Last week I posted here about a new internet entertainment that has become an established meme, the I Write Like website which analyzes a sample of writing and draws a comparison to a famous literary figures. In that post I submitted several Spatula posts only to draw comparisons between science fiction writers and other bloggers. I also submitted smut literature written by amateurs and IWL compared the works to J.D. Salinger. All good fun, but not very succinct literary criticism. IWL was pretty much worn out for me after an afternoon of loading it with nonsense. Earlier this week, Clark at The Wakefield Doctrine commented that he had fed his own blog into Typealyzer (http://typealyzer.com) which purportedly uses the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator to determine the personality traits of any blog author. Now, I’m an author who gloms onto any idea available, so I immediately had Typealyzer process the Spatula…and got an illustration of a hooker with a champagne flute. That about sums up my personality, as I’ve suspected for years. First, a little explanation of the standard Myers-Briggs Test.

Chances are, you’ve probably taken the MBPTI. It’s been formally administered by employers and educators since the early 1960′s, growing out of development by its authors for women entering the workforce as early as World War II. Myers and Briggs used the concept of personality types posited by Carl Jung in 1921. Here’s how it works in layman’s terms. There are four sets of personality dichotomies which are : Extroversion / Introversion, Sensing/ Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judgment/Perception. Each person has some combination of one of each pair that makes them work and interact with others in the way they do. For instance, according to Typealyzer and based on the writing contained on this blog, I am an ESFP. Below is a paste-up of the results (not authorized in any way by the administrators at Typealyzer):

The analysis indicates that the author of http://spatulainthewilderness.net is of the type:

ESFP – The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead – they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation – qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

–The first sentence made me laugh. I may be entertaining, but for all the wrong reasons. As for friendly, my wife would attest that I’m a COB (Cranky Old Bastard). According to the cheesy clip art illustration, I like to entertain men. unequivocably no.  The second part is right. I do like soft things. After growing up sleeping in beds that generations of grandmothers died in,  and wearing corduroy, I enjoy comfort. As for bright colors, us hicks love shiny stuff. As a cook I make a lot of brown foods, and color is always appreciated. I do plan ahead, but there is a tendency not to deliberate. Skipping to my management potential, that’s got me worried. I may be a non-supervisory burger flipper forevvvver.

As part of ongoing efforts into ascertaining the validity of these sites, I entered several extremely smutty URL’s into the Typealyzer engine. They came back as very artistic and empathetic. Not really art… . I also entered Perez Hilton and got that he’s a socializer. You know, this thing is not totally off the mark. Try it at http://typealyzer.com

This past weekend I found myself taking care of a small child. Most children are small as babies, so his size wasn’t a total surprise. The one TV channel that the baby found mildly interesting (or had the least urge to cry at while watching) was running a marathon of all three Back To The Future films. BTTF told the story of Marty McFly, a 35 year-old high school student from the year 1985. The original movie was one of a host of such pictures released during that era in which young people were shown engaged in various activities. Hollywood has since realized that kids are smarter than that. Teen wolves may have deep conversations with vampire loving classmates, but they aren’t interested in playing basketball. So, in the story, young McFly and his mentor Dr. Emmet Brown travel in a DeLorean automobile with an internal time machine to the year 1955. Marty helps his parents get together, thus ensuring his own future. Awww.  The film was a fun way of looking at the 50′s through the prism of events moviegoers were familiar with in the 1980′s. BTTF made a boatload of money and that led the studio to produce two sequels concurrently. Back To The Future II, released in the fall of 1989, imagines soon to be 40-year old high schooler McFly travelling to 2015 in order to save his children from ruin. As I watched the BTTF sequel for the first time in many years, I couldn’t help but laugh at how wrong writer/director Robert Zemeckis and his partner Robert Gale predicted the future. In Back To The Future II, which takes place just about five years from now, the vision of the future is pretty quaint. Maybe it’s shortsightedness on the part of Zemeckis, or a prediction of retro-fashion, but the future is just the 80′s redux. The self sizing clothes that characters sport is the same oversized, chunky stuff I was wearing as an unhip high school sophomore. When Marty dons the self-lacing Nike’s, all I could think about was how much I loved my puffy, orange and white Adidas Run DMC kicks. Throughout the film, Marty wears the trusty mom jeans. The future looked baggy from the vantage point of 1989. Many bloggers have commented before me on some of the mind bogglingly dull “didn’t see that one coming” ideas in BTTF II. Newspapers are still huge in 2015. This is a cinematic gimmick to illustrate the confusing nature of time travel. The middle-aged boy traveller must turn to USA Today to see where he has landed. He also has to use a pay phone. The last time I tried to use a pay phone was six years ago at some country gas station after my car broke down. It was the middle of the night and a helpful guy in a pickup whispered out his window “That phone don’t work boy…”.
The future turned out slightly weirder than Back To The Future II. We still haven’t got flying cars. The Cubs still haven’t won the World Series in our lifetime. Lasik surgery is a reality, as is the Jumbotron. Our president is an African-American and by 2015 may very well be a woman (not the current President, although nobody could say they saw that coming). Michael Jackson may still be dead in 2015, and more than likely so will Walt Disney and Ted Williams. Doc’s digital camera/binocular device is now cumbersome and should contain a phone with thousands of applications. Meanwhile, the Corning company has quietly ressurected a 1962 concept dubbed “Gorilla Glass.” Virtually unbreakable, the revived technology may lead to frameless TV’s and scratch resistant mobile devices. So, at least Star Trek IV’s concept of a super glass substance is here in the future. I’m so glad the future didn’t turn out like Marty McFly’s life.

