Tag Archives: Guy Fieri

Friday Reads: Guy Fieri Blah Blah Blah

This week was weird. I don’t even remember it, really. I spent the entirety of Monday night in a state of sleepy wakefulness – or wakeful sleepiness – and since then I’ve felt like I’ve been living in a really boring dream in which things like Excel spreadsheets and laundry have featured prominently. (Incidentally, I was conscious of many of the dreams that I was having between 2:45 and 6 AM on Tuesday. All of them were insane and in two of them I was wearing my sleeping mask.)

Anyway. I’ve decided to start sharing the things I read during the week again. So here are some things I read that you can read if you didn’t already, even though I’m pretty sure that you read at least one of these things:

– Pete Wells on Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar (New York Times): Duh. I mean, we all love this kind of stuff, right? (Also, responses to the criticism on Salon and The Awl.)

– The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly (New York Times): Because I love human interest stories.

– What Was Your Weirdest Celebrity Sex Dream? (The Awl): Some of these are rather amusing.  Also, I’ll tell mine to anyone who asks.

– Comedy Central’s 10 Comics to Watch (Splitsider): Uh, I didn’t read this because it’s a video but definitely do yourself a favor and skip ahead to Kate Berlant because she’s incredible.

– And I haven’t actually read this last thing but I plan on doing so today because Louise Erdich won the National Book Award this week for Round House. It’s her 2010 The Art of Fiction Interview with The Paris Review. (I actually have a copy of this issue in my room because I’m a terrible hoarder.)

Honestly, I don’t have any other worthwhile links to share. I haven’t even been able to keep up with my magazines these last few weeks. Why? Because I’ve been doing the following things:

– Reading and finishing Parisians by Graham Robb

– Watching every Louis C.K. comedy special

– Working at my job

– Trying to write what I think might be a novel but will probably just be something I forget about for a while and remember in a few years when I am deleting things from my hard drive to free up space on my computer

– Planning a large pre-Thanksgiving gathering for Saturday (more on that next week)

And on that note: Have a great weekend, everyone!

TV Hangover

Unless I have something planned, it’s hard for me not to watch shitty TV on weekend mornings when I’m hung over because it’s hard to do anything at all that involves thought. And once I start watching TV, it’s hard for me to stop. What follows is a true account of everything I watched on Sunday – good, bad and ugly.

10:30 AM. I can’t find anything on the movie channels so I press the On Demand button and do my usual scan through all of the free TV shows. I try to watch last week’s episode of Copper – which I know will be horrible – but it’s not available. So I do what any good American would do and check to see if Here Comes Honey Boo Boois On Demand.

Chloe, my favorite toddler, freezing up during competition.

It’s not. (I still haven’t seen a single episode.) So I turn on Toddlers and Tiaras.

I’m able to get through two episodes of that show with a break for coffee somewhere in the middle. I’m totally, totally into it for the whole two episodes but I can only watch so many mothers – who are all either black-hearted or extremely naive and all (looks-wise) on a scale between 1990s Rural Gas Station Attendant/Troll and Plastic Surgeried to Resemble E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – dress their kids up like a-holes and volunteer them to be judged mostly on how sincerely they can fake their smile for a panel of deeply strange adults.

12 PM. I start the first of two episodes of Eat Street – a Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives–type show about food trucks on the Cooking Channel. It desperately needs fewer people talking about just how local and fresh their food is that they serve out of a truck and more Guy Fieri.

1 PM. I discover the answer to my prayers, a marathon of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. I get in a just OK episode about Maine and half of an episode about different food obsessions before I venture out again for a long walk.

4:30 PM. At this point, I can say that I’m not really hung over anymore so I make a nice late lunch/early dinner and read The New Yorker while my roommate watches a few episodes of Bleak House (BBC, 2005), which I have already seen four times. (All eight, ninety-minute episodes). She stops watching with two episodes left to go.

Sometime after that, we watch an episode of Foyle’s War because we live in a quaint English nursing home. This episode – Season 2, Episode 3 – failed simply because it wasn’t the previous episode we had watched, which involved a gay war hero who murders his pregnant-by-another-man girlfriend (who is involved in an elaborate petrol-siphoning scheme because she is also a petrol truck driver).

9 PM. Boardwalk Empire season premiere. As we all know, this show is good but probably never blew anyone’s mind. That being said, I really liked this episode. (Even though I miss Jimmy’s face and haircut). At the end, I felt like I couldn’t wait to watch the next episode but also that I’d come a long way from the Toddlers and Tiaras of that morning.