When I was a waiter an at Argentine restaurant in Studio City, I once served Alfonso Ribeiro, the little dude who played Carlton on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”. I can call him “little” because he was shorter than me and had a hot-ass girlfriend, which was either ridiculously unfair or gave short guys everywhere a measure of hope.

Other than ordering the Pollo Picante and giving me a slightly above-average tip, Carlton’s visit was unmemorable (unlike seeing Wayne Brady the next day).

Will Smith was not with him that day. You know why? Because the Fresh Prince was busy transforming himself into a box office powerhouse. In case you don’t have a TV or have disabled pop-up ads on your browser, you might have heard that his latest movie, I Am Legend, broke his box office record over the weekend, opening with a take of more than $77 million. His previous record was his $62 million opening weekend for I, Robot.

Many people were surprised by 28 Days Later’s I Am Legend’s record-setting opening. It reportedly doubled industry-wide expectations.

But to me, who was raised near the glitz of Hollywood in the glamorous San Fernando Valley (represent), it is obvious why Will Smith continues to attract all demographics to his movies. His formula is so simple yet so elusive. Are you ready for this? Pay attention:

He uses soliloquacious pronouns in his movie titles.

I know, I know, you probably wish you had a nickel for everytime someone argued that point. But let me argue it once more. The first-person, singular personal pronoun “I” has appeared in Big Willy’s top two opening weekend movies of all time. This might seem like a slight coincidence to the untrained Hollywood observer. But the magical pronoun has also appeared in eight of his eponymous TV show’s episodes. Check it:

I, Done: Part 1
I, Done: Part 2
I, Stank Hole in One
I, Stank Horse
I, Whoops, There It Is
I, Bowl Buster
I, Clownius
I, Ooh, Baby, Baby

Do you think Smith’s brilliant use of this pronoun stops merely at his films and movies? Try again. Remember his 1989 hit, “I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson”? It’s not an “I, Pronoun” dealio but it does start with “I”. He’s a fucking pronoun-using genius.

Sure, Smith is known for gettin’ jiggy wit’ even bigger movies like Independence Day and Men in Black, movies that didn’t start with “I”. But imagine how much BIGGER his movies would have been if he had affixed the pronoun to his movie titles. I, Ali, would have kicked more ass and I, Wild Wild West, might have grossed more than just $113 million. Hell, even “I, Parents Just Don’t Understand” would have won more than just one Grammy award.

I think I’m going to follow Will Smith’s lead and change my blog name to I, Arjewtino, and laugh maniacally as all the millions start pouring in.

Now all I need is charisma, acting skills, and the ability to actually rap and do the hippity-hop.

Speaking of season finales, The Princess and I last night cooked some dinner, got into our PJs, and watched our third favorite non-writers’-strike-affected TV show, Beauty and the Geek.

This is what living with a woman will do to you. As a bachelor with my own (dirty) apartment in Adams Morgan, I used to do my best Charles Bukowski impression every night, staying up all night, drinking myself into a coma, and watching all the free porn I could find online.

But moving in with the love of your life has a way of changing you.

When we first started watching Beauty and the Geek this season (accidentally, I still maintain), I would roll my eyes and ridicule the saturation of reality TV. Now, I care about these people, these reality stars named Dave, Jasmine, Sam, and Nicole, as if they were my friends and their beauty and/or geekiness were more important than the fate of the world itself.

Some may consider this sweet — a couple indulging in some trash TV and bonding on the couch. On the surface, it probably seems that way. But you have to understand just how deep this rabbit hole goes.

I not only watch Beauty and the Geek, last week I voted online for the Beauty and the Geek winner.

Have those words sunk in yet?

After the penultimate episode last Tuesday, the show told us to text our vote (99 cents? Yeah, right) for who should win this “social experiment” OR go to the to vote there.

I voted for Dave and Jasmine, who were crowned the winners last night during a cheesy episode that looked more like a Mad TV skit. I used absolutely no rational thought or logic behind my vote except for the fact that Dave’s skills as a LARPer made me feel exceptionally cooler by comparison.

The online vote form asked me for my home address, though, which I was not about to give them. So I e-mailed Baby Bien:

Arjewtino: “What’s your address?”

Baby Bien: “I’m scared. Should I be scared? I guess I’ll tell you anyway.”

–provides address–

Arjewtino: “You probably should have been. You just voted for the winner of Beauty and the Geek. Well, technically, I voted using your name and address. I didn’t want any junk mail sent to me. Sucker.”

