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An odd choice of footage from MasterChef

“It’s boarding school pudding at best” followed by a thumbs-down and a raspberry.

“Wow.”
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That brief exchange between Marie Porter and Joe “Weaselly Little Shit” Bastianich was the full extent of her fifteen minutes of reality TV fame (unless she still hasn’t learned her lesson). And no, she hasn’t abandoned the nickname “Joey Coattails”, but as you’ll note in the video below, she prefers calling Joe a “weaselly little shit” now:

Seriously, though, I’m really confused as to why the producers decided to include that clip in the episode. Yes, it was Joe acting like a douche, but it just doesn’t seem to fit the character “Joe” who normally appears on the screen (at least according to my very limited viewing experience). If I’m misreading something here, please point it out because I’m just confused.

Joe’s rejection: They didn’t show him giving the death stare or sneering or spitting Marie’s mango mojito upside-down cake (instructions in the video) into the sink. It was just “It’s boarding school pudding at best,” then thumbs-down with the raspberry. Given that Joe is a judge on MasterChef, I assume the producers want him to look like a sophisticated restaurateur and winery owner… do sophisticated people normally show their disapproval by giving food the raspberry?

“Raspberry? I hate raspberry! Only one man would dare give me the raspberry… and he’s a weaselly little shit!” (My apologies to Mel Brooks for writing that.)

Marie’s response: “Wow.” I could see that interpreted in two ways, the first of which is “I can’t believe he doesn’t like my cooking.” The second (and much more likely in my mind) is “I can’t believe such a pompous, overbearing person would make such a childish, immature gesture.”

Hence, my confusion. It doesn’t seem like that five seconds of footage fits within what I’ve seen of Joe’s normal behavior on that show. “Boarding school pudding at best”? Exceptionally douchey. I can imagine him saying that to his mother (especially since she’s the one who put him through boarding school).

But the raspberry? Who does that? Little kids, that’s who. Joe acted like a little kid. Did the producers think putting that one insult on TV was worth damaging his supposedly intimidating bad-ass reputation? Or maybe people in the editing booth decided to commit an act of sabotage because they think Joe is a weaselly little shit, too.

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Joey Coattails is [cut, paste] a great guy!

The first episode of MasterChef 4 is coming up in less than 24 hours and I’m a little concerned on Marie’s behalf. Not that they’ll show her doing anything uncouth—if they show something on the screen, well, she did it intentionally. No, I’m a little concerned about the editing process.

I’ve told people plenty of times in person, but I’m not sure if I’ve written about it on here or not: on a reality show (at least in my case), they can pull you off to the side and ask you questions for over an hour, then maybe use a three-second sound clip that the producers really like. Sometimes it can be longer than three seconds; sometimes they’ll use multiple sound clips; sometimes they shuffle the order around to create more drama and suspense.

And that’s why I’m worried. If Marie complimented or expressed admiration toward either of the chefs, the producers might put that next to a sentence using Joe’s name to make it sound like she thinks he’s awesome. If that happens… she’s got a lot of knives in her kitchen and I imagine she can learn to cut and paste body parts pretty easily.

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Is “bloggeryness” a word?

If it’s not, then I’m making it one.

Yesterday, I went to the main page and started scrolling down, looking at aaaaaaaall the months that I’ve written blog entries. I got to the bottom of the list and realized that the first month I wrote anything online was February, 2003. It’s now May of 2013.

The reason it’s not “my blog’s 10th anniversary” is that I’ve had to do some site-hopping. My first page was shawnbakken.com, but one day, the web service jacked up their fees, my registration lapsed and some other person or group jumped in and snatched it from me. I had to relocate. I opted to use Blogspot for a while and called it “(almost) shawnbakken.com,” but it just didn’t feel right. It never felt like it was “mine.”

I was eventually encouraged to use a new web service and found out that shawnbakken.net was available. Well, that seemed like a damn fine option. I filled out the necessary forms, paid a much lower price and got this site up and running in April of 2007. However, there was still one big problem: I’d neglected to save a lot of stuff from the old site onto my hard drive.

By copying and pasting entries from someone’s web feed and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I only lost a few things from mid-2005, back when Beauty and the Geek was on the air and I was at my most prolific. Dammit… I also lost hundreds of comments from people, but those weren’t nearly as important (no offense to anyone who left comments back then).

Thus, this site by itself has been around for about six years, but back in February—just a couple months ago—I hit my 10th anniversary of bloggeryness. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. And if you haven’t, I hope it hasn’t made you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat too often.

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Next on FOX: Two Chefs and a Douche

I’m afraid to report that another of my friends who had avoided reality TV up to this point has come over to the Dark Side. First me, then Stephanie Link, now Marie Porter. Why won’t these people learn from my example?!

I guess in Marie’s case, it’s a little more understandable. The show wasn’t just “live in a house and try to win a bajillion dollars.” She auditioned for MasterChef. I’ve had limited exposure to fine cuisine—I’m quite fond of mac ‘n’ cheese out of the box—but she’s probably the most masterful chef I’ve ever known, so it seemed like a reasonable decision.

Part of her motivation was to win the money, but another (probably larger) part was the exposure. She’s already written several cookbooks and the results of her recipes that I’ve tasted have been ultra-yummy. Unfortunately, the market is extremely saturated. There are sooooooo many cookbooks on the shelves that it’s almost impossible to know which ones are good: “Norwegian Tailgate Grilling… Nigerian Bagels… 501 Ways to Cook Goat Testicles!”

