Spranda Factory

Top Chef has long been one of the best shows on television and Season 6 was without a doubt the best one yet.  Season 7 however has been colossally shitty.  Making matters worse, the Facebook fan page for the show pours salt on this festering wound by relentlessly polluting my news feed with stupid questions.  To try and capture what’s wrong with this season of Top Chef, I have gone ahead and answered 13 of these inane questions posted by the Bravo social media knuckleheads.  Let’s dance…

• Q:  What did you think about the premiere? Do you already have your favorites?
• A:  What did I think?  I thought the premiere was a fucking joke.  How dare you serve us such an incompetent band of worthless clowns on the heels of Top Chef 6?  The top 10 finishers from last season could straight-up own the best of these fools on Season 7.  Just an Epic Fail on the part of the producers in charge of casting the show.

• Q:  Is Angelo too cocky for his own good or is his bragging justified?
• A:  Thanks for trying to serve me this helping of made-up Bravo drama bullshit.  I’ll pass.  Instead of focusing on food and culinary skill, Bravo is trying to turn this into The Real Housewives in chefs’ whites.  For the record, I would support the cast of The Real Housewives of (Disgraced Metropolis X) being issued 12 inch chefs knives.

• Q:  What was your favorite lunch at school?
• A:  Stupid question.  School lunch sucked ass.

• Q:  Were you happy with the judges’ decision last night?  Do you think things should have gone differently?
• A:  How the hell should I know?  Unlike previous seasons where you actually show us the details of the judges’ deliberations, we hardly see a damn thing this time.  You have to log on to Bravo’s Top Chef website to get the real talk about the food.  Hey geniuses, WE CAN’T RECOGNIZE WHAT IS GOOD AND WHAT IS BAD IF YOU DO NOT HAVE YOUR JUDGES TALKING ABOUT IT IN SOME MEASURE OF DETAIL.  I would much rather watch the judges discussing what worked and what didn’t than watch these talentless fucks strut around their apartment and posture for one another.

• Q:  Want a backstage tour of the Top Chef 7 set?
• A:  No

• Q:  Should Top Chef contestants be skilled in pastries?
• A:  I’d settle for Top Chef contestants that are skilled in cooking.

• Q:  Double Elimination tonight. Who do you think the doomed duo is going to be?
• A:  That’s an easy one.  My girlfriend and I, who will sit down to suffer through another hour of this train wreck, clinging to the vain hope that the focus will at some point shift from made-up drama to the food.

• Q:  We loved seeing Mike Isabella and Bryan Voltaggio on last week’s episode, it got us thinking, “What are our favorite cheftestants from last season doing now?”
• A:  Shaking their heads in disgust someplace.

• Q:  We can all agree that presentation is important. What makes the best plates ‘pop’ visually?
• A:  That’s it…focus on the visuals since no one actually talks about food on the show anymore.

• Q:  We’re starting to think this season’s chefs are the cockiest yet. Take a look and let us know if you agree!
• A:  I think that this season’s production team is the cockiest yet if they expect the food-loving audience of Top Chef to enjoy this steaming cauldron of shit.  Is it too much to ask to show Tom Colicchio speaking more than 10 words in 60 minutes of television?

• Q:  What’s the craziest ingredient you’ve ever tackled? Anything as exotic as these Quickfire challenge ingredients?
• A:  I once cooked a ’69 Camaro on the side of the 405.  It tasted like gasoline, burned rubber and other manly things…things that have no place in this season of Top Chef.

• Q:  The Pea Puree Controversy of 2010 continues… Do you think Alex took Ed’s dish?
• A:  If there is an idiot who would steal peas, surely they would be on this season of Top Chef.

• Q:  Do you ever hear the judges’ comments and think, “Way harsh, Tai!” Uh, so do we. Take a look at this season’s cattiest critiques so far:
• A:  “Cattiest” critiques?  Just about everything that makes this season of Top Chef suck can be summed up in this post.  It’s Bravo’s idiot Housewife-crazed executive team trying to turn Top Chef into every other mindless shitfest that pits one vacant over-privileged media whore against another.  I mean, seriously.  What the fuck is this?  If I ever so much as think, “Way harsh, Tai (who or what the fuck is Tai anyway?),” I pray that someone loves me enough to strike me down with a blunt object.

