Whoopee for the iPhone, just the latest version of the device that has made us a nation of blabbing babies: the cell.

Not that I could live without mine.

Still, I found a surprising number of cell phone holdouts who somehow manage to get by without the dropped calls, post-work work and daily conversation that goes: “Hang on just a sec. Can you make that coffee light, no sugar? I AM listening to you. You say you’re getting a div – No sugar! Wait. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, so she walked out and — Can you break a ten?”

Holdouts will have none of this. In contemplating their righteous purity, we see the truth about our cell-addicted selves:

“If I were to get one, pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to live without one,” said holdout Henry Stimpson, neatly nailing the biggest problem with cell phones: The way they turn previously independent individuals into the great unweaned.

“Typical incident,” Mr. Stimpson said: “I went to a ballgame with a bunch of my friends and afterwards all the other guys in the car were whipping out their phones and calling their wives. I don’t need to call my wife! She knows I’m coming home.”

Cell phones turn adults into babies, constantly needing contact with their spouses, friends, children. In fact, it’s possible that children in a cell-connected world make out worst of all. This morning, not five minutes after I’d left for work, my 11-year-old called from the kitchen to ask if he could have banana bread for breakfast.

Kid – I’m not there. Eat ice cream and marshmallows. Make a vodka smoothie! Go wild or be a good boy, just pretend it’s 1990 and I’m unreachable. With all of us connected all the time — “Mom, I’m on the bus,” “Mom, I’m two blocks from home” – independence never gets a foothold.

Young adults fare no better. I have a friend whose daughter went shopping for her first college formal and sent her mom – 1000 miles away – a photo of each dress as she tried it on.

Grow up! Buy a dress by yourself! And while we’re at it, learn to make plans, too.

“I go to concerts all the time and my network of friends, they just don’t know what to do when they confront somebody without a cell,” said a 27-year-old holdout, Briee Della Rocca. “They say, ‘Call me when you get to the parking lot and we’ll meet up somewhere.’ I say, ‘I don’t have a cell phone. Let’s plan in advance’—and the record stops. It’s almost like they don’t even consider that this is a potential option: To plan ahead.”

Cell phones also allow their users to be late (“Almost there!”) and opportunistic. “Just this weekend, I’d met a woman at a party and I was just starting to talk when she got a phone call from a friend,” said comic Ian Coburn. “The friend said, ‘Oh, those guys that Patty wanted us to meet are at that bar right now!’” And off she went to the other bar.

Rudeness and cell phones go together like blue-tooth and terminal hipness, which is just another reason many holdouts refuse to buy in. They don’t want to be the one shouting “I said I’M IN A RESTAURANT!” in a restaurant.

Neither do I but…that might have been me. Or you. And though the holdouts don’t realize it, eventually it might be them, too. Because it’s not 1990 anymore.

And that iPhone looks pretty cool.

In 1841, when Charles Dickens finished the last installment of “The Old Curiosity Shop,” his American fans were so desperate to find out the ending, they stormed the New York piers and shouted to incoming ships, “Is Little Nell alive?”

Same question you can hear today. Only now the name is Harry.

“‘Okay, you guys. Is Harry going to die?’” a cashier at the grocery asked my friend Nancy and her son the other day.

Pretty much anyone anywhere can get into a whole conversation – with the laughs and the bonding and the way-too-detailed theories — merely by pondering young Potter’s fate. You can ponder with a friend or a stranger, a grown-up or an 8-year-old (or, of course, your amazingly precocious pre-schooler). Come midnight July 21, however, all those ponderings will end.

Forever.

Every generation from now on is going to know the arc of this classic – “Oh yeah, that’s that great series with the really sad ending.” Or not.

How precious this time is, then, when we can still bite our nails and wonder what J.K. Rowling has in store for us. Imagine sitting in the Globe Theater opening night and not knowing whether maybe Romeo and his girlfriend were going to get hitched and open up Juliet’s Juicy Pie Company. Ever since then, we’ve known: No pies. That night was special.

“It’s kind of like watching a ballgame in the third inning, or the seventh,” said Fordham University English Professor Leonard Cassuto. “Those sequential memories get rolled into a ball at the end of the ninth, and that’s how you store them. You’ll think, ‘Yeah, that was the game where X happened.’ But you won’t remember what you were thinking or feeling those two innings before ‘X’ happened.”

