(For other mysteries, check out here and here.  Or don't.) Surely there are some ugly mermaids out there - why hasn't one ever been represented in a movie or TV show? Does anyone in this country really give a rat's ass about the Olympics?  I mean, outside of the basketball team and Michael Phelps, can you name five American athletes on this year's squad? Could I get off on a vehicular homicide charge if I run a pickup with one of those rubber testicle trailer ... Read on, Daddy-O

I'm not sure how things work outside the New York City television market, but we have this annoyingly restrictive setup when it comes to NFL broadcasts.  Whether or not you like the Jets or Giants, they're almost always the only games you get to watch on Sunday afternoon.  And it usually works out that the Jets game is on at 1, then the Giants at 4.  There are no other games broadcast opposite them, and the networks pretty much never cut away ... Read on, Daddy-O

Would it unconstitutional to introduce capital punishment for anyone who posts a variation of "First!" to start a comment thread? How about for people who use the words "preggo" or "preggers"? Is there a bigger oxymoron than Ticketmaster's "convenience charge"? For whom is it convenient to spend 8-10 bucks to get a piece of paper printed? Why is it that most reality shows are more obviously scripted than non-reality shows? As far as I can remember, the only true "reality" show I ... Read on, Daddy-O

CBS recently announced that they will begin airing cage fighting (aka mixed martial arts or MMA) this spring. In reading the article, I was reminded of something I see quite often whenever advocates of the sport defend it - they try to play up the strategy aspect of MMA and how it does actually prohibit a lot of nastiness such as gouging eyes or striking groins. Then they actually try to pass MMA off as some kind of beautiful ritual ... Read on, Daddy-O

Just when I thought I had seen all the ways unscrupulous advertisers could come up with to separate idiots from their money, along come detoxifying foot pads. If you haven't yet seen any of the commercials for these things, they are a hoot. Here's a typical ad for this miracle product: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfhpeQ01Ga8[/youtube] All the ads pretty much employ the same selling tactics and points, which are summarized thusly: Scare the customer. Inform the target that the world is an icky place, full ... Read on, Daddy-O

To absolutely no one's surprise, Dave Seanor (the editor of Golfweek magazine who approved a recent cover featuring a noose) was canned. The firing made sense for a very basic reason that had nothing to do with racism - Seanor made a ham-fisted effort at generating buzz for his magazine, and any person with an ounce of common sense could have predicted the shitstorm that would follow its publication. Pissing off readers (and by association your advertisers) is career suicide ... Read on, Daddy-O

I've been known to enjoy one or two of these so-called "fast food" ham-burgers in my lifetime. I know they're no good for me, and I don't care. And sure, if something I order isn't prepared correctly or just not available, I have gotten annoyed. That's simply because I don't suffer incompetence lightly. But the level of betrayal exhibited by the people in Burger King's new "Whopper Freakout" ad campaign is simultaneously amusing and disturbing. Some customers were ... Read on, Daddy-O

Jennifer Love Hewitt, truly one of the great thespians of our time, took issue recently with a series of photos taken of her on a Hawaii beach. The photos were unflattering by some accounts (I'm not posting them here, but if you really want to see them they aren't hard to find), and since they were released Jennifer has been the subject of some pretty nasty comments. In response, she posted the following on her website (no I don't have ... Read on, Daddy-O

I happened to catch a 60 Minutes segment last night detailing a generation of Americans known as "Millennials." I had never heard that term before, but apparently it translates roughly to "entitled, coddled, self-centered punks." According to this report, this new generation is going to, like, totally change the way the world works. You know, because life is hard and it's totally reasonable to change things around to make it more comfortable for them. It starts in childhood, when they ... Read on, Daddy-O

George Carlin opined years ago about his love of entropy - that is, the amount of disorder and randomness in a system (a gross oversimplification, I know). When an ice cube melts, that's entropy in action. When a new deck of cards is shuffled, that's entropy in action. Extrapolated to our society, you could say that a riot is human entropy. Like Carlin, I'm a fan of entropy in society, although perhaps not to the extreme he is. Nonetheless, I ... Read on, Daddy-O