Thursday, January 17, 2013

OUTRAGE!!! Te'o, Top Chef, and Twitter, Too!

First off, Happy New Year! Whoops. I didn't mean to take a vacation from blogging just like I didn't mean to stop exercising and didn't mean to slow down to writing only on the weekend. It just happened. Here I am, though, confused and feeling a little reckless. The Manti Te'o bomb that Deadspin set off this afternoon has been reverberating around the internet and around my head since about the time I finished my lunch. I really bought that hard luck story on Manti and was maybe even giving him some slack as a football player/pro prospect because of his tough times. No, not consciously but, come on! Of course it colored (minds out of the gutter) my perception of him. And then I watched Top Chef. And then I watched Argo. So today is a day filled with outrage in my media consumption.





Where should I start poking the outrage? The thing that bothers me the most out of those three topics is the Top Chef stupidity. It's going to be hard to take the show even half-seriously ever again. The product placements and corny challenges were tough enough but they just kicked off the chef that has won like 80% of their stupid challenges this year because annoying retread Josie was unable to cook her food properly. Which means they kept Josie because she isn't a high caliber chef. Which makes my head hurt. There are two (maybe 4) really hotshot chefs on this season and they got rid of one of them because she had ambition. Also, because she is tall and pretty and Padma campaigned really hard to the other judges to make sure the tall and pretty, super-talented chef, got sent home in favor of the middling slow asshole. What a dumb thing to do. Padma has grown on me negatively for the last year. I used to like her, at least as a TV personality, but now she makes me uncomfortable. I took a cursory glance at twitter and, from what I can tell, fans of the show are unanimous in their love of Kristen and their hatred of Josie. This is my high-water mark for personal outrage today.

Argo is a really good movie. I really liked it all the way from conception to execution. It looks great, sounds great, is populated by great acting, and it has a satisfying bit of tension-building followed by relief. It's one of my favorite movies of 2012. If it won Best Picture at the Oscars I would be entirely OK with that. In the same sense that I was and am OK with American Beauty winning in one of the most over-stuffed years in Hollywood history. I don't think that it breaks ground or that it will endure as one of my favorites but Argo was good all the way through and I can understand the fans reacting to the "snub" of Ben Affleck in the Best Director category. I don't feel any sort of outrage but I congenitally hate awards shows of any stripe. American Beauty was a fine movie and so is Argo.

Now we've got Te'o. Oh, Manti. Ohhhhh, Manti. I am not outraged by Manti's lies and coverups. He is a college kid and he's a dummy. It's OK. He just ended up on a massive platform. I can't wait for more news about Manti. I don't think I've ever been so wrapped up in a gossipy piece of shit story as I am with this one. It's fantastic!

Bonus OUTRAGE!!! Good bye, Henry's Tacos, I like your food OK. I liked being interviewed for the news. I am OUTRAGED!!! that some dude is going to tear the building down for lord knows what reason and it's a terrible plot of land.

My eyes are hurting from closing so much and so hard (Oh, yeah!!!) so I'll go to bed now. Goodnight, angry and innocent world.