A funny thing happened to Top Chef when Season Six started in Las Vegas: the whole bottom fell out.

Contestants who obviously shouldn't have been in the competition in the first place were quickly eliminated.  The contestant who sliced her fingers to bleed all over the place in the Quick Fire challenge was eliminated for a dish that died on the table in the Elimination challenge.  Another person who wasted time during the Quick Fire challenge for not knowing the differences between opening clams and oysters was also eliminated for a dish that died on the table in the Elimination challenge.  For the first couple of episodes, this was an exciting departure from past seasons where the obvious loser lingers on forever before being eliminated.

Then the bottom kept falling out.

A typical season of Top Chef has contestants that fall into a familiar pattern: a few on top, a few on bottom, everyone else in the middle.  Which often has the judges cajoling the contestants to get out of the safe middle to cook their way into the top or bottom.  The worst season I ever saw was where the middle stayed the same, but those at the top and bottom kept trading places up and down with every episode.  Half a season goes by before the middle is squeezed out to produce the top contestants to go into the final round.  But this season is different.   The middle is being squeezed by the bottom falling out faster than usual, making the top the safest place to be that only a few contestants are there consistently.

Are the cooking challenges and/or judging too hard this season?  I don't think so.  Everything is what you would expect after five seasons of Top Chef.  These contestants should have analyzed every episode to know what have been done in the past and what skill sets they need to have to face a particular challenge or adapt to a different challenge.  Yet the contestants who are being eliminated are delivering dishes that are dead on the table.  An inedible dish is the quickest way to get eliminated from the competition.

Which raises a disturbing question:  Can any of these contestants cook their way out of a paper bag?

The answer so far this season is quite obvious.  The contestants seem to be perplexed by problems that contestants from previous seasons were able to improvise or work around even if they had no experience with the main ingredient in question.  If these contestants represent the most talented up and coming chefs available, maybe the show should be renamed as Bottom Chef.  At the very least, casting for next year's season should be better than this year.

Whatever problems that Top Chef had this season in Las Vegas will hopefully stay in Las Vegas.

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I usually mention on Twitter what I get in the mail as a writer: rejection slips that take four long paragraphs or 20 bullet points before mentioning the obvious ("REJECTED!"), the once in a blue moon acceptance letter, or rarely hard cash ($3.02 USD - KA-ching!).  With about 60 short stories and poems floating in the slush piles, I'm always adding to my rejection slip wallpaper collection.  A few weeks ago, I mentioned a credit card notice where fees and interest rates are being raised across the board.  Since the notice wasn't in super-extra-fine print that credit card companies love to use, the amounts I could be screwed over for was breathtaking.

Last week I was contacted by an editor for Business Week who saw my comment on Twitter.  We traded emails,  I sent a scanned copy of the notification letter, and we talked on the phone.  The article, Dodging Credit Card Reforms, came out this week's issue (September 21, 2009, p. 26).

C.D. Reimer of San Jose was switched to a variable card last month. At the same time the issuer, Barclaycards, upped his rate to 26.99% from around 16%. Reimer could have canceled the account. But the 40-year-old was laid off from his software support job and depends on plastic. Barclaycards declined to comment.

This isn't how I expected to break out in the national media.  (The Oprah's Book Club nomination is still some years away.)  However, I'm planning to cancel that the credit card before the opt-out deadline in late November.  Unless the credit card companies want to take rejection slips as payment, I need my cash more than they do.

Updated 16 September 2009 @ 2:00PM - Cancelled the credit card mentioned above.  One rule in today's economy: if something cost money and a pain in the butt, it got to go.

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When I saw "Extract" this past weekend, I expected a movie about seemingly normal people caught up in situations that leads to morally compromising choices that no one in their right mind would entertain and someone dropping dead for no good reason.   I wasn't disappointed.  This is a Hollywood genre that I like to call dysfunctional reality.

Small businessman Joel (Jason Bateman) finds himself stuck at work and an overly talkative neighbor, Nathan (David Koechner), that prevents him from getting home before 8:00PM, and, once his wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), puts on her sweatpants, he is so out of luck in getting laid for that night.  If that wasn't bad enough, a larger company is offering to buy out his extract flavor factory, and his workforce is more interested in bickering with each other that accidents routinely happen.  After one of his employee, Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), loses a testicle in an extended accident that involves everyone on the line, a dysfunctional reality settles on Joel.

The movie starts with Cindy (Mila Kunis) at a guitar shop looking to buy a $3,000 USD guitar for her Dad's birthday, and, once the two sales clerks are falling over each other to get something from the back room, she walks out the door with the guitar.  At a nearby pawn shop, the clerk is throwing $20 USD bills at her when she tells him about how her poor Dad had just died.  After glancing through her collection of Midwestern driver licenses, and reading an article about the factory accident with the realization that millions of dollars could be gain in a personal injury lawsuit, she gets a job at the factory to learn of Step's home address to cozy up him and starts stealing personal items from everyone else.

Meanwhile, Joel confesses his martial problems to his bartender, Dean (Ben Affleck), who loads him with booze and a horse tranquilizer pill that's supposed to be something else, and offers him devious advice about setting his wife up with a teenaged gigolo to pretend to be the pool cleaner to cancel out any the moral qualms about having an affair with Cindy.   (Recycling the 1970's answer to any problem with sex, booze and pills.)  After sobering up with a killer hang over, Joel changes his mind only to discover that the gigolo had started early after recovering from his hang over and proven himself to be too effective.  Now anger and guilt replaced the long suffering frustration to animate the conversations between husband and wife.

