This past weekend was not my first foray into the seamy depths of crappy TV over-watching due to illness or unemployment, oh no. You'd think I would have learned my lesson then and vowed to take up extended couchtime leisure activities like basket weaving or zen meditation upon my next tangle with the common cold virus. But no. Sweet mother television lured me into her web of lies once again.

Disoriented by a cold, I sat on the floor putting $400 worth of change into coin wrappers and watching quite possibly one million hours of the following utterly crap programming, hours of my life that I will never get back. I am here to provide a lesson for you, in what not to do next time you are ill.

Do not rent Jersey Girl. I believe an astute film reviewer once referred to this film as "Gagli," a succinct one-word body slam of a review that caused me to spit C2 on the entertainment section of the paper one mirthful Sunday afternoon. (Oh wait, C2 wasn't out when Jersey Girl was in theaters. Whatever. I now product place at random as a side effect of this weekend's TV over dosage so bear with me.)

As that review should have warned me, there aren't words, aside from Gagli, for how bad this film is. It's Day After Tomorrow bad, with Ben Affleck as the digiwolf. You know how when you were a kid, you'd dare other kids to eat unpalatable mixtures of tasteless childhood delicacies, like maybe marshmallows in a blender with Capri Sun and Lik-M-Aid? This movie was sort of like that-- a frappe of grating cliches, tone-deaf dialog, stultifyingly derivative, sitcomlike plot twists, and a gaggy finale concerning a corporate father's change of heart and subsequent mad dash to make it to the school play in time, replete with the child backstage, looking at the empty chair where the dad should be.

Drink up, America.

Do not watch the godforsaken Emmy Awards. Those awards shows are so freeping awful, you could not deliberately make them more awful with twice the budget for Titanic and the brain trust behind National Lampoon's Gold Diggers working 24/7. And every year, they repeat the same inexplicable gaffes, as if the bad formula for awards show production was torn from the Bible. For example:

1. Bad orchestra music drowning out acceptance speeches 5 seconds into the speech, and the speech giver shouting over the strings. Year after year after year. Are we not here to give these idiots awards? Is that not the point of the show? What am I missing here people?
   
2. Waning, unfunny comedian hosts who tell inappropriate, repetitive jokes-- this year it was Gary Shandling who appeared to have some sort of botox-related paralysis of the lower jaw. Was I the only one that noticed this? Recent plastic surgeries have left him looking like a photoshopped amalgamation of Tom Jones and Billy Crystal.
   
3. Celebrity hosts telling idiotic jokes that no one laughs at, clearly hating it as they read off canned scripts, often appearing revealingly amateurish. Kudos to Zach Braff, who said upon completing his teleprompter recitation: "couldn't I have gotten a better joke than that?"
   
4. Famous people in the audience glowering when the camera pans over them. I feel kind of sad for celebrities really, its like they have a few years (if that) of feeling entitled to the grossest egomaniacal behavior ever known to time and space, and then pay for it with a lifetime of rejection, mockery, tabloid exposure, and facelift scars. See you on Surreal Life 12, Patricia Heaton. (Actually I don't remember if she was glowering or not, I just hate her for her gagworthy affiliation with "Feminists for Life" ("women who are experiencing an unplanned pregnancy also deserve unplanned joy") and her grating portrayal of a lemon sucking b***h on TV.)
   
5. Let us not fail to mention awards being thrown at the same defunct shows and has-been actors for many years in a row by unimaginative voting panels... Kelsey Grammar must have a storage locker on his Malibu compound for all of his fawking emmys, all for for the same performance he's slept-walked though for 20 years. Shouldn't it be called something other than acting after a certain point? Like maybe just, personality?

I know, I KNOW, don't watch awards shows. It's like going into a portable toilet and then coming out and saying "hey, it smells in there!"

Anyway the moral of this story as you well know is that TV makes a sick person all the sicker. Will this stop you from a TBS Jag marathon, or the platitudes of Dr. Phil next time you start sneezing? Highly unlikely. The makers of Swiffer Wet Jet are counting on it.

Hey, peeps. Send mail to mail@tiny-dog.com.