don't, it's too late, all the stores are sold out -- all that's left in the supermarket is a few bruised kiwis strewn around the prone forms of trampled stockboys. Time to resign yourself to the fact that you are going to starve to death, unless you're lucky and happen to freeze first.

2) Do you remember how to drive? If you do, there is something wrong with you: It is not a storm in New England unless you find yourself bereft of anything other than the most rudimentary conception of what a car even is, much less how to drive it. But don't worry, the minute you get behind the wheel your mind will become a complete blank, and you can immediately commence upon maneuvering other drivers into snowbanks.

3) Is your snowblower in good, working order? It is? Well, why don't you just move to Wisconsin, winter boy. We don't need your kind around here.

4) Do you live by the shore? If so, proceed immediately to the nearest seawall with your camera. Otherwise it will be very difficult for you to be washed out to sea by a wave the size of a Range Rover. (That's a type of vehicle -- see No. 2.)

5.) Remember that time a few weeks back, when you said to yourself that you really should get your wiper blades replaced before the next snowstorm? Um ... no, me neither.

6.) Before you get washed out to sea, stuck in a snowbank or collapse from milk deprivation, please send your photos and videos to me at pchianca@cnc.com to post here and at at WickedLocal.com. Because if there's anything that's Wicked Local, it's a mid-day mid-week snowstorm -- at least around these parts.

AT LARGE Fake News Tuesday: Stern Gets Ellen, Kara DioGuardi To Kiss At Idol Audition

HOLLYWOOD (CAP) - Howard Stern got off to a good start during his audition to replace Simon Cowell on American Idol, convincing fellow judges Ellen DeGeneres and Kara DioGuardi to make out on camera.

"It was pretty hot," admitted fellow judge Randy Jackson.

The incident occurred during a screen test for the radio shock jock to see how he would interact with the other judges, during which Stern almost immediately began badgering DeGeneres and DioGuardi to make out.

"C'mon, just one kiss. I won't be able to concentrate on the contestants unless we get this out of the way," Stern can be seen saying on the audition tape, which was acquired by TMZ.com. "Make out for 30 seconds and we can all get on with our day."

"OK, now with tongues," he added when they finally acquiesced, prompting a three-minute kissing and fondling session.

"Excuse me, I'm trying to sing Pants on the Ground up here!" exhorted contestant General Larry Platt, who was brought back specifically for Stern's audition. But Platt could not get the judges' or crew's attention over all the hooting as DeGeneres and DioGuardi groped each other.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

COLUMN: Buy an iPad, feed a journalist!

As my regular readers know, I have a long history of trying to get the Apple corporation to send me free electronic equipment in exchange for a mention in this column. I have been wholly unsuccessful at this from the very beginning, when I tried to get them to ship me an Apple II to review for my elementary school newspaper. I suspect Steve Jobs may have something against the mimeograph.

More recently, I’ve tried to get them to send me test models of the various iPods (40 GB, Touch, Shuffle, Nano with Pocketknife, etc.), but they continue to insist on sending them places like PC World and CNET — places that cover, you know, technology, rather than the things I write about, such as when we’re most likely to be overrun by killer zombies. This is of course ironic, since technology reporters will be among the first to go when the zombies finally do attack.

But now Apple has introduced the iPad (motto: Enough With The Feminine Hygiene References Already), its new tablet computer — which, beyond being the latest cool-looking electronic device that I can’t afford, has another, much more important designation: It might just save newspapers. Also, I’m pretty sure that in a pinch you could slice meat on it.

As you may have heard, we in the newspaper business have been looking for ways to turn around our struggling industry. So far we’ve come up with the following ideas:

1) After readers have viewed a certain number of stories on the Internet, charge them … one meeeelllion dollars!

2) Print only pictures of good-looking people. Oh, we’re already doing that? OK, good-looking naked people.

3) Tell people they really should subscribe if they ever want to see Fluffy alive again.

