Bastet

It makes me think of what was intended to be the closing segment of Super Size Me -- a side-by-side comparison of a burger and fries from McDonald's and those from an independent restaurant, showing how the food from the latter rots as one would expect, but the McDonald's offerings sit there disturbingly pristine after quite some time because of all the artificial preservatives.

They had a Kids/Teen Tournament (which I refuse to watch) winner competing against "regular" chefs in a championship? I guess I understand the general idea (like when a Tournament of Champions includes the celebrity winner), but it seems particularly lopsided; do they normally combine such talent in one?

I dig MacKenzie (it usually takes me a few appearances to develop feelings one way or the other about contestants - if I ever do - and today my "I like her" sense kicked in), so I'm glad she pulled it off by a dollar. I enjoyed Alex saying, "Let's see if we can clear the board today" before introducing the categories. And, yay, they pulled it off. Good game after a string of somewhat disappointing ones. The Feminine Mystique being a TS annoyed me enough, and then Alex chimed in with his "You picked the wrong one" nonsense. Yeah, Alex, because there are only two "feminist classics". There aren't even only two classics associated with sparking the second wave, so even if the clue got that specific I'd be annoyed. Captain Morgan surprised me a little bit as a TS, due to the "cheers" hint in the clue, as did Johnny as the name in Why Johnny Can't Read, fief, Russia (that one that no one even guessed it, not that none of the three knew it), and rector (that one stumped me, too). Lintel, though, I just knew was going to be a TS (obviously none of them have watched Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House). No "Really, none of three contestants knew that?" head scratchers, so that was nice. Again, good game. One quibble: For a DJ category, I wish they hadn't included photos in the Famous Texans clues, but at least none of the clues were so obvious via their text that adding a picture was superfluous; I just wish they'd put that in the first round, or, if in the second, written better, text-only, clues rather than a bunch that amounted to "Identify the person seen here". The Animated TV Characters category was not my friend in the first round; that's not my genre, so I only knew Scooby-Doo and correctly guessed SpongeBob SquarePants. I missed several in DJ, but knew FJ, so overall it was a good game for me, too.

I don't think he lives there, I think he lives wherever we saw him in the episode where they met with the bank representative. When the scene in bed started, I thought, "Why are you two spending the night at her place - which is packed to the rafters with people - instead of yours?" And then realized, oh, to facilitate this dumb-ass "I want a baby" plot.

I move faster, not slower, when someone is waiting for my spot, because I think it's rude not to. So I've never been honked at, but, if that happened, I'd probably be like the people in that one study who took even longer when they got honked at. Because why are you honking? Maybe there's a reason the driver is taking so long. Or maybe she or he is just being an asshole, but, if so, honking is only going to exacerbate that.

Not in this show, but in the revival season of Roseanne, yes - he works on a fishing boat (and doesn't call home very often).

It's pretty rare for a TS to be one that makes me think, "Jeez, all three of them should have known that, but not a single one of them did?" and I can't think of an example of one of those; even Ken Jennings can be stumped by a clue, so that any given contestant doesn't know a particular thing is hardly ever surprising (it's why missed DDs don't often surprise me, because, okay, that contestant happened not to know, but if it had been a regular question, one of the other two probably would have rung in and got it). It's almost always like this situation, where it surprises me that all three failed to put it together.

Yes, please. Do not browse your radio presets, check Facebook to see what your friends had for lunch, put on more lipstick, etc. When someone is waiting, get a move on, and do the rest while driving/when you get to your next stop.

Oh, for Pete's sake! Why aren't women on TV ever actually done having kids? (Yes, I know - sexism and love of "drah-ma"). This is stupid. Ben, when you date a woman in her 40s who already has two kids, both of whom are closer to grown than to little kids, you have to understand she's probably not having more and make your choices accordingly. She's not "on the fence" when she says no, she doesn't fucking want one. Darlene, call upon some semblance of your practicality and strength and remember that you don't want another, you love Ben but don't want to start over as a parent, and "a baby will just make us so much better" is stupid, and don't give into this crap. This better not carry on. As funny as Harris and Mark as punitive damages is, this is no joke - women get pressured into this crap all the time, and it should be unequivocally shut down. Gods, I'm irritated. Speaking of stupid and irritating, the Ed Jr. storyline. In the original series, we saw Roseanne, Dan, and their kids interact with Crystal and Lonnie, then Crystal, Ed, and Lonnie, then adding Little Ed and later Angela (although her much less). Crystal has appeared in the revival season and this spinoff. So how are they learning of Ed's death via obituary rather than her? It's no stretch to say Crystal and Ed divorced, given his repeating of old patterns that Dan warned her about from jump, so even if she's that removed from Ed's life today that she doesn't even know he's dead before the paper does, that wouldn't explain a total lack of contact between any and all of the various family members all this time without an additional explanation, which wouldn't have been all that hard to invent but which the writers didn't bother to provide. "Nobody could sell a load of crap better than that guy" is absolutely Dan. "I didn't feel anything when I found out he died" isn't, given his conflicting emotions (more negative than positive, but still a pull); if that's the place he's reached, there needs to be some foundation for it. And the grandkids loved Ed; if he up and abandoned everyone later, fine, in terms of the their reaction now, but how would such a total bounce from the family not mean Crystal - still in town, still part of everyone's life - had raised Little Ed and Angela, meaning the "Who's this guy?" thing about Ed Jr. from the whole family still doesn't work, nor does Ed Jr. being all in for his dad. This episode made me cranky. "You said my cervix was where they filmed Golden Girls" was stellar, and there were some other good lines. But they're overshadowed. Also, is the beret this show's chicken shirt? Because now Dan is wearing some sort of beret-beanie hybrid that looks nothing like Dan (in the initial Lunchbox scene, where he's making some final repairs and the cook gets dismembered).

