well, you could be right about that as well - though I suppose that's a sort of confrontation too.

True! But I feel less sorry for the judges. I think their egos are insulated enough by professional success to withstand the crowd disagreeing with them. I just feel sorry for the teams.

NFNS - I can't believe it but I actually liked Lisa this week. She, Aaron, Jeffrey and Kelsey are my current favorites and they totally sent the right guy home but Nipa needs to go next.

Design Star - I LOVE that they're going to have to build some sort of dwelling in a week. Ha!

She improved a lot, and it sounds like she got it through her head that she needed to lose the crazy "three Cs" babble.

Yes, that Beautiful Basics is a much better concept.

From that TC interview:

Which of the winners of your show would you hire for your kitchen?

Any of them. I have purposefully stayed away from hiring anybody that's been a contestant. But I think Tiffany, a woman from Season 1, was fabulous. She wasn't a fan favorite, but I thought her cooking was brilliant. Harold I would have hired. Forget about the show for a second -- if Harold walked into my restaurant and said he wanted a job, I would have hired him. Same thing with Sam. [Season 3 winner] Hung, definitely. I think a better question would be, "If you were going to open a restaurant with one of them, who would it be?" That's a little different. Probably Harold or Hung. I think [Season 2 winner] Ilan -- he's a good cook, just a little immature, and he has a little way to go. If I were going to raise money and put someone in charge of the kitchen, I'd want someone with a little gravity or weight to them.

I am vaguely disgruntled about educational TV this weekend. Normally if I don't have travel plans or movies to go see I like to veg out and watch assorted science type programs on a lazy Sunday. But the History Channel has apparently become the Ice Road Truckers Channel, Discovery had a Dirty Jobs marathon that proved Mike Rowe is one of those good things you can get too much of, and the Travel Channel was one long endlessly looping Disney infomercial.

It's pretty bad when you find yourself yearning for Patrick Stewart to narrate how dragons co-existed with the dinosaurs.

My usual fallback when nothing else is on is to go to OnDemand and pull out whatever ep of The Universe looks good. I like those space documentary shows, because they usually do a good job of making something that is literally cosmic understandable to me.

Also, now that I've got a DVR, I've kept a few eps of Top Gear on tap for watching when I can't stand what on the tube.

But the History Channel has apparently become the Ice Road Truckers Channel

That and the "Tougher in Alaska" and "Ax Men", both of which I am less than enthused about. History used to be about history that appealed to everybody, not just hairy men with beer going "ugh, me tough" from their sofa. The "Ice Road" stuff was a marathon to preface the new episodes starting whenever (this week, next week?)

I'll take day long Mike Rowe over what-his-face in Man vs. Wild. Saturday was even more suck for educational TV than Sunday was.

With you on that—I find I'm skeptical about the first thing one should do in any wilderness survival situation being to strip off one's clothes and perform calesthenics.

I normally like Rowe, but after a couple of episodes he moves from "entertainingly snarky" to "smug smart-ass" with the constant flip remarks to people who put up with literal crap on the job every day. I think I can watch Mythbusters marathons a lot more happily because there are 5 different personalities interacting.

What the hell is Ax men? This is the second time I have seen it referenced today! (The first was in Pete Wentz's blog, and the way he writes, he could have meant "X-Men" for all I know!)