Oh schnozzle, is this another entry about that Fallon bloke? Hooray for us!

Do feel free to just look at the pictures and imagine what the tiny little letters are going on about.

Yeeah, I saw’d Jimmy Fallon, doing his things on the television show. Some stuff worked, some didn’t. Some stuff seemed to work that I hated a lot. And verily there were curtains and bands and suits and desks and clips. But one thing stood out to me as particularly indicative of why I should not continue watching the program, and it surprisingly had nothing to do with the frequent bits of product placement. I could give a bushel of Del Monte brand canned beets that the three items Mr. Fallon invited three audience members to lick in exchange for ten dollars across fifteen minutes in a showbituary with no other aspect called “Lick it for Ten” were properly identified by the gorky announcer. Really, it’s no worse than the Price is Right, which I also could never watch on a normal basis for reasons completely unrelated to its commercial cooperation (for example, were you aware that it is a game show about guessing how much stuff costs?). That junk’s only going to get more prevalent if we don’t want commercial breaks to get even longer. Somehow. I don’t know what is keeping television from going back to being entirely written by the sponsors. Not “integrity,” certainly. Anyway, that was the first show. The second was better. Still not great, but I don’t want it to be great because I don’t want to want to watch this. I just want it to be so unremarkable that I won’t remark upon it again.

But! My justification for bringing up this topic. On the Friday show there was a food preparation segment and it ended with Mr. Fallon having constructed an edible object. It has been my understanding that the whole point of cooking bits on these shows was that everything went wrong and that it was fun to see how they could go wrong, in contrast to the typical outcome of the chef guest’s own television programs (naturally, there’s no reason to speak on tv to a chef who has no tv show). More basely, it is fun to play around with food. I don’t like seeing edible items get wasted, but realistically one must assume that regardless of outcome most of that stuff is getting thrown away as garbage whatever happens. I can’t use this huge block of cheese! Somebody cut a piece out of it and left it on the table! Get it out of my sight! And no, you can’t have it! What the gives, man! A brother of mine used to work at a sandwich place and the boss person always got mad if anybody tried to use the stuff he was going to toss in the dumpster and report as unsold. By gum by golly, I’d rather have a dumpster full of bread and meatballs than go home knowing somebody got a free sandwich. This is America!

But that’s the best kind!

Curiously, one of the promotional ads that appeared prior to the show’s daybew depicted just such a mistakeful occasion. The woman on the left, who the nbc.com file name informs me is the domestic cyborg 215_RACHAELRAY_001, has a run-in with a wizard who magically transforms her into a flaming stunt-person who is too embarrassed to face the camera. No such sorcerial chicanery took place on the actual broadcast, alast. And despite the goggles not even a simple Family Double Dare physical challenge dared break out. Just a couple affluent goofs clinging classes together while watched by millions of pitiful proles.

Although I mentioned not being bothered [more than I usually am] by the sponsors, I couldn’t help but notice that when I looked up the internet version to get the illegal pictures that it was accompanied by full-screen Subway Restaurants ads with a banner aftertaste and Jimmy actually spoke “subway eat fresh” before he bit into the thing he was biting into (and then he pimped his own website). A joke, perhaps, but the best joke for a situation is never a current marketing slogan for a product roughly equivalent to the object you see before you. Earlier in the week Craig Ferguson, who I have been watching again because I felt about about the way I dismissed him two weeks ago even though there is no logical reason that I should since it’s just a dumb tv show that has no feelings, had his own needless chef guest who prepared little hamburgers and I am certain that at no point did it as much as occur to Mr. Ferguson to state “I’m lovin’ it!” or some other related meat-mash market mumbling.

Everyone knows the Scottish hate the British. Truly tragic, because, as a helpful person reminded me, Scotland is part of Great Britain.

I have no problem with the idea of cooperation, and if put into such a position I would also likely attempt to follow the foodmaster’s instructions, just because I do so hate trouble (Not even complimentary popomatic bubbles can change that). But I would never be given a show like this! But if the world broke and I was, and I still wasn’t willing to mess stuff up just to amuse people, I would at least look over the items on the table during the preceding commercial “break” and try to think of some stuff to say about it, secure in my knowledge that watching people make food is kind of boring, and upsetting in additional ways for people who will not have any part in consuming it. I suppose I really do owe it to them to sabotage the situation, even at the risk of having a man dressed like a buccaneer yell at me. And beside all that I have to imagine that not quite having his expectations met by a culinary amateur is less of an insult to a legitimate chef de cuisine (I’m assuming) like Mario Batali than is comparing his work to a Subway product.