My own private hell would, in fact, be in a kitchen. I don't like to cook, I am not good at cooking and I really hate the mess in the kitchen when you have actually made the effort to cook. It's like punishment for making that effort. The problem is, I have fairly sophisticated taste when it comes to food. I blame this on my mother. My mom is by far the best cook I know. Everything she makes could be served in a five-star restaurant. Even her macaroni and cheese is super-fancy with four different cheeses from around the world and finely chopped peppers and onions simmering perfectly over exactly the right level flame. I think back to growing up and I don't know how she did it. We never had the same meal twice in a month and everything was fresh and made from scratch. And all this after working a full day at work. My mind can't even begin to comprehend how she did it. Nor does it really want to.

I know that being a good cook is fairly simple. You have to be able to follow directions and just have some basic food and kitchen knowledge. Being a great chef is a whole different thing. Great chefs are artists, using food as a form of expression rather than such things as painting or playing music. Often times, with great artists comes great eccentric behavior and Gordon Ramsay does not disappoint. You might think it's an act, or played up for TV with all his swearing, yelling, and just general temper tantrums, but this guy has been around on British television for years and has always been the same. What the American version of his program doesn't show however, is the incredibly smart, funny and brilliant businessman that the original British version "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares" portrayed. Gordon Ramsay has built a food empire, from dozens of high-end restaurants, to cookbooks and TV shows. Everything he does, he does well and his high standards are maintained throughout.

More of OCD TV's voracious appetite for "Hell's Kitchen" after the jump...

The current joke of choice is all about celebs and rehab, what with our out of control Lindsey, Brittney and countless others having too good a time. I am personally of the opinion that neither of the aforementioned actually want to quit the drinking and drugs yet, it's really about the panic certain people are feeling when they sense that their cash cows are headed for slaughter. You know something isn't right when your lawyer is the one driving you to rehab. A year ago I would not have felt at all sorry for them and chalked it up to their being spoiled, having too much money and not enough responsibilities. But last year I started watching the show Intervention, and something strange happened. I began feeling something called empathy. Dammit.

Intervention is not a funny show, it's actually really sad and sometimes (hopefully) uplifting. What's funny is my realization that I am completely oblivious to who why where and how people abuse drugs. Up until a few years ago I thought freebasing was when a DJ scratches a record. I'm not kidding. I've always been that way, my parents educated me well enough at a young age for me to know that I wanted nothing to do with drugs, and my various circles of friends have always more interested in actually doing fun and interesting things rather than drinking, doing drugs and rotting our brains. I've heard lots of people talk about wild parties in high school but it honestly never even occurred to me and my friends to do anything other than make funny videos, watch movies and drive around places that we thought were creepy and scare ourselves silly. I realize how lame that may sound, but I just had no interest in doing anything else. My friends and I didn't really have anything to rebel against, and neither did most kids in my high school. We lived in a fairly affluent area where everyone seemed to live in a nice house, drive a nice car and have a nice family. That's triple nice. My high school seemed to be the opposite of a lot of schools I hear about. In my school the popular kids were the smartest, not nerds, but kids who had an A average and played sports like soccer, track and tennis were the most popular. I guess I went to a school of over achievers, no wonder I didn't really fit in. Anyway, drugs and alcohol were never a problem at my high school and it wasn't until kids went to college (as 98% of them did) that many of them were really exposed to that world.

More OCD TV after the jump.

You know what show I can't stand? "Dancing With The Stars." Ugh. Just the thought of its pandering smarminess nauseates me, and if you feel the same way, I have good news. To counteract the feeling of disgust that lingers a week after the "Dancing With The Stars" sugary, tacky finale, there is "So You Think You Can Dance," and the answer is yes. Not for me, personally. I'm fine dancing with friends at parties and doing a bit o' robot every so often, but I can't Dance. Note the capital D.

I caught the show last season after "American Idol" finished and since it's from the same creators, the set-up is almost identical. It's a simple formula and it works; auditions with really ridiculous people just trying to get on television and people whose raw talent makes me feel incredibly insignificant in the boogie-woogie department. There are three judges; a "mean" British guy, one stupidly freaky woman and then the third rotates through different choreographers whom I've never heard of because I never thought about choreographers long enough to remember a name except for Bob Fosse because his name gets stuck in front of show titles. Phew. There is also the host, Cat Deeley, who talks to everyone as though they are 5-years old, including the viewing audience, but she's hot, so no one seems to mind.

P.S. That girl has a great hair stylist.

