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Boton

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  1. Mr. Boton and I both thought that Meredith should have looked at Maggie and said, "OK, so the next time you screw something up royally, do you want me to run immediately to the authorities, or do you want a few hours to try to sort things out and get your head back in the game?" Seriously, things seemed to have been handled in the right order, and there was no need for relationship drama among any but the primary participants (Alex, DeLuca, and Jo). I know the cops had to focus on the crime first, but the people who were, oh, I don't know, DOCTORS, should in fact have been focusing on DeLuca until they knew he was treated and stabilized, and then figured out who needed to know what.
  2. I agree, the later seasons were really uneven. I think the House/Cuddy relationship kind of killed the magic for me, because, if you look at this as a Sherlock Holmes universe, this is the equivalent of Holmes dating Lestrade, which is just structurally wrong. That said, Wilson held my fascination until the very end. For me, the House/Wilson interactions in "The C Word" were some of the finest in modern television. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you convey the idea of a platonic marriage. I have never seen a more clear demonstration of what the words "til death do us part" really mean, and it nicely sets up the series finale. I still get a little misty every time House tells Wilson, "You have everything you need, right here. We both do."
  3. Well, one thing to consider is that House could always establish a backlog of Vicodin, even though Wilson seemed to be his primary prescriber and I doubt Wilson would go over the suggested number. Generally, you can get an Rx for about 6 Vicodin a day (one every 4 hours), although I think in extreme situations you can take 2 every 4 hours, so that would be 12 a day. We almost always saw House take Vicodin in pairs; I don't think there were too many times he took just one. Yet, his stashes always had those amber pill bottles, and they looked fairly new, so I think the bulk of his stash was acquired legally. If most of that came from Wilson with the occasional pity-Rx from Cuddy or from the Team, then I assume the backlog was acquired because he took fewer than 12 a day. Eight to ten a day would be plenty to sedate an elephant under normal conditions but probably what House has worked his way up to. (Note: Yeah, I know most of this was probably just an artifact of acting choice and prop choice, regarding House always dry-swallowing two at a time and the stashes full of new amber pill bottles. But I'm bored, and I'm a Sherlockian/Homesian, and I deduce things. :-) )
  4. In light of everything that's been happening with the family, I told Mr. Boton last night that, without question, I would write the check to pay for Jinger to go to a real college and study evolutionary biology. TLC can replace all the family shows with a "Freed Jinger" show, in which we get to go shopping with her to decorate her new apartment and show shots of her in the lab, wearing a white coat and holding up a fossil, saying, "Yep, tests confirm it's 14 million years old." Then we can see her come home and luxuriate in making a Lean Cuisine for one and crashing for the night in her big double bed in her own bedroom. C'mon, Jinger! It'll be fun!
  5. Yes, agreed, that's what gets me about "defraud." The word implies reneging on a contractual offer of something. So, I want to sell my car, but I'm defrauding potential buyers if I don't disclose the fact that it was in a flood. It's particularly troublesome in this context because it implies that a woman's presence in society constitutes an implied offer to provide sexual interaction if she shows certain parts of her body, and that withdrawing that offer would be defrauding the men around her who might want to take advantage of the offer. So, if I go out showing my knees, I'm implicitly telling the men around me that they may use my body for anything ranging from sexual fantasy to actual intercourse, and to later tell them that I won't allow that would be breaking an implied promise of access. The problem is not whether or not women wish to adhere to "modest" standards but that they are viewed as making themselves sexually available by their very existence.
  6. I think TLC needs to take this opportunity to reevaluate the purpose the Duggar shows have in its line-up. I think they've had a lot of mission drift that needs to be addressed. I used to watch the shows religiously (very punny!). I always thought any woman who willingly had more than five kids was bat-shit crazy, but I thought the purpose of the show was enjoyable: to show how an extra-large family handled their day-to-day living activities. So, I didn't really think too much about whether the older girls were doing too much parenting of the younger kids, for example; I just enjoyed the idea that the actual parents only had four hands between them, so obviously you had to buddy your kids off and make sure any little one was holding the hand of someone who would be responsible for them not getting lost in public, etc. But then, the mission of the show seemed to shift to portraying how heartwarming this family is, and the implication seemed to shift to treating these 14+ births as something that just "happened" to the family, and look what good sports they are to take all this in stride and still be able to live their values of never using contraception or never letting an engaged couple be alone together. I lost interest at that point, because the show stopped being sociologically interesting and started being annoying. If TLC wants this show to continue in some form past the crisis, I think they need to be very deliberate about what they think the show is accomplishing in their lineup, and whether other shows are doing the same thing better. There are plenty of families whose weird beliefs make their lives difficult, and I don't need to watch the Duggars to see that happen. So, I don't know what purpose the show would have for them now, but they had better be clear about it before they consider letting it continue.
