●We’ll dispense with the usual rundown of all things eye-rollingly wretched in the Reggie this week—our way of being nice, what with the new round of departures at OC’s largest-circ fishwrap just announced. So we won’t even get into that intellectually-challenging poll where the Reggie asked its dwindling readership what they thought of the new hot sauce at Del Taco. Or letter-writing idiot Norman Abbod of Lake Forest, who was offended by Jen Burke’s first-person shaggy dog story—literally, that’s what it was—and took time out from busily waiting for death to complain that Burke’s piece was “full of bad language” (apparently “poop,” “fart” and “loogie” hold a kind of blood-boiling power over certain curmudgeonly Reggie readers). And we won’t even complain about those obnoxious full-page, sometimes full-color house ads in the paper we see for Daybreak OC, the Reggie-sponsored mourning show (what’re you trying to do, Reggie—make your loyal readers even stupider by steering them to Daybreak, roost of that living cardboard cut-out that calls itself Pete Weitzner?). And we’ll just steer clear of commenting on the Reggie dipshit who branded Avril Lavigne a “punk-rock starlet.”
Right. What we’ll do instead is pontificate on the debut week of The Juice, the Reggie’s new daily three-minute . . . umm . . . v-cast? News report? Product placement circle-jerk? Fuel for a lunch-hour wank, since horny men will undoubtedly be choking the chicken while ogling hyper-perky host Jennifer Galardi?
The Juice is a little bit all of that, and, shockingly, not as wretched as we first thought it'd be. It’s still totally useless fluff, but Galardi is a professional fluffer par excellance. Juice producers even made her submit writing samples as part of her job interview, since only the bestest jurnlists can work for the Reggie!
Okay, let’s not be totally mean here. So what we get are five extra-short, blink-and-you-miss-it blurbs crammed into three minutes on whatever’s hot and trendy in OC (or not: Friday’s Juice had stuff on Diddy in Hollywood and Iron Man). A number of these segments feel more like commercials, though, which left us wanting to follow the money to see if anyone’s getting bought off, like those pseudo-stories on that Audi dealership, that yoga studio, that new Red Bull drink, and those two pieces that just happened to name-drop the Montage. Something on the dog beach at Huntington whizzed by so fast, we still aren’t sure what it was trying to communicate.
Other flaws: Thursday, where Galardi ran off a bunch of concerts going on this weekend, but the who-what-when was totally lost, and the accompanying Ticketmaster link was broken. And that segment where Galardi goes and gets her hair done at “Orange County’s hottest salon?” Maybe it would’ve helped if they had actually mentioned the salon name and where it’s located. (Gods N Heros in Costa Mesa, and feel free to thank us anytime for doing your work for you, Juice!)
Still, compared to other OC talking TV heads like Ed “The Corpse” Arnold and Pete “The Disney Automaton” Weitzner, we’d rather watch Galardi any day. But that’s kind of like having to choose which flavor of spray-can cheese you want shot up into your nose.
Also: that Juice-posted interview with Galardi on the Real Orange? HER NAME IS SPELLED WRONG, Reggie peeps.
No, really, thank you.
