"Young lady, put down that foam finger. Right now! And what did I say about keeping your tongue in your mouth?" That's a mother/teen daughter interaction that I hope won't be happening in any American households as a result of Miley Cyrus' performance Sunday night on MTV's Video Music Awards.

Ever have one of those days when you just want to settle in with your vegetable sandwich, snuggle up to your Mom, and rap about aspartame? No? I haven't, either. But that didn't stop the Coca-Cola Company from launching a mysterious one-page newspaper ad providing information about the safety of the fake sweetener last week.

Backwater areas of prudery still exist in our culture, particularly about female bodily functions. Take menstruation. Now there's a four-syllable term that can clear a room. But as Joan Rivers says, "Grow up!" It's just biology. Still, given all of the built-in resistance that still exists, who could have predicted that the sleeper hit of the season would be "Camp Gyno," a viral video featuring an aggressive 10-year-old girl at camp who, once she gets her period, becomes a menstrual monster.

I used to be such a fan of Woody Allen's that, to paraphrase one of the inspired bits in "Annie Hall," I didn't just love him, I leafed him, I loofed him, I luurrrved him. But then the super-prolific writer/director auteur "fell in love" with his then-girlfriend Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, when he was 56 and she was 20, and a sister to his and Mia's own young biological son. And at that point, I, like a lot of his audience, took a breather from the Woody worship.