I must be a glutton for punishment

I opened an account with Chase bank today. Again. I know, I have to be crazy after all I went through with them last time. For those that have no idea what I'm talking about, I had an account with them many years ago and had numerous BIG problems caused by errors on their part which cost me all sorts of fees; my ensuing hatred and crazy rants sort of inspired my original bitchyasiangirl website - which I'm hoping to get back up one of these days.

In the end though, the lure of free money was too much to resist. T & I had been talking for a while about each getting accounts to keep our own separate "mad money." So last month, we got an ad in the mail from Chase offering $100 to open an account. T went and opened his a few weeks ago. I've been bogged down with the child, so it took me till today to be able to go over on my own to open mine. And of course, what I thought would be a simple, 'here's the money, open the account, sign here please' transaction turned into 40 minutes of my "personal banker" trying to sell me every product under the sun. No, I don't need another rewards credit card. No, I'm not interested in re-financing my house. No, I don't need a savings account that gives me 0.5% interest on my lousy few hundred bucks. Sheesh.

We'll see how badly they screw me over this time around. Worse comes to worse, I guess I made a hundred bucks out of it.

My new favorite Japanese game show

And yes, I do have more than one! I never thought that I'd find a show more ridiculous than Ninja Warrior. But then (from the same producers) along came Unbeatable Banzuke! Oh my gosh, this show is freaking AWESOME! Whoever comes up with this stuff is either insane or a genius or both. And the person at G4 who finds these shows - also a genius.

So the premise is pretty simple. There's a list of events and people compete in individual events for a spot on the "Banzuke" or list of champions. The events are insane and most of them involve doing some sort of obstacle course. My favorites include the Hand Walk, Bamboo Derby (walking on stilts), and Kangaroo (pogo stick). And when I say obstacle course, I'm not talking about just bopping along a little race course. There are some serious obstacles. In the Bamboo Derby, there's a very fast conveyor belt, which also has little hurdles that have to be stepped over. And in one of the Hand Walk courses (there are several), there's 30-degree inclines and water hazards!

The most hilarious part of all this is the contestants. Some of them are super hardcore: 50-year-old men who've been walking on stilts for 40 years. And some of them are just morons off the street who thought that it'd be easy to use a pogo stick. It makes for some hilarious hi-jinks.

There's also some other, more interesting challenges, like Daruma 7, where the contestant has to use a big hammer to knock out a stack of drums from bottom to top without toppling the "daruma" figure on top. Or Ottoto 9, which involves balancing a pole on your palm. Super weird. As my mom would say, "Oh those Japanese - they think of everything!"

It's about frickin' time!

Let's just cut to the chase. Nikki is finally gone! Hooray! I'm sorry, but she was clearly the most useless person, not just in last night's episode but in at least the last 2 or 3 episodes. All she's done is talk about how she's Italian and she makes comfort food, and then when the judges don't like her stuff, she says that she's not doing it for them, she's cooking "for the people." Pfft...whatever! Something about her has just always rubbed me the wrong way, and her food was never spectacular. Goodbye, you won't be missed. (And before you get your panties all in a bunch, no it's not a real mugshot - it's from some lame event.)

I think T is planning on writing another "guest blog" but in the meantime, here are my thoughts. Last night's episode was pretty entertaining. I liked the idea of doing Wedding Wars instead of Restaurant Wars. It's a pretty mean bait & switch to pull though. Catering a wedding is really nothing like working in a restaurant, and to have to pull an all-nighter with no warning - rough. Especially having to make wedding cakes.

Nikki's team had disaster written all over it from the start. You just knew that Dale was going to clash with everyone. And he had every right. Most of those people were morons. I mean, they took what should have been a super easy theme (Italian food) and totally screwed it up. And not to keep bashing Nikki, but way to step up as leader. I mean, if you're connecting with the customer on what he's into, and you have the most experience with the type of food he wants, then WHY would you shirk the leader role? Again, have you not watched this show ever? I understand not wanting to take the bullet if things go south, but you'd at least get props for taking on the challenge! When she flat-out said, "I was not the lead in this effort" at Judges' Table, my jaw about hit the floor. I think you could see the shock and disappointment emanating from Tom's bald head.

Maybe I have a soft spot for Dale since he's Asian and from Chicago, but I think he was a bit unnecessarily villainized by his teammates too. There was a lot of grumbling about how he was doing things wrong or whatever, but no one actually wanted to step up and correct him or offer to take over. I hate that attitude. It's like when you're trying to decide with a group of people what to do on a Friday night, and someone sits there in the corner and says nothing while the decisions are being made, but then once you get to the bar, they're like, "This place sucks. Why'd we come here? I wanted to go to this other place." Well why the hell didn't you say so? It's so easy to complain about decisions after they've already been made.