The Rio de Janeiro TS surprised me; the clue pointed to Brazil with a neon arrow and spotted "river", so getting from there to the famous three-word city in that country with Rio as one of those words was definitely not something I expected all three to fail to do. Jane Curtin, with a picture, surprised me and, like it did several of you, made me sad. Bolt, Eddie Van Halen, and stenography surprised me a little, too. Add me to the "this man" = Charles Manson, not the Manson Family grumble list. And I had to look up the show's title, because I thought House was called House M.D., but apparently House is an accepted title, so I withdraw that complaint. But I can't believe completing "duck & ___" was worth $1200. I had a good game. I got all the religious idioms clues right, so I'm up to maybe three times that has ever happened in a category with religion in the title. I settled on the right country for FJ at the last second, but I wasn't terribly confident in it, even though I usually do well with geography (I wasn't sure what that gulf was called). I just couldn't remember Kasparov's name and didn't know a couple of the TV clues or one of the book clues (I have never managed to retain via cultural osmosis anything about the Narnia books other than they were written by C.S. Lewis and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is one of them).

Wow. The combination of a BMS for Carson but no BMS for Adams or Roosevelt must have short-circuited my brain and erased the memory of the latter. I just realized I forgot to comment on last night's episode. Not as many TS, but it still seemed like at least the high end of average and there were some some surprising ones (census and Voting Rights Acts in particular) and some doozy wrong answers; the show has been in a bit of a slump lately. I've never seen Survivor, but most of those clues gave other information to come up with the answer - except the catch phrase for eliminations, which I was hoping was in my brain via cultural osmosis, but it was not. I also didn't know Me Before You in the book category or the name of the Breaking Bad movie, and I knew Roentgen but couldn't spit it out. So, with only four misses - probably helped by how many clues were never revealed - I was having a strong game heading into FJ, a category I felt pretty good about, but it wound up being about a film/play I'd never heard of. Boo, hiss.

Really? Someone has gotten away with just saying "Roosevelt"? That's bad. I thought that would be the one example I could count on them to consistently require specificity on (unless the clue specifically negated the need, like the category was Franklins).

Exactly - knowing which [Last Name] president, artist, author, etc. did what when is part of the game. They're not going to just accept "Roosevelt" for FDR because Teddy was dead by the time FDR took office; you have to establish you know which Roosevelt. So if someone had just said "Wyeth", there should have been a BMS prompt, but they're a bit inconsistent on that, so who knows what would have happened.

Yeah, that doesn't make any sense; the flight is twice as long, but it's still a flight -- either location requires a travel day (get to the airport, sit on a flight, get from the airport to your destination). If Jeannette's concern is that Jazz might need her to come on short notice, or that Jazz may need to visit home more frequently than is typical, there's little practical difference between Harvard and Pomona; neither one is going to allow for just hopping in the car for a few hours. And the difference in flight costs isn't an issue for this family; they're quite "comfortable". So the respective distances shouldn't be a factor in choosing between the schools.

Yes, about eight years ago when some high school football players raped a girl at a party, a bunch of classmates thought it was hilarious to text each other photos and jokes and post on social media, and school officials tried to cover it up (gotta protect those football players, ya know), but there was so much evidence they ... got short sentences in juvenile detention, and the townsfolk felt sorry for them. (So, typical story.) If anyone is interested, there's a documentary on Netflix about it, Roll Red Roll.

