19) Electric toothbrushes

The Hummer of dental hygiene.

My wife should be ashamed.

18) Sonic Drive-In now sells green tea.

I saw it for myself on their glorified Lite-Brite of a scrolling marquee.

17) Nordstrom's, Neiman Marcus, etc.

. . . such a spectacularly obvious illusion of elitism. Are all the cars parked out front not a big clue that the wares they're trafficking are still mass market? What about the nationwide footprint? . . . I think they just spiff it up, mark it up, and throw in the occasional piano player lest you focus too intently on the mirage.

Come to think of it, all department stores seem incredibly anachronistic to me.

16) National Night Out

Getting out of the house and socializing with neighbors is now so rare we need a national holiday for it: http://www.nationaltownwatch.org/nno/

Thank God: at least we still have our sitcoms.

15) Fantasy football

It's Dungeons and Dragons for the Sportscenter demographic.

We were at a pub on Sunday and watched a table of 10 men spend hours simulating a players draft for their upcoming season, with all the intrigue and emotion they could possibly fabricate.

14) Juicy Couture

Haute non sequitur.

13) Professional pool, televised

I started to say the seemingly inexhaustible coverage of the World Series of Poker, but that seemed much too predictably apocalyptic. (You know anything sponsored by a large beef jerky corporation is going to be transcendental).

12) Sneakers with wheels built into the soles.

Some advertising company could market jet packs well enough so that children would persuade their parents to buy them . . . That doesn't make it a good idea.

As a rule of thumb, children should not careen.

11) TIE: Anderson Cooper & Nancy Grace

Take your pick.

10) Dog, The Bounty Hunter

And all his crew.

9) Hardly anyone drinks out of jugs anymore.

I’m talking straight-out-the-hollow, White Lightnin type jugs. The good stuff.

And here's an equally heinous assault on our culture: does anyone remember how the characters in The Sun Also Rises drank out of these amazing leather pouches with leather strands that strapped over your shoulder as they walked through the Basque country? (Or at least that's how I imagined them at the time). Whatever happened to those things? Wouldn't you rather see some yuppies walking around with those instead of the fruity eco-friendly metal things? Wouldn't we all be enriched?

(And by the way, I guess I'm technically one of those yuppies, but since when was it environmentally friendly to mine for iron ore?)

8) How Phil Collins is obsessed with the Alamo.

Singer Phil Collins' new passion: the Alamo
09:59 AM CST on Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO - Phil Collins says his new "main thing" is the Alamo.
The 58-year-old singer is in San Antonio this week for the anniversary of the March 1836 battle of the Alamo. Collins says he has "hundreds" of cannonballs, documents and other artifacts, including a receipt signed by Alamo commander William Barret Travis for 32 head of cattle used to feed the Alamo defenders. In an online story for the San Antonio Express-News, Collins said he's basically stopped being "Phil Collins the singer. This has become what I do." Collins narrated the introduction of a 13-minute "Alamo diorama light and sound show" at the History Shop by the Alamo. He's scheduled to speak to the Alamo Defenders Descendants Association on Saturday.

7) Bling h2o

A $40 bottle of water really has to be the textbook definition "irony of ironies." It's almost as outdated feeling (sooo 2007) as triumphantly screaming from the rooftop of some urban office building "I'm investing all my retirement savings in Merrill! It feels good!" As much as I hate to play into their loathsome marketing scheme, I'll bite for the sake of my soothsaying integrity: http://www.forbestraveler.com/food-drink/bottled-water-story.html?partner=rss

You know the earth's about to shatter into thousands of tiny fragments when people think it's reasonable to charge $40 plus for a normal size bottle of water. I don't care how good it sounds in theory, there's absolutely no practical reason to decorate a water bottle with Swarovski crystals, to import the water from the South Pacific, to age it for millenia in the skull of some glacier-frozen neanderthal, or to collect it from the condensation that forms on the tiny noses of Ugandan albino children*.

*In case any Ugandans are reading, Sean roundly and categorically condemns the persecution of albinos in Africa. This post was intended for non-Ugandan audiences.

6) Southern California and pathos in the star-spangled state

I don’t want to be too harsh b/c I’m sure there are plenty redeeming qualities that you simply miss in a three day visit to a place, but on the face of it, a preponderance of flat-billed Hurley caps and Ed Hardy muscle shirts does not a utopian society make.

5) The bizarre language on the shampoo bottles in my shower . . .

Apparently, b/c French has all the sensuality we can humanly fit into one language, someone somewhere decided that we would enjoy shampoo much more if foreign words were on the bottles. The ironic part is that, in order to get by with this, they often have to translate "shampoo" into "shampooing" which I think is unusually (but amusingly) clumsy for French.

Another bottle places the word "Rejuvenating" in a seemingly random place on the bottle. Ponce DAY Le-on himself would be mighty disappointed to find out, after all that exploring, that hundreds of years later we so easily and elegantly packaged the Fountain of Youth in a bottle of shampoo. That same bottle is the company's "Asian Pear & Red Tea" line of body care products, despite the fact that these two ingredients are preceded in quantity by Disodium Laureth Sulfosuccinate, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, PEG-120 Methyl Glucose Dioleate, Decyl Glucoside. Call me old-fashioned, but Cocamidopropyl Betaine just doesn't make me feel as exotic as Asian Pear.

And back to the bilingual bottle: "If your hair acts bored . . ." then simply apply "Nature's boredom-banishers, including clarifying Florida Grapefruit and invigorating French Peppermint, giv[ing] ho-hum hair a refreshing burst of enthusiasm, while mounds of frothy lather sweep away the clingy deposits that drag hair down and leave it lifeless. Limp, lazy, lackluster locks get back into the swing of things, shine again, take on a totally fresh, new attitude." Enthusiastic hair? Grapefruit that clarifies? I think you can see where all of this is heading . . .

4) The TSA agent’s question to me after he searched my carry-on. . .

He found four bags of stone-ground grits, two packages of pumpkin seeds, and a medicine bottle full of Madagascar vanilla, and then he said “You’ve got some strange stuff in here; what do you plan to do with all of it?" His question caught me a bit off guard because I don't consider grits, pumpkin seeds, or vanilla the most versatile of materials . . . you can cook with them, you can eat them, and I think that's about it. But who knows what those mad scientists (culinary geniuses?) have thought up while in safe haven on the cavernous border of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

3) Am I the only one who finds it disconcerting the zeal with which my neighbors decorate for Halloween every year?

This, if anything, must surely be a sign of the end times.

2) “Easy Mac and Cheese” -- just dump it all in a bowl and nuke it.

Was it not easy enough to begin with?

1) I'm going to have an infant crawling around my house in just over two months.