Amarsir

I think that if you turned on this show in the middle and asked me to guess what it was, "Food Network Star" would not occur to me. I'd think it was another new home cook / game show creation called Kitchen Clowning where amateurs do silly competitions for a shot at money. Because not only does this show have no relation to the ones from just a few seasons earlier, but none of these people resemble "stars" to me either. I'll say this for Lenny: he seemed a decent cook and he knew how to use a character to get a crowd's attention. (What he did not know is where to draw the line so that your past actions don't ruin your future.) I think she just lost her head. She figured that if she called it a garnish they wouldn't realize it was charred? Silly. But I give her credit for not wanting the judges to eat something that wasn't right. Monterey should have been half that conscientious with her raw chicken.

So I guess Blais is officially a regular CC judge now. I don't mind; he really seems to get into the spirit of it. But it's a bit of a shame since there was never enough Jet, Simon, and Antonia for my taste. I'm enjoying the tournament. It's a fun idea, and using winners certainly does raise the average skill a bit.

Didn't we see her taste the crumble and say it didn't taste good? I thought we did, and really that's the only answer I can think of for what I agree would be the obvious solution of a cruble top.

This is just my theory and I don't know anything. But... When Wizard Wars started, P&T weren't doing anything on tv at the time. The show did well and got picked up for a second season. During the period between seasons, CW decided to start making Fool Us episodes. And they did very well - on a bigger network with a bigger budget. So my theory is that when Fool Us got a 3rd season the CW decided they didn't want P&T doing a competitor's show. (Because it causes confusion. I've seen people mistake one for the other.) So if that theory is true, SyFy would probably like to do more. But the show's not popular enough to live without the biggest names, and they aren't going to do a small show that might mess up their deal with the big one. Again though, that's purely my speculation. All we really know is that SyFy never publicly refused to do a 3rd season and they still list the show as if it's ongoing.

Speaking logically I agree with you. But I've seen enough Top Chef contestants who would rather lose a limb than bake a dessert. All of whom have far better cooking credentials than anyone on this show. So it's mentally conditioned me to think it unreasonably difficult.

The jacket was a little too big for him, to the extent I actually started wondering if that was on purpose as a 50s style I didn't know about. But otherwise I thought it was a good look.

I'm rewatching too. I loaded all 6 seasons on my phone for gym sessions and I'm at the beginning of S3. My problem with S2, despite a lot of great stuff, is how outright villainous Pierce becomes. I can't help but see it as Harmon being annoyed at Chevy and taking it out on his character. And Jeff as the protagonist becomes the voice against him, which ends up corrupting him up through S03E01. It drags the whole show down. I much prefer the season 1 Pierce where everyone rolled their eyes but seemed to genuinely like him. Season 3 I recall as having way too much Chang. I just watched Competitive Ecology, which should really have been the peak of his craziness. (That's the one where he does a Film Noir style detective satire.) It's funny and Ken Jeong played it well. But at the end the dean makes him head of security and that sets us up for way too much of him. S4 will be the challenge for me. With issues, I like S5 and S6 because I grant the show was dealt cards with characters leaving. Nobody loved Hickey episodes, but we also wouldn't have liked a smaller cast or a new regular with no development. So I grant those have to exist and judge around it.

The only thing worse than the Honeyfund business model is those laughably bad Powerpoint slides they had. "Here's a big circle." [Reaction shots of unnamed people nodding.] "Now there's an X through that circle, and then here's a bigger circle." [Reaction shots of different people nodding.] These Beyond the Tanks have done a good job raising my opinion of Lori. Not the first season so much, but her last few appearances have all featured competent advice and direction.

The PMS Bites name was overly-restrictive, but the product wasn't. Rename it to target women in general, make sure it contains some amount of nutrients women need outside that time of the month, and just imply on the package and marketing that it's good for PMS. Serve your target market but don't restrict to it. That said, I think the price and likely competition are issue enough. For the Pavlok, gosh it sure would be nice if the person rejecting Kevin like that didn't have such an already contentious product. Many would like to see him reap what he sows for some of his more vicious rejections. But not from someone making specific claims he can't back up with a valuation he can't justify.

In a modest defense of the sticker guys, there was a fairly well-publicized study about this. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cartoon-stickers-may-sway-kids-food-c-idUSBRE87K11S20120821 Now that doesn't defend their business. It's pretty clear to me they were just trying to capitalize on the study without any real advantages to play. But the idea that cartoon stickers motivate food choices does have some basis.

Mr. Wonderful scowling at people in the den feels like a character who's being mean for drama. Mr. Wonderful scowling at partners for not delivering checks as promised ... well that I can get behind. That was not a segment for blowing smoke, and Kevin was the right guy to bring some reality into it. (Although I really suspect the reason we saw him as the group representative is that he doesn't have as many other investments to go visit.) One of the potential uses of the new breathometer did catch my attention though: fitness. You can get superior information about metabolism and workouts by measuring the CO2 proportion of your breath when you exhale. It's called "indirect calorimetry" and a mask to measure it costs more than my current car. But if they can get their device to measure it, even roughly, at a reasonable price I'd seriously consider buying it. And then the breath and gingivitis and who knows what else are just side benefits.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. Palm oil is often hydrogenated to change the consistency, which creates trans fats. But in it's naturally-occurring state I don't believe there's any significant amount of it. Buying palm shortening without trans fat is very easy to do and the fat makeup isn't really that far from butter. That said, "transfat free" is like the one label her site doesn't have, so who knows. I'm surprised she missed the chance to use coconut oil, which is all the rage right now. And the same environmental footprint as palm. (Which is to say, significant.)

