I started off rooting for Team Rainbow, because I'm a huge fag myself, after all, but it was very quickly reduced to only her. And, talent or not (and she's obviously quite good), by the time she was eliminated her world-weary, jaded, this-is-so-beneath-me attitude was really working my nerves. I did think that Leah deserved to go home before Jamie, but honestly, when Padma told Jamie to pack her knives, I couldn't muster up any outrage or even disappointment. All I could think was, "What a pity. Now you can take your Queen Hippolyte of Paradise Island gold headband and go back to San Fran to sigh, shrug your shoulders, roll your eyes, and wearily bitch about your experience while getting another tattoo."

Oh, and I've been tired of Hosea's whining for a while, but my absolute breaking point with him was last week, during the fish filleting quickfire, when he bitched with astonishment about having to prepare an eel. "Uhm, we don't have eel in Colorado!" Yeah, dude, you don't have any seafood, or much fish of any kind in Colorado. Last time I checked, it's landlocked and dry as a bone. But you know what? Your specialty is fish and seafood, and you work at a seafood restaurant, and you're totally unfamiliar with eel? What a joke! Eric Ripert should have taken him over the knee, pulled down his pants, and given him the spanking of his life right then and there!

"Cabdriver, never heard of any of your "journalists.""

That says more about the state of the present-day American news media- and of the perspicacity of the vast majority of the American public in the post-literate era- than it does about the quality of their work.

To a lesser extent, your flip dismissal of the notion that the journalists I named are in the same league as the more well-known names that you mentioned in your post, also says more about you than it does about them.

And yes, I know all of the journalistic eminences you've mentioned- Wills being the best writer in the group, in my opinion. I'll also note that none of the names you checked are investigative journalists- while all of the ones that I mentioned are. A significant point.

Condescend to me- no problem. Not only do I have a reasonably thick skin, I have no track record worth mentioning, as yet.

(My comment archive is mostly woodshedding, nothing more...as Mailer once said, "What does a writer do? A writer writes." The way knitters like to knit.)

Condescend to George Seldes, Clarence LuSane, Hank Messick, Sally Denton, Marc Reisner, or Penny Lernoux, and you skate on thinner ice than you suppose.

I'm in rough concordance with your points about speculative fiction, which is almost always allegorical. Less so in agreement about your opinion on the salutory effect of grinding out a fulltime job as inspirational to the craft of writing. Writing in the long form tends to require sustained bursts of energy, which is seldom compatible with having 8-12 hour bites taken out of one's schedule 5 days a week.

And that's about as far as I feel I need to take this particular strand, twined as it is in the spaghetti of this comment thread.

Well, I guess that's where we differ. I think Top Chef should have more to do with being a very good cook and how hard you try instead of how often they roll their eyes or think something is beneath them.

Jamie was getting all holier than thou, but she's a native of NY seems to be their standard attitude and it did make me want to strangle her when she was all "this kind of food bores me" so perfectly cooked food is boring!?! but I just found it odd that not knowing how something was put together after eating it was penalized more than making a mistake especially when you know here mistakes are far and few between, while Leah's are often and repeated.

Who knows maybe they just kept Leah around so they will have an easy time deciding who the final 4 or 3 will be.

A man boards an aircraft bound for America and finds himself sitting beside a beautiful woman reading a book. He says, "Hi, My name is Memphis Tim. How you doin'?" She says "Hello Tim. You know, according to this book American intellectual life is in decline." Tim says "Yeah, well, does it mention that I have a big dick?" She doesn't talk to him for the rest of the flight, and Tim goes to sleep complacently thinking he's scored a point for the homeland against this snooty European.

those 50-word novellas are the real reason I keep checking back in here.

An animated cartoonist and a verbose writer with laryngitis walk into a bar, distracting everyone with their bickering.

The writer is hoarsely but inaudibly whispering, "look, you can trumpet the ascendancy of imagic technology over textual communication all you want. I don't get the picture."

The cartoonist, waving his arms and arching his eyebrows, gestures around the room and asks with a rhetorical flourish, "how useful can any dialogue be, if you're unable to hear it?"

The bartender puts out his arms and says, "I already know what's going to happen next..."

The cartoonist says "what?"

The writer silently rasps "how?"

The bartender levels his gaze and replies, "You're both 86ed. I'm kicking you both out on your asses."

[ Thought balloons emerging from the heads of both disputants as they are launched through the doorway, both containing the glyph ((( ! ))) ]

pour piss out of a boot if the directions were written on the heel!

Will he give American an extreme makeover? LMAO Hell, he can't even get a decent stimulus bill passed in a timely manner. Hate to break it to you, dude, but this is it. Really. There is no money for new drapes, a new table in front of that jazzy new sofa, yadda, yadda. This is it. Hope your stimulus gets you where you want to go.