A CARE HOME THAT CARES?

Yesterday I had a visit with someone from Adult Social Care, the first I've had since moving to this shithole nine months ago. She's going to raise a safeguarding concern in the county that's funding my stay due to their terrible handling of my hamster heart episodes. My occupational therapist is raising one about the lack of repositioning, so hopefully they'll get me out of here soon!

The Adult Social Care lady also set up an online meeting between me, the care home manger, my housing officer, my occupational therapist, and herself, in order to discuss some complaints I've raised (the hamster heart treatment, the repositioning, the lack of Wi-Fi, the absence of a blood pressure cuff).

On a completely unrelated note (!) today was the first time in nine months the care home followed my care plan, hoisting me in the air to change my and repositioning me every two hours. They're using an old pregnancy pillow instead of the fancy decubitus the OT asked them to buy, and J can certainly feel the difference, but it's better than nothing! They even remade my breakfast sandwich because they used white bread instead of brown (The brown bread's all right, the white is over-processed, tasteless, bleached shit) and told me to let them know if I needed any other changes to my meals! I've been repositioned four times today, which is great because the previous one was literally three or four weeks ago (I remember it was a Sunday, I just don't remember which.

Of course, nothing in this place ever goes quite right. They started with the cushion under my right side for two hours to straighten me out, which was fine, and then left me on my back unsupported for two hours to ensure there are no pressure sores, which is also fine. They then put the pillow under my left side, so I was tipped over more to the right than usual. I couldn't even look at my laptop screen in this position - I'm holding my Amazon tablet dead in front of me as I type this and it's literally at an angle of 45°. All my weight is on my neck and the top half of my right arm. My right ear is touching the bedsheet. I told them that I need to be laid straight, but Ruth the head carer was adamant this is how repositioning works - with you on your right side, then your back, then your left side, then your back, and so on and so forth!

I appreciate that is probably how it works with most people, but with my spondylitis the last thing I need is to be spending a quarter of my time pushed further over to the right than I naturally am anyway. I've e-mailed my occupational therapist and hope common sense will prevail. Annoyingly, the day shift went home without removing the pillow and setting me flat, and the night staff carer didn't want to take the pillow out on her owm, so I pulled it out myself after being extra off kilter for three hours. I'm sure the OT is going to go ape shit!

On a more positive note, things are going great with Snowball. We're having a sci-fi/fantasy adventure that is completely wholesome and kink-free. Proper nerd shit! I'm balancing that out by adapting my role play with Stinky Lips into third person narrative.. It currently stands at 8,000 filthy, filthy words, and I've hardly started tweaking it!

Nothing much else has happened to me, but I have space for another few hundred words, so I may as well make a couple of TV recommendations for a couple of weird underdogs I've been enjoying. These are for American shows, one on Discovery+, one on Fox, so check local listings or get a VPN!

As a bedbound single dude I spend a fair amount of time watching television. I am fairly picky about what I watch though. I'm way more likely to abandon a new show after a few minutes and re-watch an old sitcom than to see it to the end. This year has been pretty bad for TV, with old shows being held up or cancelled due to COVID, and new shows seemingly determined to make a case for their own wokeness, as if it's more important to give representation to all and shed light on issues of the day rather than just being entertaining. I haven't bothered watching the already kind of dull Kung Fu reboot after an episode dealing with racist graffiti and BLM-esque protesters. I also gave up on Superman & Lois when I got sick of Superman's whiny, emo son. It's as if the CW thinks that the kind of nerds that would watch the show spent their schooldays thinking "Gee, I'm sure glad I don't have superpowers making my life more complicated! It's hard enough being a good student and dealing with the pressures of being a teen in today's society without being burdened by super speed, strength, or the ability to fly!"

 Side note: I am glad that I saw the unintentionally hilarious scene where Clark Kent reveals to his FOURTEEN YEAR OLD sons that their papa is secretly the most famous person/thing on the planet by TAKING OFF HIS GLASSES, picking a truck up over his head and flying into the air with it. Not once did one of these kids turn to the other and say "Did you ever notice that Dad looks a lot like that alien that Mom famously interviews a lot? Do you think there's anything to that?"

I will, however, try a gameshow, particularly if it has a dumb enough hook. Last year my Summer viewing was dominated by adult versions of games designed for kids. As well as the second season of mini-golf/Wipeout hybrid Holey Moley there was Ultimate Tag, Extreme Dodgeball and The Floor is Lava. This year, Holey Moley's back, but the dumb hooks have left the sports field and moved into the kitchen.

