Bastet

I confess I've already forgotten the QF details, but for the EC, the first round seemed close, and both dishes looked delicious to me, so I was rather jealous I couldn't taste Adrienne’s chicken & waffles and Kelsey’s dumplings; both looked delicious! In fact, I want to eat all the food in the EC - I love game day food. In round two, Sara was a fool to get pissed about being called out for using a mix for the waffles; her chicken drew rave reviews, so if she had done the rest of it up right, she might have been sitting pretty. But I understood her feelings at having that become a rallying cry against her in front of "her" team. I also appreciated Adrienne’s “How is this my fault?” response and immediate acquiescence to Sara’s request to be called by her name under these circumstances. It was an uncomfortable thing Sara made too much of, but everyone dealt with it pretty well. Round three, Michelle’s ribs looked a little less than great; I’d have eaten and enjoyed it, because it’s a rib, but I’d have been far more into Justin’s Juicy Lucy. I’m not surprised she was the bottom of a really good pile.

Oy, I don't do well with change. But, before the forum changes short-circuit my brain so that I can't remember anything about the previous two games ... I don’t remember many specifics from Thursday’s game at this point, but a) FJ was an instaget, b) Bif may have a stupid name but he’s a pretty smart player, and c) I joined Alex in his “duh, folks, the bluebird of happiness” style reaction to bluebird being a TS. They got a picture of a blue bird and “happiness” in the clue (plus rhymes with word as the category, but that just gave them bird) and no one could come up with bluebird? Tonight's game has also faded a bit, but speaking of stupid names, was it explained why Josh had a question mark after his name? I chuckled at his OMG, I’m an idiot reaction to missing the Thomas Paine DD. Ex (in the drop “it” category) was quite surprising as a TS. As was no one guessing the sun when Earth was ruled out in the stargazers clue. American Legion and Henrietta Lacks a bit, too. Carol Moseley Braun, with a picture, as a TS was depressing. The Christiane Amanpour-delivered clue was utterly ridiculous as a DD. What was the J in that organization going to be other than journalists?!

I did not, but I did do much better on the composers category than I expected. Same here; I pre-called several of them when the category was announced. The Kennedy clue amounting to "identify the family shown here" was my eye roll for the night. I'm good at geography in that part of the world, so FJ was an instaget for me.

Nothing is speaking to me tonight, so I'm going with simple: I have some chicken marinating in peanut oil, lime juice, garlic, and ginger, and will stir fry it with asparagus, mushroom, and snow peas. The asparagus is really early, but it was grown in a greenhouse and looks good, so I figured, why not, let's see how it tastes. If it's good, I'll make a lot of egg white scrambles this week and next, because I love asparagus with egg whites and sausage.

He asks if that's a Titleist (his brand of golf ball) and then says, "A hole in one." George is a hilarious story-teller, and that one just may be his best.

I think frogs were one of them, but they were coming up out of the river or something, not raining down. (Although they were in the hilarious "Mulder, toads just fell from the sky" moment in The X-Files.) So when thinking of something that would "rain" on the land, breaking every tree in the field, hail springs to mind much more readily than frogs. The clue had "bread" in quotation marks, precisely because it's not really a bread.

I LOL at Geoffrey Zakarian (I think it was) using chopsticks when Martha Stewart was using a spoon. I like Martha Stewart - or at least, decidedly do not dislike her - and have not a single shit to give about the chopsticks, but the slobbering drives me batty as well. This may not be Top Chef, but it's hardly public access, either. There have been plenty of judges, among the regulars or the special guests, who equal or surpass Stewart's status, yet we've never seen the obvious fawning by those cooking for said judges like we do with her. And I don't get why; I'd think it was her demand, but she came off hilariously self-aware in her show with Snoop Dog, so whether that was natural or a calculated performance, I don't know why she'd turn around and purposely present herself as a sycophant-loving diva here.

Oh, I regard that as one of life's absolute truths.

