Deep Dish Pieces

As a general rule, I do not like The View's/20/20's Barbara Walters. I find her pedantic, boring, insecure, self-serving, etc.

But I disliked her a little less after her Oprah interview two nights ago. The part where she got to me was when she dropped the interviewer pretenses and got real about the death of her mentally retarded sister.

She wasn't there for the death. It happened about two days after an operation. I could tell it still haunted her. She missed her sister's death because of another ABC obligation, delivering some "awful," forgettable speech in some forgettable town.

Maybe if she released this human side more often, ... I don't know.

Before I succumbed to a sinus infection illness that just will not go away (three months later), I would still check out the entertainment shows reporting on the various sundry celebrities du jour. Quel low-brow, but that's me. Or was.

Tonight, somehow, my mind broke through some cloudy, glittery barrier, and I'd had/heard enough of the Entertainment Tonight/Insider babble on CBS. These pinheads always sound like they're breathlessly reporting on the Second Coming.

But it's just Lindsay Lohan with a stolen?borrowed? mink. Who gives a fawk?

I don't. Anymore.

House Hunters is on in two hours.

I must confess, all this talk of block voting confuses me. Apparently it's bad, as close to cheating as an awards nomination process can get. I also don't get how it can happen if the rules are in place; aren't there smart people in charge of the Daytime Emmys who wouldn't let cheating happen? Aren't the Daytime Emmys important too?

Last Wednesday, on ABC Daytime's The View, selected daytime celebrities announced the 35th annual Daytime Emmy nominees, primarily in the daytime drama categories.

Not a lot excites me lately, what with my health issues, but when I heard about the announcements, I couldn't wait to see which GENERAL HOSPITAL and ONE LIFE TO LIVE actors would make it on the nomination list.

I felt for sure GH's Tyler Christopher (Nikolas) and Kirsten Storms (Maxie), and OLTL's Catherine Hickland (Lindsay) and Robert S. Wood (Bo). At least.

As the names were rattled off, my first and only thought was, "Who are these people?!" Most of them were from CBS shows, shows I don't watch. From what I hear, most of them suck at acting.

If block voting means the judges didn't bother watching any of the reel submissions and only voted for their pals or known entities (Tony Geary, David Canary, Brian Kerwin), then yeah, well that sucks too.

And maybe proves that the Daytime Emmys are just a popularity contest. Like that's a huge surprise.

House Hunters. Repeat last night. A young Asian-American couple embarks on a quest to find affordable, spacious housing closer to Seattle, preferably with walk-in closet and yard for two dogs.

They live in a smaller Renton house. They wound up with a larger Renton house.

The chick was going on the entire time--through three home possibilities--about living in Seattle and then in one of the houses, she complained about it being too close to the freeway because of the noise.

Does she know that it's noisy in Seattle? She was talking about living in Seattle as a city-gal, i.e., in the city of downtown Seattle.

I lived in the city of downtown Seattle with a roommate over 10 years ago. It's noisy day and night. Almost every night, we heard knife fights and ambulances just outside our window.

City-gal my ass.

I've been on a trying desperately to sleep and WTF is wrong with me that I can't sleep through the night anymore and feel refreshed in the morning routine every night. Unfortunately, that includes having to wait for my husband some nights to return from a gig, so I can rub and scratch his head while we watch an HGTV program, usually House Hunters. Then fall asleep, please God.

Last night, he rambled into our house way after 12:30 a.m., and I was barely holding on. Earlier, I tried to sail away in my mind with a couple on the latest House Hunters. They were from Florida, the woman received a job transfer to Maui, and they'd been settling in a fairly ritzy but small Kihei condo steps from the beach.

They needed a house with a yard. They wanted a pool. I needed and wanted to sleep in a house with a yard and a pool in Maui, anywhere in Maui.

What always strikes me about any show involving real estate in Hawaii is the aberrant high cost of living. For over $500,000, you can buy a two-bedroom, one-bath house considered a shack in the ghetto by Mainland standards.

These Maui homes were nice enough on the surface. But if you know Maui at all, you know that one of two things will inevitably happen: 1. you will eventually sicken of the high cost of living of living in a shack you convince yourself is a palatial deal because it's paradise and move back to the Mainland, preferably Indiana, or 2. you will start to see the cracks of paradise in its hot, humid weather, over-development, destruction of Mother Nature for more over-development, over-crowding, brewing resentment of the rich by the struggling locals, and then you'll move back to the Mainland, figuring the millions extra in profit from selling this comparable mansion will be worth the headache.

