MasterChef Junior

Gordon Ramsay Talks New Fox Cooking Series Featuring Children

By BETH HARRIS 08/01/13 08:36 PM ET EDT AP http://www.huffingtonpost.com

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Gordon Ramsay's, dare we say it, softer side comes out when the formidable chef presides over aspiring kid cooks on a new reality show.

Kids between 8 and 13 who love to work in the kitchen will face off on "MasterChef Junior" debuting Sept. 27 on Fox.

Ramsay is the expletive-spewing restaurateur and star of such Fox shows as "Kitchen Nightmares" and "Hell's Kitchen." The new show is based on a popular British series.

"I don't think I swore once," Ramsay told the Television Critics Association on Thursday.

"Twice," corrected Gavin, a 10-year-old contestant from San Francisco, adding that Ramsay's cursing was directed at servers during a restaurant challenge, not the kids.

"We know the F-word means food," Ramsay said.

The contestants knew of Ramsay's fiery reputation as a demanding taskmaster, but 9-year-old Sarah from Pacific Palisades, Calif., said, "He can't be really mean because we're kids."

Ramsay, a father of three daughters and a son, told the budding chefs when their food wasn't good enough.

"I'm brutally honest and I think the kids appreciate that," Ramsay said. "Being firm and fair isn't anything we can be short on."

To soften the blow, they were sent home in pairs during eliminations.

"We hate saying goodbye," Ramsay said. "We let them down gently."

Tommy, an 11-year-old contestant from Palos Verdes Estates, Calif., said, "He was giving us tips on making it better."

Added Gavin, "He taught you not to give up and keep on trying."

Several of the seven kids at the TCA panel said they hope to pursue careers in food when they grow up. Ramsay said he enjoyed mentoring the kids and teaching them life-long skills about eating healthy foods.

"Learning to cook for yourself is so important to set them up for the rest of their lives," he said.

Joining Ramsay on the judging panel are restaurateur Joe Bastianich and chef Graham Elliot.

The first audition round features 24 kids split into three groups of eight to create seafood, pasta or desserts.

The top 12 finalists earn a white apron and advance to a series of challenges and cook-offs, including preparing Beef Wellington as a tag-team. The kids take over a fine dining restaurant in Los Angeles to prepare a three-course meal.

The eventual winner earns $100,000.

Epic Tea Time

Shawshank Redemption

"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singin' about. Truth is I don't wanna know. I'd like to think they were singin' about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free."

The Tango

Night Vale

Welcome To 'Night Vale' — Watch Out For The Tarantulas
by NPR STAFF
http://www.npr.org/

Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have the news of the weird covered: they're the creative masterminds behind the popular sci-fi podcast Welcome to Night Vale. Though only a year old, the spooky Night Vale — which channels David Lynch, Orson Welles and H.P. Lovecraft in its descriptions of a small, weird desert town — has rocketed up the iTunes ratings list to claim the number one most downloaded spot.

Fink tells NPR's Jacki Lyden that he wanted to work on a podcast with Cranor, but he didn't want it to be anything like the podcasts he already listened to. "And I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories. And also, to a lesser extent fascinated by the Southwest desert. Fascinating things probably happen there on a regular basis. So I came up with this idea of a town in that desert where all conspiracy theories were real, and we would just go from there with that understood."

Jeffrey Cranor & Joseph Fink

Interview Highlights

Cranor on Night Vale's mysterious dog park

"It's a small community town. It has the mundane qualities of everyday life in small town America. As you hear more about the dog park, you realize it is completely locked down, not only physically, but somehow spiritually, too, you have no concept of what's happening in there, and there aren't even people in the dog park, just hooded figures that are in and around the area. So it sets the scene of, here's a mundane, quaint American town, sort of overrun by ghosts, or spirits, or conspiracies or underground societies."

