Amarsir

Yeah, one of the things I like about this is that South Park already fired back at that stereotype. "He's probably a pathetic loser in his mom's basement who's just miserable all the time." (Paraphrasing.) And then cut to South Park's most successful lawyer skipping down the street.

Maybe I was just in a good mood, but I enjoyed last night's episode. And believe me, I'm more surprised than anyone to see myself saying that. The focus on knife skills is a valid thing to teach. The dishes were multi-stepped but not unreasonable. And I found the people to be mostly likable and amusing. I think what helped was that the stupid "taste and describe" thing in the beginning was short. (And it was stupid. They weren't even describing it as food. Just irrelevant crap like "this kills Dracula".) Had the meaningless round they do in the beginning taken up half the show it would both annoy me and steal space from the part that actually mattered.

Yeah. Based on the commercials (including "sneak peak" sections I happened to catch) I thought this was going to be an LA Dogworks type of horror show. Instead it's yet another slightly controlling boss and Marcus again walking into a situation where he doesn't know everything (and everyone) as well as he thinks he does. I want a lot more math on the food truck. What's the license cost? Can they make back the overhead of a license if the truck only runs occasionally? The "90 hours" math seemed to indicate the kitchen is underutilized from 4pm-8pm. How is the truck going to help that?

Literally nothing. That was the last thing and then the credits. I think this trolling-based season is a nice counterpoint to the "safe space" criticism last year. And I'm now completely on board with the Member Berries Wine being a thing. The wine was just too prominent during all of Gerald's sessions.

Fittingly, some of them were Star Wars. "Member Chewbacca?" "Member Darth Vader?" "Member Chewbacca again?" You're right, they went pretty easy on him. But I do think they mean to include him in the whole message of playing on nostalgia rather than actually being good.

Well I was thinking a small canister as used for compressed CO2 would be sufficient. But looking again, the equalized balloon theory is absolutely right. I remembered the balloon as being bigger than it was. In reality it's about half-size so that makes total sense. --- A couple weeks ago on Penn's Podcast he mentioned there was a trick where Teller didn't play along and it ended in a weaker alternate out. During Ivan Asmodei's trick, when Penn and Teller are shuffling the cards and the magician is talking about playgrounds, Teller seems to slip one into his pocket as well. That could be why he wasn't able to predict Teller's card - because 2 were missing. (And if so I wonder if it had anything to do with Johnny's call.)

I think they've developed the skill of tying recent stuff into a planned plot. The election stuff, trolling, and Cartman taunting was probably planned long off. They just saw the opportunity to tie Kaepernick in and went with it.

Actually, Teller has an extended grabber device along his arm. While we're distracted by Penn's talking, Teller drops his pants and connects a cable that allows the grabber to extend out of his sleeve and make the swap. :) Yeah that's pretty much it. Holding 2 and keeping one hidden. While that makes a fair amount of sense, without extra pressure two balloons are just going to equalize in size. If the starting one was thicker it might squeeze down a little smaller, but you can't simply just transfer all of the helium over without work. I suppose it's possible, but overly complicated. Which raises the question: why not just use a tank? Was it simply to fool Penn & Teller's guess? The complicated part of that isn't the tank itself, but the automatic nozzles to switch to the right balloon. If he must have that anyway, I don't see what he gains by not having a small tank.

Of course if he was asked to downplay his skills for the first few episodes, trying to recreate a recipe from memory is a pretty good way to do it. The series has always been dysfunctional. It's half "World's Wackiest Kitchen Katastrophes" and half "My Fair Lady: Food Edition." Genuinely teaching skills to people who need them would be boring, and Food Network is much more about entertainment than information.

Using her psych major as a source of both comedy and character growth was a good idea. She was the hero of some of Jeff's more human moments in Season 3. And both directions worked better than wen she was playing eternal activist in season 1. The problem is that they often didn't know what to do with her. Too many episodes she'd get a joke about screwing up and that's it. With 7 characters (plus increasing presence of Chang and Dean Pelton) that has to happen sometimes. But it did lead to her being underrated.

So Ivan Asmodai fooled them with the state cards. As most of us know, Johnny Thompson is the judge and he's not likely to give away a win unless they specifically thought wrong. So, where? I thought it was fairly obvious that he just needed to know 18 cards, 6 of which anchored 6 groups and the other 12 could be randomly split among those groups. The card Penn picked was not predicted, but does actually complicate the trick if it was pulled from the same pool. Which made me think it wasn't. My guess was "deck switch when his back was turned". That makes Penn's card irrelevant and pre-sets the cards to hand out. It would be easy to do. P&T gave him more credit by suggesting he rearranged the same cards. Is it possible that's what it was? Saying "arrange" or "control a shuffle" or "add cards" when it's a deck switch? Because they're pretty close, but we saw magicians get wins that way in season 1.

