Woody: Girls gone wild???

By LARRY WOODY

Every time I think the glut of TV "reality" shows can't get any quirkier, I change the channel and discover I was wrong.

The other night I came across something called "American Hoggers." The plot, as best I could determine, consisted of comely young lasses chasing wild hogs through bogs.

They (the hogs) would invariably end up squealing in the mud with their legs tied together.

The young ladies were accompanied by an old geezer who closely resembled the hogs, except that he had more bristles.

There was lots shouting, oinking and bleeped-out bad language.

And that was it. Not exactly Masterpiece Theater, although intellectually the Hoggers ranked several notches above the Kim Kardashian show.

After tiring of watching pigs get hog-tied, I flipped over to another channel where a pawn shop operator was arguing with customers who apparently came from another reality show in which they'd bought a load of junk out of a storage shed.

Next there was a show about a tattoo parlor. A customer with green spiked hair and a chicken bone in her nose was getting Daffy Duck tattooed on a delicate portion of her anatomy.

Maybe the tattoo will get her some attention if she appears on the Bachelorettes. There, young ladies with room-temperature IQs attempt to attract a mate by the whistling of air through their empty noggins.

The winner (shudder!) marries and eventually progress to the next reality show, Desperate Housewives, in which bored housewives try to seduce plumbers.

If pig-wrestling women, tattooed tarts, air-headed bachelorettes and hot-flash housewives don't fill the bill, there's a show about drag queens. When I first saw it in the TV listings I assumed it was a show about drag racing. Boy was I wrong.

Another cable channel carries shows about the paranormal. Camera crews poke around in spooky old houses looking for ghosts. They never find one, although once they thought they heard an attic board squeak - but it could have been a mouse.

If the ratings slump, they might consider combining two shows: Paranormal Drag Queens, about transvestites who return from the after-life wearing spike heels and strapless evening gowns.

Then there's the outdoors stuff: Survivor Man, searching for Bigfoot, wrestling alligators, and catching rattlesnakes and turtles.

Survivor Man goes into the woods and spends an hour trying to start a fire in the rain so he can roast a grub-worm. You quickly realize that the poor dufus couldn't survive overnight in Central Park.

The Bigfoot hunters never find one, although once they discovered a mysterious patch of hair that could have been left by either sasquatch or Ozzy Osbourne.

"Turtle Man" specializes in catching mud turtles in ponds. When he grabs one he lets out a whoop. When one grabs him he lets out a whoop. That's about it.

The first shows about gator hunting were interesting because a thrashing gator can be as dangerous as a jilted bachelorette. But corny Cajuns - like dead gators - quickly grow stale.

The rattlesnake catchers are - to use a clinical term - nuts. In one episode the host climbed inside a glass coffin and an associate dropped 100 squirming rattlers in with him, while whispering, "Don't move, Cletus."

Cletus said his nose was itching but I didn't stick around to see how it turned out. I changed channels to watch a desperate housewife wrestle a paranormal wild hog. Or something like that.