Maybe she was just trying to get noticed

So, who is to blame for the Miley Cyrus/Vanity Fair debacle? Surely not Miley, who was sweet-talked into disrobing by that tricky Annie Leibovitz -- she's lucky she didn't wind up covered in mud or curled up naked next to Yoko Ono.

But not Annie Leibovitz either -- she was just doing her job, namely to take pictures of naked 15-year-olds. And not Vanity Fair, which was just trying to sell magazines, or at least get people to look at pictures on the Internet from magazines that nobody buys. And certainly not Billy Ray Cyrus, who is not known for having the best judgment.

No, I think it was my fault, for seeing her stupid movie. I was just encouraging her.

Where I've been, where I'm going ...

Yes, it seems I've become one of those people -- those people who only blog about how sorry they are that it's been so long since the last time they blogged. I'd come up with some lame excuse, but the fact of the matter is: All 10 of my fingers were broken by mobsters I beat in pool.

But I'm back now, and I promise (no, really) to do my best to provide my take on ... wait, let me check my notes ... "modern life, pop culture and parenting." Not necessarily in that order. So to start off, here are some important links:

• My latest column, on visiting my wife's alma mater, Penn State University, where I was mauled by a Nittany Lion. No, wait, I only wished I was mauled by a Nittany Lion -- actually I just realized I was old.
• My Springsteen blog, to once again prove that I've been doing something all that time I wasn't blogging here.
• Puff-A-Palooza, the Las Vegas event that I unfortunately somehow missed, where "for all 36 hours, guests will be treated to free shots every hour on the hour, live music from special guest headliner bands and DJ's, extreme performance acts of the aerialist variety, hors d'oeuvres and specialty hookahs." Yes, that's right -- hors d'oeuvres!
• The exciting news that "Coconut Milk Gives New Ice Cream Luxuriously Smooth Texture with Fewer Calories." Except that it all tastes like coconut.
• That naked picture of Miley Cyrus.
  

Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam ...

... and admit that it's about time Bob Dylan won a freakin' Pulitzer!

Congratulations, Bob-o. Keep 'em coming.

'College Road Trip' is the worst movie ever made

OK, maybe not the worst movie. But I think any movie featuring Martin Lawrence in full mug-mode, Donny Osmond in any capacity and a pet pig who eats coffee beans and then goes crazy and destroys a wedding reception would have to at least qualify as "bad." (And that pig sequence was not even as funny as I just made it sound, if you can believe it.)

I bring this up because, and I may be sorry I admitted this, I left the theater thinking the movie was actually pretty OK. Raising the question, have my standards really dropped that low? Have I seen so much Disney Channel that my idea of what constitutes a reasonable level of entertainment value has been warped beyond all recognition? Was I just that happy to get the kids out of the house during a nine-hour rainstorm? Well ... Yes, yes and yes.

Also, Donny Osmond was actually pretty funny. Four stars!

There will be geese!

The other day, I received an e-mail with the subject line, “Free video on resolving conflicts with Canada geese.” My initial thought was, of course, what’s the catch? Surely no one is going to just give away an entire video on resolving conflicts with Canada geese.

But as it turns out, it seems the people behind this video — the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — care more about Canada geese welfare than they do about making a buck. I know: What’s wrong with these people?

Read all about it in my column here, or better yet, watch Part I of the video below. And college students: If you want to turn it into a drinking game, you may want to try taking a shot every time someone says "poop."

You want hope? I'll give you some hope!

The New Republic reports that Hillary has adopted Bruce Springsteen's "Land of Hope and Dreams" as her entrance music, which seems odd given her decidedly anti-hope stance in recent weeks. I guess her hope is realistic, policy-driven, ready-on-day-one kind of hope, as opposed to Obama's hope, which is composed primarily of pixie dust and the hazy mist that rises off unicorns after they bathe.

The comments to this piece are particularly enjoyable (from a Springsteen fan's perspective, not a Clinton-backer's). Like this one:

If Clinton's looking for some Springsteen songs to more accurately sum up the way her campaign's gone so far, might I recommend "I'm Going Down," "Wreck On the Highway," "Lost In The Flood," or "If I Should Fall Behind."

I knew it!!

We do have to worry about being subjugated by an unstoppable robot army! It says so in the Metro West Daily News.

Dispatches from a conference in England indicate we should be worrying about killer robots. "They pose a real threat to humanity," University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey told the assembly.

Regular readers know that I've been banging that drum for years, but nobody ever listens. Well, now that I've been proven right, let me be the first to say: I for one welcome our new robot overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted Internet personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground robot parts mines.

My latest attempt to make my dogs famous

What's it like to live with six dogs and three cats for a week? To find out, you can read my column, or if you only have 59 seconds to spare, watch this slideshow. An excerpt:

The first thing I learned when our canine visitors showed up is that dogs are not like human houseguests. For instance, human guests tend to think twice before they lie on your couch with their tongues hanging out and all four appendages splayed up in the air, or eat out of your kitchen garbage, or mark their territory on your living room carpet. I mean guests who aren’t relatives.

We’re lovin’ it, ‘it’ of course being a burrito filled with sausage

If you missed it during breakfast hours this morning, don't worry: You'll have one more chance tomorrow to get your free (FREE!) McSkillet Burrito at McDonald's. Unlike the people over at Starbucks, closing their doors and telling customers to eat cake (or cranberry orange muffin, as the case may be), McDonald's is showing how much they appreciate their customers by contributing to their next heart attack.