National Public Radio contributor April Fulton posted a blog for the network’s online health page Shots today about the findings of a study to be published in August’s American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showing that excess meat consumption leads to unwanted pounds (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128845262&sc=tw). The study shows that every 250 grams of meat added to a person’s diet over a five-year span leads to a gain of four pounds. Not so bad, unless you are adding that 250 gram portion at more than one meal or snack per day. Still…250 grams seems like a lot. Most people, especially when eating on the run, don’t convert grams to pounds. When I’m in McDonald’s I’m too worried about getting a box of Grimace Cookies to bother counting grams. 250 Grams of meat is 8.8 ounces, or well over half of a pound. Yeah, you’re pretty much guaranteed some weight gain if you eat a 1/2 pound of extra meat as part of your regular diet. Here are a few other ways to put the 250 gram number into perspective:

• The meat content of a Bic Mac, pre-cooking, is 90.8 grams, or 3.2. ounces (unless you managed to get one of the Monster Macs in Germany, which boasted 363 grams of beef, or over 3/4 of a pound).
• A 250 gram steak carries roughly 630 calories. While the consumer gets a full day’s supply of protein from the meal, nearly 40 grams is fat (in other words, 55% of the calories are from fat, and even though the protein number is 45%, the inequity is not enough to regularly eat blow-out portions of steak).
• Chicken isn’t the great hope, or a choice because it’s white meat. A half pound of any substance is still a half pound. 250 Grams comes out to (at least, depending on injected preservatives) 220 calories.
• Just for kicks: The equivalent amount of butter is over a cup (1.089 cups). This also comes out to 18 Tablespoons.

A decade ago when the low-carb diet revolution really began in earnest the emphasis was not on balance, but on high protein and low carbohydrate maintenance. It worked as long as you stuck to the diet.  Higher fat foods like sausage and Cheddar cheese were staples after decades of being considered dietary pariahs. The problem is not with the diet fad, but the fact that for many dieters it never led to a lifestyle. The timeliness of the meat consumption study comes in as more and more of us find ourselves still unable to banish belly fat forever. An extra 1/2 pound of meat daily is a seemingly obscene number, but we are meating ourselves to death, while not living in balance with our bodies and lifestyles. A portion of beef is between 1 ounce (the size of a matchbook) and 3 ounces (the size of a deck of cards). The portion size for a breast of chicken (skin removed) is also the deck of cards and 3 ounces. The NPR story notes that Americans consume 60 pound of chicken a piece each year, much in the form of nuggets and breaded, fried strips. 60 pounds is 960 ounces (or 27,216 grams) of chicken. In the end, lifestyle comes down to balance. Exercise and healthy, small meals throughout the day. Enough preaching from me. May your next meal be a great one! (Reprinted from sister site, The Smoking Spatula @ WordPress.com)

