Jason works at a pizza parlor and recently got engaged. He wants to get a better job to make a better life for himself and his fiancee, but feels that his tattoos — particularly the ones on his face, neck, and hands — will hold him back from being hired somewhere. He began the process of laser removal, but didn't realize that the healing process would include giant, puss/blood-filled blisters.

Having blisters, of course, was not a good thing considering that he works with food. Especially when he started "softly draining" them in the employee bathroom. His boss told him he had to go home, and lose the day's pay.

Actually, all of the tattooed individuals on the show seemed to compulsively make decisions that were not completely thought out, like Ali, a 26-year-old woman who had her fiancé's name tattooed on her arm, after they were together for four months.

A few months after that, he left her, and subsequently (softly?) drained her bank account. Ali suffered a nervous breakdown. Now she can't stand to even look at his name on her arm. She doesn't have a job, and can't afford laser removal, but was able to scrape together enough money to get another tattoo to cover up the original. However, this would require that she get almost her entire forearm covered in ink. She briefly considered the fact that she might hate this new, larger tattoo, and that it might hurt her chances at getting a job in a law office. But she went ahead and got the cover-up tat anyway.

Then she got back together with her ex-fiancé.

Well, luckily for everyone, she answers this and a number of other questions in Time. Not to anyone's satisfaction, maybe, but she's certainly not avoiding an issue that most of us would steer clear of for at least five reasons. Weinstein, who at the time of her year-long affair was the CFO of the Jewish women's Zionist organization Hadassah, lost her shirt to Madoff financially, too: she and her family were wiped out by his Ponzi scheme, and it's not hard to see why she's using what she's got.

Harder to understand, maybe. Weinstein claims the book's not a revenge ploy, that she's only talking about his small member in the interests of psychological inquiry ("I think it started with feeling of inadequacy, his inability to accept failure, his fear of failure"), and that she plans to send him a copy in jail. She also says that her husband and son are totally cool with it. "It wasn't like, "Surprise, I've been having an affair for 20 years." It was more like, Surprise, I had an affair 15 or 16 years ago. We've really worked hard on our marriage since then, and things have come around, but this really terrible thing happened to us."

Well, I'm sure sordid tell-alls, revelations of spectacularly poor judgment and publicly humiliating your husband will really serve to mediate that. While we may find this an unlikely means of "trying to put this behind me as much as I can," I guess good for her that "there was a good deal of catharsis. I started feeling that by sharing it I was getting stronger, not weaker." I don't think I've ever agreed with Madoff's slimy lawyer, Ira Sorkin, before, but I'm kind of feeling his statement on the book: "She's entitled to her free speech, I suppose...Why one would go public with something like that, I don't know."

Well, I'm guessing she's not the only woman Madoff dallied with: maybe she figured she'd better make the most of her material before it became a cottage industry. Although, frankly, we wonder who will buy it: it seems like the target audience - those swindled by Winky Dink (which she claims arose from his winking habit) - will be the least likely to throw their money away.

Bernie Madoff's Mistress Speaks [Time]
Sheryl Weinstein, "Madoff's Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, And Me" Author, Claims Affair With Madoff [Huffington Post]

Alleged Mistress To Forward Book To Madoff In Jail [AP]
BERNIE'S 'FLAME' WHO GOT BURNED [NY Post]

Tim and Nina Zagat have been branching out from dining guides of late. But hotels and spas is one thing; applying their clinical, somewhat democratic, deeply unsatisfying, oddly detached disclaimer sneer quotes to Carrie Bradshaw territory seems like something better suited to an Onion parody. And yet, here it is: along with more expected terrain like "best nightlife spot for a first date," the off-puttingly cutesy booklet provides wisdom-of-crowds on everything from who should pay on the first date (60 percent of respondents said men) to whether to burn an ex's stuff (2 percent: yes) to — wait for it —“D.T.R.” (Defining the Relationship) talk.

Like all Zagat surveys, it's inherently skewed by the population that makes up the respondents, and in this case it's a particularly unbalanced group: says the Times, "though surveys were given to an equal number of men and women, 64 percent of respondents were female, 35 percent male. Of those responding, 94 percent of the women said they were exclusively interested in men and 86 percent of men said they were exclusively interested in women. The largest group of respondents were in their 30s (36 percent), followed by the 20s (25 percent), 40s (22 percent), 50s (13 percent) and 60s (4 percent)."

The odd thing about this whole conceit is that, even if you put implicit faith in the wisdom of the Zagat panel (unwise), it presumes a person is willing to date by committee: is simply knowing what other people prefer on a date valuable? Then too, even accurate advice isn't always what you want to hear: another recent survey reports that Chipotle is the number one place to meet men. I suppose for etiquette questions like check-paying a consensus is useful, but does the book really serve a function beyond tarted-up sociology paper? Were Zagat applying its somewhat fallible rating system to individual people on a website, the concept could fly ("Hygiene: 21") — but knowing the preferences of a group of 30-something women already self-selecting by taking time out to do such a study seems unlikely to radically alter the habits of anyone prone to buying such a book in the first place (read: the same women.) Quite frankly, we don't trust Zagat to help us buy a Gyro...but then, we take our Gyros seriously 'round these parts.

A How-To On Dating And Dumping [New York Times]
Chipotle: Get Burritos, a Date [US News]