Bastet

He still had some hair, but not much, when he popped up in an episode of Major Crimes about five years ago. It took me a few minutes of thinking, "Where do I know him from?" when that voice finally penetrated my brain and I said aloud, "Mallet!" Judi Evans (original Beth) has been hospitalized for over three weeks now, first due to a horse-riding accident, but then she contracted COVID-19 and almost lost her legs due to the resulting blood clots. She is recovering, and will hopefully soon be able to continue that at home.

I just read the archive, since I'm going to be watching Top Chef at the time the episode airs, and, yikes, that respite from numerous TS was short lived. No huge surprises among them, but The Joy Luck Club, Big Bang Theory, Hawaii Five-0, purl, Thanatos, Koko, Sean Penn, fire place, and boo! meringue (LOL) were all clues I figured someone would get. I never knew where bazinga came from (or cared enough to look it up); I wonder if that bit of trivia will stick with me. (Sometimes I learn something new via J! and go on to get it right every subsequent time it's asked about, and sometimes there can be a similar clue a week later and I won't remember.) Thanes was another TS that also stumped me, and I missed one more in the first round. I missed a handful in DJ, though (but did manage to figure out half the saint clues, so good for me). FJ came to me eventually, along with a V-8 head slap when it finally did -- ancient dude who got stabbed, of course it's Julius Caesar. But that took me a bit, and I'd have probably had a big ol' nothing written down if I'd been on the show.

Probably my favorite Alabama song. I am completely with the CU commentators on this one: I love me some John Anderson music ("Straight Tequila Night" is my jam), but this song is overrated here. Wow - like them, I would not have thought this peaked at #34 on the charts. Too low there, and too low here. Totally with them on this one, too - it's a fun song, and it's Dolly. But it's not the 555th greatest country song of all time. Oh man, I love his voice, but I only like a few of his songs -- "Time Marches On" is my favorite, and I like "I See It Now". This one and "Is That a Tear" I can never quite decide if I like. I like this song, and I like Trisha Yearwood's duet with him from The Bradley Barn Sessions.

Ira Glass thinks he has vocal fry, and has been refreshingly candid about how folks complain to NPR about the same sound from female reporters while ignoring his. I have a dim view of proposals to begin with, believing marriage should be something two people discuss whether or not to enter into, not something one person surprises the other with a request to do, so - yes. But if such a practice is going to persist, why in all hell in this the year 2020 is a woman in a relationship with a man supposed to sit around waiting to be asked by him? If you want to get married, and want that set in motion by a proposal, propose! Sexist gender roles be damned.

I can do without lighthearted clues about Confederate generals. The Ireland TS was a stunner. I was a little surprised by the Marie Kondo and Soviet Union (rather hard to deport someone to Israel in 1919, Steve) TS, but after two games in a row with a lot of TS, this was a refreshing change. I knew (well, at least correctly guessed) everything in the first round other than when Ash Wednesday is - I guessed spring - and one of the generals. In DJ, I was so close to running it, but then I missed all three of the classic rock clues at the end! That's normally a pretty good category for me, but those happened to be about three bands I'm not into. At first I stared blankly at the screen when the FJ clue was revealed, but then it hit me.

Nah, plenty of men - including Ira Glass and Noam Chomsky - have vocal fry, they just don't get labeled as ditzes for it, or often even noticed; men's voices simply aren't policed the way women's are. In fact, some studies indicate men use the fry more often, but generally throughout their sentences, while women who speak that way tend to do it mostly at the end of a thought. (Apparently I had one more bit of trivia for the day.)

Two different sites. Same founders, but different sites. TWoP started as Mighty Big TV (after it expanded from whatever it was called when it just skewered Dawson's Creek), and still existed when Tara, Sarah, and Dave created this site - previously.TV, now Primetimer - several years after they'd left TWoP (following the Bravo acquisition). When TWoP was shuttered a couple of years after that, a lot of its posters found their way here, and the site grew exponentially. So, lots of overlap, but two different sites. This concludes today's installment of useless trivia.

