Are Casey Thompson's Beaver Boots Made for Walkin'?

Oh, possums, we keep saying we've got something for you, something we call love, but now we're ready to confess.

We're doing this post because we have a nagging feeling that "Junior Missy" Casey Thompson, who keeps crying when she oughta be cooking and losin' when she oughta not bet, may just be getting knifed today, and before she goes, we simply must find out what the hell "Beaver Boots" are.

(Actually, we're afraid we know exactly what they are; we just want to be persuaded otherwise.) Of course, now we can't get that Nancy Sinatra song out of our head.

Sure, we're a little surprised that Casey--who doesn't want her staff at the Shinsei restaurant in Texas to see her all purtied up and wearing make-up (and given how much lipstick she wore during that Roach Coach challenge, we can't say we blame her; emulating Jennifer Aniston is decidedly not the way to go) because she wants their respect--would appear on her MySpace page with the moniker "Beaver BOOTS" and a photograph marked "12InchPimps.com."

Even Miss XaXa, who, like Casey, hails from Texas, has never heard of Beaver Boots before--at least not the kind you wear--so we are at a loss as to whether it's some kind of obscure regional slang for something entirely innocent, like a type of brownie you make for a bake sale at a Methodist church. They've got those in Texas, right?

So, possums, we turn to you, the collective brains of this operation, because what you know, we ain't had time to learn. So tell us, if you can, just what these Beaver Boots are, before it's too late. Possum Boots, start talkin'.

Scary But Harmless: Casey Thompson Fries Up Fellow Competitors While Amuse-Biatch Expresses Pronounced Disapproval

While you wait for tonight’s episode, possums, let your brain turn to mush as you watch this morning show segment from NBC5 in Dallas featuring cheftestant Casey Thompson as she tries to fry a fish and talk to a blowsy, vaguely nurse-like hostess while saying absolutely nothing.

(Miss XaXa thinks the nameless hostess resembles not so much a nurse as the meddling female neighbor on Small Wonder, that creepy but compulsively watchable, long-ago syndicated show about a pinafore-wearing robot named Vicky. On closer inspection, we think she’s more like the Philip Seymour Hoffman drag queen in that Robert DeNiro movie Flawless.)

During the segment, you will learn nothing about frying fish, and next to nothing about Top Chef. The two things we gleaned from Casey were that (1) the restaurant she works in and the restaurant Tre Wilcox works in are both owned by the same people; and (2) she thought the other contestants were scary but harmless.

Casey herself seems harmless, and the scariest thing we’ve seen about her has been her headscarf, but we do have a bone to pick with her.

During the Quickfire Challenge last week, she was picked as the Definition Girl, the Vanna White of sorts (last year it was Ilan Hall) who helpfully defines the term “amuse-bouche” for the audience. Naturally, we winced as we heard her pronouncing it, “AH-moose bouche.”

Of course we blamed her, as she really ought to know better, but we were willing to cut her just a teensy bit of slack because Padma, Lady Rushdie, pronounced it the same way while introducing the challenge.

But she really got our goat when, later in the episode, she scoffed and sneered at Clay Bowen’s apple-sized amuse-bouche. “I’m an executive chef, I know what an AH-moose-bouche is.”

Look, Junior Missy, Elle Woods, Floaters, Mini-Spice Rack, Sweet Potato Queen (we haven’t quite settled on a nickname), you may know what it is, but you cain’t hardly pronounce it. For the love of God, it ain’t that hard. It’s pronounced just the way it looks—ah-MEWS—like the English word “amuse.” (Padma certainly knows better; witness her asking Tom, after the tasting, “Were you amused?”).

So, darlin’, if, despite being an executive chef, you cain’t pronounce the word, don’t you go bein’ all stroppy about it with poor Clay.

And while we’re at it, why is it that, as the brilliant and ever-perceptive Eric3000 points out, Fontainebleau is being pronounced “Fountain Blue” rather than the correct “fawn-ten-BLOW”?

Oh well. Plus ça change....