Amarsir

Yeah, if Stephanie from Courage B is now the head of the Marcus Lemonis Retail Division, that's big news. Or else it's a fairly meaningless title he offered to get her to come over. Either is possible. I don't remember her having a significant role in the DiLascia episode, but they did use a Courage B store for the focus testing. So it could be either, and the lack of detail on that is really burying the lede in my opinion. Actually the lack of follow-up episodes this season is glaring at this point, and The Profit is done for the season now. I couldn't figure out why, but actually I have a theory: since The Partner was filming all summer there's a good chance that the contestants there were involved in Marcus' investments. And they wanted the footage for the two shows to be separate. So we'll see more of all those businesses when the new show starts. I have nothing to base this on other than a guess, but that's my theory. Normally the employee who keeps the business running gets the hero edit. But $175,000 / year does a lot to take away the underdog card. Even in Manhattan. Still, I wonder if she'd have gotten a different presentation had the brothers been willing to appear on camera. Overall I don't think the problem was so much that Anna was too forward so much as that Susana wasn't forward enough. She may have a natural inclination to speak more in groups, but it was definitely exacerbated by a decade of working with a boss who doesn't like talking to customers. Embolden the owner and the whole dynamic gets better.

This was a good episode. I even enjoyed the disaster robot. That guy would have been hard-pressed to get a deal in 1986, let alone 30 years later. I didn't think the clothing line was a bad idea, but if they wouldn't even give up 20% in return for some much-needed help then they're in trouble. And speaking of trouble, I really enjoyed the follow-up to a no-deal from 7 years ago. It's nice to see those being done for viewer interest and not purely to get more advertising time for the investment. (*cough* shark tank *cough*) Manjit made a very interesting offer but there was too much other interest. If her buyout was the only one, I think he might have been swayed. But who would turn down a chance to partner with 4 Dragons? The connections alone. That said, I wonder how much of that will survive due diligence. Multi-investor deals are more likely to fail and some of his claims like "you can swim with them" seem a little too good. Edit: Yup. Phazon deal stalls

What I liked about this episode was that it was pretty much a "lets build from scratch". Just a touch more honest than the usual pretense of taking an existing business and changing the name, the look, and the products. As it was, the foreclosure drama was the lowest point. Of course that still leaves the ever-present question "Why are you partnering with this guy?" Marcus is basically hiring a manager for equity - which does have some virtue but probably wouldn't be done if this was off-camera. The irony of this episode is that all they created is a brand, while proving to us that brand doesn't matter. It's all made in the same place anyway. And in order to go large they specifically avoided the lesser-known products. (Also, every time a location is shut down I think of the self-serving "I do it to save jobs" in the title sequence. Not that it's the wrong call, but he's setting himself up for that.) "I don't have a ton of interest in investing in a restaurant because it's not scalable." Maybe you could have him build a General Store, Marcus? Completely agree. Less airtime please on "this factory we shut down was already getting shut down" and more on the process that led them to that odd decision.

I'm certain you're correct. However, the method Alton called butterflying included both cutting out the backbone and levering out the keel bone. Hence my mention of it.

Alton Brown taught that method on "Good Eats", although he simply called it "butterflying".

I've seen it with German chocolate cake too, although I don't know if that originated in Germany.

To be fair, they went a different (and probably better) direction. Lori wanted them to be as common (and as commoner) as Pop-Tarts and sell in every Walmart freezer section. Instead they seem to be a Starbucks semi-exclusive. I'm not sure the first way wouldn't have worked but it's very much a bundled strategy.

I'm impressed by Kentucky Jason's knowledge of ingredients. Sometimes they don't work (pinto pecans) and sometimes they do (freeze dried cranberries) but for a home baker he's definitely put some research in. The sauerkraut cake in week 1 could have been a fluke but since then he's kept up the resourcefulness. It's a nice contrast to Matt (who I don't dislike) and his attempts to technical his way through.

Eat Your Science did a brief tour this past spring, got a repeated run on Broadway, and will tour more next year. It definitely kept him out of the studio but I suspect the decision is multi-faceted: tired of doing the game show plus touring live plus the new YouTube show.

Would have been a better theme than "why didn't I think of that".

I'm enjoying the season but am having trouble buying the explanation of Member Berries as the root cause of everything. I though they got closer wehn Garrison confronted PC Principal. "You made me" makes a certain amount of sense, since you can argue that being overly-PC has caused a backlash which resulted in trolls and the most un-PC President ever. BTW I'm not sure Boris Johnson is the best person to warn about "Membries", but it was fun to see him. Trey and Matt did an interview with the NYT in September where they said that they don't storyboard the season. They set stuff up not knowing where it will go because they think it will be interesting later. I have to think they knew TrollTrace would lead to world war potential, but other than that I think they're just tying stuff together as it comes. For example, the Cartman story seems like it's trying to self-propel but not really getting anywhere significant.