Baby Bien: “Screw you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

This means I have become one of “them”. I am one of those people who cares about a reality show and knows what a is. This is more embarrassing than singing Lee Grenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” in a New York City karaoke bar (I’m actually kind of proud of that one).

You think my devolution ends there? You are sadly mistaken.

I also have started watching Season 2 of Project Runway on DVD. The Princess asked me to Netflix the series with the promise that I would see Heidi Klum naked, which has so far failed to materialize (though I did enjoy watching her with her knockers).

We have watched eight episodes so far. I know who Santino is now. I have opinions on backless dresses. And I think Michael Kors has good taste.

This means I have learned more about fashion since I started watching this show than I have ever gathered in a lifetime of shopping for clothes at the Salvation Army.

might be proud of me for this enlightenment, considering the night I met her I told her I don’t know anything about “fashion and shit”. But to me, it just means I’m in dire need of a total guy makeover (see?).

I need to read more Bukowski, or get into a fistfight at a bar, or spend a whole day watching old Bruce Lee movies. Maybe I should pin up posters of Scarlett Johansson in my room, or drink nothing but 15-year old malt scotch for a month. Watch a boxing match (live), attend a monster truck rally, do a keg stand, buy a gun.

Nevermind. The next Project Runway DVD is coming any day now.

While catching up with a certain TV show on Netflix a few weeks ago, I told a friend who was a fan of the show that I had one episode to watch. And not just any episode. The season finale. He looked me right in the eye with excitement and asked, “Oh, so you already know that Rosebud was the name of his sled?”

Now, he didn’t really say that. But what he did say was the end-of-the-season twist ending to a show I had invested a lot of time in. (I don’t want to mention which show it was in case some douchetard finds it funny to ruin it for readers who might want to see the awesome show.)

“Uh, no, I didn’t know that,” I told him incredulously.

“Oh,” he replied.

“I can’t believe you just ruined it for me.”

“I thought, I mean, um…sorry.”

People love season finales because they are fraught with hope, expectation, cliffhangers, and surprise twists. Even people born in the 1980s understand the implications of uttering the phrase, “Who shot J.R.?”, perhaps the symbolic archetype of the pop culture phenomenon known as the “season finale”.

Season finales carry with them the weight of anticipation built up often over the course of many months. They often end with landmark events that mirror everyday life, such as a wedding, a birth, or the killing off of a beloved character. No one that I have ever read has analyzed season finales as a concept in American culture, but I think someone should (I’m looking at you, ).

The Blogger Happy Hour crew is throwing its own season finale but hopefully with less bloodshed or gestational expulsion. This happy hour is not only the last of 2007, but may be the last for a while as bloggers flock home to their families for the holidays. The plan: Friday, December 7, at 8pm, at the Four Fields (it’ll always be the “4 Ps” to me) in Cleveland Park.

The usual cast (INPY, Kassy K, , and ) is hosting, with a special guest host cameo by Roissy, who is vowing his own brand of controversy.

After the amazing turnout of the last happy hour at Chi Cha Lounge, this one promises to be one spectacular finish to an outstanding season, one whose finale may be discussed during the summer break.

Aside from this happy hour, here are my top five season finales of all time:

1. Kirk Gibson, 1988.

Gibby caps off his 1988 season by doing his best Roy Hobbs impression and belting a homerun off the best closer in the game, creating the greatest moment in Dodgers history and spiraling Big Blue into a 19-year spell in which they don’t win one playoff series.

2. Cheers, Season 5, 1987.

Diane leaves Cheers in the final episode of the show’s seminal season as Shelley Long wisely moves on to other illustrious projects like “Troop Beverly Hills” and “Don’t Tell Her It’s Me”. Never heard of those movies? Exactly.

3. Myself, Karate, 1987. At the age of 12, I cap off my final season as a karate student by successfully testing for the Tang Soo Do green belt. I abandon a prominent career in karate and the promise of many cheap, plastic trophies. Last time I tried a flying leg kick I broke a hip.

4. End of Spring, every year.

Is there any better time in the year than the end of spring, which harkens the beginning of summer, warm weather, the beach, and, most importantly, my birthday? Nope, didn’t think so.

5. Oregano.

What? This is a seasoning? Not a season? Oh well, it’s my favorite seasoning and should be added to everything. I love putting it in Ramen noodles with a fried egg on top, Frosted Mini Wheats, and my hand. I think I’ll have some tonight when I eat some pancakes.