Over at Mugglenet.com, one of the most popular Harry Potter fan sites, an editor named Rachel said she was having mixed feelings about the dwindling time left before book seven. “Initially, I was really excited for this summer,” she wrote in an email. “But then I started getting cold feet. Do I want it to end?”

I sure don’t. If Harry dies — I don’t even want to think it. And for now, I don’t have to.

When readers learned the fate of Little Nell, they took it hard. “Dickens readers were drowned in a wave of grief,” one of the author’s biographers, Edgar Johnson, wrote. The actor “Macready, returning home from the theater, saw the print of the child lying dead…[and] a dead chill ran through his blood. ‘I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain,’ he wrote in his diary… Daniel O’Connell, the Irish M.P, reading the book a railway carriage, burst into tears, groaned, ‘He should not have killed her,’ and despairingly threw the volume out the window.’”

And all this, after readers had showered the author with letters imploring him to let Little Nell live.

Today’s letters are on the Internet: Blogs and comments by Harry readers stealing themselves for the worst, and in the meantime, unable to stop talking about it.

“Dickens knew and Rowling knows how to build up expectation and suspense, getting you intellectually interested and emotionally captured,” said the author of another Dickens biography, Fred Kaplan.

Mr. Kaplan proceeded to discuss the authors’ craft and times and the amazing parallels between their work. Then, just as we were about to hang up, he added quietly, “I hope Harry doesn’t die. Do you think he’ll die?”

And so began another conversation, just before they all shall end.

lskenazy@yahoo.com

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for good ol’, all-American porn. Hard-core, soft core, Peace Corps – doesn’t matter. All I know is: bed-hopping beats head-chopping.

But bed-hopping/head-chopping is the worst.

Unfortunately, that’s what America is in for, thanks to the newest rage in Hollywood: Torture Porn.

You know — movies where women are bound, gagged, tubes shoved up their nose and blood spurting out, and then they’re hung upside down with a breast exposed. That kinda thing.

And you thought “The Wedding Crashers” was crass.

While it is indisputably great to live in a country where freedom of expression is guaranteed, it is also indisputably vomit-inducing to hear that this kind of movie is becoming, ho-hum, just another cinematic genre. Let’s see, we’ve got musicals, comedies, dramas and, oh yes, that new category where the star gets raped and disemboweled while the audience chomps its popcorn.

As reported in Advertising Age, the latest upchuck of this genre is called “Captivity,” by the company After Dark. Billboards for the movie, banned by the Motion Picture Association of America, nonetheless went up all over L.A. in March, ostensibly by accident. (As if billboards go around erecting themselves.) The series of four photos featured a woman first with a gloved hand over her mouth, then in a cage, then with the bloody nose tubes and then partly nude and totally dead. As Ethel Merman sang, “Who could ask for anything more?”

Me. Your local, resident school marm. But you know what? School marms speak the truth. Go marms!

When you consider that “Midnight Cowboy” earned its X rating in the 1960s in part because it provided a peek of Jon Voigt’s naked bottom, look how far the needle has moved.

As I write this, my neighbor is blasting the soundtrack from another ‘60s classic, “My Fair Lady.” What if Eliza Doolittle had been a kinky coed? What if Prof. Higgins had picked her up, brought her home and instead of teaching her the queen’s English, had kept her chained to his radiator for the next 17 years? Would that have been a better movie? Is that what this century has to offer us, in the fruits of creativity department?

In an interview with Ad Age, the producer of “Captivity” admitted that he’s despised, but so what? He’s just riding the wave of movies like “Cabin Fever” and “Saw” – big screen screams on mini-mart budgets, minting money. He wants in.

It’s the American dream, sort of like starting a successful whorehouse franchise. So let’s call him what he is: a pimp with a heart of dough. He’s abusing women and making a profit off it. That’s that.

But what about us?

If we start accepting this kind of movie as just “extreme” horror, the baseline will change. What once seemed out of line will become mainstream.

It happened already with porn culture. The days when going to a strip club seemed seedy are long gone. Now porn queens write advice books and grannies take pole dancing.

Do we want torture to become mainstream too? Are we eager for sexual predator reality shows? Looking forward to, “Dismemberment for Dummies”?

If that’s the world you want to live in, all you have to do is sit tight. It’s coming. But if you’d like a different future, you’ve got to act.