That said, I'd totally take #1, the new house in the new development in Wailuku. If I had five years left to live--knock wood.

My husband Eddie remarked upon watching House Hunters on HGTV last night (the one with the couple and their toddler looking for a small mansion on the Gold Coast): "Is it me, or are rich people real dumb?"

I don't know about dumb, but they sure are obnoxious. Some of that's jealousy, sure. But a lot of that's justified.

They live in another world, a world where they learn quickly to take so much for granted. So all of their observations and choices will seem to the rest of us working class as unnecessary, extravagant, spoiled.

My main justification, if you will, for tuning in is the setting. My beloved Hawaii, the east side specifically, where most rich people reside... Waikiki to Koko Head, Kahala, Hawaii Kai, oceanside, what Mainlanders call the Gold Coast.

Another is my penchant for living vicariously through the rich and famous. I used to live on Robin Leach's Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous during my college and post-college years.

So I oohed and aahed over the fancy wood and stone flooring in the three mansion choices, the pool by the ocean, the impossibly spacious rooms within that only a few million can buy in paradise.

It just puzzled me that this couple with their kid wanted to downsize, primarily to find a more kid-friendly home to live in, and yet they wound up buying mansion #2, another two-story palace with stairs and an unguarded pool. But she loved the kitchen and he had to have his covered garage, even though he had to slum it with only a two-car (the guy collected like, around 10).

I kept wondering what was up with the realtor, showing them mansions that were beautiful and lavish but decidedly not kid-friendly. I mean, the first house had a huge backyard overlooking the ocean with sheer drops, no gate, nothing. All the homes had hard stone surfaces.

When the guy complained about the third mansion only featuring a carport, and what were they thinking to put a measly carport in... I wondered if he knew where he was living. It's Hawaii. Most of the schools aren't air conditioned. Most homes aren't either, and the only kind of garages there are the carports. It's open-air living.

Unless you're rich. Then, you can live opulently as if you're in Beverly Hills, Chicago or the south side of the moon. You can shut out the local island lifestyle and pretend you're still a local, but enjoying only the perks compatible to your upper-echelon personality.

The only thing that was Hawaii to me was the million-dollar view.

With growing alarm and dread, I've noticed an increase in commercials pimping pharmaceuticals. Is it any wonder the #2 highest cause of death in Seattle is by overdose of prescription drugs? Go on any message board on the Internet, and read all about people strung out, on the rebound, suffering withdrawals, just plain addicted to OTCs and prescriptions like Nyquil, Tylenol-PM, Ambien-CR, Singulair. Don't forget the hidden dangers of wonder drugs used to treat almost everything like Prednisone (this stuff is heinous).

I'm old enough to remember the '70s. I don't remember any commercials pimping anything stronger than Excedrin or Bayer aspirin for kids. If that.

I didn't know anybody who took anything stronger than aspirin for headaches or Pepto-Bismol for tummy aches. I only saw one person die of cancer, but we all thought those were anomalies, like a meteor through the sky.

Nowadays, take a look around. It's scary how many people rely on a rotation or slew of drugs to get by or survive. And how the media and the pharmaceutical companies are making sure they're on the gravy train with most Western-medicine doctors to address those needs with the quickest BAND-AID.

Besides now knowing what a particular symptom is, whether we know the cause or not, we have a pill to take care of it. Oh, it won't go away. We're not that advanced. It's a temporary, quick-fix, a salve over a bleeding sore.

Restless Leg Syndrome? There's a pill for that.
Allergies, asthma? There are several different pill options for that.
Depression, anxiety, insomnia? Try these pills.
Wake up farting and swallowing your saliva too much? You may need this new pill.

But watch out. Side effects could be worse than the treatment. They may even bring back the very symptom you are taking the pill to alleviate.

I am constantly astounded and horrified and frustrated and almost depressed and anxious myself to watch these TV commercials heralding the latest miracle drug, and then rattling off the many side effects you could experience.

The one that really sends me over the edge are the commercials for nasal allergies. You're already hooked by, say, that little French-accent-talking bee, ready to call up your doctor to go from Flonase to Nasonex when... this bee turns into the satan of all bees to tell you, smoothly, that you could suffer from some minor side effects of use, like, viral infection, cough, shortness of breath, a third breast on your left buttcheek that squirts out stinking motor oil... Guess what, you bee-moron, viral infections coupled with allergies can bring on lasting sinus infections and drag out a simple cold into a life-threatening bronchitis, pneumonia, the wheezing shortness of breath. So you just went from a runny nose and sneezing to chronic sinus infections, adult-onset asthma, anxiety attacks every time you're around someone with cold symptoms and hands on the remote the second the wheezing comes back around and you know you won't be sleeping a wink for TWO MONTHS STRAIGHT without Prednisone intervention--and more drugs.

