Bastet

Ugh, that song! There isn't much typically-played Christmas music I like, but that song is the only one I hate so much I will turn around and leave a store to avoid hearing. I'm not a fan of McCartney's music in general, but that song is something else entirely.

My parents, especially my mom, would have loved to be grandparents (to a human baby; they've always had grandcats) and they'd have been good ones, but they never gave me shit about not having kids - they know how important it is to, you know, want to be a parent if you're going to be one and thus it would be a terrible idea for me to have a child since I can't stand being around them and would rather do an infinite number of unpleasant things than parent. They were a bit bummed, but didn't regard it as some personal affront to them or even a big deal - just something they'd have liked to be different, but accepting that it wasn't. But, yeah, plenty of other people take it upon themselves to make comments about it, and a couple have acted as if I've deprived my parents of something to which they were entitled. Um, no. That's not actually a thing. Now, if you have, say, six kids (my parents had one), you've seriously upped your odds, but you're still never owed grandkids.

I'm not aware of this as a J! initialism - perhaps you're referring to posts that discussed the contestant T.J. who played a couple of games the week before last?

Congratulations on the adoption of Quirk, @EighteenTwelve; I'm sure Snip would be pleased to know another cat is going to benefit from your loving care. I look forward to hearing about her progress as she comes out of the closet (so to speak - not that there's anything wrong with that! 🙂 ). @SuprSuprElevated, that comic is spot on. Maddie was the hairball queen (fiber helped a lot, but she still horked up quite a few in her time), and every.single.time. she did so on the floor of the study, which is the only carpeted room in the house. Riley defies the rule, though; the few times she regurgitates her food, she always deposits it behind the toilet in "her" bathroom (the half bath in which her litter box is located). It's a little difficult to reach, but otherwise easy to clean up, and it just amuses me that she goes to her box to vomit, but sits in the box and pukes over the side, and always behind the toilet -- it's as if she thinks, "Hmm, when you hurl, you do it in one of these cold porcelain things, but I can't lift the lids, and I do all my other gross stuff in the box next to this one, so I guess I should split the difference and back here is where I throw up?"

I used to get comments like that sometimes, too, because I read just about everything I could get my hands on. I preferred books about girls if they were doing something interesting (Harriet the Spy was my favorite, and I also loved Trixie Belden books), but a lot of (too many!) girls were written in ways that didn't speak to me even with my varied interests, so I also read plenty of books about boys. I think most girls did. If more boys also read "girl books", we'd all be better off.

I liked all of it - jeans, shorts, t-shirts, dresses, sandals, sneakers, mary janes, etc. - since what I wanted to wear depended on what I was doing; I loved dressing up for special events, but day to day at school I needed something I could play in at recess. So there was a lot of cute stuff to choose from, and we enjoyed shopping for clothes - and for patterns and material for the clothes my mom made me - together. (I still like a wide variety of clothes and shoes but now I have to be in just the right mood to shop, as does my mom - and we usually aren't.) I liked a variety of toys, too, so we shopped in both the "girls" and "boys" sections (which is so ridiculous; how we designate clothing by gender is bad enough, but toys?!).

Romano was an utter jackass, but they always sprinkled in a few ways in which he wasn't. Contrast that with Frank, who had not one redeeming quality, so that when they introduced us to his family and tried to claim he was this sweet man who spoke highly at home of the co-workers he treated like shit it just didn't wash.

Me too. Being in Los Angeles, and the Giants not having the national appeal they used to have, I don't get to see too many of their games each season. I get this one, and I was not expecting such a lopsided game.

Not unless one lives alone; who wants to hear/smell it if their partner has to get up in the wee hours to take a shit? I couldn't care less if someone occasionally needed to come in the bathroom while I was using it, but for that to effectively be the norm because the bathroom and bedroom couldn't be separated by a door? No thanks.

My parents both wanted a girl, and this reminds me that one of the reasons my mom was happy to have had one is that shopping for my clothes was so much easier and more fun than it would have been shopping for a little boy.

I just ordered one (a chicken alfredo pizza - thin wheat crust, alfredo sauce, with chicken, broccoli, and mushrooms as the toppings) for tonight's meal, and remembered this post. To keep it on topic, I'm grateful I have nearly endless options when ordering pizza here. Don't get me wrong; unless it was thick crust, I'd happily eat a pizza handed to me with tomato sauce and pepperoni, sausage, and such as the toppings. But that's not my preference - I prefer olive oil, pesto, or alfredo as the sauce, and want a wide variety of toppings to choose from depending on my mood (favorites are, indeed, Italian sausage, but also artichoke hearts, shrimp, spinach, grilled chicken, arugula, etc.).

So did he indeed get infected while preparing/performing at that ridiculous CMA awards show? I wondered about that in the Celebrity Deaths thread given the timing. (Not much of a suit from what I know, but admittedly I have not looked beneath the surface of it being a profoundly stupid decision from everyone involved.)

The first generation scenario you describe is nowhere near as rare as you think it is, but such families also generally cannot afford tents, caterers, and valet parking at the celebration they throw to celebrate the graduate's hard-won achievement. Most of these lavish high school graduation parties are, indeed, for kids for whom graduating high school was a given, and whose diploma is just the first of the degrees they'll accumulate.

