Fat Personal Trainers Is it too much to ask to be assigned a personal trainer who’s actually in shape? Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not really inspired to finish up my French curls when the guy cheering me on is the spitting image of Ernest Borgnine. In fact, the only thing less inspiring is...

Pasadena If I got off on buying the same crewneck sweater in eight different colors at Talbots, this’d be heaven. I used to live within a mile of the beach and a 14-theater AMC; now I’ve got a giant sign that says, “God is Still Speaking” looming outside my bedroom window. They shot The Graduate...

Girls Who “Already Ate” I order a big hunk of lasagna and you get a house salad because you “already ate.” Excuse me? Either you’re a bitch for putting me through six different e-mail exchanges dedicated to finding a mutually acceptable restaurant in a mutually accessible location or you’re lying to cover for an eating...

Wobbly Tables This is a flipping four-star restaurant. The sauteed skate we ordered came with cauliflower that you spent a week and a half caramelizing and a caper-raisin emulsion that required a Ph.D. in Chemistry to produce. You could at least seat us at a table with four legs of equal length. We’ve spilled so...

The Demise Of The Fortune Cookie Remember fortunes? Something that foretells a new job, love or financial windfall; a prediction that eerily rings true that you’ll superstitiously keep in your wallet; or at least something that sounds funny with the words “in bed” tacked onto the end. I didn’t wrestle with that cellophane packaging for...

Dance Dance Revolution Quit claiming it’s “just like Guitar Hero.” Dance Dance Revolution is to Guitar Hero what Napoleon Dynamite is to Justin Timberlake. Anyone who attempted their DDR “dance moves” in the real world would look like they were a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Jackass? Yes, GH and DDR have similar...

The Locker Room At The Friar’s Club To all of those Christian groups dedicated to “curing” homosexuality through “reparative therapy”: just send Ted Haggard to the locker room at the Friars Club and expose him to all of those hairy bellies, veiny legs and tiny wieners, and he’ll come out as straight as John Wayne....

Your First Day On The Job You get introduced to the same people five times and you still can’t remember anyone’s name, then you’re seated at a desk and given nothing to do, so you spend the afternoon straightening out your piles of Post-It notes and grinning like an idiot at your busy new colleagues...

WebMD.com So, Mr. WebMD, I had a slight rash on my face, which turned out to be a simple allergic reaction to my moisturizer. But according to you, I had incurable facial tumors, sun poisoning, melanoma and childhood obesity. Thanks so much—where did you get your license to practice medicine, St. Augustine Institute for Hypochondria...

Mr. Met Mets fans aren’t some sushi-rolling, lemonade-sipping pansy-asses. The blue in the team logo is a reflection of the hue around our collars. We may have some sentimentality for team mascot Mr. Met, but mostly he’s just an embarrassing, arcane reminder of the days when patronizing gimmickry was a boon to the spirits of...

Asian People Who Insist On Doing Karaoke In Their Native Tongues Do you see me doing a rendition of “Hatikvah”? The whole point of karaoke is to choose a song that everyone’s heard before so we can all experience the song with you. I get self-conscious picking a Cat Stevens song and you’re serenading the...

Your Annoying Plus One So you had to invite your new “friend” to come out with the boys. She got belligerently drunk and wouldn’t stop screeching about “chilling” in a recording studio with Lenny Kravitz (“…and then Kenny Loggins called and I was like, ‘Lenny, it’s Kenny!’ Ha ha ha!”), sucking the fun out of...