Patton he ain't.

The History Channel never really had a chance.

Sorry, it just goes by "History" now, but they're not fooling anyone. Almost since its origin, the channel's been a running punch line for its heavy dependence on World War II material (and that war's most recognizable antagonist), before swerving sharply into WTF? territory with MonsterQuest The Real Scorpion King, and 9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction?

And while we can argue the relative merits of Life After People until the zombie apocalypse descends upon us, the final insult to anyone with an honest interest in the subject of history just might be giving a show to Larry the Cable Guy, whose last brush with the subject was probably getting kicked out of "The United States: 1865 to The Present" for drawing cocks on his book cover.

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In my opinion, mandatory helmets ruined competitive musical chairs.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at a network pitch meeting:

CW Exec 1: All right, what have you got for us?
Producer: Picture this: extreme musical chairs.
CW Exec 2: Are you high, like, right now?
Producer: Drunk. Tell me, have you seen the ABC show Wipeout?
CW Exec 1: Of course, everyone has. It's terrible.
Producer: That's basically what this is: obstacles and terrible commentary, only with chairs at the end.
CW Exec 1: ... fuck it, it's still better than anything NBC has.

I assume the process behind greenlighting the CW's Oh Sit! wasn't any more complicated than that. At least, I hope it wasn't.

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...and out came the wolves

Weddings are a pain in the ass. Everybody's clothes and hair must be just so, families have to be restrained from killing each other, and somehow you have to keep all your bitchy friends from making a spectacle of themselves.

I understand the bride has stuff to worry about, too.

And think how bad it would be if you were *judged*. Now, I don't mean the silent judging that all of us do at someone else's nuptials (a CASH BAR?), but rather allowing three strangers to attend your wedding ceremony and reception, and then rate the whole shebang on four criteria. The winner gets a paid trip for her and her new husband to an exotic destination, where the happy couple will have a week to ponder the horrible decision they've just made. Welcome to TLC's Four Weddings.

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Jorts *and* a personalized license plate? What are the odds?

There are a millions reality shows on the naked television. We're going to watch them all, one at a time.

Olympic gold medalist Ryan Lochte's dream is to have his own fashion line.

As dreams go, it's not that terrible, I suppose. Certainly it's a more original post-Olympic career path than "television analyst" or "convicted doper." Lochte does have a style, of sorts, and judging by what I see your average person wearing downtown on a Saturday night, I'm not completely willing to write off neon green high tops or T-shirts with my name turned into a Twitter hashtag.

Were there any shocking revelations in the debut of the new (and likely to be short-lived) reality series, What Would Ryan Lochte Do? Not really. He's as big a doofus as you've been led to believe by previous interviews. If anything surprised me, it was that he wasn't *quite* as monumental a d-bag as I'd assumed.

That could be due to the fact he doesn't know what the word means, however.

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Alice Cooper falls on hard times.

There are a million reality shows on the naked television. We're going to watch them all, one at a time.

There's a reason landlords tend to be venal and lazy, it's because doing the job right is an incredible pain in the ass, so most don't even bother. I know I'm not the only one with stories about waiting weeks for repairs, or rents jacked up without warning. I'd rather move my family into a Mercury station wagon than sign another apartment lease.

And why are there so many bad landlords? Tenants. If you're lucky, they merely show utter disregard for the property they're living in. At worst, they're using your property to cook meth or run an illegal daycare. Or both. You couldn't pay me enough to be a landlord.

Even then, some lessors have to be the most absolutely loathsome. Enter Spike TV and World's Worst Tenants, which purports to show you folks even worse than the guy I lived next to who played Emerson, Lake & Palmer at 2:00 AM every night.

I still have "Karn Evil" related nightmares.

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Three against one? Not very sporting.

There are a million reality shows on the naked television. We're going to watch them all, one at a time.

If you need concrete proof that America's middle class is disappearing*, you need look no further than basic cable reality programming.

The evidence is pretty clear. On one hand, you have the shows depicting the good life in the stratosphere of the 1/10 of the 1 Percent. Examples include the Real Housewives franchise, Shahs of Sunset, My Super Sweet 16 or House Hunter: Million Dollar Homes. The life of a rich person is, as Jeremiah Mercer might say, a sweet deal: sauntering through cavernous mansions, planning gala luncheons (there's naught wrong with gala luncheons!) or simply drinking around the pool while the landscape crew does their thing. Off camera, of course.

