He's played a kindly convict, Nelson Mandela and even a mop-pushing God. On the other hand, the world was obliterated by a comet under his presidency. Yes, Morgan Freeman's record is decidedly mixed, yet we still look to him for comfort and authority in a topsy-turvy world.

But for his latest movie, we should bury Grandpa Gravitas' film career like the directions to Zihuatanejo that Tim Robbins left him in the sex orchard.

"Dolphin Tale" is a blatant piece of propaganda designed to brainwash the impressionable masses into believing that history's greatest sea monsters are not only their BFFs, but also inspiring cripples.

Dolphins have never lacked for savvy PR, making high-priced lobbying shops on K Street look as bloated, ineffective and glitter-strewn as Newt Gingrich. From Flipper, "the aquatic Lassie," to overblowholed stories about dolphins saving stranded sailors, these warm-blooded wankers have captured the imaginations and consciences of Americans too dumb to realize that permanent smiles are creepy, not cute. Slight chance that your tuna sandwich has bits of dolphin in it? Just convince the tuna industry to adopt a much more destructive fishing method!

Far from paragons of virtue, dolphins are closer to your average Oakland Raiders fan.  The motherflippers are known to gang rape both male and female dolphins and have "perfected the art to a degree unseen in any other species." They beat up porpoises, allegedly because they're "sexually frustrated," and according to a documentary about the social structure of dolphins, they would challenge humanity if their more charismatic leaders were freed from captivity. Any animal that arouses Harry Connick Jr. or fits R. Kelly's requirements for a wingman should immediately be placed on an FBI watch list.

Westerners need to get over their boner for hyper-intelligent animals, from the Ted Bundys of the ocean to Andy Serkis. The latest Science Loser Who Doomed Us All is even trying to establish "real-time two-way communication" with dolphins, to tempt the blubbery buggers into squeaking their sick fantasies at us. Here's a suggestion on getting a dolphin's interest: Log into MySpace as TweenageDream and post a request to meet "open-minded grownups."

If we're going to indulge our whitebread fetish for something, let's make it multiculturalism and go dolphishing in Taiji, Japan. I'm sure Dick Cheney is available.

The world is changing around us, but you can always count on one thing to stay the same: Americans of a certain age suck at reading the Bible out loud. They tend to be the ones who know the Bible.

You’d think the nation founded by a bunch of prudes fleeing their less-prudish rulers, creator of the First Amendment equally beloved of pornographers and cults, would excel at speaking God's Word in public, mellifluous as a Bieber ballad.  Scripture is full of references to prophets, Jesus and even Satan quoting Scripture, unrolling scrolls and eating scrolls. Reading the Bible aloud in the days before G-berg, like my favorite waste of White House space in his Grammy-winning spoken word album, used to be your ticket out of sharecropping or refereeing a WNBA game.

Add 20 years of the information revolution and you have an entire generation that talks faster than Andy Dick and sounds about as coherent. This deficiency shows up most glaringly in Bible studies.

I don't doubt the sincerity of my fellow religionizers when they struggle to make it through two verses of a Gospel translated into English as understood in 1978.  They talk in vague but heartfelt terms about God’s provision in their lives, care for each other and show more tolerance of others than most pagans I know.  But hand them a book they’ve spent years reading on a near-daily basis and watch them butcher it worse than Christina at the Super Bowl.

“Now a man of the tribe of...Levee married a Leveet woman and ... oh wait … she became pregnant and gabirtoason when she. Saw that he was a fine child. She hid him for thirty months. Do I keep reading? Oh, OK. I got lost. (hee hee) But when she could hit him no longer, she got a paperous basket for him and coated it with tar … uh … tar and (squinting) oh, pitch! (hee hee).”

How the hallelujah did you make it through college?  Are you a University of Phoenix grad?

As the Apostle Paul said, a man who can speak in the tongues of angels, but has not love, is a resounding gong.  I would rather spend two hours with Rip Taylor, a gong and a decibel-activated confetti cannon aimed at my tuchus than listen to you speed-gurgle through Corinthians 13.

You are God's representative on earth, young, hipster Christian.  And when you don't bother to learn how to speechify 10-point font in a medium devoid of Megan Fox pictorials, it reflects poorly on those of us who bring skeptics to our gatherings to see God’s people without the media filter.

I'm not asking for a Toastmasterization of the pews -- just some basic coordination between eyes, brain and mouth.  Like your mother last night.

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.

Ever since the first man listened to his ditzy wife and chomped some fruit from Clint Eastwood’s tree, dooming the human race to be clothed in public and wear ridiculous pajamas to bed, we’ve been wearing dead animals in some form.  Despite the efforts of groups trying to make these corpses more fashionable by sprinkling them with paint, Western society has recoiled of late from the “natural” look, preferring to wear synthetic or even psychedelic furs.

Nothing captures the post-Christian, Lemonish desire to “have it all,” though, quite like the panda hat.

I don’t know when these adorable emblems of laziness got their cultural cachet - they seemed to spring up all around me, like a group of 12-year-old boys around Megan Fox, as soon as the weather dipped into the 30s.  A cast member on last season’s  “The Real World,” source of the do-nothing celebrity, became known as “Panda” for his panda hat, but MTV long ago shuffleboarded its influence from the “Gossip Girl” demographic to the AARP set.  Personally I blame Japan, though my Los Angeles-based co-writer Jeremiah, married to an anime freak, claims to be unaware of any such bamboo-chewing bandwagon in balmy Tinseltown.

