TomServo

I think you may have accidentally confused Carole King with James Taylor.

Okay, after watching the first episode, I think this is better than the X-Files revival, but not anywhere as good as I'd hoped. The plot feels like everyone Rip Van Winkled the last ten years or simultaneously came down with a case of soap-opera amnesia where they aren't aware of what they've been up to for a decade. ASP could have made it work if she'd written the revival to have a shorter time hop; say, write the setting as having been 2010 instead of 2016 (She'd need Kirk and Zack to shave off those graying beards, though). Both the writing and the acting come across as "Trying too hard, but aren't we cute anyway?" The pop culture references seem forced even though that was one of the fun things about the show originally. But they don't feel as forced as the technology references. "Greetings, fellow youths. Please be sure to give Gypsy's Garage a 'like' on Facebook!" The role-reversal between Michel and Lorelai made me wonder for a few minutes what show I was even watching. I wonder if "Lorelai fires the kitchen crew" was intended to be the new "Emily fires the maid." Rory's wardrobe isn't working for me. I don't know a lot of 30-something professionals who flounce around in short skater skirts for work or corporate interviews, but maybe New Englanders are different? Again, maybe it would be easier to watch if I just pretended all the characters are 5-6 years younger than they claim to be. I've long been of the opinion that the show went off the rails in Season 5 as soon as Logan came on the scene and Rory began throwing herself at him. I had hope that ASP was doing it on purpose as leverage against anyone else's being able to bring it back home for the wrap-up. Now that I realize she meant to do all that from the beginning, I think I might have to pull a Palladino myself and refuse to acknowledge that anything after Rory's high school graduation is canon. Loved the return of the strummy la las. Loved the sets. Loved Kelly Bishop. Was surprisingly okay with Kirk!

So the way I see it, ASP outlined the plot such that Rory is the Sherry to Logan's Christopher instead of his Lorelai.

Anderson lived in north London from the time she was a toddler until the age of 11 and I think after her family moved to Michigan they still spent summers in the U.K. (there is an old video floating around of her reading poetry or something during her teen punk years and her accent was pretty thick). As a result, all of her various accents are a bit of a mess, which is not unusual among the third-culture kids in my circle. I noticed several slips in her Scully accent during the latest X-Files run.

I'm only a few minutes into the World's Strictest Parents episode, and I was surprised that the subjects were American. I watched the show a few times when it was newish (partly because a family from my hometown was on it--they didn't seem super-strict so much as "we live on a farm, so yes everyone has to do some manual labor because that's how a farm works and you won't have time for shenanigans"), and I had remembered it being about unruly international kids being shipped off to discover how American families operate. I did giggle a bit when they zoomed in on the flip-flops in the intro.

I looked it up after that scene, as well, because I'd never noticed anyone in a habit in any of the wedding pictures I'd seen before. Apparently QEII's fashion-conscious mother was worried that Philip's mother might attend the wedding in her habit, but it didn't actually happen. Philip's mother, did, however, wear a wimple with her dress at Elizabeth's coronation. They probably wanted to get that tidbit in, but didn't have a good place to put it in the coronation episode.

Given their position next to the nuts, I'm going to say those are mints of the ol' southern "cake, nuts, mints, and punch" trope. They're basically cream cheese, powdered sugar, and food coloring. And the lady whose head appears to the left of the cake looks sort of like Grandma Duggar.

It wasn't part of a sentence, so it's hard to say. I could think up sentences that could have gone either way within the context of the scene. However, in the *very next scene* after that one, Beth said something like, "It's just us ladies" when it should have been "we ladies" since there was not an unspoken preposition involved. In case it hasn't been mentioned yet: during the football game, you could hear an announcer in the background indicating the match-up between two middle schools. I wonder how Jack got his vehicle home from the game since they arrived separately but left in one vehicle. Maybe Miguel had given him a ride or something.

It goes along with the idea of "the old Albert Windsor is dead..." although you might be surprised at how many of the English monarchs did not change their given names. Queen Victoria used her middle name, as her given name was Alexandrina (I believe she was already using it as her preferred name at the time, though).

