JessDVD

It's so fortunate for all TV cops that Bad Guy Gun Training never includes a lesson on aim.

What happened with the Willis family? I thought their video was cute and I agree, it only takes one fun new family for another's show to wane.

There's no possible way anyone can prove (well, technically there is but I don't want to consider how that would work) when J&A are or aren't ... you know... and if it is or isn't at the optimal time of Anna's cycle (I feel like a heel saying all this), so if J&A decide they want to slow the train down (at least, if they haven't already), they can and probably will do a basic NFP. Technically Michelle does/did NFP too, just in the having more, not having less dept. I've never personally met any super fundie families, nor discussed this with any, but I'd be shocked if none of them ever practiced NFP at one point or another, just in the "I have a headache" department (which technically falls under NFP). Plus, a bunch of little kids is an excellent form of birth control in and of itself...

If J&A are after 18-20 kids, they need to get "producing" at a faster rate than they are now. I generally suspect that the spacing of their children is not entirely coincidental, it's a pretty even 2ish years, and if they keep up at that rate, that's still a pretty full house but 12ish kids at most. The 19-20 only happens if a mom is having babies every 14-18 months for her entire childbearing years. Sets of multiples help. Since either Anna is not that fertile or they are intentionally spacing a little more (or at least, not tracking and *trying* to have babies that close together), I think it's VERY unlikely they'll get past 12 or so. But just based on my own experiences, once Anna gets into her 30s and is raising a houseful (with or without kid moms) and notices the difference physically between having babies in the 20s and having more babies in the 30s, she may not be so keen on expanding the rodeo. And my other general opinion about the topic is that in my observations, people tend to gravitate toward whatever they grew up with, unless it was a negative experience. Anna is one of 8, and that has always seemed to be a positive experience for her. Josh grew up as 1 of "& counting" and I've not had the impression that it was always a super positive experience for him. If they keep going past 4 kids, I can see 8 being the "Ok, we can start tracking in the prevention department at this point...."

I don't even know that I think the writers are trying to portray Senior's habits to be annoying, I think it's more that the writers are trying to set up that Senior is wonderful and charming, and we should just hand wave his annoying habits, since that's what everyone but Tony does for the most part. I don't find him wonderful or charming, just slick and obnoxious. It's never inappropriate to be polite to someone with whom your coworker (and the characters are all portrayed to have a good relationship with and care about Tony) has a difficult relationship, but I don't feel it's appropriate to act like he's all amazing in the way that most of them do.

I can't believe I missed that application.. This was my favorite part: Anyway, I felt like Drew was clearly set up to be the winner which bugs me but he was the clear winner on the food IMO so I was willing to roll with it. I liked that he cooked things that don't show up on Chopped much/ever. I've seen almost every ep ever aired, and don't think I've ever seen pavlova, not sure about schnitzel either. Both of the female chefs seemed to have missed that it was a cooking show, not a fashion show. Don't tell me the hairdresser didn't have pins or something in her purse that she could have used to put her hair up in between appetizer and entree. I don't have anything against makeup or wanting to look one's best especially on national TV, but when you're spending 12 hours in a hot kitchen with lights and cameras, might be the day to dial it back a notch or at least present one's best updo?! I wasn't particularly impressed with either of their efforts nor the hairdresser's attitude. Rice with 10 minutes to go? Really? And a stew with potatoes, over rice just sounds like starch overkill to me. Scott and noodles - major eyeroll. I'm sure that the pasta manufacturers embed some fantastic pasta quality into each individual noodle, that is released never to be seen again if the noodle is broken before cooking it.

I'm just so sick of OMG ROBERT WAGNER WALKED IN, Bishop and Abby give him giant smiles and hugs, Gibbs a cordial hello, McGee a friendly hello, and Tony looks like a deer caught in headlights and we're clearly supposed to side with Anyone But Tony on this. It was enough to have it once a season and now it's been twice in the last couple months. DO NOT LIKE. If they could write Senior as improving some of his irritating traits, I might be willing to not completely despise his appearances. Like he can continue the womanizing and at a retirement community off screen would be fine. But can we please, please, please drop things like destroying Tony's kitchen and rearranging his furniture, and we're all supposed to give him a pass for this because it is, after all ROBERT WAGNER? I have no idea what happened otherwise in this ep because I was too busy being annoyed at Senior. I don't care for this either.

