Food Network has officially crossed the line

Lately, Food Network has been getting on my nerves. For the longest time I enjoyed a number of their programs. Examples: on Good Eats, Alton Brown is brilliant - he makes every aspect of cooking entertaining and educational. Rachel Ray was cool when she was limited to 30-Minute Meals and $40 A Day. But then there was Paula Deen, whose accent alone is proof that evil incarnate can be embodied in sound. But hey, I don't need to watch what I don't like, right? Then they brought me the joy of Iron Chef America - corny, reasonably entertaining, and not too annoying (at first). If you're familiar with the program at all, you'll no doubt realize it's rapidly getting out of control, like a nuclear reactor sans inanimate carbon control rods. It's taking itself far too seriously. (And don't get me started on the new Iron Chef's Hibbertesque giggle.) And Rachel Ray appears to have been injected with huge quantities of "Yummo" (by Nabisco). I think she's trying to be like Martha Stewart, minus the stick up her ass.

One of their more recent "personalities" is this guy, whose appearance alone makes me change the channel. Seriously, step away from the peroxide, and no one gets hurt. During a commercial break, he helped out some poor schmuck whose cranberry sauce is apparently too tart. His prescription included the use of a Food Network skillet, available now at Kohl's. Did I mention that this "help the dork on the street" piece was interrupted by an ad for Food Network brand cookware, available only at Kohl's?

"You got peanut butter in my blog!" or "We're all one happy incestuous e-family!"

Mel offers this post on words and identity, which brings me to an interesting related tangerine (a repurposing of the word by Mary's classmate Wes, meaning "a small tangent"):

Next semester, I'll be working on my capstone project (think "thesis" with 20% more pretension) on the future of the Ford assembly plant in St. Paul. I was thinking of asking James Lileks to drop by as a guest critic at some point during the semester. He's a former columnist at the Star Tribune, and now oversees their buzz.mn blog. (He's also, by birth at least, a fellow Nodakian.) His "regular" site has several pages on the topic of Urban Studies, and it might be interesting to get a perspective from someone who doesn't work in a so-called "design profession." So my question is, would doing so constitute an act of blogwhoring?

Monday, shitty Monday

U2 could have made a different song with that name, but I guess it wouldn't have been as political or whatever, and Bono might never have had the chance to use starving/diseased people in Africa to illustrate what a great human being he is.

Anyway, just a brief couple of notes, for the fun.
Saw a guy on the bus this morning who dressed like he was trying to be ALL of Run DMC - the hat, the coat, far more jewelry than any one person should own, let alone wear at once. He was on the one side of the back seat of the bus, and I was on the other. I had my phone out to check messages (Ben had called & left a message mere moments earlier) and find out about rescheduling my dental appointments. Dude looks at me and makes some comment about "knockin' [me] out" (perhaps at the suggestion of his mother) if I point my camera at him. WTF? If you dress like a carnival sideshow, you ought be be less self-conscious about it.

Earlier this a.m., one of my dental crowns came off. This is the same one that came off earlier this year, and then was re-attached by the dentist, who later (at my semi-annual checkup) noticed in the x-ray picture that the crown wasn't sitting properly, and would need to be removed and reset. Well, I've saved them the trouble of removing it, I guess.

Today in studio we have an "intermediate review" of our progress thus far. I haven't made any progress in the past couple of weeks, and I'm officially a fruitbasketcase right now, so I'm not looking forward to this. I guess on the plus side, I'm not going to go into the review with any delusions that I've done a good job. So when they tear me a new one, it won't catch me by surprise.

Speaking of which, I guess I'd better get to work on that.

Pretense and affectation

Is there some point at which pretense and affectation will reach a critical mass that will cause an event to collapse under its own weight, tearing a hole in the fabric of time and space and creating a singularity from which no attention whore can escape? I certainly hope so, but the fact that it didn't happen at this event makes me wonder how high that threshold is.