One fellow wrote several long paragraphs comparing me to Rob Reiner and calling me a "meat head," the slang term that Archie Bunker used for his son-in-law in "All in The Family" TV series.  I pretended I didn't understand him.  I'm sure that many younger readers didn't understand his reference to a TV series that's been off the air for a generation.  I challenged him to take a class in English.  Another insult since that's what the tea baggers hurl at anyone who has an accent, looks foreign or refuses to assimilate into the white-as-slice-bread melting pot.

His reply was swift: "You're a loser."

My reply was swifter: "Of course, I'm a loser. I'm a moderate conservative."

How many intellectual brownie points did we score with that exchange?  Not much, if any.  Not that I was keeping track or even care about that.  You will find many windbags on WSJ who try to demonstrate their intellectual superiority in a barrage of words that mean nothing.  A politician's stump speech would be more interesting in comparison, even if you heard 30 times or more during the course of the campaign.  As a fiction writer I keep my verbiage to a minimum to best communicate the human stupidity that I witness in all its forms

Poke, poke.  See how they growl, hiss and snarl.

I hate tea baggers.  If you listen to what they're actually saying rather than accept the "sanitized" version presented by the Republican Party (the Rand Paul episode is a fine example), you soon realize these people have an agenda that would—in my opinion—tea bag America (i.e., in the sexual position).  For example, tea baggers want to return to the original U.S. Constitution without all those pesky amendments that outlawed slavery, allowed women and colored people the right to vote, electing senators directly by popular vote, limited presidents to two terms in office, and prohibited the non-payment of poll taxes to deny people the right to vote.  All the amendments that made modern America so great over the last 200 years is what the tea baggers don't want.

I loved Non Sequitur's take on this.  The heads of tea baggers should explode when they find out that their version of America is unwanted by anyone who can think for themselves and for society as a whole.  America needs to move forward into the future and not backward into the past.

Comment (0)

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.

Comment (0)

The quickest way for a chef to pack their knives on Top Chef is to present an under seasoned dish to the judges.  If you haven't mastered Basic Cooking 101 with salt, pepper and herbs, you have no business being in the kitchen.  After watching the fifth season of this popular cooking show, I think all the contestants were under seasoned.  This was painfully obvious in the very first episode where 50 chefs from the New York area who didn't make the show slammed the dishes presented for the elimination challenge.  That was a tough crowd for any chef,  but the contestants should've been able to wow some of them at least.

As the season wore on, I lost all interest in who stayed and who went home, didn't read the blogs, and simply didn't care while watching the episodes.  The cooking was uninspired.  If you're going to serve deviled eggs, the deviled eggs have to be phenomenal because anyone can make plain old deviled eggs.   If you're going to serve tender lamb, you don't butcher and hammer the meat to tenderized it to death.  Even when there was eight contestants left in the Restaurant Wars episode that pits two teams to create and execute a restaurant concept from scratch, they managed to blotch that with a lackluster performance.  The moronic contestants from season two, which almost killed the show because the focus was on reality TV rather than the food, could cook a lot better than these contestants.

I did take a shine to was Jamie from San Francisco (executive chef at Absinthe).  For the first six episodes, she came close but not close enough to winning something.  That didn't change until she won episode seven.  When she got eliminated in episode 11, she looked bone tired.  (I know that feeling from having worked at The Old Spaghetti Factory as a backup cook for three years.)  She had an opportunity for the semi-finals in New Orleans to come back into the competition but she didn't win the Quick Fire challenge.  Jamie seems like the only one who had heart and soul behind her cooking.

When regular judge Gail Simmons left the show for her honeymoon, Toby Young, a British food critic with no professional culinary training, joined the judges table.  His comments - "I have found the weapons of mass destruction in this bowl," "the bland leading the bland," and "taste like cat food" - was unusually harsh.  No surprise if you read his book or seen the movie, "How To Alienate People and Loose Friends," where he comes across as being a total prick (which seems to be a British personality type).   The contestants were shocked and horrified by him.   I was disappointed that he toned down his comments for the rest of the season.  This season might've turned out different if he had hammered them rather than sugar coat the truth.

Maybe season six will have better contestants.

Comment (0)

When I went to Borders this past weekend, I was specifically looking for any magazines with info on X-Files: I Want To Believe that's coming out on July 25th.  Amazingly, the pre-release publicity has been quite thin.  Unlike all the summer superhero movies with multiple magazine cover stories, I could only find two: Creative Screenwriting and TV Guide.

I was somewhat reluctant to get Creative Screenwriting since the top tag line read "Ka-Ching! Spec Screenplays Are Selling Again" for an article on the multimillion dollar prices for scripts.  When people find out that I'm a writer, I'm usually asked if I write screenplays.  My answer is always no, and that puzzles some people.

Why not write for fabulous money?   Two reasons: the odds and Hollywood.

The odds: If I was to go into screenwriting, I will be competing with every part time waiter in Hollywood who isn't trying to break in as an actor.

I think I have better odds of being a fiction writer who builds a long term career than chasing $50,000 USD per script that disappears like a mirage.  My current plan is to write a novel per year for the next five years, and whatever shorter pieces that comes to mind during that time.  That gives me a one-in-five chance of having a breakout novel.  I supposed a screenwriter would have to write two or three scripts per year for five years to have similar success.  Either way, being a writer means traveling unforgiving roads at times, and some roads are easier than others.

