Bastet

She is, yes; she premiered her "baby bump" at the Golden Globes.

I'm expecting this to be wonderfully done, and quite powerful; Yance Ford's documentary Strong Island about his brother's murder blew me away (I posted about it at the time in the Documentaries thread, if anyone is interested in an overview of that case and film). And this Hollywood Reporter review tells me this film is going to be right up my alley, too:

Yes, sometimes friendships turn out to be situation specific, and this is especially common with co-workers. You have those you shoot the shit with in the office, then those you sometimes go to lunch with, grab happy hour drinks with before heading home on a Friday, etc, and maybe even some you occasionally do something with on the weekend due to a common interest. But once you no longer work together, you generally lose touch with the first group, much of the second, and maybe even the third. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's also a nice bonus when the friendships continue. I worked with a great group of women for about five years 25 years ago, and we spent non-work time together as a group and in various pairings/groupings during those years. More than average, certainly, but, still, who knew what the future would hold once we all moved on? Of the five OGs, four of us are still friends all these years later. For some time, we'd get together as a group four times a year (for each of our birthdays, as they were pretty evenly spread out), and then some various duo outings in between. With time that tapered off, and one moved out of state, so the whole-group gatherings are now rare, but we all keep in touch and us locals still get together in various pairings, or as a trio, just more sporadically.

Of course; it's just lunch with a former co-worker, and your respective genders are irrelevant to that. I suspect it will; you're still in the adjustment period, where the bad things seem worse than they are, and your biggest problems are a boss who isn't very responsive to emails and less interaction with others in general than you'd prefer. That's a lot easier to deal with than having a job where your biggest problem is a hostile work environment and outright harassment! Talk to her about her preferred communication method, saying you don't want to bombard her with unwanted emails but also don't want to miss anything during this training stage, and that will likely wind up being an issue easy to address and adapt. As time goes on, you'll get to know some co-workers via correspondence and meetings at first, and then in-person interaction and even socialization may follow.

Aw, no one knew Duckie. Poor Elly is probably not consoled by giving me a chuckle with her Hemingway response, but she did. (Marko's Sylvia Plath response, on the other hand, I don't even know.) I had a great first round -- I ran books (even though I haven't read any of them), bridges (I've been on three of them, but I'm positive I'd have known them anyway), scaries, and basketball, and got all but Moore in same last names. I missed two in roles, but with a little more time I'd have managed to spit out Squid Game thanks to cultural osmosis (Zendaya I had no shot at). I only ran Zimbabwe in DJ, though. I got all but one in octopus and words, but missed two in libraries and three each in roles and historical. But I rebounded to get FJ. I figured, given the year, it had to be another Black woman collaborating with Mabley, and Hurston popped into mind pretty quickly, and that worked for both 1931 and best known for a novel but also a playwright, so I was pretty confident I was right.

I was so irritated with myself several months back when I realized the Kirkland (Costco brand) dish soap I'd picked up was a different formula than what I normally use, it's a combo dish soap and hand soap, antibacterial. I don't want to use antibacterial soap, but it took me until the bottle was half empty to spot "antibacterial" on the label. And it's not in small print, either, but in my partial defense, I don't use that big bottle nightly, I fill a pretty green glass bottle that sits out on the counter, put the jug under the sink, and only pull it out for refilling -- at least I wasn't looking at it every day and still failing to see the word right there in block print.

I can't stand that relationship - they have zero chemistry to me and are each less interesting when together than when interacting with the group or other ghosts individually - so I'm not looking forward to more scenes like the final one, but I am happy to have Flower back.

Here's the updated spoiler policy.

I just checked the menu, and it's not vegetarian. It sounds good. I haven't been to Portland in quite some time, but if I'm there again and Kann is still going, I'll definitely try it out.

The Last Right, an Irish indie about a man, Daniel, flying to Ireland for his mom's funeral whose seatmate, an old man headed home to bury his long-estranged brother, strikes up deep conversation and, it turns out, lists Daniel as his next of kin (since he doesn't actually have any) -- and promptly dies. So in the midst of trying to figure out how to best arrange things for his own much younger brother, who has ASD but is high functioning, once he takes him back to NY, Daniel is initially dismissive but winds up feeling a calling to get this stranger's body out of the authorities' hands and deliver it to the brother's funeral, so they can be buried together. Of course wacky hijinks ensue (complete with a hilarious duo of garda, a crusty male veteran and a plucky female rookie), of course this is all happening around Christmas, of course there winds up being a wise and wacky woman accompanying Daniel and his brother on this journey, of course she and Daniel fall for each other, of course family secrets are revealed, and of course it ends with Daniel making the decision you'd expect any big city gal on a forced visit to her small hometown to make at the end of one of those countless awful Hallmark movies. Yet it somehow works. Maybe it's the acting, maybe it's the Irish scenery, and it definitely helps it's a man making that decision, but it all somehow works in spite of itself. I skimmed reviews online, not having heard of this film until it popped up as a recommendation on Prime, and The Guardian was spot on, calling it a "comfortably contrived Irish Rain Man" and "predictable but fits like a well-worn onesie" ("you know exactly what shape it’s going to be once you’re wrapped up in it, but that doesn’t mean it lacks for comfort and warmth").