When I was a boy (Uh Oh. Here we go again with another in Mel’s series of meandering memories) my grandfather ran a junkyard just east of the town where I was born. You probably didn’t need to know this, but it does explain quite a bit about me. Each visit to his dump was a bit of adventure and I remember the distinct smells of the place (rusting metal and cattle from the pasture across the road) and the sound the merchandise made as I rummaged through and over piles of stuff. I once took a girl there for family meet and greet. I was, after all, a stupid young man. Having a relative “in the business” meant lots of  freebies. One thing I became a connoisseur of was second-hand comic books. My grandparents gave me crates of them, dating back to the 1950′s and ’60′s. There were a few super hero titles in the stacks, but many were classic Harvey books (Ritchie Rich, Casper, Wendy). My favorites were the piles of macabre books and I learned to read with classic science-gone-wrong titles like Killdozer, Swamp Thing, and Ghost Rider. As if to keep me on the path of righteousness, there were always Evangelical comics mixed in, usually published by the Spire company. Generally they were biographies, such as the Billy Graham Story and (inexplicably) The Tom Landry Story. Many were condensed comic serial versions of full length books from Spire’s heyday (The Cross and The Switchblade, Burn Baby Burn, God’s Smuggler and The Hiding Place). I’m not ashamed to admit that I spent hours reading the biographical comics and still find myself reading mostly about the lives of famous individuals. The comics didn’t end up hurting me too much. No, it was when grandpa started giving me boxes of ’70′s Redbook and Good Housekeeping that I slid into the abyss. I started down the path of baking William Conrad’s favorite meatloaf and getting fondue tips from Dyan Cannon, then I began the life of an adolescent hoodlum.

The New York Times, the paper that doesn’t resemble a comic book no matter which way you hold it, ran a story today by George Gene Gustines on the growing popularity of comic book publisher Blue Water Productions ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/fashion/29comics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss ) The company has found success in publishing multiple lines of biographical comic featuring influential individuals and positive role models for young people. Many of the subjects I understand and would enjoy reading about. The Sarah Palin book would be wonderfully interesting and a refreshing antidote to her self-penned biography. What an action packed comic that would be as we turn pages and see her shooting animals from a helicopter, or fighting a giant salmon. Lady GaGa’s book doesn’t carry a lot of weight since her videos and live appearances are better than anything a comic artist could conceive. Lindsey Lohan would make a great comic heroine, especially as a rags-to riches-to-rags/ fight-the-man story (better yet, just rehash Steve Martin’s The Jerk as a comic book). In October, Blue Water plans to publish an Olivia Newton-John comic book. Big hair and all. At least the proceeds, if any, go to charity.

Darren Davis, Bluewater’s president, insists at the conclusion of the Times article that there will be no Heidi Montag-Pratt comic book, or biographies of other reality TV stars. Aw, C’mon! Jersey Shore’s Snooki is a walking cartoon herself. Tell me that the publishing world isn’t waiting for Snooki and The Situation to join other mutants with weird tans and misshapen torsos to fight New Jersey’s evil Governor Jon Corzine. Now that’s a comic book. You can purchase these wonderful (and mercifully short) bio-comics at your local Jo-Ann Fabrics store. No comment on that one.

The crowds in the marketplace made me uneasy and each time a stranger would push past me, I instinctively tried to elbow them away in order to protect my family. The air was thick and carried an odd jumble of scents, a mixture of perspiration, diesel fumes and dairy cows. My $2 novelty tee shirt featuring a cartoon elephant and plaid shorts clung to me in the heat and just seemed to scream ‘dummy’ amidst the sea of nondescript and purely mercenary shoppers. “Just keep moving forward…” I repeated over and over in my head, always followed by the refrain “…just get what you came here for.” As I stumbled within the crush of humanity, the crush of middle-aged women and their tiny, fidgeting, live wired daughters all vying for a chance to strike a bargain at one of the market stalls, I spun around and stopped cold. My own bubble of breathable air and shrinking little personal space were vanishing and my wife and daughter were no longer in sight. I began pressing on to find them when I saw what it was I’d ventured this far after: A discount priced American Girl historical doll. Holding my ground, I waited for my family to spot me. Call me Dad, pioneer of the girl’s empowerment movement. Heaven help us.

