Sarah Palin, Reality TV

Sarah Palin has a reality TV show.

I just saw Chris Matthews argue it was a smart move on her part.

"RONALD REAGAN WAS ON DEATH VALLEY DAYS," he said. He was speaking normally, but it was as if a normal person were shouting.

So far, I haven't heard of reality television being anyone's ticket to success.

There was Danny Bonaduce's reality show. Shirley Jones called him and asked him what he was doing.

"Shirley, it's a paycheck," he said.

"It's the last paycheck you'll ever get," she told him.

Balloon Boy's father

Would-be reality TV star Richard Heene is marketing a back scratching device. It's sort of a wood thing that you're supposed to install in your living room so you can scratch your back like bears do in the wild.

For Balloon Boy's sake, I hope it's a success.

Tony Danza

It turns out Tony Danza was the smart one.

But his reality show, Teach, has been canceled. Probably just as well.

It seems that, before he became a boxer and then an actor, Danza got a degree in education. He planned on teaching high school.

He got his chance on this reality show. He goes to work as a high school English teacher.

The kids have no idea who he is.

"I think he was on Cheers," one of them says.

A kid does recognize him in the office.

The class has a couple of kids with learning disabilities as well as really smart kid. A girl cries when she does badly on a test. She takes off while Tony is getting her a kleenex. Tony violates state law by not allowing learning disabled kids to take their tests in the resource room. The smart kid is worried that he's wasting his time in that class even though he gets to be on TV.

The trouble with the show is that the kids don't know who he is and he won't tell them. He should have been regaling the class with stories about his time on Supertrain, or Canonball Run II.

There was Frank McCourt's book, Teacher Man. Publicizing the book, he told one story. Students tried to distract him, get him talking about something else, so they won't have to work.

"Are you from Scotland?"

"I'm not Scotch. I'm Irish."

"What's Irish?"

So, it goes on, a discussion of Irish life and culture.

"So, did you go out with girls in Ireland," one of them asks.

"No. Sheep. Damn it. We went out with sheep. What do you think."

Wouldn't the young people have been interested in hearing about Danza's time co-starring with orangutans in Going Ape? Wouldn't they want to know what Gavin McLeod was really like on the set of The Love Boat?

Instead they're stuck in a class with a 60-year-old teacher working his very first normal job 40 years after getting his degree.