Hello World

My most important and difficult final of the year is tomorrow afternoon. But that’s not going to stop me from watching Top Chef tonight.

I don’t know if anyone else in the world watches this show, but I’m shamelessly addicted. Basically, Top Chef is a generic Apprentice clone about cooking. It’s filled with artless product placement and awkward editing and hilariously-arrogant people (both competitors and judges). It’s hosted by Billy Joel’s plastic wife. The best thing about the show, I think, is that there are clearly three excellent chefs and all the rest of the competitors are straw men picked for their wacky personalities rather than their superb cheffery. Anyway, here’s the breakdown of the four people left competing to get to the SHOWDOWN IN LAS VEGAS:

• Harold: a boring white guy with a potty mouth, who is clearly an awesome chef without any ambitions of being a celebrity chef with fancy weird specialty dishes and a PR agent.
• Tiffany: a red-haired professional who doesn’t take guff and runs a tight ship. She is practical but creative and her only weakness is that she can’t do pastry. But nobody on this show can, so don’t worry about that.
• Leann: Leann did a kickass job on the duck-stuffed gnocchi a couple of weeks ago, and she seems very confident and capable of putting together a super menu. But just between you and me, I think she’s a step below Harold and Tiffany.
• Dave, the effeminate caterer with a Van Dyke and a bad habit of shrieking kitchen meltdowns, will be eliminated tonight. He’s just not nearly as awesome as the other three.

For the sake of completeness, I’m going to predict that Tiffany will win it all. She’s unflappable and doesn’t make excuses and she doesn’t blow up when things get tense (which they always do because the producers of this show know what they’re doing). I imagine Harold will give her a fight, but in the end the judges will decide that Tiffany deserves the hallowed title of Top Chef.