�Soy caliente?

If you wondered, my AIM handle, ChicaCalienteTX, is a tribute to "Caliente," the sex-drenched dance party that airs on Univision, the Spanish-language TV network.

We don't get Univision--we don't get any Spanish-language television over the airwaves in our cable-free household, and this kind of surprises me--so I no longer watch "Caliente." But time was that most Saturday afternoons found me in my Chicago apartment, probably hung over, and probably watching "Caliente," which features nearly naked boys and girls who dance and writhe on a beach in a different tropical locale each week. Sometimes they dance around a pool.

I may not have understood the language, but I understood plenty.

Aside from the dance sequences, "Caliente" features breakaway segments that typically involve either lame sketch comedy (lame sketch comedy is indeed lame in any language) or a spotlight on some model, who cavorts by the sea and chitchats about this and that. The name of the latter feature is, yes, Chica Caliente.