Around The Dial: Top Chef thrives while Mancow dies

In great news, Top Chef: Masters will be back for a second season! TV Guide had the news last night, along with some other entertainment news web site. Interesting to me is that two of the featured chefs - Jody Adams and Ana Sortun - are from restaurants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is kind of close to me. I could conceivably taste one of their dishes!

But beyond that, I'm most excited for all of the special guests hinted at in the article. I could careless about Mekhi Phifer or the skanks from The Real Housewives of Orange County, but some of the other guests - the cast of Modern Family, Matt Groening from The Simpsons - definitely sound interesting. Hopefully Toby Young can make an appearance or two as well.

Speaking of the usual judges, I'm happy to hear that Gail Simmons is getting her own show, Top Chef Just Desserts. I'm assuming that Tom didn't want one, so Gail is the next-best choice of the judges. (Padma would probably just standoff-ishly ask asinine questions. "Did you think you were cooking us... something good?")

- In other news, while it isn't television news, I did get this item from Roger Ebert's Twitter: Matt "Mancow" Muller has been ess-canned from the conservative talk radio show job he had.

First, I didn't realize that Mancow was a political commentator now. My memories of him are from his short time on Rhode Island radio, for the few short months he was on The Edge / The X, a local station that tries to compete with WBRU and WHJY when it came to alternative and hard rock. The station failed and was split into a couple different pieces. 99.7 was The Score at first, but it was crushed in the ratings by WEEI and is now the FM wing for WPRO.

And second, I never really thought much of Mancow, even though he was my first exposure to "shock" jock radio, outside of Don Imus. Even though I was 12 or so when I was listening to his show, I realized it was stupid then, and I can't imagine he has gotten any better now after reading up about what he's had on his show.

The picture of Gail's... talent... is from this site.