Not willing to let any grass grow under its zeitgeisty, metaphoric feet, today the Times notices “Female Comedians, Breaking the Taste-Taboo Ceiling.” Have you heard of this Sarah Silverman person? Because apparently she is rather raunchy. And lest you find yourself wondering how you woke up in 1998, and if so, whether Dawson’s ever going to hook up with Joey, let me assure you, this story actually ran in the New York Times in November 2011. Coming next, a piece on how people are using emoticons. Oh, wait.

In the first four paragraphs of his piece on taboo-busting babes, Jason Zinoman opens with a 1979 quote from Johnny Carson, segues into a 2007 Vanity Fair piece by Christopher Hitchens, and lands with a flourish on a decade-old Sarah Silverman joke. As those saucy lady comics might say, this story is dustier than your grandmother’s vagina.

After bringing us up to speed on Silverman’s latest rape jokes, what do you think Zinoman covered next? That’s right, Whitney Cummings, “another coarse, sexually frank female stand-up comic.” Despite also doing rape jokes, Zinoman finds her “not particularly risky.”

Cummings, like Silverman, is both attractive and comfortable around the F-bomb — and a reliable marvel to the Times. Just two months ago, Andrew Goldman was asking her about being “objectively attractive,” what she wears to meetings, and whether she  slept her way to fame and is “too dumb to own a car.” It was hilarious.

You’d think the next place to go from here would be Chelsea Handler. Last spring, after all, the Times lovingly noted that “her body has the pre-silicone lushness of a ’60s Playmate” while cooing that she admits, “I try to make fun of everyone as often as possible, especially minorities.” But shockingly – shocking like a rape joke involving a black guy shocking – the Times veers to Amy Schumer. Schumer, who is not Chelsea Handler, is “blond and bubbly” with “wholesome, apple-cheeked cheer,” and an act that “spouts proudly prejudiced views, mean-girl put-downs and meticulously recounted sexual exploits.” See, it’s completely different.

I’m just a cotton-headed set of ovaries on two feet, but I can’t help noticing a recurring theme. Whether it’s coming from Katie Roiphe or a culture writer, there’s a weird mix of fascination and repugnance toward the gal with a seemingly manly swagger here. She’s so cool, she can even laugh off sexual assault. Why can’t more women be like her? And she gets to say that stuff about vaginas that other people can’t. You know, like Jay-Z can say the N-word and gay men can call each other queer. Imagine the freedom! She’s also hot. Who else feels a 1,200 word think piece coming on?

It’s not that certain female comics don’t perpetuate this attention-getting shtick — if I never hear Sarah Silverman deliver an abortion punch line in that baby-talk monotone again, it’ll be too soon. But the bangable-broad-with-a-potty-mouth story is approximately as relevant as the moms-sometimes-wear-nice-clothes-outside one. What’s amazing isn’t that a woman can cuss with her pretty little lipsticked mouth. It’s that this jive-ass story is still being written, 10 years after it was vaguely topical. It’s the astonishment that Johnny Carson’s 1979 opinions no longer hold quite so much sway, and that sometimes people who can grow babies in their tummies can curse and talk about their periods or your erections. Guess the cat’s out of the bag on that one. So congratulations to the Times on something truly original there. They’ve made the notion of breaking taboos utterly boring.

The Serenading Unicorn makes no effort to hide who he is: Although there is no Juicy Fruit featured anywhere in the video itself, all of the Serenading Unicorn’s videos have been uploaded from the gum maker’s account. Take that, Don Draper.

I have high hopes that the S.U. can become the new Old Spice Guy: i.e., a viral marketing entity that transcends commercialization and enters memehood based on its own cleverness, not from all the money thrown at it by its parent company. Because after checking out some of the other videos from the Serenading Unicorn, I’m pretty sure I want to buy the whole album of Unicorn songs if it includes numbers like:

“Thanks for Friending Me”

“Please Take That Post Down”

(and my personal favorite) “Baby Your Haircut Is Growing On Me”

So far, the Serenading Unicorn has 18 videos, most of which were put online early last month and deal with topics relating to the Internet experience. Though Sarah Silverman is the Unicorn’s first big guest star, he’s also managed to snag YouTube celebrity (and 50 Cent’s friend) Keenan Cahill to sing a duet with him.

Whoever the guys behind this Juicy Fruit campaign are, they sure know their Internets. Now, can we get the Serenading Unicorn to sing a murdercore song with Rebecca Black? Because that would be rad.

