It's dumb, over the top, strange... and a must see. Think of it as the Japanese version of the Super Bowl, or Boxing... except with cooking. No... really. It's really interesting. The Chairman (always in an over the top outfit) shows the theme food that the cooks must use and focus on. The channeling picks an Iron Chef to take on. And they both spend one hour cooking as many meals with the theme in focus using the arena style kitchen (no, really... it's exactly as you'd imagine such a thing!) to fix them all. A group of judges taste each dish, and vote for a winner.

Is it as strange as it sounds? No, of course not... it's stranger. It's a mix of sports, cooking, campy fun and culture clash... with a dash of actual cooking knowlege that you learn as you watch.

If you have the food network and never bothered to watch it before (and really, I don't blame you... I didn't either when we first got it), watch this. Give it one show to see if you like it. You'll either find it boring or utterly love it.

Sea blob a sperm whale, experts say

Big, huge sea creatures... yep, another post about that. This one is a dead whale that some thought was a dead squid. The bit about why they are often confused is very interesting.

I'm soooo glad our Cable got upgraded!

Just recently, our cable company (TCI, then AT&T, now Comcast... don't ask, long story) finally made good on promises made years ago... they improved the channel lineup! Not only do we now have several more Discovery and History type channels, we have a channel about video games and ! And Tech TV has a show called Screen Savers, which gave me this tip for a great little program for publishing my blog. It's a real program, not a web page... and it has word processing type controls, so it's easy to use. And my Mother will be glad that it has a spell checker! Hey, Mom... I might even use it!

It's called w.blogger, and I'm liking it so far. I may be using it for all but my quickie web link entries. Just have to make sure I don't go nuts and start making posts with tons of funky formating in it!

Hmmm.... just checked the spell checker out. Oddly, it doesn't have the word 'blog' or 'blogger' in it. Kind of funny for a program that is for blogging, isn't it?

OK... I'm back now. My DSL line was again down, and again it took longer than Qwest claimed it would. 24 to 48 hours became a week and a half, including the 4th of July weekend. sigh...

I'm back now, and I'll be posting interesting things again starting this weekend. Hope you all had a good 4th of July!