cooking cheetahs

in my new temporary housing situation, there's a tv in my room. at home, i specifically chose not to get a television because i LOVE television and would never leave the house if i had one.

i now spend a lot of my time with the television on, which means that i've watched a lot of shows over the past four weeks. during this time, i've found that i only like two types of shows with consistency:

Cooking shows

i love cooking shows! i used to watch them in middle school while eating chicken flavored ramen. i would flail home from school around 3:30, toss my backpack in my room, cook my msg salt brick, hurtle myself onto the sofa, and watch the hour block of cooking shows on the discovery channel from 4:00-5:00. they were perfect. no frills, no audiences, no irritating ex-wives of salman rushdie with great boobs and no charisma. just a narrator with a pleasant voice and two perfectly structured half hour episodes that reserved 10 minutes for an appetizer, 10 minutes for an entree, and 10 for a dessert, which usually highlighted some sort sumptuous chocolate ganache being poured on top of a multi-layered cake.

cooking shows are awesome for so many reasons.

• fancy cookware. nothing is more satisfying than seeing a perfectly aligned row of small, shiny silver metal dishes that contain lots of different stuff. cilantro, quartered lemons, minced red onion, saffron, sugar, salt. one by one, in they go!

• whisking. i love watching a mess of crap get whisked together. i think it's a combination of the nice metal cookware, the cheery clatter, and seeing a mess of crap get transformed into a smooth, homogeneous pool of unrecognizability.

• reliability of plot. cooking shows evade the banality of lame plot lines and the pain of half-assed writing by having the same goddamn plot every episode. it goes something like this:

Exposition
Setting: Kitchen. Character: Chef. Problem: No cooked food.

Rising Action
Unfolding story: I think I'll make a rack of lamb.

Complications arise:
Crap. Rack of lamb is hard to make.

Suspense builds:
Oh god. Can I make it?!

Climax
Turning point: Yes. Yes! I can!

Falling Action
Story dies down/events fall into place: Oh. Here's the fucking recipe. Nice of you to show up late. Dick.

Resolution
All falls into place: Now, all we have to do it wait for it to finish baking in the oven until I get bored and decide to pull the one that's already done out of my secret second oven.

Cheetah chasing shows

i would like to point out that i did not say 'nature shows.' i explicitly said 'cheetah chasing shows.'

i do not find scores of water birds paddling around a pool and quacking in south america interesting. i'm not sure who does. maybe ex-wives of salman rushdie.

cheetah chasing shows share some of the same great traits as cooking shows. namely, a dependable and always entertaining plot line. to illustrate with this example,

Exposition: Desert. Cheetah. Bored/hungry.

Rising Action: Hey look. A gnu.

Complications arise: Aw, fucker. It saw me.

Suspense builds: It's running fast.

Climax: I gotcha!

Falling Action: Why is your skin so tough?

Resolution: You were delicious.

if i could just get two channels for the rest of my life, one being a good food channel and the other being a cheetah chasing channel, i would be in a pretty good spot.