SailorGirl

Historically on the show, she's always bargain shopped -- there was at least one episode where she was shopping in a thrift/vintage store, and the white suit she wore to marry Big at the courthouse came from a thrift shop. So regardless of money, its completely in character for her to do thrift/vintage stores.

I got the impression it was more that they didn't talk about it beforehand? From the little I know about open marriages, if it is talked about beforehand and agreed upon (regardless of the outside participant's gender) by both spouses, then its all good, but if not, then its cheating. Ashley seems pretty sex positive so I don't think Michael's bi-sexuality is a problem for her. I would imagine she sees it more as a lack of respect for her and whatever agreement they have. I think its the lack of trust/communication in him not telling her. It makes me wonder if Michael doesn't have some mommy issues. Think about it -- if they have an open marriage agreement, then what is there to gain by cheating other than taking Ashley's attention away from the two other baby boys in her house. Michael sees male children getting her attention that he's not getting so he acts out in a childish way to get her attention. A good therapist would be able to identify that for him but unless he wants to actively work on it, Ashley may as well just buy three binkies instead of two and be done with it.

I'm pretty sure that was Chris and Candiace, not Ashley and Michael.

Nitpicking one does not negate my overall point. As I said, these were off the top of my head. I thought Mayim Bialik had more advanced degrees but wasn't sure, so thank you for confirming my point! 😎

Because furthering one's education is never a bad thing? Not sure why this is confusing -- a lot of people with much bigger entertainment careers have advanced degrees -- just off the top of my head -- Brian May of Queen has his PhD in astrophysics. Mayim Bialik has a bachelor's in neuroscience. Ja Rule has a certification from the Harvard Business School. Montel Williams has his engineering degree from the U.S. Naval Academy.

North doesn't seem to have a whole lot of rhythm. No plastic surgeon can fix that . . .

As I sit here post-tequila, I would like to comment that despite the divisiveness that has permeated this specific episodic thread, I commend us all on our ability to rise above petty squabbles and come together in the universal recognition and acceptance that the McDonald's fish sandwich is the one true epicurian delight that unites us all. But, as I sit here enjoying my hot plain fish sandwich (the custom order is always hot because it is prepared to order) and salty fries, I can only reflect that even in global unity there is disharmony, because the pinnacle of the McDonald's fish sandwich is PLAIN. No tartar, no cheese -- just the squishy bun and the deep fried combination of cod, haddock, and whatever else is in the leftover pile -- with one full-packaged ejection (on top ONLY of the square utopia) of faux ketchup that is 99% high fructose corn syrup -- smashed together to splay the ketchup across the entire square of golden goodness, with a side of hot salty fries to dip into the separate pool of sugary paste disguised as ketchup ejaculated into the top compartment of the cardboard box in which the squishy fishy goodness is delivered. Thus endeth my tequila-fueled soliloquy to the McDonald's fish sandwich. (I've been trying to keto for far too long. This shit is GOOD.)

Then how does she seem to be more of an asshole now? You'd think finally being able to transition into who she really is and who she hid for essentially her entire life would make her grateful, kind, and empathetic. She's just a jerk. Always was. Her transition unfortunately didn't impact her jackassery.

She asked if he had a "mud room." The house she wanted to buy had a mud room -- the takeaway is that she considers a house with a mud room to be a luxury that clearly even mid-level managers can afford.

Did you watch? What did you think of Annie Murphy's (and the rest of the cast, but mainly her) accent? I thought it was good, but I'm from Maryland and have no idea whether its legitimate to the area -- curious what a true Worcester area person thinks!

I wasn't sure how this was going to work -- going from the sitcom to the darker side, but it really works. They're doing a really good job of creating a disconnect between the two, with the sitcom component becoming more awkward and cringey as the show progresses. The actor playing Kevin is coming across as a real-world Fred Flintstone to me. . . . This is a really creative spin and I'm in!

I said nothing about the ingredients that go into baking a cake, cookies, biscuits, etc. I said the judges ask for X number of bakes and if they don't serve X number of bakes, however they prepared them, they don't meet the challenge and its a disqualifying factor. The quantity the judges are asking for is not subjective. Twelve biscuits are twelve biscuits, be they are sweet or savory, etc. Same for the added elements such as chocolate or sugar work. If they miss that element, they didn't meet the challenge. How they create the sugar or chocolate work is subjective. What is not subjective is whether they do the sugar or chocolate work or not.

