Tag Archives: Lil Jon

The Celebrity Apprentice All-Stars

17 Oct

October 17, 2012

This time around, Donald Trump will feature a roster of all-stars from previous editions of his show. This is a problem. There are rarely any legitimate celebrities on this show, so can he really make a team of all-stars? And this being Donald Trump, will he simply fill it with busty models who’ve appeared on the show?  That what I would do.

Well he didn’t, and I won’t sulk about it. But If the Donald can rerun contestants then I can rerun my descriptions of them. I’ll post my original comments along with my updated opinions.

A Baldwin.

The Baldwins are pretty much all the same nowadays. A Baldwin, by definition, is a poor actor, who is addicted to drugs, alcohol, or drugs and alcohol, and his best years are behind him. Other than Alex, or Alec, who cares, a Baldwin doesn’t need a first name as they are all pretty much the same guy. While this Baldwin was on The Celebrity Apprentice another Baldwin was on Celebrity Rehab and it was hard to tell which was which. This particular Baldwin (Antonio? Eugene?) had replaced his drug addiction with a Jesus addiction. Despite the fact that Jesus had clearly abandoned him (why else would he be on The Celebrity Apprentice?) he stuck to his religious guns. At least he did whenever it helped him. The guy was such a hypocrite that he made your typical democratic candidate seem electable.

Well a lot of time has passed and as I look back at Billy Baldwin’s time on the show I am left with one thought: He was on the show? I don’t remember a single thing about him.


Trace Adkins.

Before this show I never heard of him. Pretty soon I’ll have forgotten him. He’s a country star, maybe one of the biggest. What that means to us in NYC is that we’ve never heard of him. New York radio is run by brain-dead chimpanzees. For example, for years and years there was a radio station called WCBS-FM. They played oldies from the 50’s to the 80’s and pretty much everyone’s father or grandfather listened to it in the car. I was one of those kids in the back of one of those cars so I can name more Four Seasons hits than hits by anyone who recorded from 1990 onward. The station made so much money that the guys in charge changed it to something called “Jack.” The theory was, apparently, if ain’t broke, let’s break it. Jack was pretty much the same fourteen songs over and over, broken up only by a pre-recorded DJ bragging about how they never played the same songs over and over. And a couple of years later WCBS was back. K-Rock was a rock (duh) station with good ratings and money coming in. So they turned it into a “hot talk” station filled with talk shows that no one heard of and fewer listened too. If Jim Jones were broadcasting on K-Rock his Kool-Aid would have stayed in the pitcher. In fact, it was rumored that K-Rock regularly broadcast Eliot Spitzer’s phone calls to his prostitute but because no one ever listened it took two more years for the scandal to break. So the rock music is back. There are a lot of stations in NYC all playing the same music but not a single one plays country. Country is one of the biggest formats in the country, yet here in NYC I can’t hear a single banjo, harmonica, or steel guitar. (Not that I want too.) I can hear The Milkshake Song on a dozen stations but anything from south of the Mason-Dixon line may as well be broadcast on FAA frequencies. But, bringing it back to Trace Adkins, he’s tall and quiet and hates to take off his cowboy hat. He must be bald.

A lot has changed since then. K-Rock has dropped rock-again, grrr- and is now some typical pop music station. Eliot Spitzer has kept a low profile and his new baby is somewhat softening his douchbag image. Trace Adkins? Still invisible in New York.

Dennis Rodman


LIL JON

A picture is worth a thousand words. Or more in this case. I’m dying to see him interact with The Donald. Need I mention that he’s a rapper? That’s close enough to a singer to bring the musical total up to five so far.

Lil Jon impressed me on the show, so much that I went out of my way to listen to his latest single and wow, it is so full of profanity and pornography that if Trump heard it his hair would stand on end, which would be an improvement.

 LISA RINNA

Lisa Rinna is best known for once being relevant. I take that back. She is best known for her huge disgusting lips from botched plastic surgery. Seriously, she’s hideous. She recently had a show on TVLand where she underwent surgery to fix them. Let’s hope this was taped after, not before.

Since the show, Lisa Rinna has… has… um, let’s move on.

GARY BUSEY

Once an actor, Gary Busey now makes a living panhandling. HA ha ha, I’m just kidding. But you were halfway believing me, weren’t you? This is from Wikipedia:

At Pinsky’s recommendation, Busey was seen at the facility by psychiatrist Dr. Charles Sophy. Sophy suspected that Busey’s brain injury has had a greater effect on him than realized. He described it as essentially weakening his mental “filters” and causing him to speak and act impulsively.

