This will not be about the President’s presser. My feelings on the man’s policies are fairly clear. I only mention it here because everyone else is mentioning it and I have to jump on that train. But I’m jumping off now…

When I write, whether here or an article, or whatever, I have the TV on as background, quite literally. The volume is down around 9 and I suppose if you really concentrated, you might hear what some of the people say–about 40 percent of the time. But as I say, I don’t really pay much attention–it’s just there.

Once in a while, something will come on and catch my fancy. I try not to miss Top Gear, even if I can barely hear it, which I know is a shame because that show is the best on the airwaves IMHO. Well, that and The Deadliest Catch. I don’t watch shows–I cannot follow dramas or comedies. Occasionally, I’ll catch an old Seinfeld episode or maybe King of Queens–that’s about it, though.

A lot of the time, I have on the Food Network and tonight is no exception. Here again, I don’t like many of the shows and honestly don’t know them well except two: Diners, Drive-ins and Divesand Good Eats. Both of these shows are fun, funny and interesting. The rest, I can do without.

Yet, as near as I can tell, these two shows aren’t on all that often. The ones that FTV runs most often are the inane “Unwrapped” and she who must not be named.

Alright, I know many of you like her show and truly, I’ve naught against her. Its just that her show doesn’t interest me. In the end, I actually think the food makes things interesting. And her show isn’t really about food at all. It’s about her. This is true for Rachel Ray and it was true for Emeril Lagasse, too.

Food Network seems to have three sort of denominations, if you will. The first one is the food itself is the star of the show and really, the personalities are interesting because of what they know about the food. Alton Brown’s show as well as Guy Fieri’s show are both good-but while each has unique and fun personality traits, their shows are not specifically about those traits.

She who must not be named is nearly all about her personality quirks traits. That’s the second denomination–shows that are a cult of personality, Ray, Lagasse, Flay–all those “A” listers that seem to command attention. Finally, there’s their “reality show” section with “The Next FTV Star,” “Chopped,” and all that other nonsense. Not even linking to them. If you cannot find them by now-well, you need Internet lessons.

But Unwrapped is kind of, well–a mangled bit of all three. Its host, Marc Summers, is a bigwig producer and all, but his personality is rather—mmm….shallow. His show tries to be all about the food, but the food isn’t really interesting. Sometimes it’s fun, but mostly it’s just ghastly concoctions of crap that have been foisted upon the American public for so long that it’s part of our psyche. He did a whole 10 minute segment on Manwich for Gods sake. That’s sad and depressing.

So, I don’t know if I’m a representative watcher or not. After all, I only have the channel on for less than an hour and I don’t have the volume up enough to hear it well. When the commercials come on, I concentrate wholly on my writing task and ignore the box altogether. So, I don’t expect the programming to change on account of me.

But when I first started watching FTV, they had some pretty cool shows and the point of all of all of them was that you learned something. Whether you learned how to cook or how to present, or little nuggets of wisdom to help in all kitchen situations, all the old guard shows were about education and that was actually a fairly powerful thing.

As I write this, Unwrapped is explaining the exciting process of putting a McDonald’s Big Mac together–as though any of us want to. I’m not anti-Big Mac. Heck, I actually ate one not too long ago. I’m just not all that interested in how they make them. In fact, it may actually make me not want to eat them.

Where was I going with this? Oh, right. Nowhere special except to say—if she who must not be named can get famous and her own show—anything can happen. Anything.