The Scripps Howard News Service ran my Kids Table Manifesto column again, with my permission.

It appeared in the Defiance (Ohio) Crescent-News.

It appeared in Newburyport (MA) Daily News.

It appeared in the Wichita Falls Times Record News.

The column also has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Remember metrosexuals? They were those gay-looking guys who weren’t gay. Sure, their hair was gay. Their clothes were gay. They spent their free time doing gay things. But at the end of the day they went home to their short-haired, boyishly slim girlfriends. So clearly they were not gay.

It turns out the metrosexual reign of terror is over.

The new word you’re going to hear about in men’s fashion is “menergy.”

How do I know you’re going to hear it?

I’ve read about it in The New York Times.

I’ve read about it in the New York Daily News.

I’ve read about it in the Los Angeles Times.

I’ve even read about it in the Noblesville (Ind.) Daily Times.

(You know a trend has arrived when it makes a splash in Noblesville, Ind. Remember when people started wearing Crocs? That was Noblesville. Remember when people stopped cuffing their pants? You can thank the Noblesville High School Class of 1991 for making it un-cool. Remember when people started mixing cocaine and heroin and started doing speedballs? Again, that was the pride of Hamilton County, Ind., good old Noblesville.)

What is menergy?

Menergy is manliness.

David Beckham is metrosexual.

A bearded George Clooney has menergy.

Ryan Seacrest is metrosexual.

Benicio Del Toro has menergy.

Bill Clinton is metrosexual.

Hillary Clinton has menergy.

(OK, it’s a punch line. But seriously, in a bar fight, who do you take? Hillary or Dennis Kucinich? Hillary or Mike Gravel? Hillary or the ultimate tag team of irrelevance Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd? I like Hillary in every one of those match-ups. I also think that if she concentrated hard enough she could make John Edwards explode just by staring at him, like the U.S. Army tried with all those goats.)

Fashion expert Robert Verdi calls menergy “a return to real men.” Hirsute good looks, beards, whiskers, deep voices, 5 o’clock shadows, scotch and colognes that smell like coniferous forests are all in right now.

(Sas - oozing with menergy. Literally.)

Here’s my prediction. Getting punched in the face will be this year’s must-have fashion accessory. If you’re not getting punched in the face like a man, you can take it somewhere else, Sally. If someone breaks a chair over your head while you’re drinking Pabst in a Manhattan bar, crazy bathroom sex is in your immediate future. I have no doubt that right now Dolce & Gabbana is shooting a series of ads centered around Burt Reynolds running away from an exploding office building in slow motion.

I welcome our new menergy era for two reasons.

1. There will be an unspoken competition to see who can come up with the cleverest menergy headline and this will entertain me.

Department of Menergy (Men’s Fitness article on how to look more manly)
Alternative Menergy (Rolling Stone article on the popularity of bands like Nickleback)
Menergy Efficiency (Wall Street Journal article praising the return of the manly man)
Menergy Crisis (Cosmo article on the return of the caveman)
Menergy Drinks (bartender.com article on the manliest drinks)
Burst of Menergy (Out – you can come up with your own damn article idea for this one)

2. I also like that we are now well into the Combining Two Words Together To Make a New Word Era. Or as I like to call it, Smashwording.

I’ll coin a few right now.

Single women who never marry but play an active role in the lives of their nieces and nephews: Indeparents (Independent + Parent)

Men who continue sowing their oats well into their 40s before they finally marry and have children: Cadaddy (Cad + Daddy)

Younger men and women who return to tradition and get married right after college: The iDo Generation (iTunes + I Do)

Super-smart babies who can read by age 2: Einstykes (Einstein + Tykes)

Sexually promiscuous senior citizens: Pimpma and (Pimp + Grandma) and Pimppa (Pimp + Grandpa)

I can keep going, but this would turn into a New York Times trend piece, and you do not want that.

