Bastet

My parents' neighbors are having a party, and playing bass-heavy music at 11:30 at night loud enough that I can hear it - not just feel the bass, hear the music - through triple pane windows and across a rather large yard for Los Angeles. Jackasses (they moved in a few years ago and have been annoying ever since). I had the TV on in the living room, and now that I'm in my old bedroom I'll just put my headphones on, as I won't go to sleep for another couple of hours anyway, but how rude.

Woo hoo for the Seahawks grabbing a wild-card slot in a great game. I'm still all in for the Rams - who really, really need to earn a first-round bye - but I like Seattle being one of the other teams in the mix. If Dallas can be eliminated in the wild-card round as nature intended, and the "in the hunt" stragglers not wind up being an issue, I will be so excited for the NFC in this year's race. I love the Rams, really like the Seahawks, and like the Saints and Bears. I either don't care about or actively hate all the AFC contenders, so my NFC preference will be in full force (unless the Cowboys go to the Super Bowl, but I don't think I have to worry about that). New Orleans is going to be very tough to beat at home, so I think the NFC is theirs to lose. I'd rather the Rams or Seahawks represent, but I'd be quite happy to root for the Saints in the big game.

I've only seen about half the films on that list, a few of which I have only the vaguest memories of, but of those I can actually pull up a good recollection of the character, the only ones I find dateable are Josh from Clueless and Kumail from The Big Sick. And, yeah, what the actual fuck with Edward from Pretty Woman and Jake from Sweet Home Alabama?! I've seen a greater percentage of the runners up (although, again, there are several that I don't have much memory of beyond, "Yeah, I saw that once"), and I'm not exactly nodding my head at that list, either. That these are the men rom-coms have to offer may be why it's one of my least-favorite genres, or maybe it's just a really bad list.

I second this, @SuzyRhapsody. She's determined to fall flat on her face, and you have to let her. I'm not a parent, but I sympathize with your sheer terror at just how badly she may manage to screw up her life and how long it may take her to fix it. And your anger at how thoroughly you worked to do right by her only to have her take a steaming dump on all that effort. Not to mention your frustration that your specific aim was to prevent her from making the same type of mistakes you made at that age, yet, here we go, history is repeating itself. Keenly sympathize; I read your post and just sat here for a while feeling terrible for what you are going through. So I do not mean to sound like it's a simple, obvious thing - just step back. I know it's not. That's your child. She's technically an adult, but that's your baby, your only baby, and she's doing everything wrong and could wind up in some real trouble because of that. I understand that this is agony for you. It's just that there is no way of making her do things differently. You have done all you could to guide her, but she has chosen a different path and won't be deterred from it by anything you say or do at this point. Hopefully snippets of your conversations will ring in her head from time to time and annoy her into giving them some thought, and she'll come to see what's really going on. But she's reached the point where she has to learn the hard way. Hopefully, in time, she will indeed learn. (And deliver you a heartfelt apology when she does, and you two will settle into a new relationship.) For now, though, your hands are tied. Her choices have effectively whittled yours down to one, and you just have to let it play out.

If one called Central Casting to fill the role of "guy who's spent 40 years and counting waiting for his band to take off," they would send Graham. So I laughed out loud when his story so clearly fit his look.

They got on it pretty quickly; I haven't checked again to see if the version on their YouTube channel is updated yet (it hadn't been as of yesterday), but the TCM website boasted the updated version Wednesday, and it's airing on the network at least as early as today. Let's hope there's no need for additional entries in 2018.

Has anyone had Jack Daniel's Single Barrel Select? I have a friend who loves JD, but always mixes it with something. I quite agree that's how JD should be consumed. My local liquor store has a good deal on the Single Barrel, so I'm going to pick up a bottle for her - if she likes it well enough to drink on the rocks, great, if she just has a tastier whiskey to combine with her ginger ale, I'm not appalled by the mixing, heh. But I'm curious if anyone here has tasted it. (The same store has a good deal on Lagavulin's 16-year [single-malt Scotch], so I think I'll treat myself while I'm there.)

