Yesterday, gossip site The Dirty reported that they have exclusive nude photos of Miss California Carrie Prejean. Now the winner of Donald Trump’s 2009 Miss USA pageant on NBC is Miss North Carolina Kristen Dalton, but Miss California Carrie Prejean is likely to be the name you’ve been hearing about.

I don’t know if there is a Good Judgment category in pageants, but, if there were one, Carrie Prejean would get awfully low marks. One of the Miss USA judges this year is famous (and openly gay) gossip blogger Perez Hilton. So Perez Hilton asks Miss California Carrie Prejean what, in light of Calfornia’s Prop 8 debacle vs. other states legalizing it, she thinks about gay marriage. Let me just repeat here that Perez Hilton was one of the judges. So, in a show of what people who live in glass houses should not say, Miss California Carrie Prejean said, “We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”

CNN reported “Prejean announced last week that she would star in a new $1.5 million ad campaign supporting what she called “opposite marriage” (marriage between a man and a woman) funded by the National Organization for Marriage.” And of course the naughty pictures surfaced. What was that about casting the first stone and being without sin and all that jazz?

Graphic designer Chad Serrano, who is in my pal Sabrina’s Fabulous Book Club for Fabulous People, says he would totally support the National Organization for Marriage type folks if they opposed divorce as heartily as they oppose gay marriage. If no National Organization for Marriage or pro-Prop 8 person ever got divorced, then it would be reasonable for them to excuse homophobia and being bigoted morons as being pro-marriage. Good point.

Then again, NOM is a group who chose as their spokesperson . . . a judgmental naked pageant chick who claims to be in favor of “opposite marriage”. I just wish the people from Opposite Land (really Vista, California), where she apparently from, is from would stop voting in California elections. Oh yeah, and Miss California Carrie Prejean does have a completely valid excuse for having posed for naked pictures and never mentioning it. She was like totally tricked. Uh huh.

Yesterday, I posted a review of the new Christian Slater show My Own Worst Enemy and a gallery from My Own Worst Enemy. I was excited when I tuned in that night to recognize Nixon Sixx in the audience for an exciting martial arts competition scene. Christian Slater’s super spy personality Edward Albright has pointed out to his regular guy personality Henry Spivey that their son Jack Spivey, played by Taylor Lautner, has been lying about going guitar lessons. Jack invites his parents to come see what he has actually been doing, which is competing in some form of aggressive and underground-looking version of bo staff combat matches. Taylor Lautner actually manages to do a nice job with a Christian Slater carnivorous smirk here. Helping show how energetically excited about the match the audience was, Nixon Sixx had the highlighted audience member role closest to Christian Slater. Nixon is fabulous at bringing a good positive energy into any room. We have a gallery of MOWE stills from the show, but you can watch the whole series to date for yourself on the NBC site now, including the ep with Nixon, episode 104 – “This Is Not My Son”.

Amelia G: Do you like watching fighting in general, go to any sorts of fight or martial arts-oriented events or watch any of those sorts of shows?

Nixon Sixx: Not really. I’ll watch some martial arts just for the movement, like Capoeira, but the only time I actually go to a fight is when Thunderdome has events.

Amelia G: Have you ever done a martial art yourself in real life and, if so, which one?

Nixon Sixx: I did Aikido for a while, and a little kickboxing.

Amelia G: You managed to project such great enthusiasm, so how long did you spend cheering that enthusiastically for Christian Slater’s TV son, for them to get the length of scene his fight is?

Nixon Sixx: It was really fun to watch- I’ve never seen a fight scene shot before. It was amazing how tightly choreographed the whole thing was. They break it into short pieces and it is a lot like watching a dance, really. Plus watching Taylor take those falls was incredible- he just threw himself into it. He’s sixteen and has so much energy it’s insane. I think we shot the whole thing maybe four times, including one at half speed, plus a few rehearsals. So, a couple of hours of cheering.

Amelia G: What is the secret of your positivity/good energy?

Nixon Sixx: In this case, I don’t think there was any great secret. I’m from the Heathers generation. I had pictures of Christian Slater ripped out of Big Bopper taped to my walls twenty years ago. So, yeah, I was really happy to get that part. In general, though? I just don’t like to be down. So I try not to be.