In conclusion, Peru is a land shrouded in mystery, from the ancient Incans to the outstretched Andes mountains…

I’m sorry. Any time I write the words “In conclusion,” I want to follow it up with an eighth grade oral report.

In conclusion, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” is not just the story of one girl’s search for religion; it’s symbolic of mankind’s spiritual quest and mankind’s confusion about sanitary napkins.

OK. This one’s for real.

In conclusion, I encourage you all to welcome the menergy era. It is time for men to be men again. I am in favor of this change because I do not have any hair on my head so I cannot be a metrosexual. Anything that toughens up the male ideal of what is cool works for me. If you see me in a Manhattan bar drinking Pabst, please break a chair over my head.

To read last week’s column Fun With Research click here.

I received this letter from my friend Holly in response to The Best Holiday. This is some great ball busting. And no, she is not serious. I am guessing.

Dear joedonatelli.com,

I take exception to this week’s column, which offered “picks” for our nation’s finest holidays. Frankly, your choices largely suck, your reasoning is flawed and some of your facts are overstated or under-researched. You also failed to include an important assessment category, holiday-related store sales.

That said, here are my responses:

Halloween
There are indeed parades on Halloween, often involving urban neighborhoods where rainbow-colored flags snap proudly in the chilly fall breeze (”haaaaaaay!!!”). Halloween is Gay Christmas. I also distinctly remember one Halloween parade that circled (seemingly endlessly and without mercy) the entire fucking neighborhood around my elementary school. I was wearing one of my ballet recital costumes with a light sweater over it–presumably to discourage area pedophiles–and all I could think about were the orange-frosted and sprinkled doughnuts that were awaiting us back in the classroom. I nearly passed out from the anticipated sugar high. Nowadays, the kids return to the classroom and are rewarded with apples (although most are too cool to dress up anymore for Halloween), since it’s the only thing left that won’t spark any weight- or peanut-related lawsuits against the school district. Halloween sucks.

Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is not a holiday. It falls on a Sunday, and there is no three-day weekend grace period to recover from the hangovers, losses and disbelief over the things that qualify as being worth a $2 million ad spot. The only sales are at the grocery store, and usually involve Coors, an allegedly consumable product that could fuel a jetliner. Terrible, Joe. Just a terrible choice.

New Year’s Eve
Now this is just about the only one you did the right thing with. Complete solid agreement; in fact, it almost makes up for your poorly assessed #10. Almost. But not quite. Nah. Nevermind. I’ve always tried to make the most of New Year’s Eve, but it is always just a let’s-cling-to-Christmas-as-long-as-possible-to-avoid-the desperation-and-despair-January-inevitably-visits-upon-us fake holiday. We should follow the lead of the Jews, who allow their New Year’s Eve to pass without anybody even really knowing about it. A lot of them don’t even know about it, if they’re Reform.

Thanksgiving
You know, I just knew–KNEW–you were going to pick this one. Do you know why nobody goes home anymore for Thanksgiving? Because it is the WORST holiday ever conceived, especially if you have to go within a 78-mile radius of an airport, freeway or 7-11. The lines. The people. The strollers. The whining. The fat people. The expired whip cream in a can. The gastrointestinal events that begin to surface about 7 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, right around the time Uncle John is loosening his belt and settling onto the couch for “Jingle All the Way” or some other terrifying Christmas movie ABC has lined up after the football game. All my life, I dreaded Thanksgiving. It was this stupid thing I had to sit through (on the piano bench, mind you–I didn’t qualify for a real chair at the dining room table, nor did I even qualify for a chair of my own, as I always had to share it with my sister) and use a napkin for in order to get to the really good part–Santa. Presents. Both parents in a good
mood the entire day, at the same time.

