Is this sexy? That unnatural hand position on the tie? That looks like kitty paws, and that the model’s about to lick them and smooth back her hair or something?

It is? Really? Fine.

I have to agree with Jezebel that this has a whiff of hoax about it — the captions look off, in a way I can’t put my finger on — but if it is real, yowza. Bad news for my marriage, one way or another. If this is true…

…then I’m the dude and Dave’s the lady. Whereas if this is true…

…shit, we’re both chicks! Eh, it’s not all bad.

Hey, do you guys want to see why I’m not going to be buying Baked Lay’s, Flat Earth, or Smartfood? Check it out!

I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Women’s History Month than with the kickoff of an ad campaign so sexist and retrograde that it would be too hackneyed to show up in a “Cathy.” Like, I know that at least a couple of women had to be involved in this atrocity, to do the voices of the “characters,” but any woman who may have worked on writing it or drawing it or conceiving it in any way is a complete Uncle Tom of womanhood. Appalling.

Apparently if we start out drunkenly watching the South Park marathon tomorrow night, we’re going to get cut off in the middle, because Time Warner is dropping all its Viacom stations at midnight? I know Nikki Finke is often right about these things, but if this is really going to happen like twenty-six hours from now, doesn’t it feel like something we’d have heard about already?

But assuming it’s true, my first reaction was, “Oh shit, now how will I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?”

And then I remembered, “Online, at my desk, the day after they air, duh.”

And then I remembered, “Oh shit, Degrassi!”

And then I went and looked and saw we’re cool there, too. So do your worst, media megacorps. You’ve insulated me well from your possibly imaginary pissing contests.

UPDATE: Okay, I guess it’s probably true. Boo.

As the Prop 8/marriage equality fight rages on here in America (latest national events here, and New York State-specific info here), the latest publicity effort…totally made me cry so much today that I had to turn it off because it’s inappropriate to make such a mess of oneself at one’s workplace. But you should still check out the Courage Campaign’s Flickr slideshow of families affected by the Prop 8 passage in California. Won’t the homophobes PLEASE think of the children?!

If you haven’t listened to it yet, it’s here. What I don’t get is why Dave decided to act like he’s Dagwood Bumstead all of a sudden. Never once has he expressed any annoyance about my purse purchases unless I insist upon making them when he’s around, which I don’t, because I don’t need him to know how much my shit costs. (If he asks: I don’t own anything worth more than $15.) And would Dave rather I just made do with this thing? (You guys, how fug is that? To give you an idea of who they think is buying it, the ad aired during New York Undercover on Sleuth.)

Oprah’s whole shtick, pretty much, is pretending to be a regular woman even though she is a billionaire; it’s why her show has gotten particularly hilarious lately now that the economy’s falling apart and she acts like she’s all concerned about her budget. But, as The Frisky pointed out quite nicely today, the one facet of her persona that actually rings true is her struggle with her weight. It’s the one challenge Oprah can’t buy her way out of. Even if she hires an organic vegan chef, she can decide she wants a pail of cheese grits and fire him. She can hire the ass-kickingest trainer on the planet, but if that trainer tells Oprah to switch out the five-pound weights for the tens, she can just refuse to do it. As much as I can say that I wouldn’t have a problem if I could afford to hire people to keep me on track, it evidently isn’t true, because if Oprah can’t get on top of her disordered eating, probably no one can.

So maybe Oprah shouldn’t have set herself up as the exemplar of living one’s best life? I’m just saying.

Anyway, I sincerely wish Oprah the best of luck in taking back control over her weight, because it’s really goddamn hard. But this is a bad way to start:

You guys, how Photoshopped is the Oprah on the left? Her belly was never that flat. Frankly, I watched the show last week; I think the Oprah on the right has been slimmed down a little too. And given how many times she’s had bra-fitting episodes, I seriously don’t know how she is STILL wearing the wrong size.

This news really unexpectedly bummed me out yesterday: an entire dictionary staff laid off because the publisher can’t compete with online dictionaries? But most online dictionaries suck balls — and don’t get me started on online thesauruses. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary is one of the first reference works I bought when I became self-employed, and the one I brought with me from Toronto when I moved to New York and kept in my office at 30 Rock for spelling emergencies.

Meanwhile, my mom’s old two-volume compact Complete Oxford that had four dictionary pages per tissue-thin page and came with a magnifying glass in a little wee drawer, which fascinated me as a child, was ruined this summer when our basement in Toronto flooded from the record rainfall. Thanks a lot, God.

Like it wasn’t bad enough that I already had so much in common with Sarah Palin — like that our states both have Canada as their next-door neighbour, and that we’re both white women. But now I have to find out she used to play the flute, too, just like I did?

Okay, she didn’t play it just like I did, in the sense that when I did it, I was on-key, I played above a beginner level, and I was never cross-eyed. I also did it while marching, in a marching band, and not in some queer beauty pageant, because ALSO unlike Sarah Palin (then Heath), I was SUPER-COOL.

My sister had her baby. Dave was in Toronto dealing with Glarkware while she did baby things. And my parents were coming back from Karachi for the first time since they’d moved there for Olivia’s 30-day party, and I was already planning to stay in Toronto (and work from here) the whole time they were in town. Ever since we’d found out we wouldn’t be moving out of New York, we’d been talking about redoing the floors and the kitchen, so with the apartment about to be empty for a while, it seemed like a good time to get all that done. Our real estate agent recommended a project manager who would hire the contractors, he came to look at the place and measure it, and by last week we were all systems go. At that time, he mentioned that I would have to stage the apartment — by which he meant clear off the surfaces of all our furniture so that the floor guys could maneuver in there. He recommended getting some banker’s boxes that would be easy to stack and move around. I thought that sounded reasonable — and fortunately, the weekend before I left, Joe would be staying with me for a few days, and I told him he’d have to sing for his supper by helping me pack up the few bookshelves, to which he readily agreed. We finished in half an hour and twelve boxes. What could be easier?

And then, at 5 on Monday (the day before I was to leave), the project manager called back to arrange a time to come pick up the keys. In the course of the conversation, he reminded me about staging the surfaces of the furniture, and “reminded” me that I’d have to empty out the kitchen cabinets as well. And I put that in quotation marks because he hadn’t said a thing about the kitchen before. Now, in retrospect, of course I should have assumed I’d have to pack the kitchen as well, but maybe I thought they showed up with a bunch of Rubbermaid bins and stuck everything on their truck. Or maybe I just didn’t ask because I didn’t want to know the answer. But the upshot was that I had to take Tuesday off, go buy an assload of boxes, and pack up both the kitchen (including all the tchotchkes on top of the cabinets) and everything that was on the floors in the closets (where the floors would also be replaced). It took six hours and forty-two boxes, I did it all myself, and I cursed Dave almost the entire time. I only almost started crying when I had to unhook all the electronics on Dave’s desk and around the TV, because: complicated. But what made me feel better was realizing that since I’d had to pack everything by myself on an inflexible deadline, it will only be fair when we return for Dave to unpack them by himself while I get a massage.