ombre

It seems I now call all animals of all kinds "lovey." Keith, I am shaking my fist at you!!! (but, you know, grateful for everything else, so I think you're still winning by a lot in my heart!)

Sandi has a new series about a project she and her wife are embarking in upon - working with a 40-acre plot of ancient woodland. The series is called sandi's wood and it's on britbox. I've watched the first ep and am enjoying it (although as someone who does a fair bit of volunteer work in forests near me, much of which is pulling out and cussing at various undesired, aggressive species that get a foothold in the sunlight along paths and then wreck havoc, I'm more than a little antsy with their first step - cutting an access road). Fun to see her using her platform for what is very clearly a labor of love.

I suspect the quietness of the forum for the season shows the impact of hbo's refusal to air the most recent two seasons. I found an alternative way of watching the most recent season and it ended by noting the Keith has a new show - our Welsh chapel dream, in which he and his wife, marj (I'm forgetting her last name, sorry!) buy a derelict chapel in Wales (I know, you'd never have guessed that part from the title, eh ?) to turn into a pottery studio, performance/community space, and home. Looks like there are only four eps, which has me quite bummed as we're three eps in and enjoying it immensely. Anyway, I get the impression that he may have been up to his elbows in this madness while putting the latest pottery season together, which may well have been part of the reason why everyone is "lovey"! :D Heartily recommend the chapel show. Fun to see Keith just being a big damn dude and tearing apart parts of a big damn building. Relatable to see marj feeling a little overwhelmed by the task at hand and downright inspiring to see how she the turns on theater-manager mode and figures out the task at hand and dives in. And the pair of them manage to get the tiniest hint of fantastic orange into everything they touch. On the topic at hand, oh, I loved this season. Donna and Jan's capable scrappiness won my soul, and... Ugh I'm forgetting everyone's names already... Dan? The guy who wore the loud shirts. He physically reminded me of a very, very anal relative so it was quite cathartic to see such devil-may-care attitude coming out of that face! The last ep explained a lot about him for me - if you generally have internalized engineering principles then you can just *play*. Lovely season. Lovely humans. Lovely lovely show. So grateful that it exists!

Whitman as a Brooklyn hipster and alcott as the idealis hippie's burnt out kid are so chef's kiss.

I study Springfield Massachusetts during this era and hate Samuel bowles with a burning passion (especially pre-1854, but also 4eva). Imagine my surprise and joy to discover that he's featured and I can be the world's loudest boobird every time he enters the scene! :D As someone who know this area and this era pretty well, I am so, so charmed at how the show looks into it's soul and figures out how to communicate it's essence to modern audiences. And in utter awe at how quickly it slips from the froth to the real, weighty issues of the day. I can't believe this gem of a show got made. I'm so glad it did. I have one episode left to watch and I can't bear to.

In reading the above comments on lamb and Standish, I've got to say that I think lamb was telling her exactly what he thought would get her to walk away from slough house and the service and never look back. He was shaken that she was kidnapped (and that she is such a vulnerability for his team - look at cartwright white knighting into the park!) and wanted to get her out of there.

I loved the derry girls ep, having seen an episode or two of derry girls on Netflix, and even dug the next year's show, with the cast of... I can't remember the show's name but it was about queer life, iirc. Both were very personable people with real chemistry between them. This year's show had a real millstone around it's neck. The whatever the anniversary of channel 4?!? Lots of random people who know one another in passing and are primarily famous for being talking heads? Oy. That's a heavy load to lift. I'm sure it sounded good in some board meeting but... But if they wanted to just bring the derry girls back every single year I would absolutely tune in. Honestly, if they got that gang together to be terrible at a different activity every *month* I'd probably be down with it. Pottery. Basketweaving. Fixing car engines. Bring it!

I'm a little shocked that there was any cattiness about whether Tasha was faking it. Girl was white as a sheet some time before she went down. I'm finding this season less stratified than other seasons and love it. Dan (who started out reminding me of Richard burr from one of my favorite early seasons but has recently been a little more goofy) came on strong at first but is now having to really buckle down. Matty, who seemed like a prime candidate to head out in the early middle eps instead gets star baker. The fact that it really feels like any of them have a shot (especially if they hit that moment when some of them just catch fire) is making this a really fun season to watch.

I'll agree with everybody else who's saying how lovely this season is. Allison seems a great addition. Genuine and a really generous performer. I think abbi leaving so early is one of my biggest disappointments in all of this show. (I mean, other than the whole past season, obviously). I've been having so much fun seeing what ingredients she came up with and am really bummed that we don't get to see what she'd do in the next weeks.

