TVSquad

Looks like a lot more celebs are lining up to be on Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice than I thought.

So far, the Donald has signed Joan Rivers, Carmen Electra, Jim Cramer of CNBC, Naomi Judd, George Foreman, Pete Rose, Tony Hawk, Danica Patrick, and Jeff Gordon. That's quite a mixture of sports figures, comics, and really loud financial analysts. I wonder if Foreman will try to punch Trump if he tries to tell him how to sell things.

Trump says that there are over one hundred celebrities who wanted to be on the show (guess they'll have to wait until Celebrity Apprentice 2). Trump also reveals that Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have some interest in being on the show, and he's going to try to get Lindsay Lohan too. Oh, that would be great if they could be on the same team, wouldn't it? What could their team name be?

When I first got the job as a blogger here at TV Squad, I figured for sure that it was only a matter of time before I was receiving hundreds of super-cool DVD screeners. I pictured myself with a library of complete season box sets of all my favorite shows -- so many of them, in fact, that I could split my time between watching them and building forts out of them.

Uh, no.

Instead, what I was offered last week was 24x24 Wide Open with Jeff Gordon. Even though I'm not a NASCAR fan (and if I was a NASCAR fan, I probably wouldn't be a Jeff Gordon fan), I took it to review. Why? Because it was free, dammit.

On to the review...

Have you been sitting there on your couch thinking, "Good grief, it's January 7th already, when is NASCAR going to start?" Well, if you have, you need to find a couple more hobbies, but the good news is that the Speed channel is kicking off its NASCAR season this week with NASCAR Preseason Thunder. The season just gets longer and longer.

They will be covering Nextel Cup testing at Daytona. You can get a schedule of the shows on the Speed website. The actual race isn't until February 18th, but Speed knows where their bread is buttered. NASCAR is to them like the football team is to Notre Dame. It pays for everything else.

My early season predictions are for Jimmy Johnson and Tony Stewart to come out strong. Denny Hamlin will prove that last season wasn't a fluke. Kurt Busch will be back in the hunt now that the #2 team has had a season to gel. The #24 team will remain inconsistent, possibly leading Jeff Gordon to fire his crew chief. Robbie Gordon will crash some people, but it won't be his fault. And Michael Waltrip will continue to get all kinds of camera time despite never even getting a whiff of being competitive.