Best Misuse of "Literally" This Week

Dana Stevens on 2007 film Bug:

It was one of those movies that's too small and too odd to make anyone's 10-best list but one that quite literally bored its way into the viewer's brain.

Yes, I realize a case could be made against it if you interpret brain as synonymous with mind, but shut up.

Why Juno Sucks Balls, And Why That Matters

Every ten years or so, a bad movie gets good reviews. And I don't mean that Bratz: The Movie scored a 21 on Metacritic when it deserved to get a -999, which would mean that by federal law everyone involved in its creation can be murdered without any legal repercussions whatsoever. No, I'm talking about movies like Titanic, a lumbering behemoth of a film that managed to gross 40 trillion million dollars, mostly because 12-year old girls saw it over and over again, attempting to imprint Leonardo DiCaprio's youthful face so deeply onto their minds eyes' that every unconscious moment would be dominated by his mien, like Gregory's face spanning the world entire at the conclusion of The Man Who Was Thursday.

Juno is another such film, our generation's Titanic, just like Paris Hilton is our generation's Marilyn Monore, or Gulf War II is our generation's Gulf War I. And like our American forefathers, when confronted with a Saddam Hussein, a Paris Hilton, or a Diablo Cody/Jason Reitman, it's our solemn duty to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats. Or to write scathing blotrys that will cause the targets of their soul-crushing invective to realize their own stunning, insurmountable inadequacies and to then slit their own throats. Information Age and all that.

I'd like to begin by laying out a few facts.

As of my writing, Juno has amassed 100% positive reviews of Rotten Tomatoes' "Cream of the Crop" critics, ostensibly a collection of the most prestigious movie reviewers in film criticism-dom. It also has a score of 8.4, which suggests that the reviews are not mildly salutory, but overwhelmingly positive. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men has a rating of 90%, and a score of 8.2.

No Country For Old Men is a searing, gorgeously composed meditation on the nature of evil, the inescapability of fate, and the inability of good men to overcome either. It is best thing the Coens have made since Fargo, and is one of the great films of the year, if not the decade.

Juno is a twee vector for Diablo Cody's "wit" and "humor" masquerading as a dramedy about a teenage girl's pregnancy.

These are the facts.

I don't want to rage apoplectic about the failure of Rotten Tomatoes or of film criticism in general. Metacritic, another review compilation site, is considerably less sanguine about Juno's quality. But Juno's success is real--it's been nominated for three Golden Globes, including Best Comedy and Best Screenplay, and is apparently a serious Oscar-contender. And I do think that Juno's ascendance is indicative of larger trends at work in the world.

"We're drowning in quirk," Michael Hirschorn pronounced in The Atlantic a few months ago. Hirschorn was too indiscriminate in his condemnation, lumping The Royal Tenenbaums and Flight of the Conchords together with cultural obscenities like Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite. But he's onto something. He's right to be skeptical of the kind of aesthetic that satisfies itself with reference and nostalgia, with what the British would call twee, dainty affectations that signify nothing.

The cynical emptiness at the heart of movies like Juno speaks to the triumph of a kind of fakery that's become endemic to a lot of artistic endeavors. Yes, all art is artifice, but the good stuff gets at the humanity, the hidden realities, of the situation. That's why in Pulp Fiction (Tarantino is a writer who specializes in successful stylization and who I've seen compared to Diablo Cody more than once) two hitmen can have a conversation about hamburgers--because what they're talking about is genuinely sort of interesting (of course they can't call in a quarter-pounder in a country that uses the metric system!), and because we might imagine that hitmen who've committed countless crimes before would talk about empty frivolities on their way to another hit. Or take this exchange between Butch and his girlfriend:

BUTCH
I'm sorry, baby-love.

FABIAN
(crying)
You were gone so long, I started to
think dreadful thoughts.

BUTCH
I'm sorry I worried you, sweetie.
Everything's fine. Hey, how was
breakfast?

FABIAN
(waterworks drying a
little)
It was good --

BUTCH
-- did you get the blueberry
pancakes?

FABIAN
No, they didn't have blueberry
pancakes, I had to get buttermilk
-- are you sure you're okay?

BUTCH
Baby-love, from the moment I left
you, this has been without a doubt
the single weirdest day of my
entire life. Climb on an' I'll
tell ya about it.

Fabian does climb on. Butch STARTS her up.

FABIAN
Butch, whose motorcycle is this?

