THE GURGLING COD: Helter Skelter!

..aaand we're back to the normal foolishness. I'd been contemplating a Mad-lib style Bourdain-o-Matic,* so you can generate your own Bourdain posts on Ruhlman.com, for when Tony is eating animal faces and drinking obscure moonshines in some far-off archipelago with no wireless. And then Bourdain surprises by turning down the bluster, and dropping a solid handicapping of the contestants on the new FN show. There is something of the throwing the hand that feeds under the bus inherent when Bourdain does this kind of thing, but the Squeaky Fromme reset makes it entertaining:

The spacy Colombe comes off like Squeaky Fromme. There's a tripped out messianic vibe to her Personal Mission to share the glory of Healthy and Organic food with the public that would NEVER sit well with an audience of Twizzler and Ho-Ho eaters. Hell, she scares ME. Her total disconnection from reality should make entertaining television however--right up until her psychotic break, when she comes in with her head shaved, a little "X" carved in her forehead and a butcher knife and takes a lunge at Tuschman.

This is not quite Joseph Mitchell territory, but it seems a bit more like Bourdain writing to entertain and inform, as in KC, rather than writing to burnish the Bourdain brand, which has seemed the case quite frequently since then.

*I had the idea independently, but YPR's Raymond Carver Mad Lib is a much more fully realized iteration of the concept.