An Oxygen survey of women aged 18 to 34 found that some 37% of them have fallen asleep while clutching a PDA, while 26% of them will wake up from a dead slumber and stagger zombie-like to wherever their phone might be (or roll over) in order to read their text messages. Having engaged in both of these behaviors as recently as (cough) eight-ish hours ago, I wonder if there’s a correlative aspect between them, thanks to the light-emitting nature of the devices, which contributes to fitful sleep. I also wonder if there is a chunk of the ladies who admit to fall asleep holding their PDA who actually mean to do so, what with ebook readers on these devices being so handy? OK OK this reads like I’m trying to rationalize unhealthy behaviors that tip over into low-grade technology addictions and maybe I am. Or maybe I just am trying to cover up the real reason for this behavior, which is presented after the jump!

I can’t wait for Desmond Child to write the follow-up to this song, “We All Get Transfixed Enough By The Glow Next to Us To Delude Ourselves Into Thinking We Don’t Sleep Alone.” (NB: That title needs a bit of editing, I know.)

[Photo by Jason-Morrison]

“More than likely if you encounter a gator and it is your first time seeing one you are going to panic. You may feel threatened, and you may want to run or paddle wildly.” So writes kayaking expert Victoria Adams in a recent post about kayaking in alligator territory at Inflatable Kayak Blog, which someone should translate into German. Really, it should be translated in as many languages as possible. It’s very enjoyable: “What do you do if you encounter an Alligator on your trip? 1) Do not panic! Just leave them alone! And Don’t Feed Them!…” (It is always, always funny to end the sentence “Do not panic” with an exclamation mark.) But the reason why it’d be good if someone translated it into German is that there have been numerous reports of alligators and crocodiles running (paddling?) wild in Germany lately.

Sunday afternoon, outside the northwestern city of Bochum, a group of kids swimming in the Ruhr called the cops to say they’d been chased out of the water by a six-foot-long crocodile-one of two they saw in the popular bathing area. The cops believed them. As police spokesman Volker Schütte said:

“We can often tell when kids are just playing around and lying to us. They usually break down under close questioning. But when we took them aside individually and asked them if they were having a laugh, they insisted they’d really seen it.”

Also, in May, a local newspaper writer had reported seeing a crocodile in a nearby lake. (Could be global warming driving the reptiles North.)

Two days earlier, in a small village 100 miles to the south called Gross-Rohrheim, an alligator had been spotted walking in front of a motorcycle shop at two o’clock in the morning. Police used dog-catching equipment to take the three-foot-three-inch creature into custody (it was no doubt very drunk) and later returned it to the local circus from where it had escaped.

Meanwhile, as the German soccer team’s success in the World Cup is making most of the country very proud, you can count on the neo-Nazis to be a bunch of dicks. For obvious reasons, some people are upset that the thus-far dominant squad that will play Spain in the semifinals today is not Aryan enough. An editorial on the far-right Deutscher Standpunkt website this week had this to say:

“The squad is not a German national team and those people with dark complexions are the Federal Republic of Germany, but they are not Germany. Not tall and blond, but black, brown, puny and Muslim. What progress! In fact one cannot become German, one is German-or not. These new Federal Republic citizens are and will remain foreigners.”

If you’re kayaking in Germany and you encounter neo-Nazis, please Do Feed Them…. to the alligators and crocodiles.

I don’t know if it’ll go down with Outkast’s “Ms. Jackson” or Common’s “The Light,” but you can count this new song by New-Orleans-born rapper Jay Electronica as another good one inspired by the woman who must stand, at this point, as hip-hop’s all-time greatest muse, Erykah Badu. (Who else would it be? Janet? Sade? Roxanne? Jane?) You’ll remember that Jay-the excellent and fast-rising rapper who Jon Caramanica wrote so nicely about last week in the Times-posted live reports on his Twitter page as Erykah gave birth to their daughter, Mars Merkaba, a year-and-a-half ago. He is an open book.

We were really irritated when critic Lee Siegel claimed there was no reaction to the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers, when the Internet was full of responses. I mean, my God, here is yet another response list-Disco Rick’s Top Ten Strippers Under 40. Ain’t no Jonathan Safran Foer on this list either. PICTURED: Disco Rick with Pinkey, “the mother of all the black strippers.”

“Have you got eight quarters in your pocket right now? I rest my case.”
— Wall Street Journal circulation VP Ian Johnson makes the case for credit-card readers on newspaper vending machines, shows that he is professionally unconcerned with the “people who live in urban areas and have to use coin-operated laundry machines” demographic.

