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​I arrived home yesterday evening to find that my cable had gone out. To be fair, it could have been out for days. I have no idea. Such are the perils of owning a Roku box and living off Hulu and Netflix instead of basic cable. Either way, I had no means of watching Top Chef that didn't include crashing a friend's otherwise quiet Wednesday evening and monopolizing their TV for an hour while I curse, drink, type loudly and bitch. You see, I literally don't have any friends - that I know of - who watch Top Chef.

And then I remembered: the office has cable! Sort of. We have a 15-inch CRT TV that only has a weird blue tint to it - no other colors - and satellite. God only knows why one of those things is fancy and the other is worse than almost any piece of electronic equipment you could buy for $15 at Goodwill. But that's where I ended up. And because the entire episode of Top Chef ended up being as boring as expected, today's photos are not of anything to do with the competition and instead are a tour of the Houston Press offices by night. EXCITING.

In tonight's episode, the four remaining competitors get a fifth chef added back into the mix: Beverly. Fucking Beverly. Who has somehow battled her way out of Last Chance Kitchen - the companion webisodes that have been airing after Top Chef each week - and back onto the show proper. Literally no one is happy to see her. Including me. I really wanted Nyesha back.

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Yeah, I drink that classy shit on Top Chef nights. (And, yes, my TV is on my coffee table. It's a small apartment.)

​What you see above is one of the Healthy Choice Top Chef-branded entrees they keep hawking on this damned show. I bought two on an impulse tonight while shopping* at Target (*shopping = wandering the aisles vacantly and fondling various throw pillows and lamps instead of buying the 25-foot coaxial cable I came for). I'll let you know at the end of the episode if it's any good or not.

"My family wasn't ecstatic about me becoming a chef," says Lindsey in the first few minutes of this week's episode. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that from other chefs whose own parents were less than supportive of their chosen career path. Maybe the upside of shows like Top Chef -- for all the bitching I do about them -- is that more parents will be supportive of kids going into the culinary arts, because it is a worthy and important career path. Period.

My reverie is interrupted by Pee-Wee Herman, this week's guest judge. Why? Because why the fuck not. I am not going to pretend to know or care anymore.

The Quickfire challenge this episode is to make fancy pancakes for Pee-Wee, who needs to join the club alongside other non-agers Johnny Depp, Uncle "John Stamos" Jesse and Jennifer Connolly. It's disturbing, and ultimately distracting from the episode because I've veered off the viewing path entirely and am now looking at old videos of Pee-Wee's Playhouse on YouTube.

I do, however, like the fact that Pee-Wee completely fucks with each of the contestants by telling them that each person's pancake is the best pancake he's ever had. It's classic Pee-Wee, who taught the fine arts of absurdity and sarcasm to a generation of impressionable youths.

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I wish this were still on so that I could recap it. Although I'm pretty sure I'd have to fight Jef With One F for the rights.

​I still don't have DVR, but I do now have a refurbed Roku box from Woot, which is nice. I mention this because any single episode of Battlestar Galactica that you can stream from Netflix is a million times better -- no hyperbole here, I really mean a million times better -- than any single episode of Top Chef: Texas. What is better than watching Apollo wreck Cylon Raiders with his Viper? Certainly not a bunch of petty bitching over a single dinner in a reality show that ultimately amounts to nothing more than sound and fury.

Speaking of petty bitching, Grayson is already at it this episode. (But only after the producers sneak in one more cameo appearance by Charlize Theron. GO AWAY.) The previews have been touting Grayson as the one with "chutzpah," which is basically a nicer way (these days) of saying that someone's being a jerk.

For the Quickfire challenge, the remaining six contestants this week have been split into teams -- two girls, two white people, two Asians -- and assigned to make a pound of fettucine pasta, shuck a pound of corn and clean a pound of shrimp, then use those ingredients to cook a dish. I'm kind of impressed with this challenge, as it evenly pits all the chefs against each other across the board as well as showcasing their knowledge of cooking basics.

Of course, Grayson is yapping away in the background the entire time -- sorry, displaying her chutzpah -- and overworks her pasta. But her team still finishes first.

