Jobiska

Heh. And you'd think with that much thick hair, he'd be able to disguise it, but it only makes it worse somehow!

My recording cut out just as Jay was making a little heart symbol in a talking head. I take it Sarah insisted and Jordan agreed? I didn't have much respect for their human kindness anyway, but Nany and Johnny actually horrified me with their gleefulness at Wes' injury. And Johnny always makes it so personal in his talking heads, "f'in' ginger" and the like.

They even said that! One of them said something like assuming the "mom" figure wouldn't want to skinny dip, and the other said "I guess she didn't want to be a mom, she wanted to be a girl!" Hindsight's 20-20, of course, but I thought that was pretty poignant and sensitive of them to realize that--wish they had said it to Nina. It's Hali who's the law student, not Jenn. I think Jenn was shown as being pretty insensitive, but Hali was just more nonplussed at the difficulty of communicating. I don't have any problem with Hali so far. And I agree with whomever upthread said that Lindsay (I think?) who just rolls her eyes and snarks at Dan all the time is worse than either of them. Yeah, Dan can be obnoxious, but she was acting like he was insane or something to try to make underwear. I'm glad they didn't sledgehammer us with the obviousness that it was actually useful for Blue Collar to while away the time playing basketball (crate ball, I guess), as it may have helped them in the challenge. For once they allowed us to draw a conclusion ourselves!

Does anyone know which Blood/Water II duo was the alternate pair who replaced So and sister when they had to drop out?

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist either, but even if I were, I can't begin to imagine how TPTB would think that this would be a satisfactory outcome for anyone--even, to some degree, Katie, who didn't get the original confetti and applause, but just was informed of the win on an almost-empty sound set. I mean, I'm sure she's glad she won, but would have much preferred it to be straightforward. It reflects badly on the show to have such an ignominious finale, so I can't imagine they'd actually create this! Even if there were a fix, it's not Katie's fault. I didn't hear the vocal fry until you all pointed it out (now of course I do, ack), but I think it and the worse affectations are things she can grow out of. I like her (liked Tim and Gaspar too, though), and am happy for her. I don't know what was up with Tim, but if it was subconscious, I do feel bad for him.

I finally got around to watching this--says something about the season and its participants that I wasn't in any way eager to watch. My main impression was that it was the opposite of a Survivor reunion, where a female winner gets a few words and then Jeff Probst fawns over whatever buff male guy (even far down the chain) he thought was the perfect example of a he-man true Survivor. In this world, we got an almost-silent Dimitry (except where he had to answer accusations/tweets by Chris and Benjamin), and so much of the rest of it was the Sonjia show. Why the interminable clip package of baby girl-baby girl-baby girl-work it etc. following on top of her lengthy explanation of why she is so great and deserved to win? (and I like Sonjia just fine, too. It just seemed excessive). In a preview it seemed like they all ganged up on Alexandria, so I was relieved to see that it was mostly Michelle yelling "Alexandria!" in response to who was the most difficult to work with, and then Sonjia following up on that at length (because Sonjia show). I'm glad it was not as feeding-frenzy as I feared it would be. Patricia and Justin came off looking great. May they be successful back with their caring partners in their happy lives. Actually I want them all to be happy, even Helen and Benjamin, because if they are happy with their lives maybe they won't be so mean. And I want them to be happy off in their private lives and never see them again unless it's succeeding in their fields outside of PR.

I forgot to mention: What is the obsession with belly wounds? I've lost count. If you are a Serbian fighty guy (I always forget what their specific background is) turned jewel thief, you survive them and can even stitch them up yourself. If you are Steve (some seasons ago, forget which episode) you survive them and go leaping about the jungle with them. If you are 5-0 (Danny, recently, probably some others too) you survive them but are weaker than Steve and are often shown being patched up or looking wimpy in a hospital gown. If you are an innocent tourist in a cab, you survive. If you are a bad lady jewel thief, you die.

Yeah, I asked my cat (on my lap at the time) if she could do that, and answered "no" for her. After AOL gave the "cats are great" speech, I said for him, "and that's why I like Catherine, too!" Cuddly ninja, heh. I'm glad we were spared the scene of the apartment dweller coming home and immediately noticing the figurine had been glued together.

Oh, I'm sure he called it stage fright--I wasn't calling you on using it wrong--just wondering if that was why people in the ep thread kept adding the "social" modifier.

