By Scott Buckner
The Bears lost. Good. If I had to hear “Sweet Home Chicago” one more time, I would’ve had to find a clock tower to climb. Anyway, here are a few Super Bowl observations, made from my seat at the always-friendly and always-respectable American Legion Post in Lansing:
* Congratulations to CBS for the most gratuitous promo ever for their show Rules Of Engagement by showing David Spade in the stands. All the network did was remind us again that he doesn’t even have to open his whiny little mouth to annoy the living piss out of everyone.
* The commercials were the worst ever. The CareerBuilder.com ads were probably the best, but that’s like saying The Black Plague is funnier than AIDS. Really, guys – the monkeys were fine.
* Billy Joel: Illustrating yet again why “Oh Canada” is the best national anthem ever.
* Prince: 1) Still creepy after all these years and still keeping the pomade industry alive. 2) Marching bands and rock ‘n roll don’t go together. Ask Fleetwood Mac. 3) No matter what Prince may think, he is not God. If he was, the rain falling during his game would have been purple instead of the plain old regular stuff. 4) Maybe it was just me or maybe it was the shots, but every time I saw an overhead shot of his custom-logo stage, the IHOP logo popped into my head. 5) I’m no slave to fashion, but even I know there’s something wrong with trying to pull off a teal suit and an Aunt Jemima cap. Or as my girlfriend Kathi observed, “That teal suit is so gay. You know, if they wanted a skinny black guy, Lenny Kravitz would’ve rocked.”
Amen, sister.
*
If you think TV’s getting any smarter, stick around and it’ll change. Really, it doesn’t get any dumber than Pants Off Dance Off on Fuse TV, which I had to check out Friday night simply because of the show’s title. I came, I saw, and I left because the only thing this show has going for it is host Jodie Sweetin. I sat there for the longest time trying to place the face with the name when it dawned on me that she’s Stephanie Tanner of Full House all grown up. Take a gander at her sometime and you’ll see that nature – or what passes for nature in Los Angeles – can be quite awesome.
Basically, the show features several contestants dancing/stripping in front of big screens showing music videos, and viewers are invited to pick their favorites by sending a text message from their cell phone. Of course, this being American cable TV, the whole thing stops when they get down to bare skin. On Friday, we were treated to the “five hottest finalists” as chosen previously by PODO viewers, which pretty much shows what happens when you leave things up to a mess of people with a bottomless well of unused airtime minutes. There was “full time actress and model” (and we all know what that means) Laura Lee; hairstylist Aja, Spanish chick Claudia, make-up artist Nina, and former WWE pro wrestler and convenience store clerk in the making Giovanni. Rhodes scholars these ain’t: Laura Lee once made $2,500 by spending two days with a foot fetishist; Claudia would “love to be Billy Bob Thornton’s girlfriend and have him teach me how to act” – even in the bathroom, she says.
The real piece of work, though, is aspiring golddigger Nina. Her dream job is to be Donald Trump’s wife. But it’s not her piss-poor dancing and stripping skills that might make such a plum job tough to get. Nope, it’s the fact that she’s a full-blown transsexual.
The rest of ’em didn’t have any marketable dancer/stripper skills, either. Aja had the crazed eyes of a crankhead, Giovanni’s pecs did more dancing than he did, and Spanish chick Claudia didn’t dance so much as she sorta just jumped and bounced all over the place like Tigger in a “Winnie The Pooh” cartoon. I never thought I’d run across any occasion to admit this, but I saw better dancing 25 years ago at 3 a.m. out of the hagged-out heel-shufflers at The Chesterfield Club along the now-gone Sin Strip in Calumet City. Christ, haven’t these people ever heard of Jamie Lee Curtis and True Lies?
You can log on to Fuse’s web site to see who won – or even what she might have won, beyond maybe the adoration of dateless, lonely men everywhere. It’s too silly even for me to wonder about.
*
Meanwhile Friday night, the four blondes on Oxygen’s Bad Girls Club can’t gather enough brain cells to read a gas gauge, so naturally, they run out of gas on the way to a camping trip. So what do they do? They give some stranger named Avery 20 bucks to get them some gas and fully expect him to not disappear. Since there’s no justice in the world, Avery’s not a crackhead, so he comes back with the gas and they make it to the campground, where they need children to figure out how to put up their tent. Their stellar reasoning skills are tested again when their inability to comprehend the meaning behind the giant “No Campfires” sign gets them kicked out of the campground for building a big-ass campfire.
Back at the house, seething brunette ball of hostility Aimee piles up the blondes’ clothes and douses them with bleach as payback for one of them putting a rubber rat next to her bed.
*
Early Sunday afternoon, Turner Classic Movies shows The Dirty Dozen, by far one of the best World War II movies ever made. It’s followed by a 1950s-era movie short in which a lot of leftover WW2 Army guys wait around for the Korean War to start by demonstrating their marksmanship skills with various field artillery pieces. Actor R. Lee Ermey is conspicuously absent since he’s a Marine, but the Army manages to save the movie when a cannon the size of Rhode Island mounted on a railroad car sinks an old ship with a 1,000-pound shell.
Visit the What I Watched Last Night library.
Posted on February 5, 2007