Venus rising-a work in progress.

Very nice indeed.

Facial pain is now intermittent. My lord, the body is fragile and random.

Lethal weapons tend to be a bit finely tuned. I second the call for pseudephedrine for congestion. Can you take that?

Okay, I've achieved some work already and need coffee and a scone. I hear coffee comes in pints. That's it, I'm getting one.

next week's elimination and a finale with three finalists.

That makes sense, Sumi.

It's true that it could be Dave instead of Harold, if Harold doesn't step it up. Dave is a much less accomplished cook, but Harold gives up too easily when he's given something substandard to work with. He needs to stop waiting for everything to be perfect, and start working with what he's got, because "Oh well, if only I'd had ____ I could have done something great" is getting old.

Yes! That is exactly Harold's problem -- he needs to be more adaptable.

deleted because I couldn't get the stupid link to work

I think the final three will be Harold, LeeAnn and Tiffani as well. I think Dave has a shot at it, because Harold hasn't been taking his defeats well, and it's caused him to retreat to his "I'm a cook," position, and he needs to bring his Top Chef game.

I was quite worried that LeeAnne would go home last night, but I'm glad she didn't. I think I'm rooting for a LeeAnn win. I think that if the Scotts had chosen Dave's menu, it would have gone better for everyone involved, because Dave, with his catering experience, seemed to be the only one thinking about how his menu would be put into practice. I think this is a very good top four. It's the four I thought were most consistent over the course of the competition. I was sad to see Chunk McFunk go, because he was amusing, but he was too much of a hot head interpersonally, and not focussed enough on the prize in the kitchen. I think LeeAnn still has a decent shot, just because she wants it so bad.

Also, I'm dying to get up to San Francisco now and hit Chef Tom's 'Wichcraft, and try Harold's sandwich from last week.

I am such a Chef Tom fanboy after all this.

I'm very excited. Tom Colicchio and I are in agreement that the contestants really should have gotten sleep -- somehow I missed that they only had 16 hours for the project. Clearly, they panicked.

Sean, you and S should come to NYC and we can all go to Gramercy Tavern together.

Morning.

Good news--we (me and my visitng mom) are going to see Ellen live today. VIP tickets, so we don't have to wait in line or nothing. I have been trying to score tickets for three years, but captioning companies (we caption the show) are not high on the V.I.P. totem pole and this was the first year I could get them. V. excited.

Bad news--our water heater is leaking something fierce and the landlord is coming over today to check it out. I am pretty certain we need a new one. We live in a guest house and our landlord likes to do fix-it work himself, and I fervently hope he actually can do the repairs and do them quickly.

Oooh! That sounds like a plan, Jess.

Sumi, yeah, they should have gotten some sleep. Although I laughed my ass off at "we don't need to pull an all-nighter" Stephen, who wound up taking all night to roll up the damned egg rolls. Some nice schadenfreude there.

Top Chef:

Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons have blogs over at Bravo site, and man, they reeeeally disliked Stephen. Colicchio's last paragraph is a masterful put-down.

Stephen truly believes that he will single-handedly "raise the bar" for the rest of us. And indeed he may – to heights of culinary and oenophilic rapture that mere people can't hope to appreciate. And when that happens, there may be diners somewhere who will happily pay to be hectored, lectured, and reminded of their inferior knowledge. But if those guests are out there, in twenty-five years on the job, I haven't met them.

On a totally shallow note, Harold, who's mostly just pleasant-looking ordinarily, transforms himself into a stone-cold hottie whenever he puts on those glasses. Yowza.