I'M NOT DEAD YET

SWEAR TO GOD

Late Night Saturday Blog (im cool)

What up it's Saturday night and everyone is asleep and you know what that means. TIME TO BLOG. I got my bloggin hands on and I am ready to go. I'm already going in fact.

Not only is it Saturday night but it is also September and you know what that means as well. TIME FOR FOOTBALL AND THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION.

We'll start in reverse order here. Rudy Giuliani is probably kind of a dummy if his campaign strategy is any indication. And now we also know he hates community service. HATES IT. Also liberals and 9/11. If you haven't watched his speech, you should. I don't know if I have ever seen a more hate-filled mainstream political speech. For your convenience, the piss and vinegar is located below:







It's kinda funny that a guy who has appeared in drag on TV several times and was mayor of New York City makes a lil gay joke about Obama being too cosmopolitan. Huckabee looks displeased.

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There was also the matter of Sarah Palin but what can you even say about her? I guess some people would vote for her on account of her being a foxy grandma, but here's hoping we aren't that dumb.

ATTENTION HILLARY VOTERS: I HAVE A VAGINA
^^^INSIGHTFUL POLITICAL COMMENTARY^^^

I think there was another guy at the end there too but I can't remember.

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Okay so football.

Not that this is news to anyone, but the ACC is seriously beyond terrible. The big win of last weekend was Maryland beating Delaware by 7, and this week they got taken down by powerhouse Middle Tennessee State, who now has a total of 4 wins over BCS-conference schools in their history. And the other 3 were against Vandy or one of those V-schools. Wake seems decent, Clemson and FSU will be okay by ACC standards, and the rest...? Hooboy. State struggled against William and Mary in the second half (after Harrison Beck had to take over at QB because Evans was getting booed too much), Miami got clowned by Florida for the first time in 23 years, and Duke lost to Northwestern so apparently they still suck too. Maybe we should just disband the conference. GO MINNESOTA!

In other news, ECU looked really really good in their win over West Virginia today. Their QB was better than any ACC QB except maybe Riley Skinner (but probably not), their RBs ran straight into people and got 3 or 4 yards after contact on just about every play, and their defense actually knows how to tackle. Given that they've already won their two games against ranked teams in pretty convincing fashion, I think there's a good chance they could run the table and end up in a BCS bowl this year. Good for them, I guess. I'm so glad State has to play them next week!!! This is great news!!! For the Wolfpack!!!!

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Today I looked at some art by some 17th-century Spanish guys. There was a lot of Jesus and Mary and fruit, as you might expect. There was one picture of a chubby Jesus which was a little unusual. I had a nice discussion about what it would be like if Jesus were obese and broke the cross. It would, in fact, be wild.

Can you spare a quarter, sir? I am studying art....

This was one of the paintings. Apparently it's very popular. I don't think this guy is Jesus or Mary but he's certainly a little fruity!!!!!!!!

Then I had a burger and learned about Louis XIV and sang Pavement songs. All in all a pretty good time.

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FOR LUNCH IN THE COMING WEEK: Anelletti pasta with spinach and Italian sausage

Law School and Quiche and Lies about both

LAW SCHOOL.

I started it. It's pretty good so far, for being at UNC at least. Everyone is very nice and the faculty is very supporting even if the law school does have more assistant deans than students. People say law school is very scary, but so far is is not. No one gave the "LOOK LEFT LOOK RIGHT, AT THE END OF THE SEMESTER ONE OF THESE PEOPLE WILL BE DEAD" speech. They told us we are all beautiful little birds who just have to spread our wings and fly to greatness (HINT: the bottom 50% will not). I have learned lots of very interesting things, including what constitutes battery and why we were legally allowed to tell the Indians to get the hell off their land (HINT: It's because we were European)! Here are people my professors sort of look like: Dr. Steven Peretti (word to my Chem E people), Kima from The Wire, and an older Mr. Rogers. These are 3 separate people, just to clarify.

But I am going to try not to be one of those jerks that goes to law school and then never talks about anything else, so that is enough about that. Let's talk about something else, like....

QUICHE.

People say real men don't eat quiche. Well guess what these people are idiots and should be open palm shoved into a pit! I feel strongly about this because eggs are full of cholesterol, which is manly. It's like an omelet in a pie crust, and let's be honest, who doesn't like pie. A big egg pie filled with sausage and bacon and milk and cheese. Maybe some vegetables but probably not. NOTE: Quiche is deceptive because it is light and airy but it will make you fat if you eat too much of it. It's a trick of the French. They do not get fat because they know the trick.

Okay so what else is there to talk about? Hmmm how about

DEMOCRATS.

More like Dumbocrats am I right because man this convention has not gone well. Hillary's speech sounded very forced and everybody knows she just wants to run in 2012, Biden was very rambly tonight, Mark Warner's keynote speech was all about 'oh hey we need to be bipartisan hooray' instead of giving any reasons why to vote pro-Democrat or anti-Republican, and apparently John Kerry did something good tonight but didn't actually get on TV. I know it's an old complaint but can this party please get its act together and stop being touchy-feely and inoffensive and start being as devious and calculating as the Republicans? As morally bankrupt as they may be, their attack machine works very well and I wish we had one!

Quit calling John McCain your friend and honoring his service and start attacking him for flying into a missile like an idiot, or for cheating on his crippled first wife, or whatever really I don't care just attack his character until you can't anymore. I am not articulating my frustration about this very well but it's late and I am tired and also not a clean, articulate boy like that B. Hussein Obama. Sure it would turn some people off but look stupid people would fall for it, and that's the majority of the voting bloc. And you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Or a quiche! AND I SPENT FIVE YEARS AS THE BACON IN AN OMELET CALLED THE HANOI HILTON.

KNIVES.

I bought some cutlery the other day. I immediately made a nice divot in my thumb while dicing an onion. This is the sign of a good knife and bad technique.

MUSIC.

Listen to the new Lindstrom album. The first song is 30 minutes and about 16 minutes in I'm pretty sure it blatantly rips off the bassline from Thriller.

END OF BLOG POST

THIS IS GREAT NEWS!!! FOR CHILDREN!!!

I don't know if you guys heard but Nickelodeon is putting a bunch of shows from the 90s on iTunes as indivdual episodes or in best-of packs. Here's what's already up:

•Aaahhh Real Monsters–Season 1 (13 Episodes)
•The Amanda Show–Best of, Vol. 1 (Five Episodes)
•Angry Beavers–Best of, Vol. 1 (Seven Episodes)
•As Told by Ginger–Season 1 (13 Episodes)
•Clarissa Explains It All–Best of (Seven Episodes)
•Doug–Season 1 (13 Episodes)
•Hey Arnold–Season 1 (13 Episodes)
•Hey Dude–Season 1 (13 Episodes)
•Rocket Power–Best of, Vol. 1 (Seven Episodes)
•Rocko's Modern Life–Best of, Vol. 1 (Six Episodes)
•Rugrats–Best of, Vol. 1 (Seven Episodes)
•Wild Thornberrys–Best of, Vol. 1 (Seven Episodes)

Hey Dude, Doug, and Rocko's Modern Life are well worth the price of admission; maybe Angry Beavers to a lesser extent. If anyone wants to write and petition for a My Brother and Me best-of pack, I'd be much obliged. Mr. Parker is a proud alumnus of NC Central University. Presumably, Uncle Lawrence is as well. Here some My Brother and Me moments for us to share:

THE MAJESTIC OPENING CREDITS

GOO PUNCH


KENDALL GILL WILL AUTOGRAPH ANYTHING

Just in case you didn't have enough My Brother and Me yet here are some fun links!