@DeLurker, I didn't go shopping when I thought I would, and then it wasn't until tonight when I sorted everything for wrapping that I thought to take note of the details, but here's my long-delayed answer to the soap question: TJ's no longer carries the local/regional brand I was looking for, boo, but they do carry Bisous De Provence soap, which I also like for its scent and natural ingredients. The triple milled soap in lavender smells just wonderful (and looks pretty, too), and I like the green tea, and the lemon verbena as well. TJ's has it for a good deal less than other stores/online. I didn't see the red tin of Belgian cookies, but I got the triple ginger snaps for my mom and got my dad a tub of the dark chocolate and peanut butter cups (along with the usual local honey for her and Kona coffee for him). Because I cannot have those peanut butter cups in my presence without eating them, yet thought it tacky to give him a half-empty tub, I also picked up the small bag of them for me; I've done well eating just one per day. I also got my dad a blue cheese mustard. I hate both ingredients, but he loves both, and the little blurb about it was basically, "sounds horrible but tastes great," so I figured why not give it a try. My parents are harder and harder to shop for each year, as they have everything, so foodstuffs are a good way to add to their loot and make sure they're not sitting there twiddling their thumbs while I finish opening presents.

Fee-erry (he says Fee-eddy, going right past a rolled R into something as exaggerated and ridiculous as the rest of him).

She can’t be dumb, because she made it through all the steps required to get on the show, but, holy crap, Ellie came off poorly. I’ve never heard pea jacket, just pea coat. (I got it, because of the category, I've just never heard it referred to that way.) The carpet TS kind of surprised me, just because they’d already had another clue in that category to understand the way “daffynitions” was going to work. They missed admission, too, though, so I guess it shouldn’t have. Ted Stevens and Finland did surprise me a little, as did the missed DD of Algeria; that seems like something that comes up a lot on J! I was just as stumped by Prester John as they were, and I didn’t get some of the Dreamy Literature clues they did. I dislike most Christmas songs, but I knew all of them in the sleighing songs category. I got FJ because I happen to know the first national monument was Devils Tower, but I've never seen the film, so that wouldn't have helped me if I didn't remember that fact from my visit there. The Joe Biden clue was too easy; include a less-obvious fact about him! I also thought it was an unnecessary assist to put the “up” in the luggage clue; just say “to fit here,” not “to fit up here.” A picture of Guy Fieri is bad enough, but one of him in the midst of taking a giant bite of food? Ugh. I love that the contestant pronounced his name the real way though, not the stupid way he does.

Assuming you mean the remake, and not the original (which I know nothing about), they didn't go twice; they found Earth, and later they found a different planet they decided to call Earth. They finally found the Earth of their history, the one they were looking for the whole time (where the 13th tribe went when everyone left Kobol, the place from which you can see all 12 constellations in the sky, etc.), at the midpoint of season four. But it turned out to be uninhabitable because of the prior nuclear destruction, so they had to go back into space and look for a planet that was habitable. They found one, via Starbuck's jump, in the series finale and settled on it. When Laura asked what it's called, Bill said "Earth." She laughed at him, but he explained his logic as being after all they'd been through and having finally reached a place they could make their new home, this planet could be their new Earth. (It's like Caprica & New Caprica -- Caprica got nuked, they couldn't live there anymore, they stumbled across a habitable planet where they could settle, and Baltar decreed it New Caprica.) The confusion probably comes from the fact this planet they settled on for good in the end, turned out to be our Earth, 150,000 years ago. And you can see those constellations from here, too. But not all at the same time, like on their original Earth.

