wendyg

blossomculp: So much depends on the luck you've had with health. Bergen apparently had a stroke while she was working on BOSTON LEGAL and successfully kept it a secret for quite some time, but I would imagine it's part of why she is physically slower and speaks slower. The range of my friends in their 70s includes some who are *incredibly* active - play tennis, go pole-walking, work full-time - and one whose health problems have left her reliant on a mobility scooter to get around.

At the time when Murphy would have been in college, a big reason you'd have turned the other cheek is that you were by and large focused on proving you should be taken seriously in whatever profession you were entering. Part of that was also strenuously avoiding suggestions that you "slept your way to the top". #murphytoo didn't feel right to me either. The episode did make me wonder, though, if Murphy was telling the story of something that actually happened to Diane English.

...including Vicki Lawrence, who is herself 69, and indeed the entire *rest of the cast*.

There was a long discussion of who Gene should fear in the topic for the season 4 premiere. Law enforcement for sure - they could probably go after him for racketeering, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit murder. (They might not be able to make all those charges stuck, but he'd be in jail while they investigated.) Walt may or may not be dead yet - and Gene may not know yet if he is. Skyler we know (and Gene can surmise) is giving all the evidence she can, and she certainly knows enough to implicate him. Francesca knows a *lot*, but we presume he is paying her for her silence. Neither Gene nor anyone else knows what has become of Jesse or what his state of mind is. And Gene doesn't know what's become of Todd, the Vamonos Pest guys, Todd's ultra-creepy family, or which pieces of the cartel may have survived to want him (either to kill or to hire as their lawyer). Also, I think it's just obvious that having chosen to Disappear, you *would* be constantly frightened of being identified as yourself instead of your new identity. Gene is very much on his own - which he's never been good at - without any of his usual protective coloring. As for Werner and his wife: why are we assuming that Werner and his wife made no plans to protect him? Why shouldn't they have a thought-out advance plan that is invoked simply by the use of a few common words - say, "book club" - in a particular way? Why wouldn't Werner, knowing the circumstances were dangerous, have left emergency instructions and a "go bag" including the basic documents he would need and some cash? We know nothing about his wife. I'm not suggesting this is the case, but imagine he were married to Lydia. You don't think they'd have a plan?

65? Are they kidding me? What 65yo without a significant disability lives in a home? I thought at first maybe it was a marker, like Jack Benny never aging past 39. But no. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. All around me are 60-somethings who are working full-time, living alone or with their families, traveling, playing sports, volunteering, running things. 65 is the new 40. I love Vicki Lawrence, but I think I'm out.

I can see I'm a party of one here, but I liked Anu. She's direct, confident, and understands what she wants. I didn't see her as a bully at all (which I suppose may say something about me).

Quite. I felt very differently about hearing that Tony Randall, aged 75, had married a 25yo when I learned that he had always wanted children but he and his wife had been unable to have them, and that they'd stayed married for *more than 50 years*, apparently happily, until she died. Randall and his second wife had a couple of children before he died.

I still don't think Oliver came up with an answer to the real question: why *this* abortion-opposing, conservative justice? And the only answer I've been able to come up with revolves around the Clinton-Starr and Nixon-pardon axis. Also, I didn't believe the Federalist guy who said he didn't care which nominee. While all are I'm sure acceptable to him, he *has* to have had his preferences...but didn't want to share them, understandably.

Well, why not make the Key a more powerful god than Glory, while they were at it?

A useful comparison here is Roger Ebert. Ebert was all over online stuff very early on - he had a forum section "Ask Roger Ebert" in the movies forum on CompuServe when that system was big in the early 1990s, and had approached them about making the database of his reviews available there (which they did). When the web came along, he moved it there; when he lost the ability to speak he created a blog, which he wrote in nearly every day, sometimes at considerable length. I know for a fact that he readily exchanged email with thousands of fans, and he personally moderated the millions of comments his blog received. With all that, he was insistent for several years that he was not interested in Twitter. Eventually, various people convinced him that his ability to write - and to write concisely with meaning in every word - would make Twitter a natural home for him, and he joined and immediately became a frequent poster of well-crafted Tweets. Murphy Brown is as experienced a journalist (although she did not work in print), and if there's one thing you learn in that profession it's how to write short. Even if she hasn't *written* tweets before, she's read plenty of them in newspapers, etc. I wasn't bothered by her jumping in and being competent at writing tweets...while making the obvious mistake of not realizing how visible she was going to be. (And I've been on Twitter since 2008...and am 64.)

eel2178: That doesn't particularly worry me because there are things you can do with a law degree to help people even if you can't act as their lawyer personally. You can teach, you can advise, you can work for non-profits on policy and improving legislation.

