shura

Remember that team in Chile painting some random house thinking it was a TAR task? Yes, better be sure. And this park didn’t really look like a park either. I think that’s what gave the military brothers trouble, they were looking for something green and couldn’t find it. I agree, it made for a relatively relaxed leg. I am guessing they are going to start the next leg after flying to their next country? Because if they start 45 minutes behind while they are still in Jordan, then it’s absolutely meaningless because they will all be on the same plane out of Jordan anyway. Same here. I took it as a comment on how hard-working and into-the-task she is.

And Isaac continued with “well, I was trying to be more delicate, but yes, tree dead.” I also loved how Isaac, marching into a room when Jay was standing in the doorway, offhandedly said “Move him” and kept moving without slowing down a bit while Sam told Jay to move and Jay scrambled to get out of the ghost’s way without asking anything. They have all gotten pretty comfortable with their situation. Flower shined again when she explained to Thor that you can’t get people to do what you want if you only yell at them. This was my exact problem with Greta Thunberg. You cannot yell at everybody at the UN and expect them to become passionate about protecting the environment because you shamed them into it. ”Trevor wise like Odin… if Odin’s butt cheeks visible every time he bend over.” I liked the little look Trevor gave Hetty after she enquired about researching stable boys. And yes, that, apparently, is indeed in there.

Not being fundamentalist simply means that they are not going to prosecute you for wearing shorts, it doesn’t mean that you can’t cover up to be respectful of Muslim sensibilities. Wearing long clothes works both for this and for sun protection at the same time.

They robbed the bank when she was in a hippie commune, not a cult. At least Flower insisted it was not a cult because they let you wear shoes. She must have been in a cult before the commune. UPD: Ooh, here is the direct quote: “This was the commune, not the cult. They're very similar, but the commune let you wear your shoes and you could still talk to your family.” Fits perfectly with what she said in this episode. Nice job with continuity, writers.

You could, sure. You would probably wear it all the time around those people in the car, not just part of the time, no?

To be fair, there are tasks that are obviously impossible to do. If I were presented with (what I thought was) a solid block of marble and told to chisel a Michelangelo-quality sculpture out of it, with no other context or considerations, I wouldn’t need to try to know that I simply cannot do it. I mean, there is a nonzero chance, I suppose, that I am a genius and don’t know it and would be able to knock it out, but it’s highly unlikely. So it would be a safe assumption that it would be a waste of time and effort to try. But, of course, Dom did have other considerations. This is TAR, it’s very unlikely that she would be given something that’s actually impossible. And here are people around her that seem to be doing pretty well with the task. This all should suggest to her that maybe the task is not what she thinks it is. I cannot believe she didn’t immediately go to reread the clue or actually thought that the others were experienced sculptors. That was funny, they had the same kind of mask and it almost looked like passing it back and forth between them. I’m sure they simply were filmed after stopping and getting out of the car to ask for directions or interacting with people on the street for some other reason. Otherwise, I can’t imagine why you would wear a mask in the car when you felt perfectly fine not wearing it some time before and after. The fashion shoots were Zoolander-level ridiculous. I liked how one of the brothers referred to the giant feather one of the models was holding as “her broomstick”.

It wasn’t necessarily a tech issue, more of a lack of basic reasoning. If you can see other reviewers’ names on your computer, why wouldn’t other people be able to see your name on theirs?

Nope, there was no Gunnar, Ivar or Other Ivar. Between this and the ghost at the Farnsbys that was never addressed, I wonder if this was filmed as a potential series finale in case the show would not get renewed? The scene where the ghosts are thanking Sam for everything certainly could be used that way. Then, of course, the show did get renewed and they had to recut it into a standard-length episode and use a different ending.

I can see that, everybody's situation is different. It just felt like a teen pregnancy trope in the episode when everybody was like "of course you are scared, we will help you." Why would they (the characters, not the writers - the writers just write whatever comes to them most of the time) assume that this is an "of course" reaction? Everyone is different, she is an adult, she just said she was not religious, so she is probably comfortable around her parents when faith or lack of it is concerned. There is no need to write it as "of course she would be scared, why wouldn't she be?" Well, Mary probably has the right to be as furious as she wants, but she is talking to an adult who has her own ideas and opinions about what her life should be. Those ideas and opinions have as much value as Mary's. And yet Mary is dismissing the adult in front of her and is talking to a teenager who cannot possibly have valid opinions simply because she is not old enough. I think it might be on the writers, they just forgot that Mandy is supposed to be an adult.