BUTCH
It's a chopper.

FABIAN
Whose chopper is this?

BUTCH
Zed's.

FABIAN
Who's Zed?

BUTCH
Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead.

The exchange is stylized, it's not realistic (how could it be, really, since it follows a scene in which Butch slices up a couple of redneck rapists with a samurai sword), but it still manages to engage with real situations and emotions, as Butch desperately tries to talk his flighty girlfriend into coming with him without asking too many questions. Tarantino's dialogue sparkles because he consciously juxtaposes the absurd with the mundane, and finds humanity and humor in both. That's where the comedy comes from, why pancakes are funny, and why Tarantino deserves credit as a stylish writer.

Juno's dialogue isn't funny because it's phoney. Look at this exchange from early on in Juno:

ROLLO, the eccentric drugstore clerk, sneers at Juno from
behind the counter. He wears a polyester uniform vest.

ROLLO
Well, well. If it isn’t MacGuff the
Crime Dog! Back for another test?

JUNO
I think the last one was defective.
The plus sign looked more like a
division sign.

Rollo regards her with intense skepticism.

JUNO
I remain unconvinced.

Rollo pulls the bathroom key out of reach.

ROLLO
This is your third test today, Mama
Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no doubt
about it!

An eavesdropping TOUGH GIRL wearing an oversized jacket and
lots of makeup gapes at Juno from the beauty aisle.

TOUGH GIRL
Three times? Oh girl, you are way
pregnant. It’s easy to tell. Is
your nipples real brown?

A pile of stolen COSMETICS falls out of the girl’s jacket and
clatters to the floor.

TOUGH GIRL
Balls!

Juno crosses and crosses her legs awkwardly, hopping. It’s
obvious she has to use the bathroom urgently.

ROLLO
Maybe you’re having twins. Maybe
your little boyfriend’s got mutant
sperms and he knocked you up twice!

JUNO
Silencio! I just drank my weight in
Sunny D. and I have to go, pronto.

Why is Rollo so antagonistic? There's no hint that he has any kind of prior relationship with Juno. Instead we're left to conclude that we're deep in the territory of Quirk-Land, a kind of twisted Fairy realm populated by impossibly verbose pixie girls and angry drugstore clerks and stepmoms with oh-so-random predilictions for cutting pictures of dogs out of magazines, where the rivers flow with Sunny Delight and the ubiquitous chords of cloying indie bands fill the air.

How else to explain Juno's familiarity with Soupy Sales (the only person I know who knows who Soupy Sales is is my 60-year old father), or with Thunderbirds? Who, indeed, is apparently such a wit that she has the presence of mind to make a Thunderbirds reference just as her water breaks? That moment, in fact, nicely encapsulates Juno's dual failures: a complete lack of authenticity coupled with a tin-ear for comedy; making references to mid 60s puppet shows is not inherently funny. Over and over again, Cody mistakes reference or inappropriate explictness (nipples! pregnancy! eggo preggo!) for comedy.

Juno judiciously avoids any engagement with reality. It carefully sidesteps any hint of the extreme strains her tiny body must be undergoing--Juno carries her child as lightly as, well, a fat suit. It dances around the social consequences of being pregnant and in high school. It teeters dangerously close to genuine drama with the strange, uncomfortable relationship between Jason Bateman and Juno, but then backs away at the last second. And yes, certainly, of course, it stays far far away from examining Juno's decision to carry the pregnancy in the first place-- the burden of that decision is passed off on a suitably lame (read Asian) pro-life protester and another round of "comedy" from the inappropriately explicit abortion clinic front desk clerk.

All that would be perfectly OK if Juno's ambitions were purely comedic...but they're not, and anyway, the "comedy" is mostly contained in inane, artificial lines like, "Honest to Blog." Honest to Blog? Really? Not only does no one talk like that, no one wants to talk like that. Anyone who did talk like that would be taken out and shot. And I would be glad that they had been shot. Whoever did the shooting would receive a medal of some kind, and a delicious roast ham.

So what does Juno's ascendence mean for you and me? I hesitate to use the success of the latest flavor of the month to extrapolate broad social trends, but I do think movies like Juno suggest the triumph of easy laughs and unearned bathos over genuine humor and hard-won emotion. It's all style over substance, a kind of carefully manufactured reality, carefully crafted to stimulate without demanding anything of the audience other than that they laugh and cry on cue, when the film says that it's being funny or moving without ever actually being either. In its fakery it's not entirely unlike, say, a certain screenwriter with a catchy pseudonym and a manufactured resume involving a trumped-up stripping career which just happened, purely by accident mind you, to be parlayed into a successful blog and an an adoring press junket.

