Arctic Blast Makes New Yorkers Lose Minds, Drink 40s

The average New Yorker's brain must have tiny little temperature receptors that tell it to become totally bizarro when it gets really hot or really cold outside. I was on the F train yesterday afternoon sitting next to a woman wearing a sizaeable MP3 player and a python-lenth scarf wrapped around her neck, head, and chest with plenty of scarf left to spare. While rocking out to her tunes, she busted a paper bag out of her coat and a bottle opener from somewhere within the depths of her scarf. It dawned on me that this wasn't any old soda pop in the bag. Girlfriend had bought herself a 40 to take the edge off the afternoon. She cracked open her bottle, took an extra long drink, smacked her lips, settled back in her seat, reached into her scarf and pulled out a couple of scratch off games. She won $10. I know this because she inserted it in to the song she was singing along to: "I ain't sayin' she a gold digger, gold digger, I WON 10 DOLLARS, but she ain't messin' with no broke..." When the drink was finished (this didn't take long) and the winning scratch off was tucked away in her purse, another item was pulled from the depths of the scarf: a yo-yo. High on her win and a Crazy Horse, our girl got up and started to "walk the dog" with her Original Duncan. In answer to the question, how much fun can one person have on the F train? I think this is it.

And then there was Roger Clark standing on a highway in Jamaica, Queens this morning with a portable weather gauge that looked like one of those spinning beanies. In true Clark form, Roger managed to find a choice group of morning commuters to interview about the chill in the air: the guy who didn't want to mess up his hair with a hat, the woman wearing a fur coat that exactly matched the hair piece she had in, and the heavy-set woman who looked like Cousin It with a baseball cap on who said she was wearing four layers and asked Roger if her tank top counted as five. Needless to say, Roger didn't know and NY collectively gagged at the thought of her undergarments.

L Word Jumps Shark, Lands on Viewers

It's taken me two full days to recover from this past Sunday's "L Word." Any show that opens with a recreation of "Streetcar Named Desire" - especially when that recreation features the most annoying female character on television, who only recently stopped hallucinating about Hasidic Jews and the circus, doing the Stanley Kowalksi-style shouting - has some serious cojones. And when that recreation leads immediately into the most annoying theme song on television - one reminiscent of something you might have heard on a "Fast Folk" album before deciding that there's a reason why there's only one Suzanne Vega - what you've got is a recipe for the longest 60 minutes of your entire life and a really good reason to finish off that bottle of sleeping pills you'd been saving for a rainy day. Let's face it, like the party guest who loves fruity drinks and mistakes your closet for the bathroom - this show has overstayed it's welcome in a big way.

I'm going to lead off my tirade by asking who the heck is writing Max/Moira's lines? Poor Daniela Sea isn't the greatest actor, but when you're forced to say the line "I can do a computer search" - like it's 1955 and this is some serious futuristic technology - it makes you wonder how she keeps from tearing her soul patch out.

And then there's the Papi Problem. This girl is not only completely unconvincing as a macho ho-bag, but she's just not sexy (bring back Sarah Shahi!). Being forced to watch her confront her "competition" Shane with the words "You're nothing but a skinny white girl" while swaggering around in a cowboy hat like a waiter from Outback Steakhouse was just embarassing.

Speaking of embarassing: Helena working at the skatepark/hair salon, the hetero party (complete with football references which any good lesbian should have picked up on right away), Shane turning down a chance to pose in Hugo Boss underwear, Cybill Shepherd as a desperate nouveau lesbian, Cybill Shepherd as a desperate nouveau lesbian, did I mention Cybill Shepherd as a desperate nouveau lesbian?

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, Marlee Matlin is coming on board. In other words...

Up next: Another actor from the 1980s joins the cast, and this one's deaf!