Our main problem, of course, is that people won’t pay to read news on their computer, seeing as how online news is self-generated for free from the dust that gathers in the joint fittings on the Internet tubes. But the iPad isn’t a computer — it’s a slick, slate-like device that does computing, yes, but whose underlying purpose is much more all-encompassing: namely, to make people feel more like Captain Picard. (You know who you are.)

With the iPad, you can take your local newspaper — along with the Web, videos, photos, the latest Lady Gaga single, etc. — into your Starship’s ready room, or anywhere else you want to go. (Well, except the bathtub … boy, did Steve Wozniak find that out the hard way.) And it’s better than a laptop, because you don’t have to unfold it — if we could harness the energy spent every day on folding and unfolding laptops, we could power … well, not an iPad, but probably one of those Itty Bitty Book Lights.

But why, if people won’t pay 75 cents for their newspaper, will they pay $829 plus $30 per month for a loaded iPad? Because it’s got an “i” in front of its name, that’s why! Sure, it sounds silly, but when the thing goes on sale, throngs of people will line up to get it, and CNN will air footage of the skinny, latte-addled hipster who claws his way to the front of the line to buy the first one. (His name is Hugo.)

And then, the part that will warm the hearts of newspaper people the world over: Thousands of consumers will fire it up and immediately use their credit cards to order exclusive iPad subscriptions to the New York Times. And when I say “New York Times” I of course mean, “one of the 50-plus available fart-noise apps.” Sure, that they’ll pay for.

Still, baby steps — we didn’t obliterate the publishing industry overnight, and we don’t expect the iPad to save it for at least three or four more weeks. In the meantime, Apple, I’ll be waiting. You can send me my free iPad in care of this newspaper.

Er, for the time being.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

AT LARGE Fake News Tuesday: Study - Women Blaming Husbands For John Edwards

WASHINGTON (CAP) - Women across America are dealing with their anger at former presidential candidate John Edwards, and showing their solidarity with his embattled wife, Elizabeth, by making their own husbands' lives miserable, according to a new study.

"It's fascinating, actually," said Dr. Francis Spitznagel of the Pew Research Center. "It wasn't their husbands who lied, cheated or fathered a baby out of wedlock, but they're the ones getting berated, denied sex and, in some cases, physically punished."

"My wife yelled Men are pigs! and hit me in the shoulder with The Politician," said Mark Fresnel, 44, of San Antonio, Texas, referring to one of several new books to portray Edwards' dysfunctional behavior. "Stupid John Edwards."

According to Dr. Spitznagel, women who participated in the study seemed to follow a similar thought pattern:

1) John Edwards is a disgusting pig.
2) John Edwards is a man.
3) My husband is a man.
4) My husband must be a disgusting pig.

"Then they hit the husband with one of the books," said Spitznagel.

"How could a man run around with some strange woman and get her pregnant, and make a SEX TAPE, while his wife has CANCER?" asked study participant Sally Johansen, 38, of New Brunswick, N.J., then turning to her cringing husband, Craig, 40, and yelling "ANSWER ME!"

"If I ever meet John Edwards, I'm going to punch him right in the face," murmured Craig Johansen as his wife continued to glare at him icily.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

COLUMN: Jay-OK! Meet the new Leno

Dear NBC: We hope you will seriously consider our offer to help rehabilitate the image of late-night comedy personality Jay Leno. We’ve offered our expert advice to many celebrities, such as Lindsay Lohan, O.J. Simpson and “Screech” from “Saved by the Bell,” and everyone knows how well things turned out for them.

We make this offer because, frankly, Jay is definitely in need of help. Our most recent survey numbers show him to be one of the most hated people in the world, ahead of both Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and just shy of Kathy Griffin from the E! Channel. The same poll shows that the only ones planning to watch him when he returns to 11:30 are nursing home residents who have no jurisdiction over the remote control, and who think he may possibly be Mike Douglas.