There's a brief little moment in Juno that threatens to blow the whole farce wide open, to expose the charade. It's gone before it really registers, but it surprised me, and stuck with me. As Juno calls the clinic to set up the abortion on her silly hamburger-shaped phone, she says, "What was that? I’m sorry, I’m on my hamburger phone and it’s kind of awkward to talk on. It’s really more of a novelty than a functional appliance."

That's about right.

Now honestly, Seth Rogen isn't really that bad looking

Judd Apatow's latest film Knocked Up is concerned with a young man, played by Seth Rogen, and a young woman, played by Katherine Heigl, who inadvertantly create the greatest miracle of all (life) when Seth's character fails to enscabbard his sword in a fit of drunken passion.

Seth Rogen is not a beautiful man. Indeed, the especially ungenerous among you might even call him unattractive. To be sure, he is not in the same league as, say, Rock Hudson or Ramon Navarro. The movie's posters play this up. To wit:

Even so, I would argue that Rogen's slightly disheveled appearance and his bemused expression, as much as his objective physical attractiveness, combine to create the humor in the question "What if this guy got you pregnant?"

In reading the critical response to Knocked Up, I've come across an interesting thing. While the movie is almost universally praised, Mr. Rogen is treated, not merely as the less attractive of the fictional couple, but as something of an ogre, the beast to Katerine Heigl's beauty, to borrow a tired analogy. For example, Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times opines:

Is this what it's come to for the youth of today? The result of all Facebook and no face-to-face? Because there once was a time, long ago, when to get these two together, you'd have had to maroon them on the Blue Lagoon.

The hopelessly out of touch reference to Facebook aside (if anything, that website's picture functionalities invite even more nitpicking of appearance than ever before), Ms. Chocano's comments are clearly unfair, and intended to hurt. And really, the Blue Lagoon? That reference makes no sense because both Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins were of roughly equal hotness; they probably would have hooked up in real life. A much better comparison would have been to 2000's Cast Away, in which an isolated and psychotic Tom Hanks becomes convinced that he is the last man on earth and thus is forced to make love to a Wilson, a volleyball, in order to repopulate the earth with human/volleyball superhybrids.

Similarly, Slate's Dana Stevens comments

"What motivates Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl of Grey's Anatomy), a successful, self-possessed, and officially hot reporter for the E! network, to have drunken sex with Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), an unemployed schlub who lives in the Valley with four Neanderthal buddies (Martin Starr, Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, and Jonah Hill)? Don't get me wrong, I love funny Jewish guys with curly hair and low self-esteem(hi, sweetie!), but this is not a sociologically credible hookup...it's impossible not to take this mismatch as a sheer plot contrivance, a male fantasy a la According to Jim.

I expect that when Dana Stevens came home after writing this review, her fat face had a bone crunching collision with Mr. Mordechai "Macabee" Steven's fist.

Not sociologically credible? I'll show you not sociologically credible, you two-bit whore:

Salman Rushdie was recently sued for divorce, but my understanding is that his penis was so massive that it caused Mrs. Rushdie considerable discomfort during the physical act of making love.

A mismatched couple? Inconceivable! That's a gross violation of the rules of good relationship movies, in which the partners are always perfectly suited for one another and there's no room for humor or drama at all. A plot contrivance providing the impetus for a movie's story? Unheard of! For other examples of this, see every movie ever made.

I don't know what According to Jim is but...hang on I'm looking it up.

Okay, first of all, I don't know why the first fictional example of the schlub/beauty pairing Dana could think of was an ABC sitcom starring Jim Belushi. Has anyone ever seen this show ever? Has anyone even heard of it? Does Dana Stevens watch this show in earnest, cuddled up next to her whipped "low self-esteem" boytoy? How did her brain even think of making this comparison?

Secondly, the comparison falls apart when you consider that Courtney Thorne-Smith, the ostensible beauty to Belushi's beast, is actually a soul-devouring Gorgonlike creature of some kind:


The lowest blow of all comes from The New Yorker's David Denby who writes:

Heigl has golden skin, blond hair, a great laugh. She’s so attractive a person that, at the beginning of the movie, you wince every time Rogen touches her.