Remember The Golden Girls? He’s Sophia! The same thing happened to her: Sophia had suffered a massive stroke, which, on more than one occasion, was said to have destroyed the part of her brain that acted as a censor. Who says life doesn’t imitate art?

BTW- He did his own singing as The Big Bopper in The Buddy Holly story, so I’m counting him as Singer Number Eight, though I’m sure the closest he comes nowadays to holding a tune is watching TV.

His appearance on the show just solidified my opinion of him. He is a certified loony bird.

Claudia Jordan? Sorry, she was on the show? Are you sure she is a celebrity?

DEE SNIDER

He does not need this show. Twisted Sister does well enough without this show. Why is he here? He must have liked it when he guested last season. I only hope he wears his makeup to the boardroom..

It hasn’t been long since his time on the show ended. So what’s he been up to? He put out  a cd of popular standards, like Mack the Knife. Yes, he really did.

 

PENN JILLETTE

This man is smart. Too smart to be on this show but you know what? He says he has wanted to be on this show for years. I expect he’s using this show just for material. He is much more than a magician but you can read about when I attended his Vegas show right here.

NEVER have I wanted to eat my words more than I do right now. Smart? No way, maybe he has knowledge but he has no common sense. His time on the show was marked by inaction and weakness. Great at what he does, horrible on The Apprentice. Why is he back? I have no idea.

Brett Michaels.

1983- Poison tops the charts.
2005- sex tape with Pamela Anderson
2008- MTV’s Rock of Love with Brett Michaels
2009- Michaels suffered a fractured nose and cut lip at the Tony Awards show after performing Poison’s song “Nothin’ but a Good Time.” When he turned to exit the stage, a descending piece of the set hit him in the head before he could duck under it, knocking him on his back.
2010- Celebrity Apprentice

And you know what? He won, and the show almost killed him. Literally. How will he do this season? I don’t know, but it is a miracle he is here to be on the show at all. 

Brande Roderick

‘Nuff said. Thanks Donald.

Marilu Henner.

Remember the attractive redhead from Taxi? The one Judd Hirsh wanted to nail but was to wishy-washy to date? The same one that Danny DeVito wanted to slam upside down in his cage? Well this isn’t her. This is her maiden aunt with the same name and a craggy face. And she never stops talking. She’s like some eternally chirpy chipmunk who claims she wrote a book but no one believes her but they humor her anyway. But for my purposes, this nugget from her bio says it all for me: Henner started her professional acting career starring in the first national touring company of Grease, later appearing with the Broadway company. Can I never get away from that show? I reviewed Grease and, out of sheer sado-masochism, reviewed the sequel. Then I was forced to dredge it up again because the Curse of Grease, already hard at work on John Travolta, claimed another victim in Jeff Conaway, noted drug-abuser and former supporting character on Babylon 5, a show  so good it doesn’t deserve to be mentioned on the same internet as The Celebrity Apprentice. Now here it pops up on Marilu Henner’s bio. That does explain a lot. Like why no one has heard of her in the last decade. But to be fair, her bio also mentions that Henner’s entire life is a testimony to the power of her approach to health. So here’s to her, her craggy face, and her scrawny body.

 Since then what has she done? Lobbied to get back on The Apprentice, I suspect.

Omarosa

 The nobody from season one returns. People hate her. I don’t mean that in the good way, like you love to hate a soap opera villain, I mean that in the you change the channel when you see her way. That’s the difference between good and bad heat. Take the WWF for example. The Undertaker was the biggest bad guy in wrestling and the fans hated him but paid good money to see him and boo him. Then there was X=Pac, a piece of garbage who was only on the roster thanks to his good buddy Triple H. He was hated by the fans too, but rather than pay a cent to see him they’d flip channels when he came on tv. Nobody could stand him. That’s Omarosa. No one wants to see her but Trump is pushing her. Why? No idea.

La Toya Jackson

Well, she claims she’s a singer, though I’d dispute it. What’s to be said about the member of the Jackson family that even Michael thought was weird? In addition to having about as messed up a face as Warwick, she also has her own Psychic Network. What does this tell me? It tells me that LaToya Jackson cannot lose The Apprentice! Would you enter a contest that you have psychically foreseen yourself losing? No way! She had to have had a vision of her winning it all!

