fishcakes

They've been doing combined reward/immunity challenges since at least Cook Islands, which was back in 2006. And all of the shortened seasons (41, 42, and 43) have had separate reward and immunity challenges in some weeks and combined in others.

I swore Peacock would never get me, but argh, they've finally won.

I was thinking about how her poor kid had to go to school the next day and have all his friends say, "dude, your mom dug through your poop for days?" Even so, I like Carolyn's weirdness and how when someone asked her what she was doing, her answer was, "I'm not normal." I'm going to start using that when I want to be left alone. The other tribe mentioned that they hadn't looked at their birdcage for a while so I figured the same thing about Carolyn's tribe. I think having the four of them without Carolyn discover it had been opened suggested that they should have known, but if they hadn't looked at it for a day or so before they discovered the idol missing, then they probably figured that any one of them could have slipped away and opened it.

What's great about Randy is that he's very competent when he has to take charge, for example, when Leland got shot or when he was out sick with a bad back. Randy just immediately snaps into boss mode and kills it. The ending they gave him, as Police Chief in a small town, actually seemed perfect for him, and it continued the pattern of small town chiefs and sheriffs (Mr. Monk and the UFO, Mr. Monk Bumps His Head) being good at their jobs instead of the more stereotypical rubes that lazy writers fall back on. The rest of the time, though, Randy was like a puppy, trying so hard to please Leland with his nutty theories (suicide by monkey, lol) and everyone else with his music. I think my favorite Randy moment was when he sang his tribute song for a presumed-dead Monk's memorial service. "Shot down! In his pri-ime. Forty-eight. Or forty-ni-ine." It's so funny to me that he didn't bother to find out Monk's exact age probably because he already had the rhyme down.

Yes, I don't think it was neutrality. She seemed genuinely worried about getting voted out, which is weird because no one was thinking about her. I don't think it was neutrality with Matthew either. Brandon was the target but everyone knew about the immunity idol, so it would have made sense to split the vote and Matthew would have been the natural person to be the backup since he was the last one they approached, plus his injury. He just didn't know that the other four apparently didn't have enough wit to split the vote. The thing that confused me was they had info that Lauren was lying about losing her vote and really having an advantage. But when Lauren said she would vote against Brandon that night, Maddy, Kane, and Jaime didn't even question that. Either there was some conversation we didn't see or they are all terrible at this game.

Oh thank you! That's where I've seen him before. He does look completely different now.

I was just a kid at the time, but their arguments were public knowledge during the early seasons and it started before the show even began airing. I've forgotten most of the details but the one that sticks in my head is that they battled over who would get first billing and eventually compromised with staggered opening credits. Their names are onscreen at the same time, Penny's name is first, but Cindy's name is higher. I understand why it was an issue to each of them, but as a regular person who is content when people at work call me by my correct name, it seems like such a dumb thing.

I do like this show and it's one of the few current sitcoms I watch, but it's still finding its groove. I'm confused about why Abby is such a rube. Unless I'm mistaken she grew up in upstate New York, not Hooterville. Also, she's Harry's daughter, so you'd think she'd be a bit more street smart, regardless of where she's from. I didn't care for Tara and Johnny's bit. As stunt casting goes, I wondered if maybe everyone the show approached first was busy. However, I adored the temporary judge. "I'm going to be making the gavel noise with my mouth. Court is now in session. BANG BANG." Unlikely, but I hope he becomes a recurring character.

Not real, but ... should be real. Why can't we have nice things?

This is a recent interview with Tony Shalhoub by the SAG foundation. It's long at almost an hour and a half, but pretty interesting. Caveat: the woman interviewing him is terrible; almost all of her questions are, "I was wondering, sort of, what was sort of your experience on like you know the sort of process of ..." and she has no ability to follow up or respond to what he's saying, but fortunately, he's good at just continuing to talk until she asks the next question on her list. If I did this right, I've cued up this one part near the end of the interview where he talks about Ted Levine's audition for Monk (if I didn't do it right, the story starts at 59:44).

I guess that could work, but it would change the structure of the entire game. There might not be a tribal phase at all since the only point of having tribes is for them to compete against other tribes. So just everyone together from the start and the only immunity being HIIs, maybe? I think the challenges themselves have become repetitive, but their existence adds an unpredictability to the game and can be a factor in revealing and/or disrupting alliances. Without them, the game becomes more straightforward, but I think also boring.

