Ah, New York. It's the best date a girl can have--for a while, anyway. One minute, the city is taking you to a shady stretch of the West Village to lazily browse at the Biography bookstore while eating cupcakes frosted with pure charm from Magnolia Bakery, and the next minute it's dragging you through the dark, musty, people-clogged corridors of Penn Station looking for a chain restaurant. Oh wait, that's not New York. That's Sex & The City. My mistake.

Of course, the characters from Sex & The City never went to Penn Station. Why would they? Penn Station is dingy, depressing, gross, and (shudder) a train station, and the characters on Sex & The City never really even ventured into the subway. But Penn Station is the only place in New York City that has a Houlihan's. Which means that Houlihan's: Penn Station is the only place in New York City where you (and your girlfriends!) can drink Sex & The City-themed cocktails made with Skyy Vodka (the official spirit brand of the movie! Accept no substitutes!), and hopefully get drunk enough to forget that you're in a Houlihan's in Penn Station drinking a promotional cocktail that tastes like spiked Dimetapp called "X Boyfriend."

Unfortunately, you won't get drunk enough to forget that you're in Houlihan's: Penn Station, in part because there's not a lot of Skyy Vodka in a Skyy Vodka X Boyfriend, and Skyy Vodka X Boyfriends cost a ridiculous $10 each, but also because it's hard to forget your surroundings when you're sitting at a table in an underground, shallow-ceilinged, hospital-green room next to a "window" with a direct "view" of the Roy Rogers restaurant next door. I know, because I went to Houlihan's: Penn Station to try the Sex & The City cocktails last night, and the experience is forever burned into my memory, and still lingering in my esophagus.

(objects in this picture are 50% more depressing than they appear)

There's been a lot of talk lately about how Sex & The City changed New York, and it's true. For instance, before Sex & The City, the Houlihan's in Penn Station didn't have an aggressively mauve "Diva" poster on an easel sitting in its doorway to lure in commuters/latent SATC fans with an open invitation to "Get your girl on."

(Ugh. Thanks for ruining Houlihan's, Sex & The City. It's really lost its charm.)

Incidentally, this poster depicts both the exact opposite of what it's like to drink "Diva Martinis" at Houlihan's: Penn Station, and yet somehow captures the inherent awfulness of doing so. Weird, but true.

There were five "exclusive Sex & The City martinis" available for (cautious) consumption, each with its own hideous character description:

TuTu Mango (aka the Carrie) "Fun, fruity and totally original. Hellooooo, Lover."

X Boyfriend (aka the Samantha) "Liberating and OH so satisfying."

Peach Yorkie (aka the Charlotte) "Accessorize with pearls, twinset, and anything Burberry."

Tartlet (aka the Miranda) "Tart and sassy. Baby's breath meets Harvard Law."

and Mr. Big Shot "Sweet and sour. On and off. Here's looking at you, Kid."

I chose the Samantha cocktail, because I didn't want to find out what the alcoholic approximation of "baby's breath meets Harvard Law" was, and the idea of a liquid twinset frightens me. My friend chose the Carrie cocktail, because she likes mango, and the idea of a drinking a watered-down Casablanca reference is pretty unappealing. Our waiter was clearly excited by our choices, "That mango is fresh mango," he informed us. "You should have been here last week. All the ladies were filling out cards to win a trip to the movie premiere." Oh, were there a lot of people? "Like six, seven people."

We looked around. There was a couple eating two $17 hamburgers, two young women with a very vocal three-year-old girl eating a platter of potato skins, and a guy in a rumpled suit slouched into a booth nursing a Corona. Six or seven people? Not bad. The bar was a little more lively. And by "lively" I mean there were two girls at the bar doing shots alone, and a cluster of guys in button downs drinking draft beers and watching CNN. In other words: Glamorous. I pulled back the putty green curtain on the window next to our table, and peered into the Roy Rogers. A teenager on the other side looked up from his french fries, startled. We were more than ready to fully embrace our Diva-dom. Finally, after 20 minutes ("They're pureeing the mango right now.") the drinks arrived.