I am fascinated by the idea of exploring how comic book style superpowers would impact real world human beings. In literature, last year’s Soon I Will be Invincible from Austin Grossman is the reigning champion of this sub-genre. I kind of felt sorry for David J. Schwartz having his novel Superpowers come out around the same time as Soon I Will be Invincible. He probably sold some extra copies via Amazon “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” recommendations, but comparing a pleasant enough light read with the brilliance of Austin Grossman’s book seemed almost cruel.

So it was in the television world with Tim Kring’s Heroes and The 4400 from René Echevarria and Scott Peters, but that is about to change. I found The 4400 because of the Netflix “Enjoyed By Members Who Enjoyed” feature. The first season of Heroes featured a set of interlocking stories about people from different walks of life who suddenly discovered they were special in a superpowered kind of way. Season One of Heroes was elegantly written. A politician discovers he can fly. A cheerleader discovers she can regenerate almost any injury. A uniform beat cop discovers he can read minds. A low level cube employee working at his father’s company discovers he can bend space and time. An artist discovers he can paint the future while shooting smack. A homecare provider discovers his empathy allows him to pick up abilities from other superpowered indivduals. A watch repairman discovers a method for killing people and absorbing their abilities into his own roster of skills. There is a shadowy Company trying to keep it all contained. There is a morally ambiguous and conflicted Company employee who also has a superpowered adoptive daughter. Season 1 of Heroes has a complex yet elegant and well-structured storyline where the tales of each of the many characters are interwoven into a satisfying whole piece with a logical conclusion.

The basic concept of The 4400 is that all the alien abductees from the past upmty-ump years are returned by their futuristic UFO captors all at once. None of them have aged and many seem to have developed extraordinary abilities. The 4400 started off with two special agents as the sort of center of the show. Tom Baldwin is the action-oriented agent played by Joel Gretsch who is no stranger to either law enforcement or SF roles. His partner Diana Skouris from the CDC is played by Jacqueline McKenzie. (Incidentally, that would be the Jacqueline McKenzie who played the Gabe character in Romper Stomper, doing full nudity fucking multiple skinheads and her father, and it doesn’t appear to have hurt her acting career one bit.) Although there are some overarching story arcs, each episode of the early episodes of The 4400 centers more around new characters discovering new abilities which are investigated by this lead governmental team. The show features in particular an interesting exploration of how the government would respond to finding a sudden influx of missing persons with superpowers. There is also quite a bit of variety in how different returnees react to having extraordinary abilities. On The 4400, scientists find that something in the blood called Promicin appears to be responsible for the various abilities people develop and, as the seasons progress, ways are found to give many people Promicin-catalyzed superpowered abilities. As with many television shows, however, as the seasons go on, the show’s writers try to keep it fresh by having many of the characters start acting . . . well, out of character.

Compared to the new season of Heroes, however, The 4400 had a deft touch. Not only that, but the current season of Heroes is blatantly riffing on ideas from The 4400, down to casting some of the same actors including Chad Faust. If you are, for some inexplicable reason planning on watching Season 3 of Heroes and you have not already watched the first few episodes, I recommend you stop reading now as spoilers are forthcoming. All right then.

So Milo Ventimiglia’s empathic Peter Petrelli from earlier seasons now has multiple versions of himself, all of whom are unsympathetic. He is a talented guy normally, but it is like he totally forgot how to act. The rumor mill says that he and Hayden Panettiere, who plays the cheerleader Claire Bennet, are or were romantically involved, so maybe that explains why, when she shoots one of his many versions, she says she always loved him and it comes across as creepy and incestuous. But actors should be able to play uncle and niece so that it does not seem like they are fucking, even if the real life actors are. Ew.

I guess heroin is no longer okay on a show about heroes and heroines because now lots of characters can get inaccurate visions of the future, without the bother of shooting up first. Now they can drink fictional African drugs, which is like totally more socially responsible.

