From the back of the audience, lost beneath angled lights and slightly shifting bodies, I listened to the comedian without laughing. A band was on the stage beside him and he referenced each member individually. That’s Hector Castro on the keyboard; he says he’s from Miami but everyone knows your last name, Hector, and everyone knows that 20 years ago you were on a Goodyear tire in the middle of the Caribbean, praying not to float to Cancun. The comedian did a pantomime of Hector praying on his defection raft. Our front man, Willy Jones; Willy is African American; move into the light Willy, no one can see you. Willy convulsed silently with laughter, his huge mouth opened and huge teeth glimmered. I expected the comedian to comment on the apparition-like appearance of Willy’s smile – but he moves on. And way back there on the drums and saxophone, we got Joe Miller and Tommy Hatsfield, the white guys. This band is like a dyslexic bus in 1961 Alabama.

I sat silently because everyone else was laughing. And not the uncomfortable, I-can’t-believe-he-said-that laughter, but genuine laughter. I wasn’t laughing because I was paying attention to why these jokes were funny and how they worked with this audience. (The comedian was astute, to be sure, but I think it’s worth mentioning, for my own critical reputation if for no other reason, that this guy wasn’t that funny or edgy; the jokes he had were, comparatively, incredibly tame.) Racism has been something of a style or a device of comedy forever, seen in two forms: the actual racism of blackface and minstrel shows and rants of Michael Richards that serves only hatred; and the friendly, ironic racism that serves equally to point out differences as it does to edify that those differences are petty.

One of the clearest and most recent examples of this took place during the appearance of the cast of the film "Grown Ups" on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Kimmel adroitly takes a racial thought and flips it soundly on its ear around the 1:30 mark of this clip:

While most late night television programming urinates carelessly near the electrical fence of ethics and good taste, late night programming on Fox News blatantly, sardonically shits directly in the ears of viewers before whipping its ass on their cotton blend sheets. The worst of all these shows is called "Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld." It’s described on Wikipedia as "Comedy/Satire/News parody" – problem is, it isn’t funny, satirical and calling it news parody is like calling the Ku Klux Klan civil rights parody.

Mercifully, "Red Eye" airs at 3am, which serves minimal viewers. However, the show still manages to reach an astounding 350,000 people each time it sullies the stratosphere en route to satellites – there are even those who Tivo the show, an egregious act that should be punished, in the words of Ignatius J. Reilly, with sever lashings.

Last night, beneath a haze of alcohol and various greasy substances that pain me today (well into the afternoon) I caught a good 10 minutes of the show as I flipped back and forth with a Rachel Maddow rerun. I remember nothing, not a word, of what was said on either show. Besides my alcohol-slicked retention, there is a reason for this.

A few years ago, the problem was that no one gave the news Murrow-style anymore; everyone editorialized, spun each story around and around, proved that every occurrence was simultaneously good, bad and irrelevant. Today that’s still prevalent, but we seem to have run into a new problem.

No one simply editorializes anymore. To get the news across today you must be outraged, indignant, beside yourself with disbelief at how abjectly stupid every single other person is, particularly those whose opinions run contrary to yours. Gutfeld, Maddow, Olbermann, Beck, O’Reilly. The only one not yelling at the rain is Larry King and that’s because a) he doesn’t know it’s raining and b) he’d bust a ventricle if his voice rose above mild bemusement.

I’m quite aware that most of the aforementioned shows are "entertainment" (those are heavy quotes), but they are not comedy and they are not scripted drama. Each show is certainly sanctioned in the personality of the host and that host’s ability to deliver news. Therefore, they might consider delivering the news in a way that allows an audience to actually comprehend their point, their words without overwhelming the point with indignation.

All I can think of while I stare at Greg Gutfeld is the increasingly deeper ravine between his squinty little eyes. I figure if he would lighten up a little, take a breath between paragraphs, the crease would clear up and I’d be able to understand why he thinks it’s humorous to use Sen. Robert Byrd for a joke the day he died.

As it stands, I have no idea what happened in the world yesterday because I was busy drinking and late night programming on Fox News is like the back page ads in a pornographic magazine – numbers for hookers, bargain blow jobs, grow your penis drugs – there is no way either leads to anything good.

