KAOS Agent

Kate admitted to "borrowing" more than $100,000 from the kids' accounts to fund her lifestyle (including furnishing her house). So there were accounts set up, but there is no legal recourse for Collin and Hannah, the two who lived with Jon, to get the money back. I'm impressed Jill somehow managed to get the amount she got out of Jim Bob, but he was likely looking at it as a sort of hush money. It takes a special kind of ass to not cover the medical expenses of your daughter who almost died giving birth to a child which their religion insists is her only duty in life. This is especially crazy given that the filming of her family life is a big part of the reason he had any income at all. No one cared about Jim Bob and Michelle at that point. They were no longer "and Counting" by then.

No one in Minnesota thought they'd win. It's Minnesota. It's a known thing that they can't win anything. Ever. They usually come up with ways to lose that make things as heartbreaking and terrible as possible, so today was at least a nice break from that. On the news last night they were interviewing people who'd come to town for the game and even they were less than positive on the winning. One guy said a win would be great, but I just think it'll be fun to watch a playoff game. That's like saying I'm just happy to be nominated.

Georgia goes from celebration to tragedy. And still one player and another passenger in the hospital with serious injuries. UGA had a great season, it's terrible that it ends this way.

Axe throwing is actually pretty popular across the US and Canada. There are chains that offer just the throwing experience. But if you want to do it in Brainerd (home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox), there's a bar there that offers it. I wasn't a huge fan of the movie, but I appreciated that it didn't make the designer girlfriend evil. She was not a good fit for the guy, but I like that she dumped him because she deserved more.

So excited to see Psych is back in the rotation on HM&M!

By all accounts, the Bengals' Higgins was devastated as he was the player who made the contact. I hope they get him some real support. It's not his fault, but he's likely feeling it is. I was happy to hear that he left the stadium with his mom who had her arm wrapped around him.

This game is over. Everyone go home. Leave them alone. There should be no debate. Goddell needs to call it.

Nine minutes of CPR. That's not good. It seems like they should have gotten him out of there as fast as possible on that ambulance.

Or you know, Albert Pujols was close to breaking Barry Bonds record for something while he was playing the Colorado Rockies and Rockies fans in Wyoming looked up Bonds when it was mentioned during the game(s).

The commentators on the game had me rolling my eyes. Somehow I'm supposed to be impressed and sympathetic for Houston having to overcome the adversity of being known cheaters. Or maybe I think they got away with it completely and wonder if they keep cheating since nothing happened the first time. They got a season of no fans as a buffer and never really got the true cheater experience. None of their players were punished at all. They kept their title of World Series Champions. Basically a couple of management guys lost their jobs for a season during which there was almost no baseball anyway and the team was fined $5 million. Boo hoo. Much adversity. How they must struggle to overcome such stiff penalties.

Easy. They simply didn't notice. They weren't interested in that part of the show and didn't want to write for it, so they never noticed that it completely disappeared. The fans that enjoyed those moments aren't the type to be vocal either. The shippers and the devoted Evil Regals are out in force, but people who like the show for its quiet character moments between mother and daughter aren't screaming on Twitter or at conventions about how their favorite is being mistreated or about how they want more. I believe the lack of Snow and Emma interaction was pointed out to one of the writers sometime during S6 and that person was genuinely surprised (probably more surprised that there wre people who even cared about this).

Not gonna lie, watching Snow teaching for more than 30 seconds was too much for me. An actual storyline for her would have been nice, but then Ginny Goodwin just had baby #2 in between S5 & S6, so I don't think she wanted to actually do anything. She could have done something more than send Emma to Archie for therapy so she could go console Regina and then yell at Emma for actually seeing the therapist and taking his advice and working through her issues. Wow, I forgot how much I hated S6. Was this the season where we actually see Snowing say that they are sacrificing Emma's happiness for everyone else and closing the door on her? That was totally giving her her best chance. And then when Snow confessed, Emma didn't react. To be fair though, Emma had clearly figured this out by the first episode of S2, it just took four years for Snow to get on the same page.