RE: selling his kids' childhoods, I don't disagree but JB is neither the first nor the last to do so, reality TV is not a new thing and plenty of parents have been willing to sacrifice their and their kids' lives for a TV show. If JB doesn't compensate his adult children fairly for their participation (which IS speculation as far as I'm aware), I don't agree with that either, but other than that, JB&M's participation in 19K&C isn't any worse than the million other reality TV shows that have come along over the years. Back to Josh/Anna, I still think even though none of us know, that it's very unlikely that they're just lumped into the TLC contract with JB&M. I don't know the laws on this, but I would assume they, as their own household, would legally have to have their own contract with TLC when they got married. I'd like to think that they would stand up and say they're not appearing on the show unless they have their own contract, if that were ever in question but who knows on that....

This is entirely speculation as well, but my guess would be that TLC has some sort of contracted amount for multiple families who appear on the same show as well. Say $25k is the standard amount for a show, then for one that just has the JB&M Duggars on it, JB would receive $25k and divide it among his family as he sees fit. Then for a show where J&A are in town and all of them visit the Bateses, each family receives $10k. Even in a case where people are all actually good friends and things are well between them (who knows if that's the case here), things like dividing up money for a TV show appearance are just too dicey. I can't imagine that TLC would just give JB a check and let him divide it among non-dependent family members and friends. Surely the Bateses got paid for their own appearances on 19K&C, I would expect anyone else who's not a Duggar dependent would be the same.

yeeeeah... Unitarian doesn't strike me as the Duggars' speed. I'd hazard a guess that J&A go to a Baptist or Bible church, maybe a non-denom with fairly conservative leanings. Anna is due in early July. I think July 10. Her due date is a few days before mine, which is July 13. I can't possibly fathom that anyone on the TLC crew does anything in the way of kid wrangling beyond the extreme circumstances, like Marcus has escaped from Anna and is bolting toward the road and Key Grip #1 happens to be the one at the road and he stops Marcus. TLC pays them to be crew, not baby-sitters. I'm sure that extra childcare needs are part of the show gig, and I can't for a moment fault J&A for having one of Josh's sisters be their help, rather than asking a local friend. It could even be in their TLC contract, for that matter.

I'm sure Anna is fully capable of handling her children on her own on a day-to-day basis, yet I feel there's a difference between your standard day-to-day raising of 3 kids, versus being filmed doing xyz with the 3 kids. I've never been on TV but I can imagine that it's not exactly an easy, relaxing (it's lucrative, at least...) experience? I have 3 kids and one due this summer also and I sure wouldn't complain to have my sister help me out if freakin' TLC is going to be filming us do just about anything, knowing it will be on TV. Wrangling the kids for interviews, making sure everyone looks TV-presentable to do an errand or crafts at home or whatever. Vacationing too... vacations are fun with kids but they are work and if I had someone filming me while I was taking my 3 on vacation, I would be very grateful to have a third adult on hand. I also wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the DC Duggar filming all happens within a week's time, like Jana and Jinger come up for a week in June and they film J&A doing a bunch of different things, and then space that out over a season. I think it was a bad choice on behalf of TLC to edit the vacation to appear as though Jana weren't there but I've disliked whoever's editing their show for at least two seasons now. I think it was mentioned somewhere here that they had a producer change a few years ago, and that coincided with my non-interest in actually watching the show. Too much re-enacted footage, badly cobbled together timelines, and way way way out of date "storylines". They need to catch up with the fact that social media exists, and know that they can't pull off things like pretending Jana's not on a vacation with J&A, or airing Jill's wedding when she's halfway through her pregnancy.

I can take the time to watch the show again tonight, but until then if anyone can come up with it off the top of their head, what did the theme do to mess up the lady chopped in the app round? I thought the theme was cute and knew those green beans were fondant automatically, thank you all those years of Food Network Challenge. Dessert nachos guy was totally robbed and I'd bet at least 50 cents that it was because the winner made that comment about how her daughter says the old lady always loses and the show was all, NOOOOO that's SOOOOO not true look she won even though she clearly didn't deserve it!

