Overheard in New York, Food Network Edition

At Upper East Side bus stop.

Girl 1: I saw Batali and Giada di Laurentiis yesterday doing Italian Christmas on the Food Network.

Girl 2: How hard do you think Batali tried to bone her?

Girl 1: About as hard as you can try at anything that only takes one try.

Bobby: From Gordon Bombay to Boredom All Day

The most kitchen-centric movie out right now is not "A Good Year", but "Bobby", Emilio Estevez' film about the Ambassador hotel on the night of Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

Makes ya wanna see it, right? WRONG. Read on.

Kennedy was shot in the kitchen, and among its 19,000 main characters are a kitchen boy, a grandiloquent chef played by Lawrence Fishburne basically reprising his role as cosmic know-it-all Morpheus in a white toque and chef's jacket, and Christian Slater, taking a break from feeling up strangers to play the dickheaded kitchen manager.

Notes on "Bobby":

- Like a really long, really bad episode of the West Wing; shot similarly, with that signature Sorkin nerd-who-does-heroin talkiness, and those long, ambulatory shots.

- Emilio Estevez should be kept very far away from FinalDraft Pro. For safety's sake, we should probably keep him away from typewriters, alphabet blocks, notepads and crayons. The dialogue was painful throughout.

- Elijah Woods is Madonna's illegitimate baby, and here's why. His eyes are that same insane fake blue, lit up from within like a Furby. He's got the same gap in his front teeth. Most convincingly, he speaks weird Madonna British English. Lohan looks like she's laughing at him through the whole movie.

- With the exception of Sharon Stone, who looks like she's been hosed down with tropical parrot poop, nobody looks remotely 1960's. Everyone-- notably Heather Graham and Joy Briant--looks like they just walked off the set of TRL, perfect contemporary style intact. This would not be a problem if Estevez didn't attempt to cut in with real documentary footage from that night at the hotel, footage of people that look so preposterously, bowl-headedly, mutton-choppingly 1968 that you can't possibly stitch the film and documentary together visually.

- Ashton Kutcher provided the only real fun as a douchebag hippie who induces two young campaign interns to take acid. It was like an episode of Punk'd within the movie. That devilish Ashton and his merry mischief makery!

If you really want to know about Bobby Kennedy's shooting, watch the PBS doc "The Kennedys". By the end of it, with both his brothers gone, it's impossible to begrudge Ted Kennedy his 11 a.m. Mai Tai. Or his 11:15, 11:22, 11:37 and 11:39 Mai Tais. Estevez, however, has no excuse for taking himself so seriously.

Even with the moustache of an abject pervert, he tries to take himself seriously.

Mayor Daly's Thanksgiving Salute

Carson Daly, the Mayor of Doucheville, having nestled a cross-eyed plush turkey into the comfortable dent where his brain would have gone.

It's actually kind of sweet-- the khakis and the shitty studio are so humbling.

Stay Warm This Winter...Except Your Tits, They Can Freeze

"You better watch out! I'm gonna throw this snowball at you! Tee hee! It's a perfect sphere. This is how I throw, I put my hand out palm-forward, like I'm turning a doorknob. It's not very practical, but then again, I'm at Base Camp 9 on the South face of Mount Kilamanjaro and I'm wearing a V-neck cut to the navel with my mams hanging out, so...wait, I forgot what I was saying..."

A Haiku About My Values

Sixty-five dollar
Pasta machine: worth it. (A
Girl who won't buy soap.)

Burgess Meredith and Homemade Pasta

I came home after one of the worst afternoons of my life and all I wanted was comfort food: a heaping bowl of pasta. I love the Italian restaurant on the bottom floor of my building, but the fun of it is the waiters that know you, the chalkboard specials and the $17 bottle of wine. Takeout is just overpriced Barilla in a lukewarm red sauce.

So I decided to make my own pasta. I found a recipe on Epicurious-- just 2 eggs, a cup white flour and a quarter cup of wheat flower, blended, kneaded, left to sit, and then rolled thin.

On my walk home earlier, I had decided that I needed to decompress, so I stopped by Walgreens to see if they had any movies, which they did. About 500 obscure kung fu titles, total anachronisms like "The Three Ninjas" (early nineties kids-grownup-ass flick) and blaxploitation favorites. Amazingly, between the crap, I found a double-feature: "Grumpy Old Men" and "Grumpier Old Men" on one DVD.

I don't have a pasta machine, but with a can of carnation evaporated milk, I rolled out my dough. "This is going to be a disaster," I thought, as I shot the can off the counter for the 5th time, my pasta looking like the gingerbread man's air mattress.

Somehow I pounded the dough out, with the full force of my body weight and nine or ten different implements-- forks and spoons, a pickle jar.

And "Grumpy Old Men" and the sequel both totally killed me, mainly the work of Burgess Meredith, who plays Jack Lemmon's crazy old 95-year old, chain-smoking, lecherous dad. They play outtakes during the credits, and it's worth buying the movie for the outtakes alone-- Meredith riffing all the filthiest lines is amazing, e.g.:

Lady: You've been to Hawaii? Which Island?
Meredith: Youwannalickapeepee.

And my pasta? Somehow, awesome. Although my wrists hurt.

Anyway, my own jagged idiot pasta and the best on-screen pervert of all time: I think I turned this crappy day around.