Bastet

I tried - for the second time - to watch this movie, since it generates such discussion, and I made it farther this time (45 minutes instead of five), but I cannot with this shit. This is one of the stupidest scripts I have ever endured. The only likable characters are the deaf guy and his boyfriend, and I don't even feel bad about not learning their names because they are such empty caricatures I wouldn't be surprised if they were in the script as The Deaf Guy and His Boyfriend. Everyone else sucks. Yes, including Meredith, very much, so while I agree with the "You jerks" part of this thread's title, I am not down with "Meredith did nothing wrong". But this film sure did, because there is no foundation laid for why Amy - the only one who has met her - hates her before she even arrives, or why the rest of the family follows suit based on what Amy said -- all she tells them is Meredith is annoying because she talks about herself constantly and clears her throat all the time. Somehow Sybil takes this as a reason to be the most rude host in the history of time. It makes NO sense to give Amy the most trivial problems with Meredith to mention, or for the family to react to it the way they do. The flaw repeats itself when Claire Danes arrives, because we have literally not seen her interact with the Stones beyond saying "Really, I'm fine" when they're fussing over the knee she hurt upon falling off the bus - which means she just got there, not that they've had an hour's interaction that wasn't shown - yet they all love her. I'll finish it tonight to see if there's anything for which I can give it credit, but so far this is a lot like another Christmas movie I finally watched recently and hated like it was poison, Love Actually - it absolutely squanders a good cast on a ridiculous script.

I did that as a kid. In a striking coincidence, Santa's favorite cookies were the same as my dad's (peanut butter). As for presents, we don't open them one person at a time, but my best friend's family did that when we were kids. There were five people in that family, usually plus a grandparent and an aunt on Christmas, so it took for-fucking-ever and drove everyone but the dad - whose idea it was - nuts. Finally they all told him nope, not doing it this way, since it took the whole morning.

Aughts, but, yes, that would make me think - even though it could be any '00-09 period - of 2000-2009 because of popular usage. Similarly, while turn of the century could refer to any period of transition from one century to another, I believe the phrase became popular in the early 20th century to refer to circa 1900 so that's my first thought. Context can indicate a different period, but in the absence of contrary indications, those are my associations.

Unlike with FoL, I recognized the DS cast, and without sitting here squinting and asking my cat "I know them; who is that?" It was a boring episode, though, at least for someone like me who doesn't really know the show. It's weird they picked one without Kimberly. (And, yeah, how in all hell does someone Drummond rich not have enough bedrooms for the brothers not to have to share?). Lawdy, though, these commercials are the greatest part of this whole thing. Kudos to all involved. It was nice to see everyone (OGs and actors from both casts) enjoying each other so much after the second episode ended. But Lisa Whelchel's placement in the back meant she was totally hidden by Jimmy Kimmel; at first I thought she wasn't even there. And was Todd Bridges still there? Now that I type this I can't place him.

I never watched either of these shows regularly - I'm not sure I ever realized they were Norman Lear shows; they're certainly not his best! - but I saw them enough to know the basics of the main characters. Who I don't know is half these actors. Every time someone walks out, the audience goes wild, and half the time I either don't know them or it takes me a bit to recognize them, and I'm sitting here muttering Damn, I'm out of touch. I'd be even worse off if they'd cast younger folks, and I can't decide if they should have. On one hand, of course, but on the other I kind of like people who probably remember these shows paying homage. Whoever is playing Mrs. Garrett is doing a parody of Charlotte Rae, but oddly it is totally working for me, but whoever is playing Jo is terrible. Gabrielle Union really isn't evoking Tootie for me, but I'm enjoying her. And I'm loving the hell out of the commercials. Unfortunately, I tuned in late, so I missed the original FoL cast members singing the theme song. I'll have to watch that online, as it sounds fun. Ooh, I just got to see them at the end. I've seen Kim Fields recently, on The Upshaws, but the others I haven't seen since back in the day. Lisa Whelchel looks the same. I just know her as being so obnoxiously God Squad she nixed a totally logical storyline of Blair - who, ya know, did not share her religious rules - having, gasp, sex, so I'm certainly not a fan, but it was nice to see her and the others do this (not that I blame Nancy McKeon for skipping it, mind you). Now DS is starting; this might be a bit sad since almost all the originals couldn't participate even if they wanted to, being dead and all.

