Big Food

The Today Show this morning had one of its regular segments with the guy who wrote "Eat This, Not That," showing the health dangers in fast foods and better alternatives on the menu at the same fast food establishments. The segment was prompted, in part, by the controversy over San Francisco's desire to eliminate toys in kids' meals of fast food restaurants which are not healthy and only permit the restaurant to include a toy if the particular meal contains milk, a fruit and a vegetable.

Needless to say, there is much heat on both sides of the question, the "too much government interference in the raising of our children" parents vs. the "this is good because it will help me help my child to eat better" parents. (One can only assume, following my "juice and crackers" philosophy of life that no matter which decision is made, in 6 years they will be back with some wonderful new idea why it should go the other way.)

So while the nutritional crisis is being discussed in San Francisco and on The Today Show, The Food Network sent me a notice of its new show, Outrageous Food, starring Tom Pizzica, from season six of The Next Food Network Star.

The premise of this show seems to be that Pizzica is on a mission to find (and create) "seriously over the top eats.

I guess it's the Food Network answer to the Travel Channel program, Man vs. Food.

where food fanatic Adam Richman is "on a journey to explore the biggest and best eats our nation has to offer, including some of the craziest challenges around."

Some of Richman's shows have included eating a 72 oz. steak, the 5 lb jumbo stromboli challenge, a 5 lb nacho challenge, the "near impossible breakfast taco" challenge, the 11 lb carnivore pizza challenge, the 5 lb grilled cheese challenge and the 2-1/2 lb Dagwood challenge, to name but a few.

For his part, Pizzica made a stop at Burger Jones in Minneapolis, and checked out one of the establishment's favorite customer challenges: A massive burger piled high with everything from grilled cheese sandwiches to chicken-fried bacon (chicken fried bacon?).

(It kind of makes the controversial new KFC "Double Down," consisting of 2 pieces of fried chicken fillets as the "bread" for 2 slices of Monterey Jack Cheese, pepper Jack cheese, 2 slices of bacon and a sauce -- 540 calories, 32 gms of fat and 1,380 gms of sodium -- seem almost like a health food meal!)

What is it with our fascination at seeing people stuff a week's worth of food into their faces?

Think about the food competitions you've seen on the news. I particularly remember the hot dog eating challenge that was won every year by the skinniest, smallest Japanese guy.

At a time in our history when so many go hungry and so many more suffer from obesity, why are restaurants offering to supersize whatever you purchase, carnivals deep frying everything from Twinkies to butter, amazingly, and more than one television show focusing on the worst food you can possibly eat (I'm leaving out Guy Fieri's Diners, Dives and Drive-Ins because it's not entirely focused on food that is bad for you).

Lord knows that I, who never saw a vegetable I really liked unless it was drenched in butter or covered with mayonnaise, am the last person to speak on nutritious food, but when even I turn off a program because the thing that is being eaten is so disgusting (and I'm not talking about shows like Survivor where the contestants are asked to eat bugs and entrails, but things like the sandwich above), there's something seriously wrong!

Friday vs. Collar

A couple of people have been asking me, over and over again, if I'm watching Friday Night Lights and then tsk-tsk-tsked when I admit that I had never watched the show, telling me how it's the best show on TV.

I think "best" show on TV is definitely subjective. I had started watching Friday Night Lights when it first began and just couldn't get into it, so stopped. However, when someone told me that the Family Channel was rerunning the entire show, starting with Season 1 (2006), I decided to see what I've been missing.

When I watched the first episode, I realized why I had stopped watching it to begin with. For one thing I'm not a big football fan. I like football, but if this was going to be a show which spent an hour every week talking about football games, I wasn't really interested. I also found it very difficult to understand about 1/3 of what was said. This being about a high school team, the boys all have that mumble way of speaking which, combined with a Dallas accent makes me have to work too hard to understand what they are saying (add to that the sadly familiar Comcast pixellation that freezes our television for a few seconds several times during a show and it's not very rewarding to even try!).

But the show now has several seasons under its belt and I decided to stick with it, since it is being broadcast, now, a show a night and doing a 4-show marathon gets you hooked faster. I'm now hooked. I still wouldn't say it was the best written or best acted show on TV, but I'm enjoying it and have been informed that as the show moves on the plot lines get further away from just high school football.

It is, though, an odd thing to realize that there are places in this country where high school football is so big that it is the main topic on the radio, the players' homes have big signs in front of them with the name of the player and the position he plays, and most of the town turns out for games.

As passionate as some of my friends are about Friday Night Lights is how I've felt about USA's White Collar, though I have yet to able to get anybody to watch it.

