I have noticed an increase in the girth of my local post- men and women, their biomass inching upward and rivaling blue whales, underground mushroom colonies, and redwood fairy rings. I see them waddling down the street, like federal Stay-Puft marshmallow people.

How does the second largest employer in the United States and mover of more than 203 billion yearly mail parcels have fat employees? One only has to recall the most famous postal worker in recent popular culture, Seinfeld's Newman, who personified outsized evil, to understand the obesity problem facing our mailmen.

There was also the notorious Fat Bastard, a delivery man who liked his baby back ribs to excess.

In the real world, Son of Sam David Berkowitz was a Yonkers postal worker who, in addition to killing scores of people on the advice of a dog, also happened to be a paunchy, moonfaced nerd--not morbidly obese, but fat enough to prevent him from making a running escape from slightly less encumbered NYPD.

Are we getting the picture of America's mail men? And it's not just here. The Old Country's got its own Fat Bastards to deal with.

Lazy mail men (like Newman) have been not delivering mail, burning mail, and spending lavishly on Beef Wellington parties for years. Long gone are the days of responsible federal employees feared by dogs and loved by children and married women; today's paunchy postmen are husbands to cats and weird perverts who deliver their cross-country cartons sans clothes.

Unfortunately, there may be more at the heart of our corpulent corps of parceled communication than poor eating habits, lousy work ethic, weird fetishes, and genetic predisposition. The relationship between earnings and weight seem to correlate with the relative mass of a given postal worker.

With Michelle Obama as America's anti-fat Patton, you'd think the Post Office, which enjoys state and local tax free status and billions in reduced loan rates from the federal government, would have a program to help its larger members trim the fat. Given the targeting of school children for healthier lunches and breaks outside from slouching on the video game couch, and given the statistical likelihood that at least 4% of those children will grow up to be postal workers, it might be time to take back the night by taking it out of their asses--literally.

Don't ask me how I ran across (or acrost as they say in my old neighborhood of Redneckia) this amusing, then disturbing, then amusing again graph of common euphemisms and metaphors for lady pinky parts. This is valuable on both a literary and entertainment level, as it provides both adequate ideas for Halloween costumes ("What are you, a clam with a beard? I don't get it.") and awkward dialogue for a teen sex romp:

But I digress. For as much as I enjoy a good entendre-laced holiday or movie experience, it doesn't equal my love of and interest in genital-oriented beautification. Which brings us to Vagazzling. Not many people outside of Jennifer Love Hewitt's circle of friends had heard of vagazzling, and since the demise of Ghost Whisperer and the subsequent lack of caring by anyone in the media (Jennifer Love Who-it--get it?), no doubt vagazzling of the vajayjay would have remained in obscurity, if not for George Lopez.

Ah Lopez. You bring to light the hidden things of the world, like the Second-Coming Jehovah, or Julian Assange.

Vagazzling, aka Glitzing the Slit, aka Glamming the Clam, aka Decking the Halls With Rows of Jewelry, is barely invasive, unlike its less appealing and pricklier cousin, clitoral piercing (and the prick is quite clitoral, as opposed to Daily Kos' assessment of Dennis Kucinich). The basic feature is a genital area that, like the gold fields of San Francisco or Silvio Berlusconi's bordellos, sparkles and shines from rows of tiny jewelry carefully placed into sexy patterns by a vagazzling expert craftperson.

Is it just me, or is this the best thing to happen to the female sex organ since cautionary tales of vagina dentata put the fear of castration upon men who are superstitious about what monster awaited their bedtime frolicking? The new bejeweled woman won't bite. Instead of teeth, we are presented with Swarovski-crystals--jewels covering the jewel, little shiny flowers surrounding The Flower of Power. Nothing to fear here.

Vagazzling highlights the basic differences between men and women. Men have tools. Women have accessories. Which they then accessorize. It's hard to imagine penazzling becoming a rage, though if it did it'd probably look and feel like a tiny--I mean, average--I mean, it's a grower-not-a-shower--medieval mace.