So the serial killer from Season 1 of Heroes is now supposed to be a good guy. Maybe it is a trick and that is why his acting seems so bad, but long scenes where actors are acting like people acting badly are never a good idea. Plus serial killer Sylar or Gabriel or whatever the Heroes writers are calling him today has the most messed-up looking eyebrows ever. He had really thick eyebrows in the earlier seasons, but they look freaking drawn on in this one to a really distracting extent. (It was so distracting that I researched it and apparently he is playing Spock in the new Star Trek. He actually makes a kinda hot Spock, which just proves gothic eyebrows are sexy.)

Zachary Quinto’s eyebrows notwithstanding, one of the most jarring things about the current season of Heroes is that it is like all the actors decided they wanted to look more like movie stars than like their characters. Some characters have future versions of themselves who wear leather pants. The male actors all look like they have been passing the steroid injections around and spending all their time at the gym. Nothing wrong with wanting to be fit, but it is just implausible that all of these characters would be uber-buff. The styling on the show used to be really convincing and realistic and now it just seems like they are not even trying. Well, if the characters were all playing high end Hollywood escorts, I would consider it to be putting effort in, if they were all hellbent on working out and wearing designer clothes and too much expensive makeup. Seems less like trying when we are watching a fandom show which is supposed to feature characters from different walks of life. Even the good-guy scientist academic looks bizarrely ripped and spends most of his screen time with his shirt off. Then again, he is also either serial-killing or using spider powers to imprison people to function as lab rats. Or both.

Season 3 of Heroes brought in two of my favorite actors from The Wire and it still sucked. The talented Andre Royo who plays sympathetic junkie Bubbles on The Wire comes in as a mistreated and unjustly imprisoned vortex-making superpowered guy and it is obvious from his first moment on screen that things will end badly for him. Sexy badass Jamie Hector who played hard up-and-coming drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield on The Wire is a cool bad guy, with fear-fueled superpowers, on Heroes, but having the bad guys be the only cool characters is sorta off for a show which used to be about trying to do the right thing.

Masi Oka’s Hiro Nakamura, who used to be one of the characters the largest number of viewers could relate to, has been described by many media critics as the moral center of the show, the character from whom the themes spring. Well, this most recent episode featured Hiro stabbing his best friend Ando, played by James Kyson Lee, in the heart. I don’t care if the writers come up with a lame way to excuse it as not being real or some such nonsense. If the guy most bent on being a good guy has turned into a condescending prick who would stab his best friend, then I am done watching this show. I wish I had stopped watching after the wonderful first season. There is so much to dislike in this current third season that I could just keep going.

The Cardinal Rule of writing science fiction is that a universe may be incredibly fantastical, but it should be internally consistent. At this point, Heroes could not be more inconsistent if the writers all had a bar bet going for who could introduce the most inconsistent plot point or character action.

The only plus of the current season of Heroes is that they brought back David Anders’ charmingly chaotic neutral and essentially immortal Adam Monroe character, who, as forum readers know, is my first choice for who I would want by my side during a zombie apocalypse. But, even his engaging screen presence can’t save a show which has lost both its moral compass and any logic whatsoever. There is even a long scene where Hiro bullies Adam who he has been torturing for a long time by burying him underground in an airless tomb where he repeatedly suffocates to death and then regenerates back to life. I know the theme of the current season is “Villains”, but it seems more like it ought to be called “Assholes”. I guess they would have Kevin Smith Zack and Miri Make a Porno problems putting “Assholes” on their bus stop promos though. The characters are not evil masterminds; they are just jerks; assholes, if you will.

Heroes is officially canceled from my TiVo queue. When the Nielson’s for time-shifted (TiVo and web) viewing came in for the beginning of this season, it really raised the show’s ratings. I’m guessing that, after last week’s ridiculous episode, there won’t be any more numbers like that, although you can watch the season so far for free on the NBC site. The first season of Heroes was a rare and special flash of network television brilliance and I still recommend watching it on DVD or Netflix Watch Instantly. But, if you enjoy themes of ordinary people with extraordinary abilities, The 4400 wins for quality longevity over the long haul.