The ones for asthma relief are scarier. There's a new-fangled one out now with a shadow of a woman striding around in an outdoor park near a cityscape, raving about feeling such relief she never felt in years, she can breathe again! Then her voice gets dark and you'd never believe some of the bad symptoms that could result from using this drug. You could die.

How's that for a permanent cure?

I must admit, it's tempting as all get-out for me to jump from one pill to another -- anything to prevent an allergic/asthmatic outbreak that results in wheezing and insomnia. But the recent "trip" I've taken since August I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy and has me longing for my youth when the strongest thing I took were four Flintstone's vitamins in a row because they tasted like candy.

For the record, I'm off Singulair, still on Enablex (still peeing every hour though), might go off Melatonin because of some weird thing I read about adrenal atrophy, on the FloVent steroid. Went off 10 days of Prednisone two weeks ago, took my last generic Ambien April 5th (did nothing for my post-Prednisone insomnia and anxiety), am on an anti-fungal for a little thrush on my tongue because I was on antibiotics for four weeks, after two I developed hives and that's why I had to go on Prednisone for 10 days in addition to taking care of my allergies, Prednisone for seven days with tapering the first week of March because of wheezing from mucous in my chest....

Is there a pill on the market to turn back time to the 1970s?

This couple with two toddler girls were bugging the hell out of me. They relocated to larger quarters in a residential TN neighborhood (more power to them) c/o HGTV's House Hunters, one of my favorite shows.

As usual, the female unit kept up with the running, bitching monologue about everything. Then, both the female and male blonde units began bitching about the master bedrooms in all three options. The first one had too much space. What are they gonna do with all that space. Are they kidding me?!

Didn't they just get through bitching in the beginning about not having enough space for all their world-travel souvenirs? Where did they think they'd display them, only in the living room?

Then, more bitching about how spacious the next master bedroom was. And when they finally came to a master bedroom that wasn't as large, they bitched that it seemed too small.

W.T.F.????

Who complains about a master bedroom that's too big? Is there such a thing? Most people would clamor for a 'too big' master bedroom.

And, as usual, I failed to guess correctly. I always fail. It's like these potential home buyers are bitching so much about everything, you can't tell what they like anymore so you have no clue what they'll ultimately pick. It always looks like they hate everything and won't buy.

At church this past Sunday, one of our members of a Bible Study tribe came up to me and raved about a Hawaiian restaurant in Everett, just a few blocks away on Hewitt. She'd seen a Food Network program about it, Diners, Drive-ins and Dives with host Guy Fieri, then she and her husband drove by the restaurant, and intend to eat there soon.

Well, you know I hunted the cable programming the other night for a repeat, and there it was. Missing Hawaii in any shape or form, I tuned in just now, just to get a flavor.

The only other mention of Bobby's Hawaiian food was from another church couple. They ate there but didn't find the food all that Hawaii-worthy. The husband used to be stationed in Hawaii in the early '90s or late '80s, I forget.

Looks to be more Hawaiian than Hawaii, with the poi, laulau and kahlua pork, which is fine. But my stomach resides with the plate lunches from other ethnic influences, like the Chicken Katsu, Teri Chicken, Huli Huli Chicken, Beef Stew.

But they do have spam musubi, so that alone encourages me. We'll be there ourselves, maybe bring friends.

No "That's money!" from Guy in that segment though. Maybe he's not a laulau guy.

Oprah Winfrey's at it again. Instead of The Secret, she's tempting me--like the contemporary Eve she is to millions--with the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge to be as gods in a slightly different form.

It's called A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. She and he are holding online "classes" for the world as of late, and recently featured some of the basics of the classes on her talk show last Monday, I believe.

Most of the overly simplistic, cliched Hallmark-card derivative sayings are inspirational and tempting enough... like a candy bar when you've been on a diet... but not very fulfilling overall. Not to me.

I just found the entire can-do, feel-good themes, values and attitudes centered around A New Earth a little suspect, a little too feel-good to be believed. As heartening as it might be to hear that we can derive a true sense of peace by living in the present (duh, like I haven't heard that psalm before), or let go of our competitiveness with and judgment of others to be our truest, best selves, it's not very comforting. Or very deep.

But that's Oprah.