I know a girl whom everybody knows. Sometimes I tease her about knowing everybody, but then she tells me that she doesn’t know everybody knows her and I say, okay, fair enough. You see, when she joined Facebook, she made a pledge to herself that she would only ask one hundred people to be her friend. This is a pledge she has, to her credit and to my continued amazement, stuck to, keeping requests under twenty; her friend list possesses a supernatural fecundity – even for online proliferation.

My teasing, even this indirect, erudite teasing, is warranted, but it also turns out to be entirely misguided.

Facebook has come under a great deal of scrutiny in the past month. The critiques have come from, among others, Congress and consumer groups that cased the Federal Trade Commission, in January, to write a letter saying the complaints raised "a number of concerns about Facebook's information sharing practices."

That din precipitated over the following five months. Today we find ourselves with a semi-official "Quit Facebook Day," organized by a website of which you’ll never guess the name (it’s QuitFacebook.com). The site currently has fewer participants than my aforementioned friend has "friends" on Facebook, plus, they’re going about this all wrong.

Quit Facebook Day calls for as many users as possible to leave the online networking site on May 31, 2010 in protest of the changes to privacy policies the company adopted in April. Those changes include, the "default settings on its social-networking platform to the detriment of a user," the "concept of an ‘open graph,’ which is intended to create a larger, more social Facebook community across the web, and "Community Pages, intended to provide information about various topics."

In an e-mail to Computerworld last Thursday morning, "a Facebook spokesman confirmed that the company will hold a meeting later today to discuss privacy issues, but he would not say whether executives are looking to make significant changes to the popular site's highly contentious privacy policy."

While they seemingly have not shares the notes of that meeting, Facebook added to their defense that the company gives "our users granular controls [that] enable each user to customize many individual settings in order to share, or protect, as much information as they feel comfortable with…We already enable users to exclude themselves from being indexed by search engines, and recently introduced granular data permissions for applications."

During CNBC show "Power Lunch" this morning (on the West Coast), they went to a gentleman named Eamon Javers at Politico for comment on… oh fuck… well I forget what they were talking about (probably the continuing, if not grand chasm between Wall Street and Main Street) because the ambient activity in the Political office made concentrating on Javers’ words feel like filling-out a timed multiplication table with a flaming goldfish in your ear.

I can accept the chubby 12-year-old and Napoleon Dynamite’s brother (who was eating peanuts throughout this report), but why the fuck is an NBA referee taking a meeting at Politico?

The woman most famous for being on Eliot Spitzer’s payroll as "Kristen" is on the cover of Playboy this month. Eliot Spitzer wishes she was not on the cover of Playboy this month. Eliot Spitzer wishes she would just go away and stop dragging his infidelities back into the conversation, when we should be talking about Tiger’s twenty-third dalliance.

Christopher Napolitano, the writer of the Playboy article (yes, something like this can’t just come with "favorite color?" and "what turns you on?" fill-in-the-blanks), dedicates a paragraph to say that he likes Ashley. Like her or not, she’s not unreachably attractive. Most of the time, she looks like the result of Molly Shannon stopping half-way as she morphs into a rattlesnake.

What’s most apparent, most unique about Ashley (apart from her fake hair, fake boobs, fake eyelashes, fake lips, fake nails and fake nose) is also what’s most puzzling: her fake skin. Somewhere in the general area of where her uterus would be is a tattoo that reads: tutela valui. A butterfly next to it.

The tattoo is what it is – in and of itself, just a tattoo. What’s puzzling is how people reacted to the tattoo. Most sought erudite answers like they’d just discovered a new species of fish or were interpreting the Bhagavad Gita.

The NY Post has translated tutela valui as Latin for "fair value".

Helen Kennedy, a staff writer at Daily News reported: "Tutela, which is related to tutor, has to do with a protector or guardian. Valui appears to be a past form of the word strong."

The Daily News also sought out Daniel Nodes, a classics professor at Ave Maria University in Florida, who translated it as "I've been well and remain that way because I have protection."

And a Wall Street Journal blog said, "It’s something closer to ‘I was strong because looked after.’ Valui is a past tense of valeo ‘I am strong’; tutela is ‘being protected’ and a Roman & Civil Law state of guardianship over young people."