Still, critics seems to pretty universally agree that Knight Rider is the worst new show of the current television season. So, of course, fans desperate to defend Heroes: Assholes Villains are at pains to tell any critic to go watch Knight Rider if they no longer love Heroes. The kind of hilarious irony here is that I don’t think most of them realize that Heroes creator Tim Kring got his start writing for the original Knight Rider series back in 1982.

Lakeshore Entertainment, the creators of Crank, are bringing us Pathology, now out on DVD. Crank is the sort of quality enjoyable-but-won’t-change-your-life movie that I’d expect Hollywood to put out tons of, but which actually rarely gets produced. The movie banked largely on the appeal of Jason Statham’s ability to project manly manliness and a simple but tight script. And it worked.

Pathology stars Milo Ventimiglia, best known for playing the intelligent and sensitive, yet brooding and multi-powered Peter on NBC’s Heroes. In Pathology, Milo Ventimiglia plays a brilliant med student who others are trying to lure into a deadly game of murder as only medical lab experts could commit it. I haven’t seen the flick yet, but, from what I hear, I expect that it is a good solid watch. And, with the world going to Hell in a hand-basket at the moment, we can all use all the pleasantly engrossing diversion we can get.

Check out our Pathology gallery courtesy of Fox, if you just think Milo Ventimiglia is cute. Watch the trailers to get more of a feel for the movie, but be forewarned they are redband trailers and contain some gorey R-rated material. In all fairness, I can’t personally decide if I think Milo Ventimiglia is a hottie and a half or I just have a thing for uber-powerful conflicted superheroes.

When, in his first inaugural address, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stated that, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” he wasn’t necessarily talking about the nature of horror in television and film. The main thrust of his speech was that, in wretched economic times, hope and a positive attitude were integral to pulling America out of the Depression. Nonetheless, that one expression has, in the general zeitgeist, outlasted the rest of his speech about how “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits.” And it seems fair to say that the line about the only thing we have to fear certainly outlasted FDR’s exhortations that there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.”

Historically, comedy entertainment has flourished in times of economic strife and war and drama and horror have done better when the audience’s day-to-day lives have been more comfortable and free of fear. But we live in interesting times and horror is booming. NBC has an ambitious new television series starting today which showcases the works of thirteen top horror teams. In case this wasn’t obvious from my deconstruction of the origins of the expression about what we have to fear, the name of the series is Fear Itself.

I asked my unsavory pals and I asked the Blue Blood boards and I asked my sixty thousand close personal friends on MySpace what frightened them. They were all frightened by things besides fear, but hopefully they’ve got some optimism and some taste for the allstar horror series NBC is releasing.

Interestingly, Alien, The Exorcist, and Halloween tied for first place as scariest movies ever. Most people I know were quick to add that they absolutely 100% only meant the first Halloween movie when they were talking about terror. Poltergeist came in fourth and apparently scared a lot of viewers off of television. Pretty clever for the filmmakers, given that Poltergeist came out at a time before movies and television media had quite the synergy they do today. Hellraiser came in fifth, although I think some people I know liked the fashions more than they were genuinely scared, but I’ll accept it. Bizarrely John Carpenter’s The Thing and E.T. tied for the next slot. Apparently, I know some alienated-ass people, who didn’t trust their government or scientists as children, and who were just sick with fear over what was going to happen to that poor alien. I felt the same way actually about both E.T. and Short Circuit, if the truth be told, but no one but me thought of Short Circuit for this list, so I think it doesn’t make it. The Shining came in number eight and I would have felt that all work and no play had made us all very dull if it wasn’t somewhere on the list. Newer flicks like the SAW movies and 1408 and The Descent were mentioned, as were slightly older ones such as Event Horizon and Child’s Play and The Cell, and of course classics like Jaws and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Nightmare On Elm Street. But none of those films got a real critical mass of respondents putting them in their top ten. I’d have to give the number nine slot to a special subgenre, rather than one movie. And the number ten spot actually is a movie I’ve never seen, but I’m vaguely creeped out at how many people thought of it in the top scariest movies and television of all time.

