There’s a lot I’ve been feeling ranty about, so I am prepared to unleash a flurry of microrants and present them – for no good reason – in the “three dot” style of vintage gossip columnists.

When Dustin Hoffman jokingly planted one on the lips of Jason Bateman last month for the benefit of the Staples Center’s Kiss cam, there were bloggers, photo captioners and forum posters who wondered aloud whether this sort of behavior, however spoofish, “means they’re gay.”

It sure does. In the same way that asking such a question about a jokey same-sex kiss means the asker is gay. If you’re a homophobe or a guy whose proud heterosexuality is secretly a house of cards, you will drive yourself crazy thinking about all the seemingly random things that make people gay. And driving yourself crazy in this manner will also make you gay …

On a recent vacation back East, I watched a young couple at a fine Italian restaurant share many significant glances, a love of well-prepared pasta and a mutual twitch whereby both their heads kept dropping down in the general direction of the cell phones in their laps. I had seen this sort of condition many times before. It has apparently become perfectly acceptable to text one’s way through a date, and it’s high time that romantic comedies started to reflect this. The biggest challenge for Hollywood now is how to teach Matthew McConaughey to convincingly work those little buttons …

Miley Cyrus’ supposed rush-to-sluttishness doesn’t bother me so much as her horrid stage attire. I am certainly no fashion expert, but I think several of her outfits make her look like a turkey trussed by a really pretentious chef. She needs a better lingerie consultant, preferably not the guy who was responsible for Madonna’s missile bra …

The TV commercials for the “Toy Story 3” video game, in which kids say “This is my Toy Story” in tones of quiet defiance, are part of a rich marketing tradition of selling a bill of goods to kids by implying that certain products are not only fun but will allow them to rightfully assert their repressed individuality. Nintendo sells its DS console this way and Subway does the same with kid-oriented commercials touting the infinite combinations of its sandwich makings.

I hope children are smart enough to realize that greedy old fogeys are behind these calls-to-arms. I feel sorry for any kid whose sense of freedom in life is defined by an unrestricted access to condiments …

If you want to hear a gruff-but-insinuating German-accented voice discuss excrement while techno music blares in the background, there are two places you can go. One, presumably, is an adult website protected by a German password. The other is a TV commercial for Huggies Jeans diapers, which the Huggies website tells us is a “new denim diaper design to help your baby stay trendy.”

The commercial, however, entices us with the promise that a baby wearing these diapers can “poo in blue.” My son can already poop a rainbow, trust me …

“It’s disappointing to say the least,” Chuck Viane, head of film distribution for Disney, told The Associated Press about the paltry box office take of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” “I’m perplexed. I have no response, because I honestly don’t know what went wrong.”

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is an adaptation of a segment from the Disney classic “Fantasia.” The way Disney went about adapting material from the original film was to ignore it. The studio purportedly feared that making any but the scantest reference to “Fantasia” in the new film’s plot or marketing materials would alienate people who are not familiar with the original film. But Disney still hoped that the phrase “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” might jog enough memories in contemporary moviegoers that they’d be drawn in by a film that bears no resemblance to those memories. This seems like sound moviemaking strategy to me. Nothing completely idiotic about it at all …

I know they were only doing it for a fashion magazine, but the pictures of 16-year-old Justin Bieber and 29-year-old Kim Kardashian holding hands and frolicking in the surf were among the strangest things our tabloid culture has ever produced. They looked like productions stills from the Syfy original movie, “Mighty Isis vs. the Little Dutch Boy.” …

Thanks to Hasbro, parents will find it easier to teach their kids the collegiate pasttime known as beer pong, minus the beer of course. Also minus $15 of the parents’ dollars. That’s right – the hot new game Cuponk, which consists of a ping pong ball and a 16 ounce plastic cup, costs roughly as much as 24-pack of domestic beer. It’s enough to drive a parent to drink ...

Entertainment Weekly recently interviewed rapper Travie McCoy for the express purpose of finding out where he got the idea for his hit song, “Billionaire.” I wondered that, too. Because “Billionaire” is the first hip-hop song about wanting to be rich I ever heard … after they thawed me out of that block of ice in which I’d spent decades in a state of suspended animation …