McDonald's expects to give out more than 1 million free burritos during the Leap Day promotion; for those of you doing the math at home, at 374 calories per burrito, that's 374 million calories released into the general population over the two-day period. Assuming about a pound gained for every extra 3,500 calories consumed, that's 106,857 pounds of body fat America's fast food eaters will be piling on, and all before the weekend.

Would you like fries with that?

Or for $3.99 you can get a bag of Hershey's Miniatures

No sooner had I published this column on how press releases -- about the barbecue-flavor-infusing "SmokePistol," hand-cranked flashlights and fortified dog water -- were giving me fond thoughts of the summer to come, did I receive yet another one, from "Christopher Norman Chocolates." It was flogging their "fruity, summery, special summer chocolates," for those of us who like to throw caution to the wind and feel fruity and summery at the same time.

Their big fruity summer seller? Check it out:

BLUEBERRY - Blueberry mixed with a dark chocolate ganache, hand rolled into a ball and dusted with a dark purple sugar powder. Very dark, rich and blueberry.

This raises a few questions: 1) What the heck's a ganache? 2) Whose hands? 3) Does that dark purple sugar powder come with razor blades and a mirror? Because at these prices it better.

Catching up on the columns ...

I've been lax about posting my weekly columns of late (along with anything, you know, remotely interesting). That's partially because I've been working on another blog, Blogness on the Edge of Town, and the effort has paid off, garnering tens of regular readers. But there's another reason: sheer laziness.

Anyway, here's where you can find my columns of recent weeks:

• What a drag it is getting old-ish
• My Hannah Montana 3-D diary
• You can’t teach an old dog new songs
• My life is an open book
• You may already be a winner!
• The road to Montana is paved with good intentions

Six times the columns ... six times the fun! Best if read while drunk.

At Large Valentine's Day Poll

(If you answered "Flowers," here's a rundown of how much they're getting for roses this year. Curse you, Hallmark gods!)

You know what would really make these dogs happy? If I left them the &%$#! alone.

For those of you who've been wondering, I don't just listen to Springsteen music. For instance, this week I've been listening to the CD "Songs to Make Dogs Happy." Why? Because that's my job.

OK, not really. But I thought it would be interesting to see if the songs on this CD -- which was sent to me for free by the nice people at the Laurel Canyon Animal Co. -- actually, you know, made dogs happy. And if you watch this video of my experiment, you'll notice that Mr. Springsteen actually plays more than a tangential role:

Red Sox virtual waiting room update

You'll recall that yesterday I was shuffled into the Red Sox virtual waiting room at 10 a.m. and was still dutifully waiting for tickets at noon. Well, they finally let me into the ticket buying area ... at 11:30 p.m. last night. (Butt hurts ... Eyes stinging ... Who am I?)

OK, so I wasn't in front of the terminal the whole time. But 13 1/2 hours to get a couple of tickets to a ballgame seems like a bit much. I wound up with two sets of two grandstand seats each, in adjoining sections, on a school night. I could have gotten four tickets together if I went with standing room only, but I'd sooner take my kids to a general admission Who concert.

Meanwhile, I think that commenter Brian has the right idea.

In the Red Sox virtual waiting room ...

I'm in here right now for the first time, and I have to say it's pretty nice, although I thought they would have a better selection of magazines.

Like most ticket seekers, they planted me here in the virtual waiting room right before 10 a.m. when the single-game seats went on sale, and I'm left staring at the 30-second clicker tick down and then start up again, over and over and over ... Somewhere, John Henry is smoking big cigars and laughing his head off.

Meanwhile, I'm afraid to leave my terminal -- I feel like one of those day traders in the '90s you'd hear about, who'd get up to go the bathroom and lose half a million dollars. Which reminds me ... I shouldn't have had that large orange juice with breakfast.

If your dogs turn white, stay in ... uh ... site

First it's freezing cold, then people are sunbathing. And today, they're cleaning the snow off their dogs. Or at least I was. Welcome to New England!

Thought of the day

If you see Dr. Phil coming ... run!

This week's column: Color me unpredictable in 2008

As you might recall, this is the time when I like to look back to my predictions for the year just passed, and see if my prognosticative abilities had exceeded those of, say, a chimpanzee stringing random words together. (And before you judge me, please remember that this was the year Japanese researchers found out that chimps are wicked smart.)

So let’s see what I had to say about 2007:

“For his efforts to curtail Iran’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program, President George W. Bush will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, causing Al Gore to sit in his Prius and sulk.”

Of course, it turned out that Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapons program, despite all of Bush’s talk of an impending World War III. But the good news is, this time we found out before we invaded — that’s progress!

For the rest of this week's AT LARGE by Peter Chianca, click here.

It's freakin' cold!

OK, I'm pretty sure that when you get into the magenta -- magenta! -- it's too cold to even walk to your car. Turn around and go back to bed right now. (And whatever you do, don't lick any metal flagpoles.)

The temperature right now in my neck of the woods, according to the MetroWest Daily News, is a balmy 5 degrees, almost recalling that classic line from Planes, Trains and Automobiles. (Neal: "What do you think the temperature is?" Del: "One.") The good news is, the 10-day forecast has us in the 50s by Wednesday. Thank you, global warming!

At Large Special: What's In and What's Out for 2008

Let’s face it: It’s harder than ever to keep up with what’s in and what’s out in this ever-changing world. Fads take off and burn out before you even have a chance to notice them, raising the question: If a fad burns out in the forest and people are too busy programming their DVRs to notice, is it still a fad?

Be that as it may, you can stop worrying: Your guide to society, politics, fashion, the arts and life in general is here. Just be forewarned — these may all have changed by 180 degrees by the time you read this. Flip-flopping is in.

See the regular version here, or (for you brave souls with enough bandwith) the entire 7 MB PDF package here.