I sold out this past weekend and disavowed all knowledge of guy code. The Madison Wisconsin Children’s Museum hosts an American Girl benefit sale each July at the company’s Middleton, Wisconsin facility with the proceeds going to support the  museum. Reasoning that I would get some cheese curds and decent beer out of the trip, I hunkered down in the back seat of our station wagon and travelled with my wife and daughter to the rolling hills of Wisconsin for the sale. The only way I can describe is in this way: Every year on the Friday after the Thanksgiving holiday the women in my life venture out into the darkness at 3:00 in the morning with a bunch of over-sized shopping bags and Jason masks on. Where they go I never know. Until now. This American Girl doll sale in the middle of a sweltering July weekend in Wisconsin is exactly like Black Friday. I happened to go willingly into the trip with the promise of getting a really high quality burger afterwards and a night at a hotel built after 1937. I got both, and was able to support the museum at the same time.

American Girl, if you haven’t been indoctrinated into the culture by virtue of being related to small female children, is a direct marketer of dolls and doll accessories. It was started in 1986 with the introduction of a line of historical dolls and accompanying books depicting the fictional lives of 9-year old heroines across the timeline of American history. The dolls and their dopple-characters are distinctive in that they cross ethnic lines and feature not only the stories of white children, but Native-American and African-American girls. The company was purchased in 1998 by Mattel, and this a telling crossroads for both companies. One of Mattel’s original developers was Ruth Handler, wife of co-founder Elliot Handler. Mrs. Handler is more instrumental in the success of the company due to her creation of the Barbie doll in 1959. Handler’s Barbie is a toy that very much represents the thinking of her time. The Barbie doll is an educational toy in that it tells children they can do and see anything that the world has to offer, but real success comes while wearing 2 inch heels, owning a  bubble-butt and always being coiffed to the nines. American Girl more than subtly tells children that it’s okay to just be children. Kids have buck teeth and freckles and a variety of different skin colors. The message is that you can do things with help from your friends and family and through good old ingenuity.

There are no such toys for little boys. We’d just bury them in the yard or set fire to the toys, anyway. Our development as men is more assured. We are told that the mantle of leadership is ours for the taking, as we have been for thousands of years. American Girl fits into the great movement of the last century that has shown women the way to leadership on their own terms. While my daughter becomes angry when I don’t play right and continue to make the dolls vomit and curse like Donald Duck, I’m happy to watch what the product does for her. The heroines of the doll and book series’ push her to become one of millions of the best educated and best equipped generation of young women that the world has ever seen. So, yeah, I was happy to ride along to Middleton. Even if I didn’t get my cheese.

In most respects, the sporting world has been focused on World Cup Futbol from South Africa for the last month. I found myself enjoying many of the matches I watched and learned to appreciate the way the game is presented. The clock runs forward, often the viewer has to squint at the pitch due to the tremendous distance covered by the cameras, and at least once every game one of the teams scores. Yes, I am an arrogant American. I know nothing. All that is required of me is that I nibble on my bourgeoise Triscuits, sip some Two-Buck-Chuck and shut up about soccer. Meanwhile, in a far away galaxy…Major League baseball is still being played. That I feel slightly more comfortable talking about. Baseball, America’s Pastime (once upon an eon ago, before NFL football, Ultimate Fighting, Superstars of Poker and Women’s Beach Volleyball), heads into it’s mid-season break with All-Star Festivities from Anaheim tonight. The Monday night feature is always the home run hitting derby, in which some of the league’s best sluggers take batting practice pitches from their friends, or old high-school coaches (this is always fun, because fans get to watch some 90-year old retiree get lathered up throwing 30 lobs to an amped up big leaguer). If this isn’t your style, fear not. Dale Earnhardt Jr. is going to be featured on a repeat of MTV’s Cribs at about the same time (“This is where I keep my beer. Oh, and over here is where I keep my other beer.”).