I've made a different one of Ina Garten's, her make-ahead cranberry sauce. The conserve recipe basically just adds nuts and raisins. I like cranberry juice well enough (with or without vodka), but can't stand that canned cranberry glop, so wanted to try a "real" version of cranberry sauce to see if I liked that. And I did. The only thing I changed was to use less sugar, because I don't like adding a bunch of sugar to fruit, but I can't remember how much I reduced it by.

That's very old-school, based on tests done on rats, with the diet then implemented on dogs. Cats' needs are different, and they should not eat a low-protein diet. The modern approach when dealing with CKD in cats is a low-phosphorus diet. The prescription foods are low in both phosphorus and protein (and use inferior ingredients - yet charge you gourmet prices for them), so they work (in terms of causing the kidney values to improve) because of the low phosphorus content, but they cause other problems because of the low protein content. Thus it's better to feed a "regular" food that's lower in phosphorus than average and add a phosphorus binder to effectively further reduce the phosphorus content if necessary. When you're ready to delve into this, Dr. Lisa Pierson's website lists the phosphorus and protein (and other things) content of a wide variety of cat food. I'm glad the nuclear option worked, and Lily - and you - are now permanently free of those pills!

It seemed from the interview I saw with Jackie that her stupendously bad answer and subsequent "something bad is happening; we need to stop to get her help" break occurred before the interviews, but while she was clearly sluggish, the only "Huh?" wrong answer I saw was 411 instead of 911 and that occurred in DJ. So I'm not sure what happened when, and what got edited out. But never knowing how you'd have done if not for hypoglycemia sucks, whatever the timing. Speaking of the 911 clue, that was ridiculous in DJ; at that level, they should have had to name the British counterpart, not our own emergency services number. And a picture of Nelson Mandela in DJ? Unlike in the Teen Tournament, tonight I did very well with the TV category even though I don’t watch any of the shows.

What a lump of coal – Richard Blais and Graham Elliot in the same episode? Thank goodness for Eric Ripert and Brooke Williamson to balance that out (Ripert could do it on his own, but I like her, too). And for Tom shutting down Richard’s stupid attempt at the “do you catch the fish yourself?” joke. And I wish they wouldn’t go so far in creating Christmas episodes to make people walk around saying “merry Christmas” to each other in the morning. Create a holiday dish, fine. But pretend it’s Christmas? Come on. The guy who’s a stan for Blais – I can’t even. But that has nothing on the guy who did not come to TC with a dessert recipe (Brian?). What an idiot. I hate gimmicky QFs when immunity is at stake. Okay, enough grumbling. I got a laugh out of Sara relating being the one Jewish kid in Kentucky, and of Kelsey saying she was going to knife Brian in his sleep for putting together such an awful box – and then when Nini threatened to murder anyone who disturbed her bowl in the freezer, someone said she’d been hanging around Kelsey too much. And of Padma talking about her daughter setting a trap for Santa. That was a long-ass day, dessert is hard for most of them, they were jockeying for space in a home kitchen – a seriously tricked-out one, but still – so I’m not surprised there were some missteps. I’m not a big dessert person, so nothing got me drooling, but there were quite a few I’d have liked to try. I love that Kelsey hit it out of the park with something that was a Plan B. Nini’s looked the best to me, so I’m glad she won. I was hoping to see Brandon in the bottom, because, well, Brandon. But at least they didn’t like his dish, again; I hold out hope he’ll be gone soon, because – other than the Blais love that now has me giving that one guy the side-eye – he’s the only one I actively dislike. I appreciate Tom’s frustration that the three on the bottom all knew just how they’d messed up, and didn’t do anything about it. And I agree with taking Pablo out of consideration, given that the other two were actually offensive to the palate. I thought it was going to be Brian, but I can see it going the other way.

Yeah, I'm so befuddled by this -- it's not a company holiday, but everyone has to use one of their floating holiday days so that no one is there? That's some deep-fried bullshit. If they want to make it a non-work day, make it a company holiday. I'd show up for work (whether I could get in or not) and make a point of being there/attempting to be there and then use my floating holiday day off for something I actually wanted to celebrate.