In contrast, nine out of 10 respondents gave Conan O’Brien, the man Leno displaced, a 98 percent or higher approval rating, which puts him on par with Jimmy Stewart, Mother Teresa and the Ninja Baby from YouTube. This is despite the fact that only two out of those 10 respondents ever watched his show.

So in order to get back in the good graces of the viewing public, it is our opinion that Jay should immediately undertake the following eight reparative actions:

1) On his first show back at 11:30, he should ask himself, “What the hell were you thinking?” For best results, he should first make sure to first get caught picking up a prostitute, and also, possibly, poisoning the water supply of a local preschool. Both of these would be an improvement on his current image.

2) He should surround himself by people who make him look classy and fair-minded by comparison, like Rod Blagojevich, the cast of “Jersey Shore” and, if available, Dick Cheney. (Note: Always make Cheney leave his rifle outside. Boy, did we learn that the hard way.)

3) Despite the brouhaha, people still have fond memories of Jay’s days as an affable stand-up comic in the 1980s. To evoke that period, he should have a plastic surgeon deflate him back to his 1980s size and shape, possibly by removing all the fluid that has apparently backed up inside his face.

4) Conan’s departure from the airwaves should leave Jay with the freedom to experiment with different types of comedy than what he’s done before. For instance, he should consider trying the kind where people laugh at the end. Just a thought.

5) Jay, an Andover, Mass. native, should drive to Boston in a truck and run for public office against Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, which is apparently enough to make anybody almost breathtakingly popular. But he should definitely not pose nude for Cosmo, at least not until after they drain all those fluids.

6) Jay should expand the scope of his “Jaywalking” segment beyond the obtuse people he usually mocks. For instance, maybe he could start berating 6-year-old girls for not knowing long division, or tripping mentally challenged people. Now, that’s Leno-style comedy!

7) He should introduce more bits based on grisly murders, like his groundbreaking O.J. material back in the ’90s. Remember the Dancing Itos? You don’t? Well, you’ve probably just suppressed them deep into your subconscious as a defense mechanism.

8) Or he may want to do what he probably should have done right off the bat, which is leave gracefully with his hundreds of millions of dollars and 14,000 cars, and let O’Brien have a chance. There are plenty of other platforms Jay could explore without kicking Conan to the curb.

Although if he pursues YouTube, he should proceed with caution. We think that Ninja Baby could kick his butt.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

A female Weird Al? Nobody tells me anything

OK, how did I not know that, right here in my own backyard (if my backyard happened to be in Brockton, which it isn't, thank God), we have a woman who has basically established herself as the female "Weird Al" Yankovic? Which brings to mind a mental image that I'm frankly not prepared to deal with.

But it's true, reports the Brockton Enterprise: Jodie-Amy Rivera is apparently the hottest video parodist since Al first uttered "Eat It":

Rivera’s one-woman show — she directs, shoots, edits and stars in her own works — earns her about 11 million YouTube views per month. She is the site’s No. 1 most-subscribed female since surpassing teen star Miley Cyrus in 2008.

Her music video, “7 Things Guys Don’t Have To Do,” a parody of Cyrus’ “7 Things I Hate About You,” was named one of the top 10 viral videos of 2008 by PC World Magazine.

Did you hear that? She's bigger than Miley. I didn't even think that amount of big was possible.

AT LARGE Fake News Monday: Latest Bin Laden Tape Takes Credit For Jay Leno

WASHINGTON (CAP) - In an audiotape broadcast today on Arab television, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden claimed full responsibility for comedian Jay Leno.

"It is not fair that you should enjoy quality late-night humor while our brothers around the world are experiencing comedy of the most miserable level," Bin Laden said in his message, apparently addressing Americans directly. "Based on this, with the permission of God, we will continue to inflict Jay Leno upon you until the suffering of our people abates."

