If it was Tuesday, it must have been reality TV night at the Maynard house. Looks like I'm stuck watching this season's "American Idol". Oh, well - it is fairly fascinating to hear all those ranges and styles of voices.

The real entertainment (if you want to call it that) came from a rerun of "Fear Factor" on the Game Show Network. Usually the stunts are fairly interesting and some of them look like fun - like getting into a car, making it jump over a train while spinning, and landing the furthest in a huge pile of cardboard boxes. Really! They did that last night!

But the eating contests. Who comes up with these? Do the producers ask their 6-year old kids to come up with the grossest things possible?

"Okay, dad! What you need to do is to like, make a milkshake out of maggots! Yeah! and then add MORE LIVE maggots into the ground up maggots! And they have to suck this mess out of a bowl, and blow the maggot milkshake into a cup with a big straw! And the big cup has to have LIVE FLIES in it!! And they have to fill the cup up with maggot milkshake to drown the flies, then they have to drink it ALL DOWN AGAIN FLIES AND ALL!"

I kid you not I saw four grown adults do that last night. The host of the show made references to some of the eating stunts on previous shows, which prompted me to tell my husband: "I'd rather eat a million bull testicles before I ate one cockroach."

How many times do you get to say *that* in a conversation?