I thought the smacktalk between Dale & HatBeard was dumb. I understand that at this point, they'd probably all been up for well over 36 hours, so tempers were flaring. And much as I like Dale, it's obvious that his fuse is shorter than most. Punching the locker because they lost the Quickfire...kinda pathetic. But I do think HatBeard was just baiting him. In case I haven't mentioned it before, he REALLY annoys me. Way to cover up for your own lack of work by trying to point the finger at the guy who did the most. Yeah, that made sense. For once, Lisa did the smart thing at Judges' Table and just kept her mouth shut. She knew that her cake, ugly as it was, was going to keep her out of harm's way, and chiming in on their pissy little fight was only going to draw unnecessary attention to herself. Of course, I wonder if part of the reason that she didn't say anything was because she'd fallen asleep standing up. She looked exhausted! Way more so than her teammates, almost to a scary degree.

Not a lot of comments about the other team. It was another lovefest, led by once again by Richard, who I'm begrudgingly beginning to like and root for. I'm with T about the faux-hawk though - it's lame and needs to go. I did think it was pretty cool of him to share his win with Stephanie. And I guess TweakBeard must not have packed enough speed in his bag that day because he was strangely quiet through most of the episode. Although his comment about the "culinary boner"...well, I could've done without that.

A funny conversation

I keep telling T that he needs to get his own blog. He refuses, usually under the guise of either that he does not have enough time (but he has time for multiple fantasy baseball leagues), or that no one but me finds him funny. Both of these are untrue. I think the real reason is that he just prefers to make fun of my blogging efforts, even though he secretly longs to blog. So in the meantime, I thought I'd share an exchange we had last night which cracked me up, and then the follow-up this morning.

We were talking about the new Indiana Jones movie coming out in a few weeks, and specifically, how we're both pretty excited to see it, even though it's been 10 years since the last one. There was a minor discussion on which of the first three we'd seen more, etc., and then T ended it with, "I don't care if it's 2 hours of Indiana Jones drinking coffee, I'd still pay $10 to see it." I laughed at this for a solid 5 minutes, with the occasional giggle returning every few minutes for a while after.

There was also some discussion about the X-Files movie coming out this summer, to which we had pretty much the opposite feelings about. I mean, come on. Is anyone but the most die-hard fanboy nerds actually excited for this? It's not like David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson's careers have taken off like rockets since the last one came out. Anyways, so T & I are both going on about this (although I don't know why, since we're both in total agreement with one another) and then T goes, "What's next, '227 - the Movie'? I hear Jackee is looking for work."


Ok, both of these little tidbits may not be anything more than mildly amusing to anyone but me, but then there was this exchange this morning, over email, which started with his throwaway line at the end:

T: 227 - The Movie. Think about it! It could be awesome. Me: I'd rather think about Indiana Jones and the Steaming Cup of Coffee... T:

-- close up on Indiana Jones' face --

Indy: (tired voice, deathly serious) "I'd need some joe."

-- cut to show barrista --

Middle eastern cryptic looking guy working at Starbucks: (slight accent, wearing a turban) "Vente?"

Indy: "Yeah, that's right, vente." (focus on Indy's chin scar, Indy rubs it while reminiscing of past coffee drinking)

---cut to slow pan out: Indy reading Wall Street Journal in dusty leather jacket and hat, whip attached to belt --

Barrista: "Indiana!"

Indy: (goes to counter to fetch coffee, walks as if very sore all over, gravelly voice) "Yeah, that's right.....thanks." (tips $2 in "karma" mug with rainbows on the side)

-- fade to black --

.

.

.

.

-- Screen is black. Very slow pan out. We realize that the "black screen" is actually one of the darkened spaces on Jones' NY Times crossword. As we pan out, some scone crumbs fall onto the paper out of the corner of his mouth.

Indy: (to himself, mumbling) "Flightless bird....three letters....is it 'emu'?"

-- (this continues for 90 minutes) --

Worldwide gross: 800 million dollars

OK, someone tell me that wasn't funny!

Oh VH1, is this really where you want to go?

I used to love VH1's "Celebreality" lineup. Celebrity Fit Club, Flavor of Love, the Surreal Life...they all used to be excellent guilty pleasure viewing. But I think I have to give up. I watched about 10 minutes of "CelebraCadabra" the other day. Yes, the name was pretty confusing to me to at first. My first thought was that it had something to do with cadavers. But no, it's actually yet another group of half-assed D-list washed up has-beens competing in a reality show to become, wait for it...magicians. Yes. I don't think I need say any more.

