Bravo understands that while the mantra of a house-flipper may be "location, location, location," the mantra of successful reality TV is "extreme personality disorder, extreme personality disorder, extreme personality disorder."

If there were People's Choice Awards for mugshots, there'd be no contest this year.

Coping with tattoo regret just got a whole lot easier.

On television, it's the golden age of rude food.

In the Jeopardy Era, any dork with an Encyclopedia could memorize enough stray facts to sail through "Presidential Trivia." It takes a savant of a higher order to meticulously replicate the lyrics of a Bananarama song no one ever listened to that closely in the first place.

Hit by postage increases, many publishers resort to corporate-media-is-oppressing-you hand-wringing.

Is Apple's latest ingenue a true star, or just another pretty face to gossip about?

Archiving and analyzing our most intimate and embarrassing search requests, combing through private gmails -- Google has gotten so comfy in its role as recording angel that any concerns about the breadth of its omniscience must seem downright silly.

"Sunset Tan" is so gloriously moronic it makes competing reality fare like "Laguna Beach" look like "Masterpiece Theater."

The marketing department has decided to let customers share in the glory.

The most telling metric of America's fiscal health: All our finest sitcoms -- The Office, 30 Rock, Entourage -- are about work.

Jail as a career boost.

Idleness and introspection have as little cachet at summer camp as they do everywhere else in contemporary society. Instead, productivity and highly specialized expertise are the goal of today's camps.

Barry Bonds is one of America's most intriguing bad guys--surlier than Dick Cheney, as rich as a spoiled Hollywood superstar, but also that rare major-league jerk whose talent eclipses his villainy.

Alanis Morissette helped confirm a long-held suspicion: It's "Weird Al" Yankovic's universe now, and the rest of us are just blogging about it.

As well as exposure had worked for her, Bettie Page, who just died at age 85, discovered the power of discretion too.

Tune in to Fox News or Air America, and it seems as if apocalypse is always just around the corner, with both armies complaining of the other side's dangerous, implacable desire to eliminate all who stand in their path. Two new books stick closely to this protocol.

The 1/2 Hour News Hour has limited its comic emissions to an Ann Coulter line recycled from 2001, two fake commercials about the ACLU, a running -- no, limping -- gag about Ed Begley Jr.'s hybrid car and repeated insinuations that Barack Obama is smelly.

Public shaming online has become the best path to your own reality show.

The post-apocalyptic optimism of Survivorman and Man vs. Wild rests on a foundation as shaky as a city-slicker's first lean-to. Death is an ever-present undercurrent on both shows.