Who You Gonna Call? Maury, of course.

Hm...file this nugget under the (super loosely-based) term "creative."

I never cut school for a really good reason. If it was to see a movie, I'm sure I could've waited until the more proper time of 8:00pm. If it was to go to a friend's house, all I remember doing is talking at a kitchen table, in the same way that could've been done at, say, a table in the cafeteria. (I do recall us signing onto AOL a lot, but it was new! We could've had mail!) And if it was to go to the mall, I know I never had enough money to buy anything remotely memorable. I did steal from Claire's a lot often, again, useless pastime.

When I did stay home (for no other reason than to be bored and wish I was with my friends), I watched a lot of talk shows - never a soap opera cuz I'm not that type of girl (whatever that means) - namely though, The Maury Povich Show. The Anti-Springer, if you will. Or so it seemed at the time. All trickery, I've learned!

Please, someone, correct the 13-year-old me if I'm wrong, but was the show always about 400-lb toddlers, animal tricks, and baby daddy's? Or has it progressed, I mean digressed, into this?

Anyway, Detroit's own Judge Wade McCree (above) thinks Maury is the perfect candidate for some Scared Straight-type shit. He's begun sentencing fathers charged with failing to pay child support to the viewing of one Maury show a month. Like a dose of medicine for deadbeats. The men then have to report back to their probation officers with a summary. Like what children do with teachers. It's all very convoluted and forensic and you have to have a degree to understand why measures like this ever need to be taken. Hurts my head just thinking about it, but damnit, I'm gonna watch episode after episode until I understand this method and am near fit to be a judge myself.





Classy.

This Gives "Sandwhich" A Whole New Meaning

I am back, bitches. And apparently I should be headed back out to Quizno's.

Damn you, Quizno's. First you had Scott and that insanely awkward funny commercial ("Put it in me, Scott!") and now this (NSFW):




Smut + Viral Marketing = Genius

Ashanti Is Trying To Take My Black Card

I don't claim to have endured the "tragic mulatto" childhood that Mariah Carey so pathetically cries about (while drying her tears with diamonds), but I will say that being of mixed race gave my parents an awful lot of excuses to go above and beyond in explaining cultural differences. But only in really odd shallow ways. My father was ecstatic once my sister and I learned to exclaim "Dad!" with fervor, so as to disprove all the New York passersby's assumptions (inferred with evil stares) that his dark-skinned self was not, in fact, kidnapping us, as we were of a considerably lighter shade. Our color came in increments, and once he felt we had acquired enough tan, he began with the pseudo-schooling. First, the only song he encouraged us to learn on our brand new Christmas-gift Casio keyboards was Bill Withers' "Lean on Me," because, you know, it was about brotherhood and stuff. And he did his very best to remember to light candles for Kwanzaa, but my sister and I successfully trivialized that holiday into being one about saying "Kujichagulia" a lot and giggling afterwards. And who needs Cornflower-, Thistle-, and Periwinkle-colored crayons when all you've got are Color Me Brown books? Not I. But, if nothing else, I can say with conviction that out of this bombardment of blackness came my exposure to one of the best damn movies of all time: The Wiz. Because, no - as taught - the original was not iconic enough!



But now I hear Ashanti is reprising the role of Dorothy. On stage, nonetheless. A role previously owned by Stephanie Mills and Diana Ross (seen above). This bothers me. Pops would be so proud to see how worldly I've become per his instruction. And I feel Ashanti is trying to revoke me of my well-deserved certificate of culture by maybepossiblydefinitely ruining a truly significant sliver of my childhood. After all, something tells me she won't be able to pull it off.

Until then, a completely unrelated scene (YouTube is slacking):