Wakin' up With Robin Meade & Headline News' "Morning Express"

In my view, there are three types of beautiful women in the world: those whom only women find beautiful, those whom only men find beautiful, and those whom pretty much everyone agrees are beautiful. It tends to be only women who find art-house-type women attractive, for example.* (*NOTE: This might be for a very good reason.) Further, it tends to be only men who find female adult film stars (or, additionally, the "FOX NFL Sunday" weather-woman Jillian Barberie) attractive. Then, there's that third group. What makes them so special that nobody finds their beauty appalling and/or disgusting?

I'm going to use the woman from the Mercury TV commercials as an example of this omni-likable, third type of beautiful. I do so because she's universally considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and there's nothing wrong with her at all. She's Harvard-educated and went to medical school. In her spare time, she works on developing enzymes to strengthen chemotherapy drugs, she grows enough corn on her farm to power 1,948 ethanol-based vehicles per year, and often performs minor surgeries on children in the Philippines. She's also definitely not slutty-looking, which is key. See, dumbass psychologists like to talk about "magic ratios" and "symmetry" in relation to what we think is hot. This is bullcrap -- what we want is to not feel threatened by somebody's attractiveness. If you gave the Mercury TV adwoman fake breasts and kept her face the same, few women would still find her attractive. (Men, of course, still would. This is both why we're awesome and why we're horrible, but mostly why we're awesome.)

The Mercury TV adwoman also knows what she's talking about. She confidently tells you to "put Mercury on your list", and of course, you do.* (*NOTE: Actually, you don't. Mercury cars have sold horribly over the past few years, to the point where Ford decided to ax the ad campaign late last year. But, you get the point.) Both men and women are inspired by confident, strong-minded women, and this woman is one.

Which brings me to someone else, who isn't the Mercury TV ad-woman but is close: CNN Headline News morning anchorwoman Robin Meade. For the past year or so, since around the time that I moved to Boston, I've spent many mornings sipping coffee and eating Honey Nut Cheerios watching her "Morning Express" show, because I'm interested in the news and I like to be entertained. And man, is this show entertaining. For starters, Robin is supermodel gorgeous. Look at this picture. Can you guess how old she is?* (*NOTE: Scroll to the end of this post to find the answer.)

Further, she is horrible -- absolutely horrible -- at reading a teleprompter. She consistently stumbles over her words, accents the wrong parts of sentences (e.g. "And what, of course, happened TO her?"), and sometimes I think she makes up the endings of stories that she couldn't read fast enough on the screen to interpret for us (e.g. "And then she died." Me: "Wait, what? Nancy Reagan died?"). There's some serious Ron Burgundy potential here; if someone broke into CNN worldwide headquarters in Atlanta and threw "Go fuck yourself, America!" on the teleprompter, she'd probably say it. She also works with a supporting cast of dudes who look like they hang out at Bar Anticipation, and women who look like they bite their tongues and then say really catty things about her behind her back. The unintentional comedy is prescient and awesome.

Finally, Headline News takes a non-Northeast-biased approach to the news. From watching "Morning Express" for a year, I've learned that although everything important happens in the Northeast, nothing interesting happens in the Northeast. For example, did you know that a factory worker in Bumblefuck, Kentucky went apeshit overnight and killed five of his coworkers? Or how about the fundamentalist minister in Whogivesafuck, Arkansas, who allegedly killed his wife in a fit of rage? Did you know that We Care About Our Troops? I had no idea, until I watched the daily "Morning Express" segment with that exact title. I've got news for you, Amurrica: Fox News Channel is the new, liberal outpost in news media. "Morning Express" is where real Amurricans go for their "news"*. (*And, by "news," I of course mean "soul-less sleaze.")

Anyway, I digress. In a 2006 survey, Robin was voted "Sexiest Newscaster" by Playboy.com by a landslide, with a whopping 40% of the vote (with, like, ten candidates! Although admittedly, one of them was Connie Chung). But somehow, I think she is more than that. I think she's one of America's most important newscasters. I believe that -- despite her incompetencies -- she represents exactly what people want to accomplish by watching TV in the morning. And in a backwards way, I think she represents the face of news in the 21st century. You see, a lot of bad shit goes on in the world each day, and I think if we took an objective, deep view about all of it we'd go insane. Maybe it's better (in a psychological, not a moral, sense) that we just kinda waltz through 5-second news clips about 15 different disasters reported by a former Miss Ohio beauty contest winner who can't talk good. (Or, alternatively, maybe not. But I'll leave that to someone else who writes here.)

In Canada, there used to be an Internet newscast called "Naked News", where the actual news was presented by attractive women who would striptease as the news was presented. This was a big hit - typically with men - and the fact that the news was serious is worth focusing on here. There's a huge argument in this country (and it's a very good one) that people - and young people in particular - don't care what's going on in the world. I bet I could speak to the 10 brightest friends I have about the current political strife in Zimbabwe, for instance, and I think only half of them would know what was going on. This actually really pisses me off, by the way. But, what if we could somehow combine nakedness and news here, in this country, with the fundamentalist Christians shutting the fuck up about it? Wouldn't this be a wonderful, beautiful thing? At the very least, wouldn't a few million young adults who never cared about the news before at least start to listen?

This is why you should vote for me for President. Stay classy.

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Answer from before: Robin Meade was born in 1969, and is 39 years old (!) . She's like the Roger Clemens of attractive women, but with no steroid scandal and no alleged affairs with 15-year-olds.