caitmcg

In the gap between the in-studio competition and fashion week, everyone goes home so no one out in the world knows who was eliminated before the show airs. But while the in-studio filming happens, the eliminated designers are kept together in New York, so no one sees them out and about and susses that they were cut, and so they were all handy for this challenge. I think there has been another instance in past seasons where they brought them back as helpers. It's also a regular feature on Top Chef, which shares Magical Elves as the production company with Bravo PR.

I have a feeling that that was only part of the conversation in the apartment, but for obvious reasons, the part the producers wanted to highlight.

The dresses are impressive, though it's unclear to me how they relate to the Camp theme. Zac Posen definitely comes through with the technologically advanced, beautiful gowns. He also did this amazing light-up gown with a zillion LED lights incorporated in the fabric that Claire Danes wore to the Met Gala a few years ago.

Hope so. There are only two more to go.

I've never lived in a place with ceiling fans, but this has been an issue since the old days on TS. The designers almost always take down the fans and replace them with light fixtures, privileging form over function. Especially in all those really big suburban rooms, I assume the fans make a difference, I don't much like Doug's zebra rooms, old or new, and I thought Laurie's new room was better than the original yellow one, though still a bit bare. I'm over the producer challenges, though (use only these colors, repeat a concept you did 15 years ago, etc.), although it probably restrained Hildi in the previous episode and she needs it.

She was in Firefly/Serenity, she is also Wade Wilson's girlfriend in the Deadpool movies... she has been in other stuff too, but those are the main things I know her from. She has a pretty steady list of TV gigs, though the only thing I've seen her in is Homeland. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1072555/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1

Hell, I'd be happy if they found any storyline for Valerie. This is her second full season, and she's always stuck in the B or C plot, if she's featured. Past time to either fill in some blanks or bring her something new of substance.

I remember when I was around 14 and wore a 5 in juniors clothes and was the same height as my mother, going through some of the things she had saved from her college days in the early 1960s and pulling out a very classic, fitted black sheath dress that was a size 6. There was no way on earth it would have accommodated my waist or hips. Sizing was very different 20 years later.

I thought Dr. Turner left Lois with Trixie precisely because of how uncomfortable Lois was about speaking about it with a man, especially after her experience at St. Cuthbert's, so he was trying to make the conversation a bit easier by letting her have it with a woman.

I think the implication was also that intercourse could be problematic because her vagina was, as Dr. Turner put it, abnormally short. So there was more she’d have to put on the table than whether she could conceive, especially with little sexual knowledge yet.

Yes, vanity sizing is a thing, at least among some retailers and brands.

Did anyone notice the Overstock rug in Sabrina’s room? There was a different, larger rug under the bed, but I do not recall seeing the “must be used” one the couple picked out.

That comment came when the judges were making their close-up observations, so Venny wasn't even around to hear (or defend) it. The problem with flash-sale challenges and with the kinds of of commercial challenges they did in previous seasons is that something that is technically complex and has a lot of detail is never going to be the winner because it isn't easy enough to manufacture quickly and at the price they're targeting, even if it is objectively the best. Rewind all the way to Season 1. and you see this is why they selected Wendy's plain navy blue dress over Jay's stunning homage to the Chrysler building for Banana Republic. So they elevate Venny's well-fitted but boring dress over Sebastian's impeccably made, beautiful but much more involved orchid dress. They still should have put Sebastian in the top, just to give him credit even if he was never going to win.

Not every school requires teachers to supervise students at lunch. Some have security staff or aides for the purpose. In my elementary and junior high schools, teachers did not monitor students at lunch. I don’t see why the middle school faculty would find it important to have the lounge seat over 30 if that large a number did not expect to need the capacity on a regular basis. It was clearly used very differently than the elementary school’s lounge.