To this day, he admits that what Rudolph said does not justify his response, and, given the severity of that reaction, I can understand him including Rudolph in his next-day apologies; he seems to have realized pretty quickly that he disproportionately escalated things, and never wavered from that. So that apology doesn't make me think he only came up with the racial slur story later to attempt to lessen his suspension, especially since he didn't tell the public about it; he only talked about it after what had been said in the hearing came out and he was asked to comment. The way Garrett has conducted himself through this whole aftermath impresses me far more than how Rudolph has.

That's my thought process, too - the only time I nap is when haven't slept enough (or have slept poorly) for a few nights or am sick but haven't had any additional sleep to compensate for that, because that's the only time I can nap; sometimes I feel just a little tired and lie down for a nap, but can't fall asleep. So, since it's catching up on lost sleep, I'd add my nap times to prior sleep, rather than upcoming sleep, if I was tabulating.

As he relates it (yes, I looked it up, because I knew "Flavortown" has been part of his shtick for a while, and wondered if there was an origin story), he used "Flavortown" in an episode of DD&D (he said a pizza looked like a manhole cover in Flavortown) and used "Flavortown" one-liners a few more times on the show, when it caught on with the audience, to the point people were sending him stuff with "Flavortown" on it and referencing it when they met him. So it became his thing, I guess, as from my internet search it appears to now be a meme, he uses it on social media, he uses it on multiple shows, etc. Ugh. Anyway, here's a short article on the subject from The Wrap.

Yes. Carol Boone was very much just the "coach's wife" character, so we didn't see much of her or their marriage, but we did see one conversation between the two of them after Gerry's death. Herman is second-guessing himself on a few fronts, seeks her counsel, and she gives it; one has the sense this is the sort of thing that goes on between them. Their little moments of interaction throughout the film give absolutely no indication of strife within the marriage despite all the external stressors; they're in this together. (In real life, Coach Boone was more of a jerk than he is in the film, and she was very private and soft-spoken, so who knows what kind of marriage they actually had. But the marriage of the film is happy and stable, yes.)

I either missed it the first time around, or repressed the memory of it; I thought it was new. I heard it numerous times this weekend, and scrambled for the remote every time. Horrible!

Maybe it's my appreciation of symmetry, but I was put off by the visual result of the braised chicken. Staggering the cooking times to make sure every piece has adequate time to hang out in the sauce without being overcooked is a no-brainer in theory, but in execution it resulted in the two tapered breast pieces not getting any browning time. So, at the end, the (pale, ugly) skin was removed from those two pieces. But they still didn't match -- there are all these beautifully-browned pieces, and two pale ones. On the serving plate, one's eye is automatically drawn to the difference. Does it really matter, visually, that it's pale meat rather than pale skin? (Of course the browned skin tastes better than would the pale skin that was removed.) I'm sure it all tasted delicious (although, just as a matter of personal taste, I hate mustard other than the straight-up, non-vinegar spicy kind [because I hate a good 70% of vinegars]), but the visual result was off-putting. I wonder if it's really impossible to brown one side of those pieces -- the idea must be that in doing that, they could then only spend so little time put back into the braising liquid that they wouldn't adequately pick up the flavor. And I get that; flavor is more important than appearance. But ATK totally glossed over the glaring imbalance when it came to appearance (not to mention the fact that, as Anne Burrell always hammers home, "brown food tastes good") and presented this as the "perfect" solution for braising a whole chicken (and it's not making use of a whole chicken to begin with, as they left out the wings). It's good, but it's not perfect; make it at home, certainly, but would you serve it to guests? But, hey, my silicone basting brush is their equipment testing winner.

Because of the commercial that ran for years (or at least what seemed like years). I don't know if Aleve is still a sponsor of the show, as I haven't taken particular notice in a while, and I tend to think not, but its "What is Aleve?" commercial made to look like a FJ segment aired during the commercial break between DJ and FJ for quite some time. Alex Jacob made the same joke for his I have no idea FJ response several years ago, so this was repetitive (and not as timely).

