kassygreene

I've stopped reading the Arrow forum for that same reason - I only read the fanfic thread for recs, the rest is just overrun with sputtering rage, in spite of the moderators' best efforts (take a moment to send positive vibes to those poor mods). I've been on the internet reading forums since before the internet was the Internet, and before forums were bulletin boards, when everything in mailing lists, often with untrimmed quotes and quotes of quotes. If you can't keep up with a thread even when you have Olympic-class skimming power, it's time to give up the thread.

Ah, Inherit the Wind. That was a good movie, and he was so perfectly cast in it that I don't remember him as the actor, just the reporter.

Not to mention that long running series about that very very sweet, clever, polite, immaculately dressed and coiffed serial killer, Jessica Fletcher. She would have annihilated Dexter.

It's only those honking big clip-on earrings that you can do this with, and I think it's partly to make sure it doesn't get tugged off by the handset. I have lots of fancy earrings myself, but I don't wear the kind that get in the way of a phone. There's probably a reason that pre-dates my somewhat advanced age. Maybe it was to keep the handset from banging the earring and making noise. Or to avoid scratching the earring... I dunno. It seems pretentious, to wear something that gets in the way of conducting your life. Which is why I don't wear heels... Only on TV do female action heroes function successfully with "fashionable" heels. And those recently fashionable leg-breakers, the platform heels - gagh!

Taking off my glasses just makes me unable to see anything clearly more than 4 inches from the tip of my nose. I think the rip-off-the-glasses thing dates from the days when characters only wore reading glasses, and looking any distance through reading glasses is distracting, if not dizzying. Back then anyone who really needed glasses on screen usually needed those coke-bottle-bottom glasses, and no one expected those to be removed. If the glasses weren't thick, they were reading glasses for old age (35+), or a disguise for the hot librarian. Or Clark Kent. How blind do you have to be to not see that Clark Kent is clearly Superman? Do people really only look at glasses and hair? Hmphf. At my last job I answered the phone with my full name, because I was a support person, and that is how people knew they got me and not my voicemail, which had to be a pleasant greeting and professionally apologetic invitation to leave a detailed message, since support people were generally called when support was direly needed. I then had to be very careful answering my personal phone, because if you don't know who you called I'm certainly not going to tell you.

TVGuide still has it on the schedule, Zap2It does not. The BBC America website says nothing is scheduled in the near future, but that site also says the current season is number 14. Apparently the David Tennant show aired last night in the UK, and the Meryl Streep one week ago. The Meryl Streep episode was on the schedule for tonight. Is it perhaps because Musketeers is taking 75 minutes on the schedule this week and next? They could just air one less episode of ST Next Gen every damn week.

My mother and/or I usually need to turn on captions for The Graham Norton show. This in spite of my watching a huge amount of british programming over the years, and my mother spending three years as a teenager in Birmingham UK in the late forties. I usually watch Doctor Who with captions. Oddly I generally understood Nine, but Ten (and especially Ten & Donna) babbled at warp speed. I could read faster then they spoke, but I couldn't hear as fast as they spoke. Come to think of it I had to turn on the captioning for Broadchurch too.

I tried to watch The Hour, but I guess I expect better mystery from British mid-century period drama. I tried to watch Gotham, even though I am not a graphic novel fan, because Sean Pertwee and David Mazouz. But even though both these actors are doing a great job, and so is everyone else, I bailed after three episodes. I didn't like the stories, I'm not seduced by the atmospheric awesomeness of Gotham City, and frankly the silliness of the sixties-era Batman still tickles me too much to give the apparently more traditional (can one say historically accurate about a graphic novel series?) interpretations of The Dark Knight a fair shake.

I expected to like Breaking Bad, because Bryan Cranston (bailed about four minutes after the opening title). I expected to like Mom, because Allison Janney (forced myself to stay to the end of the pilot, but no more). I expected to like Psych, because Dule Hill (watched the first season, but the lead character's serial, perhaps even sociopathic, abuse of relationships annoyed the living hell out of me). I liked Studio 60 (Bradley Whitford), but hated how Sorkin screwed up the scripts - the man cannot meet the logistical requirements of an American broadcast television season. I expected to like Commander in Chief (female President?), but the West Wing set that bar too high. Pretty much any non-Sorkin president of the last twenty years lacks credibility to me (except President Henry Hayes on Stargate SG-1, but William Devane has beaucoup experience at president-ing). I expected to like SNL; I was a grad student in the sciences, a liberal, it was supposedly up my political alley. I think I disliked it because it was often shoddy, and I was in an environment where shoddy work would get you kicked out. Also, The Super Bass-O-Matic (a concept so toxic Wikipedia doesn't seem to have an article on it) - saw the first rerun of that and it still makes me gag. I thought I expected to like Ascension, but the scheduling (burned off in three consecutive nights in the middle of December), and the timeline provided at the website (crew was asleep through launch? could it be <gasp> fake? and sorry, only Matt Weiner can presently do a good American take on the sixties) caused me to read the spoilers in the forum here, and I was able to skip the try-to-like-it part.