Tonight’s game was preempted for me, but I was able to read the clues on the archive. The Katey Sagal TS surprised me because her Peg, Married With Children role was one of those listed. Lice, too; not that none of them knew it as a plague, but that none of them guessed it based on the kids part. Same with hail, that no one even tossed it out there as a guess (and, seriously, Will, frogs? Some of his wrong answers are so weird I wonder about him). Juliette Gordon Low was surprising in that it seems like the founder of the Girl Scouts is something that has come up enough to be something at least one of three people studying for this game would remember it, but it’s entirely possible I’m the one misremembering and she hasn’t been a recurring subject. The most surprising TS was FJ. But, interestingly, Will had the least "Huh?" of the wrong guesses. I did every bit as poorly in the sci-fi category as I predicted going in – a big ol’ goose egg.

Yep, that new show Hanging With the Hendersons is the vet show up in the rotation now on Animal Planet. As far as I can tell, there has not been any word yet as to when this one will return. It's by far my favorite vet show, so I hope it's back soon!

Encore Provence was a mildly surprising TS; I think they knew encore as the French word for again part of the clue, but didn't pick up on the fact all they needed to do to get the title being sought was add Provence to it. The missed DD of The Good Earth was also surprising, but Susan’s “Holy shit, I seriously missed that?” style reaction when it was revealed was not; bad time for a brain fart. Seriously, 98.6 (as the average body temperature) in anything beyond Kids Week?! Which brings me to FJ. Okay, Teen Tournament with that one; no surprise all three got it.

I got a migraine - my first one in years - in the second half. So, the Rams offense actually made me ill. It's a real shame how poorly they played, because Wade Phillips's defense had Tom Brady completely befuddled, which was a thing of beauty.

I absolutely love P!nk. I like some songs from many of the rest on your list, quite a few songs when it comes to Counting Crows. Of those I know (a few of them I've heard the name but can't associate it with a song), I don't hate any of them.

Snack food this afternoon and thus no dinner tonight here, too: veggie crudité with a dill dip, shrimp cocktail, a salami/cheese/cracker selection, parmesan spinach balls, stuffed mushrooms, and chicken wings. Go Rams! I got my guacamole fix last night; I made chicken tacos, so made guac as one of the toppings. Tomorrow night will be stuffed chicken breast as the main course; I defrosted one and forgot about it, so it needs to be used! It's the perfect size for stuffing, so I'm going to stuff it with spinach, mushroom, and Swiss cheese. I don't often know what I'm making this far in advance, but even if I'm in the mood for something different by the time tomorrow night rolls around, that's what I'm eating, because I don't know that it can wait another day.

My UO as an animal lover is that the Puppy/Kitten/Dog/Cat Bowls aren't anything I enjoy watching. I'm a huge football fan, so I'm watching the Super Bowl with pretty much any match-up (a Cowboys/Patriots game is the only horrifying scenario I would skip altogether), but I can't watch more than a few minutes of the animal bowls during commercials/when they're aired against programming other than the game. I appreciate the promotion of "adopt, don't shop" and that these shows lead to most of the featured animals getting adopted, and I particularly applaud the Dog Bowl (only a couple of years old) and the Cat Bowl (new this year), featuring adult companion animals - who face much greater odds than their young counterparts in finding homes - but I just don't enjoy the shows as programming. All the stupid music and announcing! It's so unbearably lame. Put on mute, just watching animals frolic is enjoyable for a time, but the programs themselves simply annoy me in spite of the cute critters.

Ha! And yes. I only know All About That Bass (meh) and Like I'm Gonna Lose You (terrific), and I don't particularly care what stupid choices she makes in her personal life by getting married young, but when I saw that "wifey for lifey" shit quoted in another thread, I damn near needed medical attention for my sprained eyeballs. Please stop apologizing every time you express an opinion on an inherently subjective topic because someone out there might disagree with it. You like a wider variety of music than the average person your age, pay attention to the charts, and like what you like/don't like what you don't like; that's not trouble, it's discussion.