He is really not very observant, is he? Even if he is not into smelling things the way Sass or Alberta or Hetty are, he has spent a fair amount of time in Jay and Sam's kitchen. Even if he never noticed cinnamon, I am sure he's had a chance to see a (gasp!) pound of sugar. The whole time they were talking about pickleball, I was picturing shuffleboard for some reason. And then it was like "wait, this is pickleball?" Good job, Jay, thinking you can do things in real life because you played videogames.

Was hers a teen pregnancy though? That's what my impression was too, but then it makes Mary barely older than Mandy. Say, she was 19 when she had Georgie, he is 17 now, so Mary is only 6-7 years older than Mandy. Where does she get off then lecturing Mandy about everything the way she did at the dinner table? She was talking to Mandy like she talks to a dumb teenager like Georgie. FWIW, Mary Cooper's BBT wiki has her birth date as Jan 13, 1950 (no idea where this comes from). Georgie's is Mar 13, 1975. The acting in the episode was top-notch. Missy's facial expressions were priceless, especially the suspicion side eye she left Mary and MeeMaw in the kitchen with. Georgie's reactions were spot on too.

I think her parents are originally from Oklahoma, but now they are living in Texas and Mandy grew up in Sheldon’s town. She said when she met Georgie that she moved back from San Antonio and is living with her parents again, and is trying not to bump into anybody she went to high school with. So they are local, there is nowhere to go back home to. It was a little off hearing everybody treat Mandy as if she is a teenager, especially the part about her being scared to tell her parents and how her father was going to shoot Georgie. The woman is 29 years old, this is not a teenage pregnancy!

I don't know about that. For me, standing in the line of fire when you should know better, in front of people who don't know what they are doing with a bow and arrow, is stupider. I loved how the ghosts were right there and Isaac launched into his "we are ghosts" speech as soon as Trevor dropped dead. I guess it was always like a show for them whenever there were any goings-on at the mansion. But there was no reason for the ghosts to expect that someone would join their ranks during the proceedings - and still Isaac was ready! Same speech he tried using to welcome Sam's great aunt some twenty years later, too. He probably honed it for centuries.

It really felt gratuitous, didn't it? Way too long (it felt like a good two minutes from what, the 18 minutes of the actual running time?), way too whimsical with those old-timey title cards. And I don't think they used the word "jealous" correctly. Yes, it can mean "protective of your domain," but when you deliver it as a one-word question with a triumphant smirk the way they did, it pretty much always means "I am rubbing it in that I have something or can do something you don't." Which is not at all what we had here. Kid Sheldon's sense of entitlement was super annoying too, from refusing to help Mary because she was not helping him (while she was making sure he has something to eat) to his insistence that everybody at Radio Shack drop everything and listen to the great ideas of the holder of three shares. "I am busy too, but I made time to call you." It always pisses me off when people use reasoning like that. You chose to do something, that really does not impose any obligation to do the same on anybody else. I kinda liked the breakup though, there was some strange dignity in it. "I love you, you know that. But we are done." And that's it. No drama, just final.

I believe they also indicated at the bottom of the screen that the scene was set in 1513 (or was it 1530-something?). Pretty sure the English speakers did not have a presence in North America yet, so the Lenape wouldn’t have any need to learn and use English.

There is a hotel in Belfast that was bombed by the IRA something like 30 times. I have always wondered how on Earth it stayed in business. You’d think that after, I don’t know, the first dozen bombings potential guests would have caught on.

I gotta say, if I were looking for a BnB and came across a website trying to convince me to pick them by talking to me from a tree’s perspective? I would scroll right on, more likely than not. It would probably just weird me out, not my cup of tea at all. And calling the tree Woody? Cringey. But best of luck to Sam and Jay, I hope it works for them. Sass is so incredibly sharp and perceptive, isn’t he? While the other ghosts sometimes don’t get the implications of what is happening (like Isaac with some things he says, Pete seeing his wife bring a “friend”, Thor with, well, most everything, etc.), Sass just sees right away what is happening and why.

