I've had countless emails come in requesting plushies of Deacon's cat. I don't even know what "plushie" means. But our operatives are on the job even now. Also coming soon will be a Wasp-Deacon "plushie", with fast-ovipositor action.

I was hoping to put forth some of my treatise on Internet society, but I honestly don't even know where to begin. I'm going to complain about reality TV instead; why does reality TV seem more and more scripted with every new show? They've even got shows now where some of the idiots are shitty actors and some of them are "real" people. What's the fucking point of that? Doesn't anybody realise that as soon as a camera is on them, everyone acts? I can't suspend my disbelief when it's so sickeningly obvious that these people who are supposed to be "real" and living in "reality" are all so disturbingly out of touch with it. I feel a little bad about all this dissing, because I haven't really watched a lot of reality TV, in fact as little as possible. But my disdain is buoyed by the fact that as I sit here in my comfortable apartment, some idiot somewhere is trying to make fire or learn how to skin a fish. The only reality TV I'd be interested in, momentarily, is true voyeurism. Which is of course illegal, as I had to find out the hard way.

Television is in a rut right now, and reality TV is just one symptom of it. Think of it as the giant festering boil on television's once shapely ass; it's what you notice right away. Continuing with the analogy, shows like King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, and that show where it's almost King of Queens except with a different fat guy and a different improbably hot wife and (remarkably) less funny writing, can be thought of as the liver disease, syphilis and colo-rectal cancer of television, respectively.

All of these shows are now in syndication, which is the only reason I'm even aware of the Twilight Zone version of King of Queens. In fact, reruns of King of Queens or Malcolm in the Middle are on continuously, on some channel, from seven to eleven every night. I'm not going to bad mouth Malcolm, except to say that the only reason people like it so much is that the bar has been set so low. And the fact that King of Queens even stayed on the air long enough to be syndicated should tell you everything you need to know.

I'm a sucker for hot women. I watched both Buffalo 66 and Pumpkin in their meandering, pointless entireties just to see Christina Ricci fully clothed (before she came down with Flockhartitis). But even with the slightly freakish hotness of Leah Remini, I cannot watch more than five minutes of that show in one sitting. It is a sad day indeed when I flip away from a hot woman hoping for a Friends rerun.

Just so you don't think I'm one of those people who hates everything, here are a couple of shows I actually do enjoy. The best sitcom on right now is Scrubs. If you don't like it, it is because you are too stupid to understand it. Or maybe you've just forgotten how to laugh. In either case, the fault rests with you and not with Scrubs, and you should be ashamed.

The other show that I'm surprised to say I quite enjoy is Boston Legal. James Spader is brilliant. Even just standing there saying nothing for five seconds, he's funnier than an entire episode of Raymond. The only flaw in the show is that they have other characters. William Shatner is alright, certainly better than Star Trek, but he's stealing precious screen time from Spader.

Aside from those two shows, television has become a festering corpse, a barren wasteland devoid of entertainment. Unless you like watching "real" people embarass themselves for potentially fictional prizes or shows about the rough and ready cowboys of crime scene investigation, in which case there just aren't enough hours in the day for all the TV you need to watch.