While I enjoy a great many stage musicals, movie musicals are generally not my thing; I'm not even sure I'd need both hands to count those I Iike, let alone love. Love Me Tonight is on that short list of loves. The first time I watched it, it was only to see Myrna Loy, and I figured it would be something I sat through once for her and never re-watched. I wound up buying the DVD.

Thankfully, that was a popular opinion in the R&I forum, because I needed someplace to grumble about it on a weekly basis when the show was airing. I cannot believe the show expected us to find it cute, just Ma being Ma, and had other characters chastising Jane when she got angry. The worst, for me, was how she kept ragging on Jane for being a cop, a job Jane absolutely loved, because it made her worry all the time; that would have been bad enough under any circumstances, but the fact she had a son who was a cop, too, and didn't give him that shit made it so much worse. Remember when she hid Jane's clearance letter from her? Jane had recovered from an injury (gunshot, maybe?) and was going stir crazy waiting to be cleared to return to duty. Angela didn't want her to go back, so kept it from her. And, of course, telling people about the pregnancy when Jane had asked her not to was a particularly low point, too.

@Ancaster I'm not tech savvy enough to be sure all the ways people view content, but I know some don't see the TC forum in its entirety, just follow certain threads. There's a thread for relating experiences of dining in the cheftestants' (and judges') restaurants (which, until I went searching for the link, I'd completely forgotten I created years ago!), so it would be great if you could post your experience there so those who don't read this thread but are interested in such reviews and thus read that thread can see yours.

I laughed at how Luxe's owner changed her tune on him getting a shot when Dr. Hodges said the alternative is her giving him pills for two weeks. Olive's floppy ears are adorable. And Apollo the baby squirrel was beyond adorable, trying to suckle on the scope. Poor little guy; what a rough start in life. I wish we'd gotten an update as to whether he was able to recover and be released. I can't say I ever thought about it, but I was surprised to learn how long the molting process can last in chickens. Willow's segment had me a bit puzzled; there was much talk of what an experienced cat rescuer the owner is, and she was clearly knowledgeable, yet there were also several references to the time that had lapsed between when she found Willow's wound and brought her in because it wasn't healing and was clearly infected. I hate getting distracted by stuff like that. Was this our first time learning Dr. Ferguson had played college football?

Exactly. I, on the other hand, hate the Dallas Cowboys with every fiber of my being, as nature intended.

Yeah, there are zones on union filming projects, where if you go outside the X-miles radius, you have to pay transportation costs, and if you go outside the larger Y-miles radius, you have to put everyone up for the night.

Same here. I figured I was doomed based on the category, but I happen to have seen the name "Harley Quinn" written around this site enough to register it (because it always makes me think "Like harlequin, cute". I have no idea who she is/what she's from, but the diamond-patterned outfits part of the clue successfully led me to harlequin, and then Harley Quinn. I was as doomed as predicted in the love poetry category, although the missed DD of "mingle" was an instaget; for a second, I could not figure out how Marko went so wrong until I realized just as Ken started to say it that he was trying to rhyme with the wrong line. I figured the $400 clue had to be Dorothy Parker, but had nothing for the rest. Bowling was my other bad category, as I've never bowled (I know this is utterly unheard of in some areas; a friend who lives where pretty much everyone has their own bowling ball in a personalized case in the hall closet actually gasped when that came up in conversation). I figured the first one was strike, and guessed king pin, but I had nothing on the rest. I didn't keep specific track, but I got most things in the rest of the categories.

Yes, they emphasized convicted, with the lawyer saying it and Hetty later repeating it. There was nothing about debts - which would be paid out of the estate so her death wouldn't have preserved their wealth for Thomas - only about the charges Elias and Hetty were facing (and then Hetty alone, since Elias couldn't be found), and how, if convicted (which she would be, since she was guilty and he of even more things so if they put those on her, too, she's good and done for), their assets would be seized. As presented by the show, any financial implications for the Woodstone heir went poof as soon as Hetty joined Elias in not being able to be tried and convicted.

That's what I do with unknown numbers as well. I do. It's one of those cordless phone sets, where the main base has an answering machine, and then the additional handsets just sit in small charging bases.

Same. And then there are the people who only call me when they're on a long drive, so I get the added pleasure of pockets where we can't hear each other, the call drops and they have to call back, etc. Do you have DirecTV, by any chance? They eliminated the caller ID feature, so receivers with the new software no longer have that option available in settings.