So, in conclusion, here are the top 10 scariest films of all time, according to Blue Blood readers:

1. Alien
2. The Exorcist
3. Halloween
4. Poltergeist
5. Hellraiser
6. The Thing
7. E.T.
8. The Shining
9. Anything Japanese involving doing weird stuff to eyeballs
10. Jesus Camp

I perused TuckerMax.com upon my return from Austin, to see if there was any vital news I should include in my article about Tucker Max and his writing and his SXSW panel. There was nothing which really jumped out as necessary for an introduction piece. But, what the heck, I’ll give you all the lowdown on what he has coming up.

He is currently working on a series for Comedy Central. He envisions the show as being a 100% scripted half hour comedy with no laugh track. Something like The Office or Entourage or Tucker suggests one “picture a Sex and the City for guys, done in the vein of my stories.” I’ve never seen Sex and the City, so this doesn’t evoke much for me, but maybe it will for other folks. At any rate, a fictional comedy half hour with the feel of a Tucker Max adventure sounds entertaining to me, so I’ll be putting the key phrase “Tucker Max” in my TiVo for whenever the heck the long-ass cycle of television production produces an actual show. I just used the word heck twice in the same article. Don’t get me wrong, I like the word heck, but I think this means I am jet-lagged.

A fun factoid is that apparently one of the producers of the upcoming Tucker Max show is former ABC president Jamie Tarses, the first female entertainment chief in the industry, who is reportedly the inspiration for the character of fictional sensitive-but-tough network president Jordan McDeere on the Aaron Sorkin-written, Thomas Schlamme-directed, star-studded, and shockingly disapppointing NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The Tucker blog announces his SXSW appearance and mentions that the show might be a bit pricey just to hear him speak, but caveats: “If you are a hot girl in or around Austin, well, you don’t need to pay to hear me speak. Just send me an email and we’ll get drinks. Or just we can just skip the pleasantries and you can come over to my hotel and fuck, whichever you prefer.”

The most recent entry in Tucker Max’s blog announces that he is going to be co-writing a book with Paul Wall. I told Forrest Black this and his first response was to ask if it was going to be called Stuff in Your Mouth. He then immediately posted this thought to his Twitter account. Twitter, although you can use it in your browser or instant messenger client, is essentially like short attention span LiveJournal for your Blackberry or Treo, and it was this year’s hot site to, err, twitter about at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference. If you are feeling digitally trendy, you can find my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/AmeliaG and the still kinda undeveloped Blue Blood Twitter account at http://twitter.com/BlueBlood. Ya know, I just popped over to Twitter, preparatory to making this post and the two most recent posts were Forrest saying “Coffee is a good thing” and Halcyon saying, “trying to find a balance between SXSW inspiration and despair.” There may be a certain sort of odd haiku quality to Twitter.

If you go to NBC.com right now, it looks like you can watch a full replay of last Sunday’s episode of The Apprentice: Los Angeles. Only the link on the front page of the site 404’s. I don’t blame them one bit. If my name were on that pale imitation of their earlier success, I wouldn’t want to extend the viewership of that show either.

Full disclosure: I have watched every single episode of The Apprentice. I watched all of the Donald Trump Coke Classic shows. And I watched all of the Martha Stewart New Coke shows, even with the lackluster candidates provided to Martha, and even though I have never seen anything else of Martha Stewart. Unless you count SNL sketches. Realistically, I think my viewing habits re: The Apprentice make it more meaningful when I say that I expect to permanently remove it from my TiVo queue later today. I’m writing this at 2am Saturday night/Sunday morning, January 14, and the show airs Sunday nights. At the end of this article, I’m going to tell you a spoiler for tonight’s episode. I know this secret info either because (a) I went to college with some big muckymucks at NBC or because (b) I have committed my valuable time and sharp business acumen to the lame task of figuring this out.

There was a lot I really loved about the first season of The Apprentice. I loved the whole businessman-as-rockstar vibe of the show. Before I lived in Los Angeles myself, I used to constantly get asked if I was in a band. There is no reason why living your life passionately and flamboyantly and taking the road less traveled should equate to being good at singing or playing popular music. Of course, living in Los Angeles has sapped some of my desire to put on some over-the-top outfit and traipse around town. Sure, I’m a writer and a photographer and those might sound like creative pursuits to someone who hadn’t been overexposed to La-La-Land. Truly, people in my town tend to view anyone dressed very creatively as either (a) a stylist or (b) a tourist or (c) talent. And, when LA people say “talent,” they do not mean it as in “good at something,” but rather as the raw meat of the Hollywood machine, the stuff they grind up every day. Coming out of a punk rock DIY background, I find the idea of “talent” as another species anathema. I started off publishing pictures of my friends and peers. When I picked up a camera, I wasn’t documenting something I felt separate from. But I found that dressing the way I did was a drag.

