Watching my grandmother make magnificent meals from scratch gave me the cooking itch. I was around 9 or 10-years-old at the time, way too many years ago. Grandma taught me how to make a lemon meringue pie totally from scratch. She designed her own kitchen and loved to cook. In that kitchen, Grandma taught me how to cook with love. It's an essential ingredient.Now I watch cooking shows on teevee and continue to learn all sorts of new techniques and dishes. But from the lofty heights to the hoi polloi of the culinary world, televised food shows are having a hard time getting the respect I think they deserve. Maybe the snobs think video too revealing--making the fine art of cooking too mainstream, too mass market. Just. . . "too."
It hasn't helped that one of my absolute all-time teevee culinary heroes Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet's career is going down in flames due to allegations of past indiscretions. For heaven's sake he was a Methodist minister! And my cooking hero! Now he's toast.
Anyway, there is a fine crop of celebrity chefs to learn from on the tube. Julia Child, the Mother of All Cookshows is still going strong. The FoodTV Network's show "Too Hot Tamales" is consistently entertaining and informative (in that order). Emeril Lagasse yelling at me is okay for a while. (Bam!)
The James Beard Foundation, whose blessing is seen by some as The Oscar of the culinary arts, totally dissed all the shows appearing on The Television Food Network. Maybe The Beards are just jealous of the individuals savvy enough to have a presence on the screen and online. I say let 'em eat cake, I want my FoodTV!
There may still be hope for aging rockers. It's The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame I'm beginning to worry about. Over commercialized? A traveling exhibit from the museum is due at a Denver shopping mall this week. No wonder Neil Young had reason to pause.
Neil and Joni Mitchell (both Canadians, coincidence or controversy? YOU decide!) figured they had better things to do when The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's awards ceremony took place.
Affairs of the heart have played a central theme in Mitchell's music, so her decision to stay home may simply be a reflection of who she really is with her new-found daughter and all. Stoking the star-maker machinery that night got prioritized out.
Neil had one very good point: with ticket prices hovering around $1500.00 only industry professionals would be able to attend. They come to see and be seen on the scene, not for the music. (Yawn.) Young provided VH1 with some great publicity they might not have had otherwise by standing up for sitting out.
Michael Jackson was there to make the evening bizarre. He looked white as a ghost and chose not to perform with his brothers. The Jackson Five couldn't enter the Hall of Fame in style, thanks to Michael. In fact, few of the honored individuals felt the urge to repay the honor with a little music. Snobbery? Or is The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame beginning to become as irrelevant as The Grammys? YOU decide.
Highly localized, conveniently collected, engaging and entertaining web-based community content must be one hell of an idea. So many Big Players are getting involved lately. The 800-pound gorilla, Microsoft, launched its Sidewalk service about two weeks behind baby bell U S WEST's DiveIn--stay tuned, there are more such sites to come. Meanwhile, Pacific Telesis' At Hand cranks, and AT&T's CitySearch grows as AOL's web version of Digital City and Warner Brothers' CityWeb loom large.
In sometimes clumsy attempts to transition to the web, traditional dead tree pulp newspapers struggle to compete for "quality clicks" in an online arena totally foreign to them. More and more targeted online services enter the fray each day as web-based infotainment sites seek to be the end-all for your localized info needs. All of the above competing with the local newspapers for the same advertisers' dollars and your coveted attention.
How many of these projects can survive? Sidewalk, just one city deep at the moment, is backed by the deepest pockets on the planet yet hindered by the negative karmic nature of the evil Microsoft corporate umbrella. (No soul, for those taking notes.) From the folks who brought you Slate: Your Town? Let's hope not. On the brighter side, U S WEST's DiveIn, currently in ten cities nationwide, seeks a coming together of online communities with useful and relevant local information across a broad range of categories.
The bottom line is traffic. Traffic is, in the long run, maintained by value and content. You can generate anything you want--let's see how you maintain.
I grew up in a half-Catholic, half-Jewish neighborhood. "You're Presbyterian." my parents said.
The Presbyterian persuasion, from what I could tell as a kid seemed like "Religion Lite:" (all of the redemption with just half the guilt). When it came to religious discussions in my neighborhood I generally just kept my thoughts to myself. But the whole Catholic thing was always fascinatingly foreign to me. Aren't Catholics supposed to marry just once and that's it or something like that?
These days about 60% of marriages fail, be they Catholic, Jewish or Presbyterian, so I think adjustments should be made. (Especially if your last name is Kennedy.)
If a Catholic couple has a really good excuse, or maybe just a solid 'in' with the guy wearing the big hat, you can get your marriage annulled. Otherwise it's pretty much dry dock if your coupling tanks and you still want an invitation to heaven--at least as I understand it.
I read that during the 1960's there was an average of only a few hundred Catholic marriage annulments granted in any given year. Nowadays you can multiply that figure by twelve thousand per cent. Increase? Stampede is more like it. What's going on? And it's not just Catholics, folks.
While no fan of divorce, I'm less a fan of unhappiness. If the tradition of maintaining an unhappy marriage for the sake of religious salvation slowly withers, I won't be too distressed. After all, the only real benefactor of a continuing unhappy marriage would be the church now, wouldn't it? Anyway, I was reared a Presbyterian so I should probably just keep my thoughts to myself.
Email publishing has an image problem. I met a couple of legitimate email publishers last week, Dan Murray of Mercury Mail and Andrew Currie of Email Publishing Inc. Both introduced themselves with the statement, "I am not a spammer." That's a real image problem.
They described an established and rapidly growing base of email addresses at anywhere from 70 to 90 million. (PointCast reaches what, one million on a good day?) The potential for INVITED, subscription email publishing is, as both businessmen put it, "huge." Unfortunately, there is also a huge potential for abuse.
A fat, greedy evil man named Sanford Wallace runs Cyber Promotions. His operation is responsible (using the term loosely) for 4 million pieces of uninvited, unwanted and bothersome email postings every single day. Wallace sleeps fine at night, having collected his fee from advertisers so clueless that they think this kind of thing might bring them business instead of bad karma.
The bane of legitimate email publishing is the crude filtering employed by some of the larger services where INVITED subscription email is deleted, falsely detected as spam.
My heart leapt when I read that a group of hackers actually fought back against the growing tide of useless spam. Cyber Promotions, the number one major polluter of the backbone, was hit in a 20-hour attack by automated programs designed to bring the offending servers down. It worked. Bravo and encore!