I Wrote A Thing About Soccer

and if you are interested in that sort of thing, you should go read it. It's posted over at Craven Cottage Newsround, which is an excellent blog for fans of Fulham Football Club.

Wait... What?

So when I finally got around to firing up the Philly cheesesteak episode of Food Wars that aired a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that it pitted Pat's against... Tony Luke's? How on earth do you do an episode about cheesesteak and not have it be Pat's vs. Geno's? I mean, those are pretty clearly the two most famous places (if you Google "philly cheesesteak" you get the Wikipedia article, Pat's, and Geno's, in that order, as your top three hits), not to mention the fact that they're right across the street from each other would make for good TV. I almost didn't want to watch the episode because this seems so wrong, but I had to see whether Geno's even got mentioned - they didn't, and the shots of Pat's were framed so as not to show it either. I can only assume there must've been a contract dispute or something.

By the way, they changed the format (no longer a blind taste test, the owners of the two places come out and talk to the judges while they're eating; the host is now one of the judges and they structured it so that she cast the deciding vote, rather than a local, which was also odd), and the winner was Pat's, but that almost seems secondary to the strange choice of contestants.

(I should add that this has also been discussed on the show's official discussion forum, where multiple astute viewers also noted that Joey Vento of Geno's was in the show's introduction prior to the changes mentioned above.)