Let’s insist on a new rating like NC-25 when films involve sexual torture, so teens can’t hand the producers their allowance. Or let’s promise to boycott not only the torture movie itself – duh — but also any future movies the stars make, so they have zero incentive to appear in a film like this. Or let’s just find the producers and hang them upside down and take out a dental drill and…

Oh wait! That’s not acceptable behavior.

Yet.

Hey kids! Sesame Street is releasing some of its greatest hits to the iTunes Store just in time for summer. Now you can spend your sunny days feeling anxious and depressed – just like a real grown up.

Yes, it’s a dark, un-babyproofed world out there and it’s never too soon to sing about it. That’s why Elmo and Rosita warble – for real — “A is for Asthma.”

Then there’s the lead-paint-can-kill-you-or-at-least-cause-serious-brain-damage toe-tapper, “Lead Away,” also brought to you by Elmo and Rosita (clearly not the first Muppets you’d invite to a party), along with Oscar the Trial Lawyer – er — Grouch.

“We’re excited to make videos and music from Sesame Street….available through iTunes to give families another way to extend the learning and fun,” came the official Sesame Street announcement.

Well consider the fun extended! Possibly the only thing that could be more fun would be a family sing-along of, “A Cookie Is a Sometime Food” – the 2005 surprise that seemed to negate the Cookie Monster’s creed (and reason for living). At the time, Sesame Street’s vice president of research and education, Dr. Rosemarie Truglio, told the Associated Press, “We’re not putting him on a diet. We’re teaching him moderation.”
Guess they started by moderating his joy.
Considering the tenor of these tunes, I’d like to propose a few rousing downers of my own.

C IS NOT FOR COOKIE ANYMORE
C is for cholesterol, that’s good enough for me
C is for cholesterol, ask any ol’ M.D.
C is for cholesterol, it clogs each ar-ter-y
Cardiovascular problems start with C!

THE SLIPPERY SLOPE SNACK SONG (to Frere Jacques)
Are you sneaking, are you sneaking
Post-nap snack? Post-nap snack?
First comes Goldfish chewing
Pretty soon you’re doing
Toot and smack, toot and smack.

HUSH LITTLE HEALTHY EATING BABY
Hush little baby, don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you organic bean curd
And if that bean curd makes you stressed,
Mama’s gonna take you for an allergy test
And if that allergy test says you’re okay,
Mama’s gonna lay off lactose anyway
And if that lactose-free diet leaves you hungry
Mama’s gonna supplement with locally produced honey
And if that local honey gives you diabetes
Mama’s gonna buy you a bowl of Wheaties
And if that bowl of Wheaties tastes dry
Mama’s gonna give you some soy milk to try
And if that soy milk makes you hurl
You’ll still be the cutest lactose-free, locally grown, wholely organic, borderline diabetic baby in the world.

THE THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS WATER SAFETY SONG
Michael float your boat near shore, Hallelujah.
Drownings peak at age of four, Hallelujah.
Put on goggles, the water stings, Hallelujah
Don’t forget your water wings. Hallelujah.

TAKE ME OUT TO THE NEW, NON-COMPETITIVE BALLGAME
Take me out to the ballgame
For cooperative fun!
Buy me some sunscreen so I won’t burn
I just hope that we all get a turn!
For it’s root, root, root for the two teams
Whoever wins it’s the same – all the same
‘Cause we Don’t! Keep! Score! anymore
At the new ball game.

IF YOU’RE HYPER AND YOU KNOW IT
If you’re AD and you’re HD clap your hands,
If you’re AD and you’re HD clap your hands,
If you’re feeling kind of antsy
There’s a word for it that’s fancy
If you’re AD and you’re HD clap your hands.

The English major sat on his air mattress, one of the two pieces of furniture in his New York apartment, as a stunning German TV reporter leaned over him. “I have to ask this question,” she said apologetically. “Are you in love with Paris Hilton?”

David Seaman, the student, did not even crack a smile. He is not in love with Ms. Hilton, he averred. He simply created a web site demanding, “Free Paris!” because he felt bad the heiress had received a 45-day jail term for driving with a suspended license.

As for the fact her license had been suspended because she’d previously been caught drunk driving, well, he felt bad about that, too. “I think the drunk driving part is terrible!” he said. (It is.)

Still, he feels Ms. Hilton is a “scapegoat,” and that “if we free one celebrity” maybe “we can change the sentencing laws in California,” and then we can turn our attention to “decriminalizing marijuana” and…and…he got in over his head. Look, he’s a nice guy, with a lot of not-quite-formed points to make, and he just happened to make them using Paris Hilton’s name.