You guys don't know the half of it on the Mission Belt guy. First, the belt was not an original idea. It's a copy of an older company called "SlideBelts". Which is run by this guy's (Nate Holzapfel) cousins. Now it's hardly the first product to appear on Shark Tank purporting to be more original than it is. But stealing the idea from family is something special. Second, this: Yes, that's a commissioned painting of the Mission Belt guy as Moses. When he's not selling belts, the guy sells books about "The 10 Commandments of Selling". I wonder if Daymond knew this when he made the "best salesman" statement because I'm pretty sure Holzapfel's going to be quoting him on that forever. http://utahvalley360.com/2015/02/06/mission-belt-co-creator-films-shark-tank-spin-off-provo-shares-success-entreprenuers/ All of which makes me hope Daymond is getting his money out of that as well, because all the warning signs are there that this is not a long-term business.

Mismanagement seems a lot of it. They made a case for the Galaxy and then "right after" there was a new model released. Well that's a fairly predictable schedule and I'd think it obvious that you create a new mold immediately for a new model. Not after it's been around. Also Lori, the self-proclaimed expert on women and technology, seemed to think "Android is half the market". She needed to be told that it's fractured and even the best-selling Android (Samsung Galaxy) is a smaller share than Apple. But also, iPhones overweights toward female buyers and Samsung toward men. So unless she has visions of men buying lots of minipurses the whole idea was `badly formed.. That said, $5000 / mold is a totally viable cost if the product was selling. If the Queen of QVC couldn't sell enough iPhone models to cover that, they clearly had bigger problems.

Call me cynical, but it made me wonder if they followed up that segment by cutting the ingredient quality. If your margins aren't good, you have to cut costs. Lowering the ingredients is a common way to do that. And if I was going to do that, the best time would be immediately after a segment aired on national television proclaiming how great our quality is.

That's a very good observation. But I have to confess I was rooting against her in that segment. Purely on the hopes that we would get to hear Daymond say "Stop trying to make Fetch happen. It's not going to happen." By the way, has the word "failure" just dropped out of the English lexicon? I believe in the prior episode the Treasure Chest lady called her business "a fail", and then here I definitely heard Kevin say "the Bridal division is completely a fail". Ugh. That phrasing is bad enough on tumblr memes. I don't need it from my sharks.

I'll take the other side on that. I love Blais and am generally happy to see him. However I'd rather he gets his own show than pop up here and there. Especially since Cutthroat Kitchen's use of 3 rotating judges means we already don't see them that often. And I think his know-it-all persona is likable in the same way that Alton is likable. But because they have that similarity that's another reason to not need both together.

On a podcast once, Alton said that he thinks the best chef wins 90% of the time. Now that was back in early seasons so his impression may have changed, but it stuck with me as an interesting observation. I liked both of the final chefs in this last (Pesto) episode. But I definitely admired the winner for keeping her bankroll intact while mostly flying under the radar. We still see the occasional bit of foolishness but I feel on average the savviness of competitors has gone up.

When they were doing the failed resurrection fakeout that no one here believed, I got a sense that maybe this is why we never saw Lady Stoneheart. Because it does add more weight to Jon coming back when we never saw it with Catelyn. Were I unsullied I might have been surprised. (Of course they also might have cut her simply because she doesn't seem to have an endgame part to play. At least not so far as we know.)

Design patents aren't worth much. Change a small detail about the look and you have a new product. Let's say I go make a version and do exactly what Barbara said - giving it a wavy edge. It's their responsibility to sue me and make me stop. When they do, I'll say "My version is a different design. And if it's not considered a different design then their patent is too broad to enforce." Because the patent office's job is basically just filing paperwork. Any tough decisions are made in a court, as they should be.

Question: How?? How is it possible to be good enough to get on Cutthroat Kitchen and yet literally scream at a live lobster? How is it possible to not know how to handle one and yet be confident enough to pick it over other seafood options? And then to win? Well I guess anything is possible on Cutthroat Kitchen. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the first time Helping Hands was done as a sabotage it was a Bob, right? Combining 2 contestants is worse. It reminds me of the early days when they did station swaps and I really didn't like those. For all the sabotage testing they do, they can't test how another contestant is going to screw your dish up for you.

Another complication is that they would need to make 3 dishes. Sometimes they are struggling to make 1 bite. (And yet succeed.) I think all of the judges pride themselves on how flexibly they interpret a dish, but it's always going to be subjective. They're not going to automatically disqualify someone for making a burrito in a lettuce wrap because they don't know what could have caused it. But they do have to knock it if all the other dishes are without obvious flaws. And I'm sure there's a secret rule list for this show, with stuff like "you can start boiling water before the round starts" and probably some rules about sportsmanship. But I've never been able to turn one up.

I have a new pet peeve: the audio remixing. Some of those voiceovers were so heavily edited the original interview could have been about a tennis match. I get more natural speaking cadence from the automated response system when I call my bank. One thing I should say that I do like about this show is how it can lean toward educational. Their habit of pointing out techniques as "pro" or "amateur" moves helps me figure out things I might apply to my own cooking. And that's something a lot of competition shows don't provide.

I was the other way around. At first I thought she was cute and quirky and the longer it went on, the more I wanted to stab something sharp into my eardrums. Always nice to see another stop on the Richard Blais network tour. So far this year CC has had him, Tim Allen, and William Shatner as guest judges. I wonder if that's something they deliberately intend on doing more of.

The Pareto Principle is in effect here. If you fit just the iPhones and Samsung Galaxy S-series you cover half of all smartphones. Getting the next 10-15% would be difficult as you're covering the LG G-series, Nexus, Note, Moto X, Lumia, HTC One, etc. For that you're right, probably too much hassle. And the remaining 40% of the market is cheaper phones who wouldn't be your target market anyway. But I think it's all your other points that are the real issue. If it was a product with a real future, they could grow huge only making 2 sizes per year.