THIS. To take it across the pond, consider the Great British Bake Off. These are home bakers, not professional chefs who do this for a living and run restaurants where food consistency is critical. GBBO does a series of three challenges, many of which require making X amount of a certain bake, or adding chocolate work as decoration, or adding some additional element to the core dish to show their skills. The technical challenges are recipes of the two main judges who ARE professional chefs. These challenges are judged blind, so there can be no claim of favoritism, skin color, ethnicity or any other non-baking-related factor, impacting a judge's decision. During COVID I binged every episode on Netflix, and I still have it on in the background if there's nothing else to watch, so I'm fairly up on the show. From what I can recall (and I'm not going to go research every episode to prove a point here), not having the requested number of bakes or the requested added element has gotten several bakers sent home. Its only very early on, when there's 10-13 bakers, has the lack of an element not been an eliminating factor. Even then, not finishing the dish with a required component has automatically put that baker last in that challenge. And the comment is always the same when the taste of the food is outstanding. "Yes it was excellent but he/she didn't complete the challenge." And its reiterated when they are considering who to send home. And these are home bakers. I realize its a different show, but cooking shows in general are based on the participants successfully completing challenges. And if the participants are professional chefs who make their living on running restaurants where food consistency is a must, not having that consistency should be an eliminating factor. If I go to a restaurant because I've heard how amazing a certain dish is and I get that dish but it doesn't have everything that supposedly made it so amazing, I'm going to be disappointed, feel like I didn't have a good experience, and that the chef doesn't know what they are doing. How many times have we heard Tom, Padma, et al say something like, "add that to your menu," or "I'll come to your restaurant every time for that dish"? If you think there's a chance you're not going to get the dish as you originally had it because the chef didn't notice certain elements weren't on the plate, why bother??? These are professional chefs supposedly at the top of their game. Missing components are not the mark of a chef at the top of their game. Consistency is, and has been mentioned, on this show all the time as what makes a winning chef. Its not like this is a new concept that is somehow being used against Dawn because she's a black woman chef. I for one would love to see her win but only if she finishes her dishes! Its a specious argument to say missing elements are only a factor now because Dawn is black. The issue (at least for me) is the inconsistency. In the challenge where she left off the peanut sauce, it was left off of EVERY PLATE, so the judges still all tasted the same plate. My issue is when something gets left off some plates and not others. That's when it becomes impossible to effectively and fairly judge the dish because not every judge is tasting the same thing.

Because judges aren't all tasting the same thing so the judging can't be consistent. The missing element(s) could change how the flavor profiles interact, so one judge is tasting a different dish than another. Its not fair to any of the chefs. If a chef can't even make one dish consistent across 3, 4, 8, or 10 plates, there's no way the judges can accurately discuss it, because they didn't taste the same flavor profiles.

I don't care what a chef's skin color is . . . if that chef consistently misses plating some elements of a dish, he or she should not be moving forward. Once, okay, shit happens, but this is what, the fourth time this has happened?? I think that's what Dale was expressing -- I don't think he was getting angry, I think he was more annoyed that this was happening yet again with Dawn, this far into the competition. Someone should have been annoyed about that -- my immediate thought was, "seriously? AGAIN?" The food flavors may be outstanding but if not everyone experiences the same dish as the chef wants it to be experienced then that chef's skills are not at the level they need to be to qualify as one of the best in the field.

If Dawn is one of the top two, she's going to have a hard time winning if she does her final meal the way she did Restaurant Wars and is as disorganized as she's been in some challenges. She couldn't pull together her dishes in time for the others to taste and work with, and she couldn't even convey to them what she was making because she was essentially just going with where the food was taking her. And there's been at least two, and maybe three, challenges where she was too disorganized to fully plate everything, or something got left off one judge's plate that was on another. How is she going to prepare an entire meal that way? Her sous chefs are going to be standing around or completely lost. She may make the top two or three but ultimately I think the winner is going to be Shota or Gabe. They are more organized start to finish overall, communicate well and clearly with their fellow chefs/sous chefs, and have been more consistent throughout the season. I guess we'll see!!

