Firstly, I’d just like to give a shout out to whomever it may be at Microsoft who so enjoys Birdie Cam that they’re streaming it 24/7. Seriously, I’m honored! 🙂

Anywho, on with the brain farts. Margaret and I were watching the Food Network program Unwrapped this evening. For those who have children/lives/taste and don’t spend their evenings suckling the Glass Teat, Unwrapped is a show that goes “behind the scenes” of various food products to give you some information on their history, methods of production, etc. It’s hosted by a goofily cheerful dude named Marc Summers. Off-topic, I’ve been looking at this guy’s face for a couple of years now, trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. A few months back it hit me: I think Summers has the classic physiognomy of someone with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: the sort of flattened face, the wide separation between the eyes, the underformed frenulum. This is apropos of nothing, and certainly not meant to be a joke, just an observation.

Ooookay, one brain fart down, one to go….

So anyway, Unwrapped is a decent show—where else are you going to see an industrial macaroni-making machine at work?—but it sometimes degrades into plain old advertising puff pieces. Not that I expect hard-hitting, muckraking journalism from Food Network, but the product-placement can get pretty thick at times. A sure-fire warning sign is when they cut to a shot of someone speaking knowingly about some or another commercial foodstuff—say, chocolate-dipped roofing nails—and the description displayed at the bottom of the screen identifies the person as, “John Winklebean—Chocolate-Dipped Roofing Nail Authority”. This means that the person is an employee of the Spike-Tastic Chocolate-Dipped Roofing Nail Company of Marietta, Georgia, and that the next stop on our televisual journey is their production floor. This pattern is repeated time and time again.

Really, I don’t have my knickers in a twist over this. I just find it amusing. But I do wish that, just once, some rogoue technician would sneak a different caption onto the character generator, labeling the so-called “Authority” as “John Winklebean—Vat-Grown Corporate Talking Head”, or something like that.