Every week I'll be here to reveal some of my favorite moments from the Internet. Whether it be bingeing television shows, streaming sports, or simply getting lost in a YouTube rabbit hole, I'm here to give you my top picks. This week, I'm saying farewell to a basketball legend and watching way too many episodes of Chopped on Netflix. 

Kobe Bryant's Last Game 

Recommended Pairing: A 20-year-old bottle of vino

I was around six years old the first time my sister let me tag along with her down to the apartment building's rickety old basketball hoop. She was five years older, pretty athletic and determined to make the middle school basketball team, so I was put in charge of shagging loose balls and rebounds. She wanted to be Magic Johnson, but I spent most of my time with my hands cupped over my eyes pretending I was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, just chucking up hook shots until she told me to go home. I loved basketball immediately.

Back then, if you didn't grow up with a local team you were only exposed to teams through the nationally televised weekend games of the week or the playoffs. I was born in Nashville, TN so the teams we saw the most were the Lakers, the Pistons and the upstart Bulls. While most of my friends were talking about this new guy, Michael Jordan, I had already pledged my allegiance to the Showtime Lakers. Luckily for me, my family moved to Los Angeles a few years later so I could settle in with a few years of mediocre Laker teams before the 1996 Draft where Vlade Divac, our cigarette smoking center, would be traded for a high school kid named Kobe Bryant.

As I made friends and adjusted to life in southern California more often than not you would find my crew and I watching games at my house. Chick Hearn would be belting out the play by play and we would watch in awe as this kid only a few years older than us was starting to dominate a league full of grown men. 

Fast forward 20 years and this kid I grew up rooting for through all of the heartbreaks, championships, injuries and recoveries had finally decided to bow out. 

I spent the week leading up to his final game rifling through highlights on YouTube, muting the terrible hip-hop backing tracks and just watching a basketball savant run, spin, twist, leap, and most importantly, win. I can trace back to where I was in my life through those highlights. I remember where I was when we won championships, when he scored 81 and when he sunk two free throws with a ruptured achilles.

Last night, I was with a handful of the same friends from high school watching this old man willing himself and his team to a victory. An unreal performance, 60 points on 50 shots. He left with such a powerful performance we have no choice but to remember him like this:
 

instead of this:

Farewell Mamba. Thanks for everything.

'Chopped' 

Recommended Pairing: Simply pour whatever alcohol you happen to have in your house in a glass with a few items from your pantry and fridge

The show Chopped perfectly balances food porn, humiliation, and pomp within the confines of a silly reality-based cooking competition. Every episode in it's eight year run has been exactly the same. 

1. Introduce four moderately uncharismatic chefs trying their best to seem likable, or often simply human.
2. Have them open up their mystery baskets with four random ingredients.
3. Eliminate the worst dish after three judges take the whole thing way too seriously.
4. Repeat steps two and three until we have an awkward winner standing excitedly, totally unsure of what to do with their hands.
   
   

Netflix recently gave me a heads up that they added a few new episodes to their Chopped collection, so I tore through them all over the course of a few days. I decided to judge the judges and declare my favorite. Here we go.

My Favorites:

Aaron Sanchez

Notable for being entirely covered in tattoos and also doing that thing where he over-accentuates all of the Spanish words in a sentence. For instance, he says stuff like:

"I really like what you did with the cuttlefish and then when you roasted the jalapeños and the poblanos to make that sumptuous crema I thought, you really have a winning dish here." 

He does that every time he's on and it makes me giggle with delight.

Alex Guarnaschelli

Alex always seems the least interested in eating any of the dishes while making a sour face like she was being served a dish of her mother's liver cooked up with some onions. When someone wins her over you actually get to see her smile, which is a treat.

Amanda Freitag

Amanda is in a tie for my favorite judge on the show because I genuinely would like to be friends with her. Whenever she's on the show, you get to watch her stressing out and actively rooting for all of the contestants to do their best. She's insightful, supportive and kind of hot in a depressingly Freudian sort of way. Forget I said that. 

Geoffrey Zakarian

Geoffrey certainly comes across as the most knowledgable as well as the most highly skilled chef. I've learned more about cooking watching him cooly berate contestants than I have from any other source. 

My Least Favorite:

Guest Judges

I don't think I've ever enjoyed a guest judge. For instance, that guy in the picture is Bruno DiFabio, a pizza expert and annoying sideshow for an episode because he wouldn't shut up about destroying the gluten strands. Every time I see that there's going to be a guest judge I'm all:

Just stick to the regulars.