truther

I actually ran into a Swedish motorcycle gang once. All black leather, with the occasional Swedish flag embroidered somewhere. They were middle-aged men and women riding around the desert Southwest and we saw them at the Grand Canyon. I'd bet that between the lot of them their records might have included two or three parking tickets, a teenage drug misdemeanor, and maybe a double dip in the salsa bowl.

I hate those giant Texas houses. They represent a market that, for me, is completely bass-ackwards -- where everything is about size rather than location. The bigger the house, the thinking seems to be, the better. So the only thing better than a 5000 sq ft mansion is a 6000 sq ft one. Even a family with 8 kids doesn't need 6000 square feet or whatever they were looking at, especially when so much of the space seems to be devoted to huge master suites and closets and to ground level great rooms and other random places nobody probably ever uses.

It's such a cool thought, actually, that I'm going to assume it's true. Dickens for the win!

Having spent a little bit of time in Holland, I can say that it's one of those countries where people who aren't motivated to learn the language don't learn it. Virtually everyone speaks excellent English. You can run into expats, usually people in the oil/energy industry, who've lived there for months and even years and barely learned anything beyond a few simple phrases.

It's silly if you think about it, but I think the purpose of that was to suggest that whatever illness he has is really affecting him more than he realizes. Mentally he's not all there.

I'll admit to not paying attention too closely, but I'll eat my own hand if that was the genuine cost of renovation, all items included. What they did would absolutely cost a lot more. Perhaps the show wasn't honest about the purchase price -- like, say, it was a foreclosure or something that they got for cheap on the understanding that they'd be renovating it into a larger (and more valuable to the bank) property. So that the whole house search was a red herring because they'd already borrowed money to renovate that particular place to create the equity necessary to justify the loan in the first place.

I had to laugh at the end when Wallander's giving the talk about "making a difference." Yeah, you made a difference -

I've seen a couple Good Bones episodes and have to say . . . there's something about the hosts that really rubs me the wrong way. Something about the disapproving way this mother/daughter duo talks about the other members of the family, for example the brother who's been assigned the Hapless Idiot role. They're obviously trying hard, and they seem to be very telegenic and the work is the real deal, but they're just not fun to watch.

I'm just a colonial and not a full on Brit, but it played alright for me. The way both men glanced at the door first, to make sure nobody was watching, was priceless. Clearly they were going for laughs. But to think of all the things they had recently been through, and how important each man considered the other to be in his life, the (quick and discrete) hug was totally believable.

My thought process while watching this ep: First 30 minutes (as Sidney is stumbling around drunk and molesting the barmaid): Ugh, I'm done with this show. Next 25 minutes (as things get wrapped up and everybody starts forgiving everyone): Yay, my happy fun show is coming back! Final minutes (when Amanda appears): Ugh, I'm done with this show.

That's a serious part of my problem with that particular storyline. It would be one thing if Gary had been plainly scapegoated into something manifestly unjust, and we could respect Sidney for being a voice of reason. But it's actually quite easy to see it from Geordie's point of view. Gary did kill her. He held her down, administered the poison, and physically restrained her when she fought for her life. He was a man using his brute strength to end a woman's life against her will. That's murder, and Gary's protestations of innocence probably sound the same, to Geordie and the others, as every other murder defendant's protestations of innocence.

If Life on Mars, which takes place twenty years later, is any indication, then policewomen had a giant brick wall standing in the middle of their career paths. I didn't like this episode. There was no tension about Gary's verdict whatsoever because it was plainly obvious he'd be convicted. So the whole angsty setup seemed pointless. And yeah, Amanda needs to get hit by a bus. I loathe Guy, but wouldn't it be great if every episode he just randomly appeared and slugged Sidney and told him to pull his finger out and get on with life?

I really liked this episode but this sequence stood out like a very, very sore thumb. Sidney's wartime trauma involved just such an incident -- declaring the all clear only for one of the men under his command to be mortally wounded by a threat Sidney failed to secure. So even putting aside the implausibility that a combat veteran would just leave a loaded gun lying there on the floor amongst suspects, Sidney himself has spent years trying to overcome the psychological wounds from his past experience. For it to happen again -- for Sidney to essentially get the widow killed because he turned his back on a gunman -- would send any rational person over the edge. And she even died in much the same way, lying there on the ground bleeding from a stomach wound while Sidney tried to comfort her. At least he didn't have to euthanize her. But for a show that spends so much time on its lead characters' mental health, it seemed bizarre to just gloss over the effects this death should have on Sidney. Otherwise I liked it. I don't think we're supposed to like Amanda very much any more, so I wouldn't worry if the show casts her in a negative light. And she deserves some credit, I suppose, for seeing Sidney and Margaret up against a wall and just walking away instead of ruining the moment like she usually does. The show continues to save its best moments for the banter. The way Mrs. Maguire, or Margaret, or Geordie's wife can deliver a line with a slight smirk or an upturned eyebrow is just priceless. "She doesn't wear stockings" had me cracking up.