• MR. PARKER'S MYSPACE. Mr. Parker has a thing for big booties.
• Alfie became a gangsta rapper. He was such a poor influence on poor DeeDee, who I think is now dead due to poor influences. I like Alfie's stack of money, where you can see a 20 and a 10. The rest are probably ones and fives. I wonder if Showbizness could beat Cool Dr. Money in a rap battle.
• Goo is doin' R&B. I like the Goo Punch song better.
• Dionne is now Amanda Diva who sucks and can be seen in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. I can't remember if she dies or not. IMPORTANT CORRECTION: Amanda Diva was not actually in Death Proof. The character I was thinking of was played by Sydney Poitier, Sidney Poitier's daughter. So I guess Amanda Diva hasn't actually done anything besides show up on VH1 pop culture shows sometimes.
  
• Harry is still the only white kid on the show.

END OF BLOG POST

Things have happened in the past five months. This is for them.

So once (okay, twice) upon a time, I had a blog then I got kind of busy or lazy and forgot to update it. Well guess what kids, we're going for the trifecta because THE BLOG IS BACK! AGAIN!

CURRENT SNACK: POPCORN WITH CAJUN SEASONING
CURRENT MUSIC: BEN FOLDS FIVE - WHERE'S SUMMER B. (THE B. STANDS FOR BLOG)

I don't really know where to begin, so I'll just pick my new apartment to start with. I am living alone now and aside from the fact that my cable jacks don't work and I have been missing a drawer for the past 2 months, it seems pretty cool. You can cook a steak at midnight or take a shower with the door open or basically do whatever! It's a chance to have fun and hang out without friends! My place is full of furniture that isn't collapsing and I have pictures on the wall in frames so it kinda looks like an actual civilized person lives there.

This charming fellow lives in my dining room.

The downside to all this is that it means I live in Chapel Hill now. And the fact of the matter is that Chapel Hill will never be as good as Raleigh. Maybe it has more trees but it also has more hippie assholes on bikes and I have to drive much farther to get to the store. Plus everything is that nauseating shade of blue and yeah ok I'm whining a little bit here but come on.

In case you don't know what I'm doing here, which I assume you do or you wouldn't be reading this blog, I've got the whole law school thing starting in exactly one week. Aaaand hopefully in three years this will allow me to collect a substantial amount of dollars. And then maybe in a couple decades I can be a senator or something. I can't wait to see this blog show up in an attack ad someday.

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Well anyway I guess that probably wasn't very exciting for you, huh? Kind of a bad way to bring back the blog. Maybe something topical would be better? How about the Olympics!

I guess you probably know they faked the fireworks in the opening ceremony and had a little girl lip-sync some song because the one who actually sang it wasn't cute enough, and that this decision was made "in the national interest." I think this has kind of made the world raise an eyebrow at China and the seriously messed up way in which they do things. I also enjoyed Bela Karolyi complaining about the Chinese women's gymnastics team being underage and making Bob Costas really uncomfortable. But the thing you don't really get to hear about on the NBC coverage is the way the Chinese train their little athletic child robots in 3,000 "athletics academies" that take 400,000 kids and train them to win gold medals, at which point I assume they are then disposed of (the kids, not the medals). Time Magazine details the programs for a few sports:

"At the Luneng Table-Tennis School in Shandong province, 230 boarding students crowd a gymnasium set up with 80 Ping-Pong tables. In the morning, children train for about four hours. A few hours of academic classes are held in the afternoon, more than at many other sports schools. Three times a week, students hone their table-tennis skills also in the evening. Many kids see their parents for only a couple of weeks each year."

"At most other Chinese sports schools, suffering is considered integral to the athletic experience. At the Weifang City Sports School, where little Cloud is being trained to be a weight lifter, most of the kids are so chronically exhausted that during their afternoon break, they collapse in eight-to-a-room iron bunks to sleep. The Weifang academy is a collection of moldy concrete buildings, with only red socialist banners to break the monotone grays."

The propaganda director assures us that the kids practice for only a couple of hours a day. But students I speak to without a minder present say they train for at least five hours. None of the dorm rooms I visit have any textbooks--strange for a school that the propaganda director tells me is "mostly for academics, with sports training just as a spare-time activity." Wang Ting, a 15-year-old runner, looks at me blankly when I ask what she does during her time off. "I run, and I sleep," she replies. "That's my day."

Also this:

One by one, the little girls walk to the wooden blocks and extend their legs into the splits, one callused foot balancing on each block, their straining bodies hovering just above the ground. Coach Yang Yaojun, his sweatpants hiked high over his belly, ambles over to the girls, smiles and hands the nearest one a stopwatch. The girls, who are six and seven years old, do not smile back. Teetering on the blocks, they wait as Yang straddles each leg in turn, resting his 70-kg frame on their outstretched limbs. No matter how tough the girls are, no matter how much resolve they have mustered, the tears come within seconds. They do not cry out, though. They just well up soundlessly and stare at the seconds ticking down on the stopwatch. After half a minute, Yang stands up and lifts the girls off the blocks. They stagger with the first step, their oversized thigh muscles visibly twitching. By the second or third step, the tremors and the tears are gone. When a child does this six days a week all year long, save a short holiday at Lunar New Year, there are only so many tears she can shed.This assembly line of pain at the Weilun Sports School in China's southern Guangdong province asks an extraordinary amount from its 1,000 full-time students. Here, in the cavernous gymnastics classroom, the girls are drilled again and again as if they were in competition, with judges monitoring their frozen smiles. They must not show weakness, no matter how grueling the exercise. "Big smile, little friend," yells Yang as the girls go through 50 reps of leg kicks with weights tied to their calves. Yang's wife, also a coach, observes: "Maybe to foreigners, this looks cruel. But it's because we start kids very young and train them hard that we have become so successful in gymnastics." Says her husband, who has been coaching since 1983: "The Chinese race knows how to endure hardship. Our job is to push these kids to their limits, so they can perform gloriously for our nation." Behind him on the wall, below oversized Olympic and Chinese flags, giant red lettering summarizes the motto of the Weilun school, proud breeding ground of eight athletes at this month's Athens Olympics: "Patriotism, Unity, Struggle and Devotion."

So yeah it's pretty disturbing but at least some people are winning things the old-fashioned way! Granted the gymnasts from every country probably have some pretty grueling training, but at least when the American gymnasts are done competing they can go to college and have some kind of opportunity in their later years instead of dying from a snakebite in a rice field!

I honestly haven't been watching the Olympics too much, but it sounds like the Americans have mostly been doing pretty well themselves, thanks mostly to Michael Phelps and the basketball team. It's a good thing swimming gives out medals like Cracker Jack prizes. I felt a little bad for the women's gymnastics team, particularly Alicia Sacramone, who has a thick neck and the natural disadvantage of being the only gymnast I've ever seen with some big ol' boobs.

It's ok Alicia we still love you :)

Also did you know Kerri Strug actually got pretty dang hot since she stole America's heart by doing a vault with a sprained ankle or something and having a really ugly haircut?

Ooh damn girl dat's a sexy Cosby sweater you got there

Also just to make you feel better about not being an Olympic athlete yourself, here's a reminder of what can happen when you try to actually do things:

"My arm has a lil scrotum on it now!"

