Oh, Barbie, now that you're 50, maybe you'll finally understand that it's inner beauty that counts. YOU SHALLOW COW! Oops. Did I just write that out loud?

Barbie, they say living well is the best revenge, and I must tell you that Alan and I have a full and productive life that has nothing to do with you but has a great deal to do with cooking up large quant.i.ties of methamphetamine in our RV and getting the young'uns to sell it to their school friends. OH, DON'T JUDGE ME! You don't know what it's been like for me living in your 38-22-34 shadow all these decades. But no more! You're just a few short years away from senior coffee at Mc-Donald's.

The playing field is a little more even now that we're both "on in years," right, Toots?

You were always so high and mighty but now you're just old and high and mighty. Don't think I don't remember how you snickered when I told you that me and Alan spent $2,000 on that pageant dress for our baby daughter, Alan-ia. Let me tell you, we were the proudest parents in the entire Ramada Inn Conference Center when she won "Best Manicure" and got that big-a.s.s trophy. She beat a whole roomful of other contestants, all of 'em dipped and fluffed to the nines.

When she won, I shouted out, "Well slap my a.s.s and call me Sally!" Oh, there went your nose again. Well, get over it. At your age, making ugly faces can lead to wrinkles. Anyway, after Alan-ia got her trophy, we all went out to eat at Ruby Tuesday. Alan had a coupon for $10 off because he thinks of every-freakin'-thing, my Alan. Alan-ia is just so much like me. We got up to go pee and the waitress came along about the time we both stood up to walk to the bathroom and we said, IN UNISON, "Don't be touchin' my s.h.i.t while I'm gone."

No way could I have been more proud than I was at that particular moment. We hate somebody touchin' our s.h.i.t. And since we'd said it together, we had to say "Jinx!" real quick to get rid of the curse. We may not be wealthy but we're also superst.i.tious.

Barbie, I guess all this has turned into more of an update on my full life instead of the Happy Birthday note that I had started out to write and for that, I'm sorry.

It's kinda like when we visit Alan's crazy-a.s.s aunt, Sudie, and she just talks and talks and talks about everything in her stupid life and then, when she finally shuts up and takes a breath, you know what she says? "Well, here I go just talkin' about myself all this time. What would YOU like to know about me?"

I will close now because Alan's outside trying to show Deavis Ray how he can set his a.s.s hairs on fire using a can of Suave Extra Hold and a torch. Again.

So, from all of your "friends" (OK, just me and Becky) at Mattel, happy d.a.m.n birthday. I hope you can still fit into your "Barbie in Switzerland" ensemble because alls I got to add to this is "Yodel-lay-ye-HO!"

Gotta go now! Alan says it's past time for my "crazy pills." See what good care he takes of me?

Love, Midge Postscript Aside from Barbie turning fifty, there's more exciting news this year from Mattel, which also owns the American Girl dolls. You know the ones: They're about a hundred bucks each and wear those Mennonites-in-the-airport outfits.

So what? So this. There's a new American doll named Gwen and she's homeless.

I'm picturing a pretty fiery board meeting as Mattel tried to figure out how to accessorize the homeless Gwen. American Girl dolls tend to have pricey accessories (who can forget the $65 plastic horse?), so how do you brand a homeless doll without seeming, well, tacky?

It's not like Mattel can, in good corporate conscience, sell a battered '86 Taurus station wagon for Gwen and her mama to sleep in.

What's next, I wonder. Mackenzie, a s.p.u.n.ky American Girl doll who experiments with drugs and alcohol to escape the reality of her daily doings with her pervy rock-star dad?

I don't want to say Mattel is being insensitive to the plight of the homeless, although there's a definite let-them-eat-cake vibe here. On the other hand, it's not terrible to introduce your precious Oilily-clad cherub to the notion that Poor People Aren't Bad People. Except maybe for Midge.

13.

Charlie Bit Your Finger? Good I'm not the only one who has noticed the depressing American obsession with all things "cute" lately. An article in Vanity Fair magazine confirmed something that I've suspected for a while now: We're on cute overload and it's only getting worse.

The whys could be debated. Maybe it's just an overcorrection to national angst about the economy, wars, and a health care system that is so whacked out it will pay for his fake b.o.n.e.r pills but not for her birth control.

If you think about it long enough, you'll go crazier than a cat trying to cover s.h.i.t on a marble floor. So you retreat from adult worries and sink into the soft coc.o.o.n of cute. Yes, we crave cute. Oooey, gooey cute. And while I think that's groovy for hawking kids' products, when cute is used to sell adult stuff, I find it sort of gagsome.

Do you really want to buy car insurance from a company that uses a cute little cartoon character made of money as its spokesman? I mean, this is insurance, the stuff that pays to have you and your car put back together after some a.s.shole pulls out in front of you in his limp lil hybrid and you end up in the hospital.