Cranor on Night Vale and post-9/11 paranoia

"The paranoia, taking that level of panic and internal angst ... and turning it into the norm in society, I think that's one of the things we love about the character of Cecil [the narrator]. He gives a dry, radio journalist approach to the news most of the time, and he gives a sense of, like, that this is a normal way of society, that this isn't trying to create sheer panic in the reader or the listener, that we've entered dystopia. It's trying to take the dystopia model and actually make the people who live there quite happy with it."

Fink on maintaining a sense of mystery

"It's interesting, you know, the fact that no one knows what most of the people look like. We very intentionally leave off most physical description, unless it's for like a joke, like mentioning that someone has spider eyes or something. Other than that, we tend to leave out physical description ... so if they're faceless, we might mention that they don't have a face, but we don't really get into hair color or height, or things like that ... I get a lot of emails every day being like, 'tell us exactly what Cecil looks like,' and then a bunch of other emails every day, being like, 'never tell us anything about what Cecil looks like.'"

J.D. Salinger

The Private War Of  J.D. Salinger

by NPR STAFF

September 01, 2013 8:11 AM

"J.D. Salinger spent 10 years writing The Catcher in the Rye and the rest of his life regretting it," according to a new book about one of America's best-known and most revered writers.

Salinger died three years ago at the age of 91, after publishing four slim books. But Catcher in the Rye has sold more than 65 million copies and has become a touchstone for young people coming of age around the world. It still sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.

Shane Salerno and David Shields co-authored Salinger, a book looking at Salinger's work and his life. Salerno is also the director of a related documentary, to be released Friday.

Salerno spoke with Weekend Edition Sunday guest host Wade Goodwyn about Salinger and the book that made him a reluctant literary superstar.

Listen to the interview:  http://www.npr.org/

Interview Highlights

On how his work and World War II intertwined

"One of the first details I learned was that he was carrying six chapters of Catcher in the Rye when he landed on D-Day. That was something that stunned me. He carried these chapters with him almost as a talisman to keep him alive, and he worked on the book throughout the war. ...

"Before he had landed on D-Day, J.D. Salinger was a Park Avenue rich kid. Nothing prepared him for what World War II was going to do to him psychologically. We know this because at the end of the war, he checked into a mental institution, and then did something truly remarkable, which is, came out of the mental institution and signed back up for more, and participated in the de-Nazification of Germany."

On how Salinger thought his work would be received

A new biography claims that unpublished fiction is on the way from late author J.D. Salinger, seen here at right posing with a friend, Donald Hartog, in 1989.

"One of the things we uncovered in a letter he was writing to Jean Miller, who was a 14-year-old girl that he struck up a very unique and unusual relationship with ... He says that he's actually very scared about what the reaction will be to Catcher in the Rye. He's very scared about what his family and friends will think about the language and some of the points of view.

"I don't think he had any idea that it would become one of the most successful novels of all time."

On the struggle to get "Catcher in the Rye" published

"There's a scene in which Salinger is treated very roughly, in which he's invited in to meet with a publisher who tells him that they're not going to publish the book and in fact, Holden Caulfield is insane. It sends Salinger running into the street.

"That's absolutely true, and when we discovered that ... they really thought Holden Caulfield was crazy, and by extension that Salinger was crazy. Since Salinger had put his whole life into Catcher in the Rye, you can imagine, a man who had stepped out of a mental institution a few years earlier. Being told that he was crazy and that Holden Caulfield was crazy was a great wound to him. In fact, he teared up in the room and was deeply, deeply hurt."

On dealing with fame

"He was completely overwhelmed by fame, and what he did, very much like Holden, very much like Catcher in the Rye, was beat a fast exit out of New York City. He moved to Cornish, N.H., and he never looked back.

"J.D. Salinger was not a recluse; he was very private, and he wanted a private life. He was a man of deep, deep contradictions. He was a man who would write about renouncing the world, and then write a letter to a friend about how much he liked the Whopper at Burger King."

On yet-to-be-released works

"After nine years, and after uncovering photos and documents and interviews with people that had never come forward or never been seen, we were able to confirm that there is more work, and that work will be published fairly soon ... in irregular installments between 2015 and 2020."

Dumbo

Dolphins

Albert and Temba