don't take no rhythm, don't take no style

The new year brings us a new blogger! I am very much looking forward to reading my friend Bean's comments on a regular basis. If he had started his blog a day earlier, I could have tagged him with that meme thing from yesterday.

Bean's first post is about Dick Clark's return to television last night. I recorded Dick Clark on the TiVo while I flipped between Regis Philbin and Carson Daly. A Google search uncovered several blog entries about Dick Clark's performance. Some are nice, some not so nice.

It may have been the lateness of the hour but I'm thinking NBC and Carson did the best job of it with their Mary J. Blige performance and Melissa Stark's street coverage. It was a solid show with no obvious mistakes.

Dick Clark's impaired speech took some getting used to, yet he was much easier to understand than Kirk Douglas. I wonder if they considered pre-taping Dick's segments. He missed a few numbers while counting down from 15, which made me feel sympathy for him. Or maybe he actually was on tape since I never saw him and Ryan Seacrest on camera together. Seacrest neither added nor detracted from the show but Hilary Duff and her teeth were a waste of time and space, especially when she sang. As Ken Levine pointed out, ABC also had Mariah Carey in her ill-fitting costume.

Poor Regis. He was stuck on Fox. The best they could come up with for him to open the show was a phone interview with Carrie Underwood. A phone interview? He's Regis! They followed that with another phone interview, this time with Donald Trump. By the time I flipped back to Fox, Regis was talking football with former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz, who at least had the decency to show up in person. Oh yeah, Jillian Barberie was there too.