I started to wonder recently why regular shmoes don’t have an All-Star break*. Sure, we get vacations and conferences. I can’t recall any examples of the super-studs among us getting sent to a big-time competition to show off our particular skill, however. There isn’t really a home run derby for accountants. Fans of nurses don’t vote to send their favorites as starters in the All-Nurse games (I might have to start that). Maybe there could be specialized All-Star competitions for the best of the best in real life occupations. Here are some suggestions:

• Cable-Network Programmers: There is a reason that you rose to the head of the industry and became the taste maker for basic cable subscribers. That decision to show Forrest Gump twice a day, every day for the past five years has landed you in the All-Star Basic Cable Scheduling Competition. Now you’ll match wits with the best executives in the industry as you line up sassy detective dramas featuring washed-up Baywatch hotties against sassy talk shows featuring washed up late night network comedians. Winners keep their jobs.
• City Bus Drivers: In your locality you are the kings and queens of running over pedestrians and artfully flinging old ladies from the steps of your buses as you pull away curbs. Do you have what it takes to compete against the toughest drivers in the country? You can see if you’ve got the right stuff in head-to-head contests such as : What’s That Smell (oh, it’s me)? Can I Get Two Passengers To Stop Making Out If I Hit A Pothole Fast Enough? What Would Sandra Bullock Do?  You Can’t Have A Transfer! Winners receive a box of No-Doze.
• Lifetime Movie All-Stars. There are actors and then there are Lifetime Movie Channel actors. Competition categories include: Over-Emoting On Cue, Over-Emoting Impromptu, Over-Emoting When The Scene Clearly Doesn’t Call For It, Love Scenes That Aren’t Humanly Possible and, finally, Chuck Norris. Winners receive at least a decade of getting to put titles on their resume like “Mother, May I Speak With Danger?” and “All The Cancer, Infidelity, Personality Disorders and Bad Dialogue We Could Fit Into Two Hours.”     ‘Off to buy some Triscuits.    *Major League Baseball actually runs a nationwide program called All-Stars Among Us, in which citizens are spotlighted during the festivities for their humanitarian and social work in everyday life. You can vote for these individuals through MLB’s website.

I took a few weeks and just let the summer wash over me with its giant, greasy wave of absurdity. No news programs, very few vuvuzelas (and, as I just learned, type that into Google carefully, or get an improved anatomical education) and blessed little to think about except for work and baseball (in other words, I worked and slept). A season of avoiding mental entanglement, whether in the form of over-thinking Lindsey Lohan’s sentencing, or trying not to think about Sarah Palin’s over-eager fans at this year’s Amusement Industry convention (the “excited” executive video is on youtube, and all I can say is…ewww. ‘Reminds me of Mr. Robinson’s line from The Graduate. “Shaking hands? Is that what you call it? Well, that’s not saying much for my wife!”). Over the long holiday weekend I found myself staring at a baseball game and staying out of the heat when an advertisement appeared that made me sit forward. Just a little. Remarkably, it was for a legitimate product and not the Shake Weight.

I talk about commercials a lot on this blog, mostly because they are often the best crafted work on television. This is the case here. The spot starts with the stark chords of Johnny Cash’s song of reeping and repentance, God’s Gonna Cut You Down. We see a railroad spike being hammered down and the visual is followed by a shot of a steam locomotive racing over a wooden trestle, reminders of the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The voice-over announcer tells the viewer that “The things that make us Americans are the things we make. We’ve always been a nation of builders.” Right on, brother. I’m with you so far. We see film footage of the first airplane flights, of machinery being assembled. “This has always been a nation of builders, of craftsman…” leads a shot of what looks like Ford’s mammoth Rouge River Plant in Detroit. “…Men and women for whom straight stitches and clean welds were matters of personal pride.” Amen. We’re 15 seconds into the sermon. A shot over the top of the Empire State Building follows. Men, women, kids, horses. Then comes the meat of the message, the words to live by. “These things are what make us who we are. As a people we do well when we make good things, not so well when we don’t.” Wait. Did he just mention Jeep 4 x 4′s? Oh, boy. Right message, wrong preacher. Uh huh. Go to color as you lose me. The spot finishes with footage of the all-new, all-American Jeep Grand Cherokee in action. A powder blue box of misfit for the new age. They still don’t get it.

The new Jeep commercials are, according to Ad Age, manufactured by Weiden and Kennedy. I have to say manufactured, because they are better American workmanship than any actual products produced by Chrysler. Weiden and Kennedy also make the really fun promos for the new Dodge Charger in which the cars take on horse mounted Red Coats during the Revolutionary War. There is the rumor afoot that the new campaigns are designed to appeal to Tea Party enthusiasts. True, or not, the Portland, Oregon based ad firm should get some serious awards for creative, thought-provoking work. Chrysler, on the other hand, should begin rolling out Fiats, because their own vehicles stink. Make them wherever you want, with the pride of whomever goes about building the things. We suck when we make bad products. I would show this ad every morning right above the time clock if I were these guys.