I love the way Long Shot is edited, as it weaves in past events with the current investigation very well. But two things bug me: that it takes them as long as it does to figure out the judge may have been the target all along and, most of all, the fuckery with the assassin’s car. Why does he leave the mirror behind? Having it missing confirms his story when he later asks the beat cops for help with his "some kid hit my car" story, sure, but it also in the immediate aftermath of what will inevitably be a high-stakes investigation makes his car the one to look at among those leaving the garage shortly after the shooting (and thus a distinguishing characteristic when they put out a BOLO, which they inexplicably do not do). He’d have been better off busting it off later, or at least not leaving it behind. And WTF? with how the ATM footage can be, with pixel magic, cleaned up to capture Angel’s license plate, but they never even try to find the assassin’s plate?! It’s the same angle. But they just zoom in on the missing mirror and never even mention the plate. They should have been much closer to identifying the car, with some shenanigans (he is a “ghost” after all) explaining why identifying the car didn’t mean identifying him, and then the exact same pace could have played out. I can’t decide if it’s annoying or refreshing that this “ghost” misses Angel twice; Angel is moving both times, so it’s nice that he can’t easily be taken out, but it’s so at odds from what we usually see of high-paid hit men on a cartel’s payroll. I also don’t understand why the ghost comes up out of the manhole to stake out Angel once Angel’s car is moved to the alley; it’s a dark alley, can’t he just hide out there like a normal person? I guess avoiding cameras, since he can come up right by the car rather than walking in from one end or the other, but he had to get into the drain system somewhere and if someone happened to see that, they'd report it. Plus, if he's avoiding possible cameras, that goes back to the stupidity of leaving the mirror behind making his car so obvious on the even more inevitable camera footage (downtown corner vs. back alley). I guess this is a “you can’t have it both ways” thing for me. But I love Rusty becoming, with an admittedly strange sense of happiness, a ward of the state. (“You’re not an orphan; you may not have a mom and dad, but you are family.”) Set up by Sharon’s perfectly ignoring Daniel’s calls so she can capture something usable once he inevitably shows up on his own and establishing a situation in which signing away his parental rights and suffering the fallout with his fiancée is preferable to the arrest he so richly deserves. And her “Honey, I do this for a living” to Rusty is fun, and lovely in that she ultimately leaves it up to him; she can still arrest Daniel if he really wants, because he was the victim of a crime. And I like the case on the whole; I love Sharon easily handing the case off to the FBI (so starkly contrasted with Brenda’s many fits over federal jurisdiction), doing the “of course, we still have a legal obligation to determine the identity of our witness and we don’t want to send the FBI down the wrong path until we confirm” routine to her team to nevertheless keep investigating something they do have jurisdiction over, but then indeed cluing in the FBI upon that confirmation to launch a joint effort, much to Provenza’s distress (“it’s like working for a hall monitor, every day"). Taking Provenza’s arm as they walk into the restaurant undercover never fails to make me laugh. And, as I noted shortly before the original forum was vaulted, I recently noticed that in the call she takes from Mike while in the car with Provenza, just before that amusing scene of taking his arm, Mike calls her “captain” during the course of it, but in saying goodbye calls her “chief.” Also, as a new bit of trivia, as she takes that call, the radio station she’s listening to is The Wave (a “smooth adult contemporary” station [having transitioned from “smooth jazz” to soft-rock, -pop, and -R&B], which is one of my presets, too. Mr. Reyes really gets to me. They contrast him with Daniel, what good fathers are willing to do and how bad ones fall short, but I get wrapped up in his story more than I think they even intended. He had a career he was proud of in Juarez, but, as a legit cop in a corrupt system, he saw his wife and all but one child killed, so he gave it all up to work as basically a maintenance man, undocumented, losing virtually all respect and living in constant fear of deportation, to keep his remaining son safe. It looks like what he's ironing when the killer comes calling are Angel's work clothes. And then he’s killed. It hits me hard. I like the touch that Angel is able to give such a good description, because of his dad’s influence; the way they all smile as he does so is bittersweet, knowing they still have to tell him about his dad.