The announcement is the latest of a rash of bad publicity for the late-night host, who even before the al Qaeda announcement had been named "the most hated man in the world" in recent polls from CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, TV Guide and Octane magazine, an auto publication that runs a column by Leno.

"Used to run," clarified Octane editor Max Cargswell. "We hate him now."

Leno has also been blamed, by various sources, for the swine flu, the Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, and global warming.

"The man owns 14,000 cars. You don't think they're contributing to the hole in the ozone layer?" asked former Vice President al Gore at a New York City fundraiser for the Alliance for Climate Protection. "Ooh, I just hate him."

The crowd at the $500-a-plate dinner then started chanting "CoCo, CoCo, CoCo," in reference to displaced Tonight show host Conan O'Brien, and "burned" a cardboard cutout of Leno by illuminating it with fluorescent light bulbs.

TV psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw, in an interview with Us Weekly, says the dramatic turnaround in public opinion toward Leno may be unprecedented. "He was thought of for years as this nice, funny, middle-of-the-road guy, and suddenly people are equating him to the likes of Hitler, Genghis Khan, Dick Cheney," noted McGraw. "I wonder how that's working out for him."

"It's not so much that people hate him now, it's the unbridled vehemence of the hate I find scary," said McGraw. "Not that it's misplaced - I'd kill him with my bare hands if I got the chance."

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

COLUMN: Have you hugged a detainee today?

As you know, President Obama’s first year in office has been considered a tremendous success, especially for the people who make “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Hillary” bumper stickers. So I’m sure his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center will go perfectly fine, and any detainees who are released will immediately become productive (i.e., not homicidal) members of society.

This is presumably the thinking of some aldermen in Newton, Mass., where they proposed an official resolution to welcome such former detainees with open arms. (The phrase “it’s my privilege to extend to you a laurel and hearty handshake” comes to mind.) Others argue that local aldermen shouldn’t be getting involved in “international issues,” because it’s just a small step from welcoming detainees to bombing North Korea. I’m paraphrasing.

Fortunately, the debate on the proposal has been civil, with most residents attending a public hearing on the matter with either a torch or a pitchfork, but not both. Declared one Newtonian (Newtonite?) of the detainees, “They want to behead and explode our children, grandchildren, friends and parents and us!” That’s right: behead and explode. (Not necessarily in that order.)

Just to revisit a little bit of the history, Guantanamo is a U.S. military prison in Cuba where, since 2002, we’ve been putting suspected terrorists until we could figure out what do to with them. The Justice Department advised the Bush administration that it’s officially outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, meaning we could imprison suspects without the evidence we’d need on American soil, but only, and this is very important, “if they look at us funny.”

But Obama apparently has some kind of a problem with locking up people without any evidence, even if those people aren’t Americans — that’s just the type of Nigerian-born fake president he is. So a lot of people will be released and cleared for entry into the U.S., but would an official resolution to welcome them here be the best approach? Let’s consider the pros:

1. It would show we have no hard feelings after locking them up all those years for no reason.

2. It would add diversity to communities like Newton, which, according to the 2000 census, has almost no terrorists. (Sorry, I meant to say Newton has no “enemy belligerents” … although anyone who was at that public hearing might disagree.)

And now the cons:

1. Maybe these guys weren’t locked up for no reason, and they will set upon planning to annihilate us the minute we present them with their complimentary Prius and the keys to their Newton Highlands condo.

2. See No. 1.

Still, I’m sure these detainees are all perfectly nice people, or at least they were before we locked them up and waterboarded them for seven years. For instance, the particular detainee at the heart of the Newton controversy was alleged to be a member of terrorist group Lashkar al-Tayyibi, but has said he worked in a “legally operated charitable wing” of the organization. See, I bet you didn’t even know terrorist groups had charitable wings. Sort of a “Bombers Without Borders.”

