This Recipe Is Bananas!

Yum.

After posting my first post related to something I baked, I discovered one of the advantages of such a post: lots of photos, and we all know that people love to look at photos, which is why those look-what-I-wore-today fashion blogs are so popular.

One of the disadvantages of such a post: lots of photos, because it's sometimes a pain in the ass to stopping every step of the alchemy that is baking in order to photograph the evidence.

In my previous baking post I discussed making Rice Krispies treats using Cocoa Krispies, a recipe that almost any idiot can pull off. Today I'd like to tell you about another treat that I made only twice in my life, but each instance resulted in a bit of banana-y bliss.

An Assessment of The Anthony Show, Thus Far

It's a Lenten Friday,
and I want a Bistro Burger!

Wow. We've completed a full month's worth of The Anthony Show. We've learned a lot about Anthony and his The Anthony Show, and not just how broadly we like to employ the pronoun "we."

I don't think it's too early to examine some of the accomplishments of The Anthony Show. Here are some highlights:

• I've posted on every weekday since I started, fulfilling my Lenten pledge to do so (unlike the pledge I made to not eat like Walter Hudson)
• I came up with a permanent name and secured the URL
• I recorded a few podcasts
• I posted some of the posts I said I would post in a previous post regarding future posts that I posted the week after the very first post
• I've recorded some very curious stats, which I'll discuss in further detail below
• I haven't be sued yet

Just so you don't think I'm patting myself on the back, I'm also aware of my shortcomings, blog-wise:

• I didn't blog about everything I'd wished to have blogged about by now
• I would been happier if I'd recorded more podcasts
• I still hate lots of people, places, and things
• I didn't receive a jillion dollars from some venture-capital-funded site that was impressed with my blogging, not to mention the cut of my jib

I still haven't decided on a theme/gimmick for my blog. I was hoping that by now the theme would poke its way through the blogger birth canal, but just like Son of The Anthony Show was on his date of birth, it's still stuck, so we might have to yank it out and hope that the forceps-marks on its cheeks fade away as quickly as the ones on my son did.

On the other hand...

Lists of Lists, Volume 1

Sorry, but no.

Hello! I spent today (that is, yesterday, when I actually wrote this post) driving Father of The Anthony Show to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan to see the cardiologist who will be performing the mitral valve repair surgery on him next month. The meeting went well and we had good weather and relatively decent traffic, but I am friggin' drained, so I was brainstorming for ideas for The Anthony Show posts that would require little effort on my part yet deliver the entertainment value and laugh/cry/offend/yawn ratio that you've come to expect from The Anthony Show.

Surprisingly, even before I cracked open my first can of Pabst Blue Ribbon of the evening, I was able on hit an idea that I can expand into an ongoing series.

Thus, I present "Lists of Lists."

"A versatile calendar of labour."

Spam itself isn't as annoying
as the repetition of spam.

There are a number of things in this world that don't bother me at all, things that would clearly bother the average person. (I can't think of any examples right now, but just bear with me.) And then there are the things that really stick in my craw, more than they'd probably stick in your craw.

(Incidentally, have you had your craw checked lately? I think April is National Craw Awareness Month.)

Two unavoidable facts of life with which I have yet to be at peace are certain Facebook ads and certain spam e-mails.

Some spam I understand. I don't approve of it, but I get the point of trying to trick me into thinking I have a FedEx package waiting, or why you'd try to fool me into entering my bank account info onto a page that looks exactly like but in fact is not the homepage for Bank of America, even if I've never banked at Bank of America.

And then there's the spam that annoys me because the e-mail is so amateur, so moronic, that my intelligence is insulted because it's as if the spammers aren't even trying anymore.

Certainly, I am definitely not the smartest person in the world, as I've proven time and again, but...

What's Cooking? Glad You Asked!

I noticed that several of these Web logs, also known as "blogs," provide evidence of the ability of the writer to perform culinary tasks of varying degrees of difficulty. Today I will attempt to do the same.

This is not a closeup of stuff scraped out of arteries from an anti-smoking commercial.

A number of blogs, particularly the fashion blogs I discussed in a previous post, include recipes, but their posts almost always have what I lack:

• A clean kitchen
• Great photography
• Food that's worthy of that photography, which is always coffee-table-cookbook ready

With that being said, one of my interests — "hobbies," if you will — is cooking, especially baking.

Have I whetted your appetite? (See what I did there?) If so, read on!

I'd Definitely Say I Wasn't a LOVER... (Or, My Fights, Round 1)

Me and Ali: two fightin'
peas in a pod.

...so that means I must have been a fighter. If you were to scan my entire school career, from kindergarten to 12th grade, you'd be able to count all my girlfriends on the fingers of one hand even if the hand ignored the explicit warning on most fireworks — LIGHT FUSE. GET AWAY. — and allowed that cherry bomb to expel every digit but the thumb.

LET'S CLARIFY THINGS A BIT
By "girlfriend" I mean someone whom I asked out, and who agreed to go out with me without immediately adding, "April fool!" (I have been asked out before, believe it or not, but those tales are worth recalling in a future post.) There were other girls with whom I'd had a tangible amount of romantic involvement ranging from minimal to I Love You Almost Like A Third Cousin Once Removed, but for this exercise I'm talking about situations where I was able to say, "X is my girlfriend" without appearing delusional or in need of a restraining order.

THERE'S NO PITY PARTY TODAY
And this isn't one of those "poor me what a loveless loser I was in high school" posts. (Not today, anyway.) My point, and I don't have one, is that if you were to tally the number of fistfights I've had during my time in school, well, let's just say my lips touched more boys' fists than girls' lips.

And I write "fistfights" instead of plain ol' "fights" because I don't mean the occasional rough-housing that gets, er, rough. I mean either...

Arresting Entertainment, Part 3

Attention, nerds and geeks:
This woman will not date you.

Hello! This the third and probably final part of what has turned into a trilogy of blog posts about COPS, the fact that it runs ad infinitum on the G4 channel, and the other shows on G4. In this post I'll be discussing some of my observations about the channel in general.

From what I've gathered by scanning its Wikipedia page, G4 launched about nine years ago with several shows about video games. That kind of programming appeals to a particular kind of demographic. What I've also noticed about G4, thanks to a steady diet of COPS/Campus PD/Cheaters, is that a lot of its shows are hosted or co-hosted by very attractive women.

And therein is the con. Picture the typical gamer, someone who spends most of his waking hours (and hours a normal person wouldn't be awake) trying to complete Halo 2 or Final Fantasy Infinity, and you picture a guy with questionable hygiene whose forwarding address is Mom's Basement, USA. This is a generalization, yes, but there is a great deal of reality to it, about which I'll explain later.

G4's female-hiring decision is very smart, because...