Yes, spending literally half of the episode watching people turn rocks over was a bit much. And the show didn’t do any service to Thessaloniki. What interesting things did we learn about the place? They got rocks, cafes, old walls with towers and a waterfront. Just like literally any other Mediterranean city then? Yawn. Socrates and Diogenes have nothing to do with Thessaloniki either. I did like Socrates’ weird intensity though.

I wish they had to spell it in Greek to make it at all challenging. Even then, you could find someone with a smartphone and google it, apparently. The same about the accent - the vendor did pronounce it more like "shoe-vlaki" and it could trip someone who had never heard of souvlaki before, but Google helpfully suggests "souvlaki" if you type "shuvlaki" or even "shoevlaki." Maybe "I've never eaten onion in my life" meant "I never eat onion" (did she actually say "have" there?), kind of like "I've never eaten it if I had a choice, and I usually have had a choice," rather than "I've never tried it." The funny thing about Kim and Penn is that they are billed as "internet personalities," and that usually turns me off a bit because I prefer real-life personalities. There is just usually not enough in an "internet personality" to make them interesting to me. I suppose, most of those other "internet personalities" are so young that they simply have not had time or reason to try other things and become anything more. But these two are legit. There was a shot of someone leaning forward and you could see a mic sticking out from under their shirt on the back, too.

Reading about the cheese on Wikipedia, isn't this a colorful description :)? "Because the larvae in the cheese can launch themselves for distances up to 15 centimetres (6 in) when disturbed,[4][11] diners hold their hands above the sandwich to prevent the maggots from leaping. Some who eat the cheese prefer not to ingest the maggots. Those who do not wish to eat them place the cheese in a sealed paper bag. The maggots, starved for oxygen, writhe and jump in the bag, creating a "pitter-patter" sound. [Much like when "The worm jump inside," as the greeter so cheerfully put it, and for the same reason, no doubt.] When the sounds subside, the maggots are dead and the cheese can be eaten.[12][8]"

Some (possibly drunk) cheesemaker looked around, saw that everybody was doing mold and decided to kick it up a notch. Apparently, the maggots digest the cheese and that adds something to the texture as well as the flavor. I still don’t understand why anyone would choose to eat live maggots though. Aside from being icky, they may carry some parasites that can make you sick. For that reason, selling and buying casu marzu is actually banned in the EU (and in the US, for that matter), I am not sure how exactly TAR legally procured that particular wheel of cheese.

Yes, exactly. Sheldon is self-overprotective. He won’t do many things that are actually safe. So if he feels comfortable hanging out with those guys, then it’s probably safe with room to spare. And George did not blow off his parenting duties because he was frustrated after a bad day at work. If you watch the scene again, he is telling Mary that Sheldon thinks it’s safe, the campus is safe, Sheldon will be with his friends, and all that. He gave it a thought and made a parenting decision that at some point you have to start trusting that your kid may be on his own and this is not a bad situation for that. We may agree or disagree whether it was a bad parenting decision, but he did exactly what Mary asked him to do - take one thing off her plate and be a parent. Of course, what Mary wanted was not to let George do parenting, but to just go and pick up Sheldon because she wanted the parenting to be done her way.

Yeah, ‘correctly’ implies that they would have to know where they are, where they are going and which compass direction they need to be facing at any given time. That last part might be too much even for people who are not navigationally challenged. You don’t need a compass to drive on a road. A road has only two directions - towards your destination and away from it, and they don’t change when the road makes a turn. Trying to navigate on a road with a compass will just mess you up. Maybe it’s precisely the compass that confused Natalia so much? “I thought we should be going east now, why are we going north? Maybe we are not where I thought we were? Where are we? Wait, why are we going southeast now? Which direction should we be going?” And that’s it, she is lost.

I couldn't understand that either. If you are on a freeway with exits, or on any street with intersections with other named streets, all you need to know is that you have to get to exit X and you should see exits M, N and O on your way there. That's how you know that you are going in the right direction. It makes absolutely no difference whether you are heading south or southwest, you follow the road whichever way it happens to be going. Of course, you need to have taken a look at a map and know where you are and what your destination is, but a compass can't help you with those things anyway. As for Arun's "we are better than this," no, I don't think there is any evidence of that. If you keep being this, then this is what you are.

And a cholera pit for epidemiology buffs, with a rotating exhibit about water heaters. This month - deliming!