Wow. Ouch. One wonders what Mssr. Denby must look like, if he is such a connoisseur of beautiful women that he cannot stand to see them sullied by the unclean touch of such inferior physical specimens as Mr. Rogen.

Oh wait, I forgot. The wonder of the Internet allows me to summon up photographs of people and mock them at will.


Hmm. All I can conclude is that unless Mrs. Denby is, in fact, an actual, literal cow or at least some form of Ungulate, Mr. Denby himself must shudder (in disgust) every time he touches her. Because boy howdy, that pig ain't winning any prizes.

In summary, Seth Rogen isn't really that bad looking. If Knocked Up features the most implausible movie couple critics see this year, they should consider themselves lucky.

Help, I have a Serious Disability!:
A Photo Essay

Some people can't discern colors. Some people have no legs. Some people are retarded. I can't tell if a man is attractive or not. It's a serious problem.

To wit, Daniel Craig, the world's newest James Bond, is, I am told by respected authorities who are in a position to know these things, not attractive.


Moreover:


What does this mean? What do women look for in men? Am I more attractive than Daniel Craig? I am the kingshit of all men? Am I a goddamn Adonis? I didn't used to think so. But now, I'm thinking, maybe! Yeah! Maybe I am good looking! You be the judge:


Also, the guy who played Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice?



So, to reiterate:


So, I guess I don't really have a disability so much as a smokin bod and the kind of face that launches ships. If the Greeks were gay. Which they totally were.

I Think it's Kind of Weird When Your Career is Entirely Based on Someone Else's Career

What I mean, for example, is the character Steve Carrell plays in Little Miss Sunshine. He's the second most foremost Proust scholar in the United States. But no matter how good he is, not matter how penetrating his scholarship is, no matter what Proust-related revelations he brings to light, he'll always be not as good as Proust. Because he's just following in his footsteps. Just documenting and analyzing the works of someone who came before him. His entire life is in his shadow.

This applies to more than just fictional characters. Take this friendly fellow:No, no that's not Saddam Hussein, friends. It's Jerry Haleva, who played Saddam Hussein in Hot Shots. He also played Saddam in such notable films as Hot Shots Part Deux, The Big Lebowski, and The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest (but he was just a Saddam hologram in that one). In all, Jerry has played Saddam in six films. This is the only character he has ever played. He is famous, to the degree that he is famous, because of Saddam.

And now Saddam's dead.

So where does that leave Jerry?

Boned, that's where.

He's fucked. Do you think George Bush thought about how Gulf War II would affect Jerry? Probably not. But it did. It radically changed his life. How's he supposed to play Saddam now? It would just be kind of sad. The guy was living in a spider hole for God's sake (the real Saddam, not Jerry; Jerry lives in Sacramento, probably in a house).

This is the reason I'm against the death penalty. There all these unforeseen consequences that occur when you kill someone. Break Saddam Hussein's neck in Iraq, and 10,000 miles away in California a poor hardworking Joe just like you or me is suddenly out on the street because Saddam's more pathetic than comical.

That's why Saddam should have lived. Not for his own sake. But for Jerry's. Next time, George W Bush, think about Jerry before implementing radical foreign policy.

Does the LGBT Community have something to do with Sandwiches?

Well, does it?

Law and Order Hoedown

The television series Law and Order has been on the air for 16 years. Kids who are currently juniors in High School have never lived on an Earth devoid of Law and Order. And these neophytes should thank God (or more accurately Dick Wolfe) that they were never made to glimpse the terror of a world without Law and Order. But I, I remember those black years. Before Dick Wolfe created Law and Order and introduced it to an unsuspecting public in 1990, the world was a dark place, ruled by barbarians and tyrant-kings who jealousy guarded their petty fiefdoms, just as a half-starved dog rabidly protects a splinter of bone or scrap of meat. Young women were little more than chattel for the amusement of those cruel sybarites who built their holdings on the back of a prostrate mankind, and young men were, at best, grist to be pulverized on the millstone of war.

Fortunately, all that ended on September 13, 1990. On that day, Our Lord Jerry Orbach descended from the Heavens and cast the opressors from their high thrones, and a great cry went up from mankind: "Praise Jerry Orbach, for He is Good." And then the Lord Jerry Orbach spaketh unto the people : "Hearken unto me, my Chosen People, for I am Lord. From this day forth, never shall mankind contend with kings and emperors. For behold, I grant unto you the twin pillars of Liberal Democracy: Law and Order. And that you shall never stray from this path, I shall send to you my most beloved sons: Chris Noth and Sam Waterston. Together, they shall be guarantors and bastions of Law and Order, and never shall the darkness of tyranny obscure the light of justice. Praise unto me."