And speaking of hospitals, did you know that some of them now give teddy bears and other stuffed animals to adult patients who complain about the service?

Patient: "You amputated the wrong leg, you idiot son of a wh.o.r.e!"

Hospital staffer: "I know! And we're really sorry. And to show how sorry we are, here's a cuddly-wuddly Mr. Snuggles the Bear for you to keep!"

Patient: "Snuggles the Bear? You think a stuffed bear that any idiot could win at the carnival by tossing plastic rings onto milk bottles is going to make up for my missing leg? Do you??? Well, aw h.e.l.l, he is kinda cute. OK. C'mere you little cutie patootie!"

G.o.d save us all.

The cute conspiracy is everywhere. How brain-dead must adults be to tolerate a commercial in which a dancing scrub mop croons ballads to its ditzy human in hopes that she'll decide to use it again for her cleaning needs?

"Martha, come quick! That mop is pretending to sing Love Hurts again. G.o.d that really makes me want to tell you to go scrub the kitchen floor."

And since kids aren't in charge of buying the toilet paper in most households, it's a mystery why cartoon bears with toilet paper stuck to their a.s.ses are causing formerly mature, responsible grownups to go to the grocery store and ask for help finding "the cute toilet paper that, you know, sticks to the baby bear's a.s.s on TV."

There's a credit-card commercial where every image "smiles" at you through its shape if you look at it hard enough. Duh-hubby loves this commercial. He sits mesmerized by it, giggling at its cleverness.

"Get it? Every object is a smile. Like that car with the headlights and the grille? If you look close, it's like the car is actually smiling at you!"

Precious Lord, where is the whip-smart man I married two decades ago? The one who once gave me a card with kittens romping in a flower-covered meadow on it with the message, "Dreams don't come true"? I still laugh my a.s.s off when I look at it. Where is the man who thought my ASK ME ABOUT MY EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA T-shirt was as funny as I did?

Vanity Fair concluded that, "The move toward cuteness has come about partly because the idea of 'edge' has gotten old." Apparently, and it grieves me to write this, Americans are tired of cynicism, sarcasm, and all the other isms and asms that basically keep me employed.

I don't do cute. Edge I like. Cars with flower-shaped tail lights being driven by women old enough to know better? Not so much.

And get this: While I was pondering this horrifying pop-culture development, no fewer than three impossibly cute e-mails landed in my inbox. Which, by the way, I imagine to be a dark, cavelike place that smells of stale puns and bean dip. You know, the kind of place where there's a stained VOTE FOR PEDRO T-shirt wadded up on the floor in the corner.

Two of these e-mails were accompanied by smiley flower "emoticons" that made me lightheaded with all their winking and tomfoolery. Which is the word of a curmudgeon, now that I think about it. An edgy curmudgeon. I don't know how to make the winky face or the frown face or any of the despicable acts that grown adults force their punctuation keys to perform. Every morning when I check my e-mail, I must first be a.s.saulted by a screen-sized emoticon before the mail is loaded. WTF? One has a lower case d and a lowercase b with the message "Listening to Music!" Another uses m's and o's to create a "Monkeyface!" Are you serious?

This morning's e-mail included a dozen criminally cute photos of kittens sleeping on computers and curled up inside their own food bowls, as well as one of a baby asleep, facedown, inside his daddy's large, and I'm guessing stinky, running shoe. The last photo was of a huge orange tabby cat asleep in a lasagna dish accompanied by a caption that asked earnestly "Have you ever been this tired?"

Tired enough to crawl into a Pyrex ca.s.serole dish or somebody's nasty-behind shoe? Can't say as I have. But my friend Lisa will crawl into a Laundromat dryer if you buy her enough beer. What? Not cute enough?

Over on Facebook, one of my "friends" asked if I would please accept his gift of "one wet puppy nose!" To which all I can muster in reply is a world-weary, "Dude."

Facebook is downright obsessed with cute, between its imaginary farm-building games and, just today, the insistence that we use our baby pictures as profile pictures. Sorry. It's creepy seeing your boss naked in a kitchen sink circa 1958. And I don't want to type in what color bra I'm wearing in my status update (but don't tell the guys 'cause it's fun to keep 'em guessing! Smiley face, smiley face, winking emoticon). What is this? Sixth grade?

But back to this crazy-a.s.s notion that people are tired of edgy. This is scarier to me than a roomful of yard-sale Beanie Babies. This ghastly culture of cuteness, a ma.s.sive group hug, if you will, could kill my career. And I believe we can all agree that this would signal the end of civilization as we know it because, in the immortal words of anchorman Ron Burgundy, "I'm kind of a big deal."