I think Candice Bergen looks fine, and I like the idea that she's in a position to tell Hollywood's weight trainers to go train themselves. I didn't like the old-person-has-a-flip-phone bit. The Murphy Brown I remember would have been all over email and smartphones when they came out. Even if she was technically out of the news business, she would have been on Twitter, because journalists *love* Twitter and most of her friends and competitors would be there. Plus, she almost certainly would have been offered serious money to write a book when she left FYI, and the publishers would have set her up if she wasn't already. The young tech guy was funny, but again, he's got older relatives who really *would* have flip phones, and he would have seen them before. I *did* very much like that they didn't go the route I expected and make Murphy and Avery estranged. It's nice to see a serious career woman depicted as being, in the end, a competent mother with a good relationship with her son.

They're all professionals, but nonetheless, as soon as the announcement was made that this is the last year, the writers started looking for their next job. Some will have burned out already and been replaced anyway, I would think. A shift in tone seems to me a strong indication of changes in the writers' room.

In 2004? Trust me (since I've been online since 1991 and make my living writing about the Internet), in 2004 the ADA could easily have found an online phone book with the number of the Coushatta police, probably they could also have found a website belonging to the Louisiana state police, if not the local police in Coushatta. They would also likely have found websites belonging to the local newspapers. *One* phone call would establish whether the church existed and who its pastor was. 2004 was the year Google went public; the year Facebook was founded. There was ten years of web before then.

eulipian 5k: Stephen Hawking had the benefit of the UK's NHS.

But if you were a writer for this show, would you choose a non-Chilean animal for that story, when there are undoubtedly plenty of cute scavengers in Chile they could have made the same point with? I've always believed from the fact that Hank et al. could not find any record of Fring in Chile that he was not in fact Chilean, though he was obvious affiliated with some pretty frightening people there, given Don Eladio's comments. These writers rarely slip up, so until or unless we're shown otherwise, my guess is it was intentional.

The first guy sounded more French to me.

What crime has he committed, exactly? He bought a bunch of phones and resold them.

Oh, no, I read that as one thing only: FEAR OF KIM. His comment that he's already shared too much seems to me to allude to the takedown he experienced. I bought a prepaid phone in Harrisburg, PA I think in early 2000 or 2001.

But she doesn't quit; she's clearly decided he's worth putting up with for some reason. Either she likes the person but not the job or it's going to turn out that her association with him makes her unemployable elsewhere.

I think that's part of it - she started out by liking him and he's relentlessly sucked her into crime and danger. I think she retains some personal liking for him beneath the anger, though. It's a relationship I'm hoping they'll explore more, because she really is the one person who's been in his life through these stages. My guess is Saul figures by November she'll be able to give him a sense of when and if he can come back...but note that despite her anger and even contempt....she expects to be there to answer the phone.

I think it was the

Yes - I think for about three days. Saul was wearing the right color shirt (purple) for it to be the day the disappearer picked him up. I loved Francesca's reaction to the attempted hug. (And thought Saul really should have given her more money up front.) What's really noticeable about Kim's work with these defendants is that her approach is very like Jimmy's was when he was doing the same work. She tells them in no-nonsense terms what to do and what awaits them if they don't follow her instructions. I thought the kid looked like he was taking in what she was telling him when she warned him what it would be like for him in "adult jail". Francesca and Kim already know each other, so ISTM she wouldn't need Kim's card. She *would* need Howard's, though. Or that of the prosecutor we're always seeing in these cases. The first contractor was obviously bullshitting, and the mention of a previous illegal job didn't help. So either he didn't have a clue what the job really involved (in which case: disastrous cave-in) or he was a cowboy out to take their money and would do a crappy job (in which case: ditto). Either way, not someone you want. Noticeable that first guy showed up like a real estate agent with an infrared beam to measure rooms and a laptop...2nd guy shows his reams of experience by bringing a little notebook, a pen, and his brain. What shocked Jimmy, I think, was realizing how atrophied his "Slippin' Jimmy" muscles were: he *thought* he could go back an interact on the streets the way he always had, but the time away in corporate law and near-respectability has in fact changed him in ways he didn't recognize until now. He *thought* the punks would realize he was one of them...instead, they see a middle-aged, middle-class guy with money they can roll. He needs a new image. Fortunately for him, there's one waiting for him.

What strikes me about Kim sitting in court daring the judge to assign her to a case is that she can tell the Mesa Verde people, "Nothing I can do - the judge ordered me to represent this public defendant." I also wondered if maybe she was trying in some way to get closer to Jimmy as he was when they got together - he was working the public courts before he went into elder law. I see it as that and also as exploring the road she might be about to close off by making this greatly enlarged commitment to Mesa Verde, which could establish her as the head of her own HHM.

Joana, one word: YEMEN.