Me, either. Or very much for Parenthood. I did cry when watching that Netflix documentary about Mitt Romney and I saw how much he genuinely loved spending time with his grandkids. And some episodes of Call the Midwife. Actually, it was then and still is. We have a little more technology now to help overcome it, but availability of technology is not a guarantee of success. Most women's natural fertility begins its decline in the late-20's. Rebecca is my least favorite character on the show. She comes across as a bit of a princess who treats the way she wants things to be as what everybody else ought to want, too. She pushed discussions about having kids into "later" until her husband couldn't stand it anymore. She told William that he wasn't allowed to see Randall, but then when Randall took the initiative to find William, she accused William of breaking "the agreement," as though William had been given a choice in the matter either time. She micromanaged Kate's eating and blamed attributed the bullying to Kate's not having worn a t-shirt (when nobody else in their family was wearing a t-shirt, either). She obsessed over Randall to the exclusion of Kevin, and ordered Kevin to stick up for his brother without showing any empathy for the fact that the peer pressure was a form of bullying Kevin, too. She probably could have helped Kevin and Randall have a better relationship if she'd handled that differently. And so forth... I have a suspicion that the lack of great chemistry between Rebecca and Jack is on purpose. It feels like the writers are going for a "Miguel turned out to be a better match for her in the end" set-up. Miguel chides Jack about his drinking, and then we get a scene where Rebecca does the same. Rebecca thinks kids will ruin the life they have, and when Jack goes to Miguel to vent about it, Miguel agrees that kids mess everything up (and present-day Rebecca hasn't yet been written as though she has a close relationship with the Big Three. We've had a few "remember what dad used to say?" scenes but I don't recall a balancing "remember what Mom is always telling us?" kind of scene). Not to mention that Jack's ashes are all the way out in California on Kate's mantel instead of with Rebecca. I give Toby a pass on his reaction to the urn, as I'd probably think the same thing if someone said, "Meet my dad!" while plopping a jar of cremains in my hands. Whether my filter would catch it before the thought passed my lips, I don't know. Toby during the rest of the episode, though, no. People like that get on my nerves really fast. I agree that whole scene was contrived. I could understand Kate's not wanting to share about her dad right away, but the point at which she changed her mind and decided to share didn't make sense. After all that, as soon as Toby said, "No hanging out on Sundays during football season," I would have said something like, "Thanks; my football ritual is important to me and someday I will explain it to you. We can hang out before or after, though." but instead she picked that moment to unload the whole thing on him after clearly not having been ready before. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of Jack/Rebecca contemplating kids in the past and Randall/Beth contemplating it in the present. Also, Randall and Beth's girls are being written "young" for their age. If nobody had said how old they were, I would have guessed from the dialog that they were more like 8 and 5.

I can't stand Rebecca, either. After the discussion with William where she accused him of violating their "agreement," I expected to see a scene where they made an agreement. Instead we got a scene where he asked if he could keep up with his son and she said, "no." That's not an agreement, but a pronouncement.

Can somebody please help bring me up to speed on what, exactly, Ross was attempting to do with the mine(s) at the beginning of the episode before he decided to invest in the pump for Wheal Grace? I watched this with someone who hasn't watched the show before, and even though business inner-workings plots in television don't bore me as much as they do some people, when I tried to explain the mine scenes, it was, "Uhmmm. This is mine business stuff. They're trying to blast through to another mine because...reasons? And I thought the abandoned mine they were blasting through to was on someone else's property in the first place so I have no idea whether they even have mineral rights to it? Never mind the details; just remember that they're trying to make money and George is being weaselly"

Every time Caroline is on screen, I expect her to start trying to sell me a Purple mattress.

I apologize in advance for what you are about to see, but I lived through the 90's, so... I want to know what kind of crazy bunker of a room Kirkman was in that he was close enough to the Capitol that he could open the shutters and see the giant fireball, but not to have heard or felt the blast while sitting there flipping channels.