Vagazzling is a welcome mat on the doorstep of the wealthy slut, but I see it, like all celebrity-endorsed clam glam makeovers, trickling down to the lowly and the poor, giving women of all socio-economic strata their own nectar-hole upgrades. After it gets used up by Perez Hilton, we'll see the artistic surge of literary vulva-va-va-voom, Eve Ensler style. From art comes commerce: we'll see vagazzling vending machines next to Best Buy kiosks in airports, lady muffin decor huts next to the sunglass place at local strip malls, and eventually it will pass into the cultural norm, like anal bleaching and voting for Tea Party candidates.

Ladies may balk at what first appears to be a disturbing outbreak of glittering herpes, but if the Lovester covets the femme gems, why shouldn't you?

False pockets, like false doors, documents, and Christs, are an abomination from Satan and must be stopped. When you need a space to hold business cards, pens, singles for the ladies at Live! Nude! Girls!, or just a lonely hand when the requirements of low temperatures force you to protect your digits from the cold or prying creeps who are only interested in your body, pockets are the protectors and keepers of our collective fates.

We place value in the hidden, like Paul's secret shame or a nerd's Nirvana; the promise of a pocket is the promise of protection and preservation. Even lacking possessions, a man's pocket is his own, and is sacrosanct. One feels pockets are needed, even if one has nothing to put in them.

That is why false pockets are so hatefully and morally corrupt. Like the Obama adminstration, false pockets deceive with the promise of openness, but the veneer is painfully and obviously that: a door that opens into a brick wall, a mythical lamp with no genie, an LA street with no drainage.

What is worse is when false pockets aren't actually false at all, but are sown shut. What the hell are we supposed to do with a pocket that's been sown shut? Manufacturers insist the pockets themselves are not false at all, but are merely sown shut for sale to retain shape. I call shenanigans. What shape? It's a pocket, not a balloon animal. A pocket's shape has nothing to do with its opening being shuttered. And in the layman's defense, what other item of clothing requires the systematic destruction of tailoring to enable functionality? It's like requiring the mirror on the Hubble to be scrubbed free of black paint off the facing before using, or putting legal notices in emails.

I suppose the sown pocket prevents wily customers from placing items in the jacket pockets, such as fecal matter or used tissues, but then again, the kind of customers who shop at suit stores aren't typically the kind who also play middle school pranks on suit shop owners.

Cheap suits that feature a Gob (that is, a Poof! cover, AKA a disgraceful illusion) are responsible for thousands of hopeful Turks' diminished hopes and dreams as they dress to impress on a budget, but are met with the futile fingering of a Planned Parenthood Pocket--a foetal fold snuffed shut before it was given a chance to hold something, anything.

Beware the false pockets in your midst, and don't be entrapped by the appearance of a good slot of fabric, lest you be consumed by the Tailor of Justice, the Sew-er and Reaper of Men's Souls.

Image courtesy of Giavasan

Standing ovations are basically an orgy of mutual masturbation, but due to public decency laws have taken the form of, well, standing and clapping. Think about it. Everyone stands at attention, stroking the artists'... egos. It makes you feel good. It makes the performer feel good. Everyone is privy to the happiness and elation of everyone around them, and each also has a private sensation of pleasure, and unless you're doing it wrong, the payoff at the end is a climax of clapping that results in the orgasmic encore...

Okay, so the metaphor is a bit stretched. So try this on for size.

Standing ovations suck. They sap the event of its spontaneity, since they are now the par dessert of any social evening; they are expected and even anticipated, and thus disingenuous. What once was a signal that the audience recognized and rewarded the impressive talents of the evening has become passé, empty of meaning and divorced of all original intent.

It is the stillborn fetus of the evening; yes, it comes out, but it is pretty bloody useless as well as tragic.

The theory goes, standing ovations are the mark of respect by the audience on behalf of the performer for an unusually brilliant performance. But in this age of Twitter and dwindling newspaper revenues and burst housing bubbles, the fact that anyone even came to the performance should be a mark of respect and admiration. When ticket sales for philharmonics, operas, and theatrical performances have plummeted and funding for the arts has dwindled into a wasted uranium slag stream, it would seem the occasion for standing ovation should be the audience actually showing up, and if anyone should stand, it would be the performers, and they should do so as the audience enters the auditorium. The correct accolade should be, "Thanks for showing up and subsidizing us!"