I'm having the same problem, but only since the new theme was installed. With the old theme, it would only revert to Normal size when I cleared cookies. Now I set font size to Larger, but every time I click back to the home page, the font size returns to Normal, even though the Larger box is still checked. So I have to set it to Normal then back to Larger, but again, it only lasts as long as I don't return to the Home page. PC Windows 8.1 (I know), Firefox 108.0.1

Gabler was not hiding in plain sight because no one was ever looking at him. He didn't control any strategy or drive any votes; he was a useful idiot to whichever alliance he barnacled himself to in any given week and because he was such a non-entity, he made it to the end. The goat finally won the game. It had to happen someday. Owen was not an underdog. He was just a bad player with an anger management problem. Cassidy wasn't the greatest player ever, but she was better than Gabler and Owen. She was targeted repeatedly by different players (Ryan, Noelle, Cody, Jesse, Karla) and managed to turn the tables on them. I do think her loss was a result of some stealth bitterness on the part of the jury, despite what an unseemly lovefest the reunion was, though maybe it seemed sappier because of all the overwrought musical cues. I really like Jesse and wanted him to win, but the editors didn't do him any favors by including so many of his tearful confessionals about his family. I found it to be genuine on his part, but if he gets a return invite, which seems likely, he's going to be targeted by other players who think he's going to play the sympathy card and win. Anyway, he was my favorite in this very lackluster season, and although I went back and forth on Cody, I ended up liking him a lot too, and loved how he jokingly thanked Jesse for bringing him along to the six. It looks like the stuff she said in her original tweet is not exactly correct. The thing about the charity being a PAC is false, and she has admits she didn't see the tweets she says Gabler liked but that she "heard it" from someone she trusts. That said, although the charity is ostensibly a real charity, it doesn't have a rating by Charity Navigator or Charity Watch, which is unusual since it's been operating since 2009, and it's been reported it has something of a shady history in regards to how it solicits money and where the money goes. I also looked at Gabler's timeline and many of the tweets he likes are pretty reprehensible. So my feeling is that I wish both Eliza and Gabler would stop inflicting their terrible opinions and themselves on the public forever.

Haha, I am the same because I feel compelled to point out that he didn't go to law school, which any idiot can do (I am class of '98!), but that he's getting a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke. His department posted an article about him when this season started. I've been rooting for him from the beginning because of his backstory, so I'm glad to see that he's actually good at the game. I too was really impressed with him when he stood up and offered his hand as Cody was leaving, and I also give Cody a ton of credit for being able to shake off his initial shock/anger and take it.

I think you two are right and it is a parking brake. I had forgotten all about those until you mentioned them, but they were common, especially when a lot of cars had bench seats in the front. I don't think I've seen a foot brake like that since the '80s.

Karla has no poker face AT ALL. Cassidy: I would love for it to be two women in the finals. Karla:

I feel like everyone should know how to drive a stick not just for purposes of the race, but for life reasons because you never know when you'll need to do it, and I drove a stick shift for decades, buying an automatic for the first time only three years ago, but I have to say I was completely flummoxed by that Land Rover last night. Derek said it had four pedals and we saw that it had a second shifter. I googled it and apparently the second shifter has two positions, one for low gears and one for high, but I don't see why that's helpful when you already control when you shift gears. Some automatics have a Sport mode that does a similar thing, but I don't see the point of it in a manual transmission. No idea what the fourth pedal is for. I wonder if David and Audrey really had to sit out the entire two-hour penalty. In the past, Phil has occasionally gone out to a last team that was still doing a task and eliminated them there once all the other teams had checked in. It was still pretty light out when David and Audrey checked in (though I don't know what time of day they started), so I wonder if once their elimination was a foregone conclusion, if they were told they could go ahead to the mat. The mat was at such a spectacular location, I could see why they wouldn't send Phil out to them, and at that point, there's really no reason to make them just sit at the task site for two hours.

It probably seems off because Owen was lying. He wasn't out of the loop; they even showed the clip where Gabler told him that James was targeting Jeanine. Even though Owen said, at least twice (once to James at the water well and once at TC), that James told him to vote for Ryan and that he did vote for Ryan, that's not true. He voted for Jeanine. Ryan only got two votes last week, one from Jeanine and one from Cassidy. I was neutral on Owen until this week, but all his self-righteous faux outrage, and his pissy little stalking away to the beach when James asked, "what's worse, me lying to you or you voting for me?" made me really dislike him. He's a, "when I play the game, it's strategy; when you play, it's backstabbing" player, and he's not even good at it. I didn't particularly like James either, but I would have rather he stayed over Owen.