Gene Simmons of KISS fame plays a personal injury attorney, Joe Adler, who seems to be the only sane person in the movie when he explains vulgarly how the monetary value of a man with only one testicle is the holy grail of personal injury lawsuits.  After Joel refuses to pay the holy grail number, the attorney offers to drop the suit in return for slamming Joel's testicles in a door as adequate compensation for his Step's loss.  But even the attorney is not immune from this dysfunctional reality when Cindy sets him up to steal his fancy sports car and drives off into the sunset.  I think Simmons performance rivals Meatballs' performance as a strict fundamentalist father in "Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny."

Joel eventually figures out Cindy's game, sleeps with her, goes about righting the wrongs of this dysfunctional reality, and reconciles with Suzie at the funeral of their talkative neighbor who keels over after she tells him off.  You can't have a dysfunctional reality movie without one person bumbling into his own death.  Which is why "Extract" reminds me of "Burn After Reading" (which I hated) with the gym instructor accidentally shot dead by the Treasury officer who never fired his gun before, or "The Lady Killers" when a fallen criminal is tossed on top of a garbage barge passing underneath a bridge.  When everything returns to normal, you have to wonder why these people put themselves through this in the first place.

This is the kind of movie that makes me glad that I have a normal, boring life with few moral complications. Then again, I'm a writer.  All my characters suffer whatever stupidity that I can think of.   Except I don't think my imagination will ever be as twisted as what Hollywood is putting out with these dysfunctional realities.

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After I got my iPod Touch a few years ago to replace an old Palm PDA with outdated wireless technology that I couldn't pick up any access points to reach the Internet, I really haven't used it much since then.  I used to listen to my 80's music collection at the gym, but I never felt comfortable using the Touch in that kind of a sweaty environment.  When the third generation iPod Shuffle came out, I got one for the gym.  I loaded up the Touch with digital copies that came with certain DVD movies to watch on the train.  Although the Apple Apps Store has 70,000 applications to download, that was 70,000 applications more than I wanted to consider.  Except I did end up with two applications that's making me use my Touch more often now.

I first downloaded Kindle for the iPhone and iPod Touch when it first came out, and downloaded a sample chapter to test out the features.  That was okay.  But I'm more of a traditionalist who would rather have the actual dead tree edition to read through for more current books.  When I decided to pursue a classical education, I was surprised to find that many classical drama, history and literature books were either free or cost less than a buck.  I'm reading "The History of The Decline And Fall of The Roman Empire: Volumes 1 to 6" by Edward Gibbon, and downloaded "The Jewish Wars" by Flavius Josephus (translated by William Whiston) and "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes/The Return of Sherlock Holmes" by Sir Author Canon Doyle. Looks like I'll be reading all the classics from Kindle on my Touch from now on, saving space in my library for more current dead tree books.

The other application was Dictionary.Com, a free dictionary.  I was surprised to discover that Apple doesn't include the Dictionary from the Mac OS X on the Touch.  There's also the American Heritage Dictionary version that cost $25 USD.  Again, I'm a dead tree traditionalist when that much money is involved.  (I made the mistake of selling my 1987 copy of The Random House Dictionary of The English Language, Second Edition, a number of years ago.)  Since I started writing haiku poems that requires counting out a specific number syllables per line, I been consulting the Dictionary on my MacBook more often to determine how many syllables a word breaks into if I wasn't certain.  Having a dictionary on my Touch makes the process of refining my haiku poems in my writing journal much easier. Dictionary.Com also has a thesaurus for looking up other words, and extended features that requires wireless access (which really kills the battery life on the Touch).

If you're a writer with an iPod Touch, these are two must have applications.

Updated 7 September 2009 @ 12:15PM:  The Wall Street Journal  posted an interesting article on the state of the dictionary in today's electronic world.

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The newest version of the Mac OS X called Snow Leopard came out last Friday. Since this was a $29 upgrade, I pre-ordered from the Apple Store a few days before.  The FedEx driver showed up after lunch with the package, and I waited until my friend came over before installing on my first-generation, black MacBook.  We ate pizza while watching the installation progress bar fill up for 45 minutes, which is twice as fast as installing Leopard.  With Dilbert having a very geeky strip on dating relationships that day, I dared ask the most geekiest question: "Is this the reason why we don't have girlfriends?"

We both shuddered, inhaled deeply, and returned to our true love.

Snow Leopard has a ton of performance enhancements and no significant features.  My first impression was that the overall interface is much faster and more snappier.  What used to take five seconds for something to happen, now takes a few seconds.  That may not sound like a lot but it does add over time.  Beyond that, you really need to dig deeper to find all the other improvements.  Ars Technica has a 23-page detailed analysis of what's new in Snow Leopard, if you really, really want to know.  If you work professionally with Macs that will be running Snow Leopard, this is required reading.  Be forewarned, the analysis is so technical that it even put me to sleep.

Snow Leopard has been smoothest upgrade that I ever had on a Mac.  The only program that wasn't compatible was an older version of Parallels Desktop for running virtual machines that I haven't upgraded.  (Which, not surprisingly, I got an email today to upgrade to newest version that's Snow Leopard compatible.)  The Image Capture program has a better interface that makes downloading from my camera easy since I have 385 pictures accumulated over the last three years.  (One of these days, I'll dump the whole lot into Adobe Lightroom and erase the memory card.)  I also like how editing a photo in Adobe Photoshop doesn't change the file association to open in Preview.  That was something I was always changing back under Leopard.

My only real complaint with Snow Leopard is that this upgrade is only compatible with Intel CPUs.  I would very much love to have this performance increase on my Mac mini with a PowerPC CPU.  Then again, I really need to get a newer Mac mini that would run Snow Leopard a lot faster and take advantage of features that my MacBook can't handle.

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