I found several spots in that talk show episode uncomfortable to watch. Typically, I knew she and her producers would handpick a cancer victim and a soldier in Iraq for full poignant effect. I wasn't reassured about painful, sudden, unfair death or the scent of it through their Oprah and Eckhart mimicry. It grossed me out, quite frankly, when the queen of cliche bestowed her approval for the audience, almost as if bored, by rote, as expected... Thank you for inspiring US, applause, applause.

Oprah pontificating about Christianity, claiming she is a Christian, and then singling out as most important the least important part of Jesus Christ's existence on earth, the old earth. No, lady, it's not His life that mattered more to us so we don't have to think about anything more strenuous than our own personal powers. It was His death and coming back from the dead, because for Christians, that signified our own rebirth, grace, salvation. If it weren't for His sacrifice and triumph over death, all of us would be going straight to hell, far from God. THAT'S Christianity.

Sure, Jesus Christ lived an exemplary, wise and truthful life. He was the Son of God, what other sort of life would He live? What was so amazing wasn't that he was allegedly here to teach us what Oprah already allegedly knows, that we have to be the truest, most present selves while living. What was so amazing was that He would come down here to intercede for us with God, not just the Mary Magdalenes and the disciples, but the Romans, the Pharisees, the killers, psychos and unrepentant evildoers, everybody.

I really found the over-simplification of pain, disease, suffering and death to be a colossal insult to those who passed on before us. It's New Age babble, IMHO.

There's also something grotesque in hearing Oprah and her followers drop the "My aha moment was..." terminology. It's like Cliff Notes for eternity or something.

Nice try, though.

It isn't often (lately) that I get mad enough for an outburst at my TV. Normally I'm too under the weather to care. But tonight, I caught up on the DVR-recorded HGTV special, 25 Biggest Real Estate Mistakes--and positively frothed at the mouth.

>> #25: Buying a House for its Decor
Remember that you are buying the house, not the stuff inside of it, so make sure you see beyond the decorations and look at the bones of the home. Focus on the floor plan and the square footage. You also might want to measure the dimensions and graph out how that's going to work with your current belongings. >>

Then...

>> #1: Failing to Showcase Your Home and Make Small Cosmetic Changes
When you are selling your house, you have to really look at it objectively and think about it from the viewpoint of the house hunter. Make minor enhancements to the house and maybe hire a professional stager to come and arrange your furniture. Staging is about decorating your house for the buyers' taste, not yours. A great place to start is with the front of the home and the main entryway. Home staging is designed to increase the potential selling price and reduce the amount of time the house stays on the market. >>

Say what?!

So #1 is to stage for the buyers' taste, but #25 is not to fall for the staging... is that right? WTF????

I guess the key is in "small" changes, but you'd never know any of that from the HGTV shows that pimp the big changes (including renovating before a sell, btw) to the poor, unsuspecting sellers. I mean these "experts" are some of the same people who advise the sellers to BUY new appliances and FURNITURE just for staging (or rent), pull carpeting, and renovate kitchens and bathrooms. Replace that frilly bed with a non-descript one for automatons, but buyers, please don't fall for it, you can't take the bed with you!

Unbelievable.

I've probably heard it a million times: It takes a tragedy to set people's priorities back on track. Death changes everything. Makes you realize what's important.

Until it's all one long, drawn-out cliche, like beauty is only skin deep.

I begin to believe, from this dance on high, until I clamor for my next breath. Then, I begin to realize I'm not even close to understanding.

GENERAL HOSPITAL's treatment of a child's accidental shooting today (April 9) was a slight improvement over yesterday for its clarification of those cliches into moments of frightening, suffocating truth.

The writers -- to their everlasting credit -- weren't afraid to show what not to do in the event of a tragedy in the form of young, selfish, spoiled brat Lulu, who should know better (where she came from), but doesn't, but can't. They managed to redeem Kate, the fashion editor who has mobster Sonny's heart, while encapsulating what's essentially wrong with Lulu, daughter of Luke and Laura, too much like Luke for her own good... in this one scene.

Kate appears the one with an utter lack of compassion, back at work, preparing for the launch of her new fashion magazine, peeved at her 2nd assistant for not showing up with the specially prepared latte. Lulu appears to be the one with the compassion, late several hours to her new job because of a family tragedy, Michael's shooting.

