And the end is increasingly nigh.

***Weather update: It flurried again this week. And we're already averaging 46/32 for the high/low, which is too much like a mid-atlantic December for my tastes.***

In a matter of five minutes this afternoon, I came to the conclusion that Rachael Ray is the devil.

Let me stress the context here. I had just awoken from the most incredible coma on my couch, the kind where it actually feels like you sink into the cushions and a heavy dark blanket of near-death envelops you. I woke up and made a sandwich and needed five minutes of television to facilitate my reentry into the world. Since it was 2:15 in the afternoon, I knew nothing would be on, but I put on NBC, thinking I might get Dr. Phil, the least evil of all daytime programming. (He's still pretty evil.)

But no, Rachael Ray came on. Rachael Ray, who I didn't even know had a daytime network show. In fact, I knew very little about her. I thought she was a cook...? On the food network...? I've heard good things about her cooking, her recipe books, and her personality, so, though I had never really seen her, I had a generally positive sense of her, collectively-constructed via my most savvy friends.

I only watched five minutes, but I am pretty sure she's the devil.

She IS a cook, right? All I saw was an officious interrrupter asking inane questions to reified teen poster David Boreanaz. "Okay. It's 3am and you're walking your dog. Do you scoop the poop or not??" She showed a clip of his show without introducing it and then CLEARLY lacked the vocabulary to talk about things like characterization in the hour-long drama, which he was painfully attempting to discuss in that, "okay, I'm just the talent, but I can at least spit back the director's pre-crafted sound bite about the sublime uniqueness of his particular crime drama" kind of way. And her response was--yet again interrupting the man--to turn to the audience and say, "Pretty watchable, eh? Eh??" thus underbidding Boreanaz's already very low cultural offer.

Who gave this woman a talk show? She's a cook, no? Shouldn't she cook? Shouldn't we all be doing our dao, as it were, and not stinking up the cultural channels with more steaming piles of meaningless words?

I mean ........what?