NOT SO TOUGH NOW ARE YOU, TOUGH GUY? I could beat him in arm wrestling now and I haven't trained a day in my life!

Also I'm not exactly sure what's going on with this but the Spanish basketball team might ruffle a few feathers with this one:

They ain't Chinese but they do play joke

At this rate, we'll probably end up with WWIII before these Olympics are over. Let's just wait for football season to start for real and maybe we can put all this hostility behind us and go back to ignoring the rest of the world.

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Ok that is enough blogging for tonight. Gotta ease back into it, you know? Maybe in a few years they will have Olympic Blogging. As soon as they do, I am starting on that Michael Phelps 9000-calorie-a-day diet.

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For the record

SWEET SIXTEEN PICKS

Thursday:
Xavier over West Virginia
UNC over Washington State
UCLA over Western Kentucky
Tennessee over Louisville

Bad night for schools starting W

Friday:
Wisconsin over Davidson :(
Stanford over Texas
Kansas over Villanova
Memphis over Michigan State

THAT'S ALL

I win!

So I did a little better with my Easter predictions, correct picks in bold...

Villanova over Siena
Texas over Miami
Tennessee over Butler
WKU over San Diego
Davidson over Georgetown (Upset Special!!!)
Memphis over Mississippi State
Louisville over Oklahoma
UNC over Arkansas

100% correct! Which sorta makes up for yesterday's dismal performance. I'll be making the rest of my picks a little later in the week. Now America's Sweetheart Stephen Curry just has to beat those God-forsaken Wisconsin Badgers and all will be right with the world. Of course, this will never happen now that I'm rooting for Davidson. They'll lose to Wisconsin just like State did in Hodge's senior year. I will always hate them.

I woke up at like 4PM last night so I just stayed up and did homework and worked out my playlist for the radio station today; I'm pulling a double shift for the guy who goes on before me. Lots of fun. It took me like two hours to get a decent list worked out, so I hope people actually like it.

SURVEY OF THE DAY: WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE STREET FIGHTER 2 CHARACTER???

Mine would have to be Guile.

GO HOME AND BE A FAMILY MAN!

END OF BLOG POST

The Upset Special!!! Happy Easter!

This is going to be painful, but let's look at my predictions for today's first round of hot hot NCAA Tournament action (correct picks in bold):

Duke over West Virginia
Kansas State over Wisconsin
Xavier over Purdue
Notre Dame over Washington State
Stanford over Marquette
Kansas over UNLV
Pitt over Michigan State
UCLA over Texas A&M

Only 4/8 on those, and Stanford and UCLA were trying mighty hard to make me wrong on their games as well. A pretty miserable record indeed, if I do say so. But tomorrow is a new day! So here's what I've got for tomorrow:

Villanova over Siena
Texas over Miami
Tennessee over Butler
WKU over San Diego
Davidson over Georgetown (Upset Special!!!)
Memphis over Mississippi State
Louisville over Oklahoma
UNC over Arkansas

I don't really believe in the Davidson pick but I hate to call for the favored team to win in every game. That said, it'd be cool to see them win!

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Anyway, tomorrow (technically today) is Easter! A holiday that started out being about the rebirth of Jesus and somehow shifted to focus on chocolate rabbits that lay eggs and weird shiny fake grass in pastel-colored baskets! I'm hyped up!

My pick for best new (technically re-released, I guess) Easter candy this year is Orange Creme Hershey's Kisses. They're white chocolate with a pleasingly orange creamsicle swirl and they taste and smell surprisingly strongly of oranges. They're really sweet and you can't eat many at a time but maybe that's a good thing if you are predisposed to weight gain from eating candy! The texture is a little off-putting though; it doesn't have a smooth mouth feel like most Hershey's chocolate and kinda clings to your teeth like congealed vegetable oil. But if you can get around that, they're a nice little treat!

ACTUAL PRODUCT DOES NOT LOOK THIS JAUNDICED

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THE DEPARTMENT OF TERRIFYING VIDEOS

This is the section where I will post Youtube videos that are unsettling in one or more ways!

#1 The Dancing Tongue Pig



Apparently this is from a 1907 film and it doesn't really get weird (relatively speaking) until the very end, when the giant dancing pig reveals his giant tongue and fangs. If you start watching this video, I require you to watch until the end! The music is awesome, though. I want an MP3 of it.

The pig reminds me of Bust Rod, the giant frog from the film "Forbidden Zone." He can be seen briefly in this trailer:


#2 It's Raining McCain



There are more terrible things than I can count about this video. It features John McCain's three youngest supporters doing a spirited reinterpretation of "It's Raining Men" about their favorite senile George W. Bush lapdog. I love how the white grandma lady's sweatshirt is close enough to the color of the greenscreen that her torso eerily fades in and out of existence at about a minute in. Not to mention the grandma lady's terrifying cougar faces throughout the whole video. Or the big black sumo woman splashing tiny John McCain bodies all over her face at 1:58.
Ugh.

THIS FACE WILL HAUNT YOUR DREAMS

Actually I guess that's really all I have right now. But that's more than enough terror for one blog post anyway. Check back tomorrow to ridicule my insane NCAA tournament prediction failings!


END OF BLOG POST

I already got beaten in the tournament

Alright, so here are my predictions from yesterday after a day in which three teams that lost to NC State advanced to the second round of the NCAA tournament. Correct predictions in bold:

Tennessee over American
Davidson over Gonzaga (Upset special!!!)
Miami over Saint Mary's
Drake over Western Kentucky
Butler over South Alabama
Georgetown over UMBC
Texas over Austin Peay
UCONN over San Diego
UNC over Mount St. Mary's
St. Joseph's over Oklahoma (Upset special!!!)
Vanderbilt over Siena
Oregon over Mississippi State
Indiana over Arkansas
Louisville over Boise State
Villanova over Clemson (Upset special!!!)
Memphis over Texas-Arlington

That's a grand total of 10/16, or .625. Terrible for a single day of the first round. Then again, it's pretty incredible that both of the 12 seeds and both of the 13 seeds won. I wonder if that's ever happened before. Apparently 51 people in the ESPN tournament challenge are 100% right so far which is also pretty amazing given the circumstances. Vegas Watch says the odds of going 64/64 with your tournament picks are "One in around 7.2 trillion. Ouch. If you did this 300 million times, there's a 1 in 23,924 chance that you'd go 64/64 in one. If you did it 6 billion times, it's 1 in 1,197."

Anyhow, the UCONN and WKU games were both particularly exciting, so hopefully that will create some more good matchups on Sunday. But for now here are my picks for tomorrow's matchups:

Duke over West Virginia
Kansas State over Wisconsin (Upset Special!!! Also I hate the Badgers with a passion!)
Xavier over Purdue
Notre Dame over Washington State (Upset Special!!!)
Stanford over Marquette
Kansas over UNLV
Pitt over Michigan State
UCLA over Texas A&M

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Here's something I heard today that I want to share but I know nobody else will actually listen to: The Most Unwanted Song. In 1996, Dave Soldier and Komar & Melamid undertook a project to try and quantify music to create both the most desired and the most undesired songs in the world, based on polling about what kind of genres, lyrics, instrumentation, and similar things that people liked and disliked.