I think one piece of your assessment where this retarded holiday–Thanksgiving–is concerned that is missing is this: You are a man. You have likely awakened around 10 or so on Thanksgiving day to find your grandma already over, stirring something in a saucepan on the stove while your mom struggles up the basement steps with a pot that outweighs her by 60 pounds. Also by the time you stumble into the kitchen, not even out of the T-shirt you slept in–in fact, HOURS after you get up–she has already pulled out the neck, organs and other slimy crap they leave inside the stomach of this non-walking bird you’re later supposed to eat. If your mother is a registered nurse, she has also made you stand weakly next to her at the kitchen sink while she points out where the aorta was and explains how the chambers of the turkey heart once mightily pumped blood through the pale, thawed bird carcass that now sits in bloody water in the sink. Perhaps after you get out of the shower around noon, you think the blur that just raced past you might have been your mother in her bathrobe, the vacuum cleaner roaring in front of her, on her way to her room to put some presentable clothing on before 27 people claiming to be relatives show up on the doorstep demanding food.

Later in the day–shortly after the 12 minutes it takes for people to consume the food she spent 4 days preparing–she flashes that look at her sullen daughters, who have tried desperately to engage their younger cousins in coversations to avoid eye contact, but who then give up and dutifully rise to clear the table of the fine china, crystal and silver (basically all the stuff that cannot go in the dishwasher). They pull back their hair, snap on the rubber gloves (which always have a hole pricked in the finger and feel hot and sticky inside) and pick their way through the devastated area once known as the kitchen, which has descended into a No Man’s Land of encrusted pots, pans, beer cans, coffee cups and every other dish the family has accumulated since 1971. Six and a half hours later, they enter the living room, where the company is getting up to say goodbye, get their pat on the head, and wave goodbye to their relations, who will probably not remember them in the way children like to be remembered at Christmas.

Thanksgiving is nothing more than a regular weeknight dinner on crack. It’s a day that reminds women everywhere to say to themselves, Buck up; Christmas is at Aunt Carol’s house this year.

Humbug, I tell you. Humbug.

Your faithful reader,

Holly

Every week I bookmark dozens of articles that I consider column-worthy. From those bookmarks I narrow my choices down to one topic. You have seen the end results in columns such as The War on Drugs is Being Fought in Your Toilet, Deloitte & Touche & Women, and Robots Cannot Love.

Obviously, I can’t use every article. And obviously I don’t want to waste the time I spend researching either. So this week I thought I’d share ten of the hundreds of stories that I have bookmarked since July that will never be featured as columns.

We’ll call it the First Ever Joe Donatelli Aborted Column Spectacular.

No, wait, the word aborted is kind of grim. It makes me think of military air strikes that were called off at the last moment. And that’s just sad. Poor little air strikes never had a chance.

We’ll call it the First Ever Joe Donatelli Cavalcade of Dead Baby Columns.

In an article entitled Binge Drinkers Prefer Beer, Bloomberg News reports that three quarters of binge drinkers prefer beer over other types of alcohol. I thought this made sense. It’s hard to binge on vodka. You’ll – what’s the word? – die.

Another beer-related story that I found on FOXnews.com brought my long-awaited dream of a merger between Keystone Ice and Gold’s Gym one step closer to reality. Spanish researchers have found that Beer After Exercise May Be Better Than Water. Don’t laugh at this. Spanish-funded research is the reason America was discovered. When the Spanish research something, you can bet that it will eventually establish a constitutional rule of law based on individual rights, carry the world economically and produce the only movies worth watching. Jogging and drinking will put a man on Mars by 2050. Trust me.

Sometimes I see articles that work well in combination together. Here are two fun ones. A story on the Voice of America web site says that Older Americans Are Staying Sexually Active. The story claims that 26 percent of people between the ages of 75 and 85 are having sex. Then I found a USA Today blog that says A Seventh of Elderly Americans Suffer From Dementia. Now I have to wonder, what percentage of that 26 percent that is claiming to have sex is also suffering from dementia? It’s not sex if you’re walking around the Benetton with no pants on, grandpa. It may be a fucking good time. It may be something we should all do at least once in our lives. But it’s not sex.