Yet it is Kate who is the compassionate one, born of maturity which is born of many many more years of firsthand knowledge of what pain feels like. It is she who sounds off at Lulu, putting the young beautiful "spunky" but self-centered girl in her place, asking sarcastically if going around and spreading her pearls of wisdom (namely, ensuring her boyfriend, mob wannabe Johnny, isn't blamed for the hit), especially to a grieving mother, achieved their ends. In doing so, she made Lulu look utterly inhuman and by default herself. For Kate wasn't just attacking Lulu.

I couldn't believe Lulu would go up to Carly, not three feet from a comatose Michael, and ask her repeatedly, insistently, to make sure Sonny was told that Johnny had an alibi. Not even Claudia is that crass, and Claudia's supposed to be the villain. Her only excuse, I must say, is her youth. At that young of an age, Lulu has no idea what she did was so wrong and heartless, and perhaps, in time, inexcusable.

Even when put down soundly and rightly by Kate, I saw nothing in Lulu's face but hurt feelings and hurt ego, then anger at Kate as she slammed stuff around on her desk in front of her boss.

If the entire episode had been about the unrepentant ugliness of Lulu, then I wouldn't even be here type-typing away -- despite my having suffered allergy-related sleep-deprivation for going on almost three months now -- about it.

Before the Paris Hilton vibe sank in my skin like rotting feces, the scene shot to Jason, prodded by Carly, to talk to Michael. Both the character and the actor clearly did not want to, afraid of the emotions that threatened to overcome them both.

Oh how I recognize that impulse to run, to hide, to stifle with small talk, staring at a running TV screen instead of the love of my life, the brief spark of pure unmitigated, unconditional reciprocated joy. The guilt will eat away at me for the rest of my life, haunts me during the sleepless nights as I lay in a post-Prednisone/antibiotic fog.

GH's PTB did what I did not have the strength or courage to do, what soap operas can do better well and above all other TV primetime dramas... they can explore and examine and drag out the cliches of us human beings, until we're staring into the face of God, emotion drowning us until we're gone. They asked Steve Burton as Jason to go into the heart of darkness, as a man, an actor, a father (of two children himself), and play out a scene of grieving as if it were real.

They asked him to go in without the small talk, the stupid distractions, the vanity plays. He had to talk TO Michael, whether Michael responded or not, as if his life depended on it, no covers, no masks, no fronting. Gently, as if a child himself, Jason spoke of when he'd visited Africa just to see if the travel books he'd read to Michael did this continent justice. Then, he compared what he saw in person with what Michael drew as a child, telling the comatose boy he would've loved seeing Africa too, how colorful the vistas and the animals were, how alive.

When he described the young boy's drawings, the thin green line for land, and so much blue above and beyond for sky, that's when I felt just a smidgeon of grief I should've shown my friend, who only passed away in October.

I saw Terri, my son, my in-laws, my father, my future and my past, the many sleepless nights I wondered if I would survive, if I would ever feel normal again. Better yet, or more impossible than it seems, I felt them passing, slipping through my fingers.

Bravo to Steve Burton for bringing his defenses down, and losing himself in the fine, forgotten art of acting. This is what GH should be about, these small poignant moments.

Like Sam said to Jason earlier, it takes a tragedy...

Admittedly, GENERAL HOSPITAL is by far and away the best soap opera out there across the TV dial. On ABC Daytime, there is no comparison.

ALL MY CHILDREN doesn't seem to know what it is, a show devoted to the flighty, fickle fancies of Kendall, Greenlee and her Fusion gals, or an homage to the veterans who first introduced true diversity in story and character. If anyone knows what ONE LIFE TO LIVE is about, please let me know. Today was just a bunch of people I didn't know talking at each other (and WTF's up with Sarah and Nash??? Talk about awkward and forced and just plain ill-advised).

At least GH takes chances, pushes the envelope, draws controversy. In the midst of its almost-always heightened sense of drama centered around senseless mob violence and gender stereotypes, something real happens, usually in the most unexpected places (usually out from under the writers' expectations).

I've been keeping up with the Michael story since last Friday, curious to see if they'd handle it well, or blow it yet again for ratings and to revert to the mob worship.

It'd be easy to go the usual online board channels and rail against subterranean performances, or the ever-obnoxious supercouple alerts. But the fact remains, whoever was and is in charge since February has been painstakingly paving a path for the mob's ultimate doom.

I would've never imagined Carly and Jason both tag-teaming mobster Sonny while in the hospital waiting room, waiting for word on the results of a touch-and-go neural surgery on their son Michael--hit by a ricochet bullet. Never. Sonny was GH money. It never mattered what he did, hang A.J. on a meat hook, push and shove women around like his personal whores, court a girl a hundred times younger than him... Sonny would rise to the top like cream, miraculously, incredulously.