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​Paula Deen is too easy of a target for the ire of the Internet. She cooks with copious amounts of butter, and has just that right mixture of cheerfulness and Southern sass to drive people crazy. Then, this past week we found out she has been living with diabetes.

Not that having diabetes is a personal flaw, but even as she showed people how to cook delicious foods with near-toxic levels of fat and sugar, she was suffering the consequences of it. Let's be honest, though: She wasn't holding a gun to anyone's head forcing them to buy industrial globs of butter to cook with. It's called free will, people. I love all those prison shows on MSNBC, but I don't have any desire to go to jail.

Today the cooking show host and surrogate crazy aunt to millions turns 65 years old, and in the spirit of the day, we found a few GIFs for you to stare at , well, really to be entranced by. Remember last year's hit meme, Paula Deen Riding Things? It's back y'all, and now it can move!

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Noted Texan actress hot-as-balls celebrity who'll hopefully bring in more viewers for Bravo, Charlize Theron.

​Charlize Theron is an actress from South Africa who lives in Los Angeles and is currently filming a shitty-looking Kristen Stewart movie set in England, so naturally she's the best choice for this week's episode of Top Chef: Texas. This show continues to make less and less sense the more it wears on. I could've been drunk this whole season, and it wouldn't have mattered. It's like the inevitable crazy-train third season of a Ryan Murphy show at this point.

This week's episode picks up right where the last one left off, at the end of a stressful Restaurant Wars battle wherein the exhausted contestants are still sniping at one another. O joy. Everyone on the ladies' team is pissed that Beverly won over Lindsay, but I tend to think that it's more that Grayson and Sarah are upset they themselves didn't win and are jumping on the "poor, overlooked Lindsay" bandwagon because it makes them look an iota better. It's not working on me.

Back in San Antonio, some dumb Quickfire Challenge is happening involving a dish made with three ingredients picked off a conveyor belt that's a bit like a half-assed version of Chopped, complete with one of the contestants -- Beverley -- running out of time and leaving one of her three ingredients off the final plating.

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Ty had an apple for the teacher in this spread from Headmaster Magazine.

​If you're still smarting over the departure of goofy Ty-Lör Boring from last night's episode of Top Chef: Texas, I've got good news for you. Sort of. Frankly, it depends on how big of a perv you are.

One of my friends, who shall remain unnamed, emailed me this afternoon absolutely shattered that Ty had been sent packing. Ugly Chris deserved to go, he said, "NOT my husband, Ty-Lör."

"By the way," he finished, "did you see the hot NUDE photos of Ty-Lör?? He's a keeper in my book!"

WHAT? THERE ARE NUDE PHOTOS OF A CHEFTESTANT FLOATING AROUND ON THE INTERNET AND I MISSED THEM?

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Spoiler alert: Harvard's Canteen is far nicer than the Canteen the boys' team puts together.

​Now that Work of Art is over, I've had to find another reality show to haphazardly catch before tuning into Bravo on Wednesday nights. That show is Restaurant Impossible, and it's weirdly addictive. I've even found myself seeking it out on purpose, which is something I never do with Food Network shows. (Except Chopped. LOVE YOU TED ALLEN.)

So what I'm trying to say is, hey, check out Restaurant Impossible because it's actually a kind of good show that's like a kinder and more realistic version of Hell's Kitchen. And also because the show was filming here last night (!) and the episode they filmed will feature Pelican Grill and it's all terribly exciting.

Anyway. Back to this week on Top Chef: Texas, where I'd somehow already forgotten that Chris was sent home last week. I thought I was supposed to care more about these people as the season wore on...

Padma threatens that some of the best chefs on the show in the past have been sent home after the likes of this week's Elimination Challenge. The teams are split by gender and assigned to take over a restaurant for the night.

The boys are up first, and Hughnibrow assigns the groups a three-course menu with at least two courses for 100 people. Some chefs have to handle the front of the house, and every chef has to make a dish. And they have all of five hours to design and execute not only the menu but the entire concept and decor of the restaurant itself.

Fucking hell.

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Where is your god now, fanboys?