And then you have the other end of the spectrum. Your men who drive ice road trucks and perform dirty jobs. Your teen moms, your "Buckwilders" (RIP "Gandee Candy"). They occupy the ever growing lower-income brackets, and for all the ways the networks try to portray these folks as somehow inferior, one thing's for certain: They can probably fend for themselves better than the Kardashians should the shit hit the fan.

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Jon's gotta go get the papers get the papers.

There are a million reality shows on the naked television. We're going to watch them all, one at a time.

Managing a successful bar -- or restaurant or genital piercing establishment (trying to cover all the bases here) -- is a tricky proposition. Your might have a solid concept, a highly desirable location and hard-working, enthusiastic staff, and it still might not matter. Most bars fail (60 to 90 percent, depending on what unsourced Internet citation you believe), as is the case with many of the watering holes I frequented during and after college.

Failure in the retail and service industries has now become an industry unto itself. Or at least the reality subgenre of "rescuing" these struggling companies. If your hair salon is getting less business than the Flowbee, Tabatha Coffey will swoop in and set things right. If your restaurant's marquee is stuck at "Dozens and Dozens Served," Gordon Ramsay will scream at you for a couple of days before setting things right. And now, on Bar Rescue, if your tavern is more reminiscent of Moe's than Cheers, industry consultant Jon Taffer and his team will save you from a life of honest employment.

All whlle yelling slightly less than Gordon Ramsay.

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Wilkinson and Webb figure prominently in all ABC's promo shots, for some reason.

With ABC's Splash, the endgame to a sinister plot is in sight. Hollywood has finally found a way to kill off unwanted celebrities.

For years, Hollywood and the record and professional sports industries have been trying to figure out a way to deal with the embarrassing glut of formerly famous people. Frankly, they're everywhere, mounting futile comeback efforts or writing tell-all memoirs only the 14 remaining members of their fan club will read. It became apparent, even before the development of 17 separate fishing-related reality shows, that -- left unchecked -- the growing numbers of ex-celebrities would result in critical shortages of both Starbucks and Twitter bandwidth.

Now as you know, all meaningful changes take time to implement, so the goal was never going to be reached swiftly. It's taken many years and incremental advances to get where we are today: forcing C-list celebs into near cardiac arrest on Dancing with the Stars, goading past-their-prime actors into physical altercations on that Donald Trump show, and even going so far as to put overweight stars through a rigorous fat camp even though they've spent the last two decades on a diet of cocaine and botulinum toxin. Splash is merely the fruition of a sinister, long-percolating plan.

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Pick me! Pick me!

There are a million reality shows on the naked television. We're going to watch them all, one at a time.

I realize the dating scene is rough. It was bad enough in the days when the only way to meet someone was through random nighttime encounters, via your parents/friends or by coincidentally running into them at various points during your life before finally realizing you were both made for each other on New Year's Eve.

The point is, social media, online dating sites, "flirting apps" and easily obtainable background checks have made finding Mr. or Miss Right equivalent to one of the labors of Hercules. And that's just the normal people. Think about how tough it is out there for the One Percent, who have the additional task of sifting through all those potential life partners who may only want them (*gasp*) for their money.

Thank Croesus for Patti Stanger, who pairs the über-rich with the ex-Hooters waitresses who (occasionally) love them.

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"Now tell me about your penis. Repeatedly."

It's safe to say we live in a therapist culture. I don't know the exact percentage of Americans who currently seek some form of psychological assistance, but it's enough that doing so is no longer something people are ashamed to admit.

Which is a good thing, I guess. If talking through your problems and getting a different perspective on various root causes and self-destructive behaviors lifts you out of depression or helps you function as a better spouse/parent/corporate drone, more power to you.

But be honest; not every problem requires intervention, and not everyone in therapy needs to be there. For those with both extra disposable income and the need to air their mundane sexual issues in public, I give you L.A. Shrinks, a new Bravo show about Southern California's mildly disturbed and borderline neurotic doctors who treat them.

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