The set change has always bothered me because the house no longer made any sense. The living room was changed putting the door on the right side of the screen, but the kitchen set remained the same with the door on the right side of the screen. So from the outside the house would have been like an L turned sideways with both the living room and kitchen doors facing the street.

TAR fans are pretty intense, not that there's anything (necessarily *cough*) wrong with that. Way back in season 3, when we were all posting on TWoP, I dared to say after the second or third episode that I was finding the season a little boring compared to the first two seasons. It was just a throwaway comment and not a real criticism. I continued to watch and post, but one of the other posters, every single week, would respond to my posts with some version of, "oh still watching? Guess it's not so BORING after all." Yeah, good times. The camels were so cute and chill waiting for their feeding stations, but they're not normally so docile. If the racers are still in Jordan next week, I hope we see a challenge where they have to ride a camel or get it to pull a cart or something. Racers + big stubborn animals is always so great.

The Fairplay story is from a couple of years back. Apparently all charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. I wouldn't know whether it really happened or they were falsely accused by another relative, but it's an ugly story no matter what.

Saw this one in the replies to that tweet and now I am deceased. 🤣

The Lowell line that makes me laugh every time is when Joe was dating the 19-year-old and Lowell said, "Joe Hackett at a Pearl Jam concert? Ha! Ha ha! Pearl Bailey, maybe."

The first ten were written while the show was still on, and they're a little bit better than the next five Goldberg wrote because that's when things got really bizarre: Adrian drugs Ambrose and takes him on an RV trip, Ambrose marries a 20-something biker ex-convict, the poop girlfriend, Natalie becomes a cop with no training. It was ... not good. The cruise ship story was Mr. Monk Gets on Board, and Conrad said that they tried for years to get that one made, but none of the cruise lines would let them film on one of their ships because they didn't want people thinking that passengers were getting murdered lol. He expanded that script, made it a Natalie instead of Sharona story, and brought back the Mexican captain and his lieutenant. That book was one of the better ones, even though he was still trying to undo the "Natalie is really the boss" thing. He did drink milk once! I think that was in the first book, which should have been a warning to me. The weird thing was that Goldberg was always really careful to mention in the acknowledgments that on the show they changed the type of bottled water that Monk drinks from Sierra Springs to Summit Creek, so he also changed it in the books, as if he were such a stickler for accuracy.

I finished reading all the Monk books, except for the one that my library doesn't have, which is okay because they're not very good. But I powered through 18 of them, so kudos to my OCD, I guess. The main problem is that the writer of the first 15 books is Lee Goldberg, who co-wrote 3 episodes of the show, but I assume his co-screenwriter did most of the heavy lifting because the Monk he writes in the books is not at all like the TV character. Monk in the books is a completely detached-from-reality imbecile who acts normal for a couple minutes while he's doing the "here's what happened" part, but otherwise there's no way that guy gets through even a single day without someone trying to murder him for being insanely annoying. It got worse after the TV show ended and there were no constraints on the book plots, so Goldberg decided to turn Natalie into a Mary Sue, making her first a police officer, then a private detective who is Monk's boss, and everyone, including Monk and Stottlemeyer, constantly telling her what a great detective she is. In three or four of the post-show books, he hints that Natalie and Monk are going to end up as a romantic couple (I am making an alarmed face just thinking about it) before mercifully dropping that only to give Monk a girlfriend who runs a store called "Poop," where she sells items made from animal feces, in case you need any more evidence that he has no idea who Monk is. The last four books were written by Hy Conrad, and they're pretty good. He wrote something like 30 of the show episodes, had a producer credit, and was with the show for its entire run. He couldn't undo all of the ridiculousness of the earlier books, but he returned everyone's personalities to normal and got rid of the girlfriend. He also is just better at writing mysteries. He'd drop enough clues throughout that the reader could take a guess about who the killer was, and then Monk would find the final piece that made the whole thing make sense. But going by the reviews on Goodreads, where the Goldberg books seems to be more popular, mine is the minority opinion.