The World Is Getting Entirely Too "In Your Face" For Me

This has nothing to do with anything, but am I the only person in the world who is offended by both the title of the new fall show "Ugly Betty" and by the Dairy Queen commercial for its chili double cheeseburger that ends with the woman telling her male significant other to "pull my finger"?

Hardly anyone seems to grasp the concept anymore that subtlety has its uses, and that you actually can get more attention by being "low key" than by being "in your face."

Why else do you think women who are considered sexy tend to speak in a breathless whisper?

OK, I admit it. I tend to speak in a breathless whisper, but I am not sexy. I'm just out of breath.

Even some of my favorite programs are on occasion too intense for me. Whenever "Meerkat Manor" shows a dead/dying baby meerkat, I have to look away--and even then, I often cry. I am too soft-hearted for this world, I guess.

And Notre Dame just got its collective butt kicked by Michigan. No wonder I'm so upset!

How can it be the middle of September, with college semesters already into their fourth week, college football games of major importance already airing on TV, and the afternoon high temperatures still getting into the 80s? And as if that all weren't bad enough, some local businesses actually put signs up this week predicting that Nebraska would LOSE to USC tonight.

That is simply unheard of around here. I wonder whether anybody in Lincoln was so daring. Probably not, but one never knows . . .

Maybe it's not so much that I am too soft-hearted as it is that I am suffering a major disconnect from this strange conjunction of events.

I know I don't at all feel like putting up my Halloween decorations yet, and the stores are already cramming Christmas down our throats.

I heard the other day that Dubya says America is in its third Great Awakening of religious fervor. I know that he and Iran's President Ahmadinejad share the belief that the "End of Days" is coming . . . although I am quite sure their takes on its details differ radically from one another's.

If Nebraska manages to upset USC tonight, I just might have to agree with them that the End of Days is coming. Soon.