Heroes is over, The Office is no more, and summer is a looooong way away. So come join us for this season finale.

Because the next day, everyone will be talking about it.

Most people by now have heard about Halle Berry’s semi-anti-Semitic on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last Friday night. For those of you haven’t heard, Berry was on the show last Friday night showing off photos she took using Mac’s Photobooth feature, which distorts your face into a House of Mirrors-kind of way.

She took out a photo that made her nose look big and cracked, “Here’s where I look like my Jewish cousin.”

No one laughed and Jay Leno replied, “I’m glad you said that and not me.” The Tonight Show aired the segment though they deleted the “Jewish” part and added a laugh track.

Rightly so, many Jews and goyim have been offended.

But they are offended for the wrong reasons.

Halle Berry’s comment was ignorant at best and distasteful at worst. She claims that shortly before coming out on stage, one of her assistants was looking at the same photo and uttered the same comment. If anything, we should be indignant at her ripping off someone else’s joke.

What I can’t forgive, and what upsets me most of all, is that The Tonight Show added a laugh track.

Let me repeat that: THE TONIGHT SHOW. ADDED. A LAUGH TRACK.

They pretended the “joke” was funny by artificially making it seem like the audience was amused by Halle Berry’s guffaw. This offends me more than anything Halle Berry could say, considering the airing makes her look vapid and desperate for acceptance.

The episode, though, seems to have sparked more outrage than Ann Coulter’s recent declaration that Jews should be “perfected” into Christians. The difference is that Berry is an idiot and less aware of her image than she should be; Coulter actually believed in what she said.

There is a long history of Jews overreacting AND underreacting to perceived slurs, slights, and insults. When people call you a kike or make Holocaust jokes, you kick their ass. When they say it’s funny but you don’t look Jewish, you call them idiots.

Some of the funniest Jew jokes I’ve ever heard have come from friends of the Tribe, usually because they’re witty, self-deprecating, and illuminate something poignant about our collective identity. The most offensive jokes come from people who aren’t Chosen because they’re, intentional or not, cheap, cruel, and sadistic.

By the same token, many non-Jews can easily be too paranoid about offending us. One of my favorite stories involves my friend , who, while we were discussing a few years ago our holiday plans, he said, “Are you celebrating, um, uh, Hanukkah? Did I say that right? Did I offend you?”

Of course, Jews aren’t immune to being overly sensitive to perfectly innocuous comments. Baby Bien once flew into a rage when a mutual friend described Jews as a race, not a culture or religion. I explained to our friend why that kind of comment could offend us but I also explained to Baby Bien why he was overreacting.

So until “Jews 101: How Not to Offend the Chosen People” becomes required reading in school, we’re all going to have to take a deep breath and gain some perspective on things.

Besides, those Photobooth pictures are .

The Princess has started watching reruns of the cancelled CBS show “Still Standing”. That’s not the disturbing part.

She thinks the show is hilarious. That’s not the disturbing part, either.

She told me recently that Mark Addy, the main actor in the show, reminds her of me.

Mark Addy (whose name I had to look up on IMDB) is That Guy. That Guy who couldn’t get it up in The Full Monty, That Guy who was in some knights movie with Heath Something or Other. That Guy who played Fred in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas seven years ago.

On his show, which I put on par with sitcoms like “Yes, Dear” and “According to Jim Belushi”, Addy plays a stubborn, idiotic dufus with a heart of gold (I don’t see the similarities). A rerun was on recently that showed him playing hockey again after his wife Jami Gertz (Lost Boys, Seinfeld chick who couldn’t “spare a square”) thinks her sister’s younger boyfriend is hot.

I know. Hysterical.

I asked The Princess how this bloated windbag (again, what similarities?) of a character could remind her of me. She said because he’s dorky, acts stupidly cute, and loves his wife.

So I did some research into Mark Addy’s life (who hasn’t, right?) to see if we were as different as I thought we were or if he is, truly, my spiritual doppelganger.

First, I compared similar photos. Obviously, I’m way better-looking:

Mark Addy

Arjewtino

Arjewtino 1, The Princess 0

I also learned that Addy has won BAFTA, MTV Movie, and Screen Actors Guild awards. I, too, have won many awards in my lifetime, including a third-place ribbon in the 50-yard dash when I was 8, Employee of the Month award when I worked in the hardware department at Sears when I was 17, and the Sportsmanship Award in Little League for my performance in the All-Star tournament.

Arjewtino 1, The Princess 1

Next, I learned that Addy has a seven-year-old daughter. I don’t.