And then all hell broke loose.

Calls started pouring in from CNN, MSNBC, newspapers, radio — international TV. He started getting hate mail.

Forget about all the press the Hilton case is getting, said Seaman. “I don’t even like the press I’m getting!”

And yet, there was more to come.

The German TV crew had come to Seaman’s apartment to get the back story before following him down to the “Free Paris!” protest he had organized for that afternoon (and for which he had made three “Free Paris” T-shirts).

This was supposed to be held at 4 p.m. in New York’s famed Washington Square Park — until Seaman learned that New York University was holding its graduation there. So he moved it to a sidewalk several blocks away and that’s where everyone showed up.

Everyone with a TV camera or reporter’s notepad, that is. Maybe 20 of us.

“Do you think any actual protesters are going to show?” we kept asking each other. “Dunno. Getting late.” Pause. “Well, do you think Paris deserves jail time?”

Seaman found himself fielding even more interviews, as did his one special guest, Natalie Reid. “I’m the famous Parish Hilton look-alike,” Reid introduced herself.

Why, she was asked, is Paris Hilton is such a media magnet? “She’s America’s princess,” Reid said.

But why?

“She’s America’s princess.”

She may have a point.

A princess commands attention by holding her head high (and being rich). Princess Paris held her head regally haute through the kind of embarrassments most of us peasants have nightmares about. She’s been seen naked in public and had her medicine cabinet exposed to the world (when she didn’t pay her mini-storage bill). She’s been booked for driving drunk.

“If she farts, we report on it,” said the German TV reporter, Sabine Beckert. Then she returned to doing, basically, just that.

For this opportunity, she had Seaman to thank: a young man who is not in love with Paris Hilton, but who got a little taste of what it must be like to be her, in all its exhilarating nothingness.

Praise the Goddess and pass the magical candle — the United States Department of Veterans Affairs has finally recognized the Wicca religion.

You’ve heard of the Wiccans, right? They’re the group perhaps 700,000 strong in this country who sometimes call themselves witches — but sometimes don’t. They believe in the power of the seasons, the Goddess of the earth, and the United States of America, which some of them even died for. Until Monday [nb Ap.23], however, none of these vets were allowed to be officially buried under the Wiccan symbol, the pentacle — a five-pointed star inside a circle.

After a 10-year fight, the VA finally relented, agreeing to add the pentacle to its list of 38 other approved religious symbols, including an atom for atheists.

Leaving aside the question of why a country founded on religious freedom would even make a list of “approved religions” (what are we, China?), how did this breakthrough finally come to pass?

Simple, said Wiccan High Priestess (and Bronx shopkeeper) Lady Rhea: Magic.

“There have been thousands of spells done to make the VA come around,” said the Lady R. “Everyone’s been doing a lot of magical operations to get them to agree that we have our Constitutional rights.”

The fruits of these spells could not have come at a more propitious moment, as the beginning of May marks Beltane, one of the two highest holidays in the Wiccan religion (the other being Samhain, aka Halloween). This is the time of year when Wiccans all over American will dance ‘round the Maypole in an age-old fertility rite (think: pole).

“Wicca has exploded in the last 10-15 years,” said Margot Adler, an NPR correspondent and author of the Goddess classic “Drawing Down the Moon.” “There’s even a military pagan network.” And yet Adler sounds a little wistful remembering the religion’s earlier, struggling days.

“When I got involved about 35 years ago, you went to the library to find out about groups,” she said. You were lucky if there was one in your state. “Now you can go on witchvox.com and if you’re Irish you can find a Celtic group, or an Italian one with a strega background.” At big Wiccan shindigs there’s often a “teen tent” (where the kids probably talk about how square their parents are). Pagan Pride events are popping up all over. And Alcoholic Wiccans can join a Pagan AA.

Wicca is the next yoga.

For all that, the religion is still widely distrusted, in good part because many confuse it with devil worship — something Wiccans never, ever practiced, except in B movies. To fight such disinformation, Laurie Cabot formed the witchcraft equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League.

“We have an organization here in Salem called the Witches Public Awareness League,” Ms. Cabot said. As the Official Witch of Salem — thus proclaimed by Governor Dukakis – she campaigns for Wiccan rights. In particular, she hopes to raise awareness of the prejudice that still meets many Wiccans in the courtroom, where judges have decided custody suits against them because of their religion.