"Women Artists". Sigh. Like last night, quite a few of the TS surprised me: Johnny Carson, marlin, fence, crochet, Moonstruck, and Man on the Moon (that one probably wouldn't have surprised me if not for Zach cluing them in by almost getting it). I just knew Judy Chicago was going to be a TS, despite the "Windy City" hint, and was sad to be right. There were a couple of doozy wrong answers tonight; not a great game. I had a good one, though; I only missed two in the first round and three in DJ, and I came up with FJ just in time.

I found Sylvia Scarlett an interesting movie, and I mean that in both the genuine compliment and sarcastic ways. One I'd have never watched if not for Katharine Hepburn, but she's one of the handful of actors I'll watch in anything if it's placed in front of me, and I particularly love Hepburn/Grant pairings (she's my favorite of his recurring on-screen partners). It has been years since I last saw it, so I don't remember much beyond a general appreciation of dismantling and questioning gender norms, a general OMG, what is this movie even trying to be? confusion, and that Hepburn and Grant play off each other well in their first collaboration. An intriguing idea, but a really weird execution. I think I saw it twice, the first time not being in its entirety, and kept a recording of it many years ago, but I've never pulled that disc out for a re-watch.

I can't believe the Santa Maria was a TS, because I can't believe when the first contestant picked the wrong one, no one rang in guessing one of the other two. Lots of TS tonight, several of which surprised me: copper, Richard, roll over, Madison and Unger, Children of a Lesser God. My FJ response was, "Oh my gods, Gone With the Wind? It's Gone With the Wind, isn't it?" Yikes. I think I missed three in each round, so being in a better state of mind than I was Friday resulted in a much better performance.

I normally get my sausage from a local butcher shop or sometimes Sprouts (they make it in-house there), but I recently bought some pre-packaged at the grocery store in order to buy everything in one place. I got a package of Papa Cantella's hot Italian sausage, and a package of their turkey version. Wow - I am impressed with how similar to the real thing the turkey version tastes. Both versions are high in sodium, but the turkey version has less than half the fat of the pork sausage yet still tastes almost as good. And both have minimal ingredients, and all natural ingredients.

Nope, they're awful. Thankfully, all the local restaurants I order from have managed to keep their in-house delivery driver(s) employed.

He calls her "Sweetheart", so they'd be some really freaky siblings.

She did that all the time, as did Brenda. I love the difference that when someone said something unrelated to Brenda that gave her an "a-ha!" moment about her case, she'd just dart off in the middle of that conversation, while Sharon would quickly wrap up the conversation and then go solve the case. The different methods really suited the two characters.

Toilet lids are kept closed in my home, but the headband was for when I washed my face, not for wearing in public; he'd have had no need to channel his inner Mr. Blackwell. Not in that place, no. And it wasn't under the stove, because I remodeled the kitchen before selling and still never found it. Yeah, I pondered over word choice, too. As a kid, they were ponytail holders. For a while, scrunchies - different than ponytail holders; they were big poofy things with fabric over the elastic - were the rage. For a long time, I've just used the basic brown bands from Goody, which are called "elastics" on the package but used to say "ties". So, whatever - hair thingies.

I haven't had the cats vs. hair ties problem in a long time since the ties are always either in my hair or the drawer, but way back when a friend and her two cats lived with me, one of the cats opened drawers. And he once opened my bathroom drawer to steal a fabric headband. We could not find it anywhere. When she moved out, we could not find it anywhere. When I moved out and the whole place was empty, I could not find it anywhere. Where did it go?!