So you think you're done reading? Wrong. There's more after the jump...

It's hard to believe that TV season is almost over and the summer schedule is about to begin. I feel overwhelmed with season finales. One show that has been dragging out its season finale for three weeks now is "Medium." "Medium" has my favorite opening credits on television, with the Hitchcockian music and a psychedelic version of the Rorschach test. The show itself has fairly simple story lines, sometimes to the extent of over-explaining, but is saved from it's simplicity with surprisingly good acting and a great sense of a real-life family.

We've all heard of psychics aiding police detectives in murder cases when the police are at a dead end (this show is even based on the real Allison Dubois, a medium who claims to have assisted the police on many cases), but in "Medium" they cut all the unnecessary corners and the psychic works directly with the D.A.'s office, giving clues to the police to help solve cases. She also helps pick jurors by psychically knowing their true feelings and emotions, which I find to be slightly unfair to the defense. It doesn't matter, though, because that part's boring anyway. I just want her to solve gruesome murders.

If you're psychic, you already know what comes after the jump...

I'm nervous. I am about to write about the show that has been written about probably more than any other show in recent television history. I have been putting off writing about "Lost" since the very beginning of OCD TV because it felt like such a gargantuan monster compared to the friendly little reality shows I have been writing about. It seems that there is nothing that hasn't been said about this show, from conspiracy theories to frustration and annoyance with the complexity of the plot, so I'm going to write about it in a way that I know hasn't been done before. This is just how "Lost" relates to me.

I have always loved puzzles, even as a really young child I loved doing puzzles, or figuring out mazes. I'm also a voracious reader and it was a short time before I found that my favorite stories were strange, scary ones with a surprising ending. Anything by Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, Graham Wilson. E. F. Benson and a few others also suited my palette. They are masters of strange, unnerving stories with unexpected conclusions. For me, "Lost" maintains the same principle. It's like a giant puzzle and there is a certain feeling of satisfaction when one of the pieces fits.

For example, the Sawyer storyline of his being on a quest to kill the man who caused his parents' deaths had sort of sat to the side like a middle piece of puzzle that didn't yet have another piece to attach to for quite some time. Enter John Locke and his amazingly horrible father and all of a sudden, that piece of puzzle that is sitting on the side looks like it might just have the right edge to fit with the Locke piece already in place. If you saw the episode, you know that those two pieces did fit together very well indeed, much to my great satisfaction.

I am also drawn to "Lost" because, much like the macabre books I love so much, atmosphere is key to the story. The island IS the atmosphere of "Lost," and is imposing and intimidating whether it's day or night. That's really quite a rarity. What seems frightening at night is usually very ordinary in the day, but not in this place. Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all and what could be more unknown than being stranded on a creepy island with a bunch of strangers and no way of getting off?

More of Sarah lurking around on the island after the jump...

Whomever came up with the idea for a show about the day to day life of little people is stupidly smart. I mean seriously, who doesn't love midgets? Yes I know, the PC word is little people and technically the Roloff family are actually dwarves, but sometimes you just have to say midget, it's a fun word.

I think everyone has had a fascination with little people at some time in their lives, dwarves and midgets have been in the spotlight dating back to the middle ages when they were often viewed as very special or being "touched by god" (with an oddly shaped finger I suppose), and then eventually fell out of favor and became "freaks" relegated to the difficult life of the circus. (I'm skipping ahead a few hundred years here but you get the point) I've read quite a bit on circus freaks (in a purely scholarly basis I can assure you...) and even there the dwarves/midgets had a tough time. When some guy with a second head on his chest or a women with no arms and three legs would show up, the dwarf and/or midget just wasn't quite freaky enough and would be forced to freak it up a bit by wearing a humiliating outfit and doing stunts that must have been quite tough on that little body. So like anyone with physical differences, little people have it a bit tougher than regular folk and that's sort of the point of the show. Little people may have it tougher but that doesn't mean they can't do what we do, they just do it differently.

More on "Little People, Big World" after the jump.

Welcome back to another addition of OCD TV! Today I would like to talk about a little British show called Katie and Peter. I myself am a half Brit, I grew up over there until my pre teen years and my mother and her whole family are English which may explain why while my humor runs on the dry side, I still find men dressing in women's clothes for comedy absolutely hilarious. I also sometimes have trouble putting my u's and e's in different places but that's something I am working diligently with a weekly therapist to cure. So I might be a bit biased on this weeks subject, but I will do my best to approach it as if I were not in fact British, but Swiss.

