In the clip above, Sammi tells The Situation that she's "experienced him already," and Snooki learns that if you eat a pickle while wearing a hat that says "Pornstar in Training," people will make fun of you. (Actually, forget the pickles: people have the right to make fun of the hat alone.)

Then Angelina, the judgmental "pretty" one, leaves the house because she's sick of working like three hours a week or whatever, and though the show plays a montage of her "best" moments, nobody misses her. Then things take a turn for the barf in the hot tub, where Snooki assaults everyone with her mouth.

Mindy came out dancing, which, according to her Twitter, she'll also be doing on tonight's Mindy-written episode of The Office:

Maryjean's Cat Massage Don'ts:

1. Touching too fast
2. Touching with your fingertips only (use full palm).
3. Taunting the cat with a high-pitched squeaky voice.

Remember the rules!

Cat Massage Lady Maryjean Ballner [Late Show with David Letterman]

Related: If There was Ever a Win-Win Situation, it's Cat Massage! [Everything is Terrible]

A segment on chocolate. Specifically: The sustainable cocoa farming Dove supports in Brazil. And then a commercial for Dove chocolate, a sponsor of the show.

The clip shows a balding middle-aged white man in the center of a circus ring. He looks nervously around, and the camera pans to show the aggressor: a black panther-woman in a gold bikini. She commands him to "dance... to the rhythm... strip!" while repeatedly calling him "baby." The cat-woman growls at him and cracks her whip while he strips down to his socks and awkwardly sways back and forth.

It's pretty clear that this man is not enjoying the experience. Melissa McEwan from Shakesville notes that the selling point is apparently that "Orangina Red will turn you into a sexually aggressive monster." She argues that there is no ambiguity to this scene of assault:

And before anyone gets it in their head to argue that this isn't a sexual assault, but instead a scene of a dominatrix and a consenting customer, I'll just note that the setting of the ad is a circus ring. She's literally treating him like a performing animal, and he appears to be utterly terrified. I am acquainted with someone who worked as a professional dominatrix for many years; men went to her to be punished, not petrified-and if someone had become visibly frightened of her, she would have stopped. Images of dominatrices thrilling in hurting scared, vulnerable men are images of sexual assault, not of anything a consent-insistent sex worker does.

However, many people will probably see this ad and think it funny, not offensive or strange. Yet try imagining it with the genders reversed: A terrified woman strips uncomfortably while a large, muscular man-animal growls at her and commands her to dance. My guess is that far fewer people would find that humorous. Once again, sexual assault committed against men is viewed as hilarious - as are violent and aggressive women.

Even without the violence, this ad is full of problems. There is the woman-reduced-to-a-cat theme, which by this point is just getting kind of tired. Call me when we start seeing some sexy rhinos (although there is a hot M&M, so I suppose even this is possible). Copyranter, posting on Animal New York, also suggests that there is an element of racial tension underlying the exchange:

It's the latest spot in Orangina's animated anthropomorphized nympho animal campaign, where we previously witnessed a giraffe-girl sniffing a rollerblading guy's ass. Now, a buff busty melanistic big cat (I'm envisioning Naomi Campbell) dominates a stereotypical White Man in a big tent setting. Is that a penis peek I spy? The spot sizzles with sexual and racial tension, RAWWRR!

That panther-thing reminds him of Naomi Campbell? This may say more about the author's views than the agency's. Either way, we can probably all agree Orangina has unleashed something that is all-around disturbing, and not at all appetizing.

Today In Rape Culture [Shakesville]
Orangina's Black Panther Dominatrix [Animal New York]

I'm one of those cultural Luddites who's been fighting to ignore Lady GaGa this year, but after this interview I might have to join the rest of the world in paying attention to her. This was a pretty kickass thing for her to say: "The truth is that every bit of me is devoted to love and art and I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger, I felt like a freak. I guess what I'm trying to say is I wanna liberate them, I wanna free them of their fears and let them know they can create their own space in the world." Okay, world, you're right, she's in.


Kate Gosselin says all eight of her kids cried when they found out they were no longer going to be on TV.


An even smugger than usual (!) Sarah Palin recycles her tired old moose chili anecdote. She's the first person ever to appear on the special two years in a row :(


The most fascinating person of 2009, Michelle Obama, admits that she watches trashy cable TV to unwind. (But just for an hour a week.) The other Most Fascinating (to Barbara) people were: Brett Favre, Adam Lambert, Glenn Beck, Tyler Perry, Jenny Sanford, and Michael Jackson's kids, who, thankfully, were not interviewed.

Tillie is a Jack Russell terrier who loved to scratch on the floor. In 1999, her owner, Bowman Hastie, discovered that when he put carbon paper on the floor, Tillie would scratch at it and make what looked to him like art, so he started selling her creations and has made approximately 100k doing so in the past decade. That's the cute story that led to Tillie's appearance on Conan last night alongside a giggling Josh Brolin, which went off the rails so hilariously that it's bound to become some sort of running joke — a bad interview is now a "Tillie." The clip above is only a small fraction of the insanity, so here's the whole interview in two parts:

Part One, the setup:

Part two, more examples of Tillie's major works:

Dave: "What I used to like to do when we would watch him on TV is I would call my son in because I wanted to show him an example of a guy who was absolutely the best at what he did."