This, combined with the atrocity that is "I Know My Kid is a Star" and Flavor of Love 17 or whatever version they're on now, it's all just too much. I like manufactured drama, but this is just taking it too far.

In fact, since the writers' strike ended and all the scripted shows have come back, I can't say that there's anything I'm over the moon about. A lot of my usual favorites have ranged from being a bit lackluster to downright disappointing. Two big examples? How I Met Your Mother and The Office. HIMYM used to consistently make me laugh, but lately, it's just kind of meh. I think all the stuntcasting is starting to overshadow the plot (as a sidenote, I was really happy to hear NPH speak out about this). And the recent Barney slept with Robin plotline is just plain dumb. I'm also getting really sick of the drawn out tease of who is the "mother" and the up and down of Ted & Robin. It's like they wrote themselves into a corner from day one. No one really wants to see another Ross & Rachel.

The Office, on the other hand, has just veered off into being out and out weird. Their first episode back was set almost entirely in Jan & Michael's condo, which seemed like an odd choice to me. I mean, it's funny once in a while when they go on "field trips" but I think the show is at its funniest when it revolves around The Office. However, that being said, I did think it was kind of funny all the stuff that came to light about Jan & Michael's relationship, even if it was only funny in that painfully awkward way that I normally hate.

The only show that I've been genuinely still looking forward to each week is 30 Rock. This is easily the craziest show on TV, but in a good way. I think they've done a really good job of keeping it zany. I loved it last week when Liz sold out and went corporate. Although, where's Jenna? She's barely been on the last few episodes.

Looking forward to more Top Chef tonight. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that one of the Idiot twins bites it.

Top Chef recap

I've been too busy to post my thoughts on Top Chef lately (although, in a nut shell, good riddance to Zoi and Ryan, even though Nikki clearly deserved to get the hatchet last week). Besides being out of town last week, T & I have also gotten sucked into Battlestar Galactica lately...but that's for another post. So since T is usually full of pithy remarks while we watch the show, I thought I'd put him to work as a guest blogger. Enjoy.

T here – I felt the need to ring in on the topic of tonight’s episode of Top Chef. I was making some snide comments during the show and M put me to the task of writing for one of her several blogs. I won’t even get into the fact that my wife has so many blogs that she has to subcontract out the blogging labor. Let’s get right to the show.

At this point on the show, we can now separate the chaff from the wheat and it is becoming clear who the front runners are. The chefs definitely in the lead are Male Mohawk, Dale, and Stephanie (curly haired Chicago chick). On the bottom are Skinny Brunette, Antonia, The Kiwi and Eyebrow Ring. Somewhere in the middle are the Two Guys That Look Exactly The Same (But One Wears A Hat) and Lesbian Mohawk.

The quick fire challenge is to make dessert. Every year they do this at some point on the show. Every year half the chefs bitch about the fact they never make dessert. This year a few actually figured out they should show up for this reality TV show with at least one good dessert recipe. And surprise! the chefs that did not do well on the challenge were the same ones bitching about now pastry has nothing to do with being a chef. My patience for the complainers on this show is wearing thin.

Male Mohawk wins the challenge with one of the several chocolate and banana dishes. Mostly nothing too exciting was created in the quick fire, but he won with ingenuity of making bananas look like scallops. He also is kind enough to tell the folks at home that he is witty. He then pats himself the back and kisses himself in the mirror. How am I so goddamn sweet?!? Man that Mohawk is looking good! So again he has immunity. He is not going anywhere and a virtual lock for the final four right now.

Then of course the “fun” event comes up and the chefs have no idea they are walking into a trap. This is reality TV! There is no escape from the cameras, there is no relaxing. Somehow this has escaped them all and they are worried about what blazer to wear to look fly at Second City . The hatted Bearded Retard Twin probably took 20 minutes picking out his “on the town” headwear.

Surprise! Those audience members yelling out stuff are designing your dish to improvise! I was astounded that the chefs were not yelling out ingredients themselves….tofu and Polish Sausage aren’t exactly the most exciting of things to cook for an elimination challenge. Why didn’t you yell out something? Wake up!

They draw numbers and end up in teams. The most predictable yet fascinating outcome here is the Retard Twins pairing up so they can rub their red beards together when no one is looking. Dale and Male Mohawk are paired up and probably the strongest team, then Stephanie and Female Mohawk might be next. The other teams are Antonia and Eyebrow Ring (doomed) and Skinny Brunette and The Kiwi (unimpressive).

