Has it come to this?

I saw this option pop up on my TiVo a little while ago, but just assumed it was an early April Fool's joke.

Apparently not.

Maybe I should be a bounty hunter

So, there's not that much on Wednesday night TV these days.

Sure, I could probably do 100 other things - that's counting the Netflix streaming directly to my TiVo and Xbox 360 - but most of those require more effort than flipping around cable TV.

When left alone, I settle on Dog the Bounty Hunter and Parking Wars on A&E. For the record, my all-time favorite bounty hunters on TV were the Evangelistas of HBO's Family Bonds. They worked out of New York and were always fascinating to watch.

For intentional and unintentional comedy, these guys were the best. Take your Christmas money from grandma and buy these DVDs if you have any interest in things that are awesome.

The big difference is that they seem to work a little harder than Dog and his family. Nothing against Dog, but drug addicts in sunny Hawaii seem to be a little more mellow than those from the Empire State.

Here is the basic rundown of most episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter:

1.) Prepare, get psyched and pray.
2.) Drive around looking concerned.
3.) Snatch the bail jumper. They rarely run.
4.) Scream and yell as groggy jumper mutters, "Huh?"
5.) Cuff, stuff in SUV.
6.) Bond with new friends. Use the word "brother" a lot.
7.) Dump jumper into custody.

Seeing this, it seems like a pretty easy job. Not enough to make me grab a can of mace and a pair of handcuffs, but it seems like a pretty fun fallback.

Leadership lessons from Chef Ramsay

There are a few things I'm continually shocked by when we settle in to watch Kitchen Nightmares with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey.

First, is that when you set your TiVo, you get the Fox version - filmed in America for American audiences - and the BBC's original version and the differences are night and day. While Americans know the chef as a foulmouthed bully who has a thesaurus of scatological terms to describe the food people prepare, the British version is a different picture.

Instead of the usual bombastic entrances, punctuated with vomiting and belittling of the waitstaff, Ramsey enters the UK's hard luck cases and almost immediately begins the hand holding and sympathetic looks. It's very different and makes me shake my head at what American audiences either demand or have responded to in the past.

Second, is that amongst the drama, he has a pretty firm grasp of leadership skills and different approaches to problems with his staff. After countless hours spent in leadership retreats, seminars and training sessions, you start to see some of the usual suspects appear in his shows.

Ramsey employs a bit of verbal slight of hand in dismissing groups from the small meetings that take place mid-show with a quick, simple, "Yes?" It's positive, short and doesn't leave a lot of room for further discussion.

Ramsey will offer a rapid fire checklist of tasks (or sometimes wholesale changes that the owners may not be on board with) to rock people back and then shove them into action with that "Yes?" It's really pretty interesting to watch once you see what he's doing.

A new one I caught last night in the follow up show - where he returned to the restaurants from last season - is his urging that his newest protegees, "don't stop." It's a little thing, but it goes a long way from his position as a giant in the celebrity chef game.

It's nothing that will change your world view, but I'm betting somewhere in his home, Chef Ramsey has a dog eared copy of a book on how to motivate and inspire his troops. It actually makes me like the guy a little more.

Being a screaming loon can only make you so interesting.

If only life were this beautiful

Everyone thank NAD for finding this and putting it up as his away message for his Gmail account.

Coming to a concensus

So, Quarterlife is on right now and within the first four minutes, I was fairly certain that I had no desire to see the remaining 56.

I know that it was four minutes in because my wife helpfully pointed this out as I voiced my displeasure with the show. She, however, is on board through the first episode. You see our dilemma.

While we each have our "take one for the team" shows - for me, it's her Law and Order in all 14 flavors, for me it's endless baseball games - where we'll watch when the other person is home, but if either of is out, it's safe to assume that those shows won't be up on the screen.

It's important to have a safe overlap of tastes in television, music and movies so that you're not driven crazy in 22-minute bursts or on road trips.

Still, at the risk of sounding much older than my age, I'm not buying into these stupid kids. I'm sure that I've been too unaware of my surroundings until now and that this isn't the first time it's happened, but I liked this concept much better when it was Singles. And was only an hour and a half long. And wasn't quite so heavy-handed.

So, there's all of that.