Yeah, but it's The Onion. It's satire. It's fiction. It didn't happen. It's like Kid Farm. It's made up. It doesn't even pass the truthiness test.

Ah, Comcast. They just hiked up our bill for no reason I can tell, and their online account information is so screwed up that the Your Account page says we are being billed at a rate that we last saw two years ago, that each of the two free digital adapters we have are being billed at $0.00, and also each at $4.95, and every upgrade package we are eligible for expired December 8 2014. I've noted before, one year of Amazon Prime + one year of Hulu Plus + one year of Netflix is less than two months of Comcast, and one year of CBS Access + one year of HBO Go would still be less than another two months of Comcast. All we need is internet and an internet compatible television (which is less than three months of Comcast).

True story - about fifteen years ago my mother took the tour of the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, VA, which has an extensive library. According to the tour guide, the library was available to "Catholic and other non-Christian" researchers... It's a thing with certain flavors of Christians to declare Catholics are not Christian. I'm not Catholic, but I am a non-Protestant Christian, and I long ago decided that if I consider the source of any such comment, it would be easy to dismiss it as ignorant, stupid, and deliberately unintelligent. By the way, the library and archives are now being digitized, but I'm sure are still available to all researchers, Masonic or not.

It's one of those weird English spelling things that actually trips up English speakers. Primer as in textbook is historically "primmer", but the "primer" pronunciation has become sufficiently commonplace to be accepted. I tend to think of fusty spinster grammar teachers as insisting on the "correct" pronunciation, but that may be a lingering sour memory of the last grammar teacher I had, who was fusty, spinster-y, and made me dislike grammar, dammit.

Which was entirely the point. At least they weren't nagging her for grandchildren, and had appeared to accept that she was good at her work. Possibly their own memories of her first husband had moderated the cultural stereotype? We never knew much about him. Now that I think about it, I'm not so sure that was a gender bias or a I'm-your-family-here-to-visit-why-aren't-you-ever-home bias; Brenda was very very good about using work as an excuse to hide behind.

I think NYC in the 80s was generally that terrible. Of course, the closest I ever got to that was The Equalizer.

I don't have a good long-term feeling about any of these people. I've said previously in this forum that I'm waiting for the E! True Hollywood Story, but my golly this is a super-slow motion train wreck. I feel bad for the victims, but the players who have enabled it (Duggar pere et mere, and TLC et al) really need to reap this whirlwind. Soon. My understanding of Calvinism is that it is a stern variant of Protestantism. Wikipedia tells me it is a major, but not Lutheran, branch of Protestantism. A fanfic writer I used to follow (she's GAFIA-ted (Got Away From It All), so no links, sorry, it was good stuff) once had a Jewish character muse that it was difficult to tell all those Protestant sects apart. I don't have anything further that isn't provocatively snarky, so thus endeth the reply.

IIRC, Mad Men and Breaking Bad debuted together in that order. I had read some reviews of Mad Men which raved about the physical and social period detail and decided I really didn't want to watch something about male WASP privilege and chain smoking. I didn't need to read any reviews about Breaking Bad because it had Bryan Cranston. Which is odd, because I only rarely watched Malcolm in the Middle (a good show but intense). I remember Cranston from a very small role he had on Babylon 5, the part of Ericsson. In just a few minutes of Show time he put together a fully realized and noble human being. And that's Cranston - he puts together fully realized characters. I bailed on Breaking Bad about four minutes after the credits. I've never seen more than a few very short clips. I've read some really insightful recaps. And my conclusion is this show is good because the characters are huge, the stories are shocking, the boundaries are non-existent, and for the most part it is what you can do when you don't have to worry about Broadcast Network Standards. It's interesting work for the actors, for the writers, for the production, and still an overall story about people I can not and will not give a good g** d***. So. That's sixty-two hours of my life I did not spend on that show. I did eventually start watching Mad Men. The last two episodes of season 3 were perfect to me, as I remember the JFK assassination when I was 7, and how everything was suddenly scary. Following it up with the "secession" of Sterling, Cooper, other Important Personnel (and Harry), files, film stock, office furniture, and plum accounts, was the sort of thing that I, as a veteran of so many corporate-level idiots, re-watched many many times. Best "You're Fired!" scenes EVER. And therefore I caught up with On Demand, and kept up with DVR. Ok, that last is not an unpopular opinion, those were superb episodes. But Breaking Bad became the show that taught me that I don't have to watch great shows on nasty topics (I'm not-looking at you, Game of Thrones).