Maybe I’m less of a germophobe than most people, but where I come from, New York Times City Room bloggers, “It’s so hot, you can fry an egg on the sidewalk” does not mean “It’s so hot, you can scramble an egg on a pan that has been placed on top of a manhole cover that’s positioned just close enough to the curb for us to not get run over in the name of journalistic stuntage.” Hmph. With NYC temperatures expected to be soul-suckingly high once again today, I’m wondering if it’s time to find a car and convince its owner to let me bake cookies on its dashboard. Anyone want to join me? [Pic via]

“A bachelor… he lived with his mother in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills…. He was a natty dresser, sporting silver hair and bare feet.” That’s the Wall Street Journal on Hollywood agent Ed Limato, who died over the weekend. A bachelor, you say! God bless Nikki Finke for being the only one to explicate “bachelor” and for tagging her extensive obit with “Hollywood gays”… even if the obit is the only item in that category yet. Honestly, no wonder every vampire and friendly alien is in the closet in L.A.

Why is Walmart spending a seven-figure sum to fight a $7,000 fine levied against it by Federal safety officials after the 2008 incident at a Valley Stream, N.Y., store that ended in an employee being trampled to death? Because they don’t want the government to tell them how to treat their employees, mannnn: “[In] fighting the federal fine, Wal-Mart is arguing that the government is improperly trying to define ‘crowd trampling’ as an occupational hazard that retailers must take action to prevent.” You mean, the government wants to tell retailers that maybe using the term “Blitz Line” when opening the floodgates for people in search of cheap DVD players might not be great for employees charged with handling crowd control?

OSHA levied the $7,000 fine in response to the death of Jdimytai Damour, a 34-year-old temporary employee, who died from asphyxiation when a stampede of post-Thanksgiving shoppers at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, N.Y., busted through the doors and trampled him just before the store’s 5 a.m. scheduled opening. The crowd, estimated at 2,000 people, had been lined up for hours near a handwritten sign that said “Blitz Line Starts Here.”

In May 2009, OSHA accused Wal-Mart of failing to provide a place of employment that was “free from recognized hazards.” Specifically, the agency said the company violated its “general duty” to employees by failing to take adequate steps to protect them from a situation that was “likely to cause death or serious physical harm” because of “crowd surge or crowd trampling.”

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, says that regulators are trying to enforce a vague standard of protection when there was no previous OSHA or retail industry guidance on how to prevent what it views as an “unforeseeable incident.”

“OSHA wants to hold Wal-Mart accountable for a standard that was neither proposed nor issued at the time of the incident,” said David Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman. “The citation has far-reaching implications for the retail industry that could subject retailers to unfairly harsh penalties and restrictions on future sales promotions.”

“Unforeseeable”? Isn’t the whole point of a “Blitz Line” to rile people up? Doesn’t Walmart have enough metrics from every one of its outlets to see which items might rile people up, especially after they’ve awoken extra-energized from their deeply satisfying, tryptophan-induced Thanksgiving slumber?

Here is what I think Walmart is trying to say with that bit about “accountability” from the flack: “We’re afraid that OSHA is going to get on our cases next Thanksgiving, and with the economy being as lousy as it is and not getting much better we’re going to have to sell Blu-Ray players for 99 cents. So cut us some slack!”

Former actress Lindsay Lohan will spend a couple of nights in jail-the jails of Los Angeles are too crowded to keep her for long!-because of her inability to make a weekly two-hour class. How hard is it to mess this up like this, in a city that processes thousands of drunk drivers, because everyone there drives drunk? It’s unbelievable. Let’s take it from a recent graduate of Los Angeles’ alcohol education program! “I missed two classes so instead of my classes being done mid April, they were done in early May… You cannot go more than 21 days without going to class; when I wanted to go on vacation, I called and said ‘I will not be in town for two weeks’ and they said, ‘k, bye!’ meaning you could go 20 straight days of no school, without calling, without doing shit and still be on the right side of the law. People who were poor, had no way of transportation other than a 2 hour bus ride, ladies with no child care, even opiate addicts were able to get to these classes. You don’t even need to be sober to go to this shit. It’s 2 hours a week, once a week. After I had four absences I was told that if I was late one more time I would go before a judge and my ass could sent back to jail. You know what was an effective deterrent for jail? Going back to jail.”

by Jordan Carr

• Would you rather go home with a man who had a nose job, must have his nipples bitten during sex and wants to get married and have children now; or one who lives with two tigers and ten pit bulls, must have lights on during sex and built a bomb shelter for the apocalypse?
• Would you rather date someone who sleeps with his eyes open, whose job is his number one priority, and who lives with a former lover; or someone who talks during movies, whose mom comes before his girlfriends, and who’s a “3-minute man”?
• Would you rather date someone who slept with Anna Nicole Smith, is $500,000 in debt and dated a transsexual for two months; or someone who has never driven a car, has chronic halitosis, and has three kids by two baby mamas?

