2. Abed from “Community” shows up on “Cougar Town”:

Easter egg for the super fans and the people who love Subway.

3. OWN picks up new series, “Don’t Tell the Bride“: Groom and future wife are separated for a month before the wedding; he has to make all the decisions about planning the event. Hope she likes nachos and a boob-shaped cake.

4. Student makes Chanel bag out of beef jerky:

(Photo by Nancy Wu)

Oh what? It’s all cowhide, no matter which way you look at it. Calm down and take a bite.

5. Museum-going men are happier than their counterparts: That 2 percent of the male population must be having a blast.

6. This mommy kitten is hugging her baby kitten:

Yes, dear, it’s very, very cute. Please let me go back to bed now, I have work in the morning. Well, if it’s so great, take a video of it! I’ll watch it later.

7. “Pop-Up Video” is coming back to VH1: Though now it’s just called “tweeting during music videos.”

8. “Jersey Shore’s” Ronnie and the Situation get into a fistfight in Florence: Really, guys? Really? Italy was ready to boot you out before you even showed up, and this is how you show your good behavior?

9. Mark Zuckerberg, woodsman: The Facebook CEO will only eat food he kills himself. His private message to friends on FB just read: “I just killed a pig and a goat.” And not on FarmVille.

10. “True Blood’s” fourth season trailer: “Oh great, now I have to deal with witches?“

Our thoughts exactly.

No, wait, scratch that. Her show wasn’t truly about Oprah at all. It was about you. All of you. But especially you, the individual sitting there watching her “every day,” as she said.

She had a message for you, the individual. Several messages, actually — and they were all intertwined: Take responsibility for your life. Be honest with yourself and others. Be responsible for the energy you put out in the world, because that energy comes back around eventually. Also: There is a God, or a life force, and you should get to know him/her/it, because he/she/it can improve your judgment and guide your life.

There was a clip reel of people admitting things on TV that they had never told close friends and family members. They said they were alcoholics or drug addicts, that they had HIV, that they had endured or inflicted spousal abuse. The confessions had a snowball effect and became collectively cathartic, Oprah said: “Little by little, we started to release the shame.”

One of the clips was of Oprah herself circa 1986, revealing that she herself had been sexually abused as a child. Another clip referenced the recent broadcast in which actor-director Tyler Perry said he’d been sexually abused as a child, then led an audience of 200 fellow sexual abuse survivors, all men, while they stood together holding pictures of themselves as kids.

Long sections of Oprah’s final syndicated broadcast, which amounted to a 42-minute monologue interspersed with video clips, suggested a church service, though precisely what kind varied from moment to moment.

Sometimes it felt like Sunday school for kids. Other times it felt like a sermon, or the opening remarks of a self-help group leader opening a meeting in a church basement.  “Don’t wait for anybody else to fix you, to save you or complete you,” she said. “‘Jerry Maguire’ was just a movie. [But] no one completes you. We have seen that with guest after guest. When you accept that you are responsible for your life, you…get….free.”

Still other times the broadcast evoked the famous sequence in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, presumed dead, attend their own funeral service and hear themselves eulogized. But here was Oprah doing the eulogizing. In an especially unfortunate moment, she suggested that God was responsible for the meeting of her father’s sperm and her mother’s egg. That may very well be true, but if so, it’s true for every other human being as well — and when you put it in the words that Oprah chose, it can’t help but sound oddly messianic.

Oprah’s last words before exiting stage left were, “to God be the glory.”

She talked about how, deep down, she really wanted to be a teacher, and near the end of the broadcast, she introduced her very first mentor, her fourth grade teacher Mrs. Mary Alice Duncan, who was sitting there in the audience, tearing up and grinning.

She said that her guests taught her that there was “no need to feel superior to anybody” because “there is a common thread that runs through all of our pain and all of our suffering, and that is unworthiness, not feeling worthy enough to own the life that you were created for…Your being here, your being alive, makes worthiness your birthright. You alone are enough.”

She said that within each person, no matter what his or her race, creed, color or life experience, is a little voice that asks, “Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you?” That voice, Oprah said, was what she hoped to answer, encourage and embrace over the course of 25 years and 4,561 shows.

It would have been nice if, at some point during the telecast, even a single audience member had been permitted to utter one syllable. There was no dialogue, only monologue interspersed by cheers, laughter and applause. The key to Oprah’s success, she assured us, is that she knows that deep down, everyone wants to be heard. But in this last broadcast, nobody else got a word in edgewise.

It was a final summation in a career which, judged in terms of social good and emotional healing, required no defense. Oprah is a force for good, period. She may inspire love, loathing, bafflement, amusement, irritation, you name it, but there is no possible way to evalute the sum total of her career on TV without concluding that the world is a somewhat better place because she was in it. And yet here she was making a case for herself, Oprah Winfrey for the defense, as if she wasn’t worthy of all this attention and acclaim. As if she didn’t get her own memo. It was poignant in ways she herself probably didn’t intend.

She left her stage, her classroom, her pulpit, unfinished. A work in progress.

So perhaps the biggest surprise of today was a heartfelt speech by Oprah’s silent partner Stedman Graham. Looking nervous, Stedman said that he didn’t know of anyone else who could change so many people’s lives and also bring a bagged lunch to work.