Unfortunately, there is still no spell against prejudice that has proven 100% effective. But a Wiccan named Starr has concocted one potion that is almost as sought after (check out charmedbystarr.com).

“I have an incense to try to get rid of parking tickets,” she said. “It worked a little bit.”

Share that with the world and Wiccans will not only be tolerated. They will be worshipped.

The minute she heard about the massacre in Virginia, author Anneli Rufus knew what was coming next. “It was almost a countdown,” she said. “Five, four, three, two, one — here comes the L word!”

And so it did. “He was a loner,” school spokesman Larry Hincker said, describing the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui.

Oh, he was a loner? Well that explains everything! He got sick of eating lunch by himself so he killed 32 people. It’s a script as old as Taxi Driver – older, even. Only problem is, it’s wrong.

Rufus, author of the loner manifesto, “Party of One,” would like to set the record straight: Loners don’t kill people. Lonely people kill people. There’s a big difference.

“The loner is a person who feels very comfortable alone,” she said. “Loneliness doesn’t even occur to them. A whole weekend could go by and it’s 6 on a Sunday and they say, ‘Oh! I haven’t talked to anyone,’ and that’s cool.”

Loners harbor no rage toward the world that didn’t stop by for tea. They didn’t want to chat anyway.

Lonely folks, on the other hand, feel frantic when they can’t connect. “Loneliness is associated with just about everything bad,” said University of Rochester psychology professor Harry Reis. “Lonely people die earlier, they have all sorts of problems. It’s the no. 1 cause of suicide.”

And it figures in violence, too. “I’ve done a lot of reading about criminals and often I find that these are people who could not get accepted into a clique, a club, a relationship. They’re hurt and they want revenge,” said Rufus. In other words: People who need people are (potentially) the most violent people in the world.

People who don’t need people, however, are the ones nobody trusts.

Happy-go-lucky loners get lumped together with needy nuts because, to the outside world, these very different groups look the same: They’re the ones sitting out the picnic. And since it’s hard for most people to imagine anyone choosing solitude, onlookers assume they must be sad. Or snobby. Or packing heat.

Then, too, there’s the self-fulfilling headline writing (we) the press are guilty of.
Google “loner” and “gunman” and you will find a slew of slayers, some of whom held very social jobs, like hairdresser and doctor. Was there ever a loner hairdresser? But Google “gossipy” and “gunman” and — forget it.

Though we automatically think of our criminals as loners (and vice versa), the fact is some of the most admired people in history have preferred solitude to speed dating, beginning with Isaac Newton, who didn’t even like playing with other kids as a child.

J.D. Salinger, Albert Einstein and Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring,” all enjoyed spending more time with their thoughts (or at least fish) than with other people, as did John Lennon, Franz Kafka and Stanley Kubrick. Emily Dickinson spoke to people through a partly closed door for a good part of her life – the “poster child for reclusiveness,” says Rufus. She was a loner, yes, but her poems don’t sound lonely. They sound full of life.

In fact, the desire to be alone has zero correlation with any kind of psychopathology, said Dr. Robert Archer, a psychiatry professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School. “The world is quite full of introverted people who are quite safe to live next door.”

And if, by some chance, the one next door to you isn’t – well, at least we know how you’ll describe him on the 10 o’clock news.

Granted, college basketball stars galloping down the court get a tad more attention than high school robots rolling around, bumping into each other, and trying to toss inflatable life preservers onto poles. But eventually — who knows?

“In 30 years, you’ll see. This will be the sport,” master inventor Dean Kamen said. He was watching just such a high-tech competition in New York the other day, having spent the previous two days jetting to identical games in San Jose, Chicago and Kansas City. In all, 1,800 robotics teams compete all around the world. “Gazelles run faster,” said Kamen. “Elephants are heavier than our heavyweights. This is the sport for humans.”

Naturally Mr. Kamen has high hopes for the sport. He invented it. He also invented the Segway, the stent, and the first portable insulin pump. But cheering on these FIRST Robotics Competitions, as they are called, is his priority now, and it¹s hard to imagine a higher calling. Not only does America need to nurture a new generation of engineers, but plenty of high school students need the nurturing only a robot — or robotics team — can provide.

“My situation got messed up,” one of the New York competitors, 16-year-old Jonathan Alarcon, said at the regionals Kamen was watching. Alarcon joined his Brooklyn high school’s team as a freshman for one reason only: His family was living in a homeless shelter. “I didn¹t really like it,” he said. “So I would spend as much time away as I could.²

When he found out that the robotics team stayed at school till 11 p.m. (robot kids are dedicated), he signed right up. In fact, he said, “I forged my mother’s signature.”

