By Scott Buckner
It’s early Tuesday morning and A&E Classroom is chronicling the life of U.S. president and poker aficionado Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his humble beginnings in Abilene, Kansas, to his place on one of the worst American dollar coins ever designed.
It’s a show filled with some interesting insights into the life of our 44th president. Initially, Ike passed the entrance exam to the U.S. Naval Academy. Had he not been too old be be accepted, he never would have enrolled at West Point Military Academy and gone on to become a five-star general in charge of planning the D-Day invasion. A born hell-raiser, he collected demerits at West Point by the boatload, but the Navy named an aircraft carrier after him anyway.
Eisenhower’s presidential legacy includes the development of the nation’s interstate highway system, a network of interconnected freeways designed to speed us quickly and nonstop to our destinations – or so the asphalt-industrial complex that keeps ripping them up and rebuilding them would have you believe. Ironically, in 1964, the Chicago City Council renamed the Congress Street Expressway the Dwight D. Eisenhower Expressway. Ike was not amused.
As Mike Royko famously pointed out, the Ike is the city’s only Republican expressway.
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I have a few theories about the existence of Fuse TV, satellite TV’s safe harbor to the lamest damn shows mankind has ever had the misfortune to witness: A) Richard Pryor has returned from the dead because he’s come up with one more way for Montgomery Brewster to waste $1 million a day; B) Fuse is owned by some Arab sultan whose principles won’t let him douse pallets of cash with gasoline and just set them on fire in the parking lot; C) Fuse is still working the bugs out of its groundbreaking pioneer program to place crackheads and the mental patients in key decision-making positions.
I’ll go with C. This can be the only possible reason why we get stuck with smegma like Pants Off Dance Off while an original thought like God, Inc. gets stuck in the YouTube ozone. Which is exactly how I ended up with Fuse’s Rad Girls and The Whitest Kids U’Know during the midnight hour last night.
Here’s all anyone really needs to know about Whitest Kids: White kids can’t jump. They can’t do sketch comedy, either.
The show tries painfully hard to rival The Kids In The Hall – a show that actually was funny almost all the time – but the only thing it accomplishes, quite amazingly, is being the only sketch comedy show in TV history worse than Saturday Night Live. The only good thing about Whitest Kids is that it’s 60 minutes shorter than Saturday Night Live.
Now, here’s another bad idea: Take the premise behind Jackass and stick it in the hands of three young women known as Ramona Cash, Munchie, and Darling Clementine who have the magical ability to fart on command. What do you get? A lame, sucking waste of time called Rad Girls, that’s what. At least Jackass managed to raise mindless and fucked-up to an art in incredibly mindless, fucked-up ways. Conversely, Rad Girls is, near as I can tell, just part of an ongoing Russian program to develop a joke.
Jackass had Johnny Knoxville shoot fireworks out his ass. Rad Girls has Ramona Cash see how many pedestrians on the street are willing to play “May I Fart In Your Mouth?” She never really farts in anyone’s mouth, since nobody actually gets close enough. Jackass had Steve-O try to get a live alligator to snap at pieces of raw meat hanging off his sack. Rad Girls has Darling Clementine see whether dogs behind a cyclone fence will lick her meat bikini.
And what do you suppose happens when Clementine wants to see what might happen if you drink a cup of Louisiana hot sauce just like the other 200+ goofballs on YouTube who have already done the same thing? She pukes. Duh. Just like the other 200+ goofballs on YouTube who have already done the same thing.
Like Ike said, beware the idiot-industrial complex.
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Peruse the What I Watched Last Night collection. You’ll be a better person for it.
Posted on May 23, 2007