Years ago, I replaced all my plastic food storage containers with glass (two of the 18-piece Pyrex snapware sets in the Costco coupon book; that was more than I needed, but 18 wasn't quite enough between pantry items, refrigerator items, and containers available for leftovers). I'm very happy with them (and they have a lifetime warranty, although I have heard they're no longer offering that with new purchases). I never had a "where's the lid?!" issue with the plastic stuff, probably because I didn't have a ton of containers so they were all in one small place and they were all the same brand. At my parents' house, my mom used to have them - of varying brands - in three different places, and with it being hard to tell sometimes what lid goes with what container (as y'all have said, the different brands are so similar the slight difference can be missed when putting washed containers/lids away), it could be a chore to find the matching lid. Thankfully she had me help her sort all her kitchen stuff several years ago and get rid of some excess, including enough containers that they're now all in one place. The "dammit, that's a Gladware, not a Ziploc" confusion can still happen, but at least there's only one spot to paw through looking for the right one.

I briefly thought of skipping “Risk Assessment”, since that asshole congressperson sends me into twitches of rage, but I so love Jada Rhodes being given her say, I really wanted to hear it again, especially tonight. And, indeed, it gives me a lot to say in response (yes, again). Because we need more of this on mainstream TV, especially cop shows. I love her contrasting the police response to her son’s death and to Robert Keller’s in the same damn spot – a working class black teenager gets killed, the community gets two squad cars and some flares for the night, with no follow-up. A rich white guy gets killed, and there remain so many cops you can’t get the mail without running into one, and here she is being interviewed by Major Crimes. They didn’t do shit about Tyler’s murder until Robert Keller’s tied into it, at which point they filled a stadium with potential suspects. And she speaks so powerfully about the balance moms in that neighborhood have to strike, instilling situational common sense without taking away hope and teaching them to be tough, but not hard. And about how that “crazy fool” (sure, dude, you’re going to transform gang neighborhoods into “enriched habitats” one garden at a time) came in with his white savior complex, messed all that up, and in fact put a target on kids' backs by paying them to paint over gang graffiti. He got Tyler killed, and was about to get Darryl killed as well – while he didn’t tell the cops the Rounders had him in the car, he was encouraging Darryl to talk to the cops on his own. I wish they hadn’t deleted the scene where Sharon and Taylor react with total disgust to congressasshole’s press conference praising his son’s efforts towards making “his ideal of urban America a reality” and vowing to continue them. The episode is clear enough as-is that Robert was a well-intentioned young man who didn’t know a damn thing about the reality he was inserting himself into, and whose white privilege led him to dismiss that reality when explicitly laid out for him by one of the black women living it, and that refusal to see got a teenage boy killed. No one disputes the truth when Jada speaks it. But I like the explicit confirmation Robert was no hero that existed in that scene (the original lead-in to the closing conversation about the letters and Rusty's participation in an SIS operation). I also love this episode for giving everyone’s backstories, as they’re all well suited to the characters, especially Sharon’s (specifics aside, her trajectory resonates with so many women, especially of her generation) and Andy’s (heh, of course he was a little hooligan who decided it would be more fun to lock bad guys up). I love the twist on the usual I became a cop to avenge a loved one’s death storyline with Julio, that it was his cat! I would have liked more detail on Mike’s though; I understand why he loved the science of medicine but realized he wouldn’t like the practice of it, but they don’t fully explore how was drawn toward policing among all his other options. Until Rep. Racist Asshole shows up and spikes my blood pressure, I love the meeting in Taylor’s office, because it’s a great illustration of the dynamic of one woman in a room full of men engaged in a dick-slinging contest. Sharon tries to diffuse tensions and redirect the conversation to how to proceed, injecting a different – traditionally feminine - leadership style into the group, but the men are more interested in continuing their pissing contest over what’s already done. It’s so realistic (in the writing, and especially as realized by Mary McDonnell’s performance and Stacey K. Black’s direction). There are some great humorous moments as always, but I am mostly taken by the honest storytelling in this episode. Something that never dawned on me until tonight’s airing: They never explain why Major Crimes is assigned this case to begin with. At the time they’re rolled out, it’s not known who the victim is – the LAPD does not know he’s a witness in an open case and a congressperson’s son. If they had known either one, let alone both, it would have been deemed a major crime from the beginning, but because they didn’t, it wouldn’t have been reassigned to them until Rampart found that out. The writers get away with cases that wouldn’t normally be assigned to Major Crimes by setting them around the winter holidays and saying they’re covering for another division’s holiday break, so that works here based on timing, but I never noticed until tonight that, unlike in other such episodes, there is no “What makes this a major crime?”/”We’re covering [other division’s] cases” conversation between the characters.