I love the characters, I love the writing, and I love the chemistry between Neal Caffrey, forger and thief, released to the custody of FBI Special Agent Peter Burke (who was the one who arrested Caffry in the first place, after a long chase) in order to help the FBI solve some of its most puzzling white collar crimes.

The problem with White Collar, however, is that I suspect it might be confusing to start watching it now. There is such a continuing story arc, which doesn't affect the weekly crimes to be solved, but is such an integral part of the overall story, that I wonder if anybody could catch up. Who is Kate? Who killed her and why? What is the mysterious music box? These are becoming larger and larger parts of the before and after story and I would probably find it off-putting myself (which is why I rented four seasons of Sopranos before committing myself to watching the new season, back when I was hooked on that show...I needed to know what had gone before).

However, I really strongly recommend investing a little time, renting Season 1 from Netflix or watching it on Hulu to get caught up before it returns next summer.

What? Me Worry?

There is a volcano in Iceland spewing volcanic ash into the air and making it difficult for people to travel around the world. "Eyjafjallajökull" looks more like the letters I've been getting in Scrabble lately...and I don't even want to think about trying to pronounce it...but as someone who will soon have to fly over its air space on our way to Helsinki, I've now added "volcanic ash" as something I must worry about.

There are many things to worry about, everything from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the plight of women and children in various African countries, to why Ned is so terribly obsessed with Ryan Seacrest. Such a scary world.

Television shows seem determined to make life scarier for us. If it weren't for The Today Show, for example, I wouldn't know that on every bedspread in every hotel, from Motel 6 to expensive hotels, you can find traces of semen, because they don't change them very often. Ewww. Who wants to sit on a bed in a hotel?

I also wouldn't know about the "splash back" effect in bathrooms which pretty much ensures that every toothbrush in the house has some bit of excrement imbedded in it from toilet spray while flushing. I don't know about you, but I've been brushing my teeth for about 65 years now so I have probably injested a lot of excrement and I'd just as soon not think about that, thankyouverymuch. I seem to have survived, so why do I need to know about it?

I've also shopped in grocery stores on a regular basis since I moved out of the family home in 1961. I have moved thousands of grocery carts through hundreds of grocery stores without ever thinking about who touched the handle before me. Now I can't go shopping without imagining some kid slobbering on the handle or somebody coughing into her hands and then putting it on the handle. Did I really need to know this after all these years?

Ironically, I'm so cavalier about toothbrushes and grocery carts, but my grandmother taught me from an early age that public bathrooms were filthy places and I should never ever touch the handle on a public toilet. I had it so firmly imbedded in my brain for so long that I automatically flush a toilet in a public restroom with my foot instead of my hands and have done so since I was a small child. When Jeri heard that she said "Swell, now when I go to flush, I have to think about the fact that maybe somebody's shoe was on the handle."

I always came home from from running errands and put my purse on the kitchen counter, until I heard on TV someone who pointed out that your purse is filthy, that it may have been on the ground where dogs peed, or where people who stepped in places where dogs peed walked. Heck, in this house I might actually put it in dog pee from time to time. So where does one now put a purse safely?

We've all heard the "5 second rule" about food that is dropped on the floor. Seemed to make sense to me. If you pick it up within 5 seconds, it doesn't have time to collect all those horrible things that might be on the floor. Not so, says The Today Show (I've gotta stop watching TheToday Show) in a laboratory test that showed exactly how much bad stuff a bit of food can pick up in the 5 seconds it takes you to bend over to retrieve it.

Now I find out that toilet paper can actually leave bits behind on your behind after you wipe.

Who knew? I mean you go to the bathroom, you do your business, you wipe carefully in front-to-back motion, you flush the toilet with your foot and you remember to wash your hands before you leave and who knew that you might be suffering the embarrassment of toilet-paper butt?

I'll tell ya, folks, there are just too many things to worry about these days. It's enough to make you hide--but where is a safe place, free from excrement splash or dog pee or bath tissue residue?

(Do you suppose the people under fire in Afghanistan worry about running out of Purell hand sanitzer?)

The Best Christmas EVER

The TV is always on in this house. I mean always on. Yes, I'm a terrible person. Ever since I got my first apartment back in about 1981 I have used the television as company. Whether I'm watching it or not, it's always on as some sort of white noise. When I was first working, back in the 1960s, I often turned on Popeye cartoons (which I didn't really even like, but it was the best that was on in that time period). Walt's mother actually bought me an 8 mm movie of Popeye that Christmas.

Over the years, the choices of programs have changed, but there is almost always something on that can be listened to. You have to sit and watch sports programs or nature programs or cartoons. But you don't need to watch sit coms or crime dramas.

In December, on the weekends, it seems like your choice of programming is either marathon crime dramas or marathon made-for-TV Christmas movies.