Marie is fairly well established on a local level, but without a wide-scale “fan base”, her books still get smothered among all of the sucky ones. Competing on MasterChef and showing a national audience what she’s capable of doing… BAM! Huge fan base! Now people everywhere know her name and can seek her out.

Marie has heard stories about what goes on behind the camera dozens of times. Talking to Stephanie and me, she already knew that “reality TV” isn’t reality: it’s what the audience sees according to editing and producers’ decisions. Still, it was the proverbial “opportunity of a lifetime.” She’s probably satisfied with just the one opportunity. Continue reading “Next on FOX: Two Chefs and a Douche”

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We’re Number 12! We’re Number 12!

Okay, maybe that’s a bit premature, but just a few hours ago, the Minnesota House of Representatives voted 75-59 to pass a bill legalizing gay marriage. If it gets through the Senate and is signed by Governor Dayton, we’d be the 12th state in the U.S. to do so. (Kinda weird to think that in November, we were voting about a provision to the state constitution defining marriage as “man and woman.”) I’ve said before that I don’t like talking about politics here, but I did a little research and found a few things that may or may not be enlightening:

1) The voting was almost split down party lines, Democrats for and Republicans against. Almost. As it turned out, two Democrats and four Republicans crossed the proverbial carpet. Dems had the House majority, so the legislation was already likely to pass, but the fact that the vote wasn’t decided exclusively according to party lines is at least mildly refreshing.

2) They passed an amendment to add “civil” to “marriage” in the bill, which I think is a great decision. If a particular church or organization chooses not to marry a couple, they can’t be punished for refusing to do so. Some people may complain that “civil” is irrelevant because marriage is a religious institution, but while I understand their point, there’s a problem they likely don’t know, haven’t considered or blatantly ignore.

3) There are 1,138 federal laws and 515 state laws in Minnesota granting specific rights to married couples that are unavailable to gay couples. 1,653 laws. Think about how big that number is. If you assigned each law to a day on a calendar, that calendar would be four years and four months long and none of them can apply to gay couples in Minnesota because they can’t get married.

So that’s the scoop of the hour. House Representatives made their votes for various reasons, not all of which were their political affiliation. They chose to legalize civil gay marriage, so regardless of your beliefs about them being loved or damned in the eyes of God, this decision was more about granting gay couples the same rights in the eyes of the law. Welcome to being Number 12, kids.

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Good morning! Time to get online!

I bookmarked this article from the New York Times a few years ago and read it again on Friday night. It wasn’t the inspiration for creating the “Unplugged” category on my blog, but it was definitely a motivator to try doing it again. (The first time I actively avoided using technology happened about two years ago.)

I think it’s worth noting that it was easier for me than it would have been for Kord Campbell: I don’t own an iPad, I don’t work with computers on a daily basis and I don’t ride the subway, so I have no idea how long I’d be offline inside a tunnel. That said, it’s not like I’ve been living in a secluded cabin. There’s still a TV in the house, I’ve got a laptop on my desk and an iPhone in my pocket… technology isn’t always in front of me, but it’s almost always there.

So I decided to try to avoid it on Saturday. I decided I was only going to use my phone for my alarm and that was it! Okay, I would have used it like a regular phone, too, but that was it! Until I decided to use it for listening to music later that night, but that was it for really real that time!

The urge to get online hit me as soon as I woke up. Normally, I roll over, then delete maybe a dozen emails from various mailing lists. (Admittedly, I let myself cheat a little bit right away: I’d written someone a message on Friday night about something happening on Sunday, so I opened up my email account, read that single reply, then turned off my phone again.)

In the early afternoon, our immediate family was meeting at a restaurant to celebrate several birthdays at once, so that helped pull me away from the laptop and television. It also helped pull me away from my phone as well because I accidentally left it on my bed before we took off, but the urge to use it was still there in force.

During the course of the meal, people were showing off pictures on their phones, looking for random information on the Internet… I wanted to pull out my phone for the same reason. I had some cool pictures I’d taken, there was something I wanted to look up during a conversation, but I couldn’t. My phone wasn’t there, but I wanted it. “Shawn wants the Precious, but the nasty little hobbitses left it at home.”

…

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad.

When I got home, I grabbed my phone, opened it up and saw that I hadn’t missed any calls. Didn’t check my email or Twitter, just closed it and put it in my pocket. Time to find something else to do.

So I started cleaning house. Or at least my small part of it. I’ve had way too much junk mail building up into little piles (that have slowly turned into big piles) over many months. After getting the space heater and humidifier out of my room—I’m hoping we’re finally done with blizzards here in Minnesota this spring—I plugged in my paper shredder and started clearing out some of those piles. I’d pull up a handful of old credit card offers, tear off the address labels, shred those, then dump the rest into a bag for recycling. Again. And again. And again.

It started getting tedious pretty quickly: tear, shred, dump. That’s when I cheated a second time by turning on some music. It helped keep my brain occupied, I could bob my head to the beat and occasionally sing along a little bit. (Yes, I can sing. No, I don’t do karaoke, so don’t bother asking.) It helped the time pass more quickly.

I was starting to feel burned out after a couple hours of being productive, so when the clock struck midnight? I turned into an electric pumpkin. Time to delete emails, scroll through my Twitter feed and play around on Facebook for a while.

Even though my “electronic fast” only lasted a day, I think it was worth it, if only as a reminder to step back once in a while. Focus less on online distractions and more on people. Get away from the TV and log off Facebook; enjoy spending time with friends and family. PUT THE SMARTPHONE DOWN. Unless someone’s actually calling you. Then it’s okay to answer the siren song of technology.