While the Yes Men have been plying their weird trade for years, a few recent interventions may have caught your attention — like when the group spoke out on behalf of Canada during the recent U.N. climate summit, or when it lent a helpful “rebrand” to the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce in October, moving its position on climate change in a more enlightened direction. An award-winning documentary was also released this year covering their work, which aired on HBO and at theaters nationwide.

A young man sitting next to us, who has the word TED shaved into the side of his head, asks us how many TEDs we’ve been to, or if we are in fact “TED virgins.” He’s a producer who lives in Los Angeles, and like the other 500-plus people here, has paid almost $4,000 to spend four days listening to a slate of thematically organized 18-minute “TED talks” by various luminaries in the worlds of technology, entertainment and design (from which the conference’s initials spring) as well as various experts, often unacknowledged, in the fields of science, politics, philanthropy, business and art.

When our new friend finds out that we’re actually here as invited speakers, the keynote of the TEDActive “TED You” program here in Palm Springs, our estimation in his eyes immediately skyrockets, and naturally he asks us about the topic of our talk. With tongue loosely in cheek, we tell him that our talk is going to detail our plan to recruit more people to engage in Yes Men style guerrilla antics to help smash free market capitalism. We are met with a blank stare.

“But … what else is there?” he asks, his bemused expression slowly morphing into one of confusion and dread. We point to Sweden and Scandinavia as another way of doing things, and explain that free market capitalism doesn’t really exist here anyway since the big banks have been de facto nationalized, even as all the profits have been privatized, but by then our erstwhile friend has already started talking to somebody else, presumably of a slightly saner persuasion. If this were a film, by now he’d have probably pushed the red alert button, and TED Agents would have swiftly moved in to eject the few radicals that had managed to breach the perimeter.

That discussion abruptly over, Andy and I get back to deconstructing some of what we’ve seen so far, and return to brainstorming about our upcoming talk — and the challenge of selling a provocative brand of anti-corporate activism at a conference heavily sponsored by a laundry list of major corporations (Dow Chemical, GE, Walmart, Shell, etc). The challenge also being how to pitch our idea (the creation of a “Yes Laboratory for Creative Activism,” which will, we hope, train subsequent cadres of aspiring provocateurs and culture jammers) to an audience that, from what we had seen so far, seemed dedicated to a utopian, fairly apolitical form of magical thinking in which change is synonymous with invention, or sometimes just better branding, and where politics is nowhere to be found.

“What the world needs now is — mind shift,” conference emcee and TED curator Chris Anderson says to wild applause, as he kicked off the conference. At TED, mind shift is best delivered in a huge luxurious ballroom, with crystal chandeliers, and rows of red beanbag chairs and comfy lounge chairs. Here in Palm Springs the experience is totally mediated, mind you, 500 “TEDsters” who paid almost $4,000 a pop are here to watch the thematically grouped talks and presentations beamed in on massive TV screens all over the room. One man lies horizontally on a bed setup that resembles a sort of Bedouin encampment in the desert. Only instead of gazing up at the stars, he’s looking up at an LCD monitor above him broadcasting the talks from the main venue in Long Beach, which is invitation-only and costs $6,000.

In the world according to TED, where high-powered über-networking between very smart people and their very big ideas is the best way to address the various social, political and economic crises facing the world, would our entreaties for more organizing, more rebellion, more creative activism to change the rules of the game fall on deaf ears? Mind shift sounded nice, whatever it meant, but could we get anybody here interested in policy shift, in economic shift, in power shift? We knew this was a conference of designers, inventors, venture capitalists and management consultants — not a hotbed of radicals — but we also figured, given the much vaunted influence of the “TED community,” if we could interest even a few of these people in our scheme, we’d be in good shape.

Because the truth is that the TED vision is a persuasive one, and one validated by the millions who have watched the various “TED talks” archived at TED.com, a fantastic repository of inspiring, encouraging and brilliant talks given by a diverse group of thinkers and doers. Volunteers around the world have translated the talks into dozens of languages, and independently organized TED events have sprung up in cities around the world in the last year. And this year’s conference featured a huge range of speakers — from a MacArthur “genius grant” winner whose innovative research focuses on poverty reduction in the developing world, to an architect and his work on a new “Imagination Playground” and a game developer who says we’d solve more real-world problems if we all played more video games. There was even a talk by a guy who unveiled his new tool for the fight against malaria in Africa — an elaborate mosquito-zapping laser.