Barbara: "But in your case, without going into great detail, you were very honest and you came out before the story, and I think that's what he should have done."

The Daily Show has historically gotten a lot of mileage out of Fox & Friends' Gretchen Carlson's "troubled mom" persona, which basically involves wrinkling her nose and innocently wondering what this Obama fellow is up to with our country.

Stewart employs Carlson's own hard-hitting research tactics (Google!) to learn that she may not be as simple and hair-twirling as she lets on. Dumbing yourself down is bad enough when it's to work an audience into a populist frenzy. But disingenuously playing into gendered soccer mom, gee whiz cliches? Evil brilliance.

Earlier Fox News Host Screens Next Generation Of Miss Americas

In the clip above, Gabourey talks about being a bully (to boys) and a crybaby as a kid, and talks about the boys who have come out of the woodwork since she's gotten famous. (She also mentions that her dad is a cab driver, so I will personally be checking the last name on the medallion of every taxi I see in hopes of meeting her dad.) Unlike Conan a few weeks ago, with whom Gabby had an immediate rapport (they were riffing like a comedy team), Jay kind of doesn't know how to talk to her, but it's okay: Gabby carries him through the interview seamlessly. (Like, say, someone who should have her own show.)

Later, in Jay's "Earn Your Plug" talent segment, Gabby announces her talent: "I am going to be awesome at *NSYNC trivia." And then she is (with the help of one of the *NSYNCers):

Men of a Certain Age portrays three men in their late '40s: Joe, an unhappily divorced dad who owns a party store and has a gambling problem (Ray Romano), Owen, a happily married father of three who struggles with diabetes and his disappointed father, who is also his boss at a car dealership (Andre Braugher), and Terry, a down-on-his-luck actor forced to work as a temp and go on humiliating auditions (Scott Bakula.) All three characters, so far, are good guys that you root for, so that makes this show original right off the bat. Anti-heroes are so played out on TV, and while the men on Men of a Certain Age have faults, no one is an asshole. And yet the show is still funny! Can you even imagine that being a show? As The Awl pointed out this morning, these guys "are each other's nontourage."

Pilot episodes are usually very awkward affairs, what with all the condescending expository dialogue required to explain the characters' back stories and motivations to an apparently idiotic audience, but this one was different. Men of a Certain Age takes its time and rewards a careful viewer with running themes ("Sisyphean") and callbacks, and ties everything together so neatly and astonishingly at the end that it feels like the TV version of reading a really good short story in the New Yorker (which is where, until now, I got all of my information about the inner lives and struggles of middle-aged men).

What's unique about this show is there is no cool guy, and there is no bad guy (maybe Owen's father/boss, but that's a complicated relationship.) There's no Turtle, there's no Samantha. These characters are either no "type" at all, or they're all the same type: sad sacks. And women aren't the villains either. No, on this show, the struggle is man versus nature and man versus himself — the villain is the messiness and humiliations of daily life and the ravages of age. Just like real life.

Men of a Certain Age succeeds as a dramedy by employing a clever trick: the characters get into situations where real danger is threatened, but the threat is revealed to be nonexistent. It does the same thing when everything seems like it's going to be okay, like when Owen tells his wife he doesn't want to go back to work ("I'm forty mother shit eight years old!") and she takes a deep breath and tells him she'll support him no matter what...and then quickly comes to her senses and takes it back. ("Woo, that's not true. It just came out!")

The last scene ties the episode up so well that it could stand alone as some sort of oddly-short TV movie in a parallel universe, yet we want to see much more from these characters. The clip above, from one of the show's first scenes, is exemplary of the show's mix of dark humor and subtle pathos — those "half-squished bugs" Joe mentions? I think we know who he's really talking about.

In the clip above, Joy asks Levi if he believes that Sarah Palin loves him, as she said on Oprah. "Sex on Skates" tells it like it is: "You've seen her on TV so you can tell she's fake if you're paying attention." (Exactly!)

Joy tries to get Levi to say whether he and Bristol ever had sex in the Palin home. He refuses, but the answer is written all over his face. (In fact, don't you think they probably did it in Sarah and Todd's bed?):


Levi "I ain't ever seen a gay guy in Wasilla" is open-minded about his gay icon status: "They're people too. It doesn't matter to me. More fans, it's great":


This kid and his handlers really need to hurry up with Levi's Book of Palin Secrets, but they probably don't have a release date yet because they're seeing if Palin will run for President in 2012, when a book like Levi's would get the most traction (and do the most damage.) Every time Sarah Palin drives me nuts (lately, several times per day) I'm just going to remember that Levi has explosive secrets yet to share. I just hope that kid kept a diary.


Here's the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, who has been obsessed with - some would say unhinged over - Sarah Palin and the former Governor's uterus for over a year at this point. He continues his line of questioning as to the circumstances surrounding the labor and delivery of Palin's youngest son, Trig. (All political conspiracy theories apparently start in Dallas.) "No one does that," he says of Palin's choice to fly home to Alaska while in labor. "No one ever does that." (We love it when men assert knowledge and mastery over female reproductive systems!) Then, he summons the wisdom of Judge Judy.