The French tongue, a mixed bag as always: it provides me both with my pan-national Favorite Surname (Thibodeaux) and pan-national Least Favorite Men's First Name (Thierry). How to determine the true value of a language that gives us both, the triumphant victor and the vile offender?

Here is what will soon be hitting the streets labeled a "Dodge Charger".

Here is what "Dodge Charger" has meant until now, until this.

Huh. You know, I think later I'll scorch some sugar cubes with a butane lighter, stick them on top of some dollar-store boxed flan mix, call it "creme brulee" and try to sell it. Apparently this sort of approach is good business.

A "fantasy", now, that involves something one hasn't done, right? I'm trying to make sense of another (sexually suspect) billboard. For Coldstone Creamery, it displays some sort of dusky-complected ice cream cake and invites the viewer to "Fulfill Your Chocolate Fantasy". Does this billboard assume a reader who has never eaten anything containing chocolate, or is something other than chocolate being referred to?

Ever watched a game with a Broncos fan, orange and blue team socks pulled up to knees, who before the game's start crouched in a corner with head in hands attempting to personally psych out the opposing quarterback, saying he doubted it would work but wasn't "prepared to rule it out"? I have, now.

Perhaps the least stomachable aspect of being laid out on the couch with some sort of Third World flu: commercials for places like IHOP and McDonald's featuring food that glistens. *Stop that glistening*.

Rain brings the ants out in the East Bay. Yesterday afternoon, before obliterating a small cadre of scout ants, I noted that one of the leaders was bearing most of the body of a fallen comrade. "Wow, they still do that?" I thought. Can you follow my imbecilic line of thinking there? For a second or two, I was basically thinking, if not in these words, "In today's callous, ill-mannered world, it's nice to see that ants still look after their dead." I humbly submit this as the most absurd anthropomorphization in human history.

(I've not abandoned this, I swear it . . . )