As someone who has celiac disease (although not as badly as she does), and who has a brother who has celiac and also casein intolerance (no cow dairy whatsoever - lactose intolerance is a cakewalk in comparison), and as someone who read her book, she got done wrong. Debilitating diseases are not something one takes advantage of, they are something one suffers with. And celiac is even harder when the people around you blow it up as psychosomatic. She had a verbal agreement on hours per week, and wound up expected to work twice that (to match DW's, who is in a lot of Show), her compensation was on par with others who were working the fewer hours, Studio and Show Owners got more for less $$$ (anyone who hasn't worked for a boss who demands more for less isn't paying attention). I will grant that her book was her POV, but again, celiac can gut your life, and because you don't "look" sick, people think you are a deadbeat. And since the cause of the sickness is gluten, and most of our social interactions revolve around food, friends and co-workers get pissy about eating in or out with you, family members get offended that you think their special recipes are bad for you (or worse, your celiac child gets all the harmful food snuck to him by the "doting" elder relative as a treat). If you don't get this, then consider fibromyalgia. I had a neighbor who was a real go-getter in the government contracting field. Then fibro slowly took over her life, her bosses thought she was gold-bricking, and now her disease is managed by the usual changing cornucopia of new wonder drugs, but she can't guarantee that any given day will be pain-free enough for her to work. Bosses don't care. DW is planning a long career in the business. He's management. However nice he may be or chooses to be, his job is to make the project profitable. It can be done by treating people decently; it can be done by exploiting anyone powerless to push back. Given the overall social theme of this show, decent treatment is an expendable line item.

I suspect with great sadness that this year's BBCAmerica airing of GN's New Year's Eve show was heavily edited, as we had only the four guests and Conchita; no flashback clips, no Red Chair... Had to make room for that Star Trek The Next Generation marathon.

Our "national id" - which I believe is still not legally our national id - is the social security number. It's the only number we get issued that isn't easily or casually changed. But a social security card, which is just a small bit of stiff paper about the size of and of slightly lesser quality than old-style calling cards, isn't a good proof of identity as it has no picture, no biometric, nothing. In fact you don't apply in person, you (or your parent since nowadays you can get it at birth) fill out a form and send it in.

Wow. I hope you stayed in touch with her. People like that are keepers.

You can't get a boarding pass without it. You have to prove you are the person whose name is on the ticket. Remember D. B. Cooper? In those days all you needed was the price of the ticket (for him, $20 including tax). If you pay cash today, many people are going to be checking on why. About thirty years ago a friend of mine received a very large cash payout from a life insurance policy (bad tragedy, not sharing the details). As part of his dealing with the grief he spent the next two or three years paying for everything with cash, and he always made a point of flashing a very large wad every time. He kept telling me people were impressed. I kept telling him people thought he was a drug dealer, or some other criminally off the grid type. Also someone worth mugging. To which he would say he could handle himself, to which I would say you have never been mugged, have you? Anyway, nowadays you definitely need government id, especially if you are paying cash. People who don't want to leave a money trail are behaving suspiciously, and airlines that unquestioningly board such passengers are risking their other customers, their crews, their planes, their reputations, and their overall ability to do business. Apologies if I'm drifting, but I've been watching Air Crash Investigation on youtube all day, and this is on my mind.

The first season is on Xfinity without an expiration date (which with Xfinity means anytime more then 28 days from now), courtesy of Electric Entertainment.

Not having the tax-exempt status of a church means they don't have to open up their books.

If I recall correctly, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., was supposed to be a big hit, and The X-Files occupied the following timeslot. Fox had no great expectations of XF, but needed to fill the timeslot. But it consistently out-performed AoBC,J, so at the end of the first season XF was renewed and the other was not. In 1993 I think the only hits on Fox were The Simpsons and Married, With Children. Today, of course, Fox will kill off an under-performing show at the end of act one of the Pilot.