New Crush, Internet, and Too Much Food Network

I have a celebrity crush.  I really did not see that coming.  I think the last time this happened was in high school, back when puberty was still the governing force in my life.  Since then, I’ve never really cared.  Famous and/or semi-famous people are often too attractive to believe, but after ten seconds of staring at a gorgeous woman on screen or a magazine cover, I move onto something more interesting.  After all, it’s not like I’m ever going to meet them, and even if I did, a good percentage of them I am convinced would be pills.

Then I found Lindsey Stirling on YouTube and my life may never be the same again.  It was a completely random discovery, too.  I was watching Imagine Dragons music video of “Radioactive” (which is bound to be one of the best songs that ever comes out in this decade) and I noticed a link to a cover version of the same song performed by Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix.  That cover is just as good as the original and I got curious to follow these people.

Pentatonix is a fun group of talented musicians, but Lindsey Stirling is incredible.  She’s a violinist that has combines her playing with dancing and makes some pretty entertaining videos.

Naturally, she’s gorgeous and her dancing is pretty cool.  And beyond that, she has some genuine talent.  I’ve always stringed instruments.  I love the way they sound and the emotions that they stir.  I’ve always found violins to be the most passionate instrument, even beating the piano, and if I were to go back to playing music and learning a new instrument, the violin or something similar would be my pick.  And Stirling plays very well.  The stories on her videos are creative, the music has energy, and her personality comes through with every song, which is quirky, heartfelt, generous with her collaborators, and absolutely joyful in what she does.

Check her out.  Talent like hers is worth the time.

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I spent a lot of time whining about the internet while I was at my parents’ place, which I’m positive they didn’t appreciate although they didn’t try to disagree with me.  It’s not that it was really all that terrible; I could still get on and do stuff.  I really only had trouble when I wanted to watch movies on YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix (these three together form an alliance threatening to take over all my available time and succeeding quite well.)

Much as I missed being with my folks, I was excited to come back to where the internet is fast and available.

And for the first two days back, my computer just wouldn’t connect while I was at home.  If it wasn’t for my school’s internet, I never would have gotten last Tuesday’s post up on time.  When I finally stopped having trouble with the internet at home, though, the internet at school decided to take a sabbatical and continued to give me grief the rest of the week.

At least the internet at my parents’ place was consistent.  Consistently slow, but I could depend on it.  Over here, I don’t know what to expect anymore.  I’ve walked into a dark place, where I don’t know what’s going on, I have no guide, and at school, I am forced into listening to my normal dictation tapes the entire time I’m there.  The agony!

Really, this portion is not meant to be an apology for my complaints.  Those still stand.  Still, given my troubles, they no longer have to feel like it's just them.

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I used to roll my eyes whenever a food program came on.  A show could easily last for an hour, watching other people cook and plate food that you can only look at, but not smell or taste (which is the main purpose of cooking good food.)  This look and don’t touch distressed me so that I couldn’t bear to sit through these programs.

Part of the reason why I ended up liking Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is because the show is not really about the food, but it’s about the restaurant business and the people who choose that life.  It fascinates me and I’ve learned a great deal about what makes this business work.

My roommate had the TV set to the Food channel last Saturday, and like the slug I am, I was watching it a full hour after he left the room.  Got to see some very interesting restaurant shows that I was not expecting, with mixed results from me.

Restaurant: Impossible has the same sort of pattern that Kitchen Nightmares does.  Robert Irvine goes into failing restaurants and turns them around, only Irvine pushes himself to fix the restaurants in two days and a limited budget.

Irvine struck me as a pro, somebody who really knew what he was doing; and an interesting aspect to the show was the restaurant makeover.  Ramsay usually does a remodel when the restaurants are stuck in the dark ages, but you get about ten seconds (at most) of watching his team doing an overnight miracle.  Restaurant: Impossible spent nearly half the show focused on what Irvine’s team did, from ripping up and putting in new walls to painting to the flooring.  It was almost like seeing something from HGTV.

At the end, Irvine did a lot of good for the restaurant, but unfortunately, it was not a pleasant viewing experience.  I just couldn’t help noticing the difference between his approach and Ramsay’s approach.  From the start, Irvine was embarrassing the owners in front of their customers, when revamping the menu, he was constantly showing off, and what really got me was how he kept saying “I.”  “I am not putting my name on a failure,” he said at one point, and it was a constant stream of “I am doing this” and “I am doing that.”  He is doing a lot of good, but it comes off like he’s doing this for his own ego as much as for the owners.

I compare that to Ramsay.  When he criticizes the food, he’s very careful to go in the kitchen or keep the conversation private, away from the customers.  I’ve seen an episode where he kicked out the camera crews so he could talk to the owners alone.  The only times he’s ever purposely embarrassed the owners before the customers is when they have let the kitchen fall so low that it has become a health hazard and the owners need an overdue wakeup call.

But except for advertising, changing the menu, and making organizational changes, Ramsay is very hands off.  He wants the restaurants to succeed, but he wants it to be their success.  I’ve never seen him say, “I’m going to do this.”  He always says “we.”  It is an ego thing for him.  He comes in as part of a team and he’s there to help them make their restaurant a success, but the success and failure lies with the owners and their team.

I would rather spend time in Ramsay’s company just from that show than I would with Restaurant: Impossible.

I was also introduced to a couple shows that have their own patterns: Mystery Diners and Restaurant Stakeout.  Both shows follow a similar pattern.  Restaurant owners are losing money and they suspect problem with their employees but can’t find out exactly what is going wrong.  So the diners or “Willie” Degel (whichever show you’re watching) set up hidden cameras in the restaurant and observe everything that’s happening in the restaurant and pinpoints the exact problems.

Mystery Diners was fun.  The diners feel like just a bunch of regular guys performing an invaluable service for restaurant owners in a rut and can’t figure out why.  All the diners do is pinpoint the problems and let the boss do what they want to do with that knowledge.

Restaurant Stakeout is actually the more entertaining of the two.  Degel is a pro; he’s smart, savvy, no-nonsense, and if I had a business, I would trust him with it.  Watching it is kind of painful, though, because as my roommate pointed out, Degel is a diva.  The whole time I watched this program, I felt that this show was all about him first and the restaurant second.  I learned a lot about business just from one episode, but I’m not eager to watch another episode.  His pride kills me.

Once I got off the couch and away from Food Network, I told myself that I had to get a life.  That I’ve just spent so much time talking about it is proof that I haven’t met that goal yet.