Germany isn't weird at all. Just like the rest of the world, kids here love to play with action figures drawn from education and entertainment. Kinder Joy, Germany's top confectioner, recently introduced a line of chocolate eggs with their own action figures hidden inside. While they're currently exclusive to Germany, it's easy to imagine American kids delighting at these toys and devising action-packed dialog just like this:

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: We have been at sea for over two years. We are out of food and water. It is finally time to consider the thought that perhaps the world really is -- wait! Do my eyes deceive me? Is that not LAND?

LEONARDO DA VINCI: I must quickly sketch this before my thoughts are lost to the wind. There! I do believe I've devised a way by which a man can fly.

JOE BASTIANICH: This Béarnaise has entirely too much salt. Did you even taste this before you brought it to me? You're a hack. A HACK! GET OUT!

Just imagine the thrill at Munich slumber parties.

MOM: I brought you girls some Kinder Joy eggs! Just one apiece, though. And you girls get to bed soon!

GIRL #1: Oh boy! Okay. Thanks, Mom!

GIRL #2: Mmm, this chocolate egg is delicious. What's this? Oh. [GARBLED] There's a tiny plastic person in my mouth.

GIRL #1: Wow, what fun! Is it super-cool Cody Simpson? Is it Tori Kelly, who voiced a shy teenage elephant in the movie Sing?

GIRL #2 [EXTRACTING FIGURE FROM MOUTH]: No. Judging from the fedora, the soul patch and the bright red shoes, I'd say this is beloved America's Got Talent judge Howie Mandel!

GIRL #1: You dummy, that's Joe Bastianich. His mom introduced him to Mario Batali in 1995 and three years later they opened Babbo.

GIRL #3: Huh. I'll trade you my Lindsay Vonn for it.

GIRL #2 Nah. [YAWNS] I think your mom is right. Suddenly I feel like going to sleep.

Despite our initial assumption that Mr. Bastianich is out of his league here, his website convinces us otherwise. "I am a restauranteur, author, sometimes television personality, rocker, runner, husband and a father," he says, perhaps unaware that after the age of fifty the word "rocker" should be deleted from one's biography. "I made the choice to pursue what truly interested me, worked like a dog to open Becco twenty years ago, and I guess the rest is history." Such initiative! Such drive! What perhaps isn't quite so historical is the fact that he opened Becco with his mom, who'd opened and run the wildly-popular Felidia restaurant in Manhattan twelve years earlier.

After following in the footsteps of Mom and Mario Batali it appears Bastianich wanted to follow Anthony Bourdain next:

Bastianich recalls one night during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when the gregarious [Bill] Clinton loudly tells an off-color joke involving lesbians and Jerry Brown within earshot of journalists, even though Bastianich tries to warn him. The story goes viral the next day. -- NY Post

So the triathlete/rocker/restauranteur/denture wearer and -- what's that? oh, right -- husband and dad is a hero too. Too bad he wasn't similarly heroic roughly eight years earlier when presidential hopeful Bob Kerrey told Arkansas governor Bill Clinton a joke involving lesbians and, yes, Jerry Brown at a political dinner in New Hampshire. It was picked up by a microphone and also went viral, prompting "profuse apologies" from Kerrey.

You'd think Clinton would have learned from Kerrey's mistake, but I'd also have thought that an experienced businessman like Bastianich, who said a restaurant owner's life is “a nickel-and-dime business, and you make dollars by accumulating nickels," wouldn't have allegedly accumulated nickels that belonged to his restaurant help, resulting in a $5.25 million dollar judgment against Batali and him.

Still, with part-ownership in something like thirty restaurants, maybe Mr. Bastianich deserves to be a little plastic figure inside a chocolate egg. It just looks a little painful when, as they say, a man born on third base claims he hit a triple, and when somebody's Wikipedia page, in addition to spotlighting their cameo in an American Girl TV film, reads like this:

Bastianich has received numerous accolades^{[example needed]}."