This is why I love this thread: Mention of Ethiopian food lit a spark under my I don't know what I want to make ennui last night, in time for me to make Doro Wat. The side was collard greens also seasoned with berbere, and the salad was made to coordinate as best I could based on what I had on hand: mixed greens with red pepper and cucumber and a white wine vinaigrette with ginger, garlic, and jalapeño. Tonight I'm going to order in from my favorite local Vietnamese restaurant; right now, I'm leaning towards goi cuon, pork bun, and seafood pho, but we'll see what I'm craving when the time comes.

I recently re-watched the first three seasons, and I had forgotten about Elena working for Schneider after it turned out she had a natural aptitude towards being "handy". I don't think we saw any of that in the first half of season four, and I hope it's something they revisit. Not even necessarily her working for him, as I don't believe she works during the school year, but just a little thing in the background from time to time where she's fixing a lamp, bookcase, etc. It fits with Penelope's frugality and Elena's desire to avoid wastefulness, and is just a nice character touch. We don't see many characters on TV who know how to fix or build anything, especially female characters. All DIY projects on TV are wacky hijinks about to ensue, when in real life there are plenty of us who just casually - and correctly - fix something when it breaks because we learned how and like doing it ourselves. I had also forgotten how many times I cried in those episodes! There was a really nice balance of comedy and emotion. I'm glad they ditched the other two characters in Dr. B's office; they were a little too sitcom-y.

Oh my, the commentary on this one is everything:

Just to be clear, there was never going to be an affair. There was only ever that kiss (which he initiated), which freaked Dottie out, and really wasn't even about Jimmy for her, it was just another example of her questioning her life. Penny Marshall got really annoyed with test audiences actually rooting for Dottie to wind up with Jimmy (like it was easy for a woman in the '40s to get divorced even if she wanted to), and it was just too much story for a movie that was already quite long anyway, so it was all left on the cutting room floor. And, while I share her frustration with the changed context of the crying scene, I think overall the movie is much better for losing the Dottie/Bob backstory. For the obvious ways it makes Dottie's story happier, and also that in so doing, it makes Evelyn's story all the more important. When Stillwell says he had to come, because she always said playing in the league was the best time she ever had in her whole life (a scene that made Marshall cry whenever she watched it), it's a gut punch reminder of her situation, and that she had no realistic way out of it. It's the perfect touch of bittersweet in the midst of the celebration. But if the main character was also stuck in her life because she was a woman of her time, meaning something that had been sporadically explored throughout the film, Evelyn's story wouldn't have that same impact.

Just make sure the mesh has a tight weave; my parents put some mesh over their row of dwarf fruit trees one year, and were horrified the next morning to find several birds trapped in it (obviously, they immediately took it down). The mesh wasn't a terribly wide weave, but turned out to be wide enough to pose a danger to birds.

Following the NFL's disingenous statement last weekend, yesterday a group of players called for the league to do better: Goodell responded today:

I had to read the archive, because my station is airing game one (which was preempted here) tonight and planning to air game two tomorrow, I assume. I didn't feel like waiting. I wanted Meggie to win. Boo, hiss. Good Teacher's Tournament this year, though; good clues and good contestants. My heart just wasn't in the game tonight, and neither was my head. I ran only one category (words coined in the '20s) and I just shrugged at so many clues I may have actually missed more than I got (I'm not going to count; the day has been depressing enough). I did get FJ, though.