Bret Michaels Transforms Transportation on Rock My RV
joe.rhodes
The Truckers Are on the (Icy) Road Again
The first thing Hugh "the Polar Bear" Rowland tells me when we climb into his massive snow-white Freightliner truck, preparing to head onto the northernmost ice road in the world, is to leave my seat belt unbuckled. He says if something goes wrong out here — on the frozen Mackenzie River, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle and headed toward the Beaufort Sea — hitting the windshield will be the least of our worries. He laughs when he says this (Rowland laughs a lot), but he's not kidding. The temperature outside is 20 degrees below zero, and if you're in a 50-ton vehicle that happens to go through a soft spot in the ice and into fast-freezing water that will kill you in 10 minutes or less, you don't want to be strapped in. He's got his sleeves rolled up, his window rolled halfway down, like a man going out for a Sunday drive. I, on the other hand, am bundled into as many layers of Gore-Tex and thermal underwear as I can find, barely able to bend my legs and climb into
Sitting on The Moment of Truth's Hot Seat
Think Fox's controversial quiz show The Moment of Truth (Wednesdays at 8 pm/ET) is nothing but hype? TV Guide's own Joe Rhodes strapped himself in for a revealing polygraph test to find out. Here, he gives us his first-person account. I'm not really nervous until the rubber tubes are strapped across my chest, the cuff is fastened to my left arm, and the metal plates are attached to the first and third fingers of my right hand. Until that moment, I assume, as most people do, that getting hooked up to the Moment of Truth polygraph machine and answering a few questions will be the easiest thing in the world. It isn't. Even with nothing at stake — no chance at the show's $500,000 prize, no loved ones sitting just feet away wondering what horrible things I'm about to reveal, and no jeering studio audience — there is still something unsettling about sitting in a basement ro
Shocking Celebrity Rehab Moments Revealed
Approximately 72 hours into the harrowing 21-day treatment regimen that is now playing itself out as Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew on VH1, an amazing thing happened, even more shocking than the sight of Crazy Town's Seth "Shifty" Binzer smoking crack while cameras rolled, incapacitated former Taxi star Jeff Conaway's horrible, convulsive withdrawal symptoms, or even the confiscation of porn star Mary Carey's sex toys. Behind the scenes, VH1 executives, who were on location last August at the Pasadena Recovery Center, made an unprecedented decision: Instead of manipulating the action in the standard reality-show way — by introducing artificial dramatic elements to make sure the storylines stayed interesting — they decided to let the treatment process unfold on its own, organically, just as Dr. Drew Pinsky had be
Why Paige Davis Returned to Trading Spaces (and Vice Versa)
Paige Davis — perky as ever, but older, wiser and with darker, straighter hair — thought long and hard before agreeing to return to TLC's Trading Spaces, the genre-establishing home-makeover show that made her famous in 2001 and then abruptly fired her in 2005 because producers wanted the show to go in a different direction. Which it did — straight down the ratings tubes. Now Davis is back and the new season premieres tonight at 10 pm/ET. When new management took over at TLC last year, one of their first priorities was revitalizing Trading Spaces, which at its peak drew as many as nine million viewers and was consistently Saturday night's top-rated cable show. Brant Pinvidic, TLC's new senior vice president of programming, decided the only way to save the franchise was to get Davis back in the fold. It w
Extreme Takeover: The Makeover Show Hits 100!