It’s as if Ashley Dupré were hiding the Holy Grail (according to Dan Brown, she is) and if we could just figure out what this nebulous, brilliant, puzzling tattoo means, we would be saved. Meanwhile, these same people, these same publications will translate the US Constitution based not on historical references or linguistics, but on what they think the writers of the document meant.

Perhaps we should take the same tactic with Ashley’s tattoo: What did Ashley mean by it?

Based on the Playboy article, this is what we know of Dupré:

She speaks in fantastic, redundant phrases: "watched…before my eyes," "think I definitely," "future boyfriend from now on." It only serves to reason that her tattoo, shares that syntax.

Therefore, through much research and think-tanking, weeks and weeks of doing nothing but looking at Playboy, we at the Eleventh Draft have conclusively uncovered the meaning of Ashley Dupré’s uterus tattoo. tutela valui (butterfly) means "I like butterflies." On to the next riddle.

Many people don’t want to hear what Bill Maher has to say. Bill Maher would tell you that’s because many people are probably infuriated by the truth, by common sense. More accurately though, he’s as intolerant and myopic as the next Munchkinland emigrant. Not even those who employ him find the patience for what he has to say. Case in point, my DVR:

Not even HBO, themselves, wanted to watch the latest Bill Maher special before it aired, in order to make sure of the topics covered.  Topics might include being a jackass, but I'll be damned if I'm watching.

Soon, will be the end of Hollywood billboards in Hollywood. The "city" known for making some of the best and worst cinema in history is once again entering the boxing ring to punch itself in the face. On Monday, a man named Kayvan Setareh was jailed on $1-million bail for illegally erecting a "supergraphic" on Hollywood Boulevard. Setareh is accused of two misdemeanor city code violations for the huge billboard he put on his building.

The impressive bail was the idea of LA City attorney Carmen Trutanich, who later said (like Ronald Reagan appealing to Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin, or Nikita Khrushchev removing his shoe before the UN general assembly), "The days of lax and inconsistent enforcement of billboard and outdoor advertising laws in this city are over!"

And the masses respond: Huzzah!

This is all in an effort to clean up, to beautify Los Angeles. Problem is, it’s Los Angeles. Billboards are not the issue; the issue is that most of the City seems to have been built so quickly and carelessly that it should crumble at the touch of one of these billboards. Billboards are certainly not the issue at Hollywood and Highland – the location of the monstrosity above. Hollywood and Highland is like a remedial version of Times Square; if anything is appropriate, it’s a huge picture of a redheaded kid riding a cartoon dragon.

Given, the intention of the anti-supergraphics law, and of the insanely high bail for Mr. Setareh (who has, since Monday, agreed to remove the signage) is to "restore" Hollywood to Old Hollywood and to prevent the rest of Los Angeles sky from being littered with neon splotches. But restoring Hollywood to Old Hollywood, goes against what Hollywood and Old Hollywood stand and stood for, respectively. That is to say: You can’t condemn a clown for spraying water from a flower.

And you can't condemn a segue for doing its job by leading you from one billboard on Hollywood Boulevard, to another on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Have you ever been in the middle of a cross-country move and thought: These guys packing up my grandmother’s china are pretty good, but they would be a lot better if they were a little gayer?

We all have.

Pink Moving was started, as they say on their website, "with one goal in mind. To provide the best moving service for the LGBT community." The website is standard, succinct, informative, and, save the pink, champagne bubble background, not super gay. The photos on the site depict what one might consider a typical home mover and a typical client.

Things get hot when you get off of the Pink Moving website and into the real world. It’s then that you learn with Pink Moving you get pink trucks, pink bows on all of your cardboard boxes, a rainbow on moving day, and the shirt off the back of the guy moving you. And you get to tell him to "flex." (I really wish I had a cleaner shot of this.)

The owner, Michael Fansh’e, provides the necessary contact information and prices. I recommend his Golden Package; if you can find 6 men and 2 trucks for less than $240 an hour, rent a hot tub, get some tequila and you know my number.

"Do you watch LOST? Are you excited for tomorrow?" The questions came out of my mouth without a beat of separation. The answers to both were understood in advance in our office and, as I rode the elevator from "L" to "4," I thought the questions and their affirmative answers the perfect length for the vertical journey.

