Bastet

No, its purpose was to give a diverse* set of women one place in the sea of male talking heads where their takes on the news of the day were heard, where they made the calls on what got discussed in the first place. Because that wasn't happening anywhere else. It still isn't to any meaningful degree; there's nothing remotely approaching parity in the percentage of women booked as commentators/analysts. It is still largely men's reactions to what's going on in the world being heard, and the stories they're interested in being examined. There is no need to insert a male voice into this show; they're heard all over the television landscape. *I've only ever very loosely followed stories of the comings and goings, so I don't really know how diverse the panels have been (my guess would be not enough). Oops; I now realize this is about The Talk, and I was thinking of The View. My point may still stand, but I'll have to look into what The Talk is about.

What is a man even doing on the panel? I know it has devolved and I never watched it because I'm not a morning person, but the entire point of the show was to have a panel of different women discussing current events. Because the news shows predominantly have men on to provide commentary and analysis, so women's takes on what's going on in the world were not being heard, some things of particular interest or importance to women were not being discussed in the first place, etc. Men are still all over network and cable shows giving their two cents, yet they need to invade this show, too? Gee, I can't wait for the mansplaining. Oops; I now realize this is about The Talk, and I was thinking of The View. My point may still stand, but I'll have to look into what The Talk is about.

It's from Friday, and became a meme.

I absolutely adored him, and found him hilarious, in Schitt's Creek, and Kate MacKinnon's face and mannerisms have cracked me up on the regular, but that Tostitos commercial is so not funny I'm almost embarrassed for them.

That's the one I have. (I usually just mince with a knife, but if I'm mincing a lot of garlic, I use the press to save time.) My mom and best friend both have the Pampered Chef garlic press and I like it just as well. In fact, that one is easier to clean.

The Nation did a nice piece on Ed Asner's activism.

Anti-social Susan is my favorite ("Wow, I'm rude"):

It's leaving Netflix today, so I finally watched Love Actually, and I would like those two hours of my life back. Holy shit. Most people I know hate it, and my friend who loves it also loves Titanic, so we are clearly not into the same films, so I don't know why I'm surprised I found it to be rubbish, but I really can't believe I just wasted a morning on that film. Or that the film wasted such a great cast. The performances were terrific - well, other than Keira Knightley, who I think is terrible in this, but in fairness she is given absolutely nothing to do other than look pretty - but most of the storylines are so utterly ridiculous that I nearly threw things at the TV. Colin Firth and the Portuguese woman? The little kid obsessed with love stories running through the airport? That cretin who lands in Wisconsin and promptly falls into a fivesome with four hot women? The guy who professes his love to his best friend's new wife? The prime minister with a staffer 15 years his junior? Are you kidding me with this shit? Am I supposed to actually like any of these guys? The Emma Thompson/Alan Rickman relationship was well done, and I'd have happily watched a film about that because it was realistic. And I love Laura Linney's character stepping away to freak out in glee that she's finally going to get it on with her long-time crush, and the prime minister grooving to the Pointer Sisters. But the rest? Hard pass.

I haven't listened to it in eons, but I have an Erasure greatest hits CD, too. I love "A Little Respect" and several others. I should play that again.

"Coal Miner's Daughter" being down at 39 made me pop an extra blood pressure pill, Florida Georgia Line being in the top 30 made me roll my eyes so hard one got stuck, and then I got to the piece of jingoistic shit that is "God Bless the U.S.A." at 25 and my entire head exploded. I scraped it up off the floor, only to find Luke Bryan and Eric Church in the top 25. This list is trying to kill me. I'm going to go listen to "Is There Life Out There?" to soothe my nerves.

Adjacent characters can't let old crushes/relationships go, either. You can have two 40-year-olds in a stable relationship of five years, and if one of them runs into a high school sweetheart the other one gets jealous and suspicious about something as simple as them grabbing coffee to catch up.

