It’s an as-seen-on-TV product with a cloak of over-the-counter innocence.
Posted on February 9, 2007
What I Watched Last Night
By Scott Buckner
I was glad to see that ESPN2 is still the official home of foreigners with big shoulders and no necks with back-to-back airings Tuesday night of the MET-Rx World’s Strongest Man competition. For those of you unfamiliar with it, WSM was dreamed up in 1977 when a group of disqualified powerlifters from the Yugoslavian Olympic team all hooched up on slivovitz somehow stumbled across an unlocked boxcar full of empty beer kegs, railroad ties and cases of MET-Rx dietary supplements.
Since then, it has grown into a very successful annual international event that tests the strength of anyone goofy enough to do things like carry a 400-pound pot between your legs, drag around an anchor and chain stolen from the nearest battleship, or toss 60-pound beer kegs over a 14-foot-high wall. Naturally, it’s an event also popular among chiropractors and hernia truss salesmen looking to write off business trips to far-flung international WSM venues like Iceland, Hungary, New Zealand, and Six Flags Magic Mountain.
Posted on February 7, 2007
What I Watched Last Night
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.
Posted on February 5, 2007
What I Watched Last Night
By Scott Buckner
I’m not a big fan of NBC’s The Office. I’ve seen it a mess of times and there’s nothing wrong with the show itself, really. It’s funny enough in its own special bizarro way, it’s good enough, and gosh darn it, people like it. For me, though, the whole show just reminds me of a lot of people I’ve worked with (and for) in the past. People I wished would get hit by trains or would probably be okay if they’d just spring for a Learning Annex class on growing a personality. So I have a hard time finding humor in the rampantly ignorant and stupid in the same way a lot of people would find more Dilbert comic strips funnier if they just weren’t so real.
Posted on February 2, 2007
What I Watched Last Night
By Scott Buckner
Spring Break sucks when you grow up. You can subscribe all you want to that “You’re only as old as you feel” business, but once 40 starts looming large, you’re just Creepy Uncle material to anyone in a string bikini along the entire Florida Coast during the month of April. But that’s okay. The National Geographic Channel informs us that yes, Virginia, there is a Spring Break for the aging. Yeah, it’s held during the summer, but still. It’s a place where, for an entire week, you can drink until you puke and witness feats of beaded necklace-collecting that reduces Mardi Gras New Orleans to a burg of rank amateurs.
Posted on January 31, 2007
What I Watched Last Night
By Scott Buckner
I had a crummy day Monday, so I grab a seat at the end of the bar at the Home Plate Pub in Hessville. That’s where I find ABC ordering me somewhat rudely to ponder What About Brian since there’s no question mark in there asking me politely. I haven’t seen the show, so I do wonder: What about Brian? Did he fall down a mine shaft? Does he overcome adversity and teach others deeply meaningful lessons about their own lives despite having some sort of handicap that would defeat a lesser fellow? Does he save others from certain death through heroic surgeries or stunning lifeguardsmanship? Does he sell insurance? What?
Posted on January 30, 2007
Esteban’s Master Class Cutaway Guitar Package
I wish I could hear Esteban’s students play, but his backing musicians are too loud.
What It Is: A 22-piece set that includes a handmade acoustic-electric guitar, packaged with accessories and instructional DVDs featuring rugged guitar veteran Esteban. It also includes a guitar chord poster, strings, picks and a cleaning cloth.
Description: In principle, not too much different from the guitar starter kits you might see at a Guitar Center or, frankly, K-Mart.
Quote: “This man has touched nearly a half-million lives with his amazing guitar packages!”
Posted on January 30, 2007
What I Watched Last Night
By Scott Buckner
Are you one of those country music purists who firmly believes Garth Brooks is the Antichrist and the eyes of hormone-raging young boys should be shielded whenever the new, improved version of Faith Hill turns up on CMT? Then you’d be right at home with The Wilburn Brothers, as I was Thursday night. Well, I wasn’t really at home with them. It was more like who in the world digs up these things?
The RFD-TV network does, that’s who. (For those of you born well after Andy left Ken Berry in charge of Mayberry, RFD is an acronym for Rural Free Delivery, which brought home mail delivery to the sticks and gave farmers the same right as city folk to have their mailboxes cluttered up by Publisher’s Clearinghouse.)
Billing itself as “rural America’s most important network,” RFD-TV is where the Propane Research and Education Council does its advertising, and I guess if I watched long enough, I could probably have picked up a subscription to Grit newspaper too, except now it’s not really a newspaper anymore and that’s just another fine example of how corporate America has screwed the heartland, dagnabbit.
Posted on January 26, 2007
What I Watched Last Night
By Scott Buckner
Take a sick day and lay in bed with some temporary but nonetheless uncomfortable physical malady until afternoon and it becomes clear that satellite TV during the day has the same miserable choices of any other form of TV reception at night. Since I was miserable enough, I tuned in to The Last Days on Earth on The History Channel to see how much more miserable I might have been Wednesday if we were in the middle of global annihilation.
This program (the DVD on sale in March at the A&E store contains “stunning graphics and representations depict[ing] every doomsday scenario in precise, excruciating detail“) showed seven very real ways that either nature or man itself can conspire to doom the whole camping trip. Whoa. Forget the chicken soup, I thought. What I’d be needing is a bigger umbrella.
Posted on January 25, 2007
What I Watched Last Night
By Scott Buckner
The Chicago Bears: proving yet again you don’t need a quarterback to win a football game.
Posted on January 22, 2007