By Scott Buckner

I’ve long believed that cats were the most vile creatures on the planet. Not any more, thanks to an early Wednesday-morning viewing of Rogue Nature: Chimp on The Discovery Channel. Sure, chimpanzees are outrageously smart and can be trained to do just about anything – act, smoke cigarettes, maybe even win a national election (or two) – and, unlike cats, they’ll come when you call. But there’s one pretty significant drawback to our closest relative in the evolutionary chain: They’ll chew off your face and hands, and rip off your balls too.

Read More

Posted on April 12, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I’ve always wondered what transpires in the moments before certain people end up winning a Darwin Award, the official “salute to the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it.”
After watching an early Tuesday morning episode of Stunt Junkies: Go Big Or Go Home, I now know.

Read More

Posted on April 11, 2007

By Scott Buckner

When you have satellite TV, you get all sorts of programming surprises popping up regularly. These are mostly in the form of channels you’ve never noticed before, and new blocks of free preview channels. Seriously, I have something like 700 channels (with probably half devoted to things I never bother with, like sports, Jesus, and home shopping), so it’s impossible to keep track of all the comings and goings.
Tonight, I noticed a block of 17 new channels. Most are HBO derivatives, but one is Cartoon Network’s “Boomerang” channel. For someone like me, this is the TV equivalent of Christmas morning because I remember when Cartoon Network became not-your-dad’s-Cartoon-Network by dumping its cable TV lineup of 1950s/1960s-era toons to shift to the whole Transformers and Ren & Stimpy-sorta school. This was great if you smoked a lot of dope, but overall it was a shame because a lot genius disappeared – particularly that of legendary voice Daws Butler in the toons generated by Walter Lantz Studio before the mid-1960s. Since they were originally movie-theater shorts, the Lantz stuff had plenty of adult humor.

Read More

Posted on April 10, 2007

By Scott Buckner

While it’s not busy covering Gene Simmons’ facelift (which apparently has had some dire consequences, judging from the previews for this Sunday’s installment of Family Jewels), A&E joins the new cable season with Sons of Hollywood. This program covers the daily lives of housemates Sean Stewart (son of singer Rod), Randy Spelling (son of TV producer Aaron), and David Weintraub (son of, uh, nobody famous).
Summarizing Wednesday’s episode, which featured Sean Stewart, was easy – hence why this column will be the shortest I’ll probably ever do. “Hi. I’m Sean Stewart. I have no job to speak of and I don’t even look like my dad or anything. But I have plenty of tattoos and long hair and friends who look worse than me in the morning after a night of drinking. Oh yeah, I have a boatload of money; wanna fuck me?”

Read More

Posted on April 5, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Scott Buckner, our regular writer of this feature, hasn’t watched TV (at least not any worth mentioning) in about a week. But he’ll watch again soon.
In the meantime, I’d like to comment on something I saw last night – an episode of M*A*S*H that perfectly illustrates my distaste of what happened to this most beloved series after it lost a good chunk of its original cast.

Read More

Posted on April 3, 2007

By Scott Buckner

So that this column doesn’t turn into just a Tuesday’s weekly reflection on The Riches, I watched the premiere of One Week To Save Your Marriage on The Learning Channel last night. This program’s trailers caught my eye last week because over the past three years I’ve become intimately familiar with marriage counseling and divorce lawyers.
Or more precisely, what a divorce lawyer charges – which is basically what a life between two people ends up being reduced to. If you’re unfamiliar with the experience, let’s just say opening the billing envelope once a month is not unlike having a jack-in-the-box clown pop out and nail you in the face with a shot from the big bottle of seltzer.

Read More

Posted on March 27, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I live in a house with three college guys and housekeeping usually comes in somewhere after “buy beer” on the to-do list, so spotless isn’t an adjective that pops up very often. But even at its worst, our place is nowhere near the cathedrals of filth, stench, and insect infestation that were featured on Sunday afternoon’s How Clean Is Your House? marathon on BBC America.
Actually, the title question is misleading. It ought to be How Big Of A Remorseless, Filthy Pig Can You Possibly Be? These people weren’t merely sloppy. They hadn’t cleaned a thing in years. Seriously.
This British show is hosted by Kim Woodburn, a household manager “for several prominent families in England and the United States,” and Aggie MacKenzie, a former associate editor at Good Housekeeping magazine, “where part of her duties included the investigation of new cleaning products and appliances.” Woodburn – who appears to be some gene-splicing experiment gone awry between Mary Poppins, Angela Lansbury, and the United States Marine Corps – does most of the down and dirty work: sticking her hands in toilets, sniffing all manner of foul things, and pronouncing urine as “YOO-rhine.” MacKenzie does the lighter cleaning with ordinary household products like salt, vinegar, and lemons, setting out bug traps, and scientifically sampling a lot of things to be grown in Petri dishes to show how much deadly bacteria should have killed these slobs long ago.

Read More

Posted on March 26, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Jeff Goldblum. A cop show where dead people help an off-kilter cop solve the crimes that killed them. I knew I was in for something a week or so ago when I saw the trailers for Goldblum’s new NBC show Raines, which debuted last night – except I didn’t know exactly what because, uh, it’s a show involving Jeff Goldblum. If there’s anyone on the face of the planet who can sit down at a kitchen table with a Buddhist monk and turn a simple game of Uno or Battleship into a rambling contemplation of man vs. nature. vs. himself vs. the Milton Bradley game company, it’s Jeff Goldblum. And ultimately, the monk will resort to self-immolation as his only way out.
This is exactly why Jeff Goldblum’s house has become the only one in the galaxy that Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t bother with.

Read More

Posted on March 23, 2007

By Scott Buckner

What in the world would possess an otherwise normal 15-year-old British girl to intentionally end up looking like the Awful-Looking Drag Queens section of a Body Worlds exhibit? That’s what last night’s airing of Supersize She on The Learning Channel might have set out to answer by following Joanna Thomas in her unsuccessful quest to win the 2004 Ms. Olympia bodybuilding competition.
People like Joanna Thomas are seriously competitive women into serious weightlifting and looking seriously like, uh, shit. Sure, you get huge vein-popping muscles, but you lose your tits, your ass turns into one huge steely tendon, and your zit-ridden face takes on the consistency of 40-grit sandpaper. As crazy as it may sound, all that muscle is for show; by the time they’re done training and crash dieting and dehydrating themselves half to death, they’ve weakened their bodies to the point where holding those poses onstage is exhausting.

Read More

Posted on March 22, 2007

By Scott Buckner

It’s Tuesday night and there’s nothing really remarkable on TV except the Miami Inked marathon on TLC. I’m rather partial to shows like this because I have a half-dozen tattoos and I’d like a whole bunch more – and at this point in my life, I actually can, without a wife threatening me with a future of living in my car if I dare get another. And really, the folks on Miami Inked do some of the greatest work on the planet. Period. These people are total artists, plain and simple.
In every single case, they take what the client walks in with – even if it’s strange or badly drawn – and turn into into a piece of body work that is absolutely breathtaking. And it’s even more breathtaking when you consider that they only get one shot at the piece. There’s just no room to fuck up. And really, if the same standard applied to us and our jobs, most of us would be hopelessly fucked.

Read More

Posted on March 21, 2007