TVSquad

A&E is bringing back its award-winning documentary series Intervention for a fifth season. The series follows people who are estranged from the friends and family and in personal crisis because of their addiction to drugs, alcohol or other compulsive behaviors. At the end of each episode, the addict is surprised with an intervention led by family, close friends and one of these experts: Jeff VanVonderen, Candy Finningan or Ken Seeley.

The season premiere will profile Chad, a gifted athlete who suffers from an addiction to crack cocaine. Chad, once a part of Lance Armstrong's cycling team, now spends his days panhandling, abusing drugs, and drinking. Also on the slate for later this season is Intervention: After Treatment. This one-hour special will feature a panel of past addicts brought together in a Los Angeles studio for a candid discussion about how the intervention changed their lives.

Intervention returns on Monday June 16th at 9 pm. ET/PT on A&E.

Okay, just for a moment let's set aside the fact that Pee Wee Herman doing a serious commercial about using crack is really, really (unintentionally) funny, and focus on just how logical it was to use that character in the first place.

One assumes this commercial was made when Pee Wee's Playhouse was on the air, which means his main audience was grade school children and not so much the older hipsters who knew the more "adult" Pee Wee character Paul Reubens created while with the Groundlings.

Making (illegal) backup copies of movies you purchase on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs may have just gotten a little easier. Just a month after the first HD-DVD rips began showing up online, it looks like members of the Doom9 forums have found the holy grail of DRM stripping: a universal processing key used by every HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disc. Up until now, the only way to get past the AACS copy protection was to find a specific key for each individual movie you were trying to extract.

In other words, ripping a high definition disc just became almost as easy as ripping a DVD. In the short term, you can probably expect to see an explosion in high definition films torrents available online. In the long run, we can only hope someone will wrap this hack into a nice little GUI and create an easy high-definition disc backup utility that anyone can use.

Maybe it's our culture's litigiousness that inhibits American tabloids. Don't get me wrong. American tabloids, paparazzi and reality shows will definitely be held up by future archaeologists as evidence of the rapid decline of our civilization, but it is the British equivalent of these outlets that get the high marks for tastelessness. Case in point, the producers of the UK's Big Brother have announced plans for another reality outing - Rock Stars in Rehab. (Technically, it's the Dutch company Endemol producing the show, but it's being made for British TV.)

The company has approached high profile heroin addict Pete Doherty, the crack-addicted Dominic Masters of The Others and ex-Celeb Big Brother contestant Donny Tourette to appear in the series. The show would essentially lock all these addicts in a house together and film them 24-7. Critics have chastised Endemol for "using drug problems as entertainment and treating addiction like a joke." Really, if you want to be entertained by a bunch of recovering heroin addicts, rent Trainspotting.

Shut up, Jesus. -Orel, while on crack

I'd like to kick off this episode recap by recalling, again, some of the funny products shown during last night's episode of Moral Orel:

KLUM-Z Caucasian Band-Aids

Hard Milk (spiked milk that Orel's dad drinks before church)

HIV Away (a doctor sprays it on a needle before drawing blood from Orel's arm)