The first one is stupid: "#1 – Because An Old Box Was Used" goes on to talk about the problems with using an old box without removing/completely covering over the old shipping label, and ends with a snotty "The moral of the story? Don’t use an old box to ship your stuff. If you really want to save the environment, plant a tree for every package you send." No, dipshits, the moral of the story is your reason should be "Because a Previous Shipping Label Was Left on the Package".

The physiology TS surprised me a bit, but that was a good game - very evenly matched (including the fact they each missed a DD). I was as bad as the contestants with the presidents category, missing three (not all the same three as them; I got the Jackson TS, but didn't know the $200 clue of Truman). I was even worse in pop culture, missing all but one. I also missed one each in non-fiction (the $200 Steve Jobs clue, and boy did I smack my forehead when that was revealed), mountains, and office -- the only thing I ran in the first round was the vocabulary category. I did better in DJ, even though I only ran theory (thanks to The West Wing, I heard C.J.'s "Is it comprehensive?" quip in my head at "theory of everything"). Surprisingly, I only missed two in mythology. I missed another two each in Russia and PhD, and one each in words and musicals (I know nothing about Dear Evan Hansen other than it exists, and I don't think this is the first time that specific bit of ignorance has cost me a J! clue). And I got FJ, so this was a game where I got better as I went. Concentrating on the geography, I quickly thought of Barbary Coast, but I'd never heard of a Barbary Something animal, so I thought that wasn't it and switched to trying to think of African primates. I could only think of mandrill, and that didn't ring any bells as a region, so I was back to square one. Not having anything else to guess, I went with Barbary.

At least you wait on them; my mom sends a cat in to wake me up at 9:00 (I spend the night on Christmas Eve). And wake me up, he does - he jumps up between me and the edge of the bed and meows (and he does not have an inside voice) right next to my head; he's like an obnoxious child bellowing "Santa was here!" in my ear. He's lucky that, unlike an obnoxious child, he's cute. And I can get him to lie down with me for a little while as I work through the waking up process. So by 9:30 I can manage to get up, pee, and go see what Santa brought. The reason I spend the night is because if I'm happily snoozing in my own bed, there's no way I'll get up early, and they'll get pissy if I don't show up until 11:00. I get it; if I want to do Christmas morning later, it's on me to have it at my house, and I don't want to, so I consent to their timeline. Thus the napping with the cats during the day! My parents get up around 7:00 (I assume; that's what time they get up at Thanksgiving when we're out in their motorhome [and thus the time I shuffle down the hall to the bedroom so I can go back to sleep]), so that gives my dad a couple of hours to play Christmas music in the living room; he's nice enough to turn it off when I stagger out, because I hate most of it and my mom is done with it by then.

Yeah, the show/cookbook is for home cooks, not caterers. The mini muffin pans make 24 muffins each, so if you halved the recipe to just fill one pan, you'd need one stick of butter instead of 2, 1 egg instead of 2, 1 cup of milk instead of 2, etc. -- the recipe for 48 muffins looks doubled, so since the episode was simply about "remembered flavors" not "neighborhood block party", I don't know why she made so many when 24 is a much more logical number for anyone not catering a brunch to make. (Even at 24 I'd have to give half away, but a family could get through 24 of them before they went stale.) Also, in looking up the recipe, it's yet another retread; she'd already published it in another cookbook, just using raspberry jam instead of whole raspberries. I forgot to note that I made the red pepper aioli to go over seared salmon. She calls it spicy, and I don't find it spicy at all, but that's why I liked it - I think something truly spicy would mask the salmon's flavor, while this was a nice complement. But - as per usual - I thought it made too much sauce for four fillets (I halved the recipe to use over the course of two servings of one fillet each, and had more than 1/4 of it left over after that second meal; I used it as a dip for calamari).

Quickly reading the "way it moves from tree to tree" part of the clue made my first thought flying squirrel (as an X-Files fan, flying squirrel is in my brain thanks to "Bad Blood"), but once I read the rest of the clue, I saw it had to be a sugar [synonym of volplaner] and then glider was an instaget. (Not because I immediately recognized volplaning meant gliding, just because sugar glider is the only sugar something-er animal I know of.)

The vagina is self cleaning, and washing it - with soap or douche - can actually be harmful (by altering its pH, which is an infection risk). The vulva should be washed; warm water is plenty, but a mild soap is fine. So, yeah, ads telling women they need special products to clean "down there" are not only sending a horrible message, perpetuating the notion women's genitalia are inherently "dirty", especially during menstruation, they're promoting activity that can be physically harmful.