I liked it. I agree with others, JudyObscure especially, that the banter and the Leonard/Mrs. Maguire scenes are this show's strong point. And this episode had several laugh-out-loud scenes with them. Leonard tiptoeing around Amanda, and Mrs. Maguire deliberately calling her by her married name, were especially funny. Likewise the blind date stuff. The plot was also quite believable. I have no doubt British universities were crawling with espionage agents in the 1950s. They're going a little overboard with Geordie and his dark past. Then again, that's how things really were for a lot of people. The country was full of angry men who self-medicated their wartime traumas with alcohol. They also hit women. So while I wasn't pleased, by any stretch of the word, to see him smack the widow I also appreciated that nod to realism. Note also at the end when she's cradling his hand to her face after he's told a white lie about her dead husband's heroism. Nice symmetry. What I don't quite understand is how Sidney still has any parishioners. Half the town thinks he's a lecherous creep, the other half a degenerate-coddling punk. It would be nice to see him earn the respect and admiration of his villagers. Imagine how wonderful it would be to watch an episode centered on, say, a midsummer festival where he's in good spirits and the town has a good time.

I thought the finished product looked spectacular. Clearly it matched their particular style -- I would likely have done a few things differently -- but none of that takes away from the overall appearance. The view was terrific and the house took full advantage, and the interiors (especially the kitchen) were fantastic. I'm actually not surprised at the overall cost. I mean, maybe they splurged on nicer fixtures because they were saving money through their own sweat equity?

I just want to say I was shocked, SHOCKED, that they went with the house that was already being renovated when they looked at it.

I'll confess to merely having the show on in the background, but still, this confused me, too It looked exactly like every other house they do. It was clearly their house. So they'd make these statements about the B&B and finding somebody to run it, or something, and I'd ask my wife what they were talking about since clearly they were renovating this house they owned. Did they actually expect us to think the people who were going to live there would turn them down? And yeah that was a big concert they showed in downtown (?) Waco. Good for them. Seriously.

Yep I have to agree. Until very recently I was defending Chip's antics and enjoying the show generally. But there's a couple things going on that I increasingly dislike. The show is very predictable and formulaic. I liked the show when it was about rehabbing run-down homes in nice neighborhoods. Now, however, it's about Jo's quirky and, frankly, ugly design choices, and Chip's efforts to be noticed, interspersed with the same segments every week about a special project, a trip to the crap store, and some family stuff. The show also isn't very honest. Maybe it's always been that way, but recently there have been episodes where the show has quite clearly manufactured some bogus story line, like where the client stumbled upon the house that just happened to be her grandmother's, or where they moved that shotgun shack off the land that a developer had bought. A large part of the show's appeal is how easily the viewer can relate to the hosts. They're not so relatable if it seems they're just feeding us a line. A third thing, and it's probably just my own pet peeve, is the way the show uses the kids. They're props. They always appear either in some staged family play segment, or doing some special project Jo gets them to do (which she then ignores in favor of her own work), or visiting Jo at the end to give her a snack during her weird all-nighter design/staging sessions. Meanwhile Chip's off in his own world. I'd rather see the kids either in their own element or not at all. Finally, the show is extremely limited demographically. That's not really Chip and Jo's fault, per se, but the fact remains virtually every episode is about white, heterosexual Baylor grads buying some dumpy shiplap-laden home in the greater Waco area and then renovating it so that it matches Jo's design aesthetic. That gets boring.

On the other hand, the views from those homes were amazing. And their broker? Hot damn.

They should have made it a Renovation episode given how obvious it was the first house was theirs. Nobody in the history of real estate has ever purchased a home that's in the middle of being actively renovated where the seller controls the renovation and the buyers don't know what they're getting. And yeah, the whole "the pool is sliding down the hillside" issue alone would have been an interesting problem to deal with.

WTF was that tonight?!? Why wasn't the show upfront and honest about the developer having bought the shotgun house land? Why did they bother moving the house only to utterly gut it? Why did the finished product look NOTHING like the original? As new construction, it was quite nice as small houses go. As a renovation of an old house that supposedly had charm or character or something, it was a desecration. I honestly don't understand the point of going to all that trouble when there was nothing left of the old house by the end except the little frame of a square foot of wallpaper "from like 1900 or something."

And when Martin said her accent was so thick he couldn't understand her.

Yeah, the constant fainting had me wondering whether there was a gas leak in town or something. But otherwise it was a very funny episode. And Sigourney Weaver!

Yeah that's weird. Eventually some knucklehead's bound to drive into it.

I'm actually house hunting in South Florida right now, and I had never noticed before but apparently this is actually a thing. I've seen four separate single-family homes with driveways leading to fake garage doors, with a little studio-type thing in the enclosed room behind. From inside the house it's just more of the first floor, noticeable merely because the floor is usually a foot or two lower than the rest of the house.