I know I've raved before about Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, but now that the Lady Wife and I have succumbed to the warm, gentle content tsunami of basic cable, I'm also really enjoying Ramsay's more recent show, Gordon Ramsay's F Word. It's a show built around a gimmick -- each episode, Gordon takes a team of four amateur cooks through the paces of working in a pro kitchen for a night. The kicker is that the diners decide at the end of each course whether they want to pay for it. At the end of the season, the team with the most purchased courses gets to come work at Claridge's at Mayfair.

But that's just the anchor concept. Between the courses, Gordon engages in various other food-related activities, including hunting, fishing, and raising his own livestock. He also does a "recipe challenge" each episode, pitting his own recipe against one brought in by a celebrity. (Well, a British celebrity. I didn't recogize any of them.) Gordon always talks a tremendous amount of smack in the kitchen, presumably in an attempt to rattle his celeb competitors. But he doesn't always win, and his maitre'd, Jean-Baptiste, is always positively gleeful when Gordon has to take one in the face. (So am I.)

This is sort of the key to the show, actually. Gordon Ramsay is a type-A, bullying personality, but he's also a high achiever, and what's fascinating about high-achieving people is watching them apply themselves to things they don't yet have mastery in. So far, the best, most efficient kitchen team of the first season was a group of lady doctors who moved fast like they were in the emergency room and repeated orders with a martial "Yes, chef!" They were fine home cooks to start with, but they were also the kind of people who, having achieved complete mastery in one area, feel comfortable trying to learn new things and have the discipline and learning skills to be successful. (Another brigade, by contrast, consisted of "Eton Boys" who worked in finance and made me cringe for the future state of the British economy.)

Gordon, of course, has achieved complete mastery in his field, and the chief pleasure of the show is watching him, as well as his amateur cooks, try new things. Mostly he succeeds, but the process humbles him, takes away some of his competitive, ball-busting energy. (It's particularly fun to watch him shrink down to quite human scale when he gets to ride along with a group of RAF pilots.) And in the process of trying to get closer to his food, he actually finds out some fascinating things, like what the jolt from an electric sheep fence feels like, or what happens to the pigs he's raised in his backyard when they go to the slaughterhouse. Some of his adventures are clearly impossible to repeat at home -- not many of us are going to go spear-fishing for food -- but some, like finding and cooking snails from his own garden instead of importing hoity-toity French snails, seem like the kind of thing an ambitious home cook could totally figure out.

Also, he involved his kids, paying them 5p per snail. It was pretty adorable -- one boy got something like 1 pound 25p, which is 25 snails! -- but it also points to the thing that makes Ramsay such an engaging figure: despite being an asshole in many respects, he's passionate about educating the public, including small children, about food and where it comes from.

(One recurring segment that seems destined to become the next Ramsay show is about Ramsay's search for the next Fanny Cradock, a seminal British TV cook who apparently taught millions of middle-class housewives to cook. I.e., Gordon Ramsay's childhood companion.)

So one of the things the Lady Wife brought to our marriage was one of these "Tivo" boxes for watching television. To be honest, I'm a little behind the times on this -- largely because I haven't had a TV in about six years. This doesn't make me a better person than you -- I still watched copious amounts of TV on DVD and Hulu. (The fact that I can actually listen to The Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir all the way through -- that makes me a better person than you. Not having a TV was just an accident.)

My wife, on the other hand, has two TVs, a DVD player, and, of course, this Tivo. When we moved into our new apartment, we were so pleased with the amount we were paying in rent that we decided to get basic cable, too, and my wife patiently spent several hours connecting boxes and programming things so that we could record shows. So now I watch TV on a TV, which is nice, because my laptop is now useful again for things like blogging about my home electronics.

When we were dating, I pretty much never saw a commercial, because the Lady Friend was a ruthless and expert skipper of commercials. I've worried for a while now that DVR technology would destroy television as a business, because advertisers obvious won't pay for airtime if everyone's just going to skip their ads. And my wife's approach seemed to confirm that problem.