But that's pretending there's worth in the audience, a sad myth entrapping both sides. There is no worth in the people filling the seatholes of the latest rendering of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 or the laughing hoi polloi at Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Standing ovations tax the already burdened audience member, who must contend with his own cultural ignorance as he tries to ascertain whether the performance was A) actually good; and B) that he understood it. On top of that, the ignoramus is now faced with the frightening prospect: Do I stand with the rest of the sheeple or should I sit and proffer my disdain for outmoded social conventions and earn the ire of my fellow attendees? It is a quandary that would vex even the most cultured patron of the arts, much less the brainless masses who dress to impress and show the world they are aware because they read the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times.

What's even worse is the ovation grudgingly given by an audience too dumb or too bored but also too cowardly not to shut the hell up and just leave. When the performance is not the greatest thing since that threesome in Cancun you had in college, then half-heartedly clapping a few times isn't doing anyone any favors.

Ovations should be returned to the place of ancient but outdated traditions, alongside the sacrificial virgins and Masses spoken only in Latin. Stand up to this stupid custom by staying in your seat. Unless you just don't know what the hell is going on.

The exclamation was once reserved for moments of surprise, exhibitions of exhilaration, outbursts and ejaculations (the verbal kind). Now it's used to express mere interest or even to show that you've actually paid attention. You see it in emails and text messaging and tweets--microbursts of information; "Sounds great! I'll meet you there!"; "Thanks for letting me know. I'll let you know how it goes!"; "Have a great day!"

The exclamation point has become the crutch of inauthentic people; the point is to show that you are someone you are not, saying things you don't believe. It is the textual penis raping our language and violating us at the end of every 140 characters.

We are so starved for attention and require validation for every syllable we utter, print, or publish; our reaction to the passe and banal is feigned excitement and urgency we neither feel nor believe in, yet expect others to feel for us and our mundane matters. When we respond to the trivial, we want others to believe we are interested, but the medium seems engineered to transmit little sentiment, so we compensate by adding pomp and flair to what is and should be a vanilla reply. The spurious dash confers sensation onto mere information.

A common defense of the orthographic excess is that the exclamation point helps convey friendliness. "Thanks!" is friendlier than "Thanks." To that I say, what made friendliness the arbiter of transient information exchanges? If anything, the exclamation adds to the information processing power requirement, the excitement increases energy usage, an unnecessary waste in this conservation age. And at what point does my exclamation become so overused as to become irrelevant or ironic? Are we so impoverished by the efficiency of the medium that we must feed it Twinkies?

I won't go so far as to equate our national obsession with the textual bang and sex--that's a job for the anthro-apologists. But think about these bursts of information we exchange--tweets and text messages are like the eponymous quickie: short and sometimes sweet, but almost never foundational and nearly always forgettable. We rarely ascribe much value to the average transmission. Our insertion of the exclamation point is like the end of the conquest portion of a short and torrid affair.

Think of the euphemisms for the exclamation point. Smash. Bang. Words of destruction, of pain, of loud noises and painful deliveries. And we can't just say something. We have to shout; we have to be louder than anyone else, even when we're replying to someone.

While these display more excitement than the response warrants, isn't it clear that what's driving these unnecessary spikes of textual adrenaline isn't actual excitement, but the pathological need to be needed? Aren't these ejaculatory points the defining feature of our ADHD culture, the tabloid urge for scandal and intrigue in a society ruled by the tweet? If we are to be judged by every jot and tittle, wouldn't the verdict be "too much banging?"

If you're someone who runs in place while waiting for the light to change, your psychological profile indicates that you're a narcissist who likes the attention and have a pathological need to be respected in your peer group, despite evidence that nobody gives a crap.

In other words, you're a douche.