Hollywood: Well, duh! Born and raised in Silicon Valley. Enough said.

Or more precisely, Silicon Valley is not only where I live but it's also my writing niche.  I know the landscape, worked in many of the top Fortune 500 companies (including eight months at Google), and have a good understanding of the human dynamics that makes this place tick.  I'm not aware of any other writer making a career out of Silicon Valley fiction.  (There are plenty of writers for Silicon Valley non-fiction, most of which I had read over the years.)  Besides, whenever is a Silicon Valley fiction book is written, it's usually featured in the San Jose Mercury News as a big deal.

What niche would I have in Hollywood?  Not Silicon Valley unless it's raising money for another movie.  Being a writer these days mean having an identifiable niche to launch your career.

I recently watched Hooper on DVD with Burt Reynolds playing an aging stunt man on his last movie.  There's one scene where the writer comes storming of the director's trailer, throwing the script in the air, getting his into his car, backing his car over the director's chair, and burning rubber to get the hell out of there.  That part of being a screenwriter I could probably do quite well.

As for the magazines, they both covered the X-Files without overlapping each other too much.  Creative Screenwriting (July/August 2008) has two articles on writing for the X-Files, both the movie and TV series.  TV Guide (July 14-20, 2008) has two articles and a side bar on the characters and why the movie almost didn't happen.  I expect more cover stories after the movie is released.  The Los Angeles Times has fresher material, including David Duchovny's comment that 'The X-Files' is equal to God in the fan community.

If you're a hard core Silicon Valley fan, pick up the current issue of Mad Magazine (August 2008).  Not only are the summer superhero movies covered, but they do a rip on the old Calvin & Hobbes comic with a Calvin & Jobs feature.  Yes, Calvin with a design-savvy Steve Jobs doll.  Apple really need to come out with a Steve Jobs doll for the MacWorld Expo next year for up-and-coming egomaniacs like myself.

Comment (0)

A month ago I was waiting for my friend to show up to go see Superhero Movie (which so bad that the best part was the end credits).  I heard the usual rap-a-tap knocking and opened the door without looking through the peephole.  A Comcast representative stood on the other side to tell me about the new rewiring that's been done in the complex, and why I haven't signed up for their wonderful service.  I restrained myself from giving an honest answer.  The rep was astonished when I told him that I don't watch TV and closed the door.

Neither Comcast service nor the pricing has ever been that great.  All the recent advertisements I got in the mail has been for the Spanish-language channels.  (Ever noticed that on the Mexican soap operas there's always one guy being shot in the stomach by an emotionally distraught woman with a gun?)  I would still have to go down to the local office to prove that I wasn't the previous resident who skipped payment nearly three years ago.  I spent an hour arguing with a service rep in India over why a cable company treats their customers differently than the phone or electric company.  Turns out that other utility companies don't have thieves for customers.  Go figure.

Seriously, I haven't watched TV in over 15 years.  What little TV I do watch is downloaded from Amazon Unbox.  That's a lot cheaper than a monthly subscription for 500 channels that I don't have time to watch.  Two of my favorite TV shows are Top Chef and Battlestar Galactica.

This is the fourth season for Top Chef.  I been a big fan of this cooking competition when it first came out.  Season One was perfect because no one knew what to do beside cook great food.  Season Two was a terrible mess since the show and the contestants distilled the previous season into a generic reality TV show.  Viewers made their opinions known loud and clear on the show blog.  Season Three was respectable as the show focused on what works and the contestants were more serious about cooking.  As for newest season, I give a thumb up for the show and a thumb down for the contestants.

The contestants for the past three seasons usually sort themselves out with a few on top and at bottom, with everyone else in the middle. Hiding in the middle was the usual complaint by the judges.  The Season Four contestants are quite different.  There's absolutely no middle to speak of whatsoever. Everyone is at top or on bottom, with a few going back and forth on each show.  Although the contestants each come from an impressive restaurant and possesses the right credentials to be in the competition, together they are such a bland group that it shows up in their cooking.

This becomes more glaring since the show is focusing on the basics with a tilt toward classical French cooking.  As head judge Tom Colicchio mentions to the San Jose Mercury News, what he was taught in culinary school years ago is no longer being taught these days.  (Just like how the three R's are no longer taught in the K-12 schools.)  The contestants are left to dance on a hot skillet because they're missing the obvious.

Worse, I have no personal favorite among this group. I really don't care who stays or pack their knives.

The other TV show I'm watching is Battlestar Galactica, which is also in Season Four.  This dark series focuses on the human drama of people fleeing the machines they built to find a mythical planet called Earth.  Since this is the final season, it supposed to get darker still.

That became obvious with the recent episode, "The Ties That Bind", where my favorite character, Specialist Cally Tyrol (Nicki Clyne), was murdered when she discovers that her husband, Chief Galen Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), is a sleeper Cylon agent.  I was jumping out of my chair screaming when she got spaced out of an airlock.  (When a show has numerous flashbacks to previous scenes, you know something bad is going to happen.)  Cally was my kind of woman: petite with a cute personality and an unbreakable spirit in the most challenging situations.  The most poignant scene was at the end with Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) sitting down with the stunned Chief to explain the apparent suicide of his wife.

Comment (0)