IronChef

Apparently there's more to being an 'Iron Chef' judge than looking thoughtful while chewing and saying that you like, or dislike, someone's food. That's what Kelly Ripa learned Thursday on 'Live With Regis and Kelly' (weekdays, syndicated), when 'Iron Chef America' host Alton Brown coached her on the lingo and a few rules of food judging.

Rule number one? "Do not taste hungry," said Brown. "Because if you're hungry when you sit down at this table, whatever they give you first will taste the best. Make sure you snack before you come to the table." Rule number two? "Taste after everybody else tastes," said Brown. "While you're eating, the judges will be making comments that you can disagree with, and that always makes you look smarter."

When you're a cable network and you're only reaching 55 million households and want to reach twice that amount, what do you do? If you're Scripps Networks, you rebrand the channel and give it a new name. That's why Fine Living will become the Cooking Channel in 2010.

The way I see this, since Scripps owns the Food Network, the Cooking Channel will be sort of a Food Network annex. Food Network 2.0. Food Network, Two. In actuality, a lot of the programming on Fine Living now is connected to Food Network. Old Iron Chef episodes, Emeril LaGasse and Mario Batali and Wolfgang Puck ... all cooking shows that were once on Food Network.

Now that it's going to drop the Fine Living angle and concentrate on cooking, all the overflow from Food Network will have somewhere to go.

Here's a video game that promises to slice up the competition. A cut above. It will serve up a dish full of fun for gamers everywhere. It'll be... All right, you get it. Food cliches. Chop-chop. But, seriously, in a marriage between the Food Network and United Media, Iron Chef: America is coming to the home market. Destineer today announced plans to publish the video game Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine exclusively for the Wii system and Nintendo DS. It's based on the popular food network competition show, which in turn is based on the original Iron Chef in Japan, produced by Fuji Television.

Another fun list over at The Onion, and as usual they miss the mark as often as they hit it. It's their selections for the 17 Memorable Thanksgiving Television Moments.

I love the fact that they remembered to include the Bob Newhart episode "Over The River and Through The Woods," where the gang gets drunk on Thanksgiving night and try to order Chinese food over the phone ("More moo goo!"), and the choice of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Bewitched are good choices. But I'll take exception to their choice of the Friends episode "The One Where Ross Got High." It's certainly a good episode, with the whole "Rachel makes a dessert" plot, but Friends was famous for its Turkey Day episodes, and "The One With All The Thanksgivings" is even better. It's the flashback episode where we see Ross and Chandler go to Ross' home for Thanksgiving and we meet fat Monica and then thin Monica a year later, when she accidentally cuts off part of Chandler's toe. That's hysterical.