How silly can you get?

I have been noticing commercials for XBox Kinect.  Okay it’s coming up on Christmas and got to get that “I want it’ buzz going before Black Friday but…

Do people really think wasting money on a video game that allows you to do things on you TV that you could be doing for real makes sense?

You stand in front of your TV and swing an imaginary golf club.  What? Why aren’t you out on the golf course swinging a real club and enjoying the fresh air?  Do we really put that much stock in the virtual world?

Okay when I was a kid, Pong was all the rage.  Kids could sit for hours playing this game if we had been allowed to do so.  We weren’t.  Go outside and play was a standard parent phrase back in the day.  We went outside in the fresh air air and played stickball, or kick ball or tennis or any of a hundred other games that either existed or popped up in our imaginations.  We ran, jumped, sweated and burned off energy in an actual physical environment we could see, smell, hear, feel and in some cases taste. We didn’t stay cooped up in the house all day.

Now we have a generation of future hermits in the making.  There’s no need to interact with the real world, make friends, meet people and experience things.  Just turn on your Xbox and pretend you are experiencing something.

I know It’s been a while

I haven’t posted in a while but I have been busy setting up another blog for my business.  It has taken a fair amount of time to get the way I want it now that is done and I’m back.  By the way if you want to take a peek at it feel free.

However I did have a bit of time to go check out the newest remake of The Thing.  My nephew took me and he didn’t know that John Carpenter’s version was a remake!  Anyway the new remake is strictly middle of the road in my opinion; not bad, but nothing to write home about either.  The best part of the movie for me was one of the cast members.

I’m a fan of the series Oz, that aired on HBO a while back and it was great seeing Simon Adibisi (Actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) again.  And I couldn’t help but be amused that once again he was wearing a hat that never came off..  Adibisi’s hat on Oz was a great mystery to almost everyone that I knew that watched the show.  I still don’t know how it didn’t fall off every time he moved.

Finally another cooking competition show I can sink my teeth into!

I am a big fan of the original Japanese Iron Chef.  Iron Chef America-not so much.  I’m not sure if it was the ‘play by play’ of the panel, the flamboyance of the Iron Chefs or the chances they took in making the dishes.  Maybe a combination of all these things.

Iron Chef America falls a bit flat for me.  It seems the Chefs tend to ‘play it safe’.  Even Morimoto who transitioned to Iron Chef America from the Original Iron Chef seems to limit his cooking techniques.  Maybe because the American palette is not as ‘open minded as the Japanese palette?  I spent some time in Asia and what passes for ‘Asian” Cuisine in the US would be mostly unrecognizable  there.  They use ingredients Americans probably wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole.  That is exactly what has made me fall in love with the show Chopped.

Chopped features 4 top chefs competing against each other instead of an Iron chef facing off against a challenger.  It also takes the concept of the ‘Secret Ingredient’ to new heights.  Chopped features three ’rounds’ of cooking; Appetizer, Entree and dessert.  The Secret ingredient is replaced with a mystery basket featuring 4 mandatory ingredients which the chef must use in some way during the round.  After each round of cooking one chef is ‘chopped’.

The mystery basket leads to some very odd and creative match ups that most Americans would look at and say “Eww!” if they saw it on a menu.  Imagine going into a restaurant and ordering Honey Herbal ice cream made with cough drops.  Or gummi bear and Kiwi Wontons as was made in this clip!

If a chef can make it to Chopped Champion, they have to have some mad kitchen skills and that is the appeal of this show for me.