This season's shameful pleasure

I know it's big nowadays to admit "guilty pleasures." Oh, look how hip and ironic and post-guilt we are! Wink, wink! While secretly we really think we're better than the people who just don't "get" the indulgence and inspiration that are Lifetime Movies.

But I think there's another level, a level beyond guilt, a level of enjoyment which, if admitted to your close friends, the ones who have forgiven you any number of errors in judgment, would make them question the wisdom of continuing to know you at all.

I'm talking shameful pleasures. I'm talking Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team.

For the season that I watched, I cringed even as I thrilled at the spectacle of young women of average intelligence and too much mascara crying their newly-broken hearts out.

I am not a better person for admitting it. I am not a better person for indulging in it. Though if that show were the greatest of my walks on the dark side, my immortal soul might still be safe as houses. Houses with cat doors and a couple of broken ground floor windows, but houses just the same.

But now there's Tabatha's Salon Takeover, and I find myself writhing in the vicious joy of watching the downfall of others. I breathe in deeply and sweetly as Tabatha dresses down a man who, I think, can best be summarized as a fuckwit, though that is the only perjorative I don't think she threw at him. I take consolation that he is, through his own efforts, driving his own business into the ground.

I am, in short, booking myself an express train to hell. Won't you join me? It's delightful.

If you don't ... then you SHOULD

Be reading the genius Project Rungay for such brilliance as this:

When we grabbed our seats for the screening of the Shear Genius finale, the last ten minutes or so of PR was running on the screen - without any sound. It was infuriating seeing who was in and who was auf without being able to hear any of it. "He's crying!" we shrieked hysterically. "Why is my man crying?!?"

"Wait. YOUR man?!" And then we hit each other with our beaded clutches.

I'm officially working the phrase "beaded clutches" into every conversation today.

(Thank you, John Majors via Eddie Izzard, for the paraphrased post title. As in, "If you don't think England is the greatest country in the world ... [long pause] then you should.")

It's called an "airport", Keith

Dear Keith, late of Project Runway:

Look. I get it. Utah IS rough. I served 23 years hard time there myself.

But it is not MANDATORY. Winning a reality show contest is NOT the only way out.

SO

SHUT

THE HECK

UP.

Coolest. News. Ever.

Julia Child was a spy.

Can we jumpstart a new Bond-like franchise, please? In which she Matahari's (or I suppose we can now say, Julia Child's) her way through the mustache-twirling French collaborators, blinding them to her real purpose with her divine sauces? I see: Fight scene, feast scene, love scene, and Julia smuggling an Albert Einstein-like genius across the Swiss border, hiding him in a very large soufflee of some sort.

I would show up for that movie.

Dear Anonymous Caller

If you have $9,000 in monthly net income, $200,000 in savings, and $300,000 in a retirement fund...

And you're calling in to the "Can I Afford It?" segment of the "Suze Orman Show" to see if you can "afford" to buy a $5,000 handmade wooden puzzle ...

YOU ARE JUST CALLING IN TO BRAG. GET OFF THE PHONE.