(The Kool-aid-looking one is the Samantha. The yellow-ish slush in a glass is the Carrie. Obviously.)

So, how did they taste? Both drinks came pretty close to embodying their characters: The Samantha tasted like old cough syrup and vodka, so, you know, it was sassy--just like Samantha! The Carrie, for all that talk of mango, didn't taste like the fruit at all. It was essentially bland, like watered-down, vaguely sweet baby food, so it wasn't anything like the thing it was supposed to be--just like Carrie!

But then I began to wonder: can a promotional vodka drink at a chain restaurant ever really capture a character? Aren't promotional vodka drinks at chain restaurants more like bad relationships: promising you fresh mango and then giving you flavorless slush-piles? Are we too willing to settle for a medicine-y X-Boyfriend instead of a cocktail that isn't a nauseating tie-in to a terrible movie? Also, seriously, when can we leave Houlihan's?

Last night on The Hills Season Finale after-party, sandwiched in between bouts of high-pitched screaming, endless yammering by two hosts wearing young people costumes, and Usher's heartfelt admission (through song) that he wants to make love, right here, in this club presumably to you, MTV dug deep into their promotional reserves and unearthed a six-minute trailer for their latest televised gag reflex: My Super Sweet 16 Presents: Exiled

The premise of the show is to "punish" some of the spoiled brats from My Super Sweet 16. How? By giving them each their own camera crew, TV show, and mountains and mountains of the attention that they so desperately crave. There's also something about sending them to less-affluent countries to live with poor people for a week in order to give them each a "reality check," but the reality of most poor people in less affluent countries doesn't include TV cameras, liability waivers, monetary compensation for living poor, and daily interviews with producers about how you're really growing as a person.

I'm sure that Amanda (who is at least 35, no matter what MTV says) learned a lot from the seven whole days she spent in Africa in the long shadow of MTV's cameras. No doubt she learned that it's hard to maintain your crispy curls in the dry heat of Nairobi, that eyeliner can melt very easily, and that she never wants to go to Africa again. But the biggest lesson she learned was definitely this: if you're spectacularly spoiled enough, you can easily make a career out of acting spoiled on TV.

This summer, CBS is hoping to make their audience interested in sex again, which isn't easy when the only reference to sex on your network is repeated use of the phrase "presence of semen" on the roughly 8 hours of CSI that air each week.

CBS's sexual re-awakening comes in the form of Swingtown, a drama about open marriages, key parties, bored suburbanites, handlebar mustaches, fondue, and everything else tawdry or dirty about the 1970s. Basically it's The Ice Storm meets The Wonder Years--which is almost exactly how it was pitched.

If the show looks more like something that would air on HBO or Showtime, that's because the creators (Mike Kelley and Alan Poul) made Swingtown with the cable networks in mind, and they only went with CBS after HBO passed on it. But there was a problem: the sex drama had a little too much sex in it for network TV.

From The NY Times:

There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultation with Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite.

“I think we’re able to be more groundbreaking and more culturally subversive by putting this on a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal with these adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said.

Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things every week to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”

Um, maybe. But certainly turning your show about crazy sex parties and open marriages into one big tease is a little constricting too, right? Also, what would you put in place of the offending "graphic depictions of sexual acts"? The article doesn't go into specifics, but here are a few ideas for sex replacements in Swingtown:

--Bingo tournaments ("I want to play bingo with your wife. Would you like to play bingo with mine?" has a nice ring to it.)

--A camera that pans out the window and zooms in on a sunset whenever people start kissing.

--Furious building of birdhouses (A repressed wife catches her husband building a birdhouse in the garage, and later describes the horrible scene to her friend, "He was in there. Alone. Surrounded by tiny nails, and hammering.")

--Liberal use of giant black boxes to cover anything that could be considered nudity.

--Shot after shot of icicles forming on tree branches

--Slo-mo dissolves of horses running whenever a character takes off his shirt.

