Why hello there and welcome to…Thursday, I guess. Yeah, today’s post doesn’t really have a coherent vibe, because, to be frank, I do not presently have a coherent vibe. Between the election, the kidney stones, the Monday morning mini-chicken emergency, and some long-overdue housekeeping, I have been drained of connective tissue. The tendons of my wit have gelatinized under sustained heat, and I am now a blubbering brisket-brain. Which makes today’s post the Texas Barbecue pit of slingin’ slices of sapience out until the meat is all used up. Let’s…serve up some stuff? This metaphor got away from me. Anyway, we’re going to do two quick reviews, one for Season 4 of Somebody Feed Phil, one for a Youtube channel I started watching, and then we’re going to talk logic and Thanksgiving Sides, because I want to talk about all of them, but I don’t have enough to say for any one specific entry to make its own post.

Somebody Feed Phil Season 4

The newest season of Somebody Feed Phil came out on Netflix October 30th. My brother and I watched it in a very choppy manner, thanks in part to my kidney stone knocking me out of a commission for a couple days. While we caught episode 1 the day it dropped, we didn’t sit down and watch any more until just this Tuesday, where we binged most of the season (which, at 3 out of 5 episodes, isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds), and wrapped up yesterday.

Our verdict: It’s good. There’s some interesting elements/changes, and of course the show is a little shorter, and a little strangely paced…since shooting for it had to end once COVID hit, but overall it’s the same enjoyable business it’s been for the previous three seasons. Phil goes to beautiful places, meets adorable or inspiring people, and eats great looking food.

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“Fried Chicken Skin Musubi” was an amazingly targeted appeal to my brother and I, Phil.

The biggest things that I think really made this season interesting for me:

Phil sums up what I’ve argued the POINT of the show is for years now in the most succinct way he’s done yet: “Sometimes, to open up someone’s heart, you’ve got to open up their mouth first.”

Second, Phil feels a little…sharper in a couple episodes. Which is perfectly understandable, given the loss he had recently gone through, and even laudable: There’s a value to tackling tough topics/acknowledging anger while discussing food, like when Ugly Delicious tackled the mess of Mexican immigration while covering Tacos, because it would obviously be a disservice to not talk about the many Mexican food workers, legal and undocumented alike, and their struggles and fears related to that system. It’s just interesting, and even a bit shocking, to hear it from Phil, who has generally been so apolitical that one angry commenter on our first review directly compared him to Trump. (Spoilers: the New York Jew cum Hollywood producer is not a Trump fan.) So It took me by surprise when, a few drinks in, he says, with the faintest hint of a snap, that he is going to SAY that a bridge is the oldest in Singapore, “because facts don’t matter anymore”, and then makes a couple joking claims of other blatantly false statements about the sights and history of Singapore.

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At least I believe them to be false. I haven’t researched the Blooming Onion recently.

The last interesting thing is the locality of it: Of the 5 episodes, 3 are set in America. Phil states that he did that partly on purpose, to remind people of the complexity and variety of foods available in America, and to hopefully encourage them to explore their own cities and towns a little more, which I think is a noble goal, and his episode on the Mississipi Delta was in many ways the most shocking to me

Mikey Chen

I have been sleeping on Mike Chen, to use the vernacular of the youth these days (Or, more likely, “the youth two to five years ago”) and I wanted to bring him to y’all’s attention, since he had just come to mine, and discovering him marks one of the few upsides of last week’s kidney stone: The first upside is that I caught it and had it sent to a urologist, so hopefully by this time Friday I know how to prevent future kidney stones, and the second is that it made me write up that quick post about the Burger Scholar Sessions, which in turn made me hop into Season 4 of the Burger Show, which led to me catching the episode with Mike Chen.

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That is a fried cheese crisp in the middle of a burger in a pita. Very uninteresting.

From there, he showed up in my recommendations, and since I was already melting into a mental morass, I resorted to my always popular maladaptive strategy: “stop liking all the channels I normally like, and consume 4+ hours of a new one”. IN my defense: I tend to pick fun channels for these sort of digital self-harm sessions. Did I NEED to watch every ScreenRant Pitch Meeting? No. But now that I have, there were a lot of funny bits in it, and keeping up on the channel is like, 6 minutes a week!