Sometimes a show takes off after the mess that is defining the boundaries of the pilot. Usually that's not the case, but I'll cross my fingers and hope, because it's apparently been penciled into the lineup at our place.

Still, I have to hand it to anyone who has the stones to take a running start at the whole question of "how does this generation try to change the world." It's a huge, slippery bastard that everyone tries to wrestle to the ground at one time or another - some of us more than once - and virtually no one is ever really able to get a handle on.

The more immediate issue is that I'm not invested in the characters, I'm not buying the premise and at a very basic level, the whole feel of the show is uncomfortable. I'm generally opposed to boiling down entire generations to thumbnail sketches, and I just can't see how the show will keep any sort of momentum. OK, we get it, she's young and she blogs her innermost thoughts... now what?

Well, I can, but the show seems to want more for itself than just a Melrose Place knock off in thrift store garb. I'll give it points for effort, but the execution fell far short tonight.

(Image from LAist.com)

Noooooo! Really?

One of our guilty pleasures is watching television shows devoid of any redeeming qualities. Give us any of the wife-swapping, nanny-involving or humans versus animals tests of strength and we're so there.

Tonight's Supernanny features Wendy Wilson and the episode is billed as a superstar's appearance. For everyone outside of her immediate family, Wilson was the utterly forgettable member of Wilson Phillips.

Remember them? Me neither.

OK, there was the chubby one, the pretty one and the other one? She's the other one. (And points to the nanny for nailing the line, "You're a talented woman," without cracking up on the spot. I suppose it could have been the third or fourth take, though.)

Sister of Carnie Wilson, Wendy Wilson now has four kids and no sense of how to raise or discipline children. It's like placing a camera in Britney's house, only much less relevant.

Need an example? So far, I've seen three minutes of the episode and the kids are literally taking a dump on the back lawn like a golden retriever.

Really, Brian Wilson's kid is having a hard time recreating the nuclear family? This guy? You're freaking kidding me.

"I think that structure was missing in the household," she says in the opening montage.

I would never have suspected that from the family that brought you "sand in the study so Dad could feel the beach on his feet while he wrote music." This will be a totally craptacular hour of my life wasted.

On a related note, can the government step in at some point and pass legislation to remove children from the lives of celebrities and just raise them somewhere else in a protected environment? If it works for polar bears, how bad can it be for Hollywood's elite?

(Image from: uberreview.com)

Making things right for the West Coast audience

I played two games of Madden.

I cleaned up the living room a bit, including vacuuming up two dozen rogue pine needles from a tree that was hauled out last weekend.

I walked the dog, ran to the mailbox on the corner and made lunch.

I still had two hours to go before the Packer game kicked off. Damn, did that suck.

With the games pushed back for the Saturday schedule - 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. for the Central zone - it was like killing time before an afternoon flight as I waited and waited for football today. You get really excited and can't really do much because you have this moderate event waiting later in the afternoon.

On the plus side, fans in the Pacific time zone must be eating this up. One of the big things I remember from a trip to San Diego was that the Red Sox were playing at the same time as Sunday football games were kicking up. There was a loud slice of Red Sox Nation in attendance to see the late-season game (2005) and more Charger fans in one place than I'd ever seen (previous record? Zero.) at that point.

The whole thing was moderately disorienting because we had to get to the bar at 9 a.m. to get seats. It was like being in college all over again, only with less murky-headedness.

I imagine this has to be somewhat comforting for California residents who are transplanted from the Midwest and out east. Still, if given the option, I'd totally opt for the West Coast schedule, which lets you get up and watch sports, no screwing around.

Sure, it'd suck for baseball season when the AL East games would be wrapping up when your lunch break ended, but still - football on during breakfast, how nice is that?

Enjoy, California - this is why the rest of the country is so chubby and pasty - by the time games end out here, you're too exhausted to head out and do anything productive.

That and every meal in Green Bay is served with a pound of fried cheese in lieu of a bread basket.

*Side note: Maybe I'm brainwashed after reading the Simmons column this week tonight, but how much better would this CBS Halftme show be if any of the color commentators were replaced by the smart-aleck Masshole who is on the NFL Network commercials at the diner?

A lot better. Much, much better.

