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While watching “The Bachelor,” the audience makes judgments about what the contestants are really like based on very little information, highly choreographed appearances, and an endless amount of self-flattering self-presentation — which is exactly what the contestants are doing too. We aren’t as naive or saccharine as the participants; we’re not looking for "true love" and we have access to our entire vocabularies. But we are constantly evaluating — she seems crazy, she seems nice, he’s so bland, they have good chemistry — and so are they. In each episode, we get to check our own judgments against everyone on the show’s, and as ninny-brained as those people may be, there is something tremendously satisfying when our and their determinations match up.

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Didn't anyone explain to this guy how television works? It doesn't have to work out. In fact, in nine years, only one Bachelor has tied the knot with a woman he met on the show, and that was Jason Mecick, who proposed to contestant Melissa Rycroft and then soon after married her runner-up, Molly Malaney, resulting in the most! awkward! "After the Final Rose" episode! EVER.

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ABC knows this, and the network used that crudely elegant blueprint to create its newest show, "Bachelor Pad," which premieres tonight in a two-hour special.  The Washington Post has a nice breakdown of the rules, but here's the gist:

• 11 former "The Bachelor" contestants join eight "The Bachelorette" alumni to compete for $250,000.  ABC is touting it as an "all star" lineup, but according to Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times, it's something closer to recyling dirty paper towels and keeping the earth clean, saying, "Rather than creating more D-level-celebrity debris, the network is kindly reusing what's already there."  Reality television going green -- who would've thought?
• The winner of each weekly competition gets a rose, which provides immunity, and the winner gets to pick three people to go on a date with.
• Each week, the men vote a woman out of the house, and the women boot one man.

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This season's "Bachelorette" followed Ali Fedotowsky, the plucky San Franciscan we last saw on "The Bachelor" pitching a fit on the hotel floor before leaving the show to return to her job. Now that she and Roberto Martinez (left) have pledged their gushy, undying love by getting engaged on the "Bachelorette's" finale, we take a look back at what host Chris Harrison might call the "long, amazing journey" of the franchise: A legacy of broken engagements, WTF moments and the incredibly rare happy ending.

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Tenley must sure be feeling like she dodged a bullet these days. After not quite winning Pavelka's heart last March, she went back to being just another freelance bachelorette. It was love-her-or-hate-her contender Vienna Girardi who got the rose-strewn, tears-inducing proposal, the underwhelming declaration from her man on the cover of People that "I didn't make a mistake." It was she who got to watch as Pavelka went on to bust assorted moves on "Dancing With the Stars," she who uprooted herself to Los Angeles to be near him. Gee, what could wrong?

Then, faster than you can say, "I'm selling my story to the tabloids," the romance went south. There were accusations of infidelity from him and "intimacy issues" from her. What? A "Bachelor" engagement that went bust? Shut up. On Monday, it all culminated in the most! tense! reunion! ever! with the two estranged lovebirds going at it on a Very Special episode of "The Bachelorette."

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Have you lost your mojo once and for all, buddy? I thought the Iraq war was supposed to make you feel sexy again. It worked at first -- all of those big, pretty explosions over Baghdad were like Jägermeister for the red-blooded American soul. So how did all that fun devolve into dusty, lukewarm kabobs and homemade explosives?

But let's not think about that now, America. Let's try to be positive. It's your birthday, after all! Put out your cigarette and come inside. The cake is ready, and everyone's waiting to sing Happy Birthday. Of course they'll snipe about how tired and fat you looked as they're driving home. But for just a second, put on a big, fake smile and suspend your disbelief, OK?

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Personally, I'm an emotional amoeba, a transparent blob of mush, nothing but permeable boundaries with fluidy goo in the middle. Set the amoeba down in front of some speakers playing sad music and the amoeba feels sadness. Expose the amoeba to some shaky camera footage with a driving, suspenseful soundtrack and the amoeba's pulse races or, rather, its ectoplasm flutters excitedly.

