I thought ** I ** was fried?????

I've been offline for a few days because my pc and my husband's pc decided to exercise a suicide pact. As his hard drive conked, every drive *except* the hard drive in mine did likewise. It was not amusing. After many deliveries of big boxes, trips to the computer store, adventures in software, and entanglements in cables, we're both back online. We also are fried.

By Friday night, I was so exhausted and addled that John parked me on the sofa and turned on the television, hoping to keep me awake long enough for us to have tea and talk a little. The Food Network is always amusing (even though I can not cook, loathe having to cook, and would rather eat oatmeal for dinner than cook), so I flipped over there and watched Rachel Ray eat for 1/2 hour. I like to watch Rachel Ray eat. But then, things started getting weird.

The next show was Rachel Ray again, only this time she spent the entire time drinking beer all over the country. I don't drink beer, so maybe I just don't get it, but are Oregon beers really that different from Boston beers? Do people really drop blueberries into their beer?

(I guess non-tea-drinkers would be puzzled to hear me rhapsodize about one Assam over another, eh?)

But the next show convinced me that I'd gotten drunk from watching Rachel drink beer. Nothing else explained it. A silver-haired woman with a deep D R A W L spent an hour cooking things with butter. Lots of butter. POUNDS of butter. A pound of butter in one dish alone.

It went like this. First, you fry chicken in olive oil and butter. Then you saute mushrooms and bacon and things in butter. While the butter is soaking into the mushrooms and bacon, you heat up a pound of butter and a pound of cream cheese (or was it heavy cream?) , and throw in some flour. Then you arrange the ingredients, so: first, a heap of spaghetti (mercifully, plain, without butter), then a layer of the butter-fried chicken, then a shovel-full of butter-sauteed mushrooms. Finally, you hose the melted butter and cream cheese sauce on the heap, and finish it off with a delicate slice of lemon.

It was so revolting that it woke me up. And that was only the first course! The rest of the show kind-of slid by, with highlights like a coffin-sized slab of butter being conveyed into the kitchen by young men carrying it on a litter, a butter-tasting, and a butter-sculpture of the cook.

Ah, but then, she did something so extreme that you will not believe me. Dear reader, she fried butter. SHE FRIED BUTTER. She did something with butter and cream cheese and bread crumbs, and fried it. And then dear reader -- she ate it.

O brave new world that has such horrors in it!

But you know -- irony is not dead. The show was sponsored by a cholesterol-lowering drug. I swear.