2026-10-04: youtube and grill

my day job is 100% remote, and I background videos or podcasts or neighbors' arguments throughout the day. Chef Reactions is top shelf. not so much for recipes but for commentary on others'. pretty much every one of his videos I've seen has a solid bust-out-laughing comment somewhere in the first half. this is my humor sweet spot: snarky asides that could bring down entire nations if timed right. I also enjoy badly dubbed voices and gratuitous violence.

one persistent target is a lady and her husband (background guy) who make absolute slop on a grand scale. logs of ground beef, WWII surplus tomato sauce, gunny sacks of factory cheese, and lots of jarred garlic (jarlic) are among her frequent flyers. You can tell fairly quickly into most of her videos that she's doing it to piss people off. She's the fox news of cooking videos, albeit without all the chunky-style racism.

morbid curiosity led me to her channel to get the raw, unfiltered experience. in one video, she was making a collossal dish on her outdoor griddle, dropping in ramen noodles, rice vinegar, and sriracha in a celebration of asian cuisine, and I heard her use a word I didn't know: ha-ba-BEE-chee. I replayed it. yeah, ha-ba-BEE-chee.

   

it took me longer than I'm comfortable admitting to get that she meant hibachi. ha-ba-BEE-chee. hih-BAH-chee. of course. and still. she spoke it with delight, at one point delivered in a singsong lilt that made me want to flick her ears. really hard.

for a while i wasn't sure if it was an honest, if oft-repeated mistake on her part, or if it was intentional, strategically sprinkled throughout the video to get even more of a rise from her viewers, or even to her secondary viewers through Chef Reactions and others...but some questions answer themselves; of course it was intentional, strategic, and actually clever, in that your-emotional-reaction-gets-me-more-clicks-and-kinda-gets-me-hard-too kind of way.

and this is my hell. it's an incredibly minor thing, an intentional cutesy-wutesy mispronunciation of a now-common term borrowed from another language on the one hand, a mark of blinder-focused, monoglot, muri-culture hubris on the other. But to this occasionally pedantic language freak, it's torture; a fly in the soup, a burr under the saddle, a lego brick lurking in the shag carpet.

which, coincidentally, is what I suspect the video's final ha-ba-BEE-chee meal would taste like.