The Most Wanted Song is a pretty boring pop song you could hear on any adult contemporary station, but The Most Unwanted Song is quite the adventure. It starts off with a harmonica/harp cowboy-style intro and segues into an opera singer rapping over tuba beats. It has accordions and bagpipes and childrens' choirs singing about holidays and telling you to "do all your shopping at Wal-Mart!" It's 22 minutes of some of the most incredible sounds you will ever hear. You can listen to it here:

And if you liked it that much, download it here. God how I'd love to play this on WKNC.

"Ramadan, Ramadan, lots of praying with no breakfast!"


END OF BLOG POST

THE BLOG IS BACK

So I've been pretty busy lately and I admit that I have not tended to the ol' blog as I really intended to when I started doing this again. But I will try to rectify the situation!

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IN POLITICS and tangentially in religion, I don't know if people still care about this issue anymore or not with the whole passport issue apparently taking root in the media now, but the full videos of the Jeremiah Wright sermons with the controversial soundbytes have been released and it's amazing how anti-American and racist they really aren't. I don't claim to know all that much about religion and what typically goes on in most churches, but I didn't find a lot to be outraged about here. If you still have concerns about this, please watch the following:





I'll grant you that the bit about injecting black people with HIV is factually incorrect, but technically I guess that did happen with syphilis...

By the way, I really like Rachel Maddow these days. Very sharp political commentary and the patience to deal with Pat Buchanan on MSNBC on a regular basis. Rachel, if you ever decide you like guys, let's get hitched, okay?

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IN SPORTS I really haven't been following the NCAA tournament at all since this year's abysmal, no-heart-havin' NC State Turdpack pretty much made it impossible to enjoy basketball. JJ Hickson is gone, Gavin Grant is gone, and Sidney Lowe has just now gotten around to saying that maybe Brandon Costner should lose some weight. Add that to the fact that we still won't have a high-level ACC point guard or shooting guard next year and it's enough to make you sick. However, I understand that today Duke just barely squeaked by against a college for country music singers and the only upset of the day came with Kansas State beating USC (aka Michael Beasley beating OJ Mayo) which really isn't all that surprising. I guess I was kinda rooting for Baylor though.

As for tomorrow's games I'll take...

Tennessee over American
Davidson over Gonzaga (Upset special!!!)
Miami over Saint Mary's
Drake over Western Kentucky
Butler over South Alabama
Georgetown over UMBC
Texas over Austin Peay
UCONN over San Diego
UNC over Mount St. Mary's

St. Joseph's over Oklahoma (Upset special!!!)
Vanderbilt over Siena
Oregon over Mississippi State
Indiana over Arkansas
Louisville over Boise State
Villanova over Clemson (Upset special!!!)
Memphis over Texas-Arlington

Not too many bold picks in there, but then again, it's the first round.

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MUSIC NEWS: Well I guess I don't really have that much actual news but the new Man Man CD that comes out on April 8 is awesome. Also, there is some band called Does It Offend You, Yeah? that obviously has a terrible name but some cool songs. Also worth listening to! Finally, Hercules and Love Affair have released a debut album that sounds like some straight up 70s disco and quite frankly I think we need much more of that. And you can listen to songs from all three of these bands' albums IN THIS VERY BLOG so do it okay:

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WHATEVER ELSE IS LEFT:

I've been reading some really good food blogs lately and thought I would share with all 2 of you who actually read this thing in case you want to try making delicious foodstuffs or just learn more about food or look at pretty pictures like these:

• The Kitchn: This site has recipes, food news, sporadic book recommendations, cookware news and more. Very interesting to look at even if you don't plan to cook anything. Updated daily.

• Smitten Kitchen: Mostly recipes and general cooking advice, but they have some pretty cool links and whatnot, like this one, which allows you to search over 2000 food blogs for recipes: http://foodblogsearch.com/ Updated every few days.
  

• Simply Recipes: Pretty much what it sounds like. A little fancier than the other stuff here, I guess. Probably for true foodies only, but worth a look. Updated every few days.

• The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from a middle-aged housewife who seems like she went out of her way to be an awesome chef in her 20s and has gotten to the point where she knows all the shortcuts and has made it much easier. Some of this stuff looks awesome. Highly recommended! Updated every week or two.

• Use Real Butter: This one is more like a personal blog than one specifically about food, but they do have some recipes and awesome food photography. This lady's camera is extremely balleriffic.

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And now it is bedtime.

END OF BLOG POST

I bought the planet on Bamzu.com

So the other night I'm watching CNN when I see an ad for these Zorbeez super-absorbent towels that can basically suck up the entire ocean. Then an ad to help old people get a reverse mortgage. Then one for the Mantis garden tiller. Then one for a personal sound amplifier. Then one for Globe Life Insurance. What do all these have in common? Bamzu.com. Every single one of these products could be found at Bamzu.com.

Amazon doesn't let me buy life insurance, so I figured it would be worth a look. Apparently, Bamzu is owned by Ted Turner and only advertises on Turner networks (perhaps not coincidentally, it seems that very few others advertise on Turner networks). Further investigation shows that it's sort of an As-Seen-On-TV hub where there are links to pretty much every product that's advertised on those channels, which isn't quite as fun as I was hoping. Nevertheless, if I were selling life insurance, I don't think I'd want somebody to be able to buy a garden tiller from the same place.

I've actually seen some As-Seen-On-TV stores around, but none featured the selection and all-round inanity of Bamzu. Why, just take a look at some of your options here:

Bible on DVD
Black Forest Decor
Blazin' Reggae
BLENDY PENS
.
.
.
HARRY CONNICK, JR.
Hat World/Lids
HIP HOP GOLD
hobbytron
.
.
.
KIDZ BOP 10
KIDZ BOP 11
KIDZ BOP 12
Kidz Bop 13
KIDZ BOP 5
KIDZ BOP 6
KIDZ BOP 7
KIDZ BOP 8
KIDZ BOP 9
.
.
.
SUNDAY SCHOOL JAMZ
Sunsetters
Super Jeweler
SWEATING IN THE SPIRIT


Thanks Bamzu.com, I came for the KIDZ BOP 12 and BLENDY PENS, but I stayed for SWEATING IN THE SPIRIT!

END OF BLOG POST

Good god this thing is way out of date

So my last post was on the 4th, right after the Super Bowl. I've actually updated my essay for class a couple times, but I guess you wouldn't read that every time you pop by here, would you?

Anyway. This is a little late but I just wanted to write a bit about the trip I took a couple weeks ago. Part of this might actually make its way into an essay at some point as well, so might as well go ahead and type it out, right?

So yeah, two weeks ago, I went to the Obama rally in Virginia Beach, VA, where it turns out he won pretty big. I heard about the thing on Friday, drove home on Saturday, and came back Sunday night. I think I've mentioned here before that this is the first time I've ever cared this much about politics. I mean, I watched the debates and voted in 2004, but this time around, it feels a lot more important. Case in point: if you told 18-year-old me that I'd break plans to get frisky with a cute girl in favor of going to a political rally I'd have slapped your mouth and called you crazy. But as it stands, this seemed like a potential once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see my generation's JFK and one of the best orators today speak, so off I went. My good friends Ping and Davis came along, which is interesting since Ping can't vote and Davis refuses to on the grounds that one vote won't make a difference. C'est la vie.

We had dinner with my parents and grandparents on Saturday, the night before the rally. Mom made burgers, which were pretty awesome as usual, although no one seemed to approve of my putting chips on the burger, but whatever, I like that extra crunch. In any case, my grandmother clearly didn't approve when I told her why I'd come home. "You mean to tell me you drove all this way to go listen to those idiots?!" she said. I asked what idiots she was referring to, but she just glared at me. A while later, mom told me that my grandma wanted to vote for Romney because she thought he was "a hunk," and when he dropped out of the race, she switched over to Hillary. Clearly, she's very concerned about the issues.

