wendyg

nosleepforme: She takes those parts because they're offered to her and she needs or wants the work. It doesn't matter what you did in the past when you need to pay the rent...

I hated the ending of this episode *so much*. The *only* conceivable reason Angel has to tell Buffy what he's done in turning back time is to manipulate the audience's emotions. It makes no sense: why would you want your final memory of the one day you have together to be of your loved on sobbing her heart out? Why would you tell her *at all*, since she's not going to remember it anyway? (Quite apart from, if there was a demon that could rehumanize vampires, why wouldn't the Watchers have discovered it long ago and begun using it to help rid the planet of the scourge?)

Bryce Lynch: Thanks for posting the podcast link. I particularly liked this exchange: "How the hell did you burn that house down?" "It was a shame. The family was very nice about it..."

The show skips over that, but it's fairly easy: we see Mike asking for the company's address when he calls Directory Assistance. So my assumption is he stakes out the company parking lot, picks an employee he thinks is suitable for him to impersonate (bald, same height), follows him home, and then steals the credential, which most people probably do keep in their car and hobbles the car so the guy will be delayed. Then all he has to do is show up the next morning. If you know how security consultants do the kind of attack Mike did, all his activities once he was in were pretty clear. Companies often hire this type of consultant to attempt to get in and use "social engineering" to convince people to give them stuff they shouldn't in order to test the quality of their security. They don't usually steal credentials and mess up people's cars, though.

A small point: I really love the detail that Juan Bolsa translates to "Johnny Sack".

Chuck and Howard's father created HM, then Howard finished growing up and joined the firm to make it HHM. That chronology works.

Dev F: I think the chronology may be the one place the writers went a little overboard. If Chuck was this genius - college at 14, top in everything at Georgetown Law, it raises a larger question: why did he pick Albuquerque to settle into law practice? With all those credits, he could have gone anywhere. And we know he was ambitious. Why wouldn't he have been angling at SCOTUS or some other top job?

It's not just age. I'm 64 and I've never heard of him before.

Long article promoting season 4, including interviews with several of the actors: https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-better-call-saul-season-4s-hurtling-sprint-toward-breaking-bad?ref=home

My last word on this, because life is too short. I think we should trust WILLOW on this: WILLOW No it wasn't. He said that so you'd take a chance and sleep with him. He's a poop-head.

I don't fall into either camp; but the deception of his approach is quite clear to me. I'd also point out that at no time did he say to Buffy, "You aren't the one for me." Instead he said he would call her later, and then left her hanging.

You may need to rewatch. Parker has a very specific schtick: he tells the girl (both Buffy and her successor) that he's been damaged, and it's hard for him to open up. Then, he appears to open up, the girl is flattered into thinking she's special to him, and *that's* why she goes to bed with him. He then tries this tack with Willow, who just laughs at him. This is most charitably described as deception. If he had said to Buffy, "We both like apples, wanna fuck?" and then Buffy took it as the beginning of a relationship, *then* you could say she was mistaken. In this case, however, he deliberately deceived her into thinking they were becoming intimate emotionally as a ploy.

I wonder if this story is apocryphal. Because: back in the 1970s I read a book that included some material on early expert systems (what we'd now call AI), and one was a translation system Russian-English and English-Russian. The story was that the machine was given various English things to translate into Russian and back again. One of them was "Out of sight, out of mind", which came back as "Invisible, insane". There were several other examples given.

Well, how come the Master's bones don't pouf?

I really hate the scene where Cordelia identifies Winter as a vampire. Given her level of experience she'd be smart enough not to let on she'd read the signs.

Yes. College-bound American high school students typically apply to 4-5 colleges/universities, one of which is a school they're pretty sure they can get into. (It might be a state-funded university in the state where they live, one where they know someone, or just a school where you know your test scores and grades are at or above their known admission standards).

Re Colorado State, two words: Safety school.

Denisof lived in the UK for more than ten years; his English accent (and the way he moves his mouth) is flawless; Denisof is effectively bilingual, in the opinion of English friends. Marsters' accent, however, is awful in the early episodes. ASH took him in hand and personally worked on it with him, so it improved a *lot* in the course of the series. But it still never sounds fully natural to me.

"Close, but no cigar" *long* predates Clinton/Lewinsky. I don't think it's a reference at all.

I think it's clear that Kendra was a relatively weak member of the Slayer line. Without Buffy to work with, she might have died sooner.

I think the first AIDS cases date to about 1981. I'd say an entire generation of gay men was lost, not men in general (though it's also true that the disease looks very different outside the US, and in Africa many more deaths were and are women). For those interested in what it was like, I suggest the TV production of Larry Kramer's THE NORMAL HEART from a couple of years ago, or the book by Randy Shilts, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON (that was also made into a movie, though I think the book is a vastly better explanation of how things went). The early association of the disease with gay men meant that Ronald Reagan's government declined to fund research until forced.

FRIENDS started some years before blogs. There was an active Usenet newsgroup - alt.tv.friends. You can find its archives at "Google Groups". And an active IRC channel with a very silly trivia quiz that I immortalized here: https://web.archive.org/web/20031204170331/http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11056 (The original site has taken that article offline.) wg

Well...YouTube has a clip of Lucy doing Freddy the Freeloader with Red Skelton: And also performing the famous DUCK SOUP mirror scene with Harpo Marx: She clearly studied comedy!

Besides the reaction of the studio audience there were reviews and, most important, ratings. Doesn't matter what they say about you; what really counts is whether people watch so advertisers will pay to sponsor your show. FRIENDS started in 1994, around the time the internet was opened to commercial traffic and began really growing. So by the time it ended it was common to find recaps, fan groups, and TV sites (including the late, lamented Television Without Pity) all discussing the show. Social media is a new tool, but there have been many tools before it.

Lucy did a lot of things that reminded me of Red Skelton - she had a vagabond character that was very like his (including similar clothes and makeup), for example. That period, coming from vaudeville, comedians often developed numerous characters they would return to frequently (see also Carol Burnett's charwoman). I never liked her actual sitcom that much, but I greatly admired her skill - even more so when I realized she started as a dramatic actress (see her work in WITHOUT LOVE or STAGE DOOR). I'd class this as a bit different from a writer plagiarizing another's joke - it's more like a magician copying another magician's trick, in that she still had to perform the skit and make it work. Skelton *didn't* sue her, after all, perhaps because he recognized that as well as their friendship.