The details are different - presents first, then Bloody Marys, then breakfast, no movies or music - but the lying around like beached whales for the day philosophy is us. We have a fire going all day long (which means some years we have to open the sliding door so it's not too hot, but my dad - a transplant to CA from OK - must have a Christmas fire), and mostly lie around reading our new books and napping with the cats. There was a stretch of 2-3 years where a friend of mine (who's been my friend since junior high, so my parents know her very well) came over for a couple of hours in the afternoon; her parents had divorced, and she was pretty unhappy about having all her traditions replaced by dividing her time between two houses, so she liked to stop by someplace familiar and comforting on the way.

My parents have never had stockings, just two for me (my grandma made me one and my "aunt" [a close family friend] also made one for my first Christmas, so I had two), and they still put them up even though I'm in my late 40s. They use them for little things I use that it's nice not to have to ever remember to go buy - Chapstick, nail polish, etc. - and candy. And I still get "Santa" gifts, too. When I was a kid, the gifts from my parents were wrapped and under the tree, and then Christmas morning there were unwrapped gifts next to it that Santa had brought. So now, for shit my mom doesn't want to wrap, she puts them out Christmas morning as Santa gifts. I never invite anyone to join us for Christmas morning. Drop by during the day, come for dinner (Christmas Eve or Christmas), welcome. But Christmas morning is for kicking it old school.

I just finally read about this new deal: For reasons known only to her, my mom decided she wanted Discovery+, so I have access via my parents' account; I think it's fine, but nothing worth paying for. I would never sit and listen to a companion podcast, and wouldn't bother to record the FN version (because they always consign her to a timeslot I am not awake for) but would watch - via the FN Go app on my bedroom TV that has a Fire stick - it in the wee hours when I'm trying to get back to sleep, and will at least check out the extended version of on Discovery+. Like all things Ina does, though, it sounds rather repetitive despite the talk of how these new platforms allow for "new and creative" programming: I think Ina offers great, "how easy is that?" recipes to home cooks - and when she's not fawning over Jeffrey or staging stilted interactions with friends is a relaxing presence as a host - and I gotta hand it to her for her marketing skills; she writes basically the same cookbook over and over, churns out basically the same show over and over to promote each one of them, and is still going strong decades later. And I'll never stop drooling over that garden of hers; imagine having the space to keep a fig tree that almost never produces despite being planted eons ago just because it makes pretty leaves to use as decoration on your cheese plates!

On an episode of "Julia at Home" (here's an article about it; it's an ATK production, but seems to only air on Pluto, not any of the PBS stations that carry ATK/CC), she made "super food" tacos: charred salmon (seasoned with chili powder) with a collard green slaw (which also has jicama, radish, red onion, and cilantro, dressed simply with lime juice and zest) and an avocado and cilantro crema. As I said in one of the Food threads, these are obviously not at all traditional, but I like a nearly infinite variety of tacos, and I was intrigued because I love raw collard greens (and also love them similarly sliced thin and briefly sautéed, but I hate them braised for eons), so I gave them a try this weekend. I think many people would not dig them (Julia even said her daughter doesn't like them and her husband is just okay with them, so she usually eats them with a friend of hers who also loves them), but I did. Nice flavors, while certainly the healthiest of the many tacos I make. I only watched that first episode and the next one, which was for spaghetti and (turkey) meatballs in a tomato sauce, which is not at all my thing, but I enjoyed it and will keep going (it looks like there are seven more so far; it's kind of fun to hear her talk about the things she does on ATK but absolutely does not take the time to do when cooking a weeknight meal at home.

Nothing has been said definitively, but I get the sense from the little that has been said it may be a Discovery+ thing. If it is, I'll be able to watch, because I have access to Discovery+ through my parents' account; my mom wanted it (I have no idea why), and once you have an account you can stream on numerous devices, so they gave me their account info to log into with my Fire stick. (All my access to paid streaming services comes via family and friends giving me their account info [since they're already paying for it and these services foolishly allow so many devices per account, so why not?], and I appreciate the sharing, but none of it is valuable enough that I'd pay for it.) At any rate, Bobby and Sophie were fun to watch together on this show - they clearly enjoy spending time together and teasing each other - and featured some yummy places, so while it was a one-season deal, I'm glad we'll see them doing at least the same general thing again (it must be different enough it's not simply season two of The Flay List this time set in L.A. [where she is based] instead of NYC).