Running in place is about as useless as contributing to a John Kerry presidential campaign. Not only do you look like a tool, you also attract the ire and contempt of drivers who feel the holier-than-thou vibe coming off your sweaty body even from the road at 35MPH.

It's the purposeful yet casual place-jog that says, "Not only am I healthier than you, my whole life is lived in utter perfection and unity with the world around me, and I am so overjoyed at my awesomeness that my body won't let me stop moving!"

It's respected by exactly zero people. Except for other runners, who don't count in this case because you're all in a global health-measuring contest, so insecure that you must show the world that you've got legs that won't quit. You're the kind of person who not only takes the stairs instead of the elevator, you take them two at a time, and then you tell everyone in your office that you take the stairs, and you let everyone know how much healthier it is to take the stairs. You tell everyone how amazing you feel when you take the stairs (read: how superior you feel to the elevator-takers). You eat Power bars and shit roses, and probably donated money to the Make-A-Wish Foundation only so you could tell people how you help children overcome autism. What a turd.

I've heard the excuses. If you stop running the lactic acid starts to build up in your muscles! Gee, stopping for thirty seconds while the light changes really throws your muscles out of whack, huh? Well if you weren't such a douche maybe you could handle it. Stopping takes me out of my rhythm. Really? How hard is it to get back into rhythm? Let's see, start jogging. There, your rhythm's back, jerk. I gotta keep my heart rate up! Idiot, it's not Speed. You're not going to blow up the retarded bus that is your heart if you stop at the intersection.

You know what else sucks about your stupid intersection treading? You look like you're going to cross the street at any moment. Oncoming drivers, or people trying to turn may be thrown off by what looks to them like a douchebag about to cross the street; what started out as a pseudo-health buzz becomes a safety hazard.

Seriously, douche, I really can't stand you. Go run in place where people can't see you, like a water-robics class at the ghetto YMCA, or your bedroom (where you can stare at your KISS concert poster and listen to Vanilla Ice).

Or better yet, why don't you just run out into traffic and save us all the annoyance.

Courtesy of Craftster

Like Arnie in Total Recall, the allergy sufferer has an invasive method for removing troublesome trackers from the nasal cavities. The post-industrial increase in airborne allergens and autism has produced as many responses, some medically sound, others more akin to technological witchdoctoring, but the more notable of these has a cult following, its devotees proselytizing its virtues like Kirk Cameron on Charlie Rose.

While its name might sound like Indian fondue, it is in fact the MOAB of allergy solutions, a bunker buster that uses the dripping power of saline and gravity to destroy any and all nose critters with no respect to creed or custom. It is the Neti Pot, and it's our Imperialist of the Week.

Like a third-world sewage ditch, your nasal cavities are filled with the unholy muck of our sinuses. That air you breathe to survive is filled with pollens, and spores, and molds that will wreak havoc upon your body when collected in the inner caves of Nasaldom. The resulting toxic sludge buildup can cause endless sneezing while your mucus-filled membranes are inundated from the inside out.

The Neti Pot changes the equation, like Andrew Breitbart at an anti-hate rally. The device resembles an Aladdin's lamp, and delivers more wishes per use. Filling it with a specially formulated kosher salt mixture dissolved in lukewarm water, the victim places the spout into one nostril, and tipping her head at an 80-90 degree angle, allows the solution to run through the other nostril. Switching nostrils for a second wash is like a buy-one-get-one-free nasal Apocalypse, when all the spores left behind are beset by the deluge of an angry and vengeful God.

It's best not to look at yourself or the user while this is happening. Like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark, your face may melt at the awesome cleansing power of the Neti Pot.

Not to be mistaken for Chinese dam construction, which, when it fails also destroys large swaths of ground and people, or even the destructive power of Indonesian tsunamis, the Neti stream is a purposeful, directed intrusion into enemy territory. If the United States really wanted to eliminate Osama bin Laden, the money should have been spent on a gigantic Neti Pot to flush the craggy Afghan caves. Guaranteed results: no more Taliban, no more VHS tapes espousing terrorist doctrines on environmentalism and extreme Islamist theology. No more bin freaking Laden.

