I hope you’ve noticed, but once in a while I mentioned Gordon Ramsay.
Picture it, Sicily, 1933 (n. Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot). The finale for Hell’s Kitchen with Rock vs. Bonnie. Trained, diligent, entirely focused, smart and consistent against the ultimate home/professional cook in waiting just off culinary school and a fire purely for cooking. While I was pulling for Bonnie, I don’t think that winning would have been the prize for her as it is for Rock. I felt a connection to her keeping that brain in wait for a few rounds, feeling that she was a gifted kid, probably out-thinks herself in a lot of cases and for all of her extensive vocab skills still curses up shit so nasty it gets cartoon @%^*! subtitles.
She’s going to have a lot of doors open to her now just from recognition and may have an easier time transitioning that into whatever career it will be than starting in the hotel kitchen. She seems more apt to run her own, smaller restaurant or being a teacher in the long run…just a hunch.
So, Rock turns the handle and shows over. In the credits, the announce for anyone who wants to try out for Hell’s Kitchen to check out the website. Sent in my request for the information and two weeks later, there’s a casting call in Ft. Lauderdale for the show. Fast forward to this past Saturday, I’m up at 8 for the Farmer’s Market, up till 4 am for Panetta’s bachelor party :
Won $45 at the Seminole Casino with $2 Red Stripes. Ate, drank and made fun of Alex at Charley’s Steak House with a Veal Porterhouse and one of those seafood fancifulness plates se incluyo king crab, steamed shrimp, calimari, scampi, boring seared tuna and stone crabs. 2001 in Tampa is strange as it’s no liquor with a 1 drink minimum. On the floor of a La Quinter.
like missy said, she ain’t patti labelle so she ain’t singing the hook. but god damn, after Mrs. Winners Chicken & Biscuits, World of Coke and the Varsity, I may have to move to Atlanta and move out of Triple A class stalking to full time.
It seems like everyone down in Florida is teaming up to undo what Rep. Don Young (R-AK) has done.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL) have taken up the cause of Lee County officials who want to use Young’s infamous $10 million Coconut Road earmark for a broader project.
Mack, congressman for the district where the projects sit, sent a letter to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure asking the committee to allow Lee County “flexibility” in how it may use the money. Lee County officials voted last week to send back the money to Congress in hopes of having it reauthorized for I-75.
The county wants the money to widen I-75, as was originally described in the bill approved by the House and Senate. But as Mack writes, “at some point after the conference report passed Congress but before the bill was signed by President George W. Bush, this language was changed.” Despite Mack’s tactful employment of the past tense, all signs are that Young or someone on his staff was behind the change.
The Coconut Road interchange would benefit a real estate developer who helped raise Young $40,000 a few days before he slipped the earmark into a 2005 highway bill.
just so you yokels remember the definition before i get a strongly-worded internets threat.
prop·a·gan·da (pr?p’?-g?n’d?) Pronunciation Key
n.
1. The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
2. Material disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause: wartime propaganda.
3. Propaganda Roman Catholic Church A division of the Roman Curia that has authority in the matter of preaching the gospel, of establishing the Church in non-Christian countries, and of administering Church missions in territories where there is no properly organized hierarchy.
No, not Grits & Gravy (St. Louis), but a guy that I followed throughout his career because he started as a freshman at Seton Hall in 2000, right after I got to UCF. Never met him, but felt a connection in his talents and inability to truly come to terms with them and make good with himself.
It’s a sad tale of a guy that I’m guessing felt very lonely in the world and continually had no place to turn.
Never realized that it would be this year that I would notice my contemporaries were starting to fall.
I can’t even put the words together to accurately describe the way that Israel tears me in two directions. The vile manner in which many of its politicians conduct themselves similar to our worst takes out the beauty and progession of the greatest social experiment in modern history.
JERUSALEM (CNN) — Israel on Sunday rejected 50 Africans — most of them reportedly from Sudan’s Darfur region — who had illegally entered the country from Egypt, a government official said.
The move angered many Israeli lawmakers and human rights advocates because of reports that some Sudanese refugees are being killed or mistreated by authorities in Egypt.
Israel has been struggling with how to cope with an increasing number of Africans, including some from Darfur, who enter the country through Israel’s southern border with Egypt.
According to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, the refugees were arrested Friday evening as they tried to cross from Egypt into Israel. They were held at a military base in southern Israel before being driven back to Egypt on Sunday, the newspaper reported.
The nationalities of the 50 sent back Sunday were not released, but the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, citing figures from the Israeli military, said nearly all of them had escaped the genocide in Darfur.
Speaking to CNN, Israeli government spokesman David Baker described them as “economic refugees from Africa.”
Baker told The Associated Press that Darfurians would not be immune from Israel’s ban on unauthorized immigrants.
Israeli law denies asylum to anyone from an enemy state, AP reports. Sudan’s Muslim government is hostile to Israel and has no diplomatic ties with the Jewish state.
Everyone at HBO deserves as much applause for airing John from Cincinnati as they do fucking scorn for cancelling it. I didn’t look for the extra, special meaning. I sat and took in amazing performances that did for me what the Sopranos must have for those teetering on the edge of faux masculinity, needing to act out passive-aggressive fantasies of murder and power, but knowing it won’t cause constant, fearsome looks over their shoulder. That show was the the porn of fat guys living out Clint Eastwood fantasies, of husbands and wives engaged in the most vitriolic arguments that could only have come from real time, and families who could only figure out reasons why they should be separated, but indefinitely stayed together.
This show, for me, was a way to listen to someone engender their ideas on the universe and the tiniest, most important connections that bind supposedly absolute strangers. People have said of the finale that David Milch was selfish and petered the show out with a obfuscated whimper, hiding behind the monologues that made the show unique. It wasn’t the case.
Those people were upset that they didn’t have enough time to reconcile their own thoughts on the story’s meanings. Don’t look at the sum of the parts because the math is all wrong, the factors this time were more important than the whole of the family, which is where you were fooled.