Some women complain that they cry at diaper commercials. I cry at diaper boxes. I get watery eyes at the last line of any book, even if it wasn't any good. I weep openly during previews for movies that I don't want to see.

Once, I saw a very small ad in the newspaper for the movie "The Joy Luck Club." I didn't know much about it, and didn't plan to see it. The tag line for the ad was something like, "Because family means everything" or "They stuck together through thick and thin." I don't remember. All I know is that I glanced at it and choked up.

Yes, my point is that you should never, ever trust my opinion on anything, ever again.

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This is why we love "House," a weekly snuff film for neurotics and hypochondriacs, and cling to "The Sopranos," a dark morality tale for guilt-plagued competitive consumers, wandering like ghosts through their crappy jobs just to keep their high-end appliances and service-economy lifestyles intact. "The Bachelor" is just an extended exercise in heart-splitting rejection for insecure wannabe Cinderellas who fear that the champagne-rose-fantasy-suite fairy tale will always evaporate into a few beers, a rented movie and a suspiciously stained futon. And "CSI" offers an endless loop of random, unfair victimization of ladies with bad habits for women who feel powerless in their marriages, and the men who love them that way.

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Thanks to laziness, I've ended up watching shows like "I Love New York" for months, despite their obvious brain-melting stupidity, because they were always at the top of my TiVo queue. Like McDonald's french fries, they sit there, stinking up the joint with their foul, foolish stench, begging me to dig into their salty deliciousness despite my best intentions.

I know it's a sin, but something rotten inside me won't let me delete "Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll" or "The Bachelor: Officer and a Gentleman" or the insipid eighth cycle of "America's Next Top Model." For some reason, the baby ho donkey festival and sea donkerella pageant are my personal El Guapo. I can't get enough of the skin-tight ass pants and the nasty little insinuations that Felicia can't dance or Jolena has an eating disorder. Sea donkey, who are you, to take these many forms?

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If only we knew when we were younger what we know now, that men and women come from different planets, both of them spilling over with their own distinct clichés. Women can try to date touchy-feely types who fold their clothes neatly and put stuff away and meditate, men can try to date "SportsCenter"-watching, back-slapping gals who know how to "hang," but the divide between the sexes is still too great. Women like to overanalyze, digress, split hairs, muse, contemplate, obsess. Men like to stare at pictures of ass cheeks.

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Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that masculinity is indeed in crisis, N.Y. Giants quarterback Jesse Palmer confessed to his diary this week that choosing between finalists Tara and Jessica -- two tall, pretty, camera-conscious blondes whose differences aren't visible to the naked eye -- would be super-duper tough, so tough that he wished that his mommy and daddy would pick for him.

So the fifth season's finale of "The Bachelor" began with Jesse urging his family to tell him which woman they liked better. No help there: Mom preferred Jessica, Dad preferred Tara. Then Jesse begged his friend Nick to tell him which woman he should choose. Appearing shocked and a little bit disgusted, Nick wisely refused, but his wife, Jenny, who served as a spy for Jesse during the course of the show, said that while she liked Tara best, she thought that Jessica would be a better fit for Jesse.

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"Israel's Secret Weapon," a BBC documentary about Vanunu and some of the activists who've struggled against his incarceration, airs Monday night (8 p.m.) on Link TV (check listings for other times). Although the film is a fairly straightforward summary of Vanunu's story, it's informative for those who know little about the whistle-blower or about Israel's rarely discussed nuclear arsenal.

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Though a voice-mail message from the guy who conceived and directed the series of monologues by beautiful women, Brian Howie, in which he identified himself as "the Piecemaster," ought to have rendered me cautious, I was nevertheless surprised by the rowdy, mostly male crowd filling the East Village theater's bar area last Thursday before the play began. When did loud, boisterous 20-something men in suits and their hand-slapping, chest-thumping, Bud-drinking, T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing brethren start going to the theater? And who were these miniskirted women responding to their none-too-subtle advances?

"How about that bar scene?" whispers the woman sitting next to me, who was reviewing the play for another publication. "Have you ever seen anything like that? And what's up with the mud-flap girls?"

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