selkie

2. Seems to vary based on state and city by city. In Florida, you can serve or sell alcohol now as long as you've hit age of 18.

If you go be the stereotypes of Germans liking their beer quite a bit and enjoying solving engineering problems, it rather makes sense. Because the show is filmed in The Real World, and not a nice controlled sound studio, Ford Focus promotion, notwithstanding, the producers do have a certain amount of leeway in changing things on the fly if need be, provided it's in the name of fairness to teams or dealing with unexpected problems. There have been secondhand reports that entire legs have been last minute substitutions because of a hurricane or other major weather event, political unrest, etc. has made it a bad idea to follow the planned route and original city/region's scheduled tasks. The origin of the' to be continued...' leg was in the days when a team that finished last in a non-elimination leg had all their money taken away and they had to beg for cab fare to get to the airport for the next leg (plane tickets go on the Race-provided credit card and are apart from the money teams get at the start of each leg for other expenses). But production realized too late that the country they were in (Hungary? Czech Republic?) banned beggars, so teams checking in were told that the leg was not over, and they needed to 'keep racing' instead, letting the team that finished last keep their money they would have lost under other circumstances as a NEL penalty. I've also got my suspicions that there was an unplanned NEL leg in Russia in a later season when the judging of a music task got all screwed up and production figured out that there had been serious problems while the Racers were still out on the course and declared it a NEL because trying to do a time credits system for the judging errors would haven been a clusterfuck of epic proportions. With Munich and surrounds, about 70-75% of people you'll talk to remember enough English from school that you can do the usual polite tourist questions and answers. Around Dresden would be harder since the over 40s in the old East Germany generally had Russian as a second language instead. One funny thing about TAR is that teams tend to default to tourist Spanish when they're trying for a language that is Not English and not quite getting to the local lingo. So many a Japanese or Russian cabbie has been told to get somewhere 'Rapido!' and you'll also see someone telling a Buddhist monk in Southeast Asia 'muchos gracias!'.

Because they've been getting the Team Who? edit until this point. I only realized that Laura existed last episode. It's rather random but there have been cases. Ron and Christina, IIRC, who both spoke Chinese, ended up spending extended time in China during their time on the show. Per RFF, the episode was filmed on November 20-21, 2014. As others have said, it's not so much about cold viruses Looks like air temperature around Munch was about 40F that day, so some risk of hypothermia if they didn't towel off right away. And while German driving is actually pretty easy once you're clear of city centers, downtown Munich is a bit of a mess- many streets closed to car traffic altogether, and a number of other one way streets where they were picking up the car.

Finally I get to say 'hey, I've been there for an episode of TAR'- got a brief glimpse of the front of the glockenspiel, and the place where they had the Focuses looked an awful lot like a parking lot we ended up in when trying to find the rental car drop-off by the train station. And I'm also trying to figure out why one of the teams seemed to have a plastic bag from a FC Bayern Munich gift shop in the car trunk. Was there a missing intermediate task not shown in the name of showing more of the fellas' most bogus non-car journey through Bavaria? It will probably take an hour and a half to clear immigration & customs and take the train from the airport out in the boonies to the center of Munich. (And I suspect that Blair wishes he would have spent an extra five minutes in one of the 'adult shops' near the main train station picking up a ball gag for Hailey) so not surprising the teams seemed to be dragging on top of the long flight. And while Munich is not the worst big city in the world to drive in and German drivers are generally quite good, the center of the city is a maze of streets closed to car traffic, one way rads, and all that fun stuff, so it was probably not easy navigating out to the warehouse.

Often local corruption involves people or companies that may be actual paid advertisers for the local news, and the tv station doesn't want to lose revenue. I live in hurricane alley (the Florida Panhandle), and am enough of a weather geek that I actually don't mind when the local weather forecasters show their inner weather geeks too and are allowed to go off on a brief tangent about how, even though the UKMET model blew it for where Hurricane Julio would pass in relation to Bermuda, it remains their favorite hurricane forecasting model, even more than the FSU Supernensemble model.

From the no one does weird like racewalking file: So in January, a Canadian racwalking blogger posted about Russian walkers seeming to compete in a domestic indoor meet in late 2014 even though they were currently serving doping bans. The Russian track promptly relabeled those photos as actually being fro ma pre-ban meet in 2012. The problem was that the "2012" photos showed athletes competing in shoes that didn't exist then, even if you were a sponsored athlete getting a test pair. And a few other things didn't add up: http://dunfeewalks.weebly.com/canadian-tf-blog/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-saransk-and-russia And then today the Russians finally kind of had to admit they'd tried to cover up the racing while banned event: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/914805.shtml

Cop and prescription painkiller addict John Cooper on 'Southland'. The last three episodes of season 5 will send you into a HULK! RAGE! but he was a very well written character until that point and his interactions with other cops generally seem spot on.

The people I know who watch televised golf are all about using it to put them to sleep when they want to take a nap on a weekend afternoon. The pretty green course and soothing announcer's voice will do it, I guess.

I just saw a promo for Worlds on Universal Sports. Announcer talked up 'America's sweetheart, Gracie Gold' Polina (no last name) got a brief mention, and then there was a wee clip of Ashley. Interesting to see promotion the inverse of likely finishing order unless Gracie manages to get her head back together.