There was a so-so movie in the 1980′s featuring Paul Reiser (Crazy People) in which, as an ad exec, he runs an airline campaign with the tag line “We don’t Crash.” Note to Dodge-Chrysler: Start there. Our cars don’t fall apart. Our products last at least 3 years. Jeeps are as good as cars made overseas. Maybe that will remind the buying public of what made America great.

Jeep Manifesto

God\’s Gonna Cut You Down

     I was bummed to read this afternoon about the passing of country star/actor/meatpacking legend Jimmy Dean at 81. For those of us of a certain age, Jimmy represented a kindler, gentler age of television celebrity spokespeople (I know that he had a whole career before breakfast sausage, but I only ever heard his songs as part of ads for K-Tel's 112 Country Classics By Artists We're Pretty Sure Are Going To Die Any Day Now). The advertisements for Jimmy's breakfast products, which stopped airing in 2003 when parent company Sara Lee fired him, were not classic or something necessarily memorable, but they contained just the faintest element of subliminal folksiness. There would be Mr. Dean, seated at his kitchen table (with a couple of massive klieg lights aimed at his hairsprayed head), earthily encouraging viewers to enjoy his quality sausage products (and he was always sure we'd like them). Inexplicably, I'd find myself shouting over one shoulder from the TV room "Ma! Buy me some Jimmy Dean Pork Sausage! He says so!" The poor woman being shouted at couldn't drive, but just as inexplicable as my yelling was the fact that she'd somehow find herself in a taxi headed across town in a search for those silver tubes of high cholesteral goodness.  Nearly as important as Dean's contribution to the mass produced quick serve pork world was the fact that he introduced the world to the Muppets on his television variety show back in the 1960's. Let's see. Breakfast sausage and sock puppets. That, my friends, is a legacy.

     I have to thank the Jimmy Dean Meat Company for one other disturbing area in my life. There are times when I want nothing more than to consume obscene quantities of starch and fats. Sometimes, mostly in the dead of winter, I'll make a casserole in which I layer a Pyrex baking dish with homemade mashed potatoes, add a layer of Jimmy Dean's Sage Breakafast Sausage and top the mess with Jiffy Cornbread batter. Bake till golden brown and congratulations on the birth of an 8 pound hot dish.  Making matters worse, I like to pour on my own sausage gravy. Sick. Wrong. Delicious and ready in no time. This recipe can't be reproduced with Bob Evans Sausage and using Poor Folks would be unthinkable. So thank you Jimmy. I'll be joining ya'll in that great cardiac-care wing in the sky very soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEe2UTAp2tM

    Several weeks ago I was attending a convention at which one of the promotional vendors was Fox Home Entertainment Division. The booth was staffed by two individuals who answered attendee questions about 20th Century Fox products and handed out materials on various studio projects. Posters for and info about the movie Avatar, recently released on Blu-Ray, were front and center. The gentleman handing out Avatar gear wasn't getting a lot of hits. His partner, seated further into the booth, was handling a crowd. She was holding court, fielding questions about actress Jane Lynch and chatting with excited fans of the TV series Glee. Avatar is genuine, worldwide cinematic phenomenon. Glee is a phenomenon of a different sort. A scripted hour of television that has captivated viewers across generational lines and a cultural conversation starter. The woman talking to fans of Glee at the convention, by the way, was already running short on giveaway material. With good reason.

     For what it's worth, Glee shouldn't be successful in this era. Can you name some of the longest running shows on television? One is a cartoon (The Simpsons) and the others are reality shows (COPS, America's Most Wanted, America's Funniest Videos). Cheap, gonzo-journalistic programs are the staple of most network television. Last night's first-season finale of Glee was another signal that entertainment programming is slowly wending out of the reality era and into the era of…realism. For a number of years, TV producers and execs have offered us glimpses of how good written, crafted shows could be. The Sopranos may have been the high water mark for cinema-quality television. In recent years, other premium (and even basic) cable outlets have struggled and finally caught up with HBO shows like Sopranos. Shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Rescue Me and Damages have broken the reality TV juggernaut, using solid actors and well written stories. The creator of Glee, Ryan Murphy, was behind Nip/Tuck, one of the most memorable dramas of the last decade. The networks have been slowly buying more of these shows, and I hope that Glee paves the way for more interesting viewing choices.

