I’ll get to the cyborgs in a second, but before I do, I need to mention one last thing in regard to Wesley Snipes — in my three February posts you may have noticed that I said my lawyer/friend Dave-o and I were in Florida during his birthday week, which coincided with the first week of Snipes’s trial, January 14-18. Then last week I said we were there when the jury gave its verdict on Friday, February 1.

Allow me to explain. See, what happened was … hey, is that Wesley at the Oscars with Spike Lee?

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Last Sunday I said I would find time to write about Al Jarreau in the coming week, but a few days ago Jeff Giles told me to put my ode to the seven-time Grammy winner on hold for now. That’s because he has something special in the works that will involve several of Popdose’s writers.

Unfortunately for Jeff, I have a problem with authority, so I now present my exclusive interview with Al Jarreau in its entirety:

ME: So were you, like, a huge Moonlighting fan back in the ’80s? I know I was!

AL: I’m embarrassed to say this, but I think I only saw it once. I kept forgetting when it was on. Was it Thursdays?

ME: This interview is over.

Full disclosure: the preceding interview took place in my imagination. But did you see how I totally stormed out of the imaginary hotel suite where I was interviewing Mr. Jarreau? He never knew what hit him.

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Were you anxiously awaiting the conclusion of my Wesley Snipes two-parter on Tuesday? Did you have to take anti-anxiety medication when it didn’t appear? It’s not my fault you’re a pill popper, of course, but I do apologize for taking away the one thing that kept you from going off the deep end on Tuesday. Or Wednesday morning. See, here was the problem — in the past few weeks I got into a bad habit of meeting my 8:30 AM Tuesday-morning deadline at 2 AM Wednesday morning.

So here we are on Sundays. To mark the occasion, here’s a clip from one of my favorite TV shows, which made a similar time-slot change on April 2, 1989. The show was canceled a few weeks later, but don’t be superstitious. Do expect a write-up of a certain singer who’s mentioned in the clip sometime soon, though.

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January 12, as I’m sure you remember, was my lawyer/friend Dave-o’s birthday, and in case you’re wondering, I didn’t end up getting him a leather attaché case. What if it rains? Exactly.

Aside from my romantic exploits south of the equator (I am talking about the actual equator, but I’m also talking about sex), I’m not the type to brag, but you should’ve seen the look on Dave-o’s face when I told him he’d be spending his birthday week with me in Ocala, Florida.

He winced. Then he looked like he had to go to the bathroom. Then I ended my dramatic pause and said, “With front-row seats to the celebrity trial of the month! That’s right — Wesley Snipes’s tax protest trial!”

Now who has to go to the bathroom, Dave-o? Actually, I do. Back in a second …

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If you were born in January or you fell in love in January or you got married in January or you have a child who was born or fell in love or got married in January, then I’m fine with you liking or even loving the month of January. But I hope everyone else will join me in boycotting the last two days of this month and all 31 days of every future January from this point forward. That’s because I hate January.

And so should you.

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As you know, these are trying times, filled with economic uncertainty, terrorist threats, military aggression, global warming, and even a few presidential candidates who aren’t white guys. In times like these, it helps to turn to religion.

Old-time religion.

No, not that old.

No, I’m thinking of something a little more high-tech, although just as exciting and venomous.

Now we’re talkin’!

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I should start subscribing to the newspaper again on Sundays. Not for the news, of course. Please. No, the only part of the paper I’m interested in is Parade magazine, particularly Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, the regular page-two feature where Scott answers readers’ questions about various celebrities’ careers, love lives, and deeply offensive character flaws.

Judging by his responses, I’m guessing that Scott is somewhere around the age of 117. He’s a curmudgeon who thinks Hollywood doesn’t make them like they used to, whether the “them” in question is movies, movie stars, or the tawdry things those stars do in public to keep Scott’s readers interested and thereby keep his mailbox full. Flash your unmentionables at the paparazzi all you want, Paris and Britney, but Walter Scott remembers a time when unmentionables with true talent were the talk of the town, and they were being violated by real celebrities like Fatty Arbuckle.

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Sequels are fun. They’re not always good, but the movie-loving teenager who continues to take up space inside my soul will always be excited by them, especially the mere concept of sequels, i.e. “more of what you love (if all goes well).” These days, when it does go well, like with last summer’s Live Free or Die Hard, it’s a nice surprise. When it doesn’t, like with 2002’s Men in Black II, you almost forget what you liked so much the first time around.

This summer there will be a new Indiana Jones sequel in theaters: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It’s a big deal in the world of sequels, seeing as how there hasn’t been a new entry in this series since 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Expectations are high for some fans, who might have preferred that Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford had stopped after three films, but the Indiana Jones series was never structured as a trilogy like the two sets of Star Wars movies. Nothing was resolved in Last Crusade that was first brought up in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, except for the deaths of more Nazis.

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I’m a little angry today. I wish I wasn’t.

After all, it’s a new year. A chance to put aside the previous year’s disappointments, setbacks, frustrating failures, endlessly escalating arguments, sunlight-devouring grudges, and temporarily blinding crimes of passion. (Technically, my crime was more like a misdemeanor of passion, but my attorney, Dave-o, has advised me not to talk about it at this time and in this particular forum.) A chance to start over with a clean slate full of hope, joy, and other emotions/feelings that are widely considered to be positive and good and so forth.

Here’s why I’m angry — I have a three-year-old niece. Yes, she’s a bundle of joy, an angel, one of God’s better people, etc. And now she’s talking all the time and expanding her vocabulary every day. But recently, after I returned home from a relaxing game of putt-putt with Dave-o and some of his other clients who are currently awaiting trial, my niece asked me if I had played “futt-futt.”

“You mean putt-putt?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she replied. “Futt-futt.”

Her parents and grandparents laughed. I contemplated smiling, but that was only because I thought she’d stop confusing the letters P and F on the third (and hopefully final) go-round. After she called my favorite competitive sport “futt-futt” for the 11th consecutive time, I couldn’t bear to look at her anymore. Away with you, child, until you can say something truly impressive, like “full scholarship” or “presidential pardon.”

You know what my niece’s first word was? “Dada.” No, she wasn’t referring to the early-20th-century art movement that generated nothing of value except for a fluke hit single by the Police in the 1980s, if I remember my history correctly. She was referring to her father. You know, like “daddy.” But she didn’t say “daddy.” She said “dada.”

This is why I’m angry — “DADA” AIN’T A WORD. And yet we praise our nation’s children for saying gibberish that’s almost like real words and then pretend like it’s actually recognized as proper English by Merriam and Webster, the one-name-only longtime companions who invented the dictionary. No wonder we’re all so screwed up — we’ve been told lies from day one! Or whatever day we started forming actual syllables that sort of combined to make actual words but not really. Day 447, maybe? I can’t remember that far back.

As an American culture — and as a popular culture (although we’re certainly an unpopular culture if you ask certain other cultures these days) — we need to stop perpetuating these postnatal falsehoods immediately. We also need to buy something nice for Dave-o: his birthday is January 12. I was thinking of chipping in for a leather attaché case. Who’s with me?