We didn't know what the lines would be like Sunday, given the reports of ridiculous overflow at arenas all over the country, so we got to the Convention Center early--the doors opened at 5:30 and we got there at 1:00. There were only about 20 people in line, and it looked like they might have camped there overnight, so we walked down to the oceanfront. It was actually my first time at the Virginia Beach oceanfront, and while the boardwalk was nice, I didn't really find a lot to like. There were "no swearing" signs all over the streets, which seemed a bit fascist. It was also extremely windy, and we all got quite a bit of sand in our eyes and hair. And of course, being a Sunday in February, almost everything was closed. We allowed ourselves to get sandblasted for half an hour or so, and headed back to the line. By the time we got back, there were 50 or so queued up, so we decided to go ahead and wait it out. This proved to be a good idea: within an hour, a few hundred people had showed up. An hour after that, there were about a thousand. By 5:00, several thousand were in a line that snaked all the way around the building. The final count in attendance was about 18,000, and we were in the first hundred. I tried to get some pictures of the crowd, but I only had my mom's little purple camera and they all came out blurry. Ping and Davis laughed hysterically at me for even bothering to bring such an effeminate little camera. "Put that thing away son, leave this one to the big boys," Davis said. Nevertheless, it was pretty overwhelming to see so many people standing out in the cold just to see one man speak. And judging by the murmurs I heard in the crowd, we all had the feeling that we were seeing a part of history.

When the doors opened and we got through security, Ping and Davis secured a spot near the railing while I went to the bathroom. I was washing my hands when I heard Davis yell, "Hey, if you hurry your ass up, we can get a seat in the bleachers." I didn't even bother drying my hands, just wiped them on my pants, and a large, Secret Service-looking fellow escorted us past the railing and we took a seat in the 4th or 5th row. A man in the crowd asked if we were young Democrats.

"Uh... not officially," I told him. "We go to NC State. We drove up for the rally yesterday, but we're not with any particular group."

"You guys are in college?" He turned to the lady sitting next to him. "Did we ever look that young?" he asked.

We waited another couple hours for the rally to begin, during which time, they played the same seven or eight songs over and over. This selection included Kanye West's "Touch the Sky," which is basically about spending too much money, but I digress. A woman in the crowd in front of the stage sang the chorus to "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" every time it played. At first, people slowly trickled into the arena after clearing the metal detectors, but around 7:00 someone opened a back door into a gated area farther from the stage and thousands rushed in steadily until they reached capacity. Some still got turned away at the door. Meanwhile, volunteers started handing out signs for us to wave for the camera. The red ones said "STAND FOR CHANGE" and the blue ones said "CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN." I got a blue one. The signs smelled oddly like maple syrup and celery.

The rally finally started around 8:00, half an hour late, and the first speaker was a former Republican who had switched her affiliation in order to vote for Obama in the primary. She was visibly nervous, and when she said she was a Republican, the crowd booed her, which I thought was a little tacky. Her speech was brief and unmemorable, but she did a good job warming the crowd up after her initial setback. After her speech, the announcer came on to introduce the man we'd all been waiting for... Virginia Governor Tim Caine. The disappointment in the room was palpable, but the crowd cheered anyway. Caine talked about the importance of Virginia being a blue state for the first time since Carter, which made me a little sad since, being from NC, I probably won't get a chance to vote in our primary and we have almost no chance of going Democrat in the general. However, Caine admittedly did a great job of hyping up the crowd even further, then personally introduced Obama as U2's "City of Blinding Lights" started playing.

Obama came out to thunderous applause and shook a few hands along the entrance railing before taking the stage. He gave the same basic stump speech I'd heard six or seven times before, but it was still electrifying to hear him speak. He talked about the usual policy points--Iraq, healthcare, fuel efficiency, college tuition grants for public service--but I was glad to hear so much about policy. I tried to do my part and look extra enthusiastic for the camera, raising my sign at appropriate times and clapping every time it seemed even remotely plausible. Some people in the bleachers behind me sounded like they were in church, shouting things like "Tell em, Barack!" and "That's right, Barack!" and "Lay down some truth on 'em!" At the end of the speech, a girl fainted and Obama called for an EMT and asked that everyone give her some air. It felt more like a rock concert than a political rally.

He left the stage and started shaking hands. A large line had already formed around the railing in front of the bleachers, but I knew what I had to do. I rushed down to the floor, but I was blocked by a phalanx of supporters. I looked left and couldn't find an opening. To my right was a spot that was only two people deep. I scrambled for the opening, turning sideways to stretch my hand out between the the hands of the two in front of me. I was just in time: he shook my hand, and I said, "Thank you, Senator!" like a little girl meeting the Beatles. I can't wash this hand again now, I thought. It has the germs of hope and change in Washington on it.

Obviously, the race is still far from over, but I really believe that I shook the hand of the next President of the United States. The swell of support around the country is truly a movement at this point, and I'm proud to be a part of it, no matter how small. Win or lose, I think Obama's already done a lot to get new people involved in politics, and should he be elected, I think it would do a lot to restore people's faith in politics and our standing in the world. I know that, at least in the internet communities I usually visit (read: Something Awful) basically everyone outside the US supports Obama. I've seen Canadians and Europeans saying they wished they were American so they could vote for him. I can't think of another time I've seen Canadians and Europeans wish they were American.

Well I didn't see that coming

Eli Manning is your World Champion and Super Bowl MVP. Maybe it could have been Philip Rivers had he and Tomlinson had working knees.

The Giants win the Super Bowl. Tom Brady sucks. Black is white, up is down.

There was an all-new House and Kumar saved the day.

Laurence Maroney is the best player in New England Patriots history.

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Speaking of things I didn't see coming, tomorrow it Super Tuesday and there's been a massive overnight bump for Obama... the latest CNN poll has him up 49-46 nationally over Clinton and every poll has him up in California anywhere from 1 to 8 points. However, there's no indication how much of this is early ballot voters (possibly 20% of California's voters) having "buyer's remorse" and saying they support Obama now when they already cast their vote for Clinton. In any case, it seems like his support is still quite strong there. The rally last night with Michelle Obama, Oprah, Carolina Kennedy, and Maria Shriver seems to have done some good.

Here's hoping for two stories in a row of the underdog beating the inevitable 2-touchdown favorite.

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It's kinda boring in the studio when I'm on the radio so listen to me and make some requests or something. wknc.org Mondays 10-11AM.

The Superest Bowl of all

I'm fake-rooting for the Patriots this year because I demand perfection and I don't think the Giants really have a chance anyway. It's not really an ideal matchup; Favre/Brady or Rivers/Manning would have been infinitely better, although Rivers wouldn't have been able to play anyway since he no longer has knees. As for the current game, I'm gonna predict 38-13 Patriots. I also predict that the commercials will be disappointing for the third year in a row. Maybe the writers' strike will give somebody a chance to write a decent Super Bowl commercial.

Anyway, I figured I'd get everybody hyped up with some Patriots videos that I was shown. If this don't get you hype then you don't have a pulse, brother!