(Image from: JSOnline.com)

American Gladiators is back, not that we needed it

I tried to warn everyone that this sort of thing would be what happens without writers, but no one wanted to listen. So, we get this - American Gladiators, hosted by Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali.

Wonderful.

There was a two-hour special tonight to get everyone back up to speed with their favorite mutated humans and it's even more ridiculous than it was before.

Let me tell you, it's even creepier in hi-def.

The Girl and I remember this show from when we were kids, watching it on sketchy local television on Saturday nights when we were too young to be let out of the house after dark. This time around, it's kind of strange and I'm not sure if that's on purpose, a product of this weird resurrection (like animals buried at the pet cemetery in the Stephen King book) or because we're old enough to see just how crazy the whole idea is.

I can live without being told which events are new and which ones are classic events. Honestly, there's only one I can really remember - the one where they fire tennis balls at people as they scramble to find Nerf weapons and try to blow up the gladiators. That's about it.

In any event, there are the usual crop of hopefuls - talking more trash than I remember, prompting several, "That's why television needs writers," comments - and the gladiators are now given distinct personalities - check here for Wolf, Toa and Hellga - which makes things better in a worse kind of way.

The house is laying odds here at possible hermaphrodites, former mental patients and people who owe money to bad people. Also, we had a spirited discussion about whether or not certain gladiators would be cool to hang out with or if they were just as psychotic when the cameras stopped rolling.

Try it, it's fun.

If you missed tonight's showing, you owe it to yourself to check in at least once to see people getting pelted with tennis balls and climbing up three stories worth of rope ladders. Plus, the contestants seem compelled to give themselves nicknames and personality, even if it's the last minute.

The fan favorite here was the undersized Asian guy who decided he was a "spider monkey" midway through the show.

Totally awesome in a "I'm getting dumber at an alarming rate" kind of way. What else are you going to watch with football relegated to Saturday and Sunday afternoons?

(Image from: SNESMusic.org)

Won't someone think of the tigers?

I knew this was coming, but didn't imagine it'd be so anti-climatic. The pro-tiger rally was held in San Francisco, with nearly as many dogs as people in attendance.

Still, the folks quoted were right - it was a tiger being a tiger and what do you expect of an animal that gets loose?

The folks at PETA really shit the bed on this one, by not latching on from the start. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, there were four or five people who showed up for a bonfire and they put a happy face on the turn out by telling everyone how heartfelt their participation was.

The funny thing is that some poor reporter got shipped out to witness this on a slow news day. This had to be a new kid at the paper, working on New Year's Day and forced to come up with something.

It's amazing that I'm beating the bushes to get back with a newspaper, isn't it?

As a means of basic housekeeping, here are a few things that have been sitting around:

* There's a chart that has the remaining shows that were filmed before the writers' strike to help you figure out when TV will suck like crazy. With The Office already dried up, among others, it helps to know how many episodes are left around the dial.

Considering new shows like The Big Bang Theory are already on their third lap around with only six or seven episodes filled, I wonder when the networks will cut those off.

I'm most afraid of the new reality shows that are in the works. Most are very, very bad and run the risk of destroying any sort of watchable television.

* Finally, after catching up with my friend, Heather, over the holiday, I'm pretty sure I couldn't fill her shoes at a government think tank. I could, however, break down rap songs into their basics for graphical representation.

If econ had been more like this, I would have opted for a different major in college.

(Image from: MyConfinedSpace.com)

We're not kidding anyone

We're on the couch tonight and just had this exchange while watching the Chuck pilot on NBC.

Me: I dunno, I'm just not buying her (female lead Yvonne Strzechowski - a woman in desperate need of a stage name) as hot. She's cute and all, but I'm not sold.

The Girl: She's cute and I guess she's got a body to die for... Do you know what I'd give to have a body like that?

Me: (Sensing a great deal of danger in a question that loaded.) Ummm... No, what?

The Girl: Well, anything except for the time and effort to actually work out enough to have a body like that.

Me: Oh my God, I'm so blogging that. Can I blog that?

The Girl: Go right ahead.

At the very least, we'll have a marriage based on honesty.

(Image from Yahoo! TV)

For the record

I really want to like CBS's Rules of Engagement but I'm really not feeling David Spade. The show is decently written and Patrick Warburton is a riot, but it's like I'm watching against my will sometimes.