The timing of Cheaters Never Prosper always confuses me; working backwards from when Sharon says it’s Saturday, Daniel Dunn was originally supposed to pick Rusty up "for the weekend" on Thursday night. First, Rusty is in school (and Daniel is an expensive cab ride away [and I love that Sharon gave him $100 just in case]), so why is he off Friday? Granted – and, yes, I confess I looked this up - the day this aired (10/8/12) was a holiday, the odious Columbus Day, but within the show the day Dunn turned up a day late was a Friday. I’ve never heard of getting the Friday before Columbus Day off even at institutions that close for the Monday holiday. (And his school recently did the faculty retreat thing to explain a Friday off, so I doubt they’d have another one so soon). But, regardless, starting Thursday night would have been a really long weekend for a first overnight visit, so it bugs. But I’ll let it go because of how much I love Sharon and Rusty’s first hug. She’s held herself back from touching him so many times out of respect for his reticence, but if she’s going to send him off to Daniel she’s going to do it with a hug. And the way Rusty slowly melts into it makes me ponder when the last time he got a proper hug probably was, and it’s heartbreaking. And then she adds on that extra squeeze before letting go. And starts to tell him to be careful, but changes to telling him to have a good time before awkwardly walking away. It’s a beautiful scene. I also love the “Miss you” at the end of Rusty's text saying he got there okay. My favorite part of that scene, though, is the smile I get from thinking of the blooper reel, when Mary McDonnell’s conclusion to the narrated email is, “You sign it Captain Sharon Fucking Raydor, and we go home.” Must have been a late night filming. (This episode looms large in the season one blooper reel; G.W. Bailey getting increasingly goofy with the “What?” reaction to “Vegas has a lot of scams” and the rest of the cast increasingly losing it in response is tremendous fun.) Sharon’s “We’re past the apology phase of our relationship with Mr. Dunn and have moved into the ‘Don’t let me drive over to his house and shoot him in the head’ phase” is fabulous. I also love that this is how Rusty finally tells the whole story of how he got left at the zoo, that he finally hit Gary back and the next day they ditched him. I have an issue with the resolution of the case, though. Sharon, especially, and Andy ride the partner, Connor, hard on brushing stalking off as “pursuing” and are appropriately disgusted by Adams’s behavior, but when dealing with this specific victim of it they seem to lose sight of that somewhat. I completely understand that Laura Elkins was more motivated by keeping her husband from finding out than anything else and that she jumped to (pre-meditated) murder without trying anything other than telling Adams directly to get lost, but they seem to gloss over the obstacles to a woman reporting a cop for this sort of thing, especially since that asshole had ignored a good thirty refusals, turned up in her home, etc. He’s a nutter, but he’s a cop and she had previously slept with him voluntarily; please acknowledge how far behind the eight ball she’d have been had she instead chosen to do things right. And then there’s some shaming with never having slept with the guy to begin with being listed as one of her options to avoid all this. It has all never sat quite right with me. The identity theft part is fun, though, for Amy’s reaction to Dr. Blowhard/Dr. Goofball, especially “You have the right to remain silent – and I can’t wait for that.” And Provenza rattling off all his identities and asking, “Are you sure none of you want an attorney?” and calling him Dr. John Jacob Jingleheimerschmitt. It’s always interesting to me (and I assume this started with The Closer, but I didn’t check the last time I saw it in syndication) that when the squad is just working in the office (as opposed to interviewing someone, or being out in the field), in addition to usually having their jackets off, Julio and Mike have their top shirt buttons undone and ties slightly loosened, Provenza has his top two buttons undone and tie totally loosened, while Andy has his perfectly done up. It's such a great character touch. In this one, I noticed for the first time tonight that when Sharon calls the office late Friday night, Andy has his tie just slightly loosened. Now it will be a viewing game to see if that ever happens again.