And in an impressive show of the networking pizzazz of the “TED community” as well. After awarding Jamie Oliver (“The Naked Chef”) the annual $100,000 TED prize this year, TEDsters leapt into action after Oliver delivered his wish onstage that every American child be taught to cook healthy foods. One audience member offered to donate trucks to repurpose as mobile cooking labs. Another volunteered to introduce Oliver to his friend Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who sits on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee.

And yet, and yet … despite all the great intentions and inspiring messages, something about this form of organizing resources and networking power behind ideas vetted by a wealthy creative class seemed dated somehow, almost as if the recent financial collapse and all that it told us about the limits of the free market as the chief organizing principle of our society, and the limits of entrusting our future to a group of “wise men” (think Alan Greenspan) had passed these people by.

The truth is that it probably has. According to a study by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Studies, unemployment for those in the top income bracket was at 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 — nearly full employment. This may or may not help explain why after a year in which the economy shed almost 8 million jobs, there were no talks at TED this year that focused on employment, on bailouts or on corporations or politically connected financial institutions as impediments to reform or innovation. Bill Gates gave a thoughtful and informative talk on why we have no time to lose in shifting toward a clean energy economy — but said nothing about the entrenched oil, coal and gas industries that are doing everything in their power to make sure that doesn’t happen anytime soon. To the contrary, corporations and the products they design and sell were almost always framed as the solution. And more than a few of the TED talks were thinly veiled product demos of technologies or innovations that are going to make some corporate TED sponsors very, very rich.

A Google employee, after giving a mouthwatering demonstration of the various remarkable functionalities of the new Google phone, asked the audience, “So maybe what the world needs now is — more smart phones?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question. This year Google donated 2,000 phones to all conference attendees, a huge marketing coup any way you slice it, putting these phones in the hands of the chattering, creative classes. It was also the one occasion when a riot was only narrowly averted among the normally low-key crowd. When at first TEDsters in Palm Springs thought they’d been left out of the giveaway, a massive “boo!” roared through the banquet hall, only assuaged when it was clarified that they too would get the phones (in the process amplifying a bit of an inferiority complex that the offsite TEDsters clearly feel toward their invitation-only brethren in Long Beach).

This was not the only spot of drama, of course. A bizarre Twitter battle erupted between Chris Anderson and Sarah Silverman after Anderson called Silverman’s TED performance “god-awful.” Presumably Anderson was offended by Silverman’s insistence on being characteristically profane and aggressively politically incorrect, i.e., being Sarah Silverman. And after so much earnestness, Sarah Silverman being Sarah Silverman — spoofing the craze for celebrity adoptions by explaining why she wanted to adopt a “terminally ill retard” so she won’t have to continue taking care of it into her old age –was a much-needed respite. And it was hilarious. And the ensuing much-publicized battle of the tweets says something about the expectations of the conference organizers, and a bit of naiveté as well. You invite Sarah Silverman to entertain the crowd, as a badge of edginess, but then when she doesn’t “tone it down” enough to fit the TED decorum, she gets trashed.

Which brings me to our talk, which was delivered to the Palm Springs crowd, and telecasted back to the main event in Long Beach. In the preparation we’d been asked to respect the TED guidelines, first and foremost being not to directly shill for money. But since we had no shame about our fundraising goals we did exactly that, but only after taking a poke at some of TED’s biggest corporate sponsors beforehand (when explaining the need for more Yes people to battle corporate criminals, we flashed a slide of major TED sponsors, then called them out as such. Here are a few lines from the speech to give you an idea):

“What the World Needs Now is the theme of this conference. … What the world really needs now is for us all to get off our asses and do something to try changing the rules of the game. The rules that let agribusiness companies shove their crap into our schools and make our kids obese (in a nod to Jamie Oliver), the rules that create global poverty every day, by perpetuating the same old rules of colonialism in glitzy modern garb, the rules that mean that malnutrition vastly outranks any other disease as cause of mortality in the developing world. And there’s no vaccine for malnutrition, and mosquito-zappers won’t do a thing about it. It’s only by changing the rules of the game that any substantial change can possibly occur.”

While the first half of the speech was greeted by a relative ocean of silence, once we started explaining the Yes Men’s particular M.O. (impersonating corporate scofflaws to give light to “their inner angels”), and flashing slides to illustrate the point, we had the audience roaring with laughter, and received a big applause at the end.