  7. Good answers in here. I think I can add a bit as well. The idea that we are all born sinners goes back to the idea that everyone is descended from Adam and Eve and has "inherited" the burden of their initial sins. So, even when you are newborn and as blameless as you're ever going to be, you are still carrying enough inherited sin on your soul to send you directly to hell. This is a big thing when religions were developing their stances on infant baptism vs. adult baptism. For those who practice adult baptism, they can argue that a person needs to have enough adult free will to accept the tenants of their faith before the baptism will really "take" and wash away the accumulated sin. Of course, this was tremendously stressful in the days when infant and childhood mortality rates were so high. Those who believed in infant baptism developed the idea that a godparent could make the promise on the child's behalf, and the child could be washed free from this initial sin as soon as possible after birth, which was a boon for those who unfortunately would be losing children young. For some segments of Christianity, there is a belief that Jesus was born without original sin, or without the sin that is inherited from Adam and Eve. There is then possibly the companion belief that Mary herself would have had to be sinless at the time of conception in order to produce a being that was sinless. This all devolves onto fundamentalist Christianity and, specifically for our conversation, onto the Duggars because of the belief that, once you are washed clean of sin (either through baptism or through a later process of being "born again"), you are in a continual state of being exposed to potential sin and have no real hope of ever re-attaining a state of being sinless enough to go to heaven. Only through a belief in Jesus as the Christ (with very specific requirements about your concept of him and your "personal relationship") can you go to heaven. The idea is, Jesus died on the cross more or less voluntarily as a sacrifice to God in exchange for God forgiving believers of their sins enough to let them into heaven. In this idea, Jesus becomes the literal (no snark intended) "scapegoat" for others.
  8. Speaking as someone who has worked in and consulted with higher education for 20 years, we are definitely in a transition spot when it comes to how colleges look at homeschooling. Generally, most students who consider themselves "homeschooled" have completed some kind of official curriculum that has gained recognition in their state and so they have a "real diploma." In that case, they are considered for admission just like any other high school graduate while having had the benefit of their parents' or family's guidance during their studies. For students who do not follow an approved curriculum, there is typically a process that may vary by university to assess their course of study. Many of these students pursue a GED simply because it makes it easier on them to demonstrate their competency, especially when coupled with tests like the ACT and SAT. Others may take an alternate approach by taking classes at a local open-access community college and then essentially "applying for transfer" to the competitive university of their choice. Having taught a number of these students over the years, I can say that I believe that there are far more intelligent and well-prepared homeschooled students than there are ones that are completely unprepared. It appears, judging only from what we've seen on TV, that the Duggars are providing their kids with very little in the way of academic support and encouragement for intellectual development, opting instead to try to tick the boxes of mandatory education without allowing too much "pollution" from the outside culture. In this, they are doing their kids a disservice, but they should not be thought of as an example of what homeschooling usually is.
  9. Well, even though I think it would bore me to tears, I'd watch the heck out of an "Anna and the girls" oriented show, predicated on Anna leaving Josh and moving somewhere with her sisters-in-law or something similar. One of the many, many things that bothers me about this situation is that Anna appears to think that it's some kind of triumph to stay with your husband, no matter what he does. Staying with your husband in spite of the fact that he's picked up 40 pounds or developed a receding hairline and a bad case of ED is a triumph of valuing a long-standing marriage. Staying with your husband in spite of the fact that he's a child molester and you have four kids is a triumph of stupidity and lack of pattern recognition ability.
  10. Here's what I'm struggling with: Josh Duggar (and the whole family) is getting a bunch of much-deserved blow-back on this situation. What he did was reprehensible, and we probably will never know all the details. I'm not even sure I want to know. But, how can a person ever come back from this kind of thing? Without excusing or minimizing the impact of his actions, he apparently did this at the age of 14. Can he ever demonstrate enough public remorse to be allowed to get on with his life in some way? Should he have never married, never had kids, or never tried to have a job linked to his faith? Even stipulating that there are some options for his life that he foreclosed upon with his actions, is there ever anything he can do to be allowed to be a productive adult? I'm not trying to defend him or his actions, but I am trying to understand how to think about the idea that any actions taken or remorse shown aren't enough. Can anything ever be enough?
