Hi, Kids! It’s a rare midday update!

Last night I watched Celebrity Poker (and no, I didn’t ride the exercise bike… shut up). One of the players was the lead singer for Creed, Scott Stapp. Oh boy, was he dumb. Or maybe drunk. I don’t know. But by the end of his stack, he was just asking the dealer to make every decision for him. He was acting like a child; protesting every lost hand. Dude, if you’ve never played poker before, why go on national TV to do it for the first time? That guy needs to stick to videos and stay away from unscripted situations.

This was the worst episode ever of Celebrity Poker. Tom Green, though he may actually be a good player, never got any cards good enough to bet. At least he didn’t act like the ass that Stapp did. Frankly I expected Green to be the worst. But he didn’t come off too bad. Except for being the first one eliminated.

Carrie Fisher was a dottering old yenta. Remember how hot Princess Leia was? Those days are gone forever.

The show got so much better once it was down to David Cross (a comedian probably best known, to me anyway, as the guy who ran the morgue in Men In Black) and Mimi Rodgers (who is still way hot). Cross was a good player, and a little funny. Rogers was a good player and her intelligence stood out in sharp contrast when she was playing against Fisher and Stapp. Unfortunately, once she lost the idiots as her opponents, she lost her confidence. Cross bluffed her out of most of her chips. Then, forced to go all in on a pair of twos, Cross beat her with a humiliating pair of threes.

But the most surprising thing to me about the show was the liberal use, unblurred, of the middle finger. Rogers, Fisher and, I think, even Cross, all flipped the bird. Fisher and Rogers gave each other long, rotating double-handed salutes. And they left it all in! When did that become acceptable? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not offended. I’m surprised it was allowed. Maybe it was because Bravo is shoved way up in the high numbered channels of basic cable. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen that on TV.

I’ve always hated the standards of American television. I think it’s insane that you can’t show a woman’s breasts, or even say the word “tits”. But you can show somebody getting shot in the head. Hell, after 8pm, you can’t even flip through the channels without seeing two or three people getting shot in the head. How is that right? Aren’t the standards supposed to make value judgments on the type of behaviors we don’t want people imitating? Which behavior to we want to suppress more: people shooting people in the head, or women taking off their shirts? I know which way I’d vote…