I'm just not buying Spade as the ladies' man.

Hell, Neil Patrick Harris is gay and I buy his character on How I Met Your Mother so many more levels than Spade.

Just awful awful casting.

Give me Joe Dirt, fine. Richard to Chris Farley's Toomy Boy? In a heartbeat.

Lady killer? Not in a million years. And yes, I remember the whole Heather Locklear thing. Still not geting it.

(entimg.msn.com)

It's all pretty simple, really

Law and Order is being shown continuously on one of the four channels that is shown on the TV in my room this week.

This is a carryover from The Girl, who will watch as much of the show as you're willing to put on the air.

Who would have thought that murder, gunfire and screaming matches involving Ice-T would have a calming effect and help ease homesickness? Well, other than Detroit residents.

Here is my quick checklist for all Law and Order viewers out there:

* The first person arrested is never the person who did it. They'll be cleared as a suspect - no matter how guilty they appear at first - in the top 15 minutes of the show.

* You won't see the real culprit until after the commercial break at the bottom of the hour. It's like watching a college basketball game - tune in for the final half hour and you'll see all you need to see.

* Ice-T is a shockingly good actor. He can be left on his own, away from the rest of the cast, and he'll be fine. No, really. I say this with all seriousness.

* The new trend is to throw out random shit from the character's personal life and then pretend like it never happened. It's getting stranger by the week and didn't happen as much in the older shows. Months ago one of the lawyers was fired and her last line in the show was, "This isn't because I'm a lesbian, is it?"

Previously, there'd been no mention of any of this. Aaaaand, credits!

* The orderlies in the background of recent episodes have been exceptionally good looking. Except one...

* Somewhere around the 40-minute mark or once a lead suspect is released on bond or let go outright, something bad will happen. The cops will be doing something else and someone will ask if they know what happened to Suspect X.

Dollars to donuts says they were shot, stabbed, poisoned or were hit with something heavy. Try to act surprised.

* All of these rules are out the window if this is a very special episode where the cops right an old wrong or have a personal score to settle. In those cases, the episode's main character will probably be forced to eat a big bucket of shit and end the episode sorely disappointed.

* I will be told to shut my mouth for pointing out any or all of these bullet points when I voice my opinion during the episode. This may or may not include something being thrown off the coffee table at me for making said points.

(Images from NBC.com for all I know / MySpace.com)

I think my brain is crying

I've gotten used to a lot of things in this world.

I pay nearly 300 percent on the markup to get a can of soda in a gas station versus buying a whole case at the grocery store. I tolerate with people who need to be protected from themselves on what seems to be an hourly basis. I even learned to share the roads with drivers who have the memory and mental acuity of a soap dish.

Some days, though? Sweet Jesus, does it get to be difficult.

Case in point is the local news tonight.

(Side note: We only really watch one channel for news in Minneapolis - KARE 11, the NBC affiliate - because the rest are embarrassingly awful. No joke, we have seen "investigative journalism" about college hockey players who were sneaking into bars underage -Oooohhhh... - countless scare tactic stories that were meant to draw us in at 10 p.m., but never did and the temperature of milk. No, really, the temperature of milk. That's still ridiculed in this house on a weekly basis and is one of the cornerstones of any good debate on why we need to move as quickly as possible.)

Well, tonight has just been one of those nights for stupidity on parade, but I'm almost happy to say it's not a direct result of the reporting.

First, we had a story of a heroic substitute mail carrier who - again, not kidding - saw a spider in a Meals on Wheels bag and then went to call the first responders. The elderly man who'd spent days on the floor was there because his daughter had gone out of town for the week.

She'd assumed that there were safeguards in place to help prevent those types of problems.

Gee, doctor, you think?

If your dad is your responsibility, has limited mobility and needs you to live at home to lend a hand, maybe calling home once or twice a day to make sure the old coot answers the phone should be one of those safeguards.

Unless you vacation in the Amazon River Basin, find a phone and call your dad. Don't wait for the mail carrier - who thinks God helped her find the victim on the floor - to clean up your mess.