THE PATRIOTS AND WE


SKIN THE BEARS


HERE WE GO PATRIOTS


Okay and here are some with a mentally ill Asian woman with what I can only assume are breast implants:





And here's a chimp in a suit just to be thorough:



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Ok anyway so that's the Super Bowl. This year I'm honestly more concerned about Super Tuesday, and less sure about what' s going to happen. Obama's been trending upwards, but sinc the 31st, Hillary has a 7-11% bump in the polls and nobody really knows why, since it appeared that the Edwards voters mostly went with Obama right after Edwards dropped out. In any case, that's a national poll, and only the 22 Super Tuesday states really matter right now... and Obama reportedly has a 1 point lead in CA, has tied the gap in NJ, and is up 20 in GA. California and New Jersey were supposed to go overwhelmingly to Clinton, so if true, these are all good signs.

If you are reading this you probably know I'm overwhelmingly pro-Obama and you don't really care but I think America has a chance right now to start changing the nature of its politics and save some face in the world.

If you need to be appealed to in terms of policy, please read this: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/
If you need to be appealed to in terms of emotional response and star power, please watch this:



"We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics...they will only grow louder and more dissonant... We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."

If you can't get behind that, then I just don't know man.

END OF BLOG POST

Here is a paper I wrote

I wrote this essay for my Creative Nonfiction class and here is the rough draft, which is now finished. It's kind of long so I would forgive you if you didn't actually read it. Once again, Dr. Orr, if you find this on a plagiarism sniffer, this is my personal blog and I wrote it so please do not have me kicked out of college!

From French Fries to Foie Gras: Episodes in the Life of a Would-Be Chef

I want to be a celebrity chef.

I want to serve Kobe beef with truffles and black caviar, just because I can.

I want to have my own sets of cookbooks and officially-licensed set of knives with my face on the hilts.

I want to spend 75% of my time running a restaurant and the other 25% on television, either teaching people how to cook things that they will never attempt in their own kitchens or traveling to restaurants around the country, eating a single bite of other people’s food, and self-importantly saying, “Hmm, not bad. There’s a good smoke flavor in this brisket. Is that real mesquite? Wow, wow. You know, that’s how we do it in my restaurant too, except we use pimento wood coals for that extra flavor boost you can’t find anywhere else. But this is still pretty good.” Both the viewers and the restaurateur will know that I am unimpressed.

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A confession: As much as I want to be a celebrity chef, it’s not something I’m actively pursuing. It’s a cool idea in theory but extremely impractical in the grand scheme, like being an astronaut or a pro wrestler, except that this one holds special significance for me because the food community is one I can always actively be involved in, if only by trying new restaurants and styles of food. I’m aware that only the tiniest fraction of chefs get to be famous, and that it’s not a particularly glamorous job for the rest. It’s not even glamorous for some of the ones that do make it. I’m not particularly anxious to spend every day on my feet, blistering my hands in a hot kitchen, and I can barely micromanage things well enough to keep a SimCity town running. I spent my undergrad career preparing for law school, and that’s still what I want to do. Despite that, the idea is always in the back of my mind—hey, maybe today is the day I should forget about law and go to culinary school instead.

The real problem with being a celebrity chef, though, is that there is perhaps no career choice more inherently contradictory. Traditionally, a restaurant’s head chef is in command of a tiny army of sous-chefs, pastry chefs, line cooks, and waitstaff. The chef commands his army in the kitchen, behind closed doors and out of the public eye. From all I’ve read and seen on TV about the restaurant business, it’s a dirty job that often requires less charisma than calculation, precision, and ruthless efficiency. An effective head chef generally has to be a taskmaster, instructing his underlings on how to make the kitchen run smoothly, rather than a cuddly, catchphrase-spouting figurehead. Maybe they’ll come out of the kitchen to shake a few hands or talk with a journalist, but otherwise they stay back in the kitchen, out of sight, until the work is done.

So why the celebrity chef phenomenon? Sure, being a celebrity chef brings in boatloads of money from cookbook proceeds, advertiser revenues, and attention for one’s restaurant(s). But beyond that, why would a chef want to give up the comfort of the kitchen and step into the spotlight? I realize that the premise of the question is ridiculous: there is no “beyond that,” but bear with me. I would argue that the essence of what makes a chef a chef is stripped away: they are thrust into the public, wearing pristine white aprons embroidered with their names, and told that their personality is more important than the food itself. Their sous-chefs and cooks, the ones who make the gears of the restaurant turn, are taken from them. In fact, the whole restaurant is taken from them. The idea of reproducing a certain number of dishes precisely to a certain standard of quality disappears when they only have to make one for the camera. Suddenly the process of making the food becomes more important than the finished product. The chef prepares food for people who are not us, yet we look on approvingly at this practice. “Oh how wonderful!” we say. “Go ahead, Paula Deen, put another two cups of mayonnaise in that spinach-artichoke dip. How decadent!”

Furthermore, why do we as a society feel the need to watch people cook food we can’t actually eat or even smell and probably will never make ourselves? And in the case of competition shows like Iron Chef, why do we need to watch a panel of judges eat the delicious-looking food, listen to them make near-orgasmic oohs and aahs, and then try to imagine what it tastes like based on obtuse comments like “I feel so gentle when I eat this sushi. The combination of the shad and gizzard is so playful”? It would be like forcing James Joyce on stage, having him write three or four chapters of a novel in an hour only to say, “This is some really profound stuff I’ve written here. It’s too bad you don’t get to read it, but I’ll put a basic plot outline and some character sketches on my website so you can have a crack at it yourself!”

#

I usually have a TV or radio on for white noise when I’m working, and this is where my celebrity chef obsession began. I was 14 or 15 years old and Food Network seemed like a good channel—not too interesting to be distracting, but not so boring that I couldn’t stand to watch it. This worked for a while, just faceless people cooking in the background, but then Iron Chef came on, the first show that really drew me into the seedy Food Network subculture. The premise of the show is that the top chefs in Japan come to Kitchen Stadium, the home of Chairman Kaga, the show’s host, and engage his elite team of Iron Chefs in culinary battle with a secret theme ingredient, and the whole thing is dubbed in English like a bad 70’s kung fu movie. If the challenger defeats the Iron Chef, he or she wins not cash, not glittering prizes, but “the people’s ovation and fame forever,” like a noble food samurai. Does this sound convoluted? It is. This is probably why most cooking shows don’t have storylines anymore. In spite of this, I was enthralled.

These guys were beyond extravagant—they slung around foie gras like it was peanut butter and sometimes used thousands of dollars worth of lobster just to flavor some vegetables. Sure it was wasteful and unnecessary, but my god, the pageantry of it! I knew that food could be more than grilled cheese and hamburgers, but this performance took things to a new level; this was the first time I had ever seen food as not just a basic human necessity, but as art—not just in the plating, but in the cooking too.

When I was growing up, my mom usually cooked fairly simple things like meatloaf in tomato paste or smoky collard greens with streak o’ lean or shepherd’s pie topped with lumpy, buttery mashed potatoes: things you just had to boil on the stove or chop up and put in the oven. She’s a good cook, but most everything at my house was country cookin’ served up family style, in a bowl or dish in the middle of the table, and you had to scoop it out and put it on the plate yourself. Never before had I seen a beef tenderloin in a basketball-sized salt crust that has to be cracked open with a hammer and chisel, never before had I seen a carrot carved into a Japanese pagoda and plated as a garnish, and never before had I seen sea urchin roe being skillfully whipped around in a wok without the aid of utensils, doused with enough brandy to create a cherry-red, eyebrow-singeing pillar of flame. Never mind that I didn’t, and still don’t, have any idea what sea urchin roe tastes like—this was how food was supposed to be cooked and how food was supposed to be eaten! How could my mom’s food, prepared in Currituck, North Carolina, possibly compare? There was exotic food out there begging to be eaten. I was a timid kid—to crave carpaccio instead of roast beef, coq au vin instead of fried chicken—this was an act of rebellion by my standards.

