I got good news from the ortho specialist the other day, and that was welcome. But the experience was clouded by a deep shadow of Blonde Stoopid.

Doctors' waiting rooms are seldom festive places. They're full of people in varying levels of discomfort facing varying threats of Medical Intervention that they hope will someday represent an improvement over their current situation. The doctors know this, and they put fish tanks in there for something calming to watch, plus maybe some books to keep the kids distracted and not acting up. Some of them make the mistake of setting up a TV set, and at least one of those compounds that error with the completely egregious decision to tune the damn thing to the Food Network.

That probably seems an innocuous choice. Who doesn't like to eat, after all? Plus, the risk is minimal that anything offensive at all will happen on the screen. (Well, the hardest-core vegans might get testy about seeing animal parts hacked apart and fed to the flames, but they were just looking for something to be cranky about anyway.) But this calculus of inoffensiveness fails to consider the bimbo factor.

Now I'm sure that Food Network presents some quailty shows, with good tips for preparing tasty dishes and maybe even some quality entertainment. I've heard Alton Brown highly recommended, and some seem to acquire a taste for Iron Chef and that ilk. More power to 'em. But in the middle of the afternoon, the best FN seems to have to offer is a string of the dumbest creatures on the planet putting their vacuousness on public display whilst chopping various vegetables and whatnot. And there in the doctor's office, you can't escape, you can't ignore, you can only hope to endure -- which you're already doing, pretty much by definition, so it seems an especially mean trick.

I caught the last part of some African-American woman expanding the range of The Blonde to encompass her unbleached and apparently untenanted noggin. She was making some slop vaguely reminiscent of New Orleans with the help of her putative boyfriend, liberally flavored with dopey banter between them. The show could have talked about how to cook okra so it doesn't become a slimy, inedible goo, but the best the hosts could do was some eye-rolling commentary about how much they loooooove the okra and how often their grandmas cooked it when they were kids. It's fine if you have some nostalgia for the damn stuff, but it's a cooking show, so talk a little about the cooking. But nope, all that was provided was some pots & knives moving around with utterly moronic voiceover, culiminating in the standard food porn money shot: Some stagey setting with guests gathered at the table drooling at the ready to consume of its bounty. I mean, these people managed to make the distribution of Mardi Gras beads unfestive.

But then it got worse. Some white-haired, paper-skinned Suthron matron in her mid-60s has been given a show devoted, apparently, to Recipes from the Trailer Court. It started off with a staged scene of her supposed grandsons running off to go fishin' and fetch back some snapper because "We're cooking lighter today." Cut to footage of the scamps aboard some boat futzing with fishing rods and repeating phrases about how important it was to bring back some fish for grandma, only to be thwarted when they hauled in -- wait for it! -- a hunk of rope instead. Oh, the hilarity. Maybe they were doing some homage to famous footage from Andy Griffith or something, but any such effect was lost on me. 

Meanwhile back in the kitchen, this woman is blathering away with further and repeated commentary about how today we're cooking lighter because we're cooking lighter today and whatnot. The practical effect of that rhetoric seemed to be to use a little less spray oil when coating a baking sheet, btw. The dish involved opening out some hunk of dough from those tubes in the fridge case at the store -- excuse me: "the stoh-ur" -- complete with effusive praise for the flaky wonders of that delectable delicacy. Some prepared meat mush of some kind was spooned into the middle of the flattened dough, and it was wrapped around and sealed into a log shape, then sprinkled with poppy seeds and sliced partway through. The single actual cooking tip I saw was to use a serated knife when cutting soft things -- yeah, thanks for that.

I was called back to see the doc just as this culinary masterpiece went into the oven, so I can't report on the excesses of lip-smacking delight it brought about, come money-shot time. I am quite sure they were stupendous, which word I believe has the same root as stupid and stupor. The damn doctor could have told me they were going to hack off the hand at that point, and I would have agreed, provided I didn't have to sit watching the effing Food Network while waiting for it to happen.