I actually gasped when Amos was sent home. A gasp! In the first episode! It seemed that there were plenty of people who'd been more consistently bad and he'd had that knockout technical. On blueberries - I hate cooked blueberries (they're a perfect fruit when raw. It's such a waste of perfection!), but recently became aware that part of what I hate about commercial "blueberry" baked goods is that they're used as a sweet flavor and much of what I love about blueberries is their tartness. And *then* I discovered that there are some areas where the blueberries tend more towards just sweetness (looking at you, maine) and so people whose tastes were developed through those blueberries have a very different sense of what "blueberry" should taste like - in Maine, most blueberry stuff seems to just be sweet and people seem to think that's as it should be and thus anybody whose tastes were shaped around the idea that maine blueberries are the epitome of blueberry also thinks it should just be sweet. Whereas I, someone who thinks there should be a complex flavor profile to blueberry stuff, think that cooked blueberries are flavorless because they lack the zing of the tart fresh blueberries. Which is a very long way of saying that I can understand why they might be wary of blueberry flavor and consider it flavorless. On the whole, a genuinely enjoyable hour. I was utterly unimpressed with last season but am really rather excited to see this one. There are so many ways that a bake can go wrong without making even the simple challenges races against the clock and contraventions of the laws of gravity. There is as much drama in the question of "is this too soon? Too long" as in the race against the clock. It's fun to see human beings nervously drinking a cuppa as they debate those questions. It's fun to see them swiping nibbles of one another's ingredients and just interacting in those down times. You can imagine being in that situation. Cheers to the production company for finally going back to that more varied texture of storytelling! And a deep and profound gratitude to the lady who thought that yep, it's time to add a mess of beaver jokes to bake off. Genius. Well played.

What a tough job SL and DHP have! To play not just people who were celebrities in their own right (julia more, of course, but so many people here have such a strong sense of Paul!) but also have such a strong and relatively recent portrayal from j&j. (and, of course, radiant as julia and Paul's relationship may have seemed in that movie, it also had the advantage of getting to shine particularly brightly in comparison to the rest of the movie). I am enjoying this show, but feel like I'm seeing the performances in triplicate - how julia would have been, how MS would have been, how SL is, all piled on top of one another. It makes time with the other characters feel so calming and restful!

Well, it's not a TV show (yet? I hear this will be going to Hulu?), but there's a cozy mystery book that just came out that's based on bake off - the golden spoon. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Golden-Spoon/Jessa-Maxwell/9781668008003 I'm listening to it as an audiobook while getting over covid and so far I'm liking it (which is to say, I'm enjoying it, but I did also recently try to put my cat's leash on my bowl of risotto and stood there in confusion not totally understanding why the cat was still yowling and why the risotto was so solidly indifferent so... Maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt!) Eta: well. That was silly and fun and a great way to surf along over the crazy temperature swings that have been messing with my sleep. Great literature it is not, but a silly fun variation on bake off? Sure. Absolutely.

The show is called It's a Sin, a reference - I've always assumed - to the hauntingly lovely Pet Shop Boys song of the same name which was popular in the 80s queer/disco culture in which the show is set. I haven't seen the show but everything I've heard is that it's excellent. I think it streams on HBO.

Jeepers. If that's the send-off for Shy it's a brutal one. And especially because we know that if things had happened in a slightly different sequence - if they'd tried to bribe Midge into silence first and *then* she'd had her moment with Shy - it probably would have played out very differently. If she'd known that he was basically trapped and isolated, was reaching out to one of his few potential human connections, would she have rejected him like that? I'd like to think she wouldn't but who knows. Perhaps it is yet another cautionary tale of the perils of show biz. I'm assuming the lump on the street was Lenny and the next episode will also be a cautionary tale. It's hard to see how they would bring Shy back for a better ending with so few episodes left, but that was one painful parting shot. I'm willing to suspend disbelief for the moment and see where they're going with this, but... well... it's a comedy. Comedies end in weddings and fruitfulness. You don't get to build likeable characters like Shy and then torture them pointlessly and still be a comedy. Jason Alexander's character may have been tortured on his way out the door, but clearly it's giving him the germ for his first great play in decades. Sophie is clearly about to land on her feet. Etc. If you both pointlessly torture a friend and still claim to be a comedy it shows an utter disregard for the humanity of the character. We know Lenny is going to have trouble, but that's tied up with Midge's conflict between being a Good Girl/Wife/Mom and an Important Comic. Lenny's torture is already baked in. I'll be very disappointed if Shy's torture doesn't have some larger narrative purpose. Otoh, this was the best-written episode in forever. Kudos to Kate Fodor. Ahahahaha - I got nosy and poked around to answer a question in my mind and discovered that which I'd forgotten - there is another season forthcoming. Eleven episodes seems like enough time to right things for shy, where three episodes doesn't. Okay, I'm okay with this loose end for now, but I reserve the right to be pissed if doesn't get tied up better by the end of the *next* season! :D

I cannot remember any other season when the bakers seemed so genuinely relieved to be done. In other years it's felt like a joke: yeah, we'll be glad this is done, but this has been fun and I'm glad I did it. But this year it felt exhaustedly heartfelt. Eff this tent and the horse it rode in on. I wish them all well and would thank them for going through this for our entertainment. I hope it will help them achieve things they want to achieve. And I'm so glad they're done and can stop coming back to the tent.