I think having a baby if you don't want to/aren't ready is a textbook definition of difficult choice and personal sacrifice. . .

well, regardless, we'll know in 6-8 months either way! :-D

I don't post often but have followed the VK saga all along. Is it just me or is everyone skirting around saying what is a likely possibility -- that she got pregnant and decided she wanted to have an abortion but was guilted into keeping/having it by others forcing their opinions and values on her, those same people who programmed DCC as the be-all end-all her entire life? She's never had a chance to figure out her life on her own, why would a pregnancy be any different? Despite women still having choices about their own bodies in this world, guilt from external forces plays much too large a role in unexpected pregnancies, and especially for someone whose life has been driven by others' expectations all along. If true, its likely that she was fed the idea that she can have the baby and still get back in uniform shape by next season, despite the realities of how having a kid takes over your life in general and that getting a pre-baby body back is difficult for anyone, and especially someone who struggles with easy weight gain. No matter what anyone tells her, her body and hormones will dictate her ability to get back into DCC-standard shape. It would explain the weight gain, the awkward selfless, brave, etc. comment, all the support from the teammates, and her essentially disappearing from all visual media overnight. . . . If true, once again, VK's life is being driven by others. Not a big fan of hers but at the same time, the poor woman has never stood a chance of figuring out who she is on her own and making up her own mind about her own life. For all the grief she gets, given the familial obsession with all things DCC, she really wouldn't have turned out any other way. There's a LOT of reasons why I think this is a possibility but I can't add them without violating political policies. What I believe I can safely say is that if you think about the state they live in, the corporate "values" of DCC and their emphasis on the external perceptions of the women's personal choices, etc., it really isn't difficult to speculate the same scenario I did.

that was a bit . . . convoluted of a second challenge?? Poor Byron. For those who don't/can't watch it, this was another two-challenge LCK. Challenge 1: Byron went up against Sarah doing bento boxes and he won. Sarah is out. Challenge 2: The five chefs who are still in the main competition came into the LCK. They each got a box to fill with 10 ingredients that Byron would be making meals of. Of the five boxes, he picked 3 and cooked against those chefs (for example, Jamie created box 2 - he picked box 2, so he and Jamie cooked against each other). Byron had to go up against three chefs. He went up against Gabe first and lost; then Maria and won; then Jamie and lost, so he is out. So the top five remains a top five.

Or maybe, shows are simply making an effort to more accurately reflect what the world looks like. One could just as easily say the whole "cop arc" would have been exactly the same if the police chief had been white, but just gotta get that diversity in by having a black man in a position of authority. The fact that some see it as an attempt to pander toward "diversity" is the very reason why shows need to better reflect what the world really looks like. Because some see it as "diversity" when in fact its just "normality." And on a completely unrelated note . . . Happy Pride Month!!

Its only because it wasn't a controlled testing environment. . . According to TMZ (aka Kris' mouthpiece): Kim's mentor in taking the exam, attorney Jessica Jackson, said, "That is extremely close on a test that most people are not taking in the middle of a pandemic." A source tells us Kim had to take the test at home, while balancing her kids and other factors ... making it more difficult than taking the test in a controlled environment. If anyone has the ability to put herself in a controlled environment, even during a pandemic, its Kimmycakes. How many houses does she own? How many nannies does she have? I'm willing to bet at least a few other people took the exam and passed under the exact same conditions, and they didn't have the ability to get away from their kids or go to a different location for what, a few hours, to take the test. This attempt to make it sound like she's just like every other harried mom trying to manage kids and school at the same time is pathetic.

Here are my two takes on Erin's murder. They each involve both Ross boys: (1) Billy is the father of Erin's baby and John knows this. Billy and Erin were meeting up that night to hang out, drink, have sex. Erin somehow tries to get money out of Billy ("I'll tell" threats, she charges for it now, etc.) for DJ's ear surgery. They are drunk and argue and the argument escalates to physical -- maybe she runs away and he tries to shoot at her but is too drunk and that's why her finger is shot off and the bullet in the tree. She falls and hurts herself badly. He grabs her and is holding her trying to shake her awake or something, which is how he gets covered in blood. Drunk, not thinking clearly, he calls John for help. John says he'll get rid of her body but she wakes up or stirs in the truck, and John kills her and dumps her in the creek but lets Billy think she was dead and Billy is the murderer. (2) Similar approach but with John as the father. Erin wants to meet with John but he refuses and sends Billy in his place, with a "take my gun, just in case." Argument ensues, she runs, he shoots at her and misses, and calls John. John tracks Erin down, kills her, returns to a drunk Billy and convinces him he shot her when she was running. In the days following, John continues to psychologically manipulate Billy to solidify the story in Billy's mind. RE: Dylan -- I think its more likely he's a drug dealer than a pimp -- remember the girls were putting themselves on a website, which enables them to control who they choose to sell their bodies too -- it eliminates the need for a pimp. Unless the third friend has the skill to run a website like that, Dylan isn't smart enough to be behind something like that. He's absolutely a sociopath but I don't think he's a pimp.

Fixed it for ya'. . . .