But do I care? Yes. Yes I do.

This is the third time I'm writing this post. The first two attempts were, of course, brilliantly hilarious, (hilariously brilliant?), but I've been having some router issues and keep losing my internet connection, resulting in those posts being lost forever to the cyber graveyard. It's a shame, really, because it was some of my best work. Ah, delusion.

At any rate, I just got off the phone with another one of my Verizon boyfriends, and hopefully, everything's hunky dory now.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I feel I should tell you that my brain isn't really functioning right now due to excessive consumption of refined sugar. This is due to two factors:

1. A gross miscalculation in the number of trick-or-treaters I'd get last night for Halloween and the resulting mountain of leftover candy it is now my duty as an American to eat by myself
2. I have a mild case of the flu, and my doctor told me it's dehydrating my intestines (yum!) and that I need to drink nothing but Gatorade for the next 48 hours in order to restore the delicate balance of electrolytes and bile to my system

Okay, so this post was originally about But Can They Sing?, a personal favor to me by VH1. See, some executive over at the network crawled inside my dreams and found out that I would very much welcome a show where a group of "celebrities" so obscure that even a pop-culture junkie such as myself hadn't heard of half of them would be given microphones and instructed to sing and compete with each other for the votes of the television audience, (kind of like American Idol with more cosmetic surgery, not counting Paula Abdul).

The first episode aired on Sunday, and I was very much looking forward to it. See, being sick, I have been watching far more than the recommended daily allowance of shitty television. (For instance, while I am normally a fierce Judge Judy loyalist, I have lately been faced with so few daytime viewing options that I have been forced to sit in the courtrooms of the obnoxious Judge Mathis, the affable Judge Larry Joe, the shrill Judge Mayblean and the sassy Judge Milian). Anyway, VH1 has also been playing its latest installment of their I Love the 80's series on a loop, and while I do love me some Hal Sparks, enough is enough. So I was excited when But Can They Sing? came along.

But I was faced with a dilemma. At 10pm on Sunday, at the same time that BCTS? was airing, a new episode of Intervention was up over on A & E. Now, I love that show for a very different reason than I love shows like BCTS? I love Intervention because it is actually good television. It's the best of reality TV, I think, because instead of trying to create artificial drama, (by, say, putting a bunch of stupid and attractive twentysomethings in a house and liquoring them up), it merely observes the inherent drama of substance abuse and its repercussions, which are quite moving and truly can't-look-away compelling. So, I flipped back and forth between Intervention and BCTS? and definitely spent more time watching the former.

I was really only interested in two of the "singers," though. The first was Bai Ling. Now, those of us who read the Fug know La Ling as an alleged "actress" who wears the most hideously comical, occasionally genital-revealing outfits to every red carpet event her agent manages to get her invited to. I must say that Bai didn't disappoint, in that she was both a phenomenally bad singer, (her voice is freakishly low which only furthers my theory that she's a Chinese trannie), and her outfit was glorious. She sang "Like a Virgin" in a huge poufy red dress, writhing around on the floor and revealing at the end of her performance that the skirt was detachable! And, truly, what could be more redundant than Bai Ling in a detachable skirt?

The other person on the show I was interested in was Carmine Gotti...excuse me, Carmine Gotti Agnello. I don't know why he now wants to be associated with his less-famously-named father, (who is barely mentioned on Growing Up Gotti), especially since Carmine's bio on the VH1 site sees fit to tell us that his father is "a made member of the Gambino crime family who is currently doing time for arson and racketeering." HOT!! Anyway, I love to hate the Gotti boys, with their plastic hair and unintelligible diction. They're like all those asshole kids who hang out at the mall except, you know, connected. Anyway, I'm sorry to say that I only caught the last few seconds of Carmine's rendition of "Ride With Me," but it was enough to reaffirm my faith in humanity in that he sucked. Believe me, if that kid wound up having some sort of discernible talent, I'd have to reevaluate my entire worldview.

At the VH1 site, you can vote for your favorite. I'm voting for Bai, because I need to see her clothes every week. I hope this Sunday she does "I Believe I Can Fly" in a pair of breakaway pants. I don't know why that makes sense, but it does.