Ox Notes: October 30, 2007

Jane Seymour & Tony Dovolani seem to have run out of nice things to say about the judges and their fellow Dancing with the Stars competitors. Yesterday afternoon, People ran a story in which Tony says he recently gave Carrie Ann Inaba a book on professional ballroom rules. He claims that Carrie Ann retaliated that week by giving Jane’s Rumba a low score.

In TV Guide’s backstage report from last night’s Performance Show, Jane accused the judges of wanting to "get rid of the old one." She went on to criticize Melanie Brown & Maksim Chmerkovskiy’s Rumba: "You get higher scores in this competition if you just walk around. Or you go up to the judges and you go pat, pat, on the cheek and you get ‘tens’ for that."

So, Jane & Tony have accused Carrie Ann of not understanding the rules and retaliating against them in her scoring. And they claim that the couples that score higher than them don’t deserve to do so.

Tony’s long been one of my favorites in professional competitions. But he’s had a weird persecution complex every season he’s been on DwtS, and he usually passes his paranoia on to his partner.

For better or worse, DwtS doesn’t operate under the same rules as professional ballroom dancing. The judges are inconsistent, but I’ve never gotten the feeling that they’re trying to submarine someone’s chances because of some personal vendetta. They really do try to judge based on what they see on the floor. If anything, I think the judges would love for "the old one" to give the younger competitors a run for their money.

As for me, I’m fine if Jane & Tony go home tonight.

In other DwtS news, Jennie Garth somehow already knows that, if she survives tonight’s elimination, she’ll be dancing the Rumba and Viennese Waltz next week. Helio Castroneves says of the praise his "Latin booty" earned last night: "This booty is small, but it is strong." He’s also postponed his wedding to fashion designer Ali Vazquez until January.

Rapper Coolio is getting his own reality show, on Oxygen of all places.

Fox is importing the British TV show Spaced, which will be reinterpreted for America a la The Office. Since the original was created by Hot Fuzz’s Simon Pegg, I’ve got high hopes for the US version.

And a study showed that, if you relied only on mainstream media for coverage of the 2008 presidential race, you’d think there were only five candidates running for the office: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. I’ll be taping the Democratic candidates’ debate tonight on MSNBC at 9 ET to see if they’re still letting guys like Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, and Dennis Kucinich even stand on the stage.