Sure, some people may point out that the original Senior Homicide Detective was portrayed by George Dzundza, and that Jerry Orbach didn't take up the signature role until the third season. And these apostates may further blaspheme that Michael Moriarty was the Executive ADA until the fifth season. What these heathens fail to comprehend is that the historical record means nothing, NOTHING compared to the Awesome Truth of Our Lord Jerry Orbach's Word. Thus, into the world came Law and Order, and it was good.

And now what you've all been waiting for, an examination of the hotness of the show's various ADAs, and the degree of shame which I would feel upon sleeping with them.

(Note that the ADAs will be listed in chronological order. A higher shame rating means it is more shameful to sleep with that person).


1. Paul Robinette AKA Richard Brooks
Now, Paul Robinette has the distinction of being the only MALE Assistant District Attorney, as well as the only BLACK Assistant District Attorney, as well as the only COMPETENT Assistant District Attorney. Coincidence? Unlikely.

However, this is blotry isn't about competence. It's about hotness, which, in the final analysis, is a far more important quality. I mean, do you think George Washington would have become God-King of America if he hadn't been the most handsome devil this side of Alexander Hamilton? I think not my friends. I think not. GW was six foot-five inches of pure muscle and bone, a towering colossus of a man with a steely glint in his eye that bespake a cold, hard intelligence that made men weep and women weak in the knees.

But I digress. We're talking about Paul Robinette, who, I must admit, find it difficult to write anything about. That's because I'm not a gay, and I can't discern male attractiveness. Paul Reubens vs. Brad Pitt? Um, roughly equal? See? I can't tell. So I'm hardly qualified to judge. But, Monsiuer Robinette is black (last time I checked). So he must have a behemoth schlong. And he did sport a stylish flat top during his run on the show.


Shame Factor: 5 (+7 for it being a homosexual act, -4 for being black, +2 for the inevitable cuddling that would happen afterwards)

2. Claire Kincaid AKA Jill Hennessy
Claire was a goddamn vision of a woman, almost competent (such is the weakness of her sex), beautiful, and stylish. So she let McCoy violate the consecrated temple of her body with his distgusting, twisted appendages now and then. So what? She was beautiful and YOU KILLED HER Jerry Orbach. Your drunken shenanigans forced her to drive you home that cold November night when she was struck head on by a drunk driver and her brains were sent flying through the shattered ruin of the windshield.

Oh well, you are LORD, and I am sure it was part of your divine plan.

Although she is dead and gone, her spirit is not forgotten. I hear Jill Hennessy was in some program called Crossing Jordan, which I think was a reality television show where people would do something to piss Jill Hennessy off and then would have to try to survive her attempts to kill them for the rest of the show. I mean, the premise was sound. I never saw it though.

Claire was the only woman I'll ever really love, but I'm grateful every day for the little time we had together, Thursdays at 8, 1993-1996. Gone, but not forgotten.


Shame Factor: -999 (-1000 FOR I DON'T CARE WHO KNOWS I LOVE THIS WOMAN, +1 for being a corpse)

3. Jamie Ross AKA Carey Lowell
I don't remember all that much about Jamie. She wasn't on the show that long, but I guess my most lasting impression was that of a male to female transsexual. They never really went into it all that much in the show, but c'mon, the short haircut, the complete lack of sexual interest in Man-God Jerry Orbach, the name Jaime? I know she was on the show during a less enlightened time in the history of the United States, but they sure laid the subtext on pretty thick. I think by the end of her run we were all expecting her to whip it out and beat McCoy around the head and shoulders a little bit. I sure was.

Or if not a transsexual at least a lesbian. I know Carey's married to Richard Gere, but I'm pretty sure he has a vagina. Or at least a mangina. Same thing.


Shame Factor: 4 (+10 for being born a man, -8 for being made a woman, +2 for still having a penis)

4. Abbie Carmichael AKA Angie Harmon
Abbie is widely considered the "hottest" or "most desirable" of the Assistant District Attorneys through which McCoy has rammed his geriatric member through the long roll of the years.

These Abbie Backers may have a point. After all, who could resist those long bronze legs, that smoky voice, those dark mysterious eyes?