Arjewtino 2, The Princess 1

Mark Addy is British. I can do a British accent, but only a Cockney one and only when I’m doing an impression of Austin Powers.

Arjewtino 2, The Princess 2

Addy got completely naked in his breakthrough role in The Full Monty. I like to walk around my apartment as naked as possible before The Princess either shields her eyes, laughs in my face, or runs screaming in horror.

Arjewtino 2, The Princess 3

“Mark Addy” is the name of a bar in Manchester, England. As far as I know, there is NO bar anywhere named after me. But there should be so I could have the following conversation:

Boss: “Why are you late for work?”
Me: “I’m hungover, had one too many at the Arjewtino last night.”

Rolls off the tongue.

Arjewtino 3, The Princess 3

There are no fan sites online of Mark Addy. I, however, constantly have women throwing their virtual panties at me through my blog.

Arjewtino 4, The Princess 3

It’s pretty obvious after this exhaustive analysis that I am nothing like Mark Addy and, this is going to be so sweet to say, The Princess is wrong.

Looks like I’M the one who now is still standing.

It’s over. It’s finally over.

When I started watching 24 more than two year ago, I Netflixed seasons 1 through 3 and watched all the episodes back-to-back. The DVDs were like crack cocaine and I couldn’t get enough. I often stayed up until 4am to wrap up a four-episode DVD so I could mail it back to that magical place in Netflix Land where leprechauns and unicorns mail my next movie the next day.

I watched seasons 4 and 5 in “real time”, greedy for each week’s episode, texting fellow 24 fan-friends as the episodes aired, and analyzing each second for a clue of where Jack was going to take us.

But Jeebus Chris, Season 6, I could not wait for you to end.

Baby Bien said it best when he wrote me: “It’s kinda like watching your girlfriend gain tons of weight, but you don’t want to break up with her because you know the hottie is still there underneath it all and you hope that one day she will come back.”

Here are 24 reasons to hate Monday night’s 24 craptastic season finale:

1. The final indignity that was the “cliffhanger” pun at the end. Some balls on those writers after such a piss-poor season to pull that crap.

2. Josh is NOT Jack’s son. Maybe Ricky Shroeder is.

3. Powers Boothe (greatest name ever) didn’t say “cocksucker” as often as he did on Deadwood.

4. Even as a traumatized coma patient with no lines, Audrey annoys me.

5. No Elisha Cuthbert.

6. It made me wish Jack jumped (off the cliff, not the shark). No, not really, that would have been too cowardly. It made me wish Jack had gotten blown up on the oil rig, though.

7. Chloe is pregnant, which in TV land means she must faint. There isn’t enough counseling in the world to save that kid.

8. It took Bill Buchanan five minutes to pilot a chopper six miles to the oil rig but it took an F-18 more than 20 minutes to scramble?

9. Only for the season.

10. Too many dropped storylines. What DID happen to Walid?

11. Bill Buchanan is a renowned yoga instructor.

12. Who are the Human Resources people at CTU? Applicants must be buying their top secret clearances on eBay.

13. “JANUARY 2008” did NOT give me goosebumps.

14. I was working on a crossword while watching this episode.

15. Nina wasn’t behind the whole thing.

16. Jack Baywatching up to the shore with his man purse lacked the slow motion shot.

17. Milo’s superfluous, one-scene brother. Even people claiming bodies at 4 a.m. can disappear into CTU. He’s probably in some systems room hooking up an uplink.

18. Grey’s Anatomy had a better finale. Yes, I watched.

19. Silent death clock. It’s either overused (Edgar?) or underused (Tony?). It’s dead to me, so to speak.

20. The end of Dave Barry’s 24 blog.

21. A passing mention of the terrorists as “confederates”. Is this the euphemism we’re using these days?

22. Father Hoggett calling Josh “Joshua”. I have a friend named Josh and I’m pretty sure he hates that name extension.

23. The contrived Star Wars vibe when Jack and Farmer Hoggett were in split-screen mode. Farmer Hoggett seemed to think, “I feel a disturbance in the force”.

24. Why, oh WHY is Josh Bauer so god damn important to Farmer Hoggett? Does he shit diamonds and bricks of gold? I heard that one possibility was that the writers were planning on revealing that Father Hoggett raped Rena Sofer and was really Josh’s father but decided to go with vague uncertainty and strangely misanthropic characters instead. Good job.

Think you know what Jack should do next year on 24? .

Thanks, Wonkette.