The problem with this was that the Iron Chefs had set the bar too high. This kind of cooking was both near-impossible in terms of technique involved and economically infeasible due to the ingredients. I could barely make fried rice without burning half of it and spilling the other half on the counter—preparing multiple time-sensitive dishes without ruining the flavor and/or setting the kitchen on fire was little more than a pipe dream, and to attempt to chop a cucumber with the blinding speed and mechanical precision of an Iron Chef was to sentence my fingers to death by guillotine. And even if I did have the culinary chops not to ruin the food, I couldn’t see my mom ever giving into my requests to buy me a $50 homard lobster so I could try out this new recipe for lobster and peach salad. “But mooom,” I would say, “the noble sweetness of the peach makes for a marvelous union with the texture of French lobster!”

Despite being my gateway into the “foodie” subculture, Iron Chef is by far the most discouraging show that an aspiring cook could watch. It’s not educational aside from the occasional fact about the medicinal powers of shark fin, and its entertainment value is almost outweighed by the sheer jealousy one feels toward the judges for being able to taste the Iron Chefs’ obscenely expensive food with smug, satisfied grins that say, “Only five people in the world will ever know what these Prawns in Chili Sauce taste like, and I am one of them, and you are not.” If anything, Iron Chef is a bad influence: the chefs’ dishes are most often too daring or too absurd for anyone in their right mind to prepare themselves. You will never be able to make these dishes at home, and attempting to do so would be like attempting to recreate the Sistine Chapel ceiling to scale with an 8-pack of RoseArt crayons.

#

Luckily, I soon discovered that there were other chefs with shows on Food Network, shows that were designed to cater to people like me—that is, people who can barely boil water without sustaining second-degree burns. They used phrases like “put two tablespoons of” and “set the oven to,” which were exceedingly more helpful than anything ever said on Iron Chef. Unfortunately, a lot of these cooking shows proved to be dreadful. Still, Food Network still seemed like a worthwhile venture: most of its programming was educational, the topic of discussion had a largely visual element, and I felt less like a weirdo than I would have sitting around reading cookbooks.

Emeril Lagasse was and to an extent still is the standard by which instructional cooking shows are measured, so I started with him. However, his actual cooking instruction was eerily similar to Iron Chef—the kitchen was re-prepped during commercials with ingredients already chopped and measured out, so all he had to do was dump them in a pot or put them in the oven and shout catchphrases while the audience cheered. To me, it somehow seemed to lack the spirit of true cooking. I’ve never tried Emeril’s food but he has a reputation for being a legitimately great chef; on his show, however, the cooking was just a vehicle for this jolly Cajun man from Massachusetts to yell things and mug for the camera. I was more offended by this than I really had any right to be (how could I criticize Emeril for not caring enough about the food when I had barely cooked anything in my whole life?), so I searched for other avenues to becoming a great chef from the comfort of my home. All of them would be dead ends.

The next option I tried was a guy who Iron Chef brought in to play the “ugly American” character, a Southwestern chef named Bobby Flay. After he finished his dishes on Iron Chef, he climbed atop his cutting board and showboated for the audience—this was taken as a sign of disrespect in Japan, and he was widely considered to be a pretty big jerk by the Japanese people. In spite of this, it seemed like a perfect match since his show Boy Meets Grill focused primarily on two areas near and dear to my heart: grilling large slabs of meat and the use of cornmeal, one of my mom’s traditional staples. He definitely hosted with an air of arrogance, but his recipes were largely easy to follow and the few I actually tried turned out pretty well. I still use one of his corn muffin recipes from time to time—very moist and peppery. However, soon after I started watching him, he began a new show called Throwdown! with Bobby Flay, and this is where the trouble started.

Throwdown! was essentially Punk’d with food: small-town chefs specializing in certain dishes are told that they are going to be featured in a Food Network show and instructed to host a party for their friends and family at their restaurants (if they have one—some of the chefs are amateurs). Bobby Flay then shows up at the party with his cooking gear and challenges the chef to a cook-off of their signature dish. The challengers sometimes appeared to have partied a little too hard before Flay showed up, giving him a slight advantage. In many cases, he also had superior equipment and ingredients, along with multiple recipes that had been practiced in the Food Network test kitchen. I found the concept of the show to be a bit morally bankrupt. I like schadenfreude as much as the next guy (maybe more), but I had no desire to see a big-time celebrity chef come in and mop the floor with an untrained amateur. It actually made me lose the desire to watch Flay’s other shows in protest and proved to me that the Japanese thought he was a jerk because he was, in fact, a jerk. I also learned that maybe Emeril was onto something—in this case, the chef’s personality really did prove to be more important than the food, but in the worst way. If food really was art then Flay was a master artist, but did seeing him act like a pompous ass cheapen his craft’s value? I suppose it did, as far as I was concerned.

There were other Food Network shows and other Food Network chefs and they were largely unimpressive. There were only so many ways to watch someone grill up a ribeye and garnish it with warm potato salad or show you how to make a classic roux to thicken your soups before you started to get a little disillusioned with the celebrity chef product. Perhaps the most egregious offender was Sandra Lee, the host of Semi-Homemade Cooking. Here was a woman who, instead of offering legitimate cooking instruction, advised viewers to coordinate their kitchen’s color scheme with their sweaters and told them that Jell-O cheesecake in a little plastic cup is just as good as the homemade kind. There is no culinary integrity in these statements; if anything, they are a cry for help.

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Worst of all, as much as I practiced, my dishes never turned out quite right and I seemed to be getting worse as I went along. From the beginning of my reluctant obsession with Food Network, I’ve experimented sporadically, and even now, the results are almost inevitably disappointing. I had some bad habits. For one thing, I insisted on cooking foreign dishes (usually Asian) with hard-to-find ingredients. In high school, I would ask my mom to pick up a few things at the grocery store so I could try making a “gourmet dinner,” a phrase my dad grew to love to tease me with. Naturally, it was impossible to find ground Thai chiles and kaffir lime leaves at Food Lion, and this always resulted in a substitution. Mom made a solid effort, but chili powder and regular lime zest didn’t taste right in place of the authentic ingredients. Or so I imagined, since they were impossible to find.

Another bad habit was finding one ingredient in a recipe that I liked individually and doubling the amount of it while removing another that I disliked—in the case of my Vietnamese egg rolls, I doubled potatoes and eliminated carrots, which resulted in their being starchy, overfilled, and bland without the natural sweetness of the carrots. The extra spices I added to the Kung Pao chicken raised the capsaicin content to what seemed like near-fatal levels. The additional layers of puff pastry on my beef and Guinness pie, instead of rising up like a Russian onion dome, stuck together in a doughy clump.

Beyond that, my technique with most kitchen utensils was simply atrocious. I sometimes tried to sauté a couple cloves of garlic in some oil to release the flavor, only to find that the pan was too hot and that my garlic had already burned up, even after I took it off the stove. I didn’t know that it was possible to over-mix cake batter, which led to some very tough baked goods. It took me seven or eight minutes to peel and cube a potato, and I reluctantly admit that I’ve only shaved about a minute off that time since then.