#selfiefail, while amusing, was inaccurate. It was a perfectly successful selfie. However, the hashtags #traincatchingfail and #raaaaaaacefail would have been entirely apropos. I didn't have much use for the selfie element....but that did make it more worth while! Poor CJ and Lebya, but they were cannon fodder all along. I hope and believe they enjoyed the experience. Although one could easily share a hot springs etc. experience with a blind date without it being too awkward, I was happy it went to a longterm actual couple instead. Those guys seem sweet and I hope it helped them relax!

I love this team (the "vicinity" convo clinched it). I was intrigued that they represent two different ways of getting into the legal profession. He was all "I was a sports law paralegal! And I loved it! And I decided to really commit to that field and become a lawyer!" And she was the too-common "My parents wanted me to go into a good, challenging field, and I didn't like the sciences, so....." I just hope she's not unhappy in her work.

I'm a little confused by folks in the episode thread referring to his "social anxiety." I only heard him say anxiety. I mean, I'm sure you can have both, but I thought that's what he said. (I don't see stage fright, referred to in Chyna's post above mine, as the same thing as social anxiety really). I'm a big ol' emotional sponge when it comes to other people's anxiety, so I am not sure I can out and out say I'll enjoy watching them per se, or not when his anxiety comes to the fore, but I like them and I feel for him.

I don't know whether I buy Probst's claim that all the puzzles "should" take the same amount of time, but re the 50 small pieces, have none of them ever seen the challenges where one or more puzzle piece among many fell off the table while being poured out? Even if noted right away, you're wasting time running around the puzzle picking it up off the ground, and you might not even see it right away. I groaned when they untied the 50 piece bag, even before Shirin choked.

I, too, think Carolyn's words were basically an abbreviation for "[Every season, the first few voteouts are almost always women to 'keep the tribe strong,' and I suspect this tribe is also going to say] we need to vote out women first to keep the tribe strong, [so I'll run with that assumption and make sure it's So and not I who is voted out]." I'll admit I like her so far, but even if I didn't, I'd guess this was her line of thinking rather than blindly spouting that women needed to go first because duh. Yeah, I think that CreepyVince was catching raindrops on his tongue in the truck, because how "playful" and "childlike" and "free-spirited" that was. I'll cosign that that was a raccoon, but it was a raccoon who has to live by its wits in the jungle, so it was svelte, unlike the raccoons here in my neighborhood close to the center of Philadelphia, who apparently find plenty to eat while barely lifting a paw. And I (perhaps biasedly) think that there are many fewer contestants from Philly on reality shows overall than there are from Boston. ETA: It may be a good thing that Jeff is referring to the tribes by collar names rather than tribe names, since the White Collar tribe sounded uncomfortably like "Messiah" to me.

The jealousy and the demand for a hug...ugh, just ugh. May he go soon.

It can't be Johnny and Averey because they were beaten by Bananas and Nany and are now gone. I think the latter are arriving to play Jonna and Zach *in* the Dome. And like Lantern7, I'm feeling glum because it's lose-lose--I dislike both of the guys. The women are fine.

I was amused when Heather calling Amanda's babies "loin fruit" in an interview so startled production that they asked her to clarify. That said, she got stuck too long on trying to get the team to guess "The Neverending Story" by gesturing at Amanda and rocking a baby. I don't know how I'd act that one out otherwise though--she should have passed, since that was an option, apparently. I like Colby. I don't care if he sounds pompous. I like Jonathan too. Penn can toss atheist gibes out all he wants during non-competition time, but it wasn't fair that he yelled something while the actress I didn't know and have forgotten the name of was up there trying to compete. I liked the touch that the boxes newly had airholes when they were shown indoors.

That means of dropping them into the water terrified me. It seemed like when they unrolled, on the first go-round (when their heads were near the edge) there would often be sort of a jerk almost as if it was catching on their head/neck. I was sure there'd be a broken neck or at least whiplash--felt bad for Averey that it "smacked" her in the cheek--you don't have time to prepare for a proper entry in this one. Not to mention Jonna's helmet practically hanging off of her when she was in the "cocoon"--you'd think they'd make sure they had their headgear on right. Here are the remaining people I can tolerate: Wes, Jay, Sarah for the most part, and Jonna. Sigh. Oh, I guess Jenna too, since she's mostly a non-entity to me, and her being not am smart is I suppose an excuse for her being deluded into thinking Zach is a tolerable person.