Nope, not for a moment. On one hand, I can certainly imagine Trixie being sympathetic to the woman's fears given her own difficult childhood and lasting trauma as a result of caring for a father suffering from shell shock; but on the other, I do not believe that Trixie, this far into her nursing career caring for women, would refer a pregnant woman to a non-medical professional for a surgical abortion regardless of her personal feelings about the woman's circumstances. I know a woman my parents' age who has let it be known in recent years that she had an abortion when she was quite young and single, pre-Roe v. Wade in the US, for which she went on her own to Mexico. Everything turned out fine medically and she has no regrets, but was terrified. (She was also terrified of being poor, young, and pregnant on her own, away even from family at a time when pregnancy, whether she kept the child or not, would most likely have cost her her employment.)

Seriously. There were some decent aspects to Carter’s room, but it was also half empty. He didn’t even spend most of that extra thousand dollars, which could have gotten him another table made, and chairs to go around it, I’m sure. (In contrast, Vern spend $2999 and change and filled his room with tables and chairs.) You know those bean bags and floor-height “coffee table” will be shoved in a corner tout de suite.

I think it's simply the timeline of the show, as the first clinical trials of the measles vaccine in the UK were in 1964, just as they incorporated storylines about the polio epidemic and vaccine and thalidomide at the points in the series that coincided with those developments. It resonates because vaccination rates have gone down in the US and Europe, with measles outbreaks the result, but I don't think it's the show pandering.

It didn't seem to me that Miss Higgins was objecting on privacy grounds, but rather that she didn't want to have anyone interfering with her strict filing standards. I am glad they showed her to have a softer, compassionate side, and she did a beautiful job of getting through to that mother and comforting both parents.

I assume it was a toilet-paper wrapping. Hoarders had a woman like this -- too immobile and hemmed in to handle it properly. I think it was just random pieces of paper. They were pretty solidly wrapped, and TP would have disintegrated. Of course, the show didn't go into where she was stashing her urine or paper waste (and just as well).

And yet, if it was possible to diagnose multiples, regardless of technology, it would have better served their patients' needs to learn in advance that they would be parenting two (or possibly more) newborns, so they could prepare. I did know a set of triplets my age who were not a surprise in the late '60s.

Forceps were used when I was born (50 years ago Wednesday), only because they induced, the OB having decided things weren't progressing fast enough, and my mother was knocked out so she couldn't push. Fast forward a few years, and they likely wouldn't have induced as early as they did, with no urgency to the fetus. I had no lasting marks or trauma, and one would hope there's no great danger to the baby as they are deployed. As for surprise multiple births, I have a younger friend (born in 1982) who is a fraternal twin, whose parents didn't know they were having twins until it happened. I assume they didn't have regular prenatal care, and that is why. (They went on to have a singleton and another set of twins in short order...five babies in three years.)

Call the Midwife has been renewed again, for another couple of series/seasons. I think S9 was already announced, and now there will be a S10 and S11 (plus Christmas specials), taking airdates through 2022.

In the Hazan case, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking does combine Classic Italian Cooking and More Classic Italian. but she edited a number of the recipes, changing ingredient ratios and such so they're not exactly the same as in the earlier books. I have a bunch of cookbooks, both in paper and ebook (I don't love using them in ebook form, but it's hard to resist snapping up a book I'm interested in when it's selling for only a few bucks), and I use Eat Your Books to catalog them. It's a pay service, but it is super useful for keeping track of and making the most of cookbooks because you can search your bookshelf for recipes using a variety of criteria, and organize them in various ways. Even without a membership, you can use it to browse through or search the recipe titles and main ingredients of indexed books and blogs, access recipes online, and read people's recipe notes. They have a ton of giveaways, too. Here is my personal bookshelf.

I think the story was that Patsy and Delia met while they were both working at the hospital, or in nursing school. Delia was a nurse, but not a nurse-midwife, and got interested in midwifery after she started boarding at Nonnatus House. As for Valerie, I recall there being a bunch of discussion when she was introduced about why she would have midwifery training given her experience was as an Army nurse, but the show never really explained the whys, just told us she did. To be honest, we've never really had more than the barest details about her back story.

My recollection is that I read that they shot part of the season organically (in order), but at the same time they were shooting later Trixie scenes ahead of doing the remainder of those episodes to get them done before Helen George left for her maternity leave.