Yet, lately, he's been beaten up, beaten down, used as the scapegoat for all of GH's ills for the past 12, 13 years, made to look the fool, perhaps to pave the way for Jason to take over.

But that's not the main point of this story. The main point is that TPTB had a 12-year-old boy we watched grow up (a little rapidly) from an infant be shot in the head. (Well, why not? OLTL impregnated 16-year-old Starr.) He won't make it in the living sense, winding up in a living coma.

All to extract the maximum grief effect in fans and characters. Ooh, how will Jason react? Will he cry like a little girly-man? Will Laura Wright's Carly measure up to Sarah Brown's Claudia (who I can clearly see struggling AS CARLY)? How insane is Sonny gonna get?

What about poor Michael? He's just a kid!

When AMC's Kendall saw her oldest toddler boy moved in on a stretcher, as she was laid out on hers, passing in the night, I felt moved. When OLTL's Viki lost her grown daughter Megan to lupus, I felt moved.

This?, not so much. Maybe GH has numbed me by now. I see the make-up, the eyes moving, a young, talented actor going out, and I see everybody taking their places, but I don't really feel much.

The person I feel the least from is Carly. Sorry Laura Wright and fans, she acted like, IMHO, Laura Wright, stoic and brave and strong, but not Carly, not trying not to freak out and barely making it Carly... the way Sarah Brown was as Claudia, the mob wannabe who ordered the hit on Sonny which went awry and hit Michael.

This show probably numbed me down to nothing with its past, predictable shenanigans. I mean, they've brought people back from the dead before, why not later on down the line when they've found what they think is a promising, hot new, cheap actor from another planet to take over as Michael and court Claudia or something.

GH's minions in charge have so reduced the meaning of life and death in the past 12, 13 years that when it happens and we're supposed to feel something, all we feel is our intelligence jerked around.

B.J. must be doing a pirouette in her grave.

I guess nobody's watching ABC Daytime soap opera, GENERAL HOSPITAL but angry, white straight guys holed up at home due to the flu or a broken leg (or maybe football season's over).

It's fairly obvious from the Playboy channel over at ALL MY CHILDREN -- save for my brief respite with Jesse and Angie -- that horny, white straight guys are the targets, what with Greenlee, Kendall, Annie, Amanda, and Babe brought out in various stages of tart for their enjoyment. Two chicks horndogging over one hunk of a guy? A threesome dream come true.

This past Friday, GH firmly joined the rank and file. Every woman on this show is put firmly in her place by one gender stereotype or another.

The good girls, such as they are -- Kate, Elizabeth, Robin -- are stuck-up, uptight, self-centered, hectoring little prissy bitches you wouldn't wanna spend 15 minutes over tea with much less pass in the hospital hallway.

You can recognize them by the way they treat the bad girls, like unclean, stupid whores. Just like daddy told them.

The bad girls are not just bad, they're intolerable. It doesn't matter if you're turning in the acting of a lifetime, working overtime to do exactly what the writers and the producers want from you (which could change from day to day depending on the wind). Eventually, within the week, they'll have you pulling some godawful stunt -- like using nepotism to pull strings for your slacker cousin to spy on a romantic rival 'cause you're too weak to deal with a miscarriage and the consequences of your mob-related choices -- that cause most of majority female fans to flinch, groan, vomit and change the channel to something more productive, like drywalling the garage in 20 minutes.

**Spoiler Alert**
This week, they're gonna have a young boy named Michael caught in a mob crossfire and get hit by a bullet meant for his mobster father Sonny. Michael may not make it out of intensive care. But who cares about all that? Who cares about putting the countless majority of women who are moms or have moms through a living torture, having them think IRL about their own children's welfare... when it's all for the greater good, right?

To entertain those horny, angry, white straight male fans we have such an abundance of. Everybody knows straight guys get off on mob violence.

Anybody caught Sherri on the View majorly slamming (as a joke gone too far?) Barbara Walters when talk turned to what presidential candidate Barack Obama will do about taxing the rich?

Sherri basically told Barbara to watch her back, since she's amongst the rich elite. MWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Barbara was about to warn Sherri not to go there, WE DO NOT GO THERE!, and that she wasn't -- for the 50th time -- rich or elite (Rosie O'Donnell caught major hell for delving into this personal topic) but she didn't have time and OBAMA was sitting there waiting to answer more questions.

Best time of my life. I always enjoy myself when Ms. Walters is uncomfortable, upset or pissed off.