Anyone who can afford to do so, now would be a great time to donate to VRC. They haven't filmed since December, so they've basically had no income other than donations this year. Both locations are going to sustain damage (they've already lost a trailer Moe just finished fixing up, one of the cat houses [a tree fell on it, but all the cats are safe] and the main door to the NO warehouse), she's going to be paying a lot of overtime, and then they're going to have displaced dogs to take in after the storm.

It was an aneurysm. Tommy Delk, the guy who was appointed Chief (when Brenda was in the running).

For whom he'd earlier written a heart attack. He was fond of people's hearts malfunctioning in the middle of the Murder Room - Clay, Fritz, Andy, Sharon.

I somehow missed this the first time around. The show had not yet been canceled when he decided Sharon was going to die. Duff decided that before they even started filming season six, and the cancellation news didn't come until shortly before it started airing, when Sharon's death had already been filmed. But the writing was on the wall; the guy who'd taken over TNT several years before never supported the show, even though it stayed the network's number one drama through all the timeslot changes he imposed, because he wanted "edgy" programming, and Mary McDonnell's contract was up at the end of season six, but there had been no renegotiation talks initiated. And Duff used to use killing Sharon off as leverage to get him to renew the show; TNT dude would say, "No, don't do it and we'll pick it up." (Because he needed to hang onto it as a cash cow while he developed his "edgy" programming, and knew without Sharon viewership would drop.) This time, TNT didn't object. So Duff didn't officially know, but he knew - no one was surprised by the cancellation, only that it was announced before season six even started airing.

I absolutely love that song. It's my favorite of his (yes, above "Swingin'") and I agree with this from the CU write-up: I chalk the latter point up to it being co-written by a woman.

That "I hate spunk" scene in the pilot was the one he did at the audition. I don't think anyone knew at the time quite how iconic it was going to become. Ed Asner lived a great life - his acting, his activism, and his family - and died at home at 91. That's fantastic, although of course still a terribly sad loss for those who loved him. Here is what wound up being his last interview, conducted just a couple of weeks ago, an extensive look back on his career. This is sad: But it's a positive interview, and it's great that one of his final acts was signing on to the class action lawsuit against the SAG-AFTRA Health Plan (draconian changes to eligibility requirements this year mean thousands lost coverage, many of whom are elderly actors who'd paid into the plan for decades [the income requirement does not include pensions or residuals - which the IRS considers income, but not the inept leadership of SAG-AFTRA - and, with few new roles available to them, that's what many older actors live on]).

There's always the potential for highfalutin to be an aspect of Duff's creative decisions - this is the man who assigned every season of both shows a different esoteric theme (e.g. identity, expectations, reason, risk) and asked not just the writers, but the actors to play to it each episode (when Mary McDonnell signed on for the original three-episode guest star gig, she asked Kyra Sedgwick how the hell one acts these themes, and Kyra said they just ignore him, heh). As for why heart issues were his go-to when giving characters a health crisis, maybe he partially based that on heart disease being the country's (and world's) leading cause of death, but most TV writers reach for cancer (number two in the U.S., not even in the top ten worldwide). But mixing it up a bit would have been better. (And having the men all bounce back but the lead woman die wasn't the best idea, either.)