If someone had directly yelled at me and overtly told me I had to change, I would have spit on them. They could not have forced me. But the Los Angeles pressure was more subtle than that. I found that, if I looked hot on a shoot day, the photos often didn’t work out as well, as models were likely to get either competitive or amorous or both. It is easier to not bother blow-drying my hair when I got out of the tub, so I wasn’t going to bother, if it made my day harder. And I found it difficult to do business. I would meet with people where I thought we could make win/win deals and they would try to take advantage of me and be shocked when I noticed. My kinky and freaky clothing and my multi-colored hair seemed to make the businesspeople assume I was wet behind the ears. It made it a lot more likely that there were going to be sharks circling me. Sharks who were sure my looks meant blood in the water. Sharks who were going to be really really pissed when they didn’t get a meal. And I definitely bear more than a few scars from sharks I didn’t manage to get away from in time.

So, I know I’m not as obviously flamboyant as I once was, but Donald Trump became a bit of a personal hero to me, when he displayed a combination of business wisdom and charismatic garishness. Most CEOs do not get in front of the camera and I appreciated that he did. In his famous boardroom scenes, where contestants on the show were eliminated, Trump had two very businesslike lieutenants in Carolyn Kepcher and George Ross. That first season of the show, Trump also had an amazingly impressive assortment of candidates. The structure of the show was to split the candidates into two teams and have them compete against one another in business tasks. The first season candidates seemed like truly exceptionally capable and innovative businesspeople. They impressed and intrigued even with the ways they addressed a task as simple as running a lemonade stand. At the part of each episode where Trump would tell the viewers some nugget of Trumpian wisdom, I used to hang on his every word.

This makes my disappointment in The Apprentice: Los Angeles much worse. The NBC web site has nicknames for all of this season’s candidates. They are pretty uniformly stupid and include such winning phrases as The Webhead and The Believer and The Blonde. The candidates from the first season of The Apprentice appeared to be, perhaps lower on the totem pole of life than Donald Trump, at least as presented. But they were still presented as all being winners. Many had achieved greatness before the show and many went on to still greater achievements after it and perhaps partly because of it. The name of the game this season, however, appears to be to degrade the candidates as much as possible. Why Trump would want to work with someone he has already humiliated is anyone’s guess.

The first twist on the show this season is that the losing team has to sleep outside. Essentially the two teams compete against one another on various basic business tasks and whichever team loses, not only has a member fired, but they have to sleep in tents in the backyard of a house. They refer to the house where the winning team sleeps as “The Mansion,” but the view from their backyard doesn’t look to me like Mark Burnett and Donald Trump sprang for the best Los Angeles real estate. Actually, it looks like “The Mansion” is in Southern California, but not technically in Los Angeles at all. Additionally, the entire winning team sleeps in the same room on beds which look like they were purchased last minute at Ikea. “The Mansion” looks like a decent enough house and placing a whole television show in a house or two is difficult, but glorifying that pedestrian abode just gives the lie to everything Trump has ever praised or bragged about in the past. Trump Tower, where the New York-based seasons were shot, looked nice. Candidates had roommates, but at least it was not a summer camp style dormitory. I cringe in embarrassment for this season’s crop as they go on for the cameras about the haves and the have nots and how sleeping outside makes people hungrier to win and being indoors makes victory so much sweeter. Keep in mind that we don’t really have weather in Los Angeles, so it is not like the people in the backyard are getting snowed on. Has Trump actually fallen so far that the best thing he could offer winners was the opportunity to sleep indoors? Has he actually managed to find people he thinks are good at business who are dazzled merely by having a roof over their heads? Mind you, a central plot point of the season opener for The Apprentice: Los Angeles was refusing to let businesspeople go to the bathroom. I’m not making that up. I wish I were. Each season of The Apprentice has shown less of the interesting business aspects than the last. I thought the shift in focus towards personality conflicts between contestants was bad, but telling professionals they can’t use the toilet and filming how they react is just pathetic.

