A handful of House episodes are forthcoming, to be aired in the next two months. The first one airs on April 30th. I’ve finally finished my House blitz, having finally finished watching the last three seasons. I took as long as my excitement would allow, which wasn’t long. When I’m interested in something, I get compulsively obsessed with it, and then the interest wanes and its brightness fades and it joins the celebrated hunk of stuff buried in my cultural consciousness. You could say that I actually fall in love with these things – the fire of dopamine transfers into the throb of oxytocin. That’s sort of how I am with everything, which makes it tough to actually, you know, do anything.

That was a revelation. I didn’t really even know that about myself. I guess I have a new topic for my therapist.

And it has nothing at all to do with these three awesome videos, all of which depict Hugh Laurie. The first is the best, his audition for House. He had the accent and the character down before he even started filming, before he was even cast. The last is his brief appearance on Friends a few years ago, marking his few minutes on that show as the only decent few minutes of Friends ever.

Americans are discovering what Britain already knew: Hugh Laurie is awesome.

Revel with me:

I don’t believe in God or Jesus. I’m willing to accept that Jesus, the person, existed, but I don’t hink he had magical powers. Jesus was the David Blaine of his time, except with a motivational message.

That’s part of the reason why I’m not a Christian, the other part being a deft command of my powers of reason.

What gets me is that Christianity is ultimately very, very silly. I find it amusing when Christians make fun of other religions for the same crime.

Christianity is a radical offshoot of a much older religion. The parent religion has a whole library of stories about a big, scary baby in space who manipulates humans into doing his work and then pays them back by destroying their enemies. There’s also a lot of stuff about killing babies and burning foliage.

Most religions have an end. That is, the book has a last chapter where the world ends. Norse types called it Ragnorok.

The Jews had an end of the world cenario: God sends the Messiah. Right around the year 0, some dude shows up at the temple, declares himself the son of God and suddenly everybody’s supposed to stop going to temple and start going to church. Chrsitianity is the post-apocalypse belief system, the Mad Max of religions. Christianity is what happens when the religious nuts crack themsleves open and reveal that there’s nothing inside.

The end of the world happened and life goes on. The Christians think that the Jews are misguided fools because the Messiah came to earth already. The Jews don’t think that’s true, that the messiah hasn’t come back yet at al, and that the Christians are misguided fools for believing that David Blaine actually can tie his shoelaces without touching them.

Magic tricks aren’t enough by themselves, so Christians upped the ante – our Messiah is super powered because he died and came back from the dead. The Jews didn’t believe it and now they’re all going to hell. No, Really! Straight to hell. Do not pass Gehenna, do not collect 200 shekels. Why the roaster? Because they applied reason. I can’t speak for ancient Jews, but I bet they had a similar reaction to the news that I do: “If the Messiah really did come back, then we would probably know it.” Some stuff would have gone down, Old Testament style.

The Christians agreed, sort of. “Wait, you’re right! Um, a lot of bad stuff should happen when the Messiah comes to earth. So that will totally, absolutely happen. Er, the next time he comes back from the dead. Then you nonbelievers are gonna have a really bad day! Whenever that happens.” And then somebody wrote Revelation and quietly twiddled his thumbs.

So now the radical offshoot is back to going to church while the Jews go to temple and get blamed for everything even though they’ve been minding their own business for pretty much the whole time.

One of the nice things about having an ancient religion with lots of stuff written down about it: you don’t have to revise it all the time.

You know why Jews are cheap? Because it’ a nasty, filthy stereotype, sure, but it comes from somewhere – in the descending years of the Dark Ages, the Catholic church decided that lending money was sinful. Because of rampant anti-Semitism, the Jews were forced out of every business except that the ones that no Christian wanted to do. Usury and other unsavory professions (most of them involving money and the burgeoning idea of capitalism and loans and stuff) became the purview of the Judaic peoples. Therefore, Jews are cheap and rich and will take advantage of you if you let them – and we cut to the late 1930s and the ghettos and you can pretty much take it from there.

Anyway, back to the superheroes.

We were all at home on Sunday, enjoying what might have been a day of rest, because the David Blaine of Jerusalem had buddies who didn’t think he was dead, rolled back the stone and found his grave empty. Hallelujah! He is risen, yadda yadda. Sorry, Jews. Here’s your ticket. Don’t bother packing anything with long sleeves.

The Mormons think that Jesus came to America. The Scientologists believe that thetans make us do bad things. They’re both silly, but so is David Blaine.

Our way of celebrating Easter is pretty cool, though. The bunnies and eggs have nothing to do with Jesus. But bunnies and eggs meant something pretty important to our European ancestors. While they lived in round houses and spiked their hair with lye and became target practice for the professional armies from Italy, they were putting women right up there with thunder, lightning and plagues – Important Stuff that they should probably consider worshipping.

Women are the source of life, after all. Men plant the seed, but women do all the work, and anybody who has ever spent time in the vicinity of rabbits knows that the lady bunnies do an awful lot of it.