Meanwhile, Dr. Maya Angelou’s contribution to the ceremony was a new poem, which she read accompanied by Alicia Keyes on the piano:

“Unplanned and unrehearsed, this big-eyed black girl from Mississippi, showed the world how to look at itself … She listened to the rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous … For 25 years she listened. … She said, ‘Be strong, be kind, and call me Oprah.’ I can. I will. And I shall. Be Oprah. I am. Oprah. Oprah. Oprah.”

Of course, not everyone took the same approach to honoring the living legend. Jerry Seinfeld used his five minutes to complain about his marriage, women in general, and how it’s Oprah’s fault that ladies mock their husbands. Then Jerry took his seat, directly next to Oprah, because they are best friends anyway.

Simon Cowell introduced a musical number where Rosie O’Donnell sang a reworked version of “Fever,” with special appearances by Dr. Phil, Nate Berkus and Dr. Oz (the last of which said Oprah’s gift to the world was teaching everyone about S-shaped poop). Usher, Kristin Chenoweth and Aretha Franklin filled out the non-ironic singing portion of the show.

The oddest moment of the episode was when Maria Shriver joined Oprah onstage with Gayle King to thank her friend for “giving me  … the most important gift of all … telling me the truth.” It was a loaded moment, though if Arnold was watching, the camera didn’t cut to him. This was Oprah’s day, after all.

Much has been written of late about how Oprah is the last of her kind, a relic from an era when daytime television belonged to talk show hosts and that other dying breed, soap operas.  And it’s true that a phenomenon exactly like Oprah will not come along again, that the world that created her is long gone. But if you’re wondering why the television world has all but ground to a halt in anticipation of her Wednesday finale, why her final few episodes have become a frenzy of celebrity accolades and tear-filled highlight reels, it’s not because she’s the last space shuttle launching herself gloriously into obsolescence. It’s because she still matters.

When Winfrey launched her show in 1986, she was an aspiring Phil Donahue, the host with the microphone and the lineup of dysfunction and shocking revelations. By the end of the ’80s — and right up to the present — that “My teenage babydaddy is out control!” format had become a daytime TV standard. But Oprah has long since distinguished herself from Maury and Montel and Rikki and Sally Jessy and Jerry. In 1994, she made the bold and public decision to steer her show away from tabloid sensationalism and take it in a more empowerment-oriented direction.

You know the rest. A book club that turned the likes of Wally Lamb, Edwidge Danticat and Barbara Kingsolver into full-blown literary superstars — and got viewers to pick up Tolstoy, Faulkner and Dickens. An international “angel network” charity “to make a difference in the lives of others.” Episodes on everything from how not to look old to how to save your family from carbon monoxide poisoning. And buckets and buckets of tears.

You can roll your eyes at her shameless manipulation. You can call her show formulaic and self-aggrandizing — in fact, let me do it for you. Oprah is a woman who could make Bono think, “Now there’s somebody with a messiah complex.” She has given an exasperating amount of airtime to dubious self-help shtick like “The Secret,” and crackpot “health” experts like Suzanne Somers and Jenny McCarthy. She has proven, time and again, that to follow all of her advice would be an exhausting, expensive fool’s errand. 

Here comes the “but.”

There’s a reason this woman is still such a powerful influencer, one who can leave the cattle industry quaking and whose departure is sending the publishing industry into a getting-drunk-at-lunch level spiral of despair. There’s a reason her voice still stands out, even in a media world that’s been exponentially diluted by cable and Internet. It’s because unlike the Jerrys and the Maurys she began with — and unlike the reality show divas and intervention-needing hoarders who came after — Oprah traffics in just one commodity: happiness.

Whether she is waxing rhapsodic on a type of pound cake or offering a redemptive message of hope in the face of unfathomable tragedy, she has remained remarkably, consistently on topic. Seven years ago, when she famously gave away that roomful of “cute little G6′s,” I wrote that her allure is in her ability to make grown-ups believe that life can offer pleasant surprises. On Monday, with each superstar trotted out to sing and dance her praises, she was still at it. That’s Oprah in a nutshell — Look, America, it’s Beyoncé! It’s a car! It’s Danny Zuko, whisking you off to a land down under!  No one is going to angrily throw a chair on Oprah. Someone might maniacally jump and down on it, but that’s not the worst thing that could happen.  Who will give us that, five afternoons a week, now?  When the curtain closes and Winfrey finally shatters into a million little pieces, there will never be another “Oprah.” Guy Fieri and Rachael Ray are developing a new series together? Well whoop-di-doo.

Oprah has not just endured but thrived because no matter how much trash talk and backstabbing and mental illness television throws at us, there will always be those of us who long for something better. And with her hugs and tears and confessional, intimate style, it’s easy to believe Oprah longs for that too. Life hands us wars and floods and sick children. Oprah hands us car keys and money for schools and stories about people who are trying to do good in the world and not be jerkwads. Those aren’t crazy dreams that seemed interesting in 1986; they’re what get us the hell out of bed in the morning when we feel like throwing in the towel. We still need to know some things are worth hoping for, that life can offer serendipity instead of shocks, that cynicism is overrated and compassion is underused. And even after 25 long years, we still need Oprah.