Well I could, that's who! Sure, she was a super babe, but Angie Harmon was on Baywatch Nights. Now, I've never seen Baywatch Nights. Hell, I've never even seen Baywatch original flavor. But I have every confidence in the world that Baywatch Nights sucked, and I defy any person on earth to say otherwise. The kind of people who were fans of Baywatch Nights are like Jesus, or fans of Carson Daily. They exist on paper, but they're not really real.

Haha just kidding. There are people who actually like Carson Daily.

Ha, gotcha again. Seriously, no one likes Carson.

Ok, being serious for a second though, Jesus. You know I love You.

Anyway, Abbie was a conservative on the show, which I guess meant we were supposed to think it was cute when she was FOR the government keeping its hands on her body. Well, I thought it was hot anyway. She was also for brutalizing criminals and keeping large caliber firearms in the hands of children and the elderly. In other words, the perfect woman. Except her voice sounded like someone crammed a pregnant frog with bronchitis down her throat, and then the frog gave birth and all the baby frogs got bronchitis.

In the end, she had the the 'tude, and the politics, but not the heart. She did have the boobs though. And the legs. And the boobs.


Shame Factor: -4 (-6 for being pretty hot; +2 for sounding like Burgess Meredith on two packs a day)

5. Serena Southerlyn AKA Elisabeth Rohm
Serena vas a gud German girl from ze outskirts of Dusseldorf, ya? She fought ze Soviet dogs tooth un nail mit her disease ridden gerbarmutter un her venereal diseases.

Actually, that was the actress who played Serena Southerlyn. Serena herself was, I don't think, ever actually identified as a German girl, but with those sky blue eyes, strong cheekbones, and yellow hair it's not hard to believe she's descended from Hitler's Aryan Ubermensch.

Serena was widely considered the most wooden of the ADAs, and not in the way you're thinking. Her delivery was stilted. She couldn't emote to save her life. I made a diagram to help illustrate my point:


Anyway, she was pretty good looking in a wholesome European girl sort of way, I suppose. And she wasn't as incompetent as Abbie "Slept my way through law school" Carmichael. In her final episode, when Fred Thompson fired her, she blurted out "Is this because I'm a lesbian?" Now, this surprised me because I thought all lesbians had short hair and wore plaid. I think she was just claiming persecuted minority status in order to get some leverage because I am sure zat ze gud German girls are all willing to procreate mit ze gud German boys for ze glory of ze Faderland.


Shame Factor: -1 (-4 for pure Aryan blood, +6 for wooden acting, -3 for making it with a lesbian)

6. Alexandra Borgia AKA Annie Parisse
This feisty brunette from down under was appointed as McCoy's ADA after Southerlyn's lesbian explosion. However, she quickly found herself under intense scrutiny from New York's Bar after...

God, I'm just making all this up. She was only on the show for a year, and I didn't really watch that season, but based on her looks I'm going to say by-the-book professional with a softer side that only a few who are close to her get to see. Very capable, but constantly feels the need to prove herself in a world dominated by a male hierarchy.

Am I right? Who knows. She was gone before we had a chance to really get to know her, brutally beaten and stuffed in a garbage can. (Really, look it up on wikipedia).


Shame Factor: -3? (-5 for being pretty cute, but +2 for being dead)

7. Consuela "Connie" Rubirosa AKA Alana de la Garza
All indications are that Connie Rubirosa is hot, but I have a weird thing about being attracted to Mexican women because I feel like somehow it might be some weird deep seated thing with my Mexican mother, so I try to avoid it where possible. Still, she seems pretty attractive. Objectively.

I think she's a half-breed though, because her large forehead and enormous eyes lead me to believe she's some sort of human-alien hybrid, sent to Earth to seduce men into getting jiggy with it.

Now, in general, I'm a bit iffy about letting minorities into the legal system. Sure, Paul worked out, but he was a man. A big black man. But these Latina/Hispanic/Mexican/Spanish women can get pretty uppity I hear. She's only been on the show a few months, so we'll have to wait and see. We'll just have to wait and see.


Shame Factor: 4 (-3 for being cute, +8 for maybe being some kind of weird Freudian thing with my mother, -1 for having "de la Garza" as a last name)

So, in the end, Claire wins the day.

Praise be unto Jerry Orbach, the Father, Chris Noth the Son, and Sam Waterston the Holy Spirit.

Amen.