I always assumed that the shows that show up on the main forums page were automatically driven by amount of posting traffic and/or whether the show is recapped, and that there just isn't enough forum traffic for 5-0 to make it so you don't have to click on the "and 18 more" or whatever the # for H is. But what do I know? I've thought for several seasons now that the makeup of their little fun gatherings were weird. The oddest was Chin Ho's wedding which as I recall was mostly colleagues. Didn't Malia have any relatives at all? And I know Chin Ho and Kono have more than were there....so the Valentine's Day party, while an odd assortment of folk for such a thing, is nothing new. Also, why bother carefully forming burgers and cutting American cheese into heart shapes if you're just going to cover them up with a regular round bun? And it's a little thing, but it irks me when they have an actor for a kid (brother of Patrice) and then the grown up version looks nothing like the kid version. Their entire skull shape was different, let alone eyebrows, etc. etc. (The grown actor looked more like he could be Patrice's brother than the kid actor did). Finally, if I, my husband, and my son caught a taxi, we'd all squeeze in the back, or if it seemed indicated that someone would sit up front, it would be my husband. I dunno--it seemed weird that the teen daughter was up front.

That's funny, I read the article about Michelle as saying that Michelle sat there for 30 minutes....with the sentence having "she" agree with "Michelle," and "she" still meaning "Michelle" in the following sentence:

I have to say, I don't usually notice the decor of places they are serving in, but I loved that tiled indoor courtyard or whatever it was and the rustic wood table with the muted table runner down the middle. Except I realized in my own house the cracks in the rustic wood would get filled with crumbs and darned if I'm going to vacuum my table--I have enough trouble getting around to vacuuming my floors!

I do have to say that if someone said to me "here, you can either have some melted chocolate with a nice sturdy white chocolate flavored whipped cream, or you can have some carrots with a thin chocolate sauce," I'd snarf that melted chocolate right up. But I agree that it wasn't appropriate for a Top Chef challenge, and that Doug should have made some dessert plans in advance. I'd even have been okay with him interviewing "boy, I don't do desserts much, but I made some plans, learned how to do a flan and a tres leches cake that I thought I might put my own stamp on, but I didn't expect to do dessert out in a field for a quickfire." You knew you needed to do it, don't just whine that you don't do it! (and I love Doug, though I'm happy with the two finalists).

I'm not that much more thrilled with Nany saying about a dozen times "I know things about you and you and everyone but I just don't say them." To me that's still sort of saying them, just not with specifics. And Johnny just casually throwing in "I call Theresa 'Theresa 10 and 2' because that's the position her legs were in"--ugh, yuck. Averey's a mess and painful to watch--strangely, to me Wes came off the best in that whole show. (And he used some of those words right, if not all...at least he's heard them before, unlike most of the Challengers). Poor host trying to get the women around to admitting they shouldn't slut-shame each other because the men do enough of it. That went over all of the women's heads, as far as I could tell.

I'm guessing it's because, along with all the previouslies and the bumpers for what's coming up after the commercial, they keep playing the later-in-the-season clip where TJ finally reveals this news in the Dome, so it seems quite familiar already. I really wish that instead of sitting around with his head bowed while Bananas ranted at him, Zach would have said "I did it because you kept ordering me around to play your game for you, as if I were nothing but your pawn, not your alliance-mate." But Bananas wouldn't have heard him anyway.

I'm having trouble finding any site listing where all the past winners are from--what I've found lists their current restaurants, but unless you know where those are or tediously click through, it doesn't compare locations. Has anyone come across this info in a neat tidy package? Full disclosure--I'm pleased to live in Philly where two former winners have restaurants (eating at Laurel's on my husband's and my to-do list--we need to call and reserve a million weeks ahead, I know). I'm curious whether Philly has a disproportionate number of winners to its size. I'd love to see a season set in Philadelphia, and it occurred to me when I saw them shopping in Boston and picking out some wine as an ingredient at Whole Foods whether our antiquated state store setup is why they haven't. But they could get around that by having wine etc. in the pantry. Do folks think there'd be enough interest in a thread about the locations themselves (their cuisines, etc.) to start one?