Anyway, I’ll be very curious to see how it all plays out in Newton. I personally can appreciate both sides of the issue, and can only hope that, if nothing else, the situation inspires an NBC sitcom in which a Guantanamo detainee (Wilmer Valderrama) is officially welcomed into a small liberal town, except everywhere he goes (the coffee shop, the DMV, to get his hair cut, etc.), people scream and dive under their desks. Or maybe a Fox sitcom, where he moves into a town where all the women have tremendous bosoms. Either would get better ratings than Jay Leno.

As for the Newton detainee, I wish him the best of luck, and if he winds up moving there I have high hopes for him becoming a vital, contributing member of that community. But if he runs for alderman, I recommend they keep him away from North Korea.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

Right after he said, 'Martha, WTF?????'

Just saw this in a release about from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the outcome of tonight's Senate election in Mass.:

“The President thanked Attorney General Coakley for her hard work and urged her to continue her advocacy on behalf of working people."

Riiiiight. I'm sure that's exactly what he said to her.

AT LARGE Fake News Monday: Re-animated Ted Kennedy Endorses Martha Coakley

BOSTON (CAP) - Republican officials are questioning the validity of the last-minute endorsement of Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley by the re-animated corpse of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

"My friends, I ask you to join in this historic journey - to have the courage to choose change," said Kennedy at a rally at the Park Plaza Hotel, flanked by two large security personnel who seemed to be holding him up. "It is time again for a new generation of leadership. It is time now for ..."

At that point a voice that sounded similar to Kennedy's, but also not unlike that of Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons, shouted out "Martha Coakley!" A survey of video from the event shows that Kennedy's lips failed to move during the entire length of the presentation.

"I don't know, it just seems fishy to me," said RNC Chairman Michael Steele, whose party is banking on a Republican victory to derail President Obama's health care vote. "The way he was propped up, and didn't move his lips, and used the exact same words as his endorsement of Obama ... something's just not adding up.

"Also the rotting flesh," he added.

Still, Kennedy's resurrection and subsequent endorsement of Coakley, the state's attorney general, seems to have gone a long way toward energizing the Democratic base in Massachusetts.

"I think it says something about the importance of this race that Sen. Kennedy was willing to come back from the dead to express his opinion," said Cindy Markenson of Brookline, Mass. Markenson, a lifelong Democrat, said she'd actually been leaning toward Republican candidate Scott Brown because Coakley is "so dull that just looking at her actually makes my molars ache."

But now, the dead Kennedy has convinced her to rethink her position.

"It was very moving, his speech, and the way he would lift his arm to wave in tandem with his security personnel, and how he even took time to go water skiing from the back of his yacht even though it's January," she said. "Kind of unfortunate how he kept bouncing off those buoys, though."

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

COLUMN: You say you want a resolution?

You’ll recall how around this time last year, I resolved that in 2009 I would become “a spectacularly wealthy icon of material success.” As you may have gathered, things didn’t quite work out that way, or else instead of typing this I’d be out stomping on all the little people.

Yes, I was once again frustrated by my own lack of ability to keep a simple New Year’s resolution. This is a common problem, since New Year’s resolutions are actually just little lies we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better about facing the coming year. You know, things like “I’m going to lose weight!” or “I’m going to get organized!” or “People like me!”

So instead of shooting for some pie-in-the-sky goal like good health or better work habits, I decided that this year I’d resolve to be more realistic, and try for the following:

1) Watch more TV. I used to love TV; I loved TV like a seagull loves a half-eaten bag of Cheetos, or like Lady Gaga loves walking around with entire live animals on her head. As a kid, I looked forward with breathless anticipation to the edition of the TV Guide that previewed all the new Saturday morning cartoons; I would sit there for hours with a Magic Marker circling the shows I planned to watch, until it was time for the neighborhood jocks to come to my house and give me noogies.

But sadly, I’ve somehow gotten away from television — for the first time in my life, there’s no show that I watch regularly. This is because my prime-time hours are now spent getting the kids to bed, working on various side projects (such as the comic strip I’m developing about a cat who loves lasagna), and writing my novel, by which I mean, “illegally downloading music.” And also, I’m concerned that TV now stinks like Fred Sanford’s backyard.