Ty and his crew invade a small Minnesota town for the feel-good hit's 100th episode (Sunday, Nov. 25, 7 pm/ET on ABC). Practically everyone in Minnetonka, Minnesota — everyone, that is, except the Swenson-Lee family — knew what was going to happen on the morning of Aug. 22. They'd all been warned, discreetly, that every street within a half-mile radius of the Swenson-Lee home, at the corner of Park Lane and Oberlin Road, was about to be blocked off, that barricades would be manned by the local police and no one would be allowed to enter the "impact zone" without a special authorized pass.Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, ABC's feel-good Sunday-night hit guaranteed to tug at your heart, bring a tear to your eye and remind you, frequently, that Kenmore appliances and Craftsman tools are available at Sears, was coming to
Cavemen Preview: The Truth About ABC's Primitive Stars
It is, until the moment the Caveman walks in, just another Tuesday night at Ford's Filling Station, a moderately upscale and oh-so-modern bistro in Culver City, California, the kind of place that caters to middle managers out on the town. There are lots of guys with beepers on their belts, ordering blood-orange margaritas and brick-oven flatbreads, steak tartare with pickled fennel and truffle chips ($14), passing time after work or before they head over to the multiplex for a night at the movies. You can dine outside by the sidewalk, or in the dim-lit dining room with exposed beams and brick walls, fresh flowers and lit candles at every table, the salt and pepper in tiny wooden bowls with tiny wooden spoons. All very tasteful, in a suburban-chic kind of way.They get a stray celebrity in here every now and then, the Sony Pictures Lot being just a few blocks away, but they've never seen a Caveman before, strolling in from Culver Boulevard in all his hairy-faced, r
Suzy Kolber Has a Monday Night Date
Before she made headlines by snapping back at Andy Rooney's 2002 sputterings about how women had "no business" talking about football, and long before Joe Namath — drunk and slurry, in a sideline moment preserved for all time by thousands of YouTube downloads — declared that he wanted to kiss her, Suzy Kolber was a little girl in love with football. She remembers being 8 years old, in suburban Philadelphia, mesmerized by Howard Cosell's Monday-night halftime highlights. She made national headlines when she was 10, one of the first girls to make a boy's football
Suzy Kolber Has a Monday Night Date
Before she made headlines by snapping back at Andy Rooney's 2002 sputterings about how women had "no business" talking about football, and long before Joe Namath — drunk and slurry, in a sideline moment preserved for all time by thousands of YouTube downloads — declared that he wanted to kiss her, Suzy Kolber was a little girl in love with football. She remembers being 8 years old, in suburban Philadelphia, mesmerized by Howard Cosell's Monday-night halftime highlights. She made national headlines when she was 10, one of the first girls to make a boy's football
Jillian Barberie on Skating 'n' Dating
Jillian Barberie, the breakout star of Fox's Skating with Celebrities (Mondays at 8 pm/ET), shares with TV Guide why Dorothy Hamill made her teary and how true love is hard to find. TV Guide: Because you were a competitive skater as a kid in Canada, some people think you have an unfair advantage. Aren't you kind of a ringer? Jillian Barberie: Well, I hung up my skates at 13 and I'm 39 now: You do the math. It's what I did as a kid after school to kind of keep me out of trouble, and I loved it. But by the time I was 13, I wanted to go to movies and hang out with my friends and go out with boys. I wanted to major in boys. TV Guide: But you're able to
Why the Super Bowl Is Totally XL-ent
Finally — and we don't know what took them so long — the National Football League has decided to give its championship game the name it deserves: XL. It's an appellation worthy of the most enormously important sporting/cultural/commercial-watching event of the year. At last, we have Super Bowl XL, which stands for Extra Large. (Kickoff is Sunday at 6:25 pm/ET on ABC). XL represents not just the monumental importance of the football game but also the Veritable Bigness for which this country stands: our Extra-Large dreams, our Extra-Large appetites and the Extra-Large freedom that allows us as Americans to be comfortable in our Extra-Large underpants. (No, wait a second. It has just been pointed out to us, by people calling themselves "editors," that the "XL" actually has nothing to do with the monstrous proportions of this particular Super Bowl. Instead, it's the Roman numeral indicating that this is Super Bowl No. 40.) But it doesn't change the fact th
Vet Earns M.D. on Grey's Anatomy
For the first 23 years of his life, before he embarked on a circuitous two-decade acting career and the breakout role of Dr. Preston Burke on Grey's Anatomy, Isaiah Washington walked a very straight line. He woke up every day knowing exactly what he was supposed to do and who he was supposed to be. Everyone in his suburban Houston neighborhood — where he did his homework, got good grades and stayed out of trouble — knew he was going to get a football scholarship to pay his way through college. But even when that didn't happen, he simply went to the backup plan and joined the Air Force, where he learned enough about aerospace engineering to land a successful private sector job in Washington, D.C. Throughout it all, he showed up every day and worked hard, and if he had any questions, he asked someone in charge: a coach, a superior officer, a boss. He got married the day aft
