The secret life of total idiots

The Food Network's The Secret Life of... (ice cream! pretzels! Hamburgers! Jellybeans!) is the show find yourself watching in the throes of season finale-withdrawal. I know who killed Lily Kane. I saw Rory decide to drop out of Yale because one guy said she wasn't the best thing since TiVo. I heard about Marissa shooting some dude. And now lost, I find myself turning to the likes of HGTV and the Food Network. The Secret Life of is basically the E! True Hollywood Story of food. The breakdowns! The drug addictions! The dangerous weight loss! Oh wait. None of that stuff happen to Philly Cheesesteaks. But boy are they greasy! This is the dumbest show ever. Last night was The Secret Life of Fried Chicken. I perked up, because I'm in the south, and we sure do love fried stuff down here. Especially when it is chicken. And so they say, in the intro, that fried chicken is most beloved by southerners -- Cut to stock footage of plantation home, set neatly between an ancient row of oak trees. And to learn about this amazing southern delicacy? We go to? That's right! Harlem. That's when you realize that they're using "Southern" as a euphamism for "black". Then, 20 minutes in, they change their tune. Oh no no no, they say, fried chicken is a staple of African American cuisine. They talk about the slaves, and how fried chicken kept longer than boiled or baked chicken, and that it travelled well, and so it made good sense as a culinary choice. Wait, I ask -- did this show start to get interesting?? Oh. They then cut to the same southern plantation stock footage, because of course, that's the perfect image when your talking about the daily lives of the enslaved. Commercial break. Then they change their tune again. We were totally kidding in that last segment, they say. Fried chicken is actually most loved by Southerners. Which is why KFC and Church's started there. To further examine this, they take us to -- oo! good idea!! -- Ohio. I'm so bored.

37 Candles?

Question: If, when you were a little kid, you memorized the dialog to a movie so well that the jokes ran through your mind like an Abba song, and then twenty years later there appears a sequel to that movie, are you required to go see it? Because rumor has it that Molly Ringwald is saying yes to a Sixteen Candles sequel and of course it is going to be horrible. It is going to hurt my soul even worse than Jar Jar Binx did, so really I'd just rather skip it. But that's got to violate some kind of pop culture international law. Maybe it will never even make it to video? A girl can hope.