I’d also like to add this scary nugget, courtesy of Wikipedia, currently celebrating ten years of helping students write bad term papers:

 On January 10, 2007, the reality TV show Armed & Famous premiered on CBS starring Jackson and other celebrities. The program documented Jackson‘s basic training and service as a reserve police officer with the Muncie Police Department. Jackson maintains her badge by continuing to volunteer as a deputy. The show was eventually removed from the CBS lineup, due to its inability to compete with American Idol. VH1 subsequently aired the remaining episodes. On the show, Jackson demonstrated her phobia of cats, after she began hysterically screaming and locked herself in a squad car. This fear, she revealed, was caused by a childhood memory in which a relative was attacked by a cat. She underwent on-screen therapy to try to relieve her of this phobia.

She didn’t come off too good on the show, but the Jackson clan in general has been looking pretty bad since Michael. The fighting and backstabbing of The Apprentice will be a relief to her.

So there you go. My pick to win it all? I tossed a coin and it came up “anyone but Gary Busey.”

Celebrity Apprentice Cast 2011: Casting a Wide Net in the Shallow End of the Pool

17 Jan

January 17, 2011

The new cast of Celebrity Apprentice was announced and while we are spared any idiots from Jersey Shore (Did you know that Snooki is an author? And I’m a concert pianist!) we do get a Real Housewife to class up the joint. As usual, the level of “celebrity” fluctuates greatly, but at least this time around most of the contestants have been working lately, which brings me to

DIONNE WARWICK

In its article, the Daily News charitably called her a singer. I know she can sing, and I know she once made a living that way, but has she performed lately? Has she put out a new single in the last decade? How long until you stop being a singer and start being a former singer? I know it is different for astronauts. Buzz Aldrin, even at age 200, is still considered an astronaut despite not having lifted off in decades. (Oh, his poor wife! That’s a joke- cue the rim shot!) I think the difference is that the job of an astronaut really only requires you to go up once or twice (Oh, his poor wife! Cue another rim shot!) while being a singer means you have to sing every once in a while. At any rate, she’s better known for being the public face (and what a decrepit face!) of the Psychic Friends Network. What does this tell me? It tells me that Dionne Warwick cannot lose The Apprentice! Would you enter a contest that you have psychically foreseen yourself losing? No way! She had to have had a vision of her winning it all! On the other hand, she’s also related to Whitley Houston, and if we could all see what was coming after Whitney married Bobby Brown why couldn’t she?

DAVID CASSIDY

Also a singer, and I bet he performs more shows than Dionne Warwick each year despite, like Dionne as well, having peaked in the 1970’s. Personally, I believe they picked the wrong Partridge. Wouldn’t scheming Danny Partridge be a better competitor? Just team him up with Reuben Kincaid and watch him weasel his way to the top. (Of course, Danny Bonaduce has more or less rendered himself unemployable over the last few years, but watching him self-destruct could be fun too.)

MEAT LOAF

Was this gag too obvious? I don't care.

Yet another singer! This one is best known for being named after a meal at your local diner, wearing strange frilly shirts, and sweating. Give him a break. If you were named Marvin you’d change your name to Meat Loaf too. No you wouldn’t? Neither would I. Anyway, The Man Called Loaf still records and performs despite coming across like a trained circus bear on stage. (And just as an aside, who can’t wait for a Warwick/Cassidy/Loaf collaboration?)

LATOYA JACKSON

Perhaps I should have warned you before springing this picture on you.

Well, she claims she’s a singer, though I’d dispute it. What’s to be said about the member of the Jackson family that even Michael thought was weird? In addition to having about as messed up a face as Warwick, she also has her own Psychic Network. What does this tell me? It tells me that LaToya Jackson cannot lose The Apprentice! Would youenter a contest that you have psychically foreseen yourself losing? No way! She had to have had a vision of her winning it all!

I’d also like to add this scary nugget, courtesy of Wikipedia, currently celebrating ten years of helping students write bad term papers:

On January 10, 2007, the reality TV show Armed & Famous premiered on CBS starring Jackson and other celebrities. The program documented Jackson‘s basic training and service as a reserve police officer with the Muncie Police Department. Jackson maintains her badge by continuing to volunteer as a deputy. The show was eventually removed from the CBS lineup, due to its inability to compete with American Idol. VH1 subsequently aired the remaining episodes. On the show, Jackson demonstrated her phobia of cats, after she began hysterically screaming and locked herself in a squad car. This fear, she revealed, was caused by a childhood memory in which a relative was attacked by a cat. She underwent on-screen therapy to try to relieve her of this phobia.