The first show I want to recommend is Discovery+'s Budget Battle. Hosted by a man who is basically John C. Reilly doing a Seth Galifianakis impression, this cooking show gives four chefs $40 and has them create three dishes: breakfast, dinner and dessert. The catch is they must buy four ingredients that must be heavily used in each meal: one from each of four categories. They're always told the $1 Daily Deal item in each category and the price of the low, medium, and high cost items. A more costly ingredient will be fancier and generally less processed, but will not necessarily be easier to cook with.

Somehow only one of these men is real!

For example, the breakfast board might have the categories Eggs, Ham, Onions, and Bread. The chefs will be told the daily deal item is gummy fried egg candies, the low cost item is $2, the medium item $4 and the high cost item $6. Two chefs buy the gummy eggs for a dollar, one gambles on the low cost item and gets Cadbury's Creme Eggs, and the fourth plumps for the high cost item hoping to find real eggs, only to find caviar!

One chef gets voted out after each meal, and the winner gets $1,000 for every dollar they didn't spend. The chefs don't have enough cash to buy many high end items, so they likely to be forced to turn a bag of calorific snacks or a frozen ready meal into a featured component of a fine dining dish. It's interesting to see what strategies chefs adopt to try and create winning dishes and still go home with a decent chunk of cash. Spending more money should buy you a better chance of winning a smaller prize, but if you're confident enough in your ability to turn garbage into delicious gold you could earn $28,000.

A small caveat: the series is only six episodes long, but they changed the game halfway through by changing the prize to $500 per remaining dollar the winner held on to, and by introducing "Out of Stock" items, including one on a Daily Deal square per show. This means the most a chef could win is $13,500. The chefs are definitely more frugal during the first half of the season, I guess when your real-world dollar buys you twice as much good ingredients it's worth splurging and spending five or six grand on good ingredients to help you win, you're also buying the right to say you won a television cooking show. That's got to be worth a couple of grand to an up-and-coming chef, right?

The other show that's captured my heart combines the tense and gritty world of desserts with the light-hearted whimsy of forensic analysis. Think Dexter meets Bake-Off. You are picturing Crime Scene Kitchen on Fox!

The name reminds me of my time in student housing - eleven teenagers sharing two kitchen sinks! Things got messy.

The high-concept idea is brilliant. Chefs compete in teams of two. Each team has three minutes to look around the same kitchen, using their knowledge of creating desserts and their skills of deduction to figure out exactly what dessert has been created. They then have a set time to create what they think the correct dessert is. The genius of the show is that even though the judges sample and criticise every dessert, the winning pudding is the one closest to the mystery one created in the Crime Scene Kitchen.

There are two rounds. In the first round the teams have to create a relatively simple dessert. Whoever is most accurate gets an extra clue in the elimination round. This time the teams have three minutes to figure out a "showpiece" dessert - an elaborately built creation that has also been decorated.

Because the teams are ultimately judged on deduction rather than baking skills, you can never be quite sure who's going through to the next round. Your favourite team could make a cheesecake that's a runny mess with a burnt base; if someone else made a tart and the mystery dessert is a cheesecake then your guys win!

And therein lies the fun! Watching teams that botched the execution hoping their detective work is up to snuff, and conversely watching complacent creators of delicious looking towering delights discover they've spent three hours creating completely the wrong dessert. There are two judges to give their takes and explain which clues there were and how they were supposed to be interpreted, and Joel McHale is there to make acerbic jokes about the dumb format of this silly show.

The lanky guy in the background who looks like a Pixar villain is not only a ringer but super catty to boot!

There are twelve teams, but they're split into two groups of six. One team goes home each week, the team furthest from the correct showpiece. The first few episodes alternate between the two groups and they merge into a group of six when three pairs are eliminated from each group. This stops there being too many similar cakes, but means there's usually enough people cooking for someone to completely misread the kitchen or else to serve a ballsed up, half-baked mess.

The teams vary in both baking skills and police work. There are definitely folk who hear hoofprints and think zebras, like a team that spot red, yellow and green fondant icing and assume they should be making an Italian dessert, because the Italian flag is red, white and green. Even if they had the colours right the logic doesn't make much sense - the winning teams looked for something red, yellow and green to sculpt.

Two solid recommends. I think I'm going to pitch Crime Scene Bathroom, where you watch Budget Battle and decide which of the three guest judges will have the worst diarrhoea after nine weird concoctions cobbled together from random ingredients.

Also Rick & Morty is back and the second season of I Think You Should Leave is exceptionally funny, as was the first.

Until next time,

Peace!

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