I'm a week behind on most of my tv watching after spending five days in New York, but the episode of TNFNS with the "be an expert" and the Iron Chef-type challenges seemed especially unfair. You can't convince me that any Food Network personality on the air today could have, at the beginning of their contract, had a random food thrown at them and be expected to deal with it "expertly" in 60 seconds. If the point is to test general food knowledge, why didn't they do that in the screening process? If the point is to test how well you can lie on camera, then the challenge makes me question any Food Network personality's expertise.

The second challenge was just gross and mean. On Iron Chef the contestants are not assigned all the ingredients, just the main one. They get to pick everything else, and they even get a list of possible main ingredients ahead of time so they can plan their dishes. Throwing a bunch of hyper-sweet processed crap at this crew and expecting something good enough to serve at Red Lobster of all places is pretty cruddy.

That said, I do think the right person went home. Even though Food Network needs to get beyond its middle-America white bread image, Nipa's limited experience outside Indian cooking probably couldn't sustain a show for very long.

The Mole is back! They're cutting down the field pretty quickly, but my top contenders right now are Clay and Victoria, though Kristen is keeping an awfully low profile and Craig suddenly became suspicious with the dry cleaning episode. Nicole and Paul--and to some extent Alex--are just too loud and obvious. According to the Mole's journal on the ABC website, the Mole was blindfolded in the luge challenge, which would include Clay, Victoria and Alex (can't recall Kristen's position), and Victoria was the one who talked and got their results tossed. Hmmm....

In other "reality" tv, what's with this trend of supermoms on all the cooking shows? Every one has to have the one contestant who's doing this all for her daughter and bases nearly every freaking recipe on something she cooks regularly for her daughter and is fine with being booted because she misses her daughter. On Top Chef it was Antonia, Hell's Kitchen it was (I think) Rosann, and now on TNFNS it's Jennifer. It's getting almost as overdone as the faux-hawk. Move on, food reality producers.

I really loathe the phrase "culinary point of view."

So Ben, Chris and I went over to my dad's bank on Friday and closed his checking and savings accounts for which we received three sizable checks. I was tootling around the IRS website today looking for info on whether this will be counted as taxable income for me next year, when I came across the following:

"Bribes. If you receive a bribe, include it in your income."

and,

"Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless in the same year, you return it to its rightful owner."

I've never noticed a space for that on the 1040. Do you need to go back to the person you stole the stuff from and get a 1099? What if you have trouble fencing the stuff? Can you take a loss? Does the IRS actually have a sense of humor?

Read it for yourself in Publication 525 (2007) under Other Income.

Bird update: at least one baby learned to fly today! One of them spent a very long time sitting on my railing, completely undisturbed by my watering the roses and changing the cat litter. Probably it was just so thrilled to not be jammed in with its bulky siblings anymore, for which I don't blame it a bit. As you can see, they get bigger by the hour.


Tuesday night I was back at the SF Opera for the first time in a while to see Das Rheingold, the first of Wagner's Ring cycle. This is Francesca Zambello's modernized production, which I didn't particularly like. The scenery and costumes look cheap and awkward--the giants especially--and the projections that punctuated scenes didn't quite work, reminding me of old science films from junior high. The music however was excellent, and most of the singing was good. Richard Paul Fink as Alberich was especially fine. Moving down to the dress circle from the cheap seats made a difference since Das Rheingold runs 2.5 hours with no breaks. I was extremely lucky to get an aisle seat.

I just got my packet on subscribing for the 2008-9 season so I have to make a decision about that. They're doing Porgy and Bess next June, though it has not been cast yet.

The "baby" birds don't even fit into the nest anymore; I think it's high time they learn to fly and give their poor parents a break. In this photo the three fattest are standing on their two siblings.