NIKI TAYLOR and HOPE DWORACZYK

Hope is on the left... or the right. Does it really matter?

They are not singers. They are hot models and frankly who cares if they sing or not?

NENE LEAKES

One of those “Real” Housewives, which means she must be totally annoying. I don’t know which state she’s from, don’t know anything about her, and didn’t even bother getting a picture of her. I assume she isn’t 4 feet tall and over 250 pounds and ugly because she is on TV and the one thing these reality show don’t show is reality.

RICHARD HATCH

Which Richard Hatch would you rather be stranded on an island with? HINT: He's wearing pants.

Trump really blew this pick. Instead of the guy who fought Cylons we got the fat guy who walked around naked and got in trouble with the IRS. See what it takes to be a celebrity? I guess they got him because the homeless guy with the deep voice is in rehab.

LIL JON

A picture is worth a thousand words. Or more in this case. I’m dying to see him interact with The Donald. Need I mention that he’s a rapper? That’s close enough to a singer to bring the musical total up to five so far.

MARLEE MATLIN

Selected Filmography:
Children of a Lesser God
Selected Television:
Reasonable Doubts
Seinfeld
Law and Order: SVU
Picket Fences
The Practice
The West Wing
Awards:
Best Actress Oscar
Best Performance Golden Globe
4 time Emmy nominee

I’m tempted to ask “what is she doing with this bunch?” but she was also on Dancing with the Stars so she must like this sort of thing.

MARK MCGRATH

Our sixth singer! (Marlee Matlin doesn’t sing.) You can’t say this guy isn’t smart. He parlayed his one and only hit (“Fly” by Sugar Ray- no, not the boxer) into a TV gig on the insipid Entertainment Tonight, or Extra, or whatever, they’re all the same. On the one hand it is the easiest job in the world- you smile and read stuff off of a teleprompter. On the other hand, you have to act like you really care about what the Kardashians are up to.

JOHN RICH

The New Face of Country, the Old Face of 80's Rock.

Yes, he is a singer- number seven (!) for those of you keeping score. He’s a Country singer but we’ll count him anyway. He is half of the band Big and Rich which was named after Donald Trump so he’s already sucking up.

LISA RINNA

Lisa Rinna is best known for once being relevant. I take that back. She is best known for here huge disgusting lips from botched plastic surgery. Seriously, she’s hideous. She recently had a show on TVLand where she underwent surgery to fix them. Let’s hope this was taped after, not before.

JOSE CANSECO

Another one who knows something about shooting stuff into his body is Jose Canseco. ‘Nuff said.

STAR JONES

She has a law degree and serves as a legal commentator, but everyone knows her for being fat. Morbidly obese. That was years ago and she’s lost the weight and donated her supply of Hostess Fruit Pies and lard to developing third world nations.

GARY BUSEY

Once an actor, Gary Busey now makes a living panhandling. HA ha ha, I’m just kidding. But you were halfway believing me, weren’t you? This is from Wikipedia:

At Pinsky’s recommendation, Busey was seen at the facility by psychiatrist Dr. Charles Sophy. Sophy suspected that Busey’s brain injury has had a greater effect on him than realized. He described it as essentially weakening his mental “filters” and causing him to speak and act impulsively.

Remember The Golden Girls? He’s Sophia! The same thing happened to her: Sophia had suffered a massive stroke, which, on more than one occasion, was said to have destroyed the part of her brain that acted as a censor. Who says life doesn’t imitate art?

BTW- He did his own singing as The Big Bopper in The Buddy Holly story, so I’m counting him as Singer Number Eight, though I’m sure the closest he comes nowadays to holding a tune is watching TV.

So what can we expect on the new, musical season of The Celebrity Apprentice? I expect viewers to be disgusted by LaToya Jackson’s horribly deformed face. Sheesh-it looks like her skull has lost most of its skin.

The real stars of The Celebrity Apprentice

UPDATE

I just saw a commercial for the show that featured that NeNe person, and man, she is going to be loudmouthed and annoyinig.