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.

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.

You're not wrong about that. Mrowr.

Venus Rising

Very lovely!

And OMG I can think of easily a dozen Buffistas (definitely including myself) who really, really need the dress Salma Hayek is wearing in this picture.

Vibing for you and Mister Kitty and all the good kind people caring for him, sarameg.

In my experience, water heaters are pretty simple. You probably need a new one, but they're relatively cheap and easy to install by the reasonably handy.

Ooh, that sounds awesome, Robin. The Ellen VIP situation, not the water heater. That sounds sucko. I'm still wondering why people were knocking on my door this morning -- I kind of figured it was a water issue, since I didn't have cold water for a bit yesterday, but no, everything seems fine. Weird.

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.

Oh yeah.

Also, Chef Tom delivers the smackdown! Heh. I have a bit of a crush on him, too, I think.