As if that story wasn't bad enough for my blood pressure, the next knucklehead up was the drunk who had a few too many, bull-rushed a window at the hotel he was staying at in downtown Minneapolis and then fell to the ground when the window totally punked out and gave up without a fight.

(If I remember correctly, the only thing that saved this guy was that he landed on the hotel's awning, Tom and Jerry style, and that broke his fall)

As they interview this mouth-breather, he's admitting on camera that a.) he was pretty drunk and b.) any attempt to recreate what was going on in his mind at the time he was rapidly approaching the window is pure conjecture.

Wonderful.

So, he gets so hammered that he crashes through a window in a high-rise and manages to survive and I'm expecting the story to end well with a nice little life lesson and how much he loves his family these days, but no.

The camera pans back to reveal a Goldschlager ad on a wall as it becomes apparent that our favorite flightless partygoer is doing his interviews in a bar.

To recap: So drunk he jumped through a window on the something-teenth floor of the hotel. Now holds interviews regarding the incident in a bar.

Now, I had my share of alcohol-related injuries and many of them fell directly into the dumbass-induced category. However, I think falling 17 stories would be enough to scare me straight. I guess Baby Huey was boozed up to the point that he thought it was a ride or something.

You can train earthworms to learn from past experiences faster, campers.

(Update: So, it turns out the guys who fell out of his hotel owns the bar he was being interviewed in. Do I regret this post know that fact?

Well, I might, until I saw him quoted in the Star Tribune as saying:

"Hanson's reflections in recent weeks have been frequent, though he still doesn't know why this happened.
"Maybe it will come to him when he gets on his motorcycle again. Or maybe, he said, the episode is a sign that he should cut back on drinking." )

(Photo from OxfordRadcliffe.nhs.uk)

Don't commit crimes because the police are smarter than you

I've been lazy busy lately, so I'm behind the curve when it comes to weighing in on the whole Aqua Teen Hunger Force terrorist flap in Beantown last week.

As one of my favorite cartoons, I couldn't have been more pleased to see the whole thing go down. This includes the stupidity of mistaking these for terrorist devices, Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, the two guys responsible, refusing to answer the media's questions, except for those on 70s hairstyles and the new "development" that a security camera saw one of the "culprits" milling around, filming the whole mess and laughing.

Let's start with the last one first.

Given that a light board you had placed was being taken down by police and the whole city was pretty worked up over the whole thing would you volunteer that information at that time?

I guarantee you'd get "Oh, hey, fellas, I put that up..." before Officers Murph and Sully pounded your skull into hamburger. Assuming the scene played out the way their lawyers said it did - with them calling Turner immediately to have them handle talking to the cops - I think that is the perfect response.

God, I love the new America. It's much better than the old America where a crudely animated, light-up alien flipping everyone off wouldn't cause gridlock that could bring one of our largest cities to its knees. All we've done is teach the terrorists that a Lite-Brite can cripple Los Angeles while the real bombs are being set.

This reminds me of the time in Chicago when guacamole in the roadway got a call placed to a haz-mat unit and The Mayor just chuckled and issued a statement about how much he loved guacamole.

As for the rest of it, I avoided the talking heads and caught the recap on G4's Attack of the Show. The question up for debate was a tongue in cheek "Has guerrilla marketing gone too far" and we learned that no, it hadn't, we're just a country of wieners.

As we watched one of the 62 Law and Order's last night - and now I contend this is the real world version of Pigpen's thesis in P.C.U. where no matter what hour of the day it is, there's a Law and Order episode on television somewhere - I was struck by just how savvy those TV cops are. No pop culture, bizarre science or historical reference slips by those guys.

Last night, they found the real killer based on identifying a brand of scotch, a love letter to a 14th century duke and the 1965 St. Louis Cardinals batting order and I realized that Hollywood is lying to us.

As we saw last week, a popular cartoon on basic cable is far too underground for Boston's finest to pick up on. Not one detective, beat cop or intern fetching donuts was able to see the image on the sign and tell everyone, "Wait, wait guys... Everything is cool."

It reminds me of public figures who appear on the Daily Show and aren't clued in on the joke.

I guess fighting the war on terror doesn't leave much time for such nonsense like watching cartoons. It's worth pointing out that even the state police were able to bring down Johnny Chimpo, though.