“Long Shot” is another one I commented on at length when it first aired under this single-topic replacing the lost vaulted forum nonsense, so I’ll mostly confine myself to thoughts I didn’t express then: Taylor’s unsuccessful “Mr. Mayor” attempts to get the mayor’s attention never fail to amuse me; it’s one of the perfect little touches in season one showing that while he is less slimy now that he’s achieved Asst. Chief (and, in fact, this started as The Closer was ending, when he knew he was going to get the promotion), he’s still Taylor – wanting to be a player, and in love with the cameras. They scatter such scenes throughout the rest of the series, too, and it’s always a nice bridge between the two shows. The one thing I feel compelled to reiterate, because I think I feel it even more than the writers intended with Sharon’s comparison between good fathers and those not cut out for the job, is how much Angel’s father gets to me. Mr. Reyes was a good cop in Juarez, and his refusal to go along with corruption led to his wife and all but one of his kids being killed; in response, he sacrificed a career of which he was proud to be a maintenance man in a foreign country, always looking over his shoulder for ICE, in order to save his remaining son (and I love the subtle touch that what he’s ironing when the assassin shows up is Angel’s work uniform). His death really gets to me. Jumping off that to another new thought (and the fact I can have one after all this time is one of the reasons I love this show), I reflected more tonight than I have upon previous viewings about Angel. His dad was all he had of his old life, and now Mr. Reyes is gone, too. So not only is Angel shunted off into a witness protection identity in which he knows literally no one, but he lives with the guilt that maybe if he’d called the police immediately and revealed what he saw, his dad might still be with him -- his decision made sense, especially in the heat of the moment (he didn’t want his dad knowing he’d been taking the extra set of keys to use the vacant penthouse as a love shack, and, more importantly, didn’t want to bring his dad to the government’s attention, given their undocumented status) – but it’s going to haunt him for how it all played out. (In the midst of this, it’s a nice touch that the son of a cop gives such a good description, better than most witnesses manage, and our cops appreciate that.) The big emotional thrust of the episode is Rusty now legally being an orphan/ward of the state, but having a family in the squad, and I enjoy that. But the Reyes family really resonates with me, too. This episode has fundamental flaws, as I said before, about the assassin’s car (why does he leave the mirror behind, why don’t the cops try to ascertain his license plate the way they did Angel’s) but it’s still a good one, especially because of the personal storylines. I think it’s a solid conclusion to a short first season, and I’m never remotely surprised TNT looked at that run and said “more please” in response to that experiment.

Twixy was an interesting case, with the pseudo-hermaphroditism. I like that such a story was shown without sensationalizing the condition or being overly joking about it. The owners just rolled with it - because who frakkin' cares, but some people would unfortunately be weirded out - and Dr. Lavigne appreciated getting to follow a case nowhere near as typical was what he usually sees. Zeus's shaking was hard to watch, poor little scaredy guy. I'm glad he just needed time to recover from soft tissue injury. And his brown "eyebrows" are adorable - I love that about chihuahuas' coloring. Prince's hyperactivity exhausted me just watching; I can't imagine having a pet like that. Dr. Lavigne joking about feeling pressure, because Dr. Blue's dental health depending on how he handles Prince's ACL surgery was funny. Hamilton's skin condition pictures are always shocking. I love all the work everyone (owners and vet) put in, rather than just ditching or euthanizing him when this cute little piglet turned into an oversized special needs child. And it's funny that his nickname is Hammy. But they need to deal with his weight! Those jowls and belly are excessive. My one gripe with this show is cats are underrepresented in the stories producers choose to show (of course, it's possible they're underrepresented among Cy-Fair's patients, and statistics indeed show Americans as a whole spend more - on everything, including vet care - on dogs than cats, but I lean towards blaming the producers on this one). I don't want to go so many episodes where the only cats I see are those in the cage shots that transition scenes!

That was my impression, too, so I just perused an article to confirm, and yep - the treatment is hard on them, and the heart and lungs need to be protected by strictly curtailing activity for a prolonged period. So it makes sense that VRC would want to take responsibility for that period. Kathleen and Daisy, from tonight's episode, having spent two days together in bed crying after Barney died is such a sad and sweet image. It was nice to see Daisy, more comfortable at home but still a little apprehensive about Daisy, calm down a little and pick Annabelle as their new family member. Minnie vaguely looks like a bigger and more colorful version of Daisy, and Annabelle vaguely like a smaller and more colorful Daisy; I thought look good as a trio. But those two shy girls are good for each other -- "quietly becoming best friends" is exactly what I predicted from their initial interaction. LOL at naming the pair of rescued dogs Brad and Angelina - I know producers include package stories filmed long ago into episodes, but that would go way back. I like the motivation behind Tania's book. I read an interview with her years ago in which she talked about how hard it was living in Agua Dulce (their CA location) as an outsider and she didn't need to say more -- it's an insular environment, very unaccepting of anyone who doesn't fit the narrow mold its overwhelmingly white, rural, conservative residents decree as the right way to be (a friend lived in that general area for several years, and her parents remain there). It's sad to hear she also feels so judged in New Orleans, a more diverse and welcoming city (and I do just mean more than Agua Dulce, as it certainly has its own acceptance problems, as anyplace does), now that she's a parent. She didn't get anywhere near as many funny looks there when it was just her, but now that she's dared spawn a child, people look at her with a baby/toddler and assume she must be an irresponsible mother. The Bluie dedication page is beautiful. I really like how Tania and Perry don't allow Salem's face to be shown on the show. I don't think it's bad that Moe and Lizzy do allow their son's, especially at his young age, but I dig the choice.