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wendyg

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Everything posted by wendyg

  1. I believe the line was actually "I respected your father."
  2. Cornellians certainly don't think so! Cornell is definitely a little *different* from the other Ivies, though. For one thing, out of the eight colleges on the Ithaca campus, four are state-funed (Agriculture, Human Ecology, Industrial & Labor Relations, and the Veterinary school), and four are privately endowed (Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Hotel and Business Administration, Law, and Art, Architecture, and Planning). So what snobbery there is about Cornell is more directed at the state schools, certainly not at Arts & Sciences. Really, though, it's just envy. Harvard students don't have the opportunity to learn tractor-driving and silage-shoveling, and they certainly don't get to take courses in artificial insemination, as my pre-vet roommate did. It's always very interesting to me who went to Cornell - it's had some very quirky graduates, and I think that's partly because of having a much more varied population of students. And one other thing: Cornell gives no honorary degrees. Anyone who has a Cornell degree earned it the hard way. A lot of alumni are very proud of that.
  3. I find it amusing that the luau performance has changed very little since 1969 - at least, the luau performance set in that year of MAD MEN (Season 6 opener) has almost all the same elements. As someone who reads mystery novels, I find this interesting because we don't even know who got killed. The setup also reminds me of the Maggie Smith-Diana Rigg-Peter Ustinov movie of Agatha Christie's EVIL UNDER THE SUN.
  4. The two girls strike me as having escaped from original GOSSIP GIRL.
  5. I think it's reasonable that Rachel was swept up in the preparations for the wedding and is more worried about her career prospects now that she's getting a clearer, and less happy, picture of the life she's embarked upon. But also: speaking as a freelance myself, I might easily want to take the job even if it conflicted with my honeymoon. Every freelance I know is paranoid that the phone won't ring again if you say no. The money in ournalism in general for non-stars got a lot worse between 2001 and 2010, and has by and large not recovered. One of the journalists I know was my editor on a computer magazine in the 1990s. Circa mid-2000s they were working for the same company, but required to churn out 5-6 stories a day, mostly regurgitated press releases. Had a mortgage and kids and couldn't afford to take any risks. Does have a different job now doing more interesting writing for an independent outlet. The point being that every career has ups and downs. Also speaking as someone used to financial independence, it is very, very hard to give that up. I think it's fair to say that every freelance journalist has written things we're not proud of. For many starting out, yes, you take what you can get and hope to improve. Being established as someone they can call any time and get usable copy on time and to brief out of...is invaluable. And a "few hundred dollars" for a piece that will take a few hours really isn't such terrible pay! Finally, I would not recommend hitting up a power-executive for an interview while on vacation. If I wanted to make a useful contact like that, I would look at it as an investment for the future. "Hi, remember we met at White Lotus - you were there with your family, I was on my honeymoon, and you gave me some really great advice? I wondered if you'd be willing to help me with this story I'm working on..." So the hit on Rachel's skills is not that she didn't ask for an interview, but that *she didn't get her phone number and email address*. She could even have tried after she saw Nicole's reaction to the story. "Oh, my god, that's terrible. I never imagined you would see it that way. How about you give me your contact details and I'll call you in a few weeks when you're back at work and see how we can make this right?" She could easily go on to sell the piece about high-flying female execs whose rise to their positions is unfairly being tagged with preferential treatment because of MeToo/etc. Circa 2007/2008, I played Werewolf at a tech conference with Jeff Bezos. I told him he was making a mistake to throw me out of the village as a suspected murderer. He did it anyway. I was not the murderer. He apologized. I asked if he was sorry enough to grant me an interview. No, he was not. :) (But I had still snuck in a question I was curious about earlier in the game while we were talking, though I never used the answer.)
  6. Co-creator Gina Yashere talks to the Guardian about the show and her career: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/jul/12/gina-yashere-on-riches-racism-and-us-success-i-dont-like-to-boast-but-im-doing-very-well
  7. This article in an interview with the leader of an organization that helped SUPERSTORE with Matteo's story as an undocumented immigrant: https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/telling-undocumented-immigration-stories-superstore.html
  8. Ebersole is amazing in KOMINSKY METHOD. I only recognized her voice. Even after I knew who it was I still couldn't really see it. By the way, I've counted up. Vernee Watson has been in no less than seven of Lorre's shows, going all the way back to GRACE UNDER FIRE.
