Now that I'm home all day, I find myself watching a lot of Food Network (surprise, surprise). Honestly, though, I had no idea how far it had fallen. Didn't they used to talk about cooking?

I'd been about to write the whole thing off if it wasn't for Coop. In her time here, she helped me to come to terms with the whole ridiculous thing and turn it back on itself. Not only did we rename shows ("Barefoot Contessa," for example, became "Cooking For Jeffrey And/Or Homos"), but we managed to invent a whole Food Network drinking game.

Drink when ...

• Bobby Flay sticks food right in the camera lens
  
• Rachael Ray takes one hand off whatever she's doing so she can talk with it
  
• Sandra Lee accents a preposition
  
• Giada DiLaurentiis pretends whatever she just put in her mouth is delicious enough to give her an orgasm
  
• Alton Brown uses a conjunctive adverb at the end of a shot
  
• Paula Deen pronounces it "bowl" instead of "boil" or "oal" instead of "oil"
  
• Tyler Florence mumbles so hard you can't understand him

Do a shot when ...

• Emeril says "Bam!"
  
• Paula Deen licks her finger
  
• Rachael Ray says "E-V-O-O-extra-virgin-olive-oil"
  
• Ina Garten, having just claimed her guests will think she's been working all day, explains how simple the meal was
  
• Alton Brown says "That's another show"
  • Do another shot if it actually is
• They show a commercial for Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, as he already wrote this critique better than I did

Chug when ...

• Ina Garten uses her electric juicer
  
• Sandra Lee has "Cocktail Time"
  
• Rachael Ray actually drops something

The Relative Rule
When a relative of the host first appears on camera, the first person to point out that relative may make any other player do a shot. Unmarried significant others count (Bobby Flay's girlfriend Stephanie), but acted relatives don't (Marsha and Elton Brown).

Do a bonus shot if you think Rachael Ray looks like the Joker.

Did I miss anything?

I posted an entry about media organizations talking themselves up.

Sometime last week, Jason was leafing through my daily paper (on a quest for the comics) and found a rather prominent story about how trustworthy its readers feel it is. Not opinion, not even the ombudsman's column, but a full-out story, started on A1. He actually (oh, the naivete!) got mad about it. But I smiled sadly, world-weary journalist that I am, because despite the Slantinel's ham-handed handling of it (most other papers put it inside, at least, and usually below the fold), this is really common practice.

On a similar note, this morning while I was watching ESPN News (which I won't write in their logo format -- ESPNews -- because that reads like information and updates for psychics), an item on the ticker noted that "ESPN reports Michael Vick won't plead guilty to killing dogs or gambling on dogfights." Is all that information necessary? The subject of the story is Michael Vick, unless I miss my guess, but the sentence makes the subject ESPN's diligent news coverage. If this nugget of info had been scooped by, oh, the New York Times, would Extra-Sensory Perception News have also said that?

You don't have a media outlet without an audience. It absorbs your information, of course, but more importantly to your bottom line, it views your ads. Without an audience, you won't have any advertisers, and you can't keep going very long without that revenue. (Even Disney Channel, long a self-supported ad-free entity, is now accepting underwriters of a sort.) So how do you build an audience? You let people know that you're a reliable, consistent source of information and entertainment. And what's the best way to dissiminate this information? It would be overkill to hire a public relations firm -- after all, you've already got this outlet. You might as well just print your accolades using your own ink.

You're seeing a problem here. When you use your medium as your PR vehicle, the people who get your message are the people who already believe in your product, so you're not going to sell anymore ads. But that's only arisen in the last thirty or so years, now that the newspaper is no longer the only game in town. Just like everything else, print journalism has been slow on the uptake on modern marketing -- readership goes down, sales go down, and the only thing the managing editors can think to say is "We've always operated like this!"