Yeah, I figure they were pissed he left early - and that he was totally over the people and the process by then - and crafted his final episodes accordingly. Because there's certainly no foundation ever been laid for it, and, as you said, what they strung together for those couple of episodes included a lot of vague comments that could have been made at any time about anyone. Am I really supposed to believe that Justin wasted this all-expenses-paid trip to the destination he lobbied for by spending the entire time entertaining himself by watching Colin and Amaya take the bait? Come on. Yes, he asked some leading questions - probably in a desperate effort to get one or both of them to catch a fucking clue and stop playing out this ridiculous melodrama over his head each night - during their time on the train, but I feel confident he spent the majority of his time in India exploring, ya know, India, not the psyches of the two immature twits he had to room with. And, yes, he had some disparaging things to say about the roomies. So did the others. So does everyone, always, living that way for months. (He was also pretty damn spot on in his analysis of them; it's notable that in compiling the harshest things he ever said in a confessional, he was rarely unfair.) I bet Justin and Irene could have one hell of a conversation.

I didn't think so at first (maybe just because I know her voice practically as well as I do my own), but after another listen I can hear what some are hearing.

What someone goes by now is how you refer to them now, and only if it's relevant that they went by another name at a specific time, that gets noted (e.g. her IMDb page being for Thandiwe Newton and credits where she was billed as Thandie Newton having that parenthetical notation). And not just in obvious examples like referring to the star of Juno as Elliot, not Ellen, Page. If, say, J! wrote a clue about Parenthood it would read, "Joaquin Phoenix played the troubled son of Dianne Wiest in this Ron Howard ensemble," not "Leaf Phoenix played ...". Newton should have been referred to as Thandiwe. If they thought her name change is not popularly known, they could have written "Thandiwe (known then as Thandie) Newton played ...". The way it was written makes me think they're like me and didn't know she'd gone back to her original name, but I'm one random person sitting in front of my TV; they're a group of people responsible for fact-checking the content they put out for broadcast on that television.

While it doesn't seem there will ever be more episodes of this show, part of the three-year contract extension he and FN recently agreed to includes development of a new travelogue series (to debut next year) for the father-daughter duo; the working title is Bobby and Sophie on the [West] Coast. It's unclear whether it will air on Food Network or the Discovery+ streaming service.

Ah, I'm glad you mentioned that - I saw "Thandiwe" Newton written recently and thought it was a typo. I did not know that was her real name she's gone back to. Good for her reclaiming it. And, yes, that's how she should have been referred to in the clue. I just checked her IMDb page to make sure it's correct, and yep - she's Thandiwe Newton, and her old credits just note "(as Thandie Newton)".

Since I'll be watching football tonight, I just checked the archive. For most of the clues with pictures, I didn't need the photo to know the correct response, and then there were a couple where it wouldn't have helped and a couple where I feel comfortable assuming if I'd seen the picture, I'd have recognized it/them. I hate It's a Wonderful Life, but I ran that category - although my initial response to the Home Alone clue was "Huh?" I also ran magazines, but that was it for the first round; I missed three in Popes (shocking, I know), two in marsupials, and one each in Post-Doc and elbow. In DJ, I only ran girl groups, but I did pretty well overall; I missed two each in finals and authors, and one each in the rest. FJ was an instaguess that turned out to be right; I didn't know exactly how Nieuwe was pronounced (I've since looked it up), but it brought to mind "new". So that plus modern made me think art nouveau. I had no idea if that was right (I wasn't sure if the timing fit), but nothing else came to mind as more likely, so I stuck with it.

No, Ane Brune.

I've never seen it on TV, just the one in the link you posted. But the shorter version wouldn't bother me; it was the kid's gift to his grandma (cheapskate 😄), so if it ended with their hug, I'd still think it was kind of cute (yet rather twee). But I have one that does annoy me. I like several of the AT&T commercials where a poor connection yields disastrous misunderstanding on video calls, but the "lullaby turns into unintentional horror movie" one bugs me (I can't find it on YouTube, but it's on iSpot). First, I would think in this day and age the kids realize what's happening, but setting that aside - What's the grandma's problem? She acts like the mom purposely scared the kids. At the beginning, she calls her "honey", so I figured she's her mom, but the way she acts at the end, I have this whole story in my mind where she's her mother-in-law and secretly hates her.

He does at the end. It's something the grandson wanted to do with her, they finish and hug, and then she invites her husband to step in. It's be pretty rude if he shoved the kid out of the way to take over.