I’ve sang praise about How I Met Your Mother over and over again on this blog. Its my second favorite active running sitcom (behind The Office), important enough for me to plan my Mondays around (last night, for example, was a Taco Bell/HIMYM man-date with Rishi).

(Side note: Penn Station Taco Bell totally pissed me off last night, because they took my order, took my money, and gave me my (partially prepared) food BEFORE letting me know they were out of sour cream….. grrrrrr)

Anyway, last night’s season HIMYM premiere was hilarious. The celebrity cameos of Enrique Iglesias and Mandy Moore (by the way…Mandy Moore in biker gear and tattoos, saying things like “Do you ask your tailor to leave extra room in your crotch for your giant vagina?”…Totally hot), Ted’s awesome facial hair sculpting (an inspiration for me), Barney shouting something to the effect of “This is going in my blog!”, a ton of other quotable lines, and of course, the slap bet reference in the closer.

Fans of the show know that the Slap Bet episode is one of the best episodes in the show’s short history, and the subplot it created for future episodes is genius. In short, one of the characters, Marshall, won a bet against another character, Barney. Marshall won the right to slap Barney at five random, separate (and unpredictable) times throughout their life. To date, only two slaps have been delivered, both in amazing fashion (the second one came completely out of nowhere in the closer of an episode last season and I nearly fell off the couch laughing so hard).

At the end of last night’s episode, Marshall calls Barney and delivers a brief, cryptic message with the address to a website displaying a countdown clock. Naturally, I visited the website he mentioned, www.slapbetcountdown.com, to see if it actually existed.

It does. It counts down to the episode at 8:30pm on November 19th. I can’t wait.

Its going to be LEGEN -wait for it- DARY!