whirlingdervish

I seem to remember Alex throwing his peanut butter jar away in a tantrum before one of the journeys.

Giving the peanut butter to Cody/Makani, and then sneakily taking some back because you think it's still yours, even though you bought it with group money and "gave it away?" Gross. And they knew it, too...that's why they snuck it out of the tent like giggling little children who knew they were being bad, instead of just openly taking it. And this whole idea of "we took the peanut butter, because THEY stole our cassava first!" doesn't wash with me. They hogged the use of the pot, told Makani (snottily) that she use it after they were done, and then left a bunch of leftovers in it and went away to go wash up and play in the water. What were they expecting Makani to do? Wrap up their leftovers for them? Wait until they were done using the pot as a storage container? Dump the food out onto the ground or into their tent so she could use the pot like they said she could? I can only imagine the fit they would have thrown if she had done that. Plus, honestly, out in the wild, especially in that hot moist heat, they were kidding themselves if they thought they could leave food lying around and it would keep for long. If spoilage doesn't get it, animals will. The campers had already been behaving like entitled brats, spending everyone's money and refusing to share what they bought; I don't blame Makani one little bit for helping herself.

The blackout (on top of the matches and mismatches leading up to that point) gave them all of the mathematical information they needed to succeed, so I'm thisclose to buying that a couple of them managed to figure it out, especially if there were a small group of people talking it out and putting the pieces together after four Truth Booth matches. I wonder how they got Camille to go along with Tyler, though, cause clearly she can't stand the guy.

I would have actually been pretty psyched to have Phillip as my sous chef in that challenge...all along, his issues have been in conceptualizing dishes, taking himself way too seriously, and talking with grown-ups who aren't his mom. When it comes down to executing someone else's work--like in the lunch shift in Restaurant Wars, he puts his head down and gets shit done. Plus, you know that he's so particular about his own dishes and so self-serious that he's going to make it a point of personal pride to ride or die nailing every detail of your dish exactly the way you want. I would definitely take him over someone as messy as Wesley.

I get that. For me, as a Japanese American, my perspective is that Japanese cuisine and Chinese cuisine, while they may share commonalities, is actually quite different (again, totally my personal perspective, YMMV). I think this is especially true during the time period that Karen was supposed to be representing. Japanese cuisine was starting to be influenced by Chinese cooking, to be sure--and noodles are an excellent example of this--but the application of how noodles were used, and the overall flavor profiles were very, very different (also very different based on what region we're in as you've mentioned, and rural home cooking vs. the highly formal meals at court. I think that's why even though I really like Karen a LOT, I'm fine with Jeremy staying over Karen. Jeremy's dish was a decent dish fit the general parameters, but was too fussy and skimpy; Karen's dish missed the point entirely, because she got swept up in the idea of Chinese influences and got carried away cooking the Chinese food she wanted to cook in the first place. (Also, that soup looked kind of gross to me, but of course I have no way of knowing how it ate). I'm hoping she wins LCK, because I'd love to see her back in the competition. FWIW, unless I was seriously in-the-know on Japanese cooking, I mighta shied away from the Imperial Japan flag...that would have intimidated the hell out of me! I kinda assumed they were talking about imperial court cuisine, which traditionally would have been served in a series of small dishes balancing a variety of flavors and textures presented with refined, minimalist beauty and representing an overall harmony and balance over the course of the meal. To try to capture that in one dish? If you've never done it before? Whew! As soon as Karen chose the Japanese flag, after grumbling about not getting to cook Chinese food, I looked at my husband and said, "Karen's going home." I think someone who is really into it could seriously knock it out of the park and win, because it's a reflects a lot of technique, refinement, restraint, and artistic presentation, but it was just not the right flag for Karen.

I really liked the diversity of the old challenges, too, and would love to see more fun challenges and non-athletic challenges in the mix. My only issue with a dating show like Are You The One as one of the two farm teams for the Challenge is that it guarantees that at least 50% of the talent pool are all heteronormative, which is kind of a bummer in 2016.

I really do miss the Right Reasons podcast for all things Challenge--even if they were in the bag for Bananas. I gave the No Quitters podcast a listen, but...for my druthers it's way too much of a chauvanistic, homophobic bro-down. Sigh. It's almost enough to make me want to podcast the damn thing myself.

Man, I've been there, though...that awful place where you just know you'll feel so much better if you could just throw up, but you can't manage to do it. At least she finally rallied, though. I think Jamie's got a point, that Cara Maria does pretty easily get to that place of despair where she just wants to give up. Color me super impressed with Jenna and Brianna for keeping it together and hanging on to their lead.

Home sick today, and rewatching some of Gauntlet 2. Man, I really did enjoy the setup of that season--this idea that if a team lost, the team captain went into the Gauntlet against a challenger from their team and the winner of the Gauntlet is the team captain going forward [until they lose a Gauntlet]. I thought that did a great job of raising the stakes while keeping everything fairly transparent. It also helped that most of the players really wanted to be there, and wanted to hang on to their numbers. I don't think it would work with the casting pool that we have now, but it was really fun to watch the old crew go for it.

Ribs would have been perfect! I can't remember, though...how much time did they have to prep and cook? I wonder if that was a factor in not choosing ribs, which takes hours to do right (in my opinion). I know you can do them in the pressure cooker quickly, but I imagine not in the quantity they would have needed.

In my classroom, if *all* of the students fail, it ain't the students' fault. That's how this challenge felt to me--clearly the cheftestants didn't fully understand what the goals of the challenge were, they didn't have the resources to pull off the challenge, and the judges went in with a different set of understandings and expectations than the cheftestants. That's a big ole producer fail to me. Also, ffs...if it's big, messy hunks of dead animal you want, don't send the chefs to Whole Foods! Setting aside how costly Whole Foods is, it's a supermarket packaging and selling meat, produce, and products for home consumers. The chefs were never going to get the kind of big huge products the judges were looking for. If that's what Top Chef wanted, they should have laid out the expectations clearly, given the chefs the go ahead to get their proteins elsewhere (and the rest at good old Whole Foods), and let them go from there. They were just set up to fail by poor challenge design, shoddy planning, imprecise challenge instructions, and entitled douchbaggery among the judges. It just made me mad.

I recently finished rewatching Inferno III, and sheesh is Susie an unpleasant little hypocrite, gliding her way through the season with snide little slut-shaming and fat-shaming comments, all while wearing this manufactured wide-eyed expression that someone must have told her looked sweet. She's done interviews and features over the years, and every time I read her or hear her I think, "Hey...uhh...Sister Christian? You're doing it wrong." Sorry. That was all pretty un-Christian of me. I guess I'm doing it wrong, too. ETA: Whoops! Sorry Stinger97...I see I've derailed the media thread into a hate-on for Susie. I'll take future thoughts on the topic (if I have any) to a more appropriate place next time.

Yeah, I've been digging the Channel 33 podcasts, too. Thanks for the tip!

I really liked Detroit 1-8-7 for the one season it was on, and a lot of what I liked about it was the kind of stuff they're talking about in this podcast--the show really tried to explore the communities of Detroit, and the tensions and triumphs among the people. I was pretty sad when it was cancelled (I guess me and the three other people watching it). I could see something that really dug into that and had L&Os procedural structure being really cool.

What do you all think of the No Quitters podcast? I've been looking about for Challenge-related pod since Grantland shut down. Any other podcast recs out there?