Clopped

One of the big reasons I don't care for the TV show "Chopped"...  Let me start over.  One of the many reasons I don't care for the TV show "Chopped" is the way the guest cooks (I like to call them that because it seems to irritate them) always use sports metaphors.  "I'm going to bring my A game; I'm going to swing for the fences; I'm going to dig in for a goal line stand..."

Sports metaphors, I believe, had little place in the kitchen.  This is why I like watching the Olympics.  Sports metaphors really DO have a place in the Olympics, and I'm not constantly brought up short by the sight of some hipster cook who couldn't defeat Gumby in thumb wrestling using sports metaphors he's not entitled to sling around.  Stick to micro-greens and chimichurri, dude, because your A game is laughable.

Of course, I don't "get" sports in general, and my idea of Hell is being stuck in a sports bar listening to guys with baggy shorts, baseball caps, and sphincter-beards roaring at the tops of their lungs about hockey, baseball, or practically any other sport.  It especially makes me wince when they say "we".  "We won six championships in the 1970s!  What do you say to THAT?"  I say, "Who's this we, Kemosabe?"  (Actually, I lie.  That's just Purgatory.  Hell, the real Hell, is being stuck in a sports bar with a bunch of guys who get weepy and sentimental about the US Olympic hockey team.  That's Hell.) 

I've just never been any good at attaching my ego to things.  Now and then I run into people who are big fans of some band, and they're so attached to the band that they can't accept that the band has been circling the drain for years.  Or people who derive some (or most) of their sense of self-worth from whether or not "their" team hit a jump shot from the baseline with 0:03 to play.

But I sort of like the Olympics, when they aren't being blatantly commercial or maudlin and saccharine.