As it turns out, breaking the rules may be the best way to a TEDster’s heart. After our talk, all of the secret radicals came out of the woodwork, and we met all kinds of people who wanted to help us raise money, attract press coverage, collaborate or otherwise take advantage of the über-networked TED community to see the project launch off the ground. And maybe this illustrates one of the wonderful things about this conference, elitist as it may be. It’s perhaps one of the few places where all of these disciplines and fields and areas of expertise come to bump up against each other, and where molecular geneticists, illustrators, playwrights and designers, not to mention the odd anti-capitalist provocateur, rub shoulders and try to explain their area of expertise in a language that anybody can understand. The disciplining nature of devising a “TED talk” certainly forced us to home in on the core concepts of our “Yes Laboratory” idea, and how to pitch it to what was not necessarily an activist audience. (In a nutshell: Let a thousand Yes Men [and Women!] bloom).

Andy and I pondered this and more, and joked about Google’s cynical marketing ploy, even as we stood outside the conference hall with the rest of the TEDsters, in line to pick up our free smart phones.

Joseph Huff-Hannon is a Brooklyn, N.Y., independent writer and producer, a 2008 finalist in the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, and a recipient of a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. See more of his work at josephhuffhannon.com.

But next month’s Vanity Fair cover story swipes back at that piece (its own piece!) with the question: Who says women aren’t funny? The story, written by New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley, holds the lighter high for today’s female comedians, a group also including (in addition to those previously mentioned) Amy Sedaris, Lisa Lampanelli, Chelsea Handler and Kristin Wiig. (It’s worth noting that Hitchens tossed off a response to this piece. His retort? Not kidding: Alessandra Stanley is obviously hot for him.) The women profiled here are all hilarious, but you may also notice that they’re rather va-va-voom. Which brings us to the good news/bad news portion of our program. Good news? Women are funny. Bad news? The only female comedians making it these days seem to be the hot ones. As Stanley writes, “It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn’t be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty — even sexy — to get a laugh.” As Joan Rivers (no stranger to the plastic surgeon) quips, “Nowadays, you can’t even get on open mike with less than a C cup.” Ba-DUM-dum!

Personally, I find it fantastic that women like Fey are subverting the old stereotype that funny women can’t be desirable. For my money, Fey is one of the most desirable women on the planet. But it’s more than a drag to think that, for instance, Roseanne Barr wouldn’t make it in today’s television climate. An important part of humor is being human — flawed and imperfect and messy and, in the end, maybe not the kind of woman who can sell the cover of Vanity Fair.

What I’m trying to tell you, honey lambs, is that when you’re feeling disappointed in general, the boob tube offers you specific disappointments on which to project your feelings of generic malaise, from the glacial, soapy pace of “Battlestar Galactica” to the harebrained behavior of Orange County’s so-called “Real Housewives” to the disgusting digressions of overly self-indulgent comediennes.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s savor each and every fresh disappointment like the crestfallen connoisseurs of dissatisfaction that we are.

Programmed for love
First things first: Why in the world did “Battlestar Galactica” (10 p.m. Sundays on SciFi) switch to Sunday nights, when it was the one show that I actually watched when it aired (instead of on TiVo) on Friday nights? “Battlestar” is the perfect Friday night show for deadbeats like me who want to rationalize their crusty, shut-in existence. What goes better with Thai delivery and weekend geekery than glowering robots and hot space pilots in love? And why oh why does everyone crowd onto the Sunday night schedule? Somebody hop on over to Monday or Friday already!

Onward. I love “Battlestar Galactica,” I do. But Lordy me do I grow weary of Gaius Baltar! First there were those repetitive and increasingly grating scenes last season where Number Six circled Baltar seductively, endlessly whispering about what his next move should be, as the same staccato, suspense-building piano chords were pounded — brutally, mercilessly — over and over and over again. Each time another Gaius-and-Six scene aired, it elicited a jittery, violence-prone feeling in me, the kind that could only arise from watching a bad Farrah-seduces-the-criminal scene from “Charlie’s Angels” while a caffeine-addled child plays Chopsticks on the piano in the next room.