Was she upset?

He smiled. “Now she¹s very proud.”

Well, she should be. Last year his school, formerly devoted to vocational education, made it to the national championships held in Atlanta. This required some serious fund-raising. “One student sold 4,000 candy bars,” said the team’s coach, Nadav Zeimer.

All of his students looked equally pumped as they prepared to send their robot into battle. One young man was keyboarding frantically as another checked the robot’s battery. All around them, teams from another 36 schools, public and private, elite and ailing, were doing the same thing: preparing for the moment their robots would face their rivals in a two-minute, 15-second battle.

For the first 15 seconds, the robots are “autonomous” — that is, they must move on their own. After that they are in the hands of a human with a joy stick who must try to concentrate as fans scream and celebrate every lurch of the R2D2s below.

Up in the stands, the Westinghouse fans began a deafening cheer for their team as the robot rolled out into the arena. Mothers beamed. Younger siblings waved pom-poms. The team’s mentors held their breath.

“We have a basketball team and other teams, but we are the glue that keeps the school together,” said Alarcon, whose family has since found permanent housing.

“We’re the hot glue,” said his team member, Akeem Cummings, who’d been getting into trouble before discovering robots.

“People chant for us,” noted a third team member, Jeremy Joseph.

They sure do. That’s exactly what they were doing — wildly, deafeningly, take that, Final Four! — as the team’s robot swung out its mechanical arm. Triumphantly, it lifted up a life preserver and proceeded to save about 15 young people’s lives.

By the way, it also proceeded to win. Beat out all the fancy private schools. But as Mr. Kamen likes to say about the robotics competition: Everyone who gets involved wins.

If schools had water coolers (which they don’t – they have teeth-rotting, kid-blimping soda machines. Thank you, corporate America!), all the students would be gathered around them talking about the latest Fox hit, “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”

And if those kids were anything like the fifth graders I talked to yesterday, they’d be saying, “Of course we’re smarter!” And they’d be right. No one is quite as smart as a fifth grader any more – especially not the morons Fox dug up for its show.

Fifth graders in 2007 have the advantage of having grown up with the very technology that made many of us middle-agers finally throw up our hands and say, “I am through trying to keep up. Get me a Jitterbug.” A Jitterbug being the super simple cell phone for the non-fifth-graders among us. It has giant, easy-to-read numbers and asks simple yes/no questions. (“Do you want to make a call?” “Do you have any idea how to dial a phone?” “Who was the first President?”) It doesn’t bother trying to synch you up with email or the internet because this, it realizes, is a lost cause.

Just a generation ago, though, the household objects that were simplified were the toys. The PlaySkool phone with the big plastic numbers. The tiny, tinny piano. Kids were the ones who needed the dumbing down.

Now that’s all reversed. I asked my 3rd grader if he knew how to text message and it was like asking if he knew how to rip an MP3 file. (Mom! Everyone does!)

This may perhaps explain why the Fox show is such a hit – the third most watched show last week: Secretly most of us adults are worried that not only are we dumber than a fifth grader, we need one around for tech support.

A show dedicated to that premise – children actually trying to teach grown-ups how to, say, instant message – might be fun and even surprising. The only thing surprising about “Are You Smarter…,” alas, is that there are still plenty of people willing to look idiotic for the chance to be on national TV and win a million dollars. (Hmm. That’s not sounding quite so unreasonable as I write it.)

Last week, for instance, host Jeff Foxworthy asked a contestant named Ebony, “If you cross the northern border of the United States, what country are you in?”

Ebony squeezed her eyes shut in utter concentration. “I think I know this,” she said, clasping her hands together as if in prayer. Time passed. Theme music played. More clasping. Finally, offered the chance to “peek” at a real 5th grader’s answer — the 5th graders don’t actually play against the grown-ups, they’re just there as assistants — Ebony chose to take the extra help.

“CANADA” the fifth grader had written.

Extended whooping from the studio audience. Ebony shrieked with joy and clasped some more.

“Why do they take so long to answer?” my actual 5th grader asked as we watched.

I wanted to explain about trying to build up false tension and the need to fill an hour slot in order to maximize the number of commercials. (This one had about 10 ads each commercial break.)