Still, I hear shows like “Mad Men,” “True Blood” and “Modern Family” are all worth my time, even if none of them happens to feature a character named Wojciehowicz. (I also have high hopes for this “Jersey Shore” program. It looks classy.) So if you need me, I’ll be on the couch, remote in hand. The kids can get themselves to bed for a change.

2) Eat more. Every year I make the mistake of resolving to eat less — specifically, less cake, less cookies, less pizza with sausage and meatballs, less deep fried seafood, french fries and onion rings washed down by a giant glass of Coke with ice … Mmm, onion rings and Coke … I’m sorry, what were we talking about?

Oh, right, eating less. Whenever I resolve on Jan. 1 that from here on in nothing will cross my lips that isn’t green and leafy, by Jan. 2 my stomach cavity is reverberating like Chuck Barris is down there banging on a little gong. By the 3rd I’m starting to picture skinny people as giant hot dogs and heavy people as hamburgers, like castaways in a Looney Tunes cartoon, and by the end of the week I’ve woken up naked in the bakery aisle at DeMoulas, surrounded by crumpled Ring Ding wrappers and knowing that something’s gone horribly wrong.

So this year I’m going to go the opposite route and pledge to eat just a little bit more of everything, so I don’t wind up eating too much of any one thing. And as for the extra calories, I’m going to make up for them by doing more exercise! By which I mean, “illegally downloading music.”

3) Be less organized. Every year I resolve to eliminate the eight to 12 piles of old memos, outdated printouts and vintage newspapers that have taken up residence on my desk, or at least to give them helpful names to remember them by. (This way when I need something I can say to myself, “Ah, I think I left that one in Fred,” etc.)

Since by the end of the year I invariably have more piles than when I started, I’ve decided this year to abandon any semblance of order and spend the year gradually devolving into chaos. In fact, all this making of deadlines and naming of piles may be exactly what’s holding me back — if I free myself up from the psychic manacles of conventional organization, I may actually have the wherewithal I need to truly excel. Maybe even become a spectacularly wealthy icon of material success.

Also, “People like me!”

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

Is it me, or are the criminals getting better looking?

A sure sign of a suffering economy: more attractive criminals.

Used to be you’d see those faces staring out at you from the signs in the post office and you could see why they’d turned to a life of crime. With their crusty, wizened visages, what else were these people going to go into? You could see them walking into a career councilor and being immediately steered toward larceny.

But lately — as evidenced by the Quincy (Mass.) Patriot Ledger’s excellent “Mass Most Wanted” series — more and more of them are looking young, happy and well-adjusted. Did these people really need to break the law? It looks like they’d do fine as yoga instructors or baristas.

But with those jobs scarce these days, I guess they’re going in to pickpocketing and identity theft, not to mention bank robbing. At least some of them are turning themselves in after turning up in the Patriot Ledger — and after they get out of the can, they can always try modeling.

COLUMN: Not the 2009 I had in mind

As my regular readers know, every January I like to look back on my annual predictions from a year ago to see whether my keen journalistic insight had served me well in that exercise. And yes, I for some reason insist on continuing to use the word “keen,” despite all the evidence to the contrary.

So let’s see what I had predicted about 2009:

1)“The economy will come roaring back as the stimulus plan creates millions of new jobs and Wall Street bankers embrace sensible new practices.” Um … I may have been a year early on that. Other things I said would come roaring back: Saturns, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the band Kiss and rotary phones.

2) “Bizarre outfits, about a dozen different wigs and thumping dance beats will spell success for the one and only Taylor Hicks.” I was close: It turns out that formula was actually the ticket to the top for Lady Gaga, not Hicks, who opted to stick with his tried-and-true “Huey Lewis on Ritalin” image and sold only 37,000 albums. I was closer on my prediction about Kanye West, who I said would attack Taylor Swift with a Super Squirter and be wrestled to the ground by Beyonce and Bruce Hornsby.