ESPN's self-reference works, though. Since they've got multiple outlets, referring from one to another ensures that their product will never be far from their customers' minds. In fact, we might be channel-surfing between ESPN News, SportsCenter on ESPN, the World's Strongest Man Competition on ESPN2, and Kiana's Flex Appeal the 1985 Celtics-Lakers series on ESPN Classic, thus exposing ourselves to all their separate advertisers -- maybe even while surfing ESPN.com and leafing through ESPN the Magazine. It's an all-new shell game. Rather than looking for new customers to bolster the audience, outlets give their existing customers more items on which to spend their money. A caged chicken struggles less than a free-range one, after all.

Oh, for the record -- my first sentence? I was talking about this entry right here. But it sure got some of you searching for my previous dissertation on the topic, thereby increasing my hits and likewise my Web presence. Crafty, no?

Here's what came in my paper this morning.



Sixty-four pages of pre-season football coverage, not counting the four pages of football news in the sports section proper. There are twelve in section A, and five of those are full page ads. Oh, and one page of baseball boxes, and the only mention of basketball was in a column about the whiny tourism magnate trying to block the new arena.

Damn it, Florida.

Have you seen this one?


Sure, I can see that. Because the shape of the bottle is how I choose my beverage, not unimportant considerations like, you know, flavor.

This is quite an assumption to base your entire marketing campaign on, Aquapod. Sure, kids are stupid, but I think they'll eventually realize that despite the extreme (or is that passe now?) bottle it's in, water doesn't have any taste, let alone sugar or caffeine. I can already see this argument dying a painful death in my house five years from now.

("Aw, come on, Avery! You don't want water? But it's orbtastic!")

So I'm watching TV during my alloted viewing period this afternoon (Avery's naptime) when a weight-loss commercial comes on. Food Network (my drug of choice) airs a lot of said advertisements, targeting the (as Gabriel Iglesias puts it) "fluffy" among us -- when you know your audience loves pork fried in butter, you stand a better chance of reaching someone who'd like to shed a few extra feet of girth. But this one (even for a weight-loss spot) strains the boundaries of credulity:


Really? So you mean there actually is a square yellow talking anthropomorphic sponge that lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Have you ever had a great idea for something, but by the time you went to implement it, you'd forgotten the whole point of what you were planning to do?

That's been happening to me all this week. I'll get an idea for a blog post, but somewhere between mental conception and sitting in front of a keyboard I lose it. It's as though it just flies away, like a fly ... no wait, like a bird, some giant bird, like I'm a birdbrain and uh ...

Well, crap. Now I forgot where I was going with that. But rest assured it included the hit comedic phrase "seagull poop."

So apparently there's much to-do about one of our Democratic presidential candidates making a new foray into low-neckline territory. No, not Dennis Kucinich or his trophy wife. I'm talking about Hillary Clinton.



One of her advisors must have Googled "what people want from female president" and got back the answer "titties."

And that's a shame. Not only is the Internet a copout when it comes to research, but this type of campaigning is pandering and insulting. A simple straw poll could have appropriately refined that response -- so that it at least included the phrase "but not Hillary's."

He's filling his tank at the Citgo, but the logo on his T-shirt is decidedly Chevron. Why anybody would profess such brand loyalty as to own apparel for a chain of gas stations and then shop elsewhere boggles my mind. Was it a free shirt, the only clean one in his drawer? Is it his dad's shirt -- is he rebelling? Was the allure of less-expensive gas a quarter-mile down the road too intense to resist?

But then the light changes, I get closer, and I notice the text above the logo doesn't say the brand name. It says, "I Have Gas."

Upon depleting a significant percentage of our liquor stash, Coop starts sobbing, because she loves everybody so much that it's become too intense to bear. In fact, she insists I call my brother so that she can share in the affection-fest. He is, after all, the common link in our friendship.

Um ... say what now? Isn't my wife your best friend?

"No, you don't understand. He's your brother and Sed's his sister-in-law, and she's like my sister, so he's like right in the middle. He's the link."

Ah, drunk logic.

Sorry, audience. We've been near the bottom of a bottle for approximately two weeks, and shan't be climbing out for another one and a half. Meanwhile, I'll try to stop sucking at this.