By Scott Buckner

I leave the TV world for a few days to come back last night all Abominable Snowman-like to the Home Plate Pub only to end up next to a guy who looks like Kid Rock’s retarded cousin while the daily repeat of Oprah plays on the corner TV. Why am I even bothering to pay attention to it? Because there’s some weird Chinese doctor dude sticking acupuncture needles into Oprah’s hand and foot while she sits in some sort of dentist/tattoo parlor chair.
I intentionally miss the last 10 minutes of the show, so I’m left to wonder exactly what Oprah got cured of in about the time it takes to get a pair of glasses at Lenscrafters. I’m pretty confident that she didn’t get a tattoo in that chair, though.

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Posted on February 14, 2007

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.

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Posted on February 7, 2007

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.

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Posted on February 5, 2007

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.

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Posted on February 2, 2007

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.

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Posted on January 31, 2007

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?

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Posted on January 30, 2007

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.

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Posted on January 26, 2007

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.

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Posted on January 25, 2007

By Scott Buckner

The Chicago Bears: proving yet again you don’t need a quarterback to win a football game.

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Posted on January 22, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I have this theory about how TV shows which aren’t spinoffs of something else are developed. It goes something like this: A guy comes up with a brilliant idea and spends a year or three (even longer if he has a day job or a relationship) developing and refining the concept, the characters, the treatments, an actual script, and whatever-else have you for the pilot show. It’s hilarious, the network suits love it, so they all sign a deal and tell him to go home and come up with a dozen more scripts.
Soon enough, it dawns on him what has just happened. So he sits back, stares blankly at his shoes and says, “Oh, shit. Now what?”
I think that’s what happened with The Knights of Prosperity, the show about a bumbling crew of people so sick of their stations in life that they dream up a plan to rob Mick Jagger and/or his apartment. They’re not yet entirely clear which, so neither am I. I missed the show last week, so I thought maybe Natasha Julius was woozy from her two-week juice fast to comment so harshly about Knights in the Beachwood’s mid-season review, but you clearly don’t need animal protein to see that this show has quickly turned into a disappointingly unfunny show just like everything else that passes for comedy on ABC.

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Posted on January 18, 2007