"I stopped watching LOST in the middle of last season." Shit. Curve. "They started breaking their own rules and it just didn’t make any sense anymore," the extremely tall intern let me know.

The sentiment was repeated in an email amongst friends this morning that started when one friend exclaimed his anticipation of the LOST Final Season premiere tonight at 9/8c only on ABC. It continued when another threatened, "They better not end the series like ‘The Sopranos’ ended – I need some solid answers to all my questions."

And it concluded when a third friend bitterly wrote, "They time travel! What questions could you possibly have after that! There is no logic."

However, the logic may be that there is no logic. The reason may be that there is no reason. This is not just some amorphous, new age jabber. And here’s what the hell I mean by it.

In 2004, JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof outlined a show that was deeply based in mythology. In fact, JJ Abrams refused Lloyd Braun’s entreaties to fix the show another producer had created until Braun agreed that the Island could have a science fiction aspect.

Along with Lindelof, a man named Carlton Cuse runs LOST. Early in his career, Cuse went in to pitch ideas for a show called ‘The Equalizer.’

In the film "Trainspotting," one character tells another that the drug heroin will change his life – that it’s better than sex.  Turns out that heroin is, for the latter character, better than sex.  Turns out it does change his life.

When you’re standing in line for "Avatar" tonight, remember one thing: don’t expect heroin. 

That’s heroin, not heroine – although, you shouldn’t expect either.  Don’t expect heroine because there isn’t one in this film; the story and peripheral characters are tethered solidly to the accidental hero, who finds himself forced to fight against that which he knows for love and ultimate good.  Don’t expect heroin because, no matter what they (reviews, friends, Tiger Woods) tell you, this film will not change the way we watch films.

It might change the way people make films, which, after seeing the movie, is the best thing one should be able to say about "Avatar" and about director James Cameron.  Cameron deserves the approbation flowing in for "Avatar" – "a total sensory, sensuous, sensual experience…" (Philadelphia Inquirer), "A fully believable, flesh-and-blood romance…" (Hollywood Reporter).  But he deserves it not for a great film, but that his film may eventually be the technological kitchen chair on which another director later stands to reach the top cupboard. 

The world that Cameron created is astounding.  In 3-D, it is one of the more beautiful things anyone has ever projected on to a white screen – and even more beautiful because it doesn’t shove the 3-D down your throat with flying spears at the camera. 

Cameron said he modeled much of Pandora, the world on which "Avatar" is set, on his deep sea excursions.  But the setting could just as easily have come from the dreams of a DJ in Ibiza, trying to create the ideal concoction of Rave and Nature.  Time Out New York, one of the worse reviews of the film, said, "Cameron’s new world may very well be a verdant Matrix," and that’s just not true. 

The envelope that Cameron pushed goes far beyond what "The Matrix" did ten years ago and (thankfully) does it without the use of Keanu Reeves’s deadpan "Whoa."  With "The Matrix," we were given intense effects that defied the physical laws of a world that we know (one of the film’s philosophical arguments, of course), but we were not given a new world; that is what Cameron, God Complex and all, has done.  And he’s done it will vigor.

However, while God (as they (reviews, friends, Tiger Woods) say) created the world, He did not create the story.  He let others create the story.  He was just the director.  And God saw that it was good.

James Cameron’s story of "Avatar" is not good.  It is, as The New Yorker says, trite.  With lines of dialogue that include, "We’re not in Kansas anymore," and "You don’t want that kind of blood on your hands, boy," the screenplay sounds like something a 16-year-old would write for a made-for-TV movie on the SyFy Channel. 

Sadly, a) this is not a movie on the SyFy Channel; it is the most expensive cinematic feat ever attempted and yet the story completely overwhelms the greatness of what the film should be.  And b) Cameron doesn’t seem to care – or at least he doesn’t seem to notice.

"I'm a techno geek and I love the innovative processes, but I never put that before telling a story," Cameron told the Los Angeles Times at the Hollywood premiere of "Avatar" yesterday. "I spent a lot of time in the writing, I spent a lot of time thinking about the characters. I love working with the actors finding the characters. I love the casting process, finding the actors that will bring those characters to life."

Cameron invited Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, even Marilyn Manson to the set of "Avatar" to see what he was creating.  He should have invited Aaron Sorkin, Charlie Kaufman and Tom Stoppard to his office to see what he was writing.  If God would have collaborated on this one, it could have been great.  It is not.  But we can hope that it is a step in the direction of greatness.

