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.

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Posted on March 27, 2007

Many charming heads, all on the same body.
What it Is: Videos and books that show you a system of exercises specifically designed to flatten female abs and perk up asses. Also included is a “squishy ball,” for exercises that more closely resemble humping.
Quote: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a firm, sculpted booty?”
Cost: $60

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Posted on March 21, 2007

By Scott Buckner

The biggest case of identity theft in TV history continued last night with The Riches in an episode that put on display the difficulties women in dresses and high heels face when it’s necessary for them to ride a bike to a prescription-friendly doctor and scale a fence to steal her own Winnebago, and what can happen when a junkie gets put in charge of a buried treasure map.

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Posted on March 20, 2007

By Scott Buckner

There are a few adages out there that say you can’t go home again, but if you do go there, they have to take you in. That may be true, but if they do take you in, nobody has to be all that happy about it. That’s pretty much how things shook out for Nick Garrett, the main character in October Road, a new ABC show that premiered Thursday night. It’s a program that really ought to be called What About Nick, since it follows he same sort of roadmap as What About Brian, another contestant in ABC’s festival of overcooked feelings and sincerity.

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Posted on March 17, 2007

By Scott Buckner

If it’s Monday night, it must mean we’re in store for another dose of the incredibly bad habits of the Irish. And yowza, did we get a good dose of it last night with FX Network’s premiere of The Riches, which I watched instead of The Black Donnelleys.
I’m not sure whether guys like Robert Young and Michael Landon ever envisioned a nuclear family that travels around the Deep South in a Winnebago, crashing wedding receptions and high school reunions to pick the pockets and gift tables of the citizenry. But they’d probably appreciate that there’s actual love and closeness within this family despite the absence of legal scruples.

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Posted on March 13, 2007

You may make money! Here is what money looks like!
What It Is: An entrepreneurship system based on buying and selling properties that municipalities repossess and auction at low prices.
Description: Books, videos, and Web resources that guide you to tax-defaulted properties up for auction; you buy the properties cheap and rent or sell at a profit.
Cost: $39.95
Quote: “This is literally the only way that you can buy real estate for pennies on the dollar.”

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Posted on March 13, 2007