We have a tendency to remain faithful to our favorite shows for far too long. When they start to take a turn for the worse, we hold out hope that they will get smart and return to their former glory. We wait and we wait and no improvement comes, and then we feel like we have to see it to the end, now that we've invested so much time in waiting for it to get good, we don't want to leave and have it return to form without us.

We were seized with this dilemma last night while watching Desperate Housewives. And before you start joking, Housewives in it's first season was awesome. It was fresh, funny, campy, and full of unexpected joy. It took a turn for the worse in seasons two and three, but rebounded in seasons four and five. Now we're well into the show's sixth year, and while it is still highly rated, it isn't what it used to be creatively. There are tons of peripheral characters that we barely care about, Teri Hatcher's Susan is even more unlikable than ever, Felicity Huffman's Lynette is pregnant again, and the writers even managed to make Eva Longoria Parker's reliably hilarious Gaby a snooze while seriously underusing the fantastic Dana Delany and Drea de Matteo. The show has gotten so bad, in fact, that we no longer enjoy making jokes about what a shitty mother Susan is or how annoying we find her daughter, Julie.

That is when it struck us—there is actually a formula that we can use to figure out when to quit watching a show, and it looks something like this:

We estimate that each season is worth 8 months, and that "joy" is measured on a sliding scale of 0-5, with zero being no jokes at all and 5 being Gossip Girl levels of hilarity at its badness (really, "Serena is a skank" jokes never get stale). So, if you plug the numbers in for Desperate Housewives here is what happens:

120 - 56 / 0 = 0

That means no more time should be afforded Desperate Housewives. Fine by us! Consider your season pass deleted from our TiVo.

This also works for deciding what to do about a new show. Here is our calculation for V, which we still find moderately amusing because of the aliens wearing human skin concept, but is starting to wear on us. Since it's a newer show, we calculated in weeks rather than months:

4 - 2 / 1 = 2 episodes.

Alright, V, you have two episodes to prove yourself when you return in March. If you can impress us in that window, then we'll keep you around until you start smelling worse than an giant alien ship without a sewage disposal and we have to bust out our formula again to calculate your life span.

But, like most formulas, there is a variable, and that is what else is on at the same time. Right now, there isn't much in terms of television greatness on Sunday nights until Big Love returns January 10, which means Housewives may get a stay of execution until then. But as soon as it does, mathematics has determined that the ax will fall. And we won't even feel guilty about it, now that we have our patented Television Doomsday Clock and good old algebra on our side.

[Image via EssG's Flickr]

Trump's "testimony" came in a December 2007 deposition for his lawsuit against Tim O'Brien, who wrote a book saying Trump was worth far, far less than a billion dollars. Trump's response was to sue him for hundreds of millions of dollars so that he sure would have a billion after he won, yea! But seriously, Donald Trump just makes up everything he says about his own wealth:

"My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feeling."

Financial projections are an emotional business! And these emotions are worth billions:

Mr. Trump said that his 2007 estimate of his net worth — over $4 billion — is "a very conservative number, in my opinion." He also said $6 billion is a good number, counting his brand value. (In the interview Sunday, he said he was worth $5 billion, not counting brand value.)

Hahahaha. Ha ha. Fun fact: Many established banks have lent this man money. What's your secret, Donald?

In the deposition, Mr. Trump is asked about the Bedminster, N.J. golf course, which financial statements showed had a net loss of $4.6 million in 2005. Has he ever done a financial analysis of his investment there?

"Yes, I've done mental projections," he said, figuring he'd eventually make $120 million. He never put them down on paper. "You don't really have to," he said.

[WSJ; Pic via]

We went back and consulted the insane excerpts of the "Diary of a Madwoman" kept by her old employee (and registered — and convincing-looking! — Republican) Tom Gosinski. (Tom marked good days as "on Percocet" or "OP"; not good days were "NOP" but she seemed to enjoy Vicodin as well.) Did you realize Cindy had five doctors writing prescriptions for this shit? (Four of them didn't really know; Cindy just sorta hacked their DEA numbers.)

Experts say she could have faced 20 years in prison if not for the whole centimillionaire heiress Senator's wife thing. But forget prison, how did she not die? Alternet estimates she was taking between 30 and 50 pills a day during the height of her addiction, but only the DEA knows for sure, and the sheer quantity of pills referenced in Gosinski's diary — in one case two prescriptions for 400 or 500-count bottles of painkillers written by the same doctor in two weeks — suggests, per the typical addict's "just-in-time" fulfillment policy, that she was probably up at least into the 70 or 80-a-day range around September 1992. 80 pills a day! Who lives through that? (Much less quits cold turkey, as Cindy allegedly did.) Well, this guy did, but he looks like he might have a somewhat hardier constitution than Cindy McCain.

In any case, we have something newfound — respect? awe? complete bafflement?? — for Cindy McCain, who Gosinski described as a very hard worker in his early days working for her MASH-modeled charity team, before she turned into the Anna Nicole of the NGO community:

August 28, 1992: Work has been crazy—Cindy decided we should take a load of supplies to the Miami area to assist in the Hurricane Andrew relief efforts. It would be simple to complete the task if Cindy would not interfere with the rest of us doing our jobs, however, she is constantly stirring things up.

We are also contemplating a trip to Somalia—Mark Salter in John McCain's Washington office has stated that the State Department and the Department of Defense believe it is not safe to travel to Somalia or the northern regions of Kenya. Cindy insists that we are going to go on the trip and that it may be wise for us to pack guns.

She is absolutely crazy—I don't know how to load a gun let alone shoot one. . .

Ha ha ha, Cindy knows a little lady who can help you with that! But seriously John McCain, to "not notice" your wife is a straight-up junkie is like…not noticing that country that sprouted on the "Iraq-Pakistan border" a couple thousand years ago. Which is to say, apparently not the sort of character flaw that takes any sort of toll on your reputation as an honorable family-oriented foreign policy veteran patriot with the record it takes to run the country!

Opiate For The Mrs.