If Crown College is any good, and I don't know anything about them other than that I perused their course requirements for secondary education (my major, more or less, mine was K-12 music, but close enough) and business which includes finance, and obviously who knows how the titles of the classes compare to what's taught in them, but the course requirements for both those degrees seemed to me to be reasonable - then they are teaching their students how to actually be legitimate financial advisers or whatever. There are probably people out there who don't care that the service they're getting is bad, as long as it's from a Christian guy, but I think it's probably fair to guess that *most* people want their financial adviser/kids' Christian school teachers/whatever to actually know their field. Maybe I'm too willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, but just because it's not accredited, doesn't mean it's not educating its students, just that their students may be limited in how they are able to use their degree in real life, which one would hope they'd know going into it. I know for education, a degree from a non-accredited college means you can only teach in a Christian school, which I'm sure is fine for many people, but does that matter for business? And if Crown College were regularly pumping out graduates who didn't really know finance or how to teach kids, the graduates wouldn't be getting or keeping jobs, and people would stop going there. At least, one would think.... I'm coming at this from my friend who just started adjunct teaching an accounting class at a local community college and the accounting dept is not very good there right now - so local employers have apparently been saying, don't hire grads from that CC because they're not very good.

Was this the all-tool version of Chopped or something? I didn't really care for any of the contestants, although the guy chopped in the entree round was mildly tolerable.

Well, that was... a bit dark. I hope that the barber had good building insurance. Even though the kid obviously lied about what had happened, I thought it took a strangely long amount of time before Steve started questioning why, exactly they were all there together. Danny - either be on the show or don't, I'm over all this there for an ep, then gone for 2. I thought both cases were worth a full episode, and probably would have preferred they go that way. I kept waiting for the home invasions case to somehow intersect with the Armenians or something, and it never did. I think it would have been more interesting if Chin, Grover, and Kono were investigating the strange disappearance of a couple kids from a neighborhood, while Steve was in the barbershop and so on, they intersect, turns out the kid was behind it, the end. Plotholes abound as has been mentioned but strangely they didn't bother me overall.

I think the thing about the adult Duggar kids/spouses posting about or getting involved in politics is that it doesn't seem that they're presenting well-thought out arguments, necessarily, just trotting out one-liners ("more children killed by abortion than in the Holocaust"-type statements). (Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this, I only idly follow them on social media) If one of them were to write a blog with well-worded, well-researched, and well-presented arguments about this or that political issue, that would be different. I don't think it's fair to completely dismiss their beliefs just because one disagrees with them, but I also don't think they're doing a very good job at all "advocating" for their political beliefs. Generally I prefer social media to be about cute pictures of kids, what people are eating for dinner, and funny cat pictures. :-) Regarding the school days off thing, Mr. DVD, who works for the local public school, told me that 75% of students have to be in attendance for the day to "count" toward the state-mandated total hours of instruction, in the state of Michigan. I assume other states have similar guidelines, SO if a school has 30% Muslims, who all skip school on a Muslim holiday, they HAVE to make up the day elsewhere so it's pretty idiotic to not have a school holiday that day. I've seen stuff online about schools pandering to Muslims (I have no idea as to the accuracy), but this ain't it.

I don't by any stretch think that you have to have your kids in public school in order to have an opinion on how public schools do this or that BUT I also think that you make yourself look like a tool if you home school and have no intention of ever changing this, and pontificate in public about how public schools do things, especially things that don't really matter, like having school holidays on days when half the kids are gone anyway. Now if a school had a very low population of Muslim students and were giving school breaks for Muslim holidays just to be fashionable or something (I have no idea if this has ever happened), that *may* be something worth pointing out... but I still am not looking for my politics from reality TV people and don't want to think about there being people who do.