I had some successes here and there, like the aforementioned corn muffins and simple recipes like slow-cooker chili, but only a cowboy can live off of corn muffins and chili. My abundant failures in the other culinary arenas were causing me to lose my passion for this cooking thing. I wondered if I’d get to experience the dishes I’d seen on TV—it was apparent that I’d never be able to make them in my own kitchen. The situation was beginning to look grim. Maybe food really was just fuel to shove in your face to keep from dying after all.

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My Epicurean crisis of faith was cured by a couple of cruises around Central America with my family. There, I got my first chance to taste some of the dishes I had coveted since seeing them on Iron Chef, the ones my mom wouldn’t cook and the local restaurants didn’t have on the menu.

On these trips, I learned the value of traveling to other countries firsthand in order to sample cuisine at its most authentic. We found a restaurant in a small shack in St. Maarten that served jerk chicken as I’d never had it before, smoked over green wood with fresh Scotch Bonnet peppers and allspice served with a sweet green jelly. The chicken took a backseat to the strong and intense flavors of the seasoning, which was unlike any collection of dried herbs I could get at the Food Lion—Chef Paul Prudhomme should be ashamed of himself. They served fried local yuca root, pronounced “joo-ka, not yuck-a,” starchier and sweeter than potatoes. In Costa Rica, every restaurant served beans and rice with every meal, including breakfast, whether you wanted them or not. They were flavored with native herbs and had a flavor reminiscent of coffee. I don’t even like coffee, yet the beans and rice never seemed to get old, even after a week. On a trip to England, I sampled Cornish pasties, the savory steak-and-potato pies that miners’ wives traditionally prepared for their husbands. I ate aged steak of Scottish “heeland coo” (highland cow, for the uninitiated), unusually lean and more robust in flavor than the American Angus I’d tried before. Even haggis, a disgusting-sounding combination of sheep innards and oatmeal, turned out to be rather tasty—savory, like sausage. These dishes all had two things in common: they were delicious and I’d never seen them in North Carolina.

On the cruises, at dinner, the new experiences continued: there was sweet, chilled watermelon soup, almost as thick as sorbet and just as crisp on the tongue. Delicate, buttery foie gras, soft and smooth enough to be spread onto the toasted baguette garnish like cream cheese. Fatty, gamey duck meat with the skin left on, roasted until crisp. Rich crème brûlée, the caramel crust torched just long enough to be hard to the touch but able to produce a satisfying crack when punctured with a spoon. Baby escargot served in the shells with garlic butter, which was disappointingly reminiscent of garlicky Vienna sausage. But it was okay, because everything couldn’t be good, and I was a better person for having tried it.

This was why I wanted to get into the food culture in the first place—the flavors were bold and unique. Sure, I might be an abysmal cook, but I could still enjoy experiencing food even if I couldn’t make it myself, in the same way a film buff could enjoy movies without being a Hollywood producer. And the more outlandish the better: steak was good, but I was not content to settle for the New York Strip with so many other options before my palate. While I was on the cruises, I ate two appetizers, two entrees, and two desserts at dinner each night. The waiters almost certainly hated me, but the meals were already paid for and my childhood would only offer me so many chances to indulge like this.

I regret nothing.

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Only recently, this whole celebrity chef fascination of mine has shown me a future way to immerse myself in the world of food. A few months ago, I discovered a BBC show called Kitchen Nightmares, in which a harsh, profanity-spewing Scotsman named Gordon Ramsay travels to failing restaurants across Europe (and now America, thanks to a Fox spinoff) and tries to correct their problems so they can turn a profit within a week. Although Ramsay is a highly accomplished chef, Kitchen Nightmares placed no emphasis on cooking for the home viewer, instead focusing on the restaurants’ troubles with service, organization, sanitation, and other problems. It stood out against the chipper, upbeat figures on Food Network, and opened my eyes to another facet of the world of food that I’d never really considered.

I would be hard-pressed to call managing a restaurant an art form in the same way that the actual preparation of food might be, but Ramsay almost made it look more appealing. Unlike all the other celebrity chefs, he was crass and brutally honest. His aggressiveness and sometimes outright meanness was a stark contrast to the chefs I’d seen before, but he made it abundantly clear that successfully operating a restaurant didn’t have to be overwhelmingly difficult, but it did take more work than most people were willing to put in. Hey, I can do work! And I can just hire a chef to do the cooking for me? Maybe this is possible after all, I thought. My ambition was rekindled, albeit with a new focus. Perhaps if I can’t make the food, I can at least bring it to the people.

I can only hope that my passion for food will last until I’m through with school and can afford to invest in starting a restaurant. I’ve evaluated my options, and the best of these right now is to start an overwhelmingly godawful restaurant in an abandoned warehouse somewhere and hope that Gordon Ramsay comes to fix it up for me, and this doesn’t strike me as an economically sound decision. Of course, the irony of my wanting to start a restaurant thanks to Kitchen Nightmares is that it has made me examine restaurants with a critical eye, thereby making my perception of them more pessimistic. I now examine the décor upon entering to see whether it’s formal and stuffy, or casual and inviting. Does the lighting match the theme of the restaurant? Are there wall sconces? There should probably be wall sconces. When I receive the menu, I check to see if the dishes are reflective of authentic, rustic flavors that could use fresh local produce. I look at plates on the tables around me to see if the chef is more concerned with flavors or frills before I order. How long does it take for someone to take my order? How long does it take to arrive at the table? Does it come out of the kitchen correctly? And most importantly, how does the food taste? How’s the texture? Portion size? I never used to care so much about these things, as long as the food was edible and there was enough of it that I didn’t have to go home hungry. Now if the restaurant fails any of these criteria, I immediately wonder how far in debt the owner is and how much longer the restaurant will be able to stay afloat.

I perversely imagine the day my restaurant earns its third Michelin star (it’s a European restaurant—how else am I supposed to have cred?) and the grand celebration that will accompany it. I wonder what kind of extravagant, psychotic features I can include for my foodie customers that only they will appreciate or even care about. Maybe I could dust all the tables with silver on a nightly basis. Maybe I could brine the roast rack of lamb in a sea turtle’s tears. I envision dessert plates dipped in melted chocolate and frozen. Bowls made out of ostrich eggs. Motion-sensitive track lighting along the entrance that changes color when someone walks by. None of these things have any effect on the food, but these deranged ritualistic behaviors are the things you are expected to do to have a famous restaurant.

People like me, who want to go to restaurants like this, see the emotion in food and we want to experience the emotions of food in every meal, and a Subway sub, for example, has no emotion. We want to eat for entertainment just as much as sustenance. It’s a little ridiculous, but it’s a lot of fun too.

In the meantime, some of my short term dreams and fantasies still revolve around the pursuit of high-quality food. My dreams are filled with the top-flight big-city restaurants I’ve only read about, like Peter Luger Steak House and Daniel Restaurant and Mario Batali’s Babbo in New York City or, yes, Gordon Ramsay’s eponymous restaurant in London. My friends think I’m weird for buying obscure Asian fruits like rambutan and mangosteen at the specialty grocery store instead of sticking with apples and bananas. In fact, I hope to one day make a pilgrimage of sorts to Jungle Jim’s International Market, a four-acre grocery adventure in Cincinnati that offers, for example, 1600 kinds of cheese, 100 varieties of honey, and a meat section diverse enough to include wild boar and kangaroo steaks.

The prospect of kangaroo steaks is one of the most exciting things I can imagine.