There seems to be a recent advertising trend lately wherein men are reasserting their masculinity by eating lots of dead animal flesh.  I guess it's always been a pretty macho thing to flagrantly eat a lot of meat, eschewing the lovely plant kingdom, but I've been noticing it more and more lately.

First off there's Burger King's ad for the Texas Double Whopper, which gives me the shits just thinking about it.

The gist of this commercial is that some schlumpy guy is sitting in a fancy restaurant, eating a meager, protein-deficient portion and suddenly spearheads a revolution of similarly-emmasculated men.  Curiously, the men choose to express their masculinity through song.  References to "chick food" abound as they thrust lots of burgers to the sky.  And they break things. 

The next commercial is entitled "Restore Your Manhood" and involves a guy buying "chick food."  You know, tofu, leafy green vegetables, pickled ovaries.  Whatever.  The guy's at the check-out when the guy behind him puts down a divider and proceeds to put an entire cow on the conveyor belt.

So what does the man do?  Of course he drives straight out of the supermarket, into his Hummer dealer where he drives off the lot with a brand-new gas-guzzler.  It's just really disgusting on a variety of levels.  I heard Ralph Nader watched and exploded.  (And no one cared.)

The last instance of this I've found (although I'm sure there's more out there) is for Nutrisystem for Men, featuring celebrity pitchman Dan Marino.  The commercial starts out by asking "Are you sick of feeling fat and tired?"  To which, I immediately respond "Yes!"

It's a pretty typical weight-loss commercial, with old pictures of chunky people smiling with heaping plates of barbecue and the person, present-day standing next to them, relatively svelte and wearing a fetching turtleneck.  The commercial isn't quite as meat-centric as the others, but definitely emphasizes "eating like a man" as well as the sexual benefits of the healthier lifestyle.  There are some incredibly awkward, incredibly staged testimonials of nerdy guys throwing around a basketball saying "My sex life's great!"

The whole timing of this trend is what I find a little perplexing.  I'd understand it more if it were an immediate response to the post-Queer Eye man.  In a response to the Ryan Seacrest metrosexual.  I'd even understand it if it were part of the whole election year, NASCAR Dad phenomenon where vaguely southern men are reasserting their male pride and power in response to "the feminists" and "the gays" and everything else that isn't covered in a thick film of testosterone.

However, it all seems to be coming out of nowhere and, as a result, it just seems stupider. 

Oh well, at least it's not as disgustingly irresponsible as Taco Bell's fourth meal schtick. 

Apparently we're all feeling a little lethargic around here. This could be, perhaps, because the world is slowly cooking us. So now for some me-time. Today I checked in with myself about all that awesome TV I was going to catch up on this summer. I'm surprised (but I really shouldn't be) that I've done so well.

• I'm smack in the middle of the second season of Lost, and have become a raving lunatic about this show. It's not the type of thing I usually like, seeing as it's all tease, all the time, but they pulled together such an appealing group of people, I'm hooked. Like crazy. Like deranged let's-watch-8-in-one-day, that'll-be-fun crazy.
• Fireflly. I don't think there's enough exclamation points and "really, really, really"s in the world to express my deep, fanatical love for this show.
• Once I realized that Deadwood really was a TV show, and not just a 12-hour-long movie, I enjoyed it very much. I remain wary of the out-of-place and stagey soliloquies, but the twisty-turny Al Swearengen politics and Timothy Olyphant's stoic Moustache of Truth and Justice are always watchable.

At least when it's a million degrees here I don't have to wear an 8-piece suit. Also, we bathe. 

Changes and alterations to the list:

• I gave up on Undeclared. I think I was probably expecting too much of it. None of the characters rang true for me, and it felt mean and awkward rather than hilarious. This opinion makes me so uncool, I can barely stand to look at myself.
• Have rented Battlestar Galactica. Critics seem to like it, but I have never met an actual person who watches it. Also, if you could combine Battlestar Galactica and Deadwood, you would get Firefly… and that's close enough for me.
• Sports Night, Wonderfalls, Jeeves and Wooster — still to come, I hope. Though I have to finish Lost and maybe season 2 of Deadwood first.
• There are too many seasons of Six Feet Under to catch up on now. I'm sorry. I'm trying to stick to things that have two-or-fewer seasons, so I don't get myself into any ugly, friendship-ruining Buffy-type situations. Maybe some other summer.

It sounds like I'm watching TV all the time, but I'm really not. (Except for that one day.) I'm also reading this book, which sounds like a certain other show, but is its own thing and such a good book it's painful to put down.

Having a marginally-read blog (no, we don't know where you can find LC's headband) is an awesome responsibility. I've been looking all over the Internets for something to reccomend to our dozens of readers, and so far I've felt like a failure. Sometimes I find things that are marginally amusing, but mostly it's junk. And if you wanted to watch junk you could follow those links your aunt sent you. However, last night just as I was going to bed (around 6pm Eastern Time; I live in the future) I followed a link from Kat Denning's blog, the young actress who played Bob Saget's daughter in Raising Dad (No, the blog's not on my reading list, I was looking for Bob Saget info) who mentioned this guy named Ze. "Who is this Ze?" I sleepily asked myself.

Well, his name is Ze Frank, and he's a bonafide Internet genius. He was first Famous on the Internet in 2001 when he made a silly invite for a party called How to Dance Properly. It was forwarded 7 billion times and a star was born. He went on to make a bunch of other silly things which were good, but not necessarily genius. But this March he started a daily Internet broadcast which is like nothing I've seen before. It takes the talking-head cult-of-personality popularized by assholes like Bill O'Reilly to a whole new level, except he uses it for good instead of evil.

He stares directly into the camera with his mismatched pupils. He comments on the news from a decidedly liberal (in the dictionary sense of the word) perspective. He explains complicated concepts as if you were five years old, but in a good way. He also makes a lot of poop jokes. He's amassed a legion of adoring fans who comment madly, organized an exhaustive wiki including transcripts of every show, and have twice authored portions of the show themselves. At the moment they're playing a game of chess destined to last for months. And it's all centered around a goofy guy in Brooklyn who talks to the camera.

I love it.