I spuddle.

Last night was the premiere of The Bachelor, which, if you’re me, is akin to my birthday and Easter and the day that JCrew Final Sale goes an extra 30% off all rolled into one.    In my case, it also included a visit to the eye doctor due to a Christmas Day eye injury that involved a toy called a Hot Potato and MY EYE and a full-force overhand pitch from my stepson who was located two feet away.    You can go ahead and do the math.   In any event, I had drops in my eyes which gave the premiere of The Bachelor a nice, Vaseline-on-the-lens look that added to the overall impression of soft-core porn that it generally conveys anyway.   In this instance, the shower scene featuring Jake’s abs made me wonder if it wasn’t actually gay soft-core porn.    I mean, really, do we need (or want) to see Jake soaping himself?   I think (but I could be wrong) that it’s sort of a guy thing to get all in a lather (ha ha, good pun! Or not!) about shower scenes.   But what do I know?  Not much, that’s what.   I mean, I thought social networking was a blip.   How you take anything I say seriously, I have no idea.

What I DO know is that I AM RIGHT.   About most things, and in this case, about the fact that Jake is a tiny, wee man of diminutive proportions.   I have it on GOOD AUTHORITY (i.e. unsubstantiated gossip) that he is 5′6″ and the fact that ALL reference to his height (and the height of the girls on the show) has been removed from sites (like IMDB) that usually give this information up substantiates this.    The fact that he’s short is really no big deal (although explains a lot about why he feels he has to be Super Extra Nice Guy all the time), or it wouldn’t be, if it wasn’t so obvious that ABC was trying to hide the fact that he’s short.    That makes people like me go insane with joy when they hear on the grapevine that indeed, the man is both short and likes to discuss his emotional state on his cell phone while strolling through airports.    It doesn’t take much to thrill and delight me, obviously.   But it DID make it pretty amusing when Chris did his one-on-one interview with Jake and it was pretty clear that Jake was perched on what amounted to a high chair (or was he sitting on a phone book?  Or two?), legs dangling over the floor, in order to appear to be the taller of the two.    THAT, my friends, is TV gold.    Am not sure why.   It just is.

So, to the show.   After the opening scenes of Jake running around with no shirt, swimming, showering, building furniture (with no shirt) and strolling around town (no shirt) and his house (no shirt), the audience was in a veritable frenzy of wondering:   Does Jake even own a shirt?   (Apart from his uniform, which we know that he wears generally all the time when he’s forced to wear a shirt against his will.   Hey, maybe Jake could start some kind of shirt-free airline where all the pilots and stewards are all shirtless all the time.   I bet that would turn around the fortunes of some of those small, struggling US airlines.  And I give you this marketing gem for FREE, SouthWest.   Enjoy!)

An absolutely nauseating montage of biographies of the various contestants followed, during which I mostly pondered why some of the surgeons who performed the many many implant operations featured on this show were not in jail.    I mean, seriously.   Some of these girls have (fake) breasts that are larger than their heads.   That’s just not right.   When your cleavage starts to look like a stretched piece of chewed gum, you have to worry.    Don’t you?   I mean, is it just me?    In any event, it was easy to tell from the way that some girls got ten minutes of screen time to discuss how their last boyfriend liked to sneak into their room-mate’s bed at night, and others weren’t mentioned at all, who would be picked.   I may have nodded off because when I try to recall details, I just get that disoriented feeling you get when you’ve been awake since Christmas Eve.   Which I have.

I think I can summarize nicely when I say that there were a bunch of girls, all of whom enjoy frolicking in their bikinis on the beach, often doing gymnastics at the same time, while regaling people with sordid tales of that time their ex-boyfriend cheated on them.   So, the usual.

According to Chris Harrison, Jake is the first contestant in Bachelor history to have “truly come to find his wife”.   Um, so the others didn’t?   ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT THIS SHOW IS NOT REALLY ABOUT TRUE LOVE?   Shocking, Chris Harrison.   Really, really shocking.   But also depressing.   Has Jake never watched the show?   The odds of him finding “true love” here are really really poor.   I’d wager he had a better chance of finding “true love” by purchasing a bride from somewhere in Eastern Europe.    The girls on this show are fairly obviously interested in their appearance, their breasts, and their hideously awful bright-coloured prom/pagaent dresses and, you know, FAME.    But maybe I’m cynical.   I mean, maybe he WILL find “love” with one of these bizarre TV Barbies that the network has built in their basement lab using only a bag of silicone, 25 wigs, and a pack of Bubblicious.    Maybe.

Er, or maybe not.

Anywho, the show dragged on and the details blurred together.   The one girl I actually liked, Elizabeth from Washington, didn’t stand a chance.   I knew it.   I mean, she had no breasts.    Durh.

So then I had some tea and regained consciousness/focus and there were a bunch of girls screaming (WHY do girls in a group always scream with their mouths wide open when they are presented with something “exciting”?   It’s a mystery more profound than crop circles, I tell you.) and a great many breasts partially exposed in a way that caused the people in charge of the blurring function to up their dose of Cymbalta.  Was it Jake?  With no shirt?   Elvis?   GOD HIMSELF?

No.   Of course not.

It was (drumroll!  trumpets!)  Jillian and Ed.    Ed looking sheepish and slimey.   Jillian looking annoyed and suspicious.    Just who you want sizing up your future wife!   A girl who dumped you on national TV and the lying, cheating bastard she chose over you!    Perfect.   I can see why the girls were screaming.    Ed predictably picked the girl with the largest rack and Jillian picked …. actually, I can’t remember.   And does it matter?   No, it does not.   Because they both emphatically stated that Michelle was a nutcase (OBVIOUS) and Jake picked her anyway.     Maybe there is some kind of production requirement to choose at least one contestant who is off her meds.

I’m going to wind this up and say that he picked a bunch of girls who I can’t yet tell apart but who uniformly had gigantic hooters.    It’s not important yet who they are, it only gets good later when they’ve distinguished themselves through degrees of relative insanity.    For now, it’s just a gaggle of girls, gagging to get at Jake.     I hope they are also gagging for God because Jake ranks God above friends and family which makes me wonder just how this show is going to go over in the Bible Belt of America, an audience that ABC is obviously attempting to pander to in some misguided way.

Oh!  I forgot that I was going to mention that I need to stop referring to Jake as a failed actor.   He didn’t FAIL, people.   He was bored with acting.   Acting?   Dull.   Flying a commercial plane between small American cities?   GRIPPING!   Why I bet that right now Chuck Norris is thinking, “Why did I waste all that time on Walker, Texas Ranger when I could have been working for United, taking people where they want to go?   Now THAT would have been an exciting career.”   On the plus side, and I’m actually being semi-serious, I think it’s great that Jake loves his job.   He’s clearly overcompensating for the fact that EVERY SINGLE PERSON in his family is a doctor.   He had planned to SHOW THEM ALL by being a famous actor, but when that didn’t work, he had to do SOMETHING.  So instead of being rich and successful and saving lives, he is going to proselytize the joy of flying at every chance he gets until maybe, just maybe, he believes it himself.    I’m starting to believe it, if only because every time we see a silhouette of Jake (shirtless) against a setting sun, a plane flies by.   It must be some sort of a sign!  And not a clever use of editing tools!   FLYING IS … GOD’S WORK!   Or something.

I don’t have a pithy conclusion to this post, so I’ll just stop typing and I’ll see you in a week for the next episode, during which I’m going to bet JAKE WEARS NO SHIRT, GIRLS WEAR BIKINIS, and A BUNCH OF PEOPLE CRY.   By golly, it just makes you feel ALIVE, doesn’t it?

Filed under: The Bachelor