3) “Couple of the Year will no doubt be Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin, with proud mom-in-law Sarah embracing Levi as a shining example of someone who lives up to his responsibilities.” Not quite, although Sarah Palin did wind up wanting to embrace Johnston in a windpipe-crushing chokehold. I did predict accurately that her book would be full of incomplete sentences, but that’s sort of a gimme.

4) “Teenagers will use their ubiquitous cell phones to text thoughtful, pithy poems, resulting in the creative resurgence of the haiku.” Replace “poems” with “naked pictures of themselves” and “haiku” with “homemade stag film” and I was dead on.

5) “In a remarkable show of bipartisanship, President Obama’s health-care proposal will sail through Congress without a single Republican accusing him of trying to murder old people.” Don’t know how I didn’t see that one coming.

6) “No dowdy, middle-aged singers with funny hair will score a hit record.” Darn you, Susan Boyle — I thought I was pretty safe with this one, unless Rod Stewart had another comeback. But I was right when I predicted this would be the year of Michael Jackson’s big career resurgence. Well, sort of half-right.

7) “Wholesome family man Tiger Woods will wind up on the cover of ‘Faithful Husband’ magazine.” I was way off here — turns out there is no such magazine. But I do hear Tiger is slated to share the cover of next month’s “Cheating Horndog,” along with David Letterman, John Edwards and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, if anyone can find him.

8) “Health experts will step up efforts to encourage women to get more frequent mammograms, catching and curing thousands of incidents of breast cancer.” OK, so they did exactly the opposite — turns out they’d prefer if women just asked the screeners at the full-body airport scanners if they see anything unusual. In my other health predictions, I was also wrong when I said that most of the human population would be annihilated by swine flu, that a zombie plague would sweep the planet and that the world would end in an orgy of computer-generated special effects and John Cusack.

9) “Jason Bay will ink a deal to play with the Red Sox until the end of time.” In fairness, this one came from my 8-year-old son, whose undying devotion Jason sold out for an extra $6 million and a fifth-year option, plus his eternal soul. I was also wrong when I predicted that Tom and Gisele would have a baby and name it “Eli Manning Brady.”

10) “President Obama will be universally hailed for the stunning success of the stimulus plan, the health-care reform initiative, and the removal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.” Er … I meant to say that he would get a dog.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

AT LARGE Fake New Monday: Nation's Perverts Endorse Full-Body Airport Scanners

RENO, Nev. (CAP) - America's largest organized group of perverts and degenerates has released a statement wholeheartedly supporting plans to install full-body scanning equipment in the nation's airports.

"Any device that can prevent terrorism while at the same time allowing you to see through people's clothes is A-OK in our book," said Nigel Friedrichsen, president of the Reno-based National Association of Perverts (NAP). "That's the definition of win-win. Um ... At least our definition."

The scanners have been highly controversial, with some civil libertarians claiming the devices violate travelers' privacy by performing a "virtual strip search."

"Yes, it's true the scans do expose the full bodies of the travelers who pass through them," noted Friedrichsen. "Screeners would be able to see, say, under the brassieres of women age 16 to 35. Or into their underpants ... their frilly, lacey underpants ... Mm ... I'm sorry, what were we talking about?"

He then noted that the public shouldn't be concerned, since only airport screeners would be privy to the scans. He did acknowledge, though, that "almost 90 percent of our membership has already applied, including myself."

Also coming forward in support of the scanners is the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which is lobbying for the scanning procedure to apply to children as well as adults.

"They younger, the better," said NAMBLA spokesman Bradley "Uncle Brad" White. "You never know what one of those little boys might have hidden in his briefs. No matter how long and hard you may have tried to guess."

[Read the rest at CAP News.]