Spoilers: Having given Glee lots of love and some credit for helping return written dramas to their rightful place, I'll say that the finale (Journey) was just okay. There was an element of predictability to the episode and some jammage (which happens when a two hour ender is stuck into one 43 minute episode). The club travelled to the Midwest Regional Show Choir Finals to face Vocal Adrenaline and (unfortunately named) Oral Intensity. Quinn's water broke after the kids did an awesome Journey Mash-Up Medley and finished where they started, with Don't Stop Believing. The show choir pieces were the highlight of the show. In between there were some "Aww, don't sell out Glee" moments, including Sue Sylvester's (Lynch) change of evil heart and the sparing of the club for another season. What came out of the episode for me is that Lea Michele (who plays Rachel) is destined for a career on par with Kristen Chenoweth (which gives neither woman enough credit) and that the ensemble cast is great all the way around. Dianna Agron (Quinn), Chris Colfer (Kurt) and Amber Riley (Mercedes) have all spent the past season not only singing, but acting with more heart than many senior actors (and in many cases more than was required for pop TV). I was not a huge fan of the ending and at one point turned to my wife and mentioned that if the show turned into Mr. Holland's Opus I would leave. In the end, it was still very good television. Good for a show about singing high schoolers. Good for the future of television drama.

     Rookie. Hack. Amateur. I was applying all of these terms to myself on Saturday afternoon as I beat the living snot out of some very un-ripe avocados. I don't know if you've ever seen the living snot contained within the average avocado, but it can be extracted much more freely from a ripe specimen. The ripe avocado yields rich, verdant, pulpy flesh that can be easily mashed into the basis of guacamole. These were some seriously newborn avocados. The demon spawn of the overlord of all appetizer hell. I persisted in beating these motherhonking tennis balls down, nonetheless. I don't usually quit trying to work with the unworkable when I should. There I was with a tenderizing hammer and 8" French knife. Someone was going to lose flesh, and most likely it wasn't the avocados. The battle ended nearly 40 minutes later and the lumpy little bastards had finally beaten me down. I stuck my work (skins and all) in a bowl and waited two days for ripening. Two days later I went after the mess with an immersion blender. And got grainy, sandy guacamole. Next time, I'll buy ahead and let 'em ripen. Rookie. Hack. Amateur. Not the first time and certainly not the last.

     I am reminded again that the mistakes in a lifetime of cooking far outnumber the glowing successes. There is world littered with the tombstones of my failed cooking forays. Fish Chilli has it's own monument, at least in my wife's mind. Fish Chilli was the brainchild (brain cramp) of my bachelor days when I believed that I could cook without training or clues as to how ingredients might taste (and smell) when combined. I liked Chilli. I liked fish. Natural merger. Lori and were dating and she was in my apartment one night while I was working a late shift at the Post Office. Now, something should have told the blissfully deluded woman not to attempt any cleaning of my home, heaven forbid unnecessary opening of the refrigerator. I was somewhat offended that she actually had to ask me what the pot of death stink was when I got home. There had been tears and a call to her mother, but it is the mark of a "keeper" that she stuck by me and my experiments in cuisine/taxidermy. She's taken on a lot of my cooking. Our first post-honeymoon fight was because I made Kraft macaroni and cheese with thousand island dressing, because we were out of milk. Lori was kind of repulsed (yet somehow intrigued) over the Christmas dinner the year our daughter was born when I ran out of cream for a sauce and squeezed in the first playtex bottle I found in the fridge (the sauce was actually good, but a little sweet. File that story under Mel's Shouldn't Be Repeated Culinary History).

     Live and (possibly) learn. I started cooking in my dad's lunch counter the summer I turned 11. I hated getting out of bed at 6:00 in the morning and taking a bus to his location, but I loved the look on a customer's face after I'd hooked up properly cooked food. Good trade. Tomorrow I'll walk to work at 6:00 in the morning and hopefully feel the trade-off at least once. I'll also buy some ripe avocados. Onward, upward and I'll put down the knife and mallet before anyone gets hurt.