But now that we're married and her Tivo is my Tivo and because we work opposite shifts I am sometimes alone with the Tivo, I've discovered that I, through laziness or passivity or a sort of last-gasp loyalty to commercially sponsored television, often forget to fast forward when the commercials come around. My wife, even if she's three-fourths asleep next to me on the futon, will instinctively feel around for the remote to avoid being sloganeered by purveyors of car insurance and premium gasoline. But I often forget. For a while. And I've noticed two things about my relationship with commercials in this strange new land of ad-optional viewing.

The first is that I don't generally get impatient right away. I don't mind sitting and watching one commercial. It's waiting through the second and third and fourth ads that usually inspires me to press the fast forward button.

The second thing I've noticed is that sometimes I like to watch ads. Many ads, being basically short films on a single theme, have a terrific punch and cleverness that I sometimes wish TV programs themselves had. So today, for example, I've watched an ad for Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, because the ad cleverly replicates the frustration one often feels at the blockheaded stupidity of Google search results.

(By the way, it took me six different searches on Google and YouTube to find that.) I've also watched the T-Mobile ad about people chasing economists off their lawns and the Prius ad that shows a car driving through a field of human flowers. (That last one mainly just makes me wonder how they do the special effects.) On the other hand, I'll promptly skip the Burger King ad that features the Whopper, Jr. on a faux home shopping channel (ugh) or the bland "ecomagination" corporate image-polishing video from GE.

What does all this mean? Well, of course, a certain percentage of viewers will simply skip all commercials, and advertisers will have to live with that fact. But it turns out advertisers can do quite a bit to salvage their viewership. And that means that there might now be a more competitive market in advertising, which would be a good thing for us all. Advertisers might well compete for the first slot in each block of ads, hoping that they can engage our attention before we have a chance to realize that we're watching a commercial. They may also try to more closely monitor microdemographics of a given show, since Tivo reports that viewers are less likely to skip ads they think are relevant to them. And of course, some products are simply more interesting than others: Tivo also reports that viewers skip movie trailers less than any other kind of ad.

But if we're lucky, perhaps the ability of consumers to pick and choose between ads will result in better advertising. Up to now, advertisers have had only the clumsiest, most aggragated feedback from viewers about whether their ads were truly eye-catching or interesting. But now they'll have, essentially, the kind of instantaneous feedback that Nielsen ratings provide to television studios. And we can all see how that's improved the quality of television shows.

Seriously, though -- in this way ads are in a bit better position than TV shows, for two reasons. First, sure, some good, interesting ads will probably tank. But who cares? They're ads. And second, because ads are more like short movies on YouTube or FunnyOrDie than they are like long-form drama, viewers will invest the minimal time involved if an ad can prove itself engaging and clever.

The real danger, in terms of taste, comes from ads that are compelling but also revolting -- whatever the Jerry Springer or A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila of advertising might be. But here, fortunately, we might be spared -- advertisers are happy to hawk their products between the acts of such shows, but they seem, so far, to be reticent to actually wade into the jello-pool of debauchery where their brands are on the line. This isn't because companies are above such things, but because it's probably not economical for Toyota to create one set of ads for NBC, another set for F/X, another set for MTV after 10 p.m., and so on. On the whole, we benefit from advertisers' limited resources and their need to make one ad appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Yes, I think the DVR revolution might augur well for, at least, the art of advertising, in much the way that the introduction of cable in the 1980s forced the networks to stop making crap and start producing better TV. And with that, we return you to your show, "Economic Musings On Ten-Year-Old Technology," already in progress.

The Lady Friend (soon to be Lady Wife!) and I love the short films of Neill Blomkamp, especially this ingenious commentary on South African politics (cleverly disguised as an alien invasion movie!):

Now, if this is not a complete hoax, it would appear that Peter Jackson has given him a chance to make a feature:

The trailer looks absolutely fantastic, and if it's as dark, witty, political, and technically ingenious as his shorts, this will be this summer's Matrix or Blair Witch -- a risky, smart movie that changes the commercial landscape.

If you're a terrorist listening to your iPod while tinkering with your suitcase bomb, be warned -- you're out of bounds and in hot water with Apple, Inc.

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