The Neti is a digusting and frightening, but necessary weapon in the war against the tiny terrorists in our nose. As long as ragweed and hay fever are out in force, we'll maintain vigilant defense, pop our Zyrtec, flood the caverns, and by God, we're going to win this war.

There are certain things a culture can do to obliterate itself on the relevance scale. When the Mayans lost their empire to the Spaniards, imported disease, a misuse of local resources and poor agribusiness practices, and ridiculous sacrifices to damaged goods gods certainly didn't help matters.

Making stars out of Katy Perry and fetishizing suicide as a manner of speaking out against the Man tends in this direction.

But where things start to go really wrong is in the department of good taste, and nowhere is this more egregiously offended than when it comes to jeggings. Looking back, I think they were the first sign of the crumbling of the Mayan power as well.

Jeggings are the unholy union of leggings and jeans. Like Tiger sleeping with multitudes of creepily unattractive bimbos, this lithe love child carries the stigma of denim mated with spandex, as if the two even had a chance at a decent relationship.

Unlike capri pants, whose summery feel gave them a sense of playful innocence, if short lived usefulness, jeggings already feel dated and unusable in all but the most bizarre circumstances. They might find a home in a Greenwich village showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, with its gaudy pu pu platter of human misery and ridiculousness, but outside of that or Cher's sad Botox-injection of a funeral, these harbingers of anti-fashion say nothing and do less.

What exactly do jeggings accomplish other than forcing your legs into an acid washed splotchy gym pant of dubious pattern, making you appear half-primed to camouflage yourself amongst alien shrubbery to avoid being eaten by a denim-hungry bird of prey? Mobile elongated cottage cheese containers aren't what we were promised by futurists and science fiction gurus of the 50's, but oh what our collective disposable imaginations have wrought. You might have thought the words "denim" and "camel-toe" could occupy the same sentence, much less the same anatomical area, but thanks to jeggings, humans can now move on to the next sin against nature.

If they were shorter, you could excuse them as a kind of aerodynamic cowboy underwear, or as bike shorts. But jeggings elicit the feeling that you are a prostitute with a high risk for gonorrhea and stupidity.

Problems compound when men start to adopt women's fashion. They did it with berets, skinny jeans, and now, sadly, Jeggings, which promotes tucking, as if the emasculation of men wasn't limited to cutting off the circulation to one's genitals. Turns out the Crying Game is less revolutionary now that Lady Gaga has co-opted the androgynous look for her own private monster playground.

The one good thing to emerge from the jeggings' rise to fashion frenzy is the downgrade of muffin tops and visible g-strings to just "trashy." Civilization's decline may not be certain if we can just mature fast enough to reject these bad ideas before they expand outwards like visible cellulite ripples on a fat girl's thighs.

The bedbug, like heroin in the nineties, is coming back in a big way. It's a tiny creature, not quite a parasite and not quite a Dina or Michael Lohan, with the urge to thrill you while you sleep, leaving welts and scratches on your body like markings of an enthusiastic lover, or Megan Fox. With their will to live, their meteoric rise from the downtrodden ranks of last century's pests to this decade's number one hotel downgrader, and their perky political clout, bedbugs are antennae-down our Imperialist of the Week.

Bedbugs aren't known for loyalty or courage, but they are embued with an indomitable spirit; they were once considered the scourge of New York until they were nearly eradicated in the early 1900's. But you can't keep a good pest down, especially when you have a way of crawling into people's psyche's the same way Thomas Friedman crawled into position at the New York Times--using global warming.

Yes, while Friedman was praising China for its environmental friendly ghetto-squalor tenement housing boom and excoriating the West for buying too many Hummers, bedbugs were using the climate-change for their own ends: the complete and utter destruction of North American hotel sanitation pride.

And it's not just happening in New York. Every major city with an upscale hotel is infested with these tiny beings whose sole mission seems closely aligned with that of Al Quaeda and the Taliban, proving Code Red isn't just for fertilizer bombs and boxcutting suicidal Sunnis. Theirs is a war with no soldiers, only casualties, and the victims are the once clean, once well-minted pillows and 500-threadcount sheets of our nation's temporary homes on the road and tryst-tychs for affair-bound lovers. According to reports, Chicago could experience a New York sized problem in two or three years, and that's not even counting if Rahm Emanuel decides to run for mayor.