In 1990, a young(er) Bill O'Reilly took a seat at the soda fountain at Schwab's Drug Store and ordered his usual: A root beer float topped with Gummi Bears ("Only the green ones, you idiot!" he reminded the clerk, "Does that look green to you!?") and served with a spoon so shiny O'Reilly could gaze at his own reflection while slurping down the treat.

As it happens, a big-time Fox News Network executive was passing by when he noticed the wild-eyed man at the drug store counter, and the sight of O'Reilly made him stop in his tracks. There was just something about him--the pure flames of ego flickering behind his eyes, the jaw clenched in anger even as he sipped a root beer float, the way he would stare into the shiny spoon and endlessly fluff his thinning hair--this man had "it." So the Fox News Network executive triumphantly swung open the Drug Store door, took a seat on the stool next to O'Reilly, and whispered in his ear, "Hey Kid. How'd you like to be a star?" O'Reilly spit in his face out of pure instinct. And with that, Fox News Network's angriest bloviator was born.

Either that, or someone at Fox saw this clip of O'Reilly erupting at everyone and everything around him as an anchor on Inside Edition, and said, "He'll do."

I love the silent tantrum at the end of this clip: it's like O'Reilly is dancing to song made out of rage that only he can hear.

This Week In Terrifying Hybrids

1. Life philosophy based on archery accoutrements + lack of birth control + the strongest uterus in the world + an apparently endless supply of "j" names = The Duggar Family

Oh, you're pregnant again? Considering that you've already had 17 kids and that your adult life has essentially been one long pregnancy, it would be more newsworthy if you weren't pregnant, Mrs. Duggar. Where is the Today Show segment about that? Mother Of 18's Uterus Finally Empty.

I'm surprised one of the kids didn't start sobbing uncontrollably when they announced their latest pregnancy.

In case you're unfamiliar with the Duggars and their horrific Discovery Health Channel Show, they're a family made up of two thoroughly spacey and marginally evil parents, 17 essentially interchangeable children, more garbage than a small city, and they're basically the cause of global warming. That last part isn't exactly true, but if they ever discover a hole in the Ozone layer directly above Arkansas, it's probably because the Duggars were constantly running their washer/dryer for 35 years in order to have clean laundry for the 18 kids on their compound.

Every news story about the Duggars focuses on zany math of their family: 100 bananas a week! 200 loads of laundry a month! 9000 diapers a year! 1,000,000 loving glances from the kids unreturned by their incredibly distracted parents! But the giant, empty-eyed elephant in the room is insanity: no one mentions how totally insane you would have to be to think that having 18 kids is a good idea (though they sometimes mention how totally religious you'd have to be--the Duggars are part of the Quiverfull movement). The first question that anyone asks the Duggars should always be: So when did you first realize you were crazy?

Another issue that is constantly overlooked in the coverage of the Duggars: they name all their kids "J" names, but why would they make up a name like "Jinger" (the name of their 14-year-old) before finally getting around to an obvious name like "Jennifer" (the name of their current youngest)? Weird.

2. The Kardashians + political awareness + dressing rooms = The most tonally weird PSA about Burma

Where is the FunnyOrDie logo? This is a joke, right?

When you're talking about raising money to stop government-sponsored rape, you should probably use a different inflection than when you're pronouncing a Herve Leger dress, "Sexy." Unless, of course, you're kidding. But the Kardashians say they're totally NOT kidding, so unless this is a parody of something (of life, maybe? That's what Keeping Up With The Kardashians is, right?) then this is probably a pretty ineffective PSA.

3. Meat Loaf + AT&T + Tiffany + the uncontrollable urge to put your fingers in your ears and never take them out = Go Phone Commercial.

A cell phone commercial is actually a pretty appropriate avenue for a Meat Loaf song: the showiness of Meat Loaf really meshes well with the relentlessly annoying aspects of all cell phone advertising. It's a seamlessly irritating combination that is really hammered into your temporal lobe, due in no small part to the fact that this commercial airs at least 100 times a day. "Let me sleep on iiit!" is now constantly ringing in my ears, and I can't stop buying Go Phones just to throw them at my television. So kudos, AT&T.