In his excellent, if curmudgeonly, essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” David Foster Wallace argues that TV “is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

Which, frankly, is probably the best explanation of how, last night, three college friends and I ended up pigging out at Virgil’s Real BBQ, then sneaking 40’s of malt liquor into a screening of Meet the Fockers.