I sometimes feel like Penn has gone too far to the extreme with not giving away tricks, to the point that he maybe feels he can just say "You didn't fool us". With Anthony Asimov and the walnuts, they did indeed know precisely but I understand him wanting more explanation. With Ivan Amodai, I'm not sure what that was about. Probably have to keep it to the explanation thread to speculate further. (But thanks for the subtitle tip, @Totale.) Was this the last episode of the season? It was good, but I think I would have picked another one to end on. And like I said last year, Penn & Teller blew out a lot of their big stage tricks in a short time during season 2 so it was pretty evident they had to put together some stuff to show. Not that it wasn't fun - judging themselves (and revealing the method) was very cute here, and the newspaper patter was fun on the prior episode. But neither is near the quality of Cell Fish, Invis-Ball Thread, or Bullet Catch - all of which were done right in a row at the start of season 2.

Fitbit specifically markets as a "Smart Fitness Watch", not calling themselves a smartwatch. But whether that distiction mattered to the people who made your tally I don't know.

Lots of stuff going on. This season could be going somewhere brilliant, but it would be too easy to leave some stuff and never resolve it. Making Gerald the troll not only raises the question of "why him?" but demands an explanation of what Cartman's up to as well. And tying nostalgia to Trump is a very clever angle that never occurred to me. But I don't see a connection to the kids plot or what role PC Principal still has to play.

Un churro. Muchos churros. Nice idea for a round, but man did that bother me.

The first few times I saw GBBO, my thoughts on Mel & Sue were "They need 2 people for this job??" The hosts didn't need a high profile and the jokes elicit more of an amused grin than anything resembling a laugh. However, I do think they fit the tone of the show very well. They were calming and kept the show moving, holding interest without being distracting. GBBO can continue just fine with new hosts, and perhaps I'll like them even better. But I can certainly understand the appeal of this pair. And hey, now I can finally relate to all the drama over Top Gear that I didn't really follow!

There are tells give have significantly better than average chances, but I don't think anyone claims they are 100%. If he went on TV with a method that isn't foolproof he deserve to win on guts alone. But then I don't know what he did do, so don't listen to me.

Of course that might be the problem. In the Venn diagram for Flex, the circles "Likes our look" and "Wears watches" have to overlap. :) Personally I think the original design looked fine, but like "$10-20 fine". And I do wear watches. But I have a Fitbit Surge for kicking around and more classic looks for other occasions. I don't have a need for orange plastic. Also maybe this is just me, but I think some of the patterns Marcus wanted to "add value" are kind of ugly. Does this dalmation watch look like something you'd want to wear?

Thanks for directing me there. Yeah, lots of problems. The biggest one for me is that it makes the watches seem like an afterthought. The front page does not have a single picture of a watch. Once you select a charity you do get a small picture from one angle. But no other information about it. Are these related to the original watches where you could remove the timepiece from the band? Or is there no "flex" left in Flex? As a result, the overall impression it gives is that they aren't selling watches to raise money for charity, so much as using charities to make money for themselves. Not because there's anything wrong with the model, but purely because of the emphasis presented.

That's interesting. I wonder what would prompt them to do that? Even if they feel it's more accurate, why go through the trouble of making the change?

I thought the quicksand challenge was pretty clever. Wilderness-themed, outdoors-appropriate, and physically challenging but not debilitating. On the other hand, using "Bob the Bear" to cook for you makes no sense. I wonder if maybe they had a different challenge planned but a technical issue came up so this was their substitute.

You mean like this? (Time to find out who the young'uns are when they miss the joke.)

There are tells that you can use to get a pretty good guess, but only getting 3 out of 4 would really hurt the trick on national television. Derren Brown has if not invented the trick then certainly popularized it, but I don't think even he would rely on body language unless he had to. Some methods detect via magnet (hence the ring guess) but it wouldn't shock me if it used RFID or some other kind of detection now.

It's a very cute trick. And without giving anything away, it's easy to learn the calculator prediction part. (Changing the napkin into an egg is harder and was uniquely his finish.) Traps is such a great routine that they haven't done in ages. It feels really special that they brought it back for this show and we get to see it in such clarity. (There's an old version on YouTube if you want to see the slight differences, albeit much blurrier.)

Warm reading does seem the most likely, but I'm skeptical they have that level of access / control at the Rio. (At a small theater they're headlining, sure.) To find a guy who'd be sitting on the aisle toward the front and get that information in a way that isn't tempting disaster when you ask him "how many people here know that?" Impressive coordination.