When Taylor Hicks kept going

When Taylor Hicks kept going on and on about his “toboggan”—as in “I have to wear my toboggan or else I get recognized!”—I seriously thought he might have that disorder where you get your brain thinks one thing and your mouth says another, and your loved ones have to gently figure out what you’re talking about when you say you want to arrange the antelope. But then I thought that would be an awfully cruel joke of Fox to air such things without proper editing, and while “awfully cruel” isn’t really outside the description of Fox reality shows, I had to assume some people say “toboggan” when they mean “hat.”

Sometimes, especially in the dead of summer, you know not to get on a certain subway car because it is completely empty while the rest of the train is full. This means your fellow travelers have done the research for you and determined this train car unfit for habitation (i.e. no air conditioning, dead bum). But other times, it’s just a crap shoot. You can’t always tell when you clamor on a train that when you sit down, you will be across from a couple unabashedly chowing down on a huge fried chicken feast, complete with shared French fries and dipping sauces. You won’t know prior to sitting down that how utterly disgusting the smell of fried food is inside an enclosed subway, and how nauseating it is to be in the line of vision of those consuming said fried foods until it is too late. When this happens, I play a game. I pretend that what really happened is I had climbed onto a train and instead of fried food, it reeked of really raunchy BO. The kind that seems like it is actually eating away your flesh simply by existing. It was SO bad, I had gone back in time and got on another subway car, only to find it smelled like KFC and, deciding it wasn’t worth another trip back in time, I let it go. It’s all relative in New York.

Also, I SO scooped Salon on the Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret pad/belt thing. By like TWO years. Ha.