And this season, Baltar’s narrative arc has absolutely flat-lined. After a promising start as the self-serving president of the colonists on New Caprica, Baltar escaped certain death at the hands of his people by fleeing with the Cylons, a move that robbed the eerie machines of at least half of their imposing creepiness. After all, if Baltar can hang with them for a few weeks, they can’t be all bad, right? Certainly nothing like the gun-wielding, Nazi-inspired toasters marching through the streets of New Caprica, the ones that sent chills down our spines at the end of last season. Yes, yes, I know that’s the point: Who’s worse, wishy-washy man or God-fearing machine? But there was still a certain thrill to having the colonists up against a shiny, merciless, mysterious enemy.

I knew things were getting a little sloppy when the writers ripped off that Seer-in-a-tub-of-goo thing from “Minority Report.” Yes, having the skin jobs awaken in the goo made some sense, but when they threw the clairvoyant lady into the goo, and had her speaking in catchy, disturbing haikus? It was certainly visually stunning and poetic and memorable on the big screen when Spielberg did it — a little bit too memorable, in fact, to swipe whole-hog.

But those bad Battlestarians couldn’t leave well enough alone! They had to send poor Baltar, with his bloodshot eyes and his veins popping out of his forehead, into the thick of the goo-covered Cylon fantasy. Next comes the plinky, rambling piano music and the long, lighted tunnels; the glowing floors and the big beds in the middle of empty rooms; the dreamlike dialogue and the abrupt jump cuts; and before you know it, every episode of the show is interrupted by 10 or 15 minutes of this aimless French New Wave film fantasy, starring a buggy-eyed, panicked Baltar.

Speaking of which, are you as tired of that look on Baltar’s face as I am? You know, his one look: The frantic, darting eyes, bulging out of his head? The scrunched, veiny forehead? How does the man survive, in a perpetual state of panic? And why in the world is he panicked, anyway, when all he seems to do is wander around lighted hallways and lounge about in bed with two hot women?

“Battlestar Galactica” has been fairly uneven this season — the winter finale, with its never-gonna-happen nuclear standoff, was lackluster at best, and the soapy Apollo-and-Starbuck story line has “Who the hell cares?” written all over it — but for the most part, it’s still a compelling show. So why do we have to sit through this endless Cylon-ship wanking, particularly when it never seems to drive the story forward, and only lessens the sense of mystery and foreboding and fear surrounding the Cylons?

When Baltar almost died last week, I was more than ready to see him go. Kill the guy and let’s restore those nasty Cylons to their imposing, fearsome robot selves. They can still have faith in God, and be purer and more deeply ethical than humans are, as long as they have one scary red eye and two gigantic shiny silver man-titties. They can even be skin jobs — we’ve still got to meet the “final five” remaining human-look-alike Cylons, don’t we? Just keep them away from avant-garde composers and big fluffy beds once and for all.

A bubblin’ crude
If there’s one thing more formidable than dirty-minded female robots, it’s dirty-minded female comedians. Sarah Silverman has always taken great pleasure in this fact, peppering her routines with jokes that are sure to make even the heartiest, most resilient, most outrageously un-p.c. jerk among us cringe ever so slightly:

“I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”

“I don’t care if you think I’m a racist, I just want you to think that I’m thin.”

“A couple nights ago, I was licking jelly off my boyfriend’s penis. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God. I’m turning into my mother.’”

Silverman may not have shiny silver man-titties, but she does have enormous balls. She’s fearless, cranky and merciless, with a taste for the absurd. What’s not to like? That girl should get herself a comedy show!

Unfortunately, Comedy Central’s “The Sarah Silverman Program” (10:30 p.m. Thursdays) has all of the charms of a joke with an audible fart as the punch line. In fact, in one scene, Silverman and her friends are out to brunch, and each friend takes a turn farting audibly. When it’s Silverman’s turn, she soils herself instead of farting, then breaks into a melancholy ballad about pooping instead of farting, and we cut to a music video starring Silverman in a flowing white dress, gesturing dramatically on the beach like a lovelorn Alanis Morissette.

Sounds great, right? And it should be, but it’s not. This confuses me. After all, I applaud almost everything that Silverman stands for: I like that, instead of accepting her fate playing benign, kinda-funny kinda-hot roles on sitcoms, she insists on writing comedy that’s absurd and offensive and seriously crude. That’s not the sort of thing that women in Hollywood attempt to do very often.