  9. I was thinking the actress who plays Margaret - Melissa Tang - looked familiar. In other topics (I think mostly relating to BOB HEARTS ABISHOLA) there's been some discussion of Lorre's reuse of actors he likes (Paul Reiser's mother in this show is played by Christine Ebersole, who is a regular on ABISHOLA). Tang turns out to be quite the Lorre regular. Besides this one: MOM, BIG BANG THEORY, and YOUNG SHELDON. However, I'm guessing that the champ Lorre recidivist is Vernee Watson - by my count she's been in *seven* Lorre shows, all the way back to GRACE UNDER FIRE. It was a little odd watching Paul Reiser playing one fictional character watching himself playing a different fictional character.
  10. I feel sure that the money truck pulled up to his house for MAN WITH A PLAN.
  11. Ken Levine has already done it (in the last six months) as a play called AMERICA'S SEXIEST COUPLE. A reading of is starring Joely Richardson is (or maybe was) on YouTube as part of a series to raise money for actors out of work during the pandemic. It's here:
  12. Didn't Emily Baxendale say the same thing?
  13. Schwimmer has done a lot more movies than that. He was superb (and so different) in the lesser-known IT'S THE RAGE. He's also done a *lot* of theater, which of course is largely invisible if you look at IMDB. He's really a very good, versatile actor. Re casts who are good friends: the cast of THE BIG BANG THEORY appear to have gotten along very well, to the point where the three top leads took salary reductions so the other three could be paid more.
  14. The actress playing Lizzie is also a Lorre veteran - she was on DISJOINTED,
  15. It's not fair to blame Remini for being a Scientologist; her mother brought her into the cult when was 10 or 12. She didn't join as an adult of her own choice.
  16. Yes, the Guardian has this story, too: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/may/24/kevin-spacey-return-italian-paedophilia-drama Apparently it is neither a joke nor satire that he is playing a detective investigating a man wrongly accused of pedophilia.
  17. I was happy enough with this ending. The newcomers gave them all a chance to remember how far they've come, and they all were left in a pretty good place. It wasn't a laugh riot, but it was true to the show.
  18. The New Yorker has a piece about the Aghan war reporter and interpreter who's one of the show's writers: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/a-mullah-walks-into-a-bar-from-war-torn-kabul-to-a-writers-room
  19. iMonrey: What characters other than killing off Charlie in TWO AND A HALF MEN after Sheen melted down and nearly killed the show? He notoriously had problems with Cybill Shepherd, but he didn't have a chance to take any sort of revenge out on her character because she got him booted from the series he created. The only other actors I'm aware of that he had trouble with were Brett Butler (who was using drugs) and Roseanne Barr (who had trouble with *everybody*). It's really notable to me how many actors are happy to work with him again and again - on MOM there's Mimi Kennedy (Dharma's mom in DHARMA AND GREG), on THE BIG BANG THEORY Sara Gilbert, Laurie Metcalfe, and Johnny Galecki (ROSEANNE), Christine Baranski (CYBILL), on BOB HEARTS ABISHOLA Vermee Watson (too many of his shows to count).
  20. I think it would be harder to make a tough, hypercritical father funny. I had friends as a teenager whose father was very authoritarian, and there wasn't anything funny about it. That said, one problem with a lot of sitcoms is that the female adult lead is the one who's always stomping down on anything that's fun.
  21. ams1001: I was thinking that. And there's really no excuse for these writers, since the Smithsonian National Zoo's baby panda was born on August 21 to a fanfare of publicity. (Watch him on the webcam!)
  22. Marco Pennetti, whose real life experience the show is based on, has said in interviews that he and his donor are still in touch and they sound like good friends, but it doesn't sound like it developed into anything else. So that's promising...
  23. The dances were fun, but this episode contained yet another absolutely infuriating depiction of severe allergies. No one for whom peanuts pose a risk of anaphylactic shock eats strange food without checking out the ingredients, no matter how much they want to please their hosts. Or they take the cookie and don't eat it. (Or, at *worst*, they eat a very small bite and check for a reaction before proceeding.) I am so, so tired of this particular sitcom trope (and Lorre has used it berfore - Howard on BBT was also allergic to peanuts) because it treats people with allergies as if they were irresponsible idiots.
  24. People who travel for a living do often have more than one passport - eg one for Israel and one forAraab countries or a spare they can use when they have to submit one to get a visa.
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