More attractive and deadlier than the vampires of Twilight, these bloodsuckers have a peak feeding period of an hour before sunrise; they drop upon their human victims as they sleep and in the cool darkness, suck upon the living tissue of their prey's skin, leaving a host of welts and sequential bite marks behind. When you check out, bedbugs check out with you, traveling with you and infesting every place you visit.

Their seeming omnipresence is merely the first of many characteristics of an infestation. Before long, you'll feel them crawling on you, your mind playing tricks on you. You'll clean your sheets, you'll burn your furniture, you'll even move. But unlike Keyser Söze, the best trick the bedbugs ever pulled was convincing you they're all around you and they're never going to leave.

Time was, you could call a woman ma'am without her getting offended. Just because that time was 40 years ago and mostly in the South doesn't mean it didn't demonstrate a certain quality of upbringing. Then, it was charming. Now, it'll get you a dirty look.

What happened?

Apparently, "ma'am" carries the connotation of age, and in the West, age is antithetical the ideal. Implying a woman is old, or even hinting that a woman has an age other than a nebulous hand-wave in the area of the mid-twenties is akin to calling her fat or pointing out her expanding crow's feet. If we ever get around to respecting our elders again, the first thing we'll be able to do is safely ask a woman's age, and get the truth. But that's a long row to hoe.

To some, there's the hint of sexual disenfranchisement, the defeminization of the addressee. She feels the throwback to the days of manly men and mousy women, when the only secretary she could ever aspire to be was at the local insurance office and equal pay for equal work was about as fair as Whites Only country clubs. Ma'am supposedly gives off the whiff of royalty and distance, simultaneously bestowing respect and standoffishness.

For Senator Barbara Boxer, "ma'am" implies the lack of career; last summer when US Army General Michael Walsh referred to her as such, she asked him to call her 'senator' instead. "It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title, so I'd appreciate it." I'm not sure she realized that in the military it's common practice to refer to equals and superiors as sir, ma'am, or madam.

If the stuffy Madam Senator from the bankrupt state of California gets annoyed at the erroneous eponym, what are the pleasant, well-meaning men from Brer Rabbit's part of the country to do?

Perhaps there's an unspoken objection to the word, namely, its phonetic relation to the missus' front-running mammaries. Every time some polite young gent sends her a ma'amogram, it's a subtle innuendo: Show me your boobs!

Honestly, I don't see any of it. Is the word, unarguably coming from a linguistic place of power and respect, so frightening that even its beleaguered beneficiaries shy away, opting for the far less respect-worthy "Miss" or the dis-engenderous "Ms"? Who exactly is being sexist here?

Even Hollywood agrees with me. In one episode of M*A*S*H Major Margaret Houlihan told Radar O'Reilly, "Men are sirs. Women are ma'ams. I am a woman: I am a ma'am." From God's liberal lips to our overly sensitive ears.

But you know what, in deference to the senators and secretaries of the world, I offer up some alternatives; these are ways you can address women that are flattering, respectful, and non-threatening:

Big Mama - this name refers to her bigness of heart and mind, her astounding mental girth, and combines with her natural child-rearing capabilities and her child's innate affinity for her in one beautiful expression of maternal awesomeness.

FeminiMs - Willowy children of the revolution should applaud this powerful address to a woman who knows no master, least of all linguistic enslavement to the male's subordinating claws. FeminiMs (pronounced Fem-en-em-Mizz) is proud and strong, either a single woman with a career in business or politics or a pro-gun girlie who knows the best way to earn respect is to take it without apologies.

Madam Gyneral - Only applies to women in the military, but can be any woman of the femme persuasion, from enlisted ms to the career officer to the President's Petraeus replacement.

I hope these will be useful for the new generation of men who will continue to be baffled by the winds and waves mentality of women in America.