eskimo bliss

I have a major bone to pick with what used to be one of my favorite websites. And since they’ve temporarily banned me from their forums, I guess I’ll do it here!

Several years ago (either around the same time that I was becoming addicted to the Kelly & Justin story that was American Idol, or before MTV’s The Real World had become a mockery of itself) I became a big fan of a website called Mighty Big TV. At the time it was a fairly small website that was dedicated to forums and recaps of reality tv shows. It was hilarious and I loved it.

Fast forward a few years later, and it’s gotten really popular, is acquired by Bravo and changes its name to Television Without Pity (I might not have the exact order right there, but you get the idea). I still check it out occasionally but just don’t have the time that I used to.

Anyway, as some of you know my hubby’s boss Richard Blais is on Top Chef; we’ve always been a fan of the show but obviously we’re even more interested in it this season. I had been keeping up with some of the forum talk about Blais on the TWoP site, and decided to weigh in on the topic of him googling himself, among other things.

Well I guess it’s standard protocol for the site administrators to allow you to say whatever you want about a “cheftestant,” but as soon as someone (me) takes up for them by saying it’s ridiculous to be saying things like “he’s funny looking” then you get a warning. That’s basically what I did, and if you know me you know I’m not really argumentative unless I’m forced into it. I was really nice (I think so anyway), basically explaining that I’m delurking to weigh in on some of the criticism that had been thrown Blais’s way, over silly things like him googling himself (so? my argument was if you know people are talking about you what’s wrong with being curious about what they are saying), and comments about his looks (which have absolutely NOTHING to do with his cooking). My take was this, this is reality TV, these people aren’t actors. To harp on things like how they look, wear their hair, and what color Crocs they wear is a little silly. Blais is just trying to do what he loves and get a little recognition for it. Can we fault him for that? Well I guess my saying this was considered an attack on another member of the forum, and that’s a no-no, so my post got censored (they removed the part where I said calling him funny looking was ridiculous). I didn’t like my post being edited though, but couldn’t find a way to delete it… so I just edited it further asking how to remove it. Eventually they did.

Today I return to the site to see more Blais bashing by the person who seems to be leading the anti-Blais camp, someone who calls herself (I think it’s an angry ex, so that’s why I’m saying “her”) Peachtreeinatl, so I got curious and clicked her handle to see what I could find out about her. Whatdya know, my account has been suspended! WTF?!? Crazy. So people can go all over the Internet bashing him (I suspect a lot of the negative comments I’m seeing on other sites are from this same person), but I can’t defend him in the slightest without getting banned. And what I said wasn’t even confrontational anyway. Whatev, I guess I’ll stick to just posting my opinions here, and reading the recaps on David Dust’s site. His is much funnier anyway (and there’s half-naked gay guys to boot).