(Turner Classic Movies is also sometimes good, though there are some themes that I don't really want to watch. I'm not a big fan of B-movies and a lot of the movies made in the 40s and early 50s derive their quality from the visual element more than from the plot line. When you are using TV for white noise, you are very big on plot line!)

Christmas movies are good to have on because they are pretty much all the same. Some disgruntled person (a jilted woman, a grieving father, a disappointed Santa, a homeless person, or some other Scrooge-like figure) hates Christmas and over the course of the next 90 minutes meets an angel or an adorable child or a persistent pooch who teaches him or her the meaning of Christmas and the movie ends with hugs and falling snow and a glowing angel or star on top of a Christmas tree, and truly it is the very best Christmas ever.

Yesterday I wasn't into sappy Christmas movies, so I immersed myself in a Law and Order: SVU marathon. From morning until 5 p..m it was nothing but Elliot and Olivia and a parade of raped women, abused children and brutal murders. HoHoHo and a Merrrrry Christmas to all!

At 5 p.m. the Criminal Minds marathon started. I prefer Criminal Minds so I switched to that, where the really perverted criminals hang out. Kind of bittersweet watching one of the earlier episodes with Hotchner laughing and carrying his newborn son, laughing with his wife, who, in reality, was killed two weeks ago, leaving the 4 year old son, after Hotch's bitterness caused the break-up of the marriage.

I could easily have continued the Law and Order (not SVU) marathon today, but I decided that Walt had had enough of murder and mayhem for the weekend even though he spends most of his time upstairs anyway) so I went Sappy (with a capital "S") and just turned on the Hallmark Channel for its all day Christmas movie marathon.

By 10 a.m., I was a soggy mess already--with hours to go.

The first movie, Christmas Visitor starred Meredith Baxter and William Devane as a couple who had not been able to celebrate Christmas since the death of their only son in Desert Storm. Dad picks up a mysterious young stranger on the highway and brings him home for the night. Naturally it's the dead son, in an unfamiliar body, returned for one last Christmas. Dad suspects, Mom and daughter just enjoy talking with him. Daughter, who was was potentially very ill, suddenly recovers after dead son lays on hands and tells her everything is going to be all right, the broken star that son broke years ago gets fixed, by morning Dad has figured out who he is, and as he drives him to a deserted road, supposedly to meet his friends, the son melts into the air, with one last salute to Dad. Snow falls, hugs all around and it's the very best Christmas ever.

The movie made me angry. How DARE their son come back. I'm waiting for some mysterious stranger to march back in here to restore the true joy of Christmas before fading into thin air again. I'm not particular. I won't even demand two mysterious strangers. One would be enough--either one. I don't care. (Unless maybe foster dog Dexter is really one of our kids in disguise...) But still I was sobbing and using lots of tissues by the time the movie ended.

The next Hallmark movie was one I'd seen earlier in the week, but fortunately Turner Classic Movies came through with a Judy Garland movie (In the Good Old Summertime), followed by a parade of light MGM movies which were perfect for background noise. Movies that I've seen before are always great for white noise because I can "see" them without even looking.

I figure that if I keep up this see saw back and forth between murder and Merry Christmas I'm going to be expecting some deranged criminal to commit mass murder in a house, but find an adorable moppet hiding in a closet who will make him see the error of his ways and he will march out the door into falling snow and give himself up to the police and it will be (almost) the best Christmas ever, except for the people bleeding inside the house behind the glowing lights of the Christmas tree seen through the front window.

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

I'm so angry about "balloon boy." Oh, not about the hoax perpetrated on television watchers, apparently in the hope of getting a reality show. I'm furious about how much air time the stunt has received.

For some reason, I missed the actual event and only saw the reports after everyone knew that the kid was safe, so I missed all that emotional involvement that many probably felt.

But still the media has gone ballistic over this whole thing. It has featured prominently in every newscast I've seen for several days and been discussed ad nauseam on talk shows. Ed Schultz made it the lead story on his "The Ed Show" on MSNBC and even devoted one segment of it to a psychologist, who never met the kid, never met the family and was basing his assessment solely on news reports. He gave an in-depth analysis of what the family dynamic probably was and how the kid was feeling and what his relationship with his father must be. Talk about a non-story.

Following The Ed Show, when I saw that Chris Matthews was leading off with balloon boy too, I turned off the TV.

When are the newscasters going to understand that you only encourage dumb stunts like this by giving them so much air time. Are we so hungry for 24 hr a day coverage that we have to listen to junk like this? (Notice please that I said I turned the TV off in disgust! I do have some integrity..not much, but some.)