I only saw this in bits and pieces because I was watching during breaks in football play. Kino's situation is so weird! If she was born with only one kidney, how did neither of the two vets who spayed her notice that, especially the second one, who'd be using it as a guidepost to find the area where the ovary would have been (and thus where a remnant would be found). But he couldn't possibly have mistaken a kidney for an ovary and removed it! So it must be congenital. I guess unless it was a deformed, little shriveled kidney. Anyway, that poor dog - something so simple as a spay requiring three surgeries. At least that's behind her now and she can be her proper lab self. I wish the white cat's owners had done the blood tests, since Dr. Jeff offers it for only $65 (!!); the cat was found as an adult, so has a completely unknown history. The first thing I do after they settle in is get complete blood work, urinalysis, and abdominal and chest x-rays so I have a baseline. So I wish they'd done the basic blood tests (and that they knew consistent regurgitation means you need to feed less at a time), but I'm glad she has a home with a kid she loves.

Good to know! I was watching in my living room, which has a small TV; my eyes would never have been able to pick up a pin, let alone see what was on it.

I agree. I remember watching it when it came out as a rental (on laserdisc, heh) and it was fine, but I can't fathom re-watching it. In an even more unpopular opinion: I feel the same way about Die Hard. The only offering in that franchise I have ever re-watched is the third, and that's solely because of Samuel L. Jackson.

Damn! I loved Charley Pride's voice. He performed at that ridiculous CMA Awards show a month ago; I wonder if that's when he became infected.

So did I. Quality tools, great selection, lifetime warranty - it was fabulous tool shopping. I still wander in occasionally (well, prior to this COVID year) when I'm at another nearby store in the mall, and I've found a couple of handy gadgets I hadn't thought of, but it's a mere shell of its former self and it has long since ceased being where I go when I'm in need of a specific tool. (Thankfully, my local independent hardware store is still in business, but even there things aren't what they used to be.) Now everyone get off my lawn!

I was out after the liberal use of the word "psychotic" to describe more than one person; I'd never heard of him before he died, either (although my former assistant worked at Zappos for years as an HR manager and loved it, and I've ordered shoes from there, I had no idea who ran the company), so I wasn't interested enough in wading through that hyperbolic opinion piece for the facts at hand.

Along with Craftsman tools, back when those were good.

I assumed she was right away, and then of course didn't think about it again until she won, when I wondered if she was the first transgender contestant to win. But has she spoken anywhere (e.g. on social media) on the subject? Because if it's just someone on Reddit making the same assumption I did (which may not even be correct), or even someone who knows her personally and thus knows her gender identity for sure, that's not cool (which is why I didn't say anything last night) -- any first public declaration should come from her. Representation is important, but we should first know that she a) is a transwoman and b) wants to publicly represent. There's a lot of danger in being "caught" at "trying to pass" just as there is in living openly; there's no right or wrong answer, just trying to find the best way of living as their true selves in a society in which both discrimination and physical danger are rampant. I think "Something's coming" brought to mind "Something wicked this way comes". (And I think I'm repeating someone upthread in speculating that, but am too lazy to check.) That's what I figured last night when two of them guessed Wicked, because I can see that, especially if the lyrics didn't do anything to signal West Side Story for them (as it didn't for me; I've never seen the play, only the film, and don't really care for it, so I only correctly guessed FJ by having a vague memory of reading about an upcoming revival of it - that's the part of the clue that helped me).

Rachel was the white child of a white lawyer and a white doctor and we never heard she sucked as a student; she'd have to actively try to permanently blow up that privilege, so if she marginally applied herself she could progress through the educational ranks in high school and secure admission to a good university. It was quite refreshing that the painfully honest discussion Mark decided to finally be a proper parent and have with Rachel on his way out didn't magically transform her, but clearly made her think, so it's also perfectly believable that nuanced talk rattled around in her head as she muddled through in the wake of his death and made her think. Jen would be forced to be not just once again the primary but the sole parent, Rachel would continue doing what she was supposed to do to get by while also acting out, and at some point in college she'd get her shit together and - grades, MCAT score, and perfect sob story in hand - enter medical school. This could just as easily have not happened, of course, but I don't have any problem with it happening, given how young she was when we left her.

This is why I hate photo cards. I especially hate photo cards that have not one damn personalized thing on them; mass produced, meaningless crap I'm just going to dump right in the trash. Thankfully, I don't get many cards anymore and send even fewer out; for the most part, we all email each other or, in a few cases, call. Personal, no waste - love it.

Ft Worth was a surprising TS (army post + Texas = Ft. Worth), as was Marshall (old-time Supreme Court Justice = Marshall). The Dolly Parton TS was a bit distressing just on general principle (It's Dolly! And one of her greatest songs! [And one with a wider audience thanks to the success of the Whitney Houston cover.]) I think "pinking" should have been "pink" since the clue was "to cut ..." not "cutting ...", but I am not surprised they weren't that picky. I only missed three in the first round, three more in DJ, and correctly guessed FJ.

No. The best thing to do is cut out a section along the lines of the pattern and replace that, because other patch jobs generally very much look like patch jobs. So they ought to be able to get you fixed up. (Although, if it's a small kitchen, they could decide to just do the whole floor depending on its overall condition.) I did that to the vinyl kitchen floor in my old condo - I was impatient, wanting to get the refrigerator moved back in after I'd put down new vinyl flooring, so I didn't take the care I knew damn well I needed to take and, sure enough, tore two big gouges in my new floor. At least being new, it was very easy to cut out and replace a section, but the pattern was such that the repair was always visible to me (anybody else would have to look for it, but I saw it every damn day until I moved out).