According to an interview with Rebecca Wisocky posted in the Media thread, the creators came to her about a month before they shot the episode, saying, “We think that this is the direction that makes sense to go in with this.” When she'd asked them in the first season how she was going to talk about her character, not knowing how she died or what her ghost power is, they told her to just wait, they wanted to leave lots of doors open. So how long they'd been mulling this scenario over, I don't know, but they included her during that month in fine-tuning the right way to present this revelation. It's a great interview, all about this episode; here's an excerpt:

I know. As I said, it's just one of my pet peeves, people not knowing the difference, so if that's an episode's biggest problem for me, it's a damn good episode. It just came out in kind of garbled phrasing; I'll clarify.

Godsdamn, this was old-school Ghosts. This season has not been bad, far from it, but it hasn't matched the firing on all cylinders brilliance of the first two seasons until tonight. My only problem was people repeatedly using "cement" when they meant concrete (cement is an ingredient in concrete, which is what was getting poured), only getting it right once, but that's a personal pet peeve, so if that's an episode's biggest flaw, it's a damn good episode. All of us who figured Stephanie's boyfriend was the one who actually got sucked off are proven right, yet that was such a blip in the episode. (A blip that gave me a chuckle in the flashback, where her reaction was "Seriously?!" then "That was rude" and immediately followed by "I'm going back to sleep".) Because, my stars, the reveal of Hetty's death. Her accidental OD celebrating Elias's death explanation was great on its own, but then to find out that's a cover for the real story, and why? Just perfect, and a fantastic weaving in of the stuck in a hole story, to explain why Thor, Sas, and Isaac not only didn't know about Elias's vault (I freely admit I did not pick up on that at the time), but didn't know about Hetty's death. Isaac's non-verbal reaction when she reveals her ghost cord to save Flower, while everyone else is focused on Flower, was so fitting their relationship, as was him telling Sam and bringing her to talk to Hetty. Isaac and Hetty are two of the most myopic ghosts, but they're getting there, and, as they do, their love for each other has always been a bright spot. And then the classic sprinkling of great lines throughout, the little moments, like Sas protesting he is "literally the storyteller" when Isaac takes over, Trevor saying having to pull, not push, is his greatest challenge yet, Thor's inadvertent "she said 'I'm well'" reveal of where Flower is, and "Pull the plug and save our girl, you miserly bastard" when it turned out the ghosts don't show on Facetime so their only hope was Jay not wanting to spend the money to fill in the well. Plus it leaves open the possibility to later come across the Puritan ghost wandering the dirt, on a show that perpetually has to work to explain the appearance - and disappearance - of additional ghosts the longer it goes on. Fantastic episode.

They're all just varying points on an inherently predatory spectrum, a legal loophole where someone adds product and turns an illegal pyramid scheme into a legal (here in the U.S. and other, but not all, countries who regulate such things) MLM. (If most of a particpant's income comes from selling to true customers, that’s a business. If most of it comes from selling to people they'll have to recruit to become sellers themselves, and then they recruit others, and the percentage of their commission is how the money is made, that’s a legal pyramid scheme.) The income gulf between these MLM leaders and their distributors is huge, and it's not the same as looking at the same gap between CEO and worker, because the middle rungs of the corporate ladder are at least made up of salaried employees with benefits. What really gets me is the feminist façade used to prey on low-income women, with promises of autonomy and entrepreneurship; it's design, not coincidence, that these are pitched to women by women. Another disturbing aspect is how MLM leaders use many of the same indoctrination tactics as those used by cult leaders. Bottom line, most don't bring in decent money shilling this stuff; the overwhelming majority of MLM participants make little to no money, and in fact a significant percentage lose money. There are three general reasons for this: 1. The buy-in model. First, the company doesn’t spend a penny on training and marketing – participants pay to do it themselves. Then, obviously the cheaper a seller can buy the product, the more profit they make when they sell it. But to maintain access to those discounts, they have to keep buying; there are levels to attain, badges of honor with greater benefits at each, based on how much is bought. (And there are poor buy-back policies for unsold inventory, so people wind up with garages full of this crap they can't unload.) 2. There’s an inherently limited supply of people to recruit – that’s why the real winners are the person who started the business and the first people recruited. 3. You create your own competitors by recruiting other sellers from your social network, which is how these are structured; it benefits the owner, but not the participants. I think the best thing to do when a friend has been sucked into one of these is to gently present her with the facts, but if she's intent on learning the hard way go to one party, make clear you won't be recruited, and only buy something if you actually want it and think it's a good deal (I have a couple of Pampered Chef products I still use to this day).

Well, boo, but Alison had a nice run and I'll see her again in the next ToC. I had a horrible first round for a regular game. I ran crossword clues and got all but one in patience, but I almost blew literary characters entirely, only knowing Puck, and missed two each in the rest. I got back on a more typical track in DJ; I ran Juilliard and patients and got all but the hackathon TS in words, missing two each in the rest. And I got FJ. I still remember all the states in alphabetical order thanks to "Fifty Nifty United States" in sixth grade. I knew it wasn't Alaska or Arizona, put a pin in Arkansas as a possibility, but figured 1) it was probably an older state than that and 2) FJ wouldn't be so easy as being another "A" state; I had oodles of time left, so kept singing. Obviously not California or Colorado, but, a-ha, Connecticut!