Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride

March 5, 2013

In honor of the return of Donald Trump and his ego, I represent my take on the cast of The Celebrity Apprentice All-Stars. A lot has happened since this originally ran back in October. However, not a single bit of it matters EXCEPT THIS:

Yeppers, that’s Dennis Rodman and North Korean lunatic Kim Jong Un. I HOPE AND PRAY that he convinces Kim to appear on the next season of Celebrity Apprentice.

Also this week, Mr. Blog favorite Paul Teutul showed up and bought a meatball, Brett Michaels got fired, and Omarosa continued to be her usual crappy self.  (And if you are expecting a weekly rundown this season, sorry, that’s it.)

From 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.”

Tags: 2013, All-Star Celebrity Apprentice, Apprentice, Bash at the Beach, Billy Baldwin, bmj2k, Brande Roderick, Brett Michaels, Celebrity Apprentice, Claudia Jordan, Dee Snider, Dennis Rodman, Donald Trump, Gary Busey, Kim JOng Un, La Toya Jackson, Lil Jon, Lisa Rinna, Mack the Knife, Marilu Henner, Mr. Blog, Mr. Blog's Tepid Ride, Mr. BTR, North Korea, Omarosa, Paul Teutul Sr., penn and teller, Penn Jillette, Team Trump, Trace Adkins, Trump, WCW