​We've had a week off, and in that time frame the Top Chef: Texas contestants have moved on from Dallas to Austin. My drug of choice this week is cough syrup, which I've been drinking all day long. I feel like a gangster. (More on this later today.)

Nathan Myhrvold is the guest judge this week, and TV Guide tells me (because I'm 67 years old and it's packaged with my Reader's Digest subscription) that the main competition will involve Texas barbecue. I'm conflicted about this for two reasons.

Number one, having Nathan Myhrvold judge a barbecue cookoff is a little bit like that time Jethro Tull won a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance. And number two, I'm not the hugest fan of Myhrvold after reading myriad articles suggesting that he is a rather malevolent little patent troll. (Read Hanna Raskin's article at Seattle Weekly for a basic primer on the whole situation.)

Coming on the tails of another episode featuring a controversial figure -- Patti Labelle, whose security detail beat up a West Point grad outside of Bush Intercontinental Airport -- I'm wondering who is responsible for securing talent on this season of Top Chef and exactly how much they secretly hate the show and all of its viewers.

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HERE'S PATTI LABELLE BECAUSE WHY NOT THAT'S WHY.

​I left a dinner tonight at Roost earlier than I would have liked -- I really need to stop making dinner plans on Wednesday night, but my job more or less necessitates that I eat out every night -- and will circle back around to this fact shortly. Needless to say, Kevin Naderi is doing the kind of cooking at his new restaurant that I'm pleased to say would never fit into Top Chef: Texas's mold of what Texas cooking should be. Roost is wholly Houston and wondrous in its sense of time and place, and also has nothing whatsoever to do with tonight's Top Chef -- which is exactly what makes it so splendid.

Tonight's Quickfire challenge is to cook a meal in 30 minutes using "suggestions" thrown out by Twitter users. I have a deep love-hate relationship with Twitter, one that can't be explained in 140 characters or even one blog post. As expected, I'm conflicted about its role in the show tonight. Is Bravo trying too hard to keep up with social media trends? Or is Twitter now acceptably mainstream?

Regardless of the answer, Twitter offers up "bacon" as the first demand for the contestant's dish. This is the Internet, after all. Its atomic structure is composed of bacon neurons and kitten protons.

This challenge is inherently unfair but hilarious to watch, as only Ugly Chris is smart enough to keep his bacon extremely simple from the start, knowing that Twitter -- as it is wont to do -- will throw a bunch of misspelled bullshit their way in just a few minutes. The first is to make a hash (some Twitter hack "cutely" reasons that they should do a hash for a #hashtag challenge and I fight some bile back down my throat at this), the second is to pick one item from the pantry and hand it off to another chef, the third is... I've stopped paying attention. Twitter encourages gnat-like attention spans, you realize.

Oh, and Paul won tonight's Quickfire challenge. Obviously. He's winning this whole thing, folks.

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Also known as the episode in which Padma goes full Pocahontas, complete with faux Indian choker I once bought during a family vacation to Tucson in 1993.

​Seven episodes in, and I'm sorry to report that none of the challenges thus far have involved the contestants being forced to shoot their own horses and grill them over a fire of cactus paddles. What is this, Bravo? Amateur hour? THAT'S RATINGS GOLD.

On a more positive note, the show has continued the positive trend set by last week's episode with guest judge Dean Fearing. Another pre-eminent Texas chef is featured tonight: Tim Love, of Fort Worth's Lonesome Dove. Eater Dallas predicted earlier today that "his Top Chef Texas appearance will effectively erase the embarrassment experienced by the metroplex thanks to the Highland Park progressive dinner episode."

All I know is that I love the batshit crazy show that comes on before Top Chef, because every time I tune in to Bravo and catch the last few minutes of it, some "artist" (?) with crazy eyes is literally weeping and rending the clothes they stole from unattended dressing rooms on the set of Glee -- even the judges! Why can't Padma display this level of emotion? Or anything even approaching it? It's almost the level of crazy I want to see from Top Chef, although I know a show with OCD-level plugs for the Toyota! Sienna! probably has to maintain some sort of Thorazine-drugged affect in order better align itself with the Sienna's core customer base.

Moving on...

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