Anyway, Mike Chen made a food Channel called “Strictly Dumpling”. And another one named “Eat with Mikey”. And another one named “Cook with Mikey”. Look, he has like, 10 formal channels. None of these are the one I’VE been watching, which is his personal travel vlog channel of“Mikey Chen”. Do I know what the other channels do? No. Will I eventually watch them? As long as my mental health remains as fragile as a smoked quail egg, almost certainly. Anywho, in the Mikey Chen videos, the ones I’ve watched so far are really just a straight-up food vlog: he gets a recommendation for 2-3 restaurants or dishes, he gets them, he eats them. It’s a very direct and simple format, with only a couple outliers like “Trying every Indian dish they sell at Trader Joe’s”, and the most format breaking one I’ve seen so far being him recording what he ate for 14 days, since he traveled to South Korea last month, and had to quarantine in the hotel, where they delivered him pre-made meal kits.

I’m certain if I recognized Korean foods this would look much more impressive than a typical American lunch box.
Are those Slim Jim chunks in the bottom middle?

The channel has a very positive energy, with him tending to really like the dishes recommended to him (so far, the only two dishes I haven’t seen him like were some naan bread from Trader Joe’s, and some instant noodles he picked up from an Indian supermarket, which the Youtube comments INSIST that he made ‘wrong’. (in that the packaging tells him the formal way to make them, but no one ACTUALLY does that, they do the secret cool way.) What might have only been a 1-2 hour distraction turned into a 3-4 hour one when I saw that he had 2 hours of reviews of restaurants in Seattle, including one that’s been showing up in my Facebook ads for like, 3 weeks now, which he loved, making me feel like maybe I need to make a quick road trip.

Are all his shows fun? I don’t know. I don’t even know if all of this CHANNEL is fun. I just know that watching him love Asian and Barbecue dishes in Seattle has been enjoyable for over 2 hours.

Planes, Mashed Potatoes, and Maps

Oh good, even the section titles are losing coherence. Just joking, that string of nonsense IS actually the last topic I wanted to touch on. Specifically, I wanted to talk about THIS map.

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In case you’ve lost the ability to read images again, that is clearly labeled as a map of “Favorite Thanksgiving side dish” for each state, or whatever it actually says, I’m not currently looking at the picture. (editor’s note: Damn it, close.) And the picture has been going around recently with a lot of people lashing out at it as being incorrect, announcing that everyone THEY know disagrees. And I wanted to quickly touch on two thing regarding that.

1. The plural of anecdote is not “data”. Just because you don’t know people doing Thing X doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. There are 9 houses within 150 feet of mine, and I literally only know the names of the TWO of the families. Am I typical? God no, my dark sins call for penance not seen on this earth in centuries. But really think about how narrow your own view of your town/state might be.

And

2. It probably is kind of wrong.

What? Just because you make a point incorrectly, doesn’t mean it’s not a correct point. That’s the fallacy fallacy. THIS, however, is something kind of like the Survivorship bias. What’s that? Well, it’s a type of fallacious thinking I was taught with THIS image.

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Oh no, you have Plane Pox!

That is an overlay of all recorded bullet damage on US bombers in World War 2. Bombers were being shot down, and they wanted to know how to stop it. The US military saw that overlay, and said “well, obviously, put some extra armor where the red is, job’s done.” But a research group they sent the data to disagreed. See, obviously, you can only record the damage on planes that COME BACK. All of these shots are where the plane got hit, and was fine. It’s everywhere that DOESN”T have bullet holes that probably needs armor, since it indicates that none of the ones that got hit there made it.

Can you see how this is relevant to the map above?

Let me give you an example/answer: you know what my family makes every Thanksgiving? Wild Rice Dressing. You know what my family does not need to Google to know how to make? Wild Rice Dressing. If this is a list of the MOST searched side dishes, that kind-of implies that they’re the least popular. Or “the dish I am least satisfied with”, or “the dish I have to change for company”. (Like, I’m sure some proportion of the West Coast googling Mashed potatoes were specifically Googling “VEGAN Mashed potatoes”, in order to accommodate new diets or guests for the day. )

Vegan mashed potatoes really only need to use Olive OIl instead of butter and milk, but props to these people for going the extra mile.

And that’s what the last fat-capped slice of cerebellum I’ve got this evening, so I’m going to pass out, and hope my brain builds back better come tomorrow. Ciao chow!

MONDAY: WE MIGHT MAKE BRITISH BREAD, OR… SOMETHING MUCH MORE ELABORATE AND DUMB. IT DEPENDS ON MY ENERGY LEVEL/FREE TIME THIS WEEKEND.

THURSDAY: ONE OF THESE DAYS, JON WILL BE PREPPED FOR AN ENTIRE WEEK AHEAD OF TIME.