I've been looking forward to this since Marcus tweeted about it in the summer. Very interesting to see the tiny openings Cuba is allowing (and the massive restraints still in place). It's really telling how big the differential is between the government salaries and what an individual can do, even for a business like driving a taxi.

Yeah, the sentence "Annie's pretty young; we try not to sexualize her" became pretty hypocritical through a lot of the show. When characters were played straight she was pretty demure, but it seemed like every time they did an homage to something that's the direction her character went. The most egregious probably being her Betty Boop number during the Glee Club episode. (They knew what they were doing and they had Jeff hang a lantern on it, but still.)

Chi as in kimchi, Lantro as in cilantro. At least I assume so. I'd heard of kimchi fries as being an awesome new trend but haven't figured out how to get them yet. Maybe Barbara will get him to open one in NJ near the Tom + Chee.

Sacca didn't mention Uber or Twitter even once. And I think he was right on everything. And he still managed to annoy me. That Chi'lantro sounds great. And fast casual is hot. If he didn't get an offer from Barbara I'd have told him to call Marcus Lemonis.

I just realized! Do you think they were setting up a Bill Clinton / Eric Cartman parallel? Because that would have been a massive opportunity to have him go "Women are smart and funny, get over it."

I liked trying to picture how it would have been different had Hillary won. Garrison gives a concession speech saying "Thank God". Bill Clinton comes to South Park as the "First Gentleman" to get the boys in line since women are in power now. Turd Sandwich's excuse to enlist Gerald is not "rigged election" but rather "national security". I think those worked better this way, although Mr. Garrison as the President probably isn't a corner they intended to get themselves into. The only part I don't see is Randy's involvement, since him meeting Caitlyn Jenner and getting zombified wouldn't make sense.

DD's twitter said earlier today that it's off this week and next week is a special "Why didn't I think of that?" episode.

I've done that. It's probably because I multitask, but there are plenty of presentations where I find someone talking about their ability to "grow the brand" and I have no idea what they sell so I have to back up the pitch.

Yeah that was really uncomfortable phrasing. He might have simply meant "When creating a new brand it's important that everyone express themselves properly" but it just came off as "I don't work with immigrants no matter how much money they offer!" Anyone remember what happened to the parkour gym a few years ago? Total deja vu during the obstacle race presentation.

Did you get the pre-roll clip? (That thing they're doing for some reason this season where they show the studio countdown before the presentation?) Lori called out the mannequins as being real before the pitch even started.

Pretty much. Daymond gets an extra 11%; Cuban gets is $500k back plus interest. Let's be wildly optimistic and assume 1 year's worth or $40k. The break even is $540,000 / .11 = $4.9m. Of course she did say she needed tech help more than clothing expertise, so maybe Cuban was the right partner for her regardless of price. Now I don't really get what he saw in the business, but any time a shark makes a debt offer it means they're more worried about the downside than the payoff. To be fair, they didn't lose the $13M. Someone else lost it and they grabbed the tech in the proceeding bankruptcy. Now admittedly that's not the selling point they seemed to think it was, but it does open the possibility that what they're doing is different from the prior owners. The problem with the device is that the fishermen don't want it. A customer only taking the cleanest fish is a problem for them. If everyone has these readers, the fish gets tossed. If some have them then you're actually raising the average mercury level at the ones who don't. If they had a way to clean out the mercury that would be amazing. But effectively all they're doing is pointing out a problem without a solution.

They almost always reference it the next night. Usually it's just a line or two and a change of who stands where, not influencing the main plot much. This time it could, but all the odds say it's pretty safe to start animating President Elect Turd Sandwich. The closest they've done to a full-on results-driven plot was Trapper Keeper in 2000, but that didn't come out until a week later. (And for all the brilliant moments in this show's history, I think "Oh great, Flora's undecided!" may be the biggest laugh I've ever had.

Why does one of the Worst Bakers in America watch Ashley Adams clips "all the time"? There are a lot of things I'm bad at. One of the reasons I'm bad at them is because I'm not constantly watching instructional videos about them.

Is fifty thousand the amount of the prize, or the number of times they mention it? That was my pet peeve. We get it! There's a prize! But they don't have to keep reminding us. What's the worst case, I spend a few seconds thinking the teams are competing out of sportsmanship? That aside, it was odd that the amount doesn't split evenly. It's not actually a problem since I'm sure it's all contractualized, but it's odd to go home to your family and friends and say "I won sixteen thousand six hundred sixty-six dollars!" If I had to guess I would suspect that's the origin of the bad blood. Early on there was a difference of opinion over creative direction and then the women decided they outnumbered Jeremy so they never had to listen to him. Blind guess of course. If @OtherLevelJ wants to correct me I'd be thrilled.