(Photo from Wikipedia.com)

What bad, bad news

As if my ongoing struggles to outsmart the Comcast DVR in the bedroom weren't enough heartbreak on the cable television front, now there's this news from Deadspin.

Major League Baseball sold the rights to its games to Direct TV for the next seven years.

Those sons of bitches.

I know they can't just give the money back, but honestly, this has taken away one of the few things I really enjoy in this world. Being able to watch Cubs and Red Sox baseball all summer, in addition to the literally hundreds of other games was one of life's little pleasures and it's gone now.

No more watching most of the Opening Day games, no more following the Red Sox daily and back to the dark ages of bookmarking the Cubs schedule on WGN's Superstation, which is only really good for a quarter of the televised games anyways.

I know that it can sound like I'm playing this for laughs, but this is seriously a major shock to my system. I am so full of anger right now that I'm seriously considering calling the Twins and telling them to take their season ticket package and shove it straight up their greedy, enabling asses.

EA Sports locking in the Madden Monopoly was a shame.

This is nothing short of a national tragedy.

Taser! Taser!

I don't know what was funnier tonight on Armed and Famous - LaToya Jackson asking for a finger bowl at the Texas Roadhouse, La Toya Jackson calling one of her brothers and name-dropping Michael or LaToya Jackson getting her ass tasered...

OK, not a fair fight, but for those who missed this touchstone of Western Civilization, here's a quick recap.

(Bonus points to Trish Stratus for taking her tasing like a man and asking for the leads to be shot into her back with barbed points.)

Christmas came early

I'll admit I was never a huge fan of Donald Trump and then this beauty showed up on What Would Tyler Durden Do today.

Now? I couldn't be a bigger Trump fan, it's literally impossible for me to be a bigger fan of his if I actively tried to love him any more.

Here's the problem if you're Rosie O'Donnel - you never had that many fans, lost the Asian vote with your "ching chong Ching" bit and now there are better reasons to hate her even more.

I have to say, that final slot on The View is just a magnet for losers and no-talent knuckleheads, so maybe there's hope for K Fed yet.

If you're scoring at home, I liked this part of The Donald's message of disgust: "So, probably I'll sue her, because it'd be fun."



I'm adding the feed of Rosie talking smack and here's where I get a degree of sick satisfaction - she's yapping away and the studio audience is eating it up, so she's got to feel pretty good about the whole situation leaving the studio.

It's akin to talking shit in a high school hallway, never taking the time to realize that in a fishbowl like that, word will spread like wildfire and then you're stuck with a sick feeling in your gut because you realize you really outran your coverage.

I'm with Anderson Cooper - utterly speechless.

God, please don't let this man save SNL

I'd be interested to hear what teenagers think of Saturday Night Live, considering it's been a punchline for as long as they've known.

And not a good kind of punchline, either, but the kind where it represents all that sucks about sketch comedy.

While stars have emerged from the show since the early days, most didn't find their stride until they were edging towards the door and lining up movie careers anyways.

Lately, SNL has begun to put up a bit of a fight and today was the first time in a while I've heard someone ask if I saw the show this weekend. You'll find Justin Timberlake singing about putting his dick in a box at the bottom of the post.

Still, the common thread in all of the "did you see..." buzz has been Andy Samberg. Should this worry me as much as it does?

Beyond words

I'm holed up in a motel in Central Wisconsin today, but thanks to modern technolgy, I'm not roaming the streets, looking for locals to annoy.

Instead, I'm here at the laptop and I bring you the Great Leprechuan Hunt.

I'd list my favorite scenes, but it'd basically be a transcript of the newscast.

Anybody here who seen the leprechuan say, "Yeah!"

Levels of pissivity

Gentlemen, gather around - today, it's all about you.

Not in a posting about beer, football and crapping in a hole in the ground in the woods kind of way, but in a nod your head at your desk in your cube, while the women in the office - were they to walk by - would ask, "What the hell is he talking about?" kind of way.

That's the long way 'round to my discussion on the Lady TV hosts that drive me crazy and categorizing the three biggest offenders by the level to which I have a violent reaction.

