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Hell’s Kitchen Season 2

I’ve been watching the old seasons of Hell’s Kitchen. I’m only 2 episodes into Season 2, and it’s so patently obvious that Heather wins the entire thing. (Um, spoiler alert!)

That’s opposed to Season 1, where Michael’s edit left you thinking he’d probably go far, but

But right off the bat, it’s apparent that Heather is the only person on the entire show who has any idea how a restaurant kitchen works, how to behave in such an environment, and generally knows how to cook.

Maybe during the course of the season she gets yelled at a lot by Chef Ramsay (actually, that’s pretty much a guarantee), but from the get-go, there were no other options for a winner.

More Season 2 thoughts over the coming weeks as I progress through the shows.

Warning! This blog may vanish for a while

I'm seriously considering doing a server change soon, so if the blog vanishes for several days, that would explain why.

Blogger brings the jump break to blogging

So Blogger has decided that they're going to implement the jump break to blogging.

It's a good idea. I guess.

Except I just tried it in this post, and it failed. It works in the actual Blogger blogs on a blogspot domain, but apparently not on other domains.

Mike’s Mini Music Review – Thousand Foot Krutch – Welcome to the Masquerade

It’s been a banner couple of weeks for stellar album releases. Skillet blew me away with Awake, and now Thousand Foot Krutch has come out with … well, it’s not the best Christian rock album of the year (Skillet wrapped that one up two weeks ago), but Welcome to the Masquerade is really, really, really, really good.

I hesitate slightly to call it “excellent” – although it borders on that – because for such a fantastic album, Masquerade has a few flaws that keep it from being one of those five-star, two-thumbs up records.

First, though, the positives: many of the songs are tremendous. I love the title track, as well as Fire It Up, Bring Me To Life, and Forward Motion. There’s a good mix of traditional-style TFK rock-rap-nu metal songs, and some more pop-rock oriented songs. The ballad Looking Away blew me away because it didn’t sound like TFK at all. Heck, when I first heard it, I thought it was a band like FM Static. (Well, at least that makes sense.) Overall, the highs of this album are very high.

The negatives? The songs are great, but the structure of some of the pieces just doesn’t work for me. A song called Smack Down (Hello, WWE, are you going to pick this up now, or, like, now?) should be more like an in-your-face rocker akin to Fire It Up, but instead it’s almost a dirge and never really finds its groove. The closing song, Already Home, is a really pretty ballad until the last 20 seconds, and then all of the crescendo orchestration just suddenly dies in favour of an acoustic finish. It’s so abrupt, it’s like the orchestra got gunned down. As a result, it’s a huge anti-climax. And my biggest pet peeve of the album is that so many of the songs just end. Stop. Done. Finish. No flourish, no fade out, nothing. They. Just. End.

But in the end, you have to love any band that can properly incorporate triplets into its songs these days.

And for the record, the album cover freaked out my wife.

I still like Skillet’s Awake more than this record, but that’s a matter of taste and degree. TFK has put out an album that deserves the superlatives it’s receiving. My frustration is that with a little bit of tweaking of a few individual songs and some better choices on production, this album could have been an all-time classic. It’ll have to settle for being the second-best Christian rock album of 2009.

Sneak peak at The Ultimate Fighter 10 - Heavyweights

Meet The Heavyweights | UFC | SPIKE.com

Sunday afternoon humour

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Happy fifth birthday to Shine FM!

Edmonton’s Christian radio station, Shine FM, turns five years old this weekend.

I remember how excited I was when the station first came on the air, because it was the first time in Canada I’d ever heard a Top-40 style Christian music station, and it opened my eyes to all kinds of new bands and artists – Starfield, Casting Crowns, Downhere, Pillar, Skillet, Drentch, Big Dismal, FM Static, Switchfoot, Building 429, Hawk Nelson, Thousand Foot Krutch and dozens more. In the first year Shine was on the air, I think I spent more money on music than I did in the previous 10 years. It was, quite literally, the only radio station I listened to. I had been waiting my whole life for a Christian pop-rock station, and Shine was a Godsend.

Over the years, Shine’s music mix has shifted, and it has become more of an adult contemporary station than a Top 40 station, and I admit that, as a result, I haven’t listened to it as much in the last couple of years as I had when it first came on the air. Its playlist and my musical tastes were diverging too much, and any one of a half-dozen Internet-streaming Christian rock radio stations that I rotated through were filling that gap. (I particularly like the Christian rock station Ignite 107 in Winnipeg, which streams over the Net.)

However, I’ve been very happy to discover that all those rock songs that Shine basically erased from its playlist have now been moved to an Internet-only radio station – ShineFMRocks.com. And while I can’t get that in my car, it’s now my first choice for my streaming music when I’m at home on my laptop. So I’m happy again.

I’m pretty sure that in the five years Shine has been on the air, a half dozen other stations in Edmonton have shifted their format completely trying to find a bigger audience and higher ratings. Meanwhile, Shine plugs on - playing Christian music without a lot of fanfare from the local media or, I’m sure, much recognition or appreciation in Edmonton’s radio community.

God bless them all. And happy birthday to the Shine gang. May you have many more birthdays to celebrate on Edmonton’s airwaves.

And turn Shine FM Rocks into an actual radio station, OK? Thanks.

The Ultimate (Fighting Championship) good news-bad news situation

Former UFC champ Rampage Jackson in Vancouver, set to star in new A-Team movie as BA Baracus

Former Ultimate Fighting Championship world light heavyweight champion Quinton (Rampage) Jackson is in Vancouver to star as BA Baracus in an upcoming movie version of The A-Team.

Jackson has been removed from the UFC 107 card where he was set to face Sugar Rashad Evans in an Ultimate Fighter finale showdown, so he can appear in the film. He was spotted on Robson Street Friday afternoon, signing autographs for fans.

The good news is that this could make Rampage a mainstream star. The bad news is it screws over the UFC 107 card big time, and turns the new Ultimate Fighter season building up that fight into something more of an anticlimax.

How big is Skillet's new album?

I know, I know ... I've been raving about Skillet's new album, Awake, for an entire week now. But it's really good! And now, it's really big!

How big?

It's the number two selling album on Billboard this week.

That's very cool.

Skillet's new video - Monster

Midweek random thoughts

• Of course, because it’s September and the kids are back in school, Edmonton is now being hit with the hottest weather of the entire summer. Just in time for fall. Eh, I’m hardly complaining.
• It’s been fun to bike to work in this weather. Slightly less fun to bike home from work – I tend to arrive home a dripping wet mess after 60 minutes cycling uphill home.
• Wipeout is the best show on TV.
• I’ve been watching Hell’s Kitchen Season 1 on YouTube. It’s interesting to see Gordon Ramsay dialled up to only 85 instead of 110 and a somewhat more human Ramsay in this series than in the later versions. I’m still amazed that every freaking chef on this show smokes!
• Skillet’s new album is still awesome.