Or would you just say “screw it” and pick the more attractive one?

These questions are the heart of Baggage, the most compelling TV show nobody—and, really, we mean “nobody”—is watching.

Hosted by Jerry Springer, Baggage runs on the Game Show Network. It is as formulaic a show as there is on television. This is a bad thing and a good thing. It’s bad thing because formulas are predictable and not that exciting. It’s good thing because the formula is brilliant.

The show opens with Jerry Springer saying some variation of the following: “This is [primary contestant’s name] and he’s got a secret hidden inside this red bag. Was he engaged to three women at the same time? Did he leave his girlfriend for her niece? Or was he a male escort?”

There are other things you know will happen. Jerry will explain that the other three contestants have brought their small, medium and large baggage, each containing a secret—and of course, the bigger the bag, the bigger the baggage. The primary contestant will feign concern at a benign baggage (once a contestant responded to the baggage “I’ve never voted” by saying, “I’m big into civic duty”).

The DealBreaker round will occur, in which the primary contestant eliminates a contestant blindly by picking the most intolerable medium baggage. The show will introduce you to the term “medium baggage.” The contestants will stand by one of the three bags and then switch places. This happens in every single episode, but the fake audience noise is always set to “surprised gasp” anyway. Jerry will tell the eliminated contestant it’s time to pack up and go. The eliminated contestant will have a zinger ready.

There will be a segment on the couch, which is called The Hot Seat, which will be sponsored by a company that spies on potential dates. The rest of the episode will be sponsored by another dating company. The two remaining contestants will cattily argue with each other and explain their baggages. The time between the revelation of the second and third baggage will be interminable, taking two commercial breaks. Finally, the biggest baggage will be revealed, the two remaining contestants will make their final plea and the primary contestant will chose one who will then have the chance to judge him on his baggage.

At last, our attention is recalled to the first three possible baggages of our primary contestant. Only one is true, you see, and you find out at the end of the show which it is. Then the contestant explains away something like being engaged to three women with “I got caught up in the moment.”

One time a story began, “I’m at a karaoke bar, Fourth of July weekend…” and concluded with the baggage “I slept with two sisters on the same day.”

If they want to go home with this person, they say “I accept your baggage.” If they would prefer the consolation prize of a six-month subscription to an online dating site, they say, “You have too much baggage” and close the suitcase representing their baggage and shut the metaphorical clasps on their would-be relationship while also doing so on the literal suitcase.

The interesting happenings in an episode of Baggage are pretty much limited to the nine true baggages and two false ones, the people’s reactions to them and explanations of them. If you own a DVR, you need to watch no more than ten minutes of any episode.

But some of the baggages are the kind of magical thing that, the more you think about it, the more delightful they become.

For instance:

I’m obsessed with death. I dated a serial killer (NB: this guy rejected a woman for having too-severe PMS). I have a webcam in my bathroom. I refuse to wear a condom. I date NBA players. I sleep with rats. I cheated on my ex with twin cousins. I’m bad in bed. I don’t believe in foreplay. I refuse to raise my kids in America. I’m a grandmother. I used cocaine frequently at Studio 54. I wear adult diapers. I lost my virginity in a threesome. I text during sex. My homeless brother lives in front of my house. I have been to 32 Donny Osmond concerts. I’m obsessed with “The Rock.” I buy panties at the 99-cent store. I pretend I’m famous to get laid. I dated a man in prison. My penis is crooked. I refuse to be on top. I’ve never said “I love you”…and I never will. I had a threesome with my girlfriends’ best friends. I take my cat to a pet psychic. I cheated on my boyfriend while he was in coma. I cheated on my boyfriend with his teammate.

As with all games, there are some strategies. If all you want to do is win, the best way to go is to have Baggages that aren’t really your fault. “I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder” is a good one. If you have to have something embarrassing from your past, at least seem apologetic about it—if you worked as a male stripper, let her know that you’ve closed the book on that chapter of your life. One thing you should not do is reveal secrets that show how untrustworthy you are. Cheaters and thieves tend not to do especially well, so unless you have a really good excuse, keep that story about the time you faked infertility to break up with a boyfriend to yourself.

