Are you Fat, Bald, or just plain Stupid?

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What the hell happened to TV?

I grew up watching Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Jeffersons and Alice. The comedy writing was elevated by shows like Cheers, M*A*S*H, and eventually Seinfeld and Friends.

I knew the characters, rooted for them in their fictional lives, and laughed and cried with them to the bitter end.

Last night, my wife convinced me to watch "Are you Smarter than a fifth-grader" with two of my boys - we divided the boys up and played along with some of the dumbest son-of-a-bitches that were ever granted a few minutes of TV time.

I must say - I didn't miss even a single question - and neither did my wife or sons (okay, I'm lying, my wife missed a couple, but I'm trying to be gracious).

Anyway, I didn't really enjoy the hour - there were just seven questions asked in a full hour. The rest of the time was spent in mindless chatter - back and forth silliness about how stupid the contestants were compared to the 5th graders - and a lot of lights and noise.

A couple of days before, I was flipping through the channels and saw the weigh-in on the biggest loser show - tell me, why should I care if Matilda went from 4 spins to 3 spins - and then cried because she didn't think she'd be able to maintain. As the great Howard Stern once said to a gravity-challenged caller - "Just stop eating - just because you have a whole in the center of your face, you don't have to try and fill it."

Perhaps, I'm a tad insensitive these days - I'm really not in real life, but I wonder why we need to see anonymous people struggling with their problems in a game-show format. If you aren't smarter than a 5th grader - here's an idea - read a book.

If you can't drop those extra pounds - spin in a circle until you feel like you're going to pass out, or better yet, join a gym.

And yet, what do I do? I'm thinking of making my own show - I'll call it - "Are you balder than a cueball." We can all sit around telling each other stories about how cool it was when we had hair to twirl.

I gotta' go - I hear the Deal or No Deal music starting - it's time to take that page from my grandfather and root, root, root against the stupid, anonymous son-of-a-bitches.

By the way if you saw 5th grader last night - what in the hell is a predicate? I'm a writer - and me and little Nathaniel both blew that one.

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