Nonetheless, it’s not funny enough. Furthermore, I find Silverman’s character on the show grating and unlikable. Even though her character is supposed to be lazy and self-involved and pathetic, even though I quite obviously relate to this lazy, self-involved, pathetic character, I still find her unbearably cutesy and grating. You know how Chris Elliott of “Get a Life” had a certain flair that told you that, even though he was a total loser, he secretly thought he was a little bit adorable anyway? Well, Silverman has that same coy smile, but in her case, it seems to detract from the laughs instead of adding to them. She’s a little too happy with herself, too peppy, too chirpily harsh.

Silverman’s character could take a few pointers from Tina Fey on “30 Rock” (You’re watching it now, right?): an awkward, vaguely pathetic character who manages not to be unbearably smug and cloying in a way that makes you want to punch her in the face. With all of the potential here — the fantasy sequences, the extreme weirdness, the desire to offend — Silverman should manage to make us laugh more often. I’m going to give this one a 3 on the Bad Sitcom Pain Scale.

Plant me in your penthouse

So there. I just assigned a number to someone else’s creation, something that another human being put lots of time and energy into, and that makes me far lazier and more pathetic than any character Silverman could dream up.

But at least I’m not as lame as any of those “Real Housewives of Orange County” (10 p.m. Tuesdays on Bravo), which is why I watch the show in the first place. People who need bad people are the loneliest people in the world, you see.

“Real Housewives” is the purest example of the Bad People genre of reality TV that I can think of. It’s all about rubbernecking the worst sorts of behaviors and traits: Laziness, vanity, greed, egocentrism, teaching your children that money is the most important thing in the world, teaching your horse that it’s perfectly normal, and not incredibly embarrassing, for a horse to wear hot-pink leg warmers.

Of course it makes sense that when Hollywood went hunting for obnoxious yet telegenic freaks, they didn’t have to search very far. Orange County is home to mutants of all stripes, from a rich array of surgically modified, neurotic housewives to a vast and colorful range of fine examples from the whoring sea donkey species. As it turns out, Orange County is the natural habitat for a thrillingly demonstrative variety of freaks who are more than willing to strut and swagger and show off their brightly colored plumage and their repetitive mating cries for the camera’s benefit.

Since it would be an injustice if our impressions of Orange County remained represented mainly by the fickle teens of MTV’s “Laguna Beach,” Bravo’s reality narrative allows us to look beyond the enormous fake tits and the botox injections and the ugly clothes that these housewives embrace, in order to see what these very real human beings are like on the inside: Namely, they’re obsessed with spending money or contemplating the money they have to spend or showing off the stuff that they’ve bought with their money or imagining how much money other people have and are currently spending.

In this way “The Real Housewives of Orange County” is something of a paean to consumer culture. It’s also a sweet little love letter to motherhood — crappy motherhood, more specifically. When real estate agent Jeana isn’t talking about how much commission she’ll make when she sells a $15 million mansion, she’s informing her daughter that she’d really like to sell one of the family dogs on eBay. The daughter is horrified and disgusted, but Jeana doesn’t mind. In fact, she seems to move about her life in a constant state of distraction, while her kids alternately roughhouse, act out and try to comfort each other, since their mom can’t seem to manage it.

When Lauri, a tall blonde who looks like she’s been surgically altered to resemble Heather Locklear, talks about her divorce and how it affected her three kids, all she mentions is how devastating it must’ve been for them to live in a small apartment. Thank god those days are over, because Lauri just met another rich guy, and he’s so very successful and he’s such a good guy, and did she mention how rich he was? It seems that the males of the Orange County species are more than happy to pay for their wives’ extravagant lifestyles as long as they look as much like a Barbie as humanly possible. Lauri’s life is going great again! Well, except for the small matter of her son having assaulted a teacher at school (the boy is currently living in a state-run boarding school), which Lauri glosses over in conversations on the beach with her friends.

And then there’s Jo, the whoring sea donkey of the group. Jo doesn’t seem to have a career or a life of any kind, but she does have a chumpy boyfriend who pays for everything while she dresses up in lingerie and goes to parties at the Playboy mansion without him. These days, Jo is so, like, over her boyfriend, but then she kinda wonders who’s going to buy her, like, food if she breaks up with him.

Yes, “Real Housewives” is full of soulless, distasteful people who will disappoint and disgust you and most important, make you feel much better about your own disturbingly shallow existence. Which is nice, because when you smile at how shallow and focused on quick fixes and immediate gratification other people are, the world smiles back at you, then reminds you that there’s blueberry pie in the fridge with your name on it.

Next week: What do white rappers, Broadway hopefuls and interior designers have in common?