OK, maybe not. But I do so love the snarky, the sneering, and the snotty. There's simply no room for all these YouTube videos of laughing babies that you people keep forwarding to me. That little kid who squawks about how "Chah-wee bit my finger again"? Not funny. Ditto the little boy who's still loopy from his trip to the dentist, which was sent to me by a friend who said, "This is the funniest thing I've ever seen!" Yep. Nothing says hilarious like videotaping your kid while he's recovering from oral surgery. Maybe he can return the favor one day after your hemorrhoid operation. Payback's a b.i.t.c.h, eh?

Clearly she has never seen Bon Qui Qui at Burger King. Now that's some funny s.h.i.t; Google it.

The cuteness craze is even taking over food. Cupcakes weren't cute enough. Now there are miniature cupcakes topped with fluffy-wuffy icing and teeny-tiny decor-wations. Even the traditional wedding cake is being replaced by cupcake towers. Sure, they're tasty enough, but you can't really jam a cupcake into your spouse's face in that weirdly aggressive reception ritual. For that, you need a giant, very un-cute wedge of cake. You want him to be picking red velvet crumbs out of his nose hairs for weeks. You can't do that with a cupcake.

Of course I'm looking to blame somebody for all this and I have decided the whole thing is the fault of, you guessed it, the j.a.panese. Ever since they invented h.e.l.lo Kitty, the world hasn't been the same. You can safely chart the rise of The Culture of Cute ever since that flat-faced s.k.a.n.k started showing up everywhere.

The first time I saw h.e.l.lo Kitty was on a tour boat that was circling the Statue of Liberty. For some reason, I was the only non-j.a.panese person on the entire boat. And every single occupant of the boat, even the men, were wearing some article of clothing-purse, shirt, jewelry-with that mutant white head on it. Creepy thing doesn't even have a mouth. How do you get such a fat head if you can't even eat? OK, I've overthinking it.

Stop the madness. Embrace the snark. Or, yes, I will come to your house, kill your puppies, and kick in the door of that stupid Lego car you drive that you insist is "so ugly it's cute!"

News flash: It really is just ugly. What? That hurt your feelings? Oh, no! I'm sooooo sah-wee. Here, have a minicupcake and Mr. Snuggles the Bear to make it all better. a.s.shat.

14.

Chinese Bachelors Would Be Lucky to Find Cougar You remember that whole one-child limit thing in China? Seemed like a good idea at the time now, didnt it? When your population hovers around 1.3 billion and you're not quite as large as the United States, landwise, you've got to do something.

So you set limits and enforce them. One child per family. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, funny you should ask.

According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (motto: "Everybody w.a.n.g Chung tonight"), in about ten years, there will be approximately twenty-four million Chinese men who won't be able to find a wife. That's right; not even an ugly one.

But wait, that's not all! In a cruel little quirk of demographics, at the exact same time, China's elderly population will explode. What does it all mean? That's easy. Ten years from now, the typical Chinese household will consist of an elderly couple whose bachelor sons are getting older and crankier and less-laid by the minute. Doesn't that sound dreamy?

Let's face it. It's hardly a harmonious situation, this clash of the generations. Even ten years from now, it's possible that those very sons will still have to spend the better part of an hour trying to explain to their aged parents that most people have voice mail, not answering machines.

Which means that you end up burying your head in your hands while your mama shrieks into the phone to your cousin: "Pick up Ming Sai, it's me! Pick up! I know you're there! Your auntie said you were home! (very long pause) If you there, why you not answer the phone? You know it's me! OK, I guess you're not there after all. Call me!"

You can try to explain voice mail a million times but it will never matter to the elderly parent, Chinese or not. They still think it's an answering machine and you're just sitting there ignoring them.

This could go on, literally, for hours.

All of which is to say that it's never a good idea for grown sons to move back in with the 'rents no matter where you live. In America, almost everybody knows an old couple or two whose s.h.a.ggy-a.s.s son lives in the bas.e.m.e.nt eating Fritos and drinking bong water, and it only makes for a miserable family dynamic.

Just call me Dr. Phil-lis.

And how's that workin' for ya?

Being something of a Chinese-history scholar myself-I have watched Mulan at least forty-eight times, learning to love it even after discovering that Donny Osmond was the voice behind the fiercest warrior in China-I feel uniquely qualified to say that this is a recipe for generational disaster.

The frustrated parents won't even be able to nag their sons around the breakfast table-"Why you don't date that nice Kai-ying?"-because Kai-ying will be able to pick and choose from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of aspiring suitors. For a country that hasn't exactly been supportive of women achieving greatness, or, h.e.l.l, even supportive of them being born in the first place, this is revenge as sweet as the sticky rice pudding at Ting Ting's mile-long buffet, no lie.

I hope my Chinese sistahs are enjoying this attention a little bit. After all, every desperate male suitor will need to bring his "A" game to the courting ritual if he wants to have any slim chance of attracting a wife. That means he can forget about showing up at Chen-chi's house in some triflin' rickshaw of a car and expecting her parents to fawn all over him with tea and crumpets and s.h.i.t.