Eggs are like that, too. You can eat an egg, and that gives you life. If you have a hen and you feed it regularly, it will feed you. Sometimes, its eggs can create more chickens to feed you, too. And when you get sick of all that egg salad, you can have some chicken salad instead.

When Christ’s Marketing Department started selling its product to the forest-dwelling hairy dudes in western Europe, they needed a hook. After all, Christianity and its parent religion are all about a bunch of swarthy people in the desert a few thousand miles away. So they created the world’s first corporate synergy – by adding some light polytheism and ancestor worship in the form of Patron Saints, and by fudging some of the dates to coincide with holidays the heathens liked best.

We eat candy and eggs on the day of Christ’s resurrection because of an ancient, well-crafted marketing ploy that makes Wal-Mart’s falling prices look like the retarded meanderings of a heavily sedated chimpanzee.

Keep that in mind the next time you start piling hate on Cadbury for commercializing your religion. You’re a Christian now because your dumb ancestors did the Celtic equivalent of licking the frosty filling out of a Creme Egg.

Same shit, different century.

The Method: Retractable Spikes.

Imagine a queen-sized platform of nails that emerges slowly from within the mattress. They move slowly, with a long, low, crawling grind, as if constructed from rust-crusted iron and ancient stone. The nails poke up through the mattress, slowly pressing their sharpened points into my flesh.

The Counter: Rubber Mat.

I’ll sleep on a rubber mat. The noise alone will wake me up. There’s no point in making myself suffer, right? Yeah. Those noisy gears are plenty, with how noisy they are.

Being single and being interested in sex leads to a certain kind of thought process. It can sometimes be the all-consuming, white-hot ache marked by a lack of physical contact, but it can also be the kind of idle, meandering thoughts that one has while squeezing out a log.

One of my thoughts includes the idea of leagues. Let me be specific, because there lots of kinds of leagues – there are football leagues, bowling leagues, 20,000 leagues, dart leagues. I’m talking about the kind of league that you enter by being born, and by taking or not taking care of your health or your appearance.

Everybody is in a league, but the people you mostly hear talking about them are sad, lonely people who have such low opinions of themselves that they see everybody from below.

There is an easy way to figure out which league you’re in. First of all, look at the people around you. Assign each person a number based on the following scale:

1 – really ugly
2 – really hot

In every room of more than six people, one of those people is going to be very ugly. The way you determine where you are in that scale is to find the really ugly person. If you don’t see one, then I have bad news for you.

If you do see the ugly person, then you’re in luck. Everybody who gets a 1 is considered to be “in your league.” Just like a football player can’t play football against a basketball player, you can’t go on dates or kiss people who aren’t in your league.

Another way to tell what league you’re in is by using the above rating scale on people who want to be your friend. People make friends for two reasons: because they need somebody new to borrow money from, or because they want to have sex with them.

Well, I have great news. I am now in a completely new league, and I don’t even know how I did it. I don’t think I’m doing anything differently. I’m still the same old me. I’m more confident and friendly in person, but that doesn’t come through online.

Oh, well, I’m not going to look a gift whore in the mouth! Look at all these stone-cold babes who want to be friends with me!

I think this catapulted me right into the next league over. I was playing lawn darts or whatever before, but now I’m totally playing field hockey or lacrosse or something. Maybe you guys can help me choose which one to have sex with?

Remember, though. If you’re not in my league, I can’t be your friend anymore. Sorry.

I can’t stop thinking about House. As a character, there’s really nobody quite like him on television.

He goes from intense misanthropy one moment to subtle emotionalism the next. He abuses his employees, annoys his boss, insults his friends, intimidates his patients and then slips quietly into a heartfelt connection with one of them. In one exchange, he apologizes to his friend Wilson and then calls him pathetic for accepting an obviously false sentiment. Wilson maintains House’s sincerity (“I didn’t even mean that,” says House. “Yes, you did,” says Wilson) even in the face of House’s objection.

The more he pushes people away from himself the closer they are drawn to him. Wilson sees a Gregory House who thrashes against every affectionate embrace, but he doesn’t think House is actually the misanthrope he appears to be, convinced instead of House’s essential goodness. Even though House has been at least partially responsible for at least one of Wilson’s failed marriages, and even though their methods and bedside manners are entirely different, and despite the unapologetic disdain House has for most everything about Wilson, he still maintains their friendship.

Wilson clearly represents the audience – we root for House as the hero of the series despite the gasp-worthy things he says to people, and despite his methods. He routinely lies to patients in order to preserve their lives or the lives of others. He places science and reason above anything else, especially feelings. Wilson tells House that he figured he might enjoy the company of a person instead of the company of his pills for Christmas; House’s response is a derisive snort.

Despite all of these things, we still watch the show. We still hope that House beats the odds and saves his patient. Even though we might wonder why Wilson stays friends with House, we still watch the next episode, standing beside House just as he does.