Elsewhere on the internet, someone posed a question that got me thinking. This is a show where the episodes weren't always all that great, but individual scenes and interactions between characters were excellent. So what were some of your favorite scenes in the show? One of my top scenes is between Emma and Jefferson in S1 where they discuss the possibility of the existence of magic. Jefferson's words do a really good job of encapsulating the where Emma and the audience and their mindset clash with the show's premise. I wish they'd been more true to this overall. All of the doors and all of the worlds he mentions in this scene in this quote: "A real world. How arrogant are you to think yours is the only one? There are infinite more. You have to open your mind. They touch one another, pressing up in a long line of lands. Each just as real as the last. All have their own rules. Some have magic, some don’t. And some need magic. Like this one." As disappointing and as much of a letdown as it was, I also like the scene in S2 where Emma and Snowing are somewhat alone for the first after the memories are returned and Emma believes. David's awareness that pushing Emma is a really bad idea and Snow's refusal to let it go and Emma actually telling the real truth about the whole giving her her best chance stuff. It was some of the most truthful this show ever got to covering the damage Regina's curse had done and how their own actions had led to Emma's life. Snow: We’re together – finally. And I can’t help but think you’re not happy about it. Emma: Oh, I am. But, see… Here’s the thing – no matter what the circumstances, for twenty-eight years I only knew one thing. That my parents sent me away. Snow: We did that to give you your best chance. Emma: You did it for everyone, because that’s who you are. Leaders, heroes, princes, and princesses, and that’s great. A-And amazing. And wonderful. But it doesn’t change the fact that, for my entire life, I’ve been alone. It gets left there and is never really addressed again, but this is where I think Emma's feelings remain. She moves on and deals, but this is always the reality. It also pisses me off that the next time everyone finally gets to be reunited and happy, the show focuses on how this makes Regina sad.

Season 1 is the only season that I find to be re-watchable pretty much the whole way through. There were filler episodes that I'm not a huge fan of, but it's got a cohesive narrative that actually ends in a fairly satisfying conclusion. The twists are interesting and often are worked well into the story. There are also quite a lot of character relationship moments which make us care about the characters and actually lets them show real emotions to things that happen to them. I love Hat Trick more than any other episode of this show and it's so telling that the writer of that episode had nothing to do with the show at all and was able to come in and write something so completely awesome that fit the tone of the show. It was full of really awesome quotes from Jefferson. Like this one, "You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants some magical solution for their problem, and everyone refuses to believe in magic." It's just right and I'm sad that guy never wrote another episode. Sadly, it's also annoying to watch Season 1 because I know that the anticipation of comeuppance for Regina will come to nothing and the reunion of Emma and her parents is lackluster and highly unsatisfying and this will only get worse as the series goes on.

This implies that they were actually thinking about things. Mostly their thought process consisted of "Wouldn't it be cool if..." and then they were stuck making crap that never made any sense.

Lacey Chabert and Brennan Elliot were at some kind of convention and she indicated that the Crossword Mysteries had ended its last episode in a good place. It didn't sound like they planned on any more.

1099 contractors pay FICA just like everyone else. The only difference is that they are responsible for the full 15.3% instead of splitting it like W-2 employees do with their employer. If Jana has any income above a very minimal level, she is required to pay into Social Security and Medicare. It would be interesting to see how the payments from TLC went to the older kids since that was likely one contract payment to the family LLC. How that was distributed from the Duggar family account to the adult couples like Jessa/Ben and Jill/Derrick would affect their FICA liability, but it couldn't just be given to them.

So Kristoffer Polaha's comments about Mystery 101 are interesting. Something must be going on at Hallmark.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom did it in 1984. Although that movie used the Blood of Kali to control people.

I think this is going to be a wait since Brennan Elliott's wife is battling stage IV metastatic gastric cancer. It doesn't sound good and they have two young children. However, both Lacey Chabert and Elliott signed deals with Hallmark, so I expect they do plan on more movies in the future, but I suspect it might be awhile.