I don't know that they have a separate designated survivor for Congress, but the Designated Survivor is sometimes a member of Congress rather than a member of the Cabinet. I think Senator Hatch did it one year. In real life, the d.s. has to go through training ahead of time and they already have the "football" with their Secret Service detail. It's highly unlikely that the Designated Survivor is anywhere in the vicinity of D.C. during the SOTU. It would also not be out of the question for a few people other than the official Designated Survivor to be absent from the SOTU for some reason or another. Maybe the Secretary of State is out of the country on official business, or someone has a family emergency, or it's past a member of the Supreme Court's bedtime... (Thomas, Alito, and Scalia were not at the last SOTU) Fun Fact: they also have a designated survivor during other large government gatherings like the inauguration ceremonies The b-roll for the day after the explosion was a beautiful autumn scene. For a second, I thought it had signaled a time jump.

Yes and no. Getting in is the hard part, and the Gilmore-esques do have a head start from that perspective. But Ivy league schools are not funded the same way as most colleges and can afford to work with students on the tuition and fees because of their huge endowments. None of the ivies offer performance-based scholarships because they sort people for success and achievement just to get in the door. All their scholarships are based on need--they calculate a financial aid package that takes family size, income, etc. into account. For some students it actually ends up being more financially manageable for them to attend one of these schools than it would be for them to attend a flagship public school, particularly in instances where the family has multiple children attending universities at the same time. I remember back in college, one of my professors was in the middle of figuring out how to make herself look as poor as possible because one of her children had fallen in love with Princeton. Marty is not from a "write a check for Yale" level of wealth, but it appears his family was also not poor enough for him to qualify for a full ride all four years. So that's why we saw Lorelai being shocked when she found out that her recent windfall had prevented Rory from getting a good financial aid package. She assumed that Rory wouldn't have to pay much because Lorelai viewed herself as broke. (again, you'd think after the mess with Chilton and the fact that Lorelai's business degree required accounting classes that she should have been aware of this)

A couple of seasons in to Parenthood, I thought LG was starting to look...tired and bloaty in the face. I never could decide if it was because she was aging or if it was because she was trying too hard not to.

I thought about going to the one near me, but after hearing from a friend how slammed it was and that the "Luke's Cups" were not actual mugs available for purchase, but that the coffee was being served in paper cups with a quote from the show printed on them, I decided to skip it. It was at least a half-hour drive. If it had been closer, I might have braved it. I always assumed that the Trix/Marilyn casting was on purpose as an inside joke. As in, "well of course you'd have a cousin who looks kind of like your mother." I have a cousin whose daughter looks shockingly similar to my great-grandmother's pictures.

That was the scale my high school used, as well. In college, they used the 90 - 100 = A, 80 - 89 = B, etc. scale. But very few of the professors believed in grading on a curve. You got what you earned outright, especially in the intro courses where they were trying to weed out the students who realistically belonged elsewhere. I only remember one class taught by a dean where the tests were regularly curved, and one Calculus class where the instructor let us retake the make-up version of the tests if we wanted to try for a better grade. So 75% = C is plausible, depending on the school.

Well, this is awkward. I actually have a bottle of M-H spray cleaner around here somewhere. There have been several products on Shark Tank that I bought before I saw them on the show, but this is a first for The Profit. After this episode, I doubt I'll be buying a refill for it once it runs out.

I don't get that network, so I have to wait for the whole season to come up on Hulu and hadn't been paying attention to whether the show had been renewed or not. I just finished season 2 last night, and now I am wishing I hadn't binge-watched it since that's all there is.

Yes, she should have, since the Duggars were pushing the Jim Sammons seminars back in the day.

Just as I had gotten used to the black scar on Ross's face, the make-up department decided to change it into a regular-looking pink one.

It's unlikely. Jewish men in that time period did not grow their hair long enough to wear a man-bun.

On the fashion topic: I have an acquaintance who recently got married, and her wedding dress was the same as the infamous silver MOB dress, but in a different color and without the jacket. The length and number of skirt ruffles was the same as the version Michelle wore, so you know how some people were theorizing that Michelle had extra length added to hers? My theory is that instead Kelly Bates might actually have had hers shortened(!) to a more flattering length.