However, if you are confident that your charm and good looks will take you to victory and you want to do so on your own terms, there are a number of ways to go with this. If selected, you have the chance to start a relationship where your three most abhorrent behaviors are implicitly tolerated—who wouldn’t want that? So yes, let it be known that you want an open relationship, that you check your man’s text messages, that he can’t have any female friends, that you won’t be cuddling, that you won’t be faithful, that you’re a dead fish in the sack and/or that your girlfriend is not allowed to chew gum and must be fully waxed. As another aside, you’d be surprised how often the obsessive controlling types are able to come away the winners.

STATISTICAL ANALYSIS BREAK

Of the 38 episodes I was able to get my hands on, 27 resulted in a match. That’s a 71% success rate. That seems high—on the other hand, these are the people who are desperate enough to be on a dating show on the Game Show Network, and their only obligation is to go on a date. When men have had the chance to choose whether or not to accept a woman’s baggage, they have accepted it 14/17¹ times (82%), whereas when women have had the choice of whether or not to accept a man’s baggage, they accepted it only 13/21 times (62%). This drops to 12/20 if we discount the special Cougar-themed episode because, come on, as if any of these poor self-identified cougars were going to reject something, anything with a heartbeat under the age of 30.

Figuring out what works and what doesn’t is more art than science: one man was rejected for having been arrested eight times, whereas another was accepted even though he had been arrested 22 times.

The numbers do confirm a long-held scientific hypothesis though: men are willing to take a crazy but attractive woman 20% more often than women are willing to do the same. For example: a woman rejected a man who slept with his boss to get a promotion, but a man accepted a woman was abducted by aliens (twice). (Yes.) This disparity also forces one to consider the horrifying prospect that people are actually going on Baggage to find a long-term romantic partner.

Also, it’s very much possible that a lot of Baggage is faked.

JERRY SPRINGER’S BAGGAGE: I SLEPT WITH A PROSTITUTE

The host of Baggage is Jerry Springer. He could not care less about Baggage, and the show is all the better for it. Do you think the guy whose parents escaped Nazi Germany, whose political career was derailed because he paid a prostitute by personal check², who decided that his floundering political talk show would be improved by going to the violent hillbilly soap opera format, cares at all about some dating show? Surely he does not.

It’s still not really known how he ended up hosting the Jerry Springer Show, in its late format — remember, it was once a serious political talk show. Maybe having his political career ruined by a harmless encounter between consenting adults took any idealism out of him, maybe it was all the money, but Springer settled in as the well-paid host of a show he doesn’t watch.

That Jerry Springer does not get too worked up about the people on Baggage perhaps reflects that he’s made well over 3,600 episodes of his eponymous show where his job is to moderate over such sessions as “I’m Dating My Son’s Grandfather,” “Baby I Screwed Up,” and “You Took My Virginity!” Suddenly “I refuse to reciprocate oral sex” and “I’m a spokesman for an erection pill” look pretty benign.

Springer described Baggage as “a step up because the people here have teeth.”

But there is something Jerry Springer definitely does care about — you. More specifically, your opinion of him. A former Mayor of Cincinnati disgraced by a scandal, he went into television after a failed bid for the Democratic nomination for the governorship of Ohio.

Jerry Springer was once a man whose career depended on large groups of people liking him personally and having as few enemies as possible. In 2003 when he was considering running for one of Ohio’s Senate seats, a tour of the state quickly found that his 71% unfavorable rating-to that point the highest measured-would prove insurmountable.

Springer has made it clear he would jump at the chance to take a drastic pay cut for that one electoral victory that would wipe away twenty years of sleaze and bad reputation, or at the very least, allow him to command begrudging respect from the elites that have mocked him for so long.

But here he is hosting Baggage. One small stone on the path to respectability. Is this more effective than writing columns in Slate and hosting a lame show on CNN with Kathleen Parker? Probably not. But at this point, Springer must be resigned to the fact that he can never hold elected office, and with that resignation comes the calm that sets in when we give up on our dreams.

And that calm, non-judgmental indifference to other humans makes him the perfect host for a show about revealing embarrassing secrets! Baggage airs weeknights at 6:30. You can find episodes online here.

¹ One of three such rejections: “I put my cat before any man.” Sorry, cat ladies.

² In a 1980 campaign ad for the Ohio governorship, Springer said, “Some nine years ago I spent time with a woman I shouldn’t have and I paid her with a check. I wish I hadn’t done that.” Grammatically speaking, does “that” refer to the time spending or the check paying?

Jordan Carr is really getting into summer break.