That would have been like yelling Spanish at a Russian. Comanche and Dakota are completely different languages. They aren't even in the same language family. It was ridiculous that the warrior understood what she said unless he happened to know Shoshone (they were once the same tribe as the Comanche), a mortal enemy to the Lakota. And given the whole we kill each other mentality between those two groups, speaking Shoshone would have also triggered an attack. The Shoshone and Crow were on the side of the US Army during the Lakota War and are a big reason why Crook's army didn't end up just like Custer since their scouts provided warning of the coming surprise attack and provided cover for their retreat. A week later, Custer ran into that same group of Lakota/Cheyenne at Little Big Horn. Needless to say, Shoshone and Lakota were not friendly and speaking to one in the language of their enemy would not end well.

The question is whether this happened because there was a non-related victim of his acts or whether they truly did want to address things for their other children. If all of the victims were within the family, especially a family as insular as the Duggars, maybe they never would have done anything to acknowledge it. The whole locks on the doors and the trip to dig a ditch or whatever Josh was sent off to do might have been it and no one outside the Duggar family would ever have known anything about it. However, there was someone else who was clearly believed and reported it to someone. At that point, it was out in the open and they needed to do something to seem like they were addressing it. Court testimony shows that Josh was acting badly for years and they knew about it. So what changed to make them actually address it with others? Why were Josh and his victims suddenly discussing this in front of their church and a police report being filed? Something spurred them to act when they had done the bare minimum for years. Isn't a good explanation that he made a mistake by going after Jane Doe #5? There are numerous reasons why this person wouldn't want to push too hard about Josh, but I can see the people who care about her privately demanding more be done to deal with him. And since it wouldn't be widely known that other victims existed or the extent of his actions towards them, it might not have seemed to be as big a deal to them. A repressed teenage boy who touches a girl against her will is very bad, but it's much worse when put in the context of years of abuse of others which had been largely ignored.

It looked like Noemi and her kids were fine. I think the ones who circled the wagons survived because they were able to fend off the attack. Since they lost most of the wagons, but not any people in the tornado, you have to assume that multiple families were with each wagon. Maybe five or six families are left? This episode was just weird in terms of its geography. By 1883, there wouldn't have been any random camps of Dakota families in Wyoming - especially not as far west as Casper, which they claimed was six hours away. It's also not likely that the warriors would have spoken Comanche since the two didn't have any overlapping territory. Maybe he spoke Shoshone, which is essentially the same as Comanche, but it's a stretch. Dakota is not a Numic language, so it's not like they are even in the same language family. I know it's picky, but I liked how well done some of the historical aspects were even if it didn't make sense for the time period, so it annoys me when it's off in terms of believability and basic historical accuracy.

They aren't actually on the Oregon Trail. They aren't even near it. They're heading to Fort Laramie to meet up with the trail, which is roughly 600 miles from their location. They were still in Oklahoma at the time of this episode. The time period has been better established based on the comments Sam made in the episode. He said his land was with Quanah Parker south of the Wichita Mountains. That's the reservation and they had been there since 1875. There was also mention of Dakota/Arapahoe rumblings due to government lies and both were on separate reservations in the late 1870s and Sitting Bull returned from Canada and surrendered in 1881. They also discussed the use of barbed wire, which only started to come into widespread use in the mid to late 1870s. It may not be 1883, but it's way past the time that the Oregon Trail was in real use. These people are in serious trouble at this point. They keep talking about the coming winter and said they'll get to Fort Laramie in October and be crossing the South Pass in the winter. This is absolutely and completely insane. It's a month from Fort Laramie to Fort Bridger in good weather and from there it's all mountain country. For context, the Donner Party left Fort Bridger in late July and that was considered very late. This photo was taken the day after Labor Day 2020 and another round of nine inches hit that night. This wagon is sitting directly on the trail.

That's largely true, but those people all need to be in the place where there is a track to train and then they all need to travel to the events to qualify. The cost of housing, travel and training for four people is obviously many times more expensive. Just read about the difficulties the Jamaican bobsledders had in doing this. The town of Evanston, Wyoming was the reason for their presence at the Sochi Olympics since the Jamaican federation told them they were on their own. The town donated food, housing, transportation and other things to support the athletes' training in Park City. Winston Watts went with a two man team that year because it's all he could afford.