That’s all I can stomach for now…and you can spare me your “If you don’t like it then don’t watch it” talk.  This is nothing but tough love from a pissed off fan and foodie.  If you like watching people bitch at one another and fight over nonsense there are countless options on television to meet your…taste.  Let’s leave this quality show alone.  Here’s hoping that as the cast is trimmed down that they will have no choice but to shift the focus back to the food.

No doubt, the most offensive part of summer vacation when you’re a kid is the month of August when those god forsaken back to school ads start to run. “Hey kids. You know all that fun you’re having right now? Well just a quick reminder that all that shit is about to come to an end…in 4 weeks.” Thanks assholes. Thanks for dangling that sword over my head for the entire month of August.  The worst part about these ads is that they inevitably depict a bunch of happy-ass kids acting like going back to school is the best thing since pony parties and banana splits.  And how much back to school shopping do you really need to do?  Use your backpack from last year, swipe a notebook and a pencil from your folks and you’re good to go.

Here in America, the mainstream news media is good for a few things.  Reporting the actual news in an intelligent and reasonable manner is not one of them.  However, when it comes to stirring the pot of full-blown hang-onto-your-ass, lock yourself in the basement hysteria, they wield a power ordinarily reserved for iron-fisted dictators.  The latest example of this bullshit fear-mongering is all of the carrying on about this swine flu.  Swine flu?  Give me a fucking break.  More people die in wood-chipper accidents each year than from the swine flu.  More people die from the regular flu each day than have died from the swine flu in the last week.  Put your hard-on back into your collective pants and mix in some real news.  Isn’t our economy still in the shitter?  Can we do something about these Harvard MBA cocksuckers who are still free after engineering this debacle?

The only thing more pathetic than the irresponsible response from the American news media has been the actions of a number of third world governments who have decided that they are going to exterminate all of their pigs.  Never mind the fact that you don’t catch swine flu from pigs.  Can’t we just ship these pigs to the starving people in the world?  You know, the people in those countries where millions of their people die from malaria each year.  I’m sure they’d be happy to take your pigs.  Dumbasses.

No pigs were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

Man, I feel so much better about myself today.  Since Dancing With The Stars first took off, I have never for the life of me been able to understand why some people (married men, I’m looking at you) enjoy watching this show.  Listening to some of my older colleagues at work talk about this show in staff meetings used to completely blow my mind.  I mean here were heterosexual men talking about c-list celebrities prancing around a ballroom like Peter Pan the way me and my buddies talk about the NFL draft.  Naturally, I concluded that these gentlemen were simply “taking one for the team” on the marriage front; that they had no real interest in the show but were simply playing the compromise card and had inadvertently gotten caught up in the nonsense.  That was before last night.

While putting the finishing touches on yesterday’s post, I turned on my television for a little background noise.  I find the banal drone of the television to be particularly…inspirational while writing.  After a quick flip through the channels, I stopped at the sight of a sweaty fat man dressed up like a 1950′s era doofus, clumsily gyrating with a woman half his age and wearing one-third the amount of clothing.  Wondering who this big bastard was, and thinking that something tragic could happen at any moment (how we define “quality television” here in L.A.), I put down the remote control to watch this horror unfold.  A quick Google search revealed that the fat man in question was Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple…I didn’t know he was a celebrity, but ok.  Now I probably should have mentioned this earlier but I had never actually seen Dancing With The Stars before last night.  I, having always fancied myself to be a bit of a man’s man, could think of few worse tortures than watching a bunch of showbiz rejects dress up in fancy costumes and twirl around a dance floor.  However, being the pop-culture connoisseur that I am, I felt that this might be a proper time to finally find out what all the fuss is about.  After all, I had read online that Steve-O from Jackass was a contestant and I harbored an ever-so-small hope that he might finish a big routine by launching a bottle rocket out of his ass.