Here’s a story that comes out at least once every six months. In an article entitled Film Smoking Sways Teens, Study Shows, The Hollywood Reporter reports on a new study that claims to link smoking on film and teenage tobacco use. No way. If this was true, film would influence other social behaviors as well. As a child I watched American Ninja at least a dozen times, and at no point did I ever wait silently in a ceiling rafter only to descend upon my enemy, slit his throat, throw a smoke bomb and disappear into a cool mountain mist in further search of the man who murdered my sensei. Did I want to? Yes. Did I act on this impulse? No.

(Above: Private Joe Armstrong kicked ass so I didn’t have to.)

Sometimes I grab a story just for the headline. I can’t resist any article with a title like Pac-Man Finds Next Level Of Fear Research. The Nobel Prize for Totally Fucked Up Research goes to the Wellcome Trust centre for neuroimaging at the University College London, which modified a version of Pac-Man to deliver electric shocks to people to see how they react to danger.

Two questions:

1. Do you think the Wellcome Trust centre is located in London’s historic Thannk Yoou District?

2. Why Pac-Man?

Pac-Man is one of the only nonviolent video games that people love. If the Wellcome Trust centre wanted to instill fear in people – and I think it’s hilarious that anything called the Wellcome Trust centre wants to instill fear in people – it should have forced players to spend more than five minutes playing E.T. on the Atari 2600. I would claw a man’s skin inside out and build a ladder with his blood-wet bones to get the hell away from playing E.T. on the Atari 2600. If you played this game, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Here are two more stories that belong together. In a story called A First For The FCC: Fining Fake News, prwatch.org reports that the Federal Communications Commission is fining broadcasters that air video news releases without disclosing that they’re not actually news. Meanwhile FEMA held a ‘News Conference’ during the recent wildfires in California in which FEMA staffers posed as real reporters. So … will the FCC be fining FEMA? Also, can someone please tend to the lump of grey matter that now rests in front of my laptop? I was just thinking about how these are the same people who are responsible for the fact that I have to pay $12 a month to hear Howard Stern and my head exploded. Please put whatever is left of my brain back on top of my neck. Thank you.

I love this story – Pentagon Confirms It Sought to Build a Gay Bomb. It’s true. It was tested once, on Feb. 5, 2006 in Pittsburgh, Pa., on the day the Steelers won Super Bowl XL. It was a complete success.

And finally, according Great Britain’s Telegraph, Italy’s Biggest Business Is The Mafia. Some countries should just be forced to start over. Here are five signs your country has failed completely and needs to file for the U.N. equivalent of Chapter 11:

1. You were on the losing side of more than three wars in the last 100 years.
2. You have failed to mass-produce a decent automobile.
3. You can’t break double digit medals at the Summer Olympics.
4. There are more people of your nation’s descent in New York City than in your capital.
5. The Bill Gates of your country started his career by leaning against a street corner lamppost flipping a coin.

That last one could go on for a whole column. Let’s have some fun with this. Send me your qualifications for when a country should be forced to start over. If I use them, I will give you credit in the column. Best entry wins a special prize to be determined. If we can come up with about 20 I’ll write a whole column about it.

If you don’t, you will have killed a dead baby.

To read Joe’s previous column The Best Holiday click here.

With a writers’ strike looming, I thought I’d throw these out there and encourage everyone to watch them before we’re inundated with nothing but reality shows for the next three months:

1. South Park
The boys responded to being censored last year with a three-part epic centered around a terrorist attack against Imaginationland. The show has never been better.

2. The Office
I can’t get enough. It’s hitting a stride I’ve seen few sitcoms match. Like Arrested Development in its prime.

3. Friday Night Lights
I am shocked by how much I like this teen drama set in a Texas town surrounding the local high school football team. It is excellent.

4. 30 Rock
The most quote-able show on TV.

5. The Daily Show
The most important political show ever.