  11. Yes, there is this element to it. I don't know exactly what happened; I wasn't there. And I in no way condone a brother taking sexual advantage of his sisters. But there is the possibility that we are looking at a situation in which Josh is a victim as well as a perpetrator. If he was raised to believe that every sexual question, every bit of curiosity, every uncontrolled or inadvertent erection, and every temptation to self-pleasure was a ticket to hell, then it casts a slightly different light on things. What was presumably done is still reprehensible, but it might have been done at the hands of a scared, confused, immature boy who felt that he was already damned for a normal human response. And that would add to the tragedy.
  12. I don't know what to think about this particular news, and I hasten to say that, even for people as batshit crazy as the Duggars, I'm not going to make judgments until and unless something concrete comes out. No one deserves that, especially someone who was legally a child at the time of the "crime." But in general, what concerns me about this type of fundie is that calling the cops on your own child seems pretty in-character. If you truly believe that any sexual experimentation is an immediate path to damnation, then it quickly follows that you have to do anything in your power to stop said experimentation. I mean, these are people who believe that holding hands should be reserved for engaged couples, and that kissing belongs exclusively in a marriage. And while I support anyone's decision to save some sexual acts for marriage, there's a difference between doing that and believing that any physical contact is literally the road to hell. I can easily see someone like a family patriarch involving the law to stop his child from doing something sexual. Where I'm trying to be careful is by not assuming that (if indeed this even happened), that something that horrifies them would horrify me. For me, it would take an actual act of pedophilia to get me to involve the law on my own child. For a fundie, it may be a single episode of rounding second base. If it's something like the latter, I won't be changing my opinion of someone negatively for having a normal human urge and emotion. ETA: I feel constrained to point out that I wrote this post after it was released that Josh had underage interactions with a girl, but before I heard any news that it involved his sisters. While I still don't actually know what happened, and while I'm still careful about any opinions I form about a "perpetrator" who was himself a child at the time, the new information changes my feelings. Originally, I was assuming the event in question was more along the lines of experimentation between two young, non-related teens.
  13. You know, I don't care if it's canon or not. I guess I'm either extremely internally consistent in my logic, or I'm a complete hypocrit, but I have different standards for all of the different incarnations of Sherlock Holmes. And for this one, it will really piss me off if he's relapsed. This is a tough, gritty Holmes, and this is the one that I most believe could descend not just into drug abuse but into street drug abuse and pull himself out of it by sheer force of will. If they go with what I consider to be the tired trope of "drug abusers always relapse because the siren song of the triggers and bad situations is too much," I'll be very disappointed. I kind of want to see him sitting and being interviewed by Gregson about Oscar's death and saying "Well, in the past five years I've gotten two useless druggies off the street: me and Oscar. I'd consider that a good piece of work."
  14. When I first watched HLV, I felt it was very linear; I had no trouble figuring out what was happening when. Then I got online and saw that a lot of people felt that there were unnecessary time jumps going on throughout the thing. I don't know what my point is, exactly, other than to say that it scares me a little that I'm apparently screwed up in exactly the same was Moftiss are, in order for this to make sense to me. This is something I think ages well and improves on future viewings. I felt a little bludgeoned by this point the first couple of times I watched, but after a while it made some sort of internal sense to me that, in the mind palace, Sherlock really didn't know what was going on with Mary, and he had every reason to think that his death could leave John married to a murderer and in imminent danger. On the Appledore terrace, I think there were a lot of concerns there: not eliminating Magnussen would likely result in Mary's death (Sherlock's friend, in addition to John's wife), because CAM would probably mess with her just to get back at Sherlock. It would also destroy John, because he's very much in love with Mary even if he's still angry with her, and Sherlock knows this. Then, there are the things that tipped the scale: When CAM says that Janine "makes the funniest noises" when he flicks her face, Sherlock's head snaps up, like it was another burst of anger for him -- he may not want to marry Janine, but he doesn't want her hurt. And then Mycroft's copters arrive, and Sherlock knows that his being arrested for giving away state secrets in the form of Mycroft's laptop would destroy Mycroft's professional reputation. So I think there's a lot more going on in that final scene than just wanting to protect John.
  15. I loved this episode, partly because I like Sherlock Holmes stories of all incarnations more for the Holmes-Watson relationship than I do the cases. Once they killed off Mary Morstan (I never bothered to even learn the boyfriend's name -- just Mary Morstan does it for me), it was time for Watson to come back home to Holmes and reform the unstoppable duo. I feel like a lot of times Watson isn't written as Watson, if that makes sense. Sometimes it feels like she's written as just another one of the many people that Sherlock could be solving crimes with. But get her back in the brownstone without the distraction of another job or a significant other, and Moriarty back on the radar, and that's a Holmes/Watson story!
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