I want to say I remember a leg one incident on a westward outbound route from Los Angeles where the producer-designated plane that was first to leave actually had to divert to Hawaii or Guam for a medical emergency and got to the first location too late for those Racers to have a chance at a win. The producers do give a sometimes extensive list of exclusions for each flight teams book. Someone at RFF got a look at one of those sheets this time around. Most of them are perfectly logical like you cannot book a ticket that requires you to transit an airport in North Korea or you cannot book a ticket on this list of airlines, most of which are banned from operating in EU air space over safety concerns, but there are also a few what would be logical connecting points allowing visa-free transit and involving generally safe carriers that will be banned from use on a given leg, I'm guessing so that a team doesn't get a crazy good route that would let them get ahead of Phil.

Camille was always described as a quiet, shy sort. Reports from her boyfriend are that she was very happy during filming, and people might have really seen her coming out of her shell during the show. The show's contestants really were A-list of French sport outside of soccer. Cyclist Jeanne Luongo and figure skater Phillippe Candalero were also part of the cast that wasn't on the helicopters.

Hate to say it, but I think that poor nutrition/female athlete triad also plays a role in terms of some athletes' tendency to get injured. My take on Karen Chen's long program at Nationals was that it was skated extremely well and that I was going to remember nothing about it ten minutes after she finished other than she seemed in the zone that night. There was just something rather generic about it, and it wouldn't surprise me if she got kind of forgotten in the shuffle at some events where she wasn't in that same zone. Even though I agree that Tinkerbell was a miss this season, at least Polina can set herself apart with her spins. Sad news out of Argentina today. Philippe Candeloro is safe but ten others from cast and crew are dead following a helicopter crash during the filming of a French reality show he was participating in.

10 members of the cast and crew of the French reality show 'Dropped', including Olympic gold medalist Camille Moffat (swimming) and Olympic bronze medalist Alexis Vastine (boxing) when their helicopters collided: http://swimswam.com/olympic-gold-medalist-camille-muffat-killed-in-helicopter-crash-in-argentina/ This one has me in tears. Camille was a class act. She was 24 years old.

I'm blanking on the exact shows now, but there are some period shows on HBO, Showtime, and the like where you get to the naked sex scene and it's like, "Yep, casting call must have said-attractive woman, no fake boobs because they were really trying to go for 1930s or 1870s authentic-looking."

In addition to the seeming return of Eat/Sleep/Mingle, anyone else see the first part of the FitBit prize and go 'Hey it's like the old days when the teams had to pretend to be excited to win a Kodak Easyshare Camera as a leg victory prime?' Okay, just me then.

So many times, we see singers who have one great audition song and then quickly slide into the background because they don't have much more than that one good idea. I liked Sawyer's audition quite a bit, and am inclined to think that by going with Pharell he's the kind of artist who is looking to keep trying to really put his own spin on things when Adam or Blake would have been the 'safe' choice if he wanted to stick close to a country or rock box. As for his hair, I assume he buys product over the intrawebs like a lot of rural folks do these days.

At which point, we remarked that it was a good thing the 15 year old boy had a guitar in front of him, lest the camera crew have to shoot him from the chest up.

Way back in the early days of the intrawebs, one of the running jokes in Highlander fandom involved playing 'Spot the member of the Vancouver Repertory Company'. There were actors who you could follow from X-Files to Highlander to Forever Knight to Due South (brief Ontario trip there) back to Sliders and then Highlander in a different role. Bonus when they showed up in the Stargate franchise again a few years later. Getting his Can Con paperwork pretty much kept Jim Byrnes in an acting career.

Increased star power or not, Zeljko Ivanek is still the guy that casting directors have on speed dial if they need a weaselly bureaucrat for a 3-7 tv episode run.

Truck series driver Matt Crafton per ESPN.com

We're starting to watch Bosch, and the casting is running pretty HITG- Troy Evans (Frank Martin on ER), Titus Welliver in the lead, Lance Reddick in the obligatory Dude from The Wire spot, and Sarah Clarke in the obligatory actor from 24 spot.

I can get behind Polina like I can Ashley because neither come across as malicious even as they signal that they aren't happy playing the same old 'I went out and skated my best and hoped the judges liked it' game, a game that seems to encourage the same old waiting of your turn unless you're Russian. I also find Polina more visually interesting than a lot of the women out there- she just needs to work on programs that seem to fit her interesting body language (maybe her graceful-awkward is like ANTM's ugly-pretty) on the ice better.

There are times the series is better than the book(s). The first few seasons of Dexter come to mind.

Episodes had one where Helen and Carol try to figure out whether their coworker Myrna the mumbler is pregnant or just getting fat. I'd so rather hear about Carol and Bev talking about the best way for Bev to pitch what's probably a $30 million joint project with Sean to a male studio head.

I want to say I remember a gay crime victim on Hawaii 5-O: Original Recipe and, this being Jack Lord's McGarrett, he was treated pretty respectfully even though you couldn't actually say he was gay on broadcast tv at the time. Lord was one of the more progressive guys in Hollywood, and since he had a fair amount of creative control on the show, McGarrett was very big on making sure that disenfranchised populations were seen as worthy of getting legal justice too.