Early last week, Andre Agassi was scheduled to be on Jimmy Kimmel Live. It was in the listings. He was scheduled for today, but now today’s guest is: Heidi Klum. Hard to say what happened to Agassi’s appearance on Kimmel. One would surmise a time constraint – but Agassi did The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Regis, Letterman, Tavis Smiley, Fresh Air on NPR, a local KPCC (Los Angeles) show on NPR, Jim Rome, Good Day LA, and kept scheduled book signings, inducing the one at the Century City mall.

A week ago, I asked a friend if there was a "Fire Rich Rodriguez" group on Facebook. The second year University of Michigan football coach has neatly steered the team to its most depressing two seasons in the last 20 years. No sport at any level has the potential to be more depressing than college football. The goal is always a NCAA Championship. With one loss in the season, that is possible. With two, maybe, if your school’s Athletic Director has blown enough sports writers. Or if your head coach is a gigantic cry baby like Urban Meyer.

After somewhat promising starts the last two years (not a high bar after the 2007Drive-by Shooting loss (Level VII in The Sports Guy’s "Levels of Losing 2.0") to Appalachian State, Rodriguez gave the University of Michigan three wins and nine losses his first year, its worst season in school history – and keep in mind that this is a football history that goes back to the Rutherford B. Hayes administration. Last year was also the first time the University of Michigan didn’t play in a bowl game in over 30 years. For the bargain price of $2.5 million a year (plus an extra $2.5 million paid to West Virginia University because Rodriguez is too much of an immature jackass to legally get out of a contract), UM Athletic Department bought the worst football team that it’s ever had.

Ever.

After today’s loss to Wisconsin, Rodriguez is now 5-6 in his second year (a spit-take 1-6 in the Big Ten). Needless to say, people are talking about his removal – and not just on Facebook.

During the Purdue-Michigan State game today Bob Griese and whatever asshole joined him in front of the atrocious green screen pontificated Rodriguez’s future. Keep in mind that the only reason the Purdue-Michigan State game was being broadcast is that the most broadcast team in college football history (yes, Michigan), and the team with maybe the strongest professional alumni base in the nation (again, Michigan) is so god awful that ABC couldn’t bring themselves to put the game against #21 Wisconsin on any of their 18 sports channels.

The debate came to something of a conclusion when Griese said of Rodriguez, "They’re not going to fire Rich Rodriguez after two years. If they wanted Rich Rodriguez to come in, run the same system, keep the same coaches, and do everything the same as it was before – then all right" fire him.

Albeit slightly invalid, it’s still a point. So, let’s take it for a test drive.

Admittedly, you need to give things time to work, to catch on. This has been the argument for everything from the new town your parents move you to when you were eight years old, to staying the course in the Iraq war: give it some time and it will work. Health care isn’t going to be fixed over night. The economy takes time to react. OK. Fine. And for Rich Rodriguez, you could even argue that, in a way, at least speaking of the upper-classmen, this is still Lloyd Carr’s team.

When Lloyd Carr took over in 1995, it was already his team in a way; he’d been in the program since 1980. He was in the Michigan fold already. Is that why he went 9-4 his first season, beat Ohio State in each of his first three years and won a National Championship in his third year?

I’m patient. I’m cool with giving things time to work. However, the University of Michigan and whoever gives the University money to pay off Rich Rodriguez contracts to West Virginia need to have the prescience to know when to call a cancer a cancer and cut it from the body.

Rich Rodriguez is the plague that has spread through Schembechler Hall in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the chain around the ankle of a drowning program. He is the preexisting condition that prevents the single mother of dozens of needy young men in the Midwest from receiving adequate health care. He needs to be dealt with accordingly.

Before the weekend is over, University of Michigan athletic director, Bill Martin, should fire Rich Rodriguez. The head coach’s departure is the only hope Michigan has of beating Ohio State next weekend. It is the only measure drastic enough to turn around what will otherwise be a needlessly wasted year.

Over the first 11 seasons in Michigan Football history, the team went 23-10-1, almost a .70 win percentage. And that was without a coach. Maybe it’s time for Michigan to get back to its roots.