Asteroids 1, Powerball 0

I've never bought a lottery ticket merely because it never occurs to me to play. Whenever there's a big pot and lines form at convenience stores everywhere, I think there must be a sale on Bud Light. But now I feel entirely justified in my ignorance:

"... There's only a one in a million chance any year that an asteroid will strike us — which makes a civilization-ending encounter more than 100 times as likely as winning the Powerball."

This revelation in a Washington Post story came from a new display in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum — the most-visited museum in the world. Powerball, that's what is called bad press. And that's why people who wait in line for lottery tickets should maybe think that while they are standing there they are much more likely to be killed by a gigantic rock hurtling toward Earth than to win a whole bunch of cash.

If that's not an outrage, I don't know what is.

Proof that blind dates are only for other people's reading pleasure

"Date Lab" is a weekly feature that was recently introduced by The Washington Post Magazine in order to get members of my generation to read it. It's working.

It's fabulously outrageous and not nearly as awkwardly awful to watch as dating shows, mostly because the vast majority of dates are like reading a play-by-play of a horrific car accident. How many times does a guy have to read "Date Lab" in order to understand that it's not OK to mention that a girl ate a lot at dinner, and it was probably because the Post was paying for it?

The single exception was the eye-rolling inducing date that ended in an engagement four weeks later.

While both guys and dolls present themselves as douchebags during their date labs, this week, the male dater was truly a colostomy bag and an outrage:

"I didn't know the whole night that she was black — (not that) it would have made a difference. Culturally, she's a white girl. I may have to go back and talk to the hostess, though. She was a sista with dreadlocks. Definitely my type: young, cute and skinny."

Who says that in print?

No one wants to see it

Boys, trust me when you read what I'm about to write: No one, save for maybe, maybe the person who is having sex with you, wants to see a picture of your penis.

It might seem to be a simple and obvious message, but a lot of boys on Craigslist don't know about this rule. Warning: This is graphic content you probably do not want to see. These are just a handful of the many that occur in the M4W category — proof that there are lots of men out there who think women like to see penis pictures. Yes I know you aren't one of them, but believe me boys, they don't.

There are many reasons why, but the easy one is that pictures of penises are an outrage.

Just too easy

This is Aleksey Vayner. Apparently, he is a Yale graduate who is a famous douchebag now because one of the Wall Street brokers he sent this video resume to leaked it on YouTube, just after they laughed until they cried and rolled their eyes into the top of their brains. It's worth the six and a half minutes. And it's almost too obvious an outrage.

Finally

"Grey's Anatomy" has overtaken "CSI" in the ratings recently, if only some weeks and only by a slim margin. That's because "CSI" is a bad show and "Grey's Anatomy" is not. Yes, Meredith is getting annoying, I can nap through Burke's dramatic pauses and McDreamy is an asshole, but at least we can say they have personalities and are an attempt at character development. They smile and cry, and sometimes they even raise their voices.

I know that for a reason having to do with the lowest-common denominator, "CSI" has been the most popular show in America. Yet it stuns me that good actors like Gary Sinise agree to be cast in a show that apparently calls for all the lines to be delivered in monotones. Every. Single. One. And I swear that's the only face he's allowed to make on "CSI: NY."

And everybody knows that the people who wear white lab coats and work in the lab are never the same people who carry guns and wear sunglasses in pursuit of killers. If it were "Law and Order" it would be like the cops suddenly morphing into prosecutors in the second half of the show. And what's with the weird colors in Miami? One scene everyone's blue. The next, they are shaded yellow. It's as if the editing and graphics people just wanted to see what they could get away with and gave everyone jaundice for fun. But it's not fun at all. In fact, it's an outrage.

And I totally want the calendar.

Modern love?

Generally, I think The New York Times is on the ball. I even think it apologizes way too often for stuff it shouldn't. But lately, the weekly essay column "Modern Love" has been bugging me. What's wrong with these morons who write gracefully about their romantically-charged marital dilemmas, hoping good writing will cover up the fact that they are idiots who forgot to ask their fiances whether they wanted children before they got married?

It's clear that I'm no relationship expert, but, hello?

And who is this person? Who? Well, I'll tell you who she is. Her name is a Suki Kim, and she was a 2006 Guggenheim fellow in fiction. Her book, "The Interpreter," was printed by a reputable publishing house. And she lived with a guy in London when she was 21, whom she supposedly loved, and yet couldn't stand. Her relationship was apparently "One Long Lesson in How to Break Up." (You could read her whole "Modern Love" essay, but TimesSelect, an evil invention I'm sure, won't let you so I'll just have to give you excerpts.)

"LOVEMAKING was no better. Inevitably, I would stop in the middle by putting a hand on his shoulder or his chest, and he would slow down with a sigh, and then silently we would both turn to the wall, often with him embracing me from behind. Soon we slept in separate rooms.

We were like an aged couple who had been through it all, retreating to our single beds with compassion, except that we were 21 and had known each other for barely a year....We were not having sex, and yet we were not interested in having sex with anyone else. The longer this continued, the more fiercely we insisted on being with each other because we were young and believed that there must have been a greater meaning to our incompatibility."

And it even goes on:

"At night we cooked omelets and spaghetti and washed them down with wine. We must have tried sex and failed again, because on one of our last nights, he said, ''When I'm with you, I feel incredibly alive, and yet always terrible.''

Oh, please. You weren't young and in love. You were dating a psychotic masochist. Why does the Times print this inane blather written by clearly neurotic and unbalanced people? It's an outrage.

P.S. To be fair, even though It's an Outrage. clearly isn't about fairness, I have not read Kim's novel. It is probably good, seeing as it has won awards and there are a lot of books out there that haven't.

Slow-cooked squirrel

Oh, come on. Don't they know squirrels are just rats with cuter outfits? There's one with liver, too.

Yes, I would like some cheese and a hammer

Allow me to whine.

I worked until 3:30 a.m. Wednesday morning. I arrived home around 4 a.m., and didn't fall asleep until past 5 a.m., at which point I had been awake for more than 22 hours. At 11 a.m., I was awoken by men, in my alley, prying furniture apart with hammers and throwing the remnants into a Dumpster with all of their might. Enraged, I lept out of bed and marched downstairs to give their boss a piece of my mind.

"Sometimes they get carried away," he said. Carried away? With a hammer? I can't imagine. By the time I got back upstairs, the hammering men were long gone, but I was awake and wanted a hammer of my own to get carried away with. Eventually, in my delirium I decided to try to turn my car on since I hadn't done so in a good three weeks. Then I decided to drive it around. It's a 1989 Nissan 240SX, and its retractable lights became stuck up a few weeks ago, so it now looks like some sort of cartoon car that's winking at you.

With no direction in mind, I ended up at Trader Joe's. As soon as I turned the car off, I knew I was screwed. It wouldn't turn back on. It wouldn't even try to turn back on. Luckily, I know and love AAA. In the meantime, I was at Trader Joe's, wandering around in the delirium. I bought five pounds of onions, chicken broth, peanut butter and a cajun shrimp roll. I made two passes by the macaroni and cheese sample stand. The AAA guy came, shifted the winking 240SX into neutral and turned it on. Voila. I drove home, carried my 15 pounds of broth and onions upstairs and collapsed.

Thursday at 8 a.m. I had jury duty. But that's another outrage for another day.

It's them

A friend who is a boy confirmed that this is how many men think. I knew it. I've officially called off the search, to the extent that there ever was one. You might as well lock me in a convent and throw away the key. And to think that for the longest time, I thought I was the screwed up one.
It's an outrage.