Danny ChaiIt’s amazing what you can learn by watching late night TV.
The other night I discovered this whole new oven technology. It was an infomercial for a Flavorwave Oven. It supposedly cooks frozen foods (frozen chicken breasts, steaks, salmon, etc.) super quickly and perfectly. The way it does it is using 3 things – conduction (like a normal oven), convection (like a convection oven), and, this is the breakthrough, infrared waves, which apparently penetrate the food so it cooks evenly.
So, I wondered if this worked and decided to check it out on the web. It turns out there are a bunch of new ovens that do similar stuff like this, like hybrid microwave-convection ovens, different stuff like that. But what fascinated me most was this oven that GE has, the GE Advantium. There are similar ovens, I think, like something called the Flavorbake oven, stuff like that.
Anyway, the way this thing works is, it uses halogen lights to cook the food. Sounds bizarre, but it apparently penetrates the food so it cooks fast, like 8 times as fast as a normal oven, but unlike a microwave, it tastes like it’s baked. And you can press a switch so it works like a microwave also.
Have you ever even heard of this? I hadn’t, but it sounds pretty amazing, and the bulletin boards are pretty positive about it. I want to try it out.
Anyway, Henry mentioned Street Smarts. I hate this game show. First of all, and this is slightly mean, but whatever, the host just has a really funny body shape. Like, his limbs are just way too small for his body. It looks like someone ripped off the limbs of a Barbie doll and stuck them on the body of a Cabbage Patch.
But what I hate most is that it just makes no sense. One thing that makes me angry more than anything else are illogical game shows. The first time I was outraged was with Fun House with JD Roth. You remember this? This was one of those kids game shows that started getting big with Double Dare.
Anyway, the show built up to the final race, which was basically all that mattered. Anyway, this race was completely illogical. How it worked was, there were things along the way that had this puck-like things that gave you a certain amount of points each. You also got some points for winning the race.
What didn’t make sense was, the point breakdown made zero sense. Like, each puck was worth like 25, 10, or 5 points or something like that. But winning the race was only worth like 10 points. But the kids were all idiots. Instead of trying to get as many pucks as they could on the track, they’d just grab whatever they could on the way, as if winning the race were the most important thing.
That makes no sense! Idiots! I seriously wanted my sister and I to be on the show. First of all, we’d get all the stupid questions right. But we’d also use the optimal strategy, just take our time, getting all the pucks we could, and screw winning, it makes no difference. I have no idea what those idiot kids were thinking. Argh!
I’m convinced they had some kind of screening process where they didn’t let any intelligent kids on the show. I’m serious. It’s like, if a smart kid tried to be one the show, they’d be, “Sorry, can’t let you go on and show how utterly illogical the basic premise of our show is and make a fool of us and British Knights.” That’s why you never saw any Asian kids on the show. Yikes, pretty racist.
So yeah, it made me pretty angry as I watched it every single day. Anyway, Street Smarts is like this – it’s utterly illogical. What they basically do is ask random questions to three people on the street, and the contestants are supposed to guess which one gave the right answer.
This makes zero sense. Like, you know that since they chose those three, that each got some right and some wrong. But they’re random people, and you have absolutely no basis for selecting between them. So, it’s completely random. And this is a game show? Why not just show people rolling dice and award the highest roll? Anger.