The American viewing public has been so screwed by that writers' strike so many years ago. It spawned the first reality shows and I guess Americans are so fascinated by living vicariously through other people's lives that it has become an entire industry.

I will admit to having watched Jon and Kate Plus Eight a couple of times. I watched the first time because I've been pregnant and know the feel of a pregant belly at term and I just couldn't even begin to imagine carrying six babies. I watched because the show opened each week with shots of Kate and that enormous belly. Then I continued to watch that first episode and the next one because the kids were cute. But I hated Kate who seemed never to smile, who ran the house like a drill sergeant and who browbeat Jon so badly I'm amazed that it's taken him this long to find someone else. I figured they had a strange and unusual relationship that seemed to work for them and I had no right passing judgement.

I gave up on the show the day she fired her nanny for forgetting to dust a small shelf under a table once.

I guess people continued to watch because kids are always cute, but has anybody read how screwed up the lives of the Dionne Quintuplets were, the first "reality show" played out throughout their entire lives in front of the camera?

I wouldn't be caught dead watching any of the camera-in-the-home shows, starting with the Loud family, back in 1973, where cameras followed the family for seven months and 10 million people got to be peeping Toms. I see promos for that show where wives change families for a week and they seem to be so terribly exploitative, though obviously the women and the families have signed an agreement to participate. But am I interested in the resulting train wreck? No way.

But stuff like this, and especially stuff like balloon boy encourage nutcases to go to bigger and better extremes in the hope of getting their 15 minutes of fame. Some go so far as to create mass violence and end their own lives gloriously. That news reports publish their names and photos endlessly only encourages other people with troubles to follow suit. "I may be miserable in this life, so I'll end my life but by God you'll remember my name!"

The sad thing about balloon boy is that someone found a video of him and his brothers on You Tube (which I will not link to) in which they do a rap which appears to be strongly anti-gay and which includes lines like "I hate gay faggots. I hit 'em with a bat." Kids that young don't know enough about life to write lyrics like the ones that appear in this rap video. They obviously have some talent and it's a shame that they are being led in such negative directions.

Frankly, I want the whole family to climb into that balloon and sail off to a place where we never have to hear about them again.

Television

Television, television
I'm sick from looking at television
I got weak in the eyes
Weak in the head likewise
From sitting here looking at television

Why can some people be such snobs about television?

Someone asked me recently about the name of a celebrity, which sounded familiar to her, but she couldn't quite place it. I said that she had been a member of the cast of one of the classic television sit coms.

"Oh." came the reply.

"I don't watch television."

She then went on to say that she stopped watching television when she saw how it affected the grades of her college roommates. She then said that she much preferred going to theatre and concerts.

I admitted that I watched television (I didn't bring up the fact that I watch a lot of television or that I am hooked on such stupid programs as Touched by an Angel or that I can tell you too much about contestants on too many reality programs!). I said that until I became a critic, I wasn't able to get to that many stage shows because the tickets were just too darn expensive.

"Well, if I can't get to the theatre, I prefer to read a book," came the reply. "I read lots of books. It's a much better pastime than watching television."

She doesn't even go to movies, feeling that anything that isn't "live" isn't worth her time.

Clearly I was not going to convince my friend that there was any value whatsoever in the boob tube. Our conversation came to a skreetching halt.

The other class of "non-TV watchers" that I frequently encounter, especially in this university town, are those who stick their nose in the air and admit that they only watch public television, as if apologizing for actually owning a television set but excusing it by somehow assuming that as long as it comes over public television it was high fallutin' enough to be considered OK.

Now I will admit that there is a lot of junk on television. I will even go so far as to admit that I watch an awful lot of junk on television. But nothing is all bad. And, trust me, I've seen enough junk live on stage over the past eight years that just the fact that you are watching something "live" doesn't mean that it's somehow better quality than, say,

I still cringe at memories of "Defending the Caveman," "Virgo, Hebrew Rising," "Magdalene," and Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Wistle Down the Wind." Heck, even "Touched by an Angel" was a step up from these!

To dismiss an entire entertainment genre and look down your nose at people who enjoy it is narrow-minded, and (to use the current buzz word), "elitist."

There is very good stuff on television. There is very bad stuff on television. There is good stuff on PBS, there is bad stuff on PBS. The quality of a thing is in the mind of the viewer and, ya know?...sometimes just plain entertainment is a valuable thing (witness the wonderful scripts of "Two and a Half Men" or "30 Rock").

But you can't answer someone who looks down his or her nose at you and sniffs "I don't watch television. I prefer to see a stage show or read a book."

I enjoy stage shows. I love reading. But I also enjoy watching television and I think that makes me a better rounded person.

At least when someone mentions a classic television program, I don't have to feel uninformed because I never once watched that show.