Whatever the cause, this pandamonium has gotten out of control, and it’s time to clearcut the cultural thicket surrounding the hattification of Ailuropoda melanoleuca.

Sure, it starts cute, as a few quirky teens and administrative assistants don the black-and-white babushkas to signify that racial harmony is always “on their mind.”  Next, the hats get adopted by unpopular girls who are too timid to post a rambling YouTube video proclaiming their indelible cuteness despite a low-nutrition diet, mascara-lacquered eyes and sedentary lifestyle.  Before we know it, professional women are wearing the noggin nuzzlies to board meetings, court hearings and Unitarian ordinations.

What do we see in these harlequinned heavies anyway? Despite their knowledge of sexual harassment law and ability to prick the conscience of the rapacious ChiComs, pandas are really just welfare bears.  They can’t move beyond a narrow geographical area and they have no energy to do anything more than eat stomach-wrenching comfort food all day.  And thanks to enterprising labor policies, these welbears are nearly extinct.  As a coldhearted conservationist lamented, “people always have this rather peculiar affinity with the big blubbery things.”

This desire to look cute and forsake all responsibility is what underlies America’s social decline.  Like a dexterous rat marionetting a clueless chef, panda hats ass-ride their human drones to Pandorrah.

Women of liberty, throw off the accountrements of the ursinine!  Unbear your soul!  Ooh, is that a Hello Kitty hat?

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.

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.

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.

The Jewish-sounding Zachary Levi is actually a committed Christian, it turns out. And for the first time with anyone, I really want a celestial audience with him. Not enough to kill us both in a murder-suicide plot, which may eternally backfire, but following our respective and wholly unrelated deaths.

Viewers have long suspected something was different about 29-year-old Levi - his fondness for video games over girls, cherubic smile and utter lack of pretension. He could easily double for another cuddle-bear of wholesome sexuality, Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba, and may have the chance now that Carrabba is going back to his original Christian band.

Having recently finished "Chuck" season three, I went looking for more about Buy More's top Nerd Herder, and found not only his fish-and-loaf distribution of "Nerd" T-shirts at Comic-Con but also his Christian frat house that doubles as a "home church." This was the greatest news since Jeremiah found out Buster Bluth, aka Tony Hale, attends his church in LA!

And then I thought, for the first time in my life, I'd really like to meet this guy in heaven.

Not Moses, not the non-Eddie-Murphy talking donkey, not even Jesus - I want to pop my cherub with some lovable schmuck who can thank a footlong sandwich for his career trajectory. The thought of chillin', or whatever verb appropriately describes the temperature in the other realm, with Sexy McRighteous made me really excited about dying and swapping energy with another glowing spirit-ball. To paraphrase Liam Neeson, I must be the worst Christian ever.

For all I know, the Levi who didn’t appear in Playgirl could have some weird theological fetish, like battling Satan’s minions through Wii Tennis or confessing his carbon consumption. Who knows what his business partner/pastor is teaching in that home church.

But he's so dreamy! Just like Chief Justice John Roberts.

No, I'm not talking about a Bieber-Kardashian liaison, but rather the thinly-veiled advertisement for the Big Piano known as Big, when Hanks played Josh Baskin and Perkins played Susan. Remember their sexual tension?

That's a stupid question - of course you do. Chances are Big is in your parents' VHS library, and always a few millimeters down in your subconscious. It's an iconic movie about coming of age after a magic fortune telling machine catapults you into emerging adulthood, a satisfying career, and losing your adolescent virginity to a MILF 10 years before MILFs existed.

Think about it! Hanks was not mentally ready for intercourse in the post-carnival love scene, where he turns the light back on and takes off Perkins' bra, and hello, he was underage! And yes, Perkins didn't know that until she was wearing that gender-bending shirt and tie, while they were developing the choose-your-own-adventure interactive comic book, and Hanks tried to tell her about the Zoltar machine. But how did she react later, when Hanks left the office during the big presentation, and she followed him to Sea Point Park where he Zoltared again? She was heartbroken that she wouldn't be able to bang this stickball star from the sticks anymore!

The most outrage I've seen leveled at this unrepentant pedophilia came from my Rosie-lookalike high school choir teacher. We were taking a day off from practice as a reward for success (state champs, 1996), eating pizza and watching Big. When the love scene came up, the teacher simply blushed and made a joke about how awkward this was. Yes, watching foreplay with your students is a tad uncomfortable, unless you're a professor at Vassar. But foisting statutory rape on them? Reprehensible.

As you may have guessed, not all tweentimacy is celebrated in our society. The farthest Jennifer Garner goes in 13 Going on 30 is remarking that she's seen her guy's "thingy. And who hopes that depressed dad Kevin Spacey nails perky little Mena Suvari in American Beauty? If the notion of guys and (literal) girls hooking up didn't repulse us, Roman Polanski would still be partying with prepubescents in Pasadena.

Yet we continue to celebrate Big, and Tom Hanks' career as the eccentric Everyman continues abated. At least until he finishes the Da Vinci Code trilogy.