Chen-chi's holding all the cards now and she likey.

Since the Chinese people, if Mulan is the historical doc.u.ment I accept it to be, are obsessed with matchmaking, it would appear that, at last, the shoe is on the other tightly bound foot, eh?

Now, it's the male clients who must seek out a matchmaker or, if that's too low-tech, there's always eHarmony or Match.com, though I expect those sites to crash from the sheer volume of desperate Chinese bachelors. Moonlit walks on the beach? Don't make me laugh. I repeat: "A" game.

This wretched gender imbalance, some social scientists predict, will result in a surge of marriages between young men and much older women. These most honorable cougar will be too old to have children which is your basic win-win sitchy-ation.

But what of those who really want to have kids?

a.s.suming the Chinese man won't want to cheat and get himself a mail-order bride from another country, how should he go about making himself stand out from all the rest?

I'm thinking he could take a page or two from Barack Obama's playbook. Love him or hate him, the dude knows how to treat a lady.

Let's face it: Husbands and boyfriends across this great nation are whining because Obama is making their date nights look lame. This was sooooo not a problem during the Bush years. Remember when W's idea of a romantic getaway was to fire up Air Force One and fly to Crawford, Texas, for a weekend of brush clearing and faux cattle roping? We never heard what poor Laura Bush did during those less-than-sumptuous vacays but I'm imagining it involved cooking stew for the boys in the bunkhouse and reading some bodice rippers to while away those hot, dull afternoons.

Never once in those eight years did I nudge Duh in the ribs and demand a date night like poor Laura Bush was being treated to.

Even Bill Clinton wasn't known for putting together an awesome date night. At least not with Hillary, bless her heart.

No, Clinton took virtually no time away from Washington, let alone whisking his bride to a Broadway show and dinner in New York like Obama did. Just because.

When he needed to go to Paris for some summit thing or the other, do you think Obama told Mich.e.l.le to watch the kids and he'd bring her back one of those Eiffel Towers with the thermometer inside it?

h.e.l.l, no! He took her along and even carved out a date night of foie gras and pheasant de truffled snootypants right beneath that famous thermometer tower.

See, Chinese suitors? This is how it's done. Your dates will have to have some serious "Wow!" factor. Otherwise, and I really can't state this strongly enough, you're going to be in charge of the prune juice acquisition for a long time to come, just saying.

To be honest, the Obamas' European adventure made me a little pouty because, like a lot of American women, the closest I've come to an exotic European vacation is ordering the "Tour of Italy" trio of I-talian favorites at the Olive Garden recently.

And since you ask, yes, it was pretty d.a.m.n tasty.

Chinese men, listen the h.e.l.l up! I know what I'm talking about when I tell you that Obama is The Man when it comes to planning date nights.

Even on a night when he was going to an NBA playoff game with the boys, he made sure to have an early date with his wife, at Citronelle, an uber-ritzy restaurant in Georgetown.

Do not follow the example of poor duh-hubby when it comes to a date night. When I complained that he never took me anywhere unless I suggested it first, Duh ran out of the room and returned a few minutes later holding aloft a raggedy coupon he'd found in the newspaper for two-for-one dinners at Ruby Tuesday.

Antic.i.p.ating that I would squeal with glee at this, Duh held up his hand as if to stop the celebrating that hadn't actually happened in the first place.

"You can't use it for the premium steaks and you have to eat the broccoli instead of the salad bar," he said.

"But broccoli gives me gas," I said, regretting it instantly. If I want to be treated like Mich.e.l.le Obama and taken to tony restaurants all over the world, I can't go around talking like that. "I mean, er, flatulence."

Of course, Chinese men, your girlfriend can make pooty noises with her armpits in front of your whole family and y'all can't complain because, as the social scientists have said, there just won't be enough women to go around. You'll just have to suck it up if she's weird, demanding, and wants to bring her fire-breathing dragon of a mama to live with y'all.

Don't even think about complaining when they both ask you to cut their toenails. It's the least you can do.

Don't be cheap about the wedding either. Here in the American South, we all know that only heathens and Yankees get married at hotels. Just remember that when it comes time to pick the spot. Don't complain about how much it's going to cost because Hop Sing is right around the corner waiting to pounce.

A final bit of politico-inspired advice: In general, when it comes to women, if South Carolina governor Mark Sanford did it, you don't. This is an excellent guideline, regardless of country of origin.

While Sanford was highly hateable for his insistence on asking his wife's blessing for his affair with the Argentinean hoochie-mama, it wasn't until I read Jenny Sanford's tell-most book that I realized what a t.u.r.d he really was. Is. Turns out he once asked his wife to give back the diamond necklace he'd given her for Christmas because he decided it was too expensive and he wanted to take it back and get the money.