I also wanted to mention what Prof. Ted Mandell of Notre Dame calls the “reality show feel-good effect:” the stupider the people on the show, the smarter the people at home feel, and the more they keep watching.

It also seemed important to note that co-producers Mark Burnett, of “Survivor” fame, and Fox’s Mike Darnell (“Temptation Island”) are the godfathers of reality TV, and they don’t want to get to the big prize too often, too quickly, or the show will peak.

On the other hand, all that takes a lot of time to explain and, after all, he’s a 5th grader.

He’s got to download my photos before he goes to bed.

Rats on the brain.
That’s what New Yorkers have lately, thanks to that tape that boosts the ratings of any news show that can possibly figure out an excuse to air it again: the rodents romping through the Greenwich Village Taco Bell/KFC (Kentucky Fried Critters).
If those rats had agents, they’d have a three-picture deal already. Instead, the nameless gnawers have so seared themselves into public consciousness that they are in danger of turning our hard-boiled Gothamites into Purell-pickled prigs, the kind of folks who place tissue on the seat of any public toilet despite a million studies showing that all this does is end up sticking toilet paper to the thighs. For God’s sake, New York, remember: Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but it is several columns over from “tastiness,” and it is not even on the same menu as atmosphere, charm, or authenticity.
Yes, this is a plea for a little more grit and a lot less grandstanding.
Alas, it is a plea too late. Yesterday, a state Senator of the Bronx, Jeff Klein, released a perfectly timed update to his 2005 report “Restaurants That Are Enough To Make You Sick: An Analysis of Unsanitary Conditions at New York City Restaurants.” The report not only has a way-too-long name, it has a way-too-silly idea: Grades. It proposes a new law that would require all restaurants to post their inspection results in the form of a letter grade, A through F.
I’ve got a better idea. Let’s post the results as “R on premises” or “R-Free.” I think we’d all understand what that means. Beyond that, the grade idea is just splitting hairs.
“If a restaurant is open, it’s safe to eat there,” the executive vice president of the New York City chapter of the New York State Restaurant Association, E. Charles Hunt, said. Grades would only start patrons wondering what, exactly, they should be worried about. “Gee, honey, this place got a C. Does that mean its refrigerator isn’t quite cold enough or vermin are breeding in the bread baskets?”
What’s somewhat encouraging is that despite the senator’s heightened, even hysterical, sense of alarm, many New Yorkers are still willing to trust their own tastebuds, let the health reports be damned.
At the Cove Diner yesterday — no. 2 on Mr. Klein’s list of the “10 Worst Restaurants in New York City” — patrons were arriving in droves.
Well, maybe not droves, exactly. But there were two patrons on the premises at dinnertime, and one of them, by golly, was a health inspector.
“I didn’t come here to inspect,” she said, “I live here in the neighborhood.” She’d dropped by to say hi because the restaurant had closed for a while to address its hygienic shortcomings. “I was so incredibly happy when I saw you were open!” she told the cashier.
The cashier was happy to see her back. They both agreed that the place had needed, perhaps, a little “refreshment” (the inspector’s word), but that it had never posed a real health risk.
No, the inspector said, if you’re looking for a health risk, check out the Brooklyn fast food joint she inspected on Friday.
“Do NOT go there. They have the ones” — you know what “ones” are — “this big and that big.” She held her hands 6 and 12 inches apart. “The American rats, they speak my language. They like you. The Norwegian rats, they will fight you. They carry a lot of disease. I just saw that something was there and that something was biting on the chicken in the freezer.”
The cashier looked appalled.
“I went out and puked my brains out,” the inspector concluded.
See? Now, that kind of place would have an “R” on its door and you’d avoid it. Who needs a grade?
From the Cove I jogged up to John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker. This Village favorite had also been closed briefly after a zealous health inspection, but now was back open for business — and business was booming.
“I didn’t see any roaches,” a happy diner said upon emerging from the restaurant. “The food was good and there was ambiance.”
Ambiance and slight health violations: Perfect together.
Another couple was entering the joint, eager for a real New York experience.
“We were recommended this place by someone in Australia,” a tourist, Carla Oliveri, said.
“My friend said it was average pizza but apparently it’s ‘the’ New York pizza,” her friend, Chris Vandenheuvel, said.
The fact that the place had some health violations? That only made it more authentic.
The day New York gets an “A” for cleanliness is the day it becomes Disneyland, and that’s not a place you go for the food. Besides, it has mice.