I first discovered Katie Price and Peter Andre about two and half years ago when I was over in England visiting family and my boyfriend. (yes my boyfriend is also British, I keep it real yo) The T.V. was on while we were getting ready to go out,I wasn't really paying much attention to it, I just remember glancing at it and seeing two incredibly tanned people talking to one incredibly pale person in a talk show format. The shear magnitude of their tans on a British talk show caught my interest, as well as their matching outfits and heavy make up and so I started listening. What I heard was one of the funniest interviews I had seen on Television, the two tanees were obviously a couple and the segment turned into them having an argument about who they had slept with and how slutty they both were before meeting each other. That in itself may not sound like the height of comedy, but it really was the argument itself, it was real and the girl had the most wicked mouth on her and it was honestly just funny. Nothing scripted or fake, just real, in the moment and funny. In the middle of this I called my boyfriend into the room and asked him who the heck these oddly browned people were. He told me that the girl was known as Jordan, a Page 3 Glamour model (from tabloid newspaper The Sun which features topless models on the third page of the paper) who was famous for getting into fights in public with other models and just for generally being a bit wild. The guy was Peter Andre, a sort of washed up Australian pop singer who had a few hits in the early 90's but hadn't done anything since. The couple had met on the show I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here,! where B list celebs live in the jungle without the comforts of home, and the two were inseparable ever since.

More on Jordan and Peter after the jump.

Sarah apologizes for the lateness of last week's column, but she was sick...and on a weekend. So have a heart, already! Cut the woman some slack! She's doing her best!

The Girls Next Door

This is my third season watching "The Girls Next Door". I caught it completely by accident the first time. It aired about halfway through the first season and I thought it was going to be dumbest, grossest, most annoying show ever. Therefore, I must the dumbest, grossest most annoying person ever because I haven't stopped watching it since. I LOVE IT!

Once again, I find myself completely enthralled with a show whose main premise and morals are my complete opposite. I mean, let's be honest, this is a show about kept women. They are sort of like prostitutes who hit the jackpot. They are paid tons of money, are showered with gifts, given hot cars and a super fancy place to live--all for boning a gross old man. But through the genius of editing and some actually somewhat interesting personalities, I find myself not minding the 50-year set-back in women's liberation and just enjoy watching the behind-the-scenes view into in the home of the most famous men's magazine mogul of all time.

More on Sarah's peek inside the Playboy mansion after the jump...

One of the shows that I really got into recently was Top Design on Bravo and I was sad that it finished on Wednesday because I was so into seeing the cool rooms that the contestants put together. It wasn't the most exciting show, but I just loved seeing the creativity and how the designers truly made something out of nothing. The replacement show for Top Design follows an almost identical judging/hosting format but with stranger contestants and lots of hair. The show is Shear Genius, but the first episode was more like Shear Weirdness.

I've always sort felt like I had an hairdresser lurking inside me. I would always jump at the chance to cut friends hair, but they would always back out at the last minute leaving me standing heartbroken in the bathroom with a pair of paper cutting scissors in my hand, forcing me to resort to just cutting my own bangs. The last time I was allowed to cut my sister's bangs was when she was in middle school and I cut them right before she had a choral concert and left them about an inch long and her sobbing uncontrollably. I think I put a barrette in her hair and convinced her no one would notice even though she looked like a little Julius Caesar. Luckily we are fast hair growers in my family so she only had to go to school looking like a Roman emperor for a month.

More of Sarah's observations about "Shear Genuis" are after the jump.

Hello my fancy Lupines, and thank you for joining me once again for another installment of OCD TV. Before I begin this weeks column, a few of you were kind enough to leave comments last week asking questions, and so I should like to be kind enough to answer. I also buy muffins for homeless men and rescue small children from drowning if I'm not too full of cookies. So here are you answers, in order;

1. thanks, I thought so too, and yes I do

2. it rhymes with Zrach Blaff

3. I am, and I do

And now, this weeks edition of OCD TV.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before the boys of famous people were given a reality tv show just like their girls of famous people counterparts. For whatever reason, the boys are not as famous as the girls in Hollywood gossip (perhaps because they don't dress quite as slutty), often seeming to hit the spotlight only if they are dating one the girls for the usual five minute Hollywood relationship. After watching Sons of Hollywood on A&E, I have decided that it's actually because they are really huge douchebags who don't do anything more interesting than call each other names like "mama's boy" and live as manchildren off their parents fortunes while the rest of the world tries to make a decent living. I'm a little grumpy today.

More on the "Sons of Hollywood" after the jump.