That they'd be condensing all but the heavily-trafficked forums into single threads was announced several weeks or so ago; it's simply a server space issue, so there's no way around it. Almost every forum in which I post will get vaulted, and future discussion will take place in single threads. No more organization by episode or season, no more small talk topics or game threads. I'll have to use Followed Content rather than the Customized Home Page. It's unfortunate, definitely, but it's how the site can continue, so I just have to adjust. I hope you'll all stick around, too - for whenever we get new episodes again. Does anyone know when that will be? I can't find anything on the show's page on the Animal Planet website. (This week we don't even get repeats like last week, so I don't know if the season is already over or what.)

Hmm, I'm still only finding the original version from five days ago; do you have a link to the one updated to include Penny Marshall?

I laughed pretty hard at his reaction; it took me a while to decipher what the hell that "drawing" meant when it first started showing up in posts here. And then when I did, I thought, "Duh!" But the drawing had more detail than appears in text online, and the contestant even demonstrated. Silly Alex. Casserole and hyperbole kind of surprised me as a TS, but that was it for the night. Lake Okeechobee is an answer I perpetually stumble over since The X-Files, which early on included an episode set on Lake Okoboji. Whenever I attempt to answer the former, I have to concentrate lest the latter come out. Similarly, when ginkgo biloba was an answer last night, I had to take care not to say "ginkgo balboa," thanks to a malaprop by Andy on Major Crimes that was the source of much amusement. And that's in my living room. If I had to spit either out on the show, I'd speak so deliberately and probably laugh while doing so that I'd come off like a nut.

And now she has posted this on Twitter, perfect in its simplicity (the account doesn't have the little verified symbol, but it seems to be her and multiple news outlets have referenced it as indeed being that of the Cindy Williams):

I only vaguely remember Home Alone as something entertaining but not anything I need to see again, so I am not the target audience for that commercial, but it still amused me. I like that someone thought of it, and that he signed on.

A friend and I still exchange "Happy Festivus" cards each year, on which we each write, "a donation has been made in your name to The Human Fund."

Oh, she damn well better be; she's one of the most-successful female directors in American film history; Big was the first film directed by a woman to pass the $100 million mark, and then she did it again with A League of Their Own, the highest-grossing baseball movie ever. She was a leader to and champion of other women in comedy and behind the lens. TCM always builds in room to add late-breaking deaths by including stock footage that fits their theme, so some of that can be replaced with someone's picture and the total running time of video still syncs with the length of the song.

I ran the first round other than the Roald Dahl category, at which I was a spectacular failure. I've heard the name, of course, but apparently I have never read any of his books (or at least not any asked about tonight). I hadn't seen Jackie until today (or read this forum, since I didn't see the games), and I didn't recognize her by sight, but her name made me think "Where do I know her from?" She's an attorney in L.A., as am I, so I was searching my brain for a case/cause where I could have read something from her and coming up blank, so I was very happy I actually listened to the interview segment (something I often skip) to have my "A-ha!" moment. In her shoes, I'd have been embarrassed by the Martina Navratilova answer (instead of Billie Jean King), especially since she was so sure of it. Oh, and I grumbled loudly enough to wake up my cat when they went with that helicopter museum category early on; while it worked out, those clues take up a lot of time, so I like when contestants leave them for the end. Same with the round (can't remember which one) when there was less than a minute to go and quite a few clues left on the board, yet they kept saying the entire category name instead of shortening it. It worked out then, too, but come on.

We'll see how long it takes Tuner Classic Movies to update its TCM Remembers 2018. They put one together every year (always exponentially better than the Oscars' In Memoriam segment), and leave room to edit in any deaths that occur between the time it's released and the end of the year; they can replace stock footage with photos of new deaths without screwing up the total running time being synced to the music. This year's just came out a few days ago. Here it is as it stands now: