Bastet

I have never dressed up for Halloween other than as a grade school kid and once as a young teenager. I don't think it's dumb for adults to do so, but it holds zero appeal for me. If I get invited to a costume party, I decline. I liked wearing a costume each year in elementary school, because we had an afternoon-long carnival and it was fun to play games while everyone was in costume (and my mom always made me one, so I was in haute couture rather than off the rack <g>), and I carved a jack o' lantern (in the same basic design every year because I have no drawing ability) back then, but I didn't go trick-or-treating (I went once, thought it was dumb, and didn't do it again) and I've never given out candy to trick-or-treaters. I was only mildly a Halloween person as a kid, and not at all after that.

I still have some hope Mike Richards was behind the increase in Bible clues (I noticed it last season [at one point, looking up the previous ten games and discovering six had religion categories, four of which were about Christianity, plus scattered clues in other categories] and once I learned he graduated from Pepperdine - a Christian university - I thought perhaps he was the reason for it and the prevalence would go away with him), and it will wind up being a more typical number of such clues/categories this season. The battery TS surprised me. I think a lot of people don't know the difference between assault and battery, generally hearing the two together, but only one of those is also a car part, so I was not at all expecting that to go unanswered. I ran the entire first round! (The TV Show Opening Credits category had me nervous, since I'm so hit and miss with pop culture depending on what decade it's from, but I got all of those even though I've only seen two of the shows.) In DJ, I only ran world and federal agencies, but did pretty well with the rest; I missed three in Bible numbers (of course <sigh>), two in bays, and one each in foreign films and boredom (doldrums, which is a word I use, but I did not know it was also an equatorial region, and I got caught up with that, coming up with nothing). And I got FJ - although Frost was slow to crawl out of my brain after I quickly thought of O'Neill - so that's two great games in a row for me this week.

I'm in the final stretch of season three, and it's interesting to see Daniel and Wilhelmina have to work together, because in the aftermath of Connor cleaning out the Meade Publications coffers they've both broken the number one rule of business by spending their own money. I've said before I remember very little about this show, so a lot of storylines feel new to me. I remembered Connor was bad, but nothing specific. Once Betty got the YETI assignment to go over the budget, I groaned aloud in remembrance: Yes, of course, an assistant doing a class assignment uncovers an embezzlement scheme an entire publishing company's worth of professional accountants failed to detect. I was 100% Team Hilda when Ignacio said she was acting like a child (being weirded out by him and Elena canoodling on the couch during movie night) and she came right back with, "Because you're acting like a horny teenager." As if he wouldn't be uncomfortable if Hilda or Betty carried on like that while the family was sitting there watching a movie. Hell, he gets weirded out when one of them says they're spending the night at a boyfriend's house, but they're supposed to roll with it smoothly when for the first time ever someone other than their mom is coming to the breakfast table in his robe. Betty's wardrobe physically pains me sometimes. She looks like a rodeo clown.

That's already a thing (at least in some regions; it's common in Los Angeles, where I live, and I've read articles about it from people in the midwest). If I have any bare crust, I dip it in ranch (have done for eons). But I know some people dip their pizza slice itself (no thanks, but, hey, you do you). Hell, there are pizzas with ranch dressing as the sauce. Kathleen Madigan's current comedy tour is called "Do You Have Any Ranch?" because she has a bunch of teenage nieces and nephews, and when they and their friends are at her house, she's amazed that no matter what food she puts in front of them, she gets asked "Do you have any ranch?"

There's a thread for the Halloween franchise, and pretty much all of us who've posted about Kills feel "meh" about it too (but are hoping the final film in this reboot trilogy will kick ass).

"Because this was clearly the middle part of a trilogy, and this killer is craving some filler for Halloween" and "As everyone in Haddonfield fights back in the dumbest way possible" sums it up. I love "You're just going to leave him there? You're not going to chop him into pieces or blow him up? He's just going to get up again. See? What did I just say?" because you could say that about every horror movie. When that happened, my friend and I quoted Scream: "This is the moment when the supposedly dead killer comes back to life for one last scare."

I feel the same way. I'd wager a good 95% of references to women as "females" (rather than uses of "female [something]") I've ever encountered were in a dismissive, diminishing, and/or derogatory context. So whether the other five percent meant it that way or not, I don't care; I bristle at any utterance of "female" as a noun because of how that is predominantly used these days.

I laughed out loud at that. Great delivery.

From the article: Yes, because only TV shows have access to camera equipment in this the year 2021, so the only way to make sure the kids can get together years from now and watch the wedding (probably as part of trying to remember when all their various stepparents came and went) was to have it filmed by a Discovery crew for a streaming special.

Arthur's last name is Chu, not Cho. I'll be watching football tonight, so just checked the archive. Thankfully there weren't too many photo clues. I didn't know C.C. Sabathia or deuterium, but, thanks to several lucky guesses, I got everything else in the first round (giving myself credit for shooting gallery and dahlia, which I believe I'd have known had I been able to see the pictures). It was downhill from there in DJ, but I still did well; I ran What Happened When and TV History, missed three in dust, two in La Mancha, and one each in flags (the sagebrush TS stumped me, too) and word pairs (I knew the flack flask TS, but not where hobbits come from). And FJ was an instaget, so my J! week is off to a great start.

I don't believe she ever said she was gay rather than bisexual; when Ted Allen "outed" her during an interview, he said he was not going to put a label on her, but she was "dating a woman right now". (I put "outed" in quotes, because Burrell's rep said she didn't feel outed, as it was no secret who she'd been dating for a couple of years at that point, it's just that her then-partner is a very private person.) Anyway, regarding the wedding, I love the colors! Especially the orange bridesmaid dresses. I think Anne's dress is nice, too, and I don't like very many traditional wedding dresses.

I'd have deflated it. And then taken it home with me to sell to the highest bidder who wasn't Tom Brady. Brady would not be getting that ball back.

I'm the same way - I like Parker largely because of the actor's line delivery on "You're the man, man". And, no, I've never seen Leverage; if you asked me to name Parkers, I'd say Parker Posey, Parker Stevenson, and Parker who brings a gallon jug as a side of ranch.

I use Photoshop, but I know Paint has a re-size option. So if you use Windows, that's available to you and might be the easiest way. Congratulations on the new kitties!

I don't remember the original Jake from State Farm having a wife. The guy who called State Farm at 3:00 in the morning had a wife (the "What are you wearing, 'Jake from State Farm'?"/"She sounds hideous" woman), but I don't remember seeing Jake anywhere other than at his desk.

Gift as a verb has been around since the 17th century. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

Any time someone is offering guests a place to stay, the guests can take it or leave it. If the RV is what's offered, and any given guest isn't interested, they can get a hotel room instead and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's nothing wrong with an RV being what the HHs have to offer guests, either. I'll generally opt for a hotel, but if I was staying at someone's house instead and they offered me their guest room or their RV, I'd take the RV, for the privacy. I grew up motorhome camping, so I'm well aware of their limitations and am not bothered by them for the length of a vacation (I wouldn't want to travel full time in one, but we routinely did three weeks when I was a kid, and that was in a motorhome nowhere near as nice as the one my parents have now, so for a long weekend or week, no problem).

However you wish the storyline had played out instead - this being an opinion thread, and an unpopular one, so we're all here to vent our spleens - there was nothing "screwball" about how the writers resolved Reese's custody battle. What they wound up with is what the overwhelming majority of real family courts (under the mandated "best interests of the child" standard) would have ordered -- neither Peter nor Roger had a biological parental right as a trump card (as Chloe did in the Little Susie example), and both had been a dad to him in every way that counted - with Roger spending more time with him than Peter did, since Carla had primary custody while she was alive - for most of his young life (and Reese's age is a factor; Roger wasn't a stepdad for two years to a teenager who'd prior to that only had one dad for 12+ years).

I doubt it was the only reason, since the writers loved to reach for lazy, sexist writing to create conflict for - and prop up audience support for - a main character via a secondary character's actions (e.g. turning Jen into a cheater to distract from the fact Mark had been the biggest problem in the Greene marriage), but, yes, given the lack of understanding and accommodation of mental illness then - not that it's where it should be now, but it was even worse then - I will always believe that played a role. They labeled the actor "difficult" - where, of course, misogynoir comes into play again, since it takes far less to dismiss women, particularly BIPOC women, that way - and took it out on the character.

The Venus, serenade, and Rubik TS all surprised me a bit. I got all but four in the first round; the oyster and du Pré TS stumped me, too, and I also missed one more in cello and Resident Alien. I didn't do nearly as well in DJ. I was terrible in authors, missing all but one (and that one - Austen - was a lucky guess; I'd never read any of the works asked about). I also missed two each in planets, actors, and revolution, and one in "for"; the only category I ran was puzzles & games. I rebounded for FJ, though; it was an instaget (and instead of saying the name, I sang it [and, since I can't carry a tune with a wheelbarrow, that would've caused Sting to request I please never do that again, but my cat doesn't care]).

Oops, you're right that I had the timing wrong; I'll fix that. But Roger was every bit as much a father to Reese as Peter was, which is why Peter was never going to succeed in trying to deny him any custody rights.

No strike; they reached a deal (members still need to ratify it).

Holy crap, y'all - in June, dungeness crab meat was around $50/pound, and today it's $79/pound! It's for a birthday dinner, but yikes.

I don't eat much beef, but that commercial always makes me crave a ribeye steak.

What gall? He'd been raising the child since he was born (oops, as pointed out below, I got the timing wrong - Roger had been raising him as far back as Reese would probably wind up remembering, but not back to birth) so it would have been quite shitty to just walk away because Carla died. Neither Roger nor Peter had any biological rights, so a custody arrangement needed to be determined. Family court standard is "best interests of the child" and what Peter initially wanted didn't meet that. Thankfully for Reese, it eventually got worked out that way. Oh, yeah. Cleo being wooden and only having chemistry with Reese is a separate issue, and an unfortunate one. I liked Benton and Corday's relationship even after they split up, which was nice. I love the moment when he comes into her office, she lies because she doesn't know what to say, he totally lets her get away with it because a) it's human nature and b) it's her, but within moments she admits she lied because she didn't know what to say. And then, of course, his giddiness when she helps him. I'm glad the respect and affection continued.