Yes, it was conceived that way (thus the differing focus in the titles), and the ensemble nature is one of the reasons I prefer Major Crimes to The Closer, and in fact it can make it hard for me to watch The Closer (other than the Sharon episodes, as I love her), because what was fine at the time can be annoying to me in hindsight after seeing what the squad members are capable of when allowed to do more. Lifetime is showing the middle of season one tonight. I love Sharon’s trajectory over that season, in how she adjusts to the job and how her relationship with the squad members and Rusty evolves, and I also like the Provenza arc in this middle stretch of episodes. “Citizen's Arrest" shows us he took that obnoxious life strategist Thorn’s advice in the previous episode about changing himself if he wants his circumstances to change; starting with "Citizen's Arrest", he deals with Sharon and Amy differently. In an impressive moment of personal growth, he steps back and takes an objective look at his new work situation and acknowledges Sharon is a great strategist and Amy has a specific skill set, both of which add the squad’s collective expertise; he takes Sharon's side in a disagreement over plan of attack and suggests Sykes take the lead because of her SIS experience's relevance to the case. Accepting and grudgingly appreciating these changes to the squad instead of wallowing in resentment leads to a real turning point in the next episode, "Out of Bounds", when Amy puts her physical self and Sharon puts her job on the line to solve the case. Although he certainly continues to be irritated with them at times, they both have his respect from that episode on. With season one of The Closer being about the squad getting over themselves and accepting Brenda, this show’s first season about the squad getting over themselves and accepting Sharon could easily feel repetitive. But Duff and the writers wisely had everyone but Provenza come around pretty quickly and gave him a longer but realistic trajectory given his individual issues beyond stubborn resistance without dragging it out – by episode six, things are no longer fundamentally divisive even with our lone holdout. Not perfect, certainly, but the foundational respect came quicker this time, and that makes sense given everyone’s previous experience; the conflict is not drawn out for manufactured drama, but instead resolved at a natural pace. And then the next episode, “The Shame Game”, brilliantly brings together the parallel stories of Rusty’s and Provenza’s evolving relationships with Sharon in that pitch perfect scene where Rusty melts down over the discovery of his biological father and accuses Sharon of wanting to get rid of him. An eavesdropping Provenza steps in to yell at Rusty in defense of Sharon’s care of him, Sharon waves him off and tries to assure Rusty while barely making it out of the cubicle before they can see her cry, and Provenza quietly chastises Rusty for the hurtful fit Rusty already knows was totally out of line. The state of the relationships at the end of the first season and then at the beginning of the second after a long break are established at an impressively organic pace.

Watching it a few years later makes me sad neither Eli Manning nor Odell Beckham Jr. are playing for the Giants anymore (well, Eli isn't playing at all), but it also still makes me smile. I love the whole thing, but ODB's imitation of Jennifer Grey tossing her head back and laughing is utter perfection:

It does indeed suck, but it also was indeed the right thing to do. Only a very small percentage - about five - of pets given CPR wind up going home, and if they arrest anywhere other than in hospital (where CPR can begin immediately), there will almost certainly be no meaningful recovery. I learned this the hard way, and still regret insisting on CPR for a cat who'd gone into cardiac arrest completely out of the blue. Getting him to the vet in five minutes, I bought him three days in hospital, and he actually seemed - improving each day - to be a candidate for that elusive five percent club. But he arrested again, and I told them to let him go. I wish I'd said that from the beginning, but I was so stunned that a healthy 13-year-old cat had keeled over. Sorry, I didn't mean to make it about me. I just want to assure you from what I learned about survival rates that if a vet says the choices are euthanasia or CPR and we recommend euthanasia, you are unequivocally right in agreeing to euthanasia. (Despite what TV would have us believe, most people who undergo CPR die, too - in most cases, circumstances are such that CPR cannot be performed quickly enough to help, and then there's the underlying issue that when someone is sick or injured enough to need it, that's a hard condition to overcome.)

DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I haven't seen the commercials, but yes, it's him:

The only one of those personal storylines which isn't about a guy is her own health problem, so the only interesting personal thing she got to do on her own was die. If this was truly a procedural, where we just didn't generally get into personal stuff, I'd chalk it up to the nature of the genre. But existing in the same universe as seven years of exploring Brenda's life, it sticks out, and even within just its own bubble we learned more about Rusty's personal life than we did hers. Hell, we learned more about Philip Stroh's personal life than we did hers. Sharon was a terrific character, but it was an odd treatment of a main character. Rusty being the character Duff based on himself, even more so than he did with Brenda, is not a coincidence when looking at the percentage of the small amount of non-case storyline time doled out to him compared to the other characters, including the main one.

I'm so sorry to hear about the sudden death of O.C. Even with her age and health, to be fine one minute and dead the next must have been a shocking experience for you. She was a lovely kitty, and my heart goes out to you during this awful time, @GaT.