Fun_People Archive
22 Aug
Cooking shows

Date: Tue, 22 Aug 95 00:19:26 -0700
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: Cooking shows

Forwarded-by: bostic@bsdi.com (Keith Bostic)
From: Mike O'Brien <obrien@aero.org>

	Local cable access being what it is (and isn't), especially in a
large metro area like Los Angeles, and esPECially in a highly gerrymandered
cable area like mine, which includes a corridor from downtown out to
the ocean, down through dead-broke, gang-ridden Venice and into
super-rich Marina del Rey...  what was I saying?

	Oh yeah, local access.  We have a lot of it.  Things being as
they are, (did I say that before?) lots of people think they can cook.
I watch some of these when my medicine kicks in and I can't get out of
my chair.

THE FRAGILE GOURMET
Maybe she was big-league once, I don't know.  Now she's about nine years
older than dirt and can't weigh more than 85 pounds.  Her print dresses
do things to the CCD elements in the studio cameras and the scan lines
don't help any; she's hard to look at straight.  But boy can she cook!
I've gotten recipes I'm convinced are proprietary secrets from various
restaurants, which she remembers but has forgotten the origins of.
Trouble is, this only works about half the time.  The other half of the
time she zaps, thinks she's at home, and wanders off the set to go change
the sheets or something.  Since the crew's all gone out for coffee, this
leads to about ten or twenty minutes of bare set.  A real Zen experience,
especially if she's left something on the stove.  The sprinklers went off
once, and that was a hoot until the camera shorted out.

THE FERTILE GOURMET
This lady has between six and nine kids - I've never gotten an exact count
- and this has to be one of the most valuable shows on TV.  She
demonstrates how to cook for a whole huge bunch of family, every day, on
a budget, while keeping half the family from assassinating the other half
with anything that comes to hand.  She brings all the kids to the set for
every show.  I think she has to.  Unfortunately this very valuable show
was cancelled after every single piece of studio equipment had to be
replaced three times due to a buildup of saliva and Smurfs.

THE FARMER GOURMET
This guy looks like Steven King's take on Mr. Green Jeans.  I think he's
a truck farmer with a messiah complex.  He wheels in this grocery cart
loaded with dirt-covered vegetables, and proceeds to cook...something, I
don't know what, it's different every time.  You can watch what he's
doing, but the problem is that while he starts talking about the cooking,
he wanders, the way people do, until after about five minutes it's all
about the New Christy Institute and the Trilabial Commission and a whole
bunch of people and nations that don't really correspond to any reality
with which I'm familiar.  That's on Tuesdays.  On Wednesdays he deals with
meat dishes, and those are much more pointed and direct, but I've never
managed to watch that one much past the point where he leads in the goat.
If anyone else ever actually watched this it wouldn't be on long, I don't
think.

I think there are some more of these on, but I have to go take some more
medicine now.

© 1995 Peter Langston