I was just commenting to Mrs Chabernet that Food Network appears to have been hijacked by Guy Fieri who ordered them to run all his episodes back-to-back. Lo and behold, Salon Magazine has just published a story titled “How one man destroyed the Food Network: Guy Fieri has made culinary TV into a viewer’s hell”
Could this signal a tipping point for the highly successful Food Network and now every cooking show will be Triple-D’d? This reminds me of the Shoe Store theory in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: an economic theory that draws a correlation between the level of economic (and emotional) depression of a society and the number of shoe shops the society has.
The theory is summarized as such: as a society sinks into depression, the people of the society need to cheer themselves up by buying themselves gifts. This is usually done through the purchase of shoes. As more money is spent on shoes, more shoe shops are built, and the quality of the shoes begins to diminish as the demand for different types of shoes increases. This makes people buy more shoes.
The above turns into a vicious cycle, the end result being that other industries begin to falter.
Eventually the titular Shoe Event Horizon is reached, where the only type of store economically viable to build is a shoe shop. At this point, society ceases to function, and the economy collapses, sending a world into ruin…”
Let’s hope that Food Network reads Salon (or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Who is really in control anyway?