The bottle rocket never came.  In fact he didn’t even dance because the damn fool did a flip during rehearsal and landed on his mic pack, injuring his back.  (He really couldn’t see that one coming?)  However, after watching a good half-hour of the show, the pieces started to fall into place.  I don’t know a polite way to say this, but it’s a total stroke show.  It’s a bunch of hot, uber-flexible, scantily-clad, professional female dancers with absolutely insane bodies, letting washed-up dudes grope and spin them around.  Before seeing the show, I had always assumed that these gals were heinous and wore big fucking ball gowns…but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.  And as if the outfits these dancers wear during the routines aren’t revealing enough, Dancing With The Stars shows clips of the rehearsals where these girls are wearing even less.  This one girl, who is partnered with former free-basing linebacker Lawrence Taylor, was rehearsing bra-less and could barely keep her boobs in her top.  It was seriously one of the hottest things I’ve seen on television in a long time.

The answer is clear.  Dancing With The Stars is soft-core pornography for guys who aren’t allowed to have pornography in the house.  The genius behind this is how covert it all is.  Women are so thrilled that their men are enjoying the show that they don’t bother to question it and the ones who do know what’s up are happy to ignore it.  Hell, it probably does wonders for their love lives.

There you have it.  Another one of life’s little mysteries solved.  Man…I feel so much better now.

I just saw a commercial for something called the Spyder Roadster.  It’s some kind of ass-backwards tricycle for cowards who can’t hang with two wheels and fools who think that a third wheel “makes it safer.”   Not since the Segway has there been a more pointless method of transportation.  Hey folks, riding one of these ain’t cool.  In fact it’s the automotive equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons.  Fellas, women aren’t going to look at you on your tricycle and say, “Ooh, I want to get on the back of THAT…thing.”  No, it will just be you standing there in your thousand-dollar riding “outfit,” parked in front of Johnny Rockets waiting for some vacationing rube to notice your…vehicle.

If you must get a trike.  Get one of these…

Let's eat some mushrooms and RIDE!

This is what three wheels should look like.  Otherwise, buy a motorcycle or stay in your cage.  Stop with the nonsense already…Spyder Roadster…humph!

Fucking Crybabies

When I get ready for work in the morning, I like to keep CNBC on in the background.  As a business student and a man with the bulk of his savings tied up in the stock market, I feel like I should have an idea of what’s going on out there in the business world.  However, the hosts of CNBC’s morning programming are straight-up whiny bitches.

If I have to hear one more of these bitter clowns shouting nonsense about “class warfare” or throwing a hysterical tantrum over Barack Obama’s attempts to pick our country up off of the shit heap I sear to God I’ll start watching Good Day LA…or maybe I’ll just slice my belly open and call it good.  Meanwhile, none of these geniuses actually have anything valuable to add to the discussion.  God forbid they actually come up with an alternative solution to the problem.  And you can spare me your bullshit grandstanding about letting the market and the natural forces of capitalism “run their course.”  How about this.  The next time a big brush fire is burning in the hills around your mansion we’ll just call off those taxpayer subsidized firefighters and let the fire run its course.  The forces of nature will eventually halt the blaze, right?  Why should we redistribute the wealth to fire crews so that idiots who build their mansions in fire zones get bailed out every time there’s a fire?

The only anchor on this journalistic abortion who is even worth a damn is Maria Bartiromo.  Not only does she engage in actual journalism, but the woman is smokin’ hot.  I mean she could convince me to buy shares in a chain of Michael Jackson day care centers.  In fact, CNBC should just play clips of Maria running in slow motion on a tropical beach somewhere while she tells us how hot it makes her when we buy stock.   This financial crisis would end fucking TOMORROW.

I love capitalism.  I hate losing money.  But these people seriously need to get a fucking grip.  Making people panic by screaming that the sky is falling every morning MAKES YOU PART OF THE PROBLEM.  Report the financial news and shut the fuck up with the political commentary already.

**Update** Apparently the writing staff at the Daily Show is sick of these jokers too.  Watch Jon Stewart put my pathetic rant to shame as he turns both keys and hits the “Vaporize” button on these schmucks.