Attention Deficit David

Put some spice where your mouth lives

I caught a bit of my least favorite show in the history of television (starring one of my least favorite people on earth) Mad Money as Jim Cramer interviewed CEO and President of McCormick Spices Alan Wilson to the show to talk about how safe their stocks are in this terrible market (thereby inflating Cramer's portfolio of McCormick, of course).

In any case McCormick has launched the McCormick Science Institute to help determine the benefit of spices, (which sounds a whole lot like the smoking industry launching safe-smoking studies) and they're using the results of this (company funded) "science" institute to promote things like cinamin, curry, tumeric "and the things that have high 'ORAC' values," to quote Wilson " which is a measure of the antioxidants that are really good for you and taste great.

Then Cramer asked the reasonable question "what do antioxidants do?" The answer is a bit astounding to me:

"Oh gosh, I'm not, I'm not a doctor," said Wilson (about to prove that statement beyond a shadow of a doubt) but what it does is frees up your blood flow and does a lot of positive things..." the ellipses are because he was cut off not because I started yelling at the television.

It frees up your blood? At first I thought he said that it freezes up your blood, so I had to go find the clip, which is here on CNBC but really his answer is no better. Remember, this is a man who is the CEO of a company that has just spent a ton of money on a science institute launched to help figure out if spices really are good for you, and he's proclaiming they are, because they're so high in antioxidants. What's an antioxidant do? I dunno.

I'm not saying he's got to be an expert, but the guy runs the company. Shit, can you imagine what would happen if the CEO of Chrysler got up and said "we're going to make an electric car" and was asked "what does that do?" and replied "I don't know, I'm not a mechanic, but it drives around and makes your streets better."

Seriously man, if you're going to spend millions of dollars pretending your company is doing scientific work, learn the pretend answer.

I was such a genius then

About, I dunno, 15 years ago or so I mentioned an idea I had to Abby that I thought would change advertising. The idea was really simple: Advertisers could combine their ads for more influence. Like an ad for a movie theater where customers were drinking a cup with the Coke logo, instead of a big cup that says "Soda".

Today we saw an ad for a Toyota hybrid vehicle, where the "actress" was filling her car with groceries from a Wild Oats grocery store. Instead of some generic "health food store" they used a real organic grocery store chain.

My brilliance is both a gift...and a curse.

The fathers of Lost

As I was falling asleep last night, having just watched the most recent episode of Lost, something popped into my head. (In addition to the violently bad dreams I had all night.)

I don't know if they're doing this on purpose, but so far many of the characters have had traumatic experiences linked to their fathers. Dig it:

Locke had a long lost father who befriended him and then stole his kidney.
Jack turned in his dad, who was drinking on the surgery-job, and was transporting his dead dad to the US.
Sawyer's dad left killed his mom after a con, an event which shaped his life and turned HIM into a con.
Kate killed her real dad.
Boone and Shannon lost their dad/stepdad in the car accident that injured the woman who would become Jack's wife.
Jin was being forced to be a heavy-hitting muscle man for his wife's dad, and they were presumably escaping Korea on their trip to the US.
Added: Walt's father and his step father both abandoned him.

No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of dad themes.

Pack your knives and go home

Critics have already started to chime in on Top Chef, bravo's new reality show. (To save you some research, they like it, but they don't like it as much as Project Runway, made by the same people. I don't give a flying rat's ass about clothing competitions, so I really can't tell.)

I've been sitting on the couch, sort of just decompressing, and watching the first two episodes of the new series. I'm in a lousy mood, and watching fucktards try to cook is making me relatively happy.

So far though, the only thing that's really grabbing my attention is what a assclown Stephen the Sommelier is, and how completely un-talented some of these people are. (And how they're giving the cooking school student too much shit.)

But the question that's on my mind is this: why does bravo bleep out the word "shit" but not the word "tits"?

I gotta hand it to the cinematographer though. In the first episode the assholic Irishman got kicked out after he mouthed off when he was thrown off the line for tasting food with his finger. In the second episode the camera man catches the competitors tasting with their fingers about three times. Nice.

FOLLOW UP: Okay, so when one of the contestants got kicked off on the most recent episode, she went back, grabbed her knives from the prep area and put them inside her jacket in some interior pocket. Really? They make jackets with knife slots? Wow.