My heart aches for Crunch; I suspect he'll live out his life at VRC. It was sweet to see his short burst of energy to low-key play with toys, but he was wiped out afterward. And he's just very low-key in general, so there aren't a lot of people out there looking for a dog like him. I really like those adopters - that their granddog won them over to the breed, that they want a senior, that they were so enthusiastic about it, and that they agonized so much over picking one (since the first time I went to the shelter to choose two cats, I stood there and cried because I couldn't take them all, I relate). I liked Lizzie telling them not to feel guilty about who they don't take; no one deserves a home more than the other, so whoever they pick they're doing the right thing. (I could have used hearing that back when my young self was blubbering in the shelter.) Since J.D. was the one whose face on the website set the woman on this path, it seems right that he go home with them, but I loved that they loved the others, too, especially the second one (Trigger? Tigger?) -- he sure had some energy for an old guy, and a terrific personality. Workers cheering as J.D. was led out for his drive to his new home and lining up to kiss good-bye was wonderful. And Tania put a sweater on him when they got to cold Idaho. So cute! Watching Harvest (I assume he's Harvest and she's Autumn) seemingly totally unfamiliar with how to get into a vehicle was touching, as was how much he relied on his presumed mama. And, I'll probably say this every episode, but Marcel is terrific with skittish dogs. The DNA testing was silly fun (LOL at everyone trying to bribe Tia to tell them the results early instead of waiting until all the results were in). I'm not good with identifying dog breeds, and don't really care, but it was fun. Dugan is hilarious looking. I remember the rescue of the dingoes, so I love that they stayed in the family. Marcel talking about Outlaw got me choked up; don't we all know how true it is than when your self esteem is in the toilet for some reason, the unconditional love of a pet makes a huge difference. And, of course, Lulu - Tania's love for that funny little dog has always made me smile.

I've only ever heard Ariana Grande's name in conjunction with licking donuts and the Manchester bombing, never with, you know, a song, so this discussion got me curious to see if I'd ever heard anything of hers without knowing who it was. I made it through about a minute each of three different videos (from the list that came up when I put "Ariana Grande songs" into Google) and she came off like a vapid twit in each of them. She also doesn't have much of a voice. Color me unimpressed. OMG, that was so strange just from the small bits of her videos I watched. I wanted to reach through the monitor and hold her damn face straight!

Cried and cider ("wept and an apple beverage"). While looking that up, I looked up Will's wrong answers to refresh my memory on just how odd they were. For "true blue and a substance composed of two or more metals," he said, "compound and cobalt." For "ASAP and a positively charged subatomic particle," he said, "proton and possible." Even if he'd had the right answers, it annoys me when they're put in the wrong order ("true blue" comes first, so put "loyal" first, etc.). But that's just a personal quirk; those answering correctly don't always do that, and it's accepted. His version of anagram, however ...

Good close game. Saint Elmo’s for the brimstone clue? WTF? Yes, I know, St. Elmo’s Fire, but what on earth about that clue led her there? I guess because biblical was in the clue she went to saint, but, damn; even I know the phrase fire and brimstone, and you have to search to find someone who knows less about the bible than I do. (But I didn't know brimstone referred to sulfur, so that's my learn something new for the day.) I even did an internet search to see if there was an association between the weather phenomenon (assuming she wasn't referring to the song/movie!) and sulfur I wasn't aware of, but all I found were a couple of references to the the smells of the two things sometimes occurring together. It was such a weird guess, I feel like I'm the one missing something and it actually wasn't weird. And co-sign on wondering if Will knows what an anagram is. Or how to spell. Or something. Because those wrong answers of his were really weird. The "What a Dad Wants" category? Um, a great many women and non-breeding men would like those things, too, J! writers. Did we need the audio part of the Piano Man clue?! That’s as bad as some of their picture clues. I'm surprised winch was a TS when they went in order and got that clue right after the wench one.

FYI, in case anyone feeds this, Hill's has issued a voluntary recall of some canned dog food for excessive vitamin D content. (The link is to the product list section of its website, which right now has the recall notice on top of it; if you come along later and just see the regular product list at that link, you may have to hunt the notice down.)

Padma's facial expressions are a highlight of any episode, and with this one I loved her reaction to Eddie saying the first time he cooked for his wife back when they first started dating, he made her fish because she didn't like fish. When he told the story to the other cheftestants, one of them said, "That's so Eddie." I'd laugh my ass off if he got home and his wife told him she actually still doesn't like snapper, she was just being polite.

I got a little hung up on the NY native part of the clue, trying to come up with female singers strongly associated with NY and getting nowhere. Once I switched to female singers with a slew of hits in the '90s, Mariah Carey sprang right to mind. I had no idea where she was from, so I couldn't use the NY part of the clue to confirm it, but she seemed the right guess so I stuck with it.