I hated this plotline when they did it in NCIS a few seasons ago and I hated it here too. I would much, MUCH prefer to see a legitimate investigation on the leads about the things they've done that actually are illegal. We all know going into it that everyone's going to be cleared in the end, so let's spend some time with a competent, non-asshole investigator asking them legitimate questions and them giving legitimate answers. I think that would be interesting to watch. Steve's line about how they all could end up in a Colombian prison was just laughable. Duh, we KNOW that they're not going to get stuck there, we KNOW that they'll accomplish their mission within this episode or the next. Of course CIA guy was crooked, like that wasn't telegraphed from a mile away. Also, the "case" was super weak because the only reason anyone knew anything was because Doris told Joe told Steve. I could happily have lived the rest of my life without seeing that guy's eye stabbed out. Not their best, IMO.

Urgh, really?! Are there really people out there who want to watch completely fake and staged footage just so they can "see" a "gender reveal"? Really?! I mean, I can totally accept that when they're filming this or that, they may ask someone to repeat something they said so they can get a different camera angle, and it's not like every minute of footage could ever be completely natural, not to mention people aren't always natural when they're being filmed anyway. But I really, really don't enjoy watching clearly staged and re-enacted footage. Just record the actual gender reveal and post it on UP's website. ETA: they *could* have done genetic testing at 12 weeks but I find that unlikely. My 2nd was due on June 11 and I had my u/s at the end of January. Unless Erin is having regular ultrasounds because of her miscarriages, she probably wouldn't have found out earlier than that.

Internet varies between early June, and July 10, I think the second is more reliable and likely as it seems they just found out the gender and I'm due July 13 and just had my ultrasound. Timeline is hard to tell with these people...

I clearly was not really paying attention when I wrote my comment originally, because yes, expensive for the *advertiser*. What I should have said was, that I can't imagine every producer of every brand name wanting to pay Chopped when Chopped wants to use their product.

Yeah, any brand names that appear are considered advertising and thus have to be paid for and that would get expensive. It makes me think of when on CBS procedurals, someone gets out a tablet to show how Suspect X did whatever, and they make sure they show us the Windows 8 start menu, lest we think the tablet is a Samsung. Or the leads jump in their car to detain a suspect and the camera focuses on the car's logo as it zooms up the highway. I also find more amusing when they call things commonly known by the brand name, by a generic name. Processed cheese spray instead of Cheez Whiz or whatever. Gummi is a brand, but I thought that gummy is just an adjective. Any idea? What word could they use instead? Gelatinous?

My guess is Madyson, Madelyn, or Macy. I won't presume to guess what level of math Josh completed but I'm sure he can do basic addition and subtraction and is aware of his monthly income in relation to their expenses and I have a really hard time imagining him giving up his life of moderate ease to have a hockey team van size family. I feel this way about the majority of the Duggar kids but especially the ones old enough to really remember 17 people smushed into a 3-bedroom house. 4 kids in 6 years is still within the norm and I'm fairly sure I'm not just saying that since that's what I have (or will, after #4 is born this summer), we'll see how it shakes out in the next few years. But as was mentioned above, if they stay at this every 2 years thing, they will have a large family by any standard but not mega. That video they did would have been a lot better if it weren't totally obvious that they were cribbing from cue cards, incidentally. Good thing the kids are cute.

In case anyone's dying to know, a brief Facebook survey of my Canadian-born but US-living since the 80s mom's Canadian friends & relatives shows that nobody's ever heard nuh-neye-EE-moh, just nuh-NEYE-moh. Other votes are pronounce it how you like but get the recipe right and serve them with a bold dark roast coffee. Back to the judges, I am of the mind that if I wanted to eat something non-sweet, I'd eat dinner so please serve me a good sweet dessert. I would probably not do well on Chopped. Actually what's more likely is that I'd try so hard to make something non-sweet that I'd end up getting the "This reads more like brunch" feedback.

I know we all have different thresholds of pain, and are, well, different- but I would take labor over weeks of shots in a heartbeat. Different pain, different amount of time, different immediate results. And I had long labors for my first two also, but I'd still take that over weeks of shots when given a choice. I would suck it up (and cry a little bit, yeah) for the sake of my baby as I'm sure ultimately Erin is. Anyone know Erin's due date off the top of their head? Alyssa is soon, right?