The Super Bowl halftime show reminded me of why I loved the ’80s.

First, there was Madonna. I don’t know whether she and Lady Gaga actually have that much in common besides both being attention whores, since I prefer to live in the past regarding my musical tastes, but the show encapsulated the ’80s: tacky, over-the-top costumes full of blinding bling and a seizure-inducing mishmash of themes and songs.

I went to a Super Bowl party, and one comment I overheard pretty much said it all: “What the fuck is happening?”

The whole thing could have gone horribly wrong considering Madonna is 53 years old. Age might be just a number, but there’s a number at which you look ridiculous in a thong, and Madonna seems to have grasped that her time for thongs is behind her. Lo and behold, she’s still sexy fully clothed, despite the camera’s many attempts to get cooch shots. Plus, I can totally relate to her missing that step and nearly falling. The last time I wore heels that high, I couldn’t even walk on my own.

Rock on, Madonna. Never stop wearing leopard-print capes.

But if you stop and think about it, it gets more and more retarded. And then you realize why Fark gave Florida its own tag.

Ronda Storms, a Republican state senator from Florida, says it’s about the unfairness of taxpayers paying for junk food items combined with concern for the health of poor kids. But it seems the goal is more about gaining a petty sense of moral control. Dog forbid poor people enjoy — and let their kids enjoy — a snack every once in awhile.

This is increasingly nonsensical when you consider all the unhealthful foods that are still available: orange juice, apple juice, flour, sugar, bread, sugary yogurt, etc. Kids will be putting down the chips and picking up those gross yogurt pops, I guess. I wonder who gets to decide what is junk food — and how long it’ll be before Florida just starts sending people boxes full of the foods they’re allowed to eat. It would be a lot simpler that way.

The worst part: The law doesn’t even save Florida any money. It’s not about cutting costs. It’s about waving a “naughty, naughty” finger at people who are getting kicked in the teeth already. I always assumed these programs were about keeping people from starving to death, not about imposing some state-approved diet on the poor. Stupid me.

Note to Florida: Your poor residents may very well be abusing the system, but it isn’t by munching on a 99-cent bag of Cheez Doodles. Back away slowly from the smug self-righteousness.

Summary: His stance is that Star Wars the Old Republic is sexist because it allows you to administer electro shocks to a Twi’lek slave-companion named Vette.

That’s about as fair as saying SWTOR is racist because it allows you to shock an alien with long tails on her head.

Kain says: “So the inclusion of a shock-collar-wearing slave in BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, a new Star Wars MMORPG that released this past December, is not so much surprising as it is disappointing. And really creepy.”

Of course it’s creepy. It’s supposed to be creepy. If you shock her, you are a creep. The Sith are creepy. That’s why they follow the Creepy side of the force, and the Jedi follow the Asshole side of the force.

The game is full of morally questionable choices, so it’s weird that anyone would fixate on this as evidence that BioWare is morally broken. In one Sith quest. you have to pour poison into some slaves’ water supply. You can give them just enough poison to cause unspeakable torment, or you can give them enough to slaughter them all. And slaughtering them is the Light Side option.

While you have the option of torturing Vette with a shock collar, it’s clear from the beginning that this is the douche-bag path to galactic domination. And female Sith can inflict just as much pain as male Sith, which is exactly what’s happening with me and Devon. He’s being super sweet to her in hopes of getting into her pants, and I’m shocking her just about every chance I get to keep her in line. If BioWare would get around to allowing homosexual romances, I might be trying to get into her pants, too.

Maybe I’m a closet sociopath, but I doubt it. Roleplaying games are fun precisely because they let us be the kinds of people we will never be in real life. If I were shocking slave girls left and right in real life, I would be playing RPGs about underemployed crafters with a thing for steampunk.

I keep hearing how hard it is to be a female gamer. Maybe I grew up in an alternate universe, but I’ve never found it hard to be a gamer. We were pretty rare before the days of Team Unicorn, but I always found gamer dudes pretty welcoming. For some of them, I was one of the few girls who would talk to them, which probably helped. And we were all misfits with a love of looting the corpses of the imaginary fallen. The guys who were inclined to be assholes were assholes to everyone.

Which brings me to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

To see this in action, check out every WoW PvP battleground chat log ever. There’s always at least one player bitching and moaning about how much you suck. He doesn’t care what you have between your legs. He’s just emo because he’s going to have to hold off on upgrading his armor a little longer than he’d hoped.

My use of “he” here is probably sexist. For all I know, battlegrounds are full of women roiding out because you insist on fighting midfield in Warsong Gulch.

This is a dragon curve. I don’t understand any of this Wikipedia article. Last night, I had a dream I argued with a former co-worker over independent clauses, so this isn’t my strength.

It’s super red when it’s straight, and I cut off 2 inches. I’m inclined to let it go curly, since this is what it wants to do anyway. My friend Dan tells me redheads are nothing but trouble, so you might want to back away from the blog.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year. At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I’ve always been less sad about his death than mom’s. His life felt done. It’s like finishing a great book that ends as it should. I’m sad that it’s over, but it was time for it to be over all the same.

Saul brought Mom and Dad a bottle of wine, and I let them have a little — in part because Dad loved to booze it and in part to celebrate with them. I wanted to let them know they were going to be grandparents again. Devon and I found out the previous week. I know they would have been excited, especially mom. My brother has two kids, but people who took in 350 foster kids would have gladly welcomed more. When Mom was in ICU, two months before she died, Devon and I told her we were getting married and that if we had a kid and it was a girl, we would name her Aurelia, after my mother’s mother. She cried.

So I poured some of the wine into the dirt and told Mom to go easy, because she’s a lightweight. I sat by the grave for a bit and talked to them about the future. Then I went home.

Two days later I miscarried. It wasn’t very painful and there’s wasn’t a lot of blood, and I’m fine.

Devon took Friday off and we spent a long weekend cooking and watching movies and playing video games. I drank the wine I couldn’t drink at the grave site. We lit the candle over Fitz’s tiny urn and enjoyed the amazing lamb and ratatouille Devon made, along with my cream of mushroom soup and vanilla-chocolate pudding.

A lot can happen in the first three months. We were aware I was pregnant for only 10 days. The embryo would have been the size of a lentil bean. But it was a wild 10 days. We’re not devastated, certainly not like we would be if one of you died. Sad and subdued is more like it. But we’re OK.

Well, that’s a relief. Here we are, with wars raging, pollution wrecking our environment and me not getting nearly enough cheese, but at least we don’t have to worry about Jay-Z abandoning the b-word. Which I assume is bitch, because it would be really strange to stop saying “breakfast” or “bocci.”

I’m glad I’m not famous. More importantly, I’m glad I’m not famous enough that anyone would care if I stopped saying bitch. I don’t even know what I would do if I had to stop saying bitch. I couldn’t say things like, “Bitch, please,” and “Wassup, bitches?” and “I’m gonna cut a bitch.”

It’s clear I couldn’t function.

So good on you, Jay-Z, for sticking with such a versatile word. Don’t let those bitches tell you what to do.

Don’t let ass clowns make the Internet lame.

If you’re an alcoholic, that is. This multivitamin claims to support liver health and other crap that might keep you from keeling over when your liver finally stiffens into a decrepit paperweight. I have no idea whether that’s true. I’ll verify it after I finish this whiskey.