OK, folks...It's confession time. (Deep breath in...and out...) Here goes nothing: I am totally addicted to "The Simple Life" television series starring Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie. I KNOW! I am crazy to watch such crap on tv, and I am even crazier to ADMIT TO IT!

For those intelligent, witty, normal, good people out there who have no clue what "The Simple Life" is, and for the REALLY good people who don't know who Paris and Nicole are, I will explain very briefly. This tv show features the heiress to the Hilton fortune ($380 million, or billion, or zillion...whatever...) and rich-ass Lionel Ritchie's daughter, in a show that follows two spoiled-rotten princesses through their weak attempts to actually work for a living in the "real world." I guess they filmed four seasons of the show before calling it quits after the demise of the girls' friendship.

I was out of the country or something when the shows originally aired, but I got really lucky during my last visit to the Hadji Market at Camp Slayer. The Hadji market allows Iraqi vendors to come aboard the base and sell their wares. In this case, "wares" basically refers to bootleg DVDs, a tiny selection of bootleg Nike gear, sheisha (hooka) pipes, cigars, and various other bits of junk. Camp Slayer is attached to Victory, and this was my first time visiting its version of Victory's bazaar. I've been to the bazaar often enough to have made a couple of friends who like to spoil me with gifts of baklava and roses. I had heard that Slayer's Hadji market had good, cheap boxed sets of television series, so I was stoked to visit.

I picked up a set of all the Six Feet Under episodes ever aired on HBO, every season of King of the Hill, and a few movies (I hope the quality of these is better than the one I just watched, in which you can see people's heads move across the screen as they are getting up and leaving the movie theater during the movie). I also grabbed some knock-off software (Front Page), and as I was checking out, I spied "The Simple Life, Entire Four Season." It was a thin little box, so I thought "entire four season" meant entire FOURTH season, but it turns out they meant "entire four SEASONS." After the first few episodes of the first season, though, I realized they were using the word "entire" very loosely. I'm pretty sure a few episodes are missing, as are parts of the episodes that are not missing, because things didn't exactly flow well from episode to episode. But who cares!? I was laughing my butt off, and, anyway, who minds the occasional "Stay tuned for American Idol, next on Fox," or, "Next on the evening news" bits during the show? These shows are recorded off of regular tv, so they feel pretty authentic. Heh heh.

I am totally depressed now, though, because I am nearly finished with the final season. Every night, I lie on my back in my cot with my laptop on my chest, earphones in place, laughing my butt off like a pre-teen. For whatever reason, these twits amuse the heck out of me. And I love their tiny little rat dogs, Tinkerbell, Honeychild, and Foxy Cleopatra.

I cannot wait to get back to the tent to throw in that final DVD and get to watchin'. I hope you all forgive me for this little vice of mine.