Other things which suck about The Apprentice: Los Angeles include Trump having fired one of his lieutenants, Carolyn Kepcher, for enjoying the limelight too much. This suggests that the mere act of pointing a camera at someone makes people think they are a greater person at the very same moment it turns them into a lesser person. Maybe true and maybe a justified rightsizing, but it makes it look like working for Trump is not quite the “job of a lifetime” that the commercials for his show suggest. George Ross, with his brilliant insight and professional gravitas, apparently still works for the Trump organization, but he doesn’t really care for LA and has work to do in New York. So this past week’s boardroom, Trump had his daughter Ivanka Trump on one side and the leader of the winning team on the other. Of course, the leader of the winning team had to act like a jerk and rub her victory in the face of the losers (even thought they lost by a very very slim margin.) Here is the big twist coming up tonight: The candidates already know that the winning team’s leader (The Hottie) will remain the leader as long as she is winning, but what they do not know is that she is going to have to switch teams and try to lead the people she just lorded it over in the boardroom. Hardy-har-har.

I thought Ivanka Trump came across great on the most recent season of the show, when she guested. Her image then was tough, beautiful, flawless, brutal but fair. Unfortunately, she apparently went to image coaches over the summer and she just comes across as a mean person with bad manners now. Her taking Carolyn’s place on Donald’s left also gives one the sense that nepotism is going to be the way in the Trump organization and it may make no difference how hard someone works. Which makes viewers ask why anyone would compete hard to get a job working for the Trump family, especially when they never let anyone else finish a sentence.

Speaking of Ivanka, most internet users will have been unable to escape the recent feud between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell. I’ll give the Cliff’s notes, so anyone who missed it previously will now have this data filling up their gray matter. Trump owns a pageant or two. A couple of pageant girls were seen out on the town, behaving in a supposedly unseemly manner i.e. allegedly drinking, doing lines, possibly having sex partners back to her place, and maybe kissing girls. The implication was that the two pageant babes were lovers. There was a big public brouhaha where stripping one girl of her crown was discussed but she was given a second chance and the whole thing was unseemly for all involved. So Rosie stated publicly that she felt Donald did not have the moral high ground or compass to judge a twenty-year-old girl. So Trump called Rosie fat and is suing her and Ivanka told the press she felt Rosie was a bully. I’d feel more sympathy there, if Ivanka and her father were not both coming across as such bullies on The Apprentice: Los Angeles.

Full disclosure: Although I understand that Rosie appears on the show and has said inflammatory things on it before, I have never watched The View. Unless you count SNL sketches. It is my understanding that Rosie O’Donnell is a famous lesbian and my opinion that she may have felt a responsibility to speak out about the pageant nonsense. Or she could be a jerk. I have no idea.

Now, maybe I’m just letting my own sexual fantasies intrude here, but I get the impression Ivanka Trump knows how to please a woman. On the list of things this former Trump fan is horrified by is his apparent homophobia. Is it really that awful if some pageant winners make out? Is it really that awful if Rosie O’Donnell is not physically attractive to Donald Trump? Is Ivanka Trump not on the cover of The Advocate because Trump would consider it unseemly? And, most importantly, by being on the show The Apprentice, does Trump have the right to go after Rosie in court? Does The Advocate have the right to put Ivanka on their cover whether or not she wants to be there? Are they public figures who are subject to public comment? What makes someone a public figure? Does becoming a public figure make someone a worse person? I don’t know all the answers, but watching the tragic devolution of this brilliant TV show, I am definitely thinking about the questions. I hope I am not causing any damage by pointing my own cameras at people I think are cool.

At any rate, I think I won’t be buying any more Trump books or watching any more Apprentice shows after tonight. I do intend to continue to watch Saturday Night Live. But I won’t be watching Donald Trump any more. Unless you count SNL sketches.