The Retard Twins clearly offer the most comedy value. They decide to make squash soup for “Yellow Vanilla Love”. The Hatted Twin has been talking about squash soup for what seems like weeks. They think they are each pretty cool and maybe their counterpart Twin might be 2nd coolest of the group in their minds. This show started with two lesbians, but these guys seem to be pretty gay for each other. They are very proud of themselves and their squash soup, despite not having any food processors to get through the disk (improv! you crazy Top Chef producers). I’d like to thank Bravo for not showing these guys making out in the back room and telling each other how awesome each other is.

Dale and Male Mohawk are the front runners, despite having the toughest draw with “Perplexed Green Tofu”. They are so clearly the most creative and skilled chefs on the show it isn’t even funny. They have this nutso idea of making the tofu taste like beef, which sounded insane and risky but these guys are the only ones that could possibly pull it off. The tasting table clearly loved it.

Stephanie and Female Mohawk get into the “Sexy Orange Asparagus” which sounded like a fun dish and they really worked hard to make it look phallic and had fun with it. Seemed like they worked hard on the dish, but it was pretty busy. Their delivery of the dish went over well but Colicchio clearly hated it. Trouble.

The most amazing thing of this challenge was that Antonia and Eyebrow turned “Magenta Drunken Polish Sausage” and ended up serving fish with chorizo over purple potatoes. It drives me insane when people completely ignore the rules of the challenge and make whatever they want and then claim that they are an artist, or in the case of this challenge look at how they improv’ed! I will ignore the rules! I am creative! I will ignore Polish Sausage! I will bring out tequila shots for myself but not the judges! These guys are idiots and are trying very hard to make America hate them.

The Kiwi and the Skinny Chick made something; I don’t remember what it was and it seemed like they were largely edited out. Clearly in the middle of the pack. I want to like The Kiwi due to the afro and the accent (and the fact that I know a Kiwi that has both of these attributes as well and is one of the craziest guys I have ever met) but he seems like kind of a dumbass.

The winners were Dale and MaleHawk and the Soup Twins. No major surprise there except for the hatted Twin was now on chapeau #6 while he bared his soul about how his mother said the mark of a good chef was being able to make a simple soup….didn’t the judges say the exact same thing an episode or two ago? What a kiss ass. I can’t wait to see the fedora he rolls out next week. Dale wins the challenge, and rightfully so. He’s solid and also a virtual lock for the top three or four.

Steph and LezHawk, along with Antonia and BrowRing are the losers. The only really talent in the bottom four this week is Steph so me and M are hoping that she doesn’t get cut in some bullshit way like Tre last season. I figure there is no way the Fish for Sausage team doesn’t lose but I was wrong and LezHawk gets cut. Slight surprise, but she clearly wasn’t going to make it much farther than this anyway. She went on to say that chefs need to “give 1000%” which I find so disgusting that I’m very happy she is gone. I am an admitted math nerd and hate it whenever someone says they have to give more than 100%, but more than the mathematical reason, and the fact that it is freakin’ impossible to give more than “all”, it just makes people sound so stupid. On par with mixed metaphors or saying things like “it’s a mute point”, “irregardless” or saying “literally” for emphasis. No reason for it. These people are what is wrong with America . Good riddance.

Thanks for letting me vent and occupy space on M’s blog. We’re huge Top Chef fans and while this season doesn’t seem as strong as last, the drama levels do seem pretty high. I hope y’all enjoyed my commentary. Don’t look for me on the crafty blog as the most creative thing I can make is an egg sandwich. Peace out! -T

Ok, I have to add a few comments. First off, I have about an equal amount of hatred as T for Richard and the Idiot Twins. I enjoyed Hung's cockiness last season, but Richard is just over the top with his smug, "I'm so clever" attitude. Also, I fail to understand how making bananas look like sea scallops can be considered inspired. Let's see, cut banana into rounds...done.

And the other two...I'm not sure I even want to get started. Hat Twin is annoying because of the ever-changing hat rotation. His personality isn't exactly winning him points either. The digs at the lesbians seem to be a little unnecessary too. The other Idiot Twin is so freaking twitchy I can barely watch him. I swear, he's tweaking on speed.

I'm also endlessly annoyed when the cheftestants complain and make assumptions about how this or that can't possibly taste good, or that the judges are simply WRONG in their opinions. I'm sorry, but no one's paying you for your opinion. And while I think that Ted Allen's culinary qualifications are a bit dubious, he's still probably more qualified than you.

And this is what I don't like about living in Texas...

I turned on the air conditioning today for the first time this year, and I don't see it going off again for a while. I was really really hoping to make it to at least May, but well...I caved. It was just too humid today for me to deal. Last year, we turned on the a/c in April and it stayed on through at least September and part of October even. Argh.

I actually just got back from California (Bay Area) and I have to say, I sooooo wish we could live there instead.