The Girl has her shows like I have my shows. The running joke is that the Food Network is her ESPN and that's not so much of a joke anymore. She watches it too much in my opinion like I watch sports too much in her opinion. If she could fork over an additional $200 to watch cooking competitions from around the nation, I bet we'd have that like we order our Extra Innings package.

The Passable - Great Hotels with Samantha Brown isn't too bad, but she's way too perky, makes stupid puns and over-involved set ups and plays to the camera in a more pandering way than the Teletubbies.

I always feel like she's 10 seconds away of telling me the fun things to do in the Fort Lauderdale area for those who have been kicked in the head by a mule.

All told, I can live with this show in small doeses, like once a day or less.

Still, some of the hotels are cool, but there's no way that normal people can watch this show and start planning vacations or anything (on the show we saw tonight, the fucking cabana cost $150 a day).

I guess they'd have no show if she stayed at the HoJo's and Holiday Inn's of the Upper Plains, but still. Tonight I found out she is getting another show to pander, lame-ass joke and perk away on.

Why? Was the outcry for a third Sam Brown show so great that they simply couldn't keep her off the air any longer?

You know who I think should have three shows?

Flavor Flav, that's who.

You're Pushing Me, Lady - Stacy London of What Not to Wear pushes me into the world of outright irritation.

She yaks and pokes fun and tells people that their wardrobes suck - which, in all fairness, they usually do - all the while looking like The Nanny's ill-tempered older sister.

This usually gets old around the four-minute mark. Here's the thing - the new gimmick is to embarass the victim in front of their friends, families and co-workers. This strikes me as a bit counterproductive in the long run.

If I came to your place of business, bitch-slapped you and called you ugly, would you want to listen to anything I said after that? It's one thing to claim you're a fashion expert - yes, apparently you need to go to Vassar to qualify for that (Class of '91) - it's another to make someone feel like shit because they're out making a living instead of reading fashion magazines in bed and calling your friends to discuss what dresses you loved at the Oscars three weeks ago.

Much like most of these shows, the whole thing boils down to a few vital parts - throw out anything made with puff paint, make sure your pants are tailored or at least fit and, Lord almighty, don't ever wear the same clothes you did in high school, even if you can still fit in them - but that doesn't make good TV, so they might as well take a dump on someone while they're at it.

The whole package might be a bit easier to swallow if she wasn't such a bitch throughout the whole thing and tried to be a bit more supportive before the 21-minute mark in the show. It's like they flip a switch on her back and she turns into Princess Sunshine, praising that week's sucker for picking out clothes that don't look like they came from a hooker clown college.

Banned in the Household As Long As I Have a Pulse - This brings us to the Queen Bee of pissing me off tothe highest level of pissivity.

Rachel Ray.

Another one who everyone but me has apparently writing non-stop to the networks beg them to slap her mug on every channel possible every hour of the day and night.

I mean, Jesus...

I nearly began foaming at the mouth when I saw her on the Ritz cracker box a few weekends ago and had a pre-emptive apology from The Girl, who swears she didn't see Rachel Ray on the box before she bought it.

I wish I could believe that.

This swamp donkey is obnoxious to no end and her show drives me batshit crazy. About the only real entertainment value I get from the show is seeing her and knowing there are rumors that a.) her husband pays women hundreds of dollars to spit on him - heh - and b.) that he also requested things so disgusting that a hooker said no, regardless of the money involved.

I imagine this playing out like that scene in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where Jay is so vile he makes a hooker quit.

According to The Girl, Ray has been told to knock that shit off or they're going to pull the plug on her new talk show as well, which I think is beyond awesome. She's running around, hopped up on sugar and oven cleaner and I can't understand half of the things that come out of her mouth and get driven crazy by the other half.

Would the ratings be that much worse if they ran non-stop episodes of Good Eats in her place?

The half-assed money-making scheme of the week? A grown-up version of the V-Chip that would block these three women and any other shows the viewer deems craptacular.

I'd keep this on the down-low in the in-store ads so the ladies wouldn't catch on, but I'd also include a short, 30-minute prep session on how to say, "Why no, honey, I think the Food Network isn't carried by our cable company anymore. I hear that Rachel Ray stabbed an intern and the lawsuit that followed bankrupted the network." without smiling from ear to ear.

(ButtermilkPress.com / Vassar.edu / Discovery.com)