Bastet

For those who like pictures of animals snuggling with each other as much as I do, presenting my niece and nephews: in the middle is Shermie (Sherman), and the black bookends are Scully on the left and Spooky on the right. (The three S names were unintentional; Spooky and Scully obviously - to X-Files fans, anyway - go together, but the symmetry with Shermie went unnoticed for a few days.) Shermie is about 15 and the other two are closing in on a year old (they're litter mates). The kittens are obsessed with Shermie and have been since pretty much the day they came home from the shelter this summer. When they're all awake, he tolerates them with mild expressions of annoyance, so when it's nap time, they take advantage of their chance to snuggle up to their big brother.

It was especially impressive how they let it play out gradually over the course of a season; economic conditions in Lanford change between when he decides to go for it and when he has to let it go, and those changes happen sometimes in the background, with just a line in conversation about something else, and sometimes overtly, like Roseanne losing her job because Rodbell's was turning the diner into a bargain bin (reflecting the community's changed spending habits, given the various Wellman layoffs and other job losses).

Well, great, but the biological clock isn't what I was talking about. As I said, it was the sense that because a woman is established and able to support herself and a child, that's a reason she should continue a pregnancy she doesn't think she wants. Like it's her responsibility to opt for parenting upon becoming pregnant because she can, since she doesn't have the "excuse" of being a poor student or something to "justify" having an abortion.

Aww, Coburn was very good with Abby. And I liked the conversation with Luka in general, and especially when she said being friends for several years and going through stuff together doesn't mean they're equipped to raise a child together. This is such a missed opportunity to go for a parenting storyline rather than the abortion storyline, but I'll obviously have to let that go and move on. But it's sad to see Abby say, "Well, I'm at the right time of my life for this," like she's obligated to give birth just because she's not young and/or broke. (Well, sad that women are made to feel that way, not sad that she said it.) I have to leave soon, so by the time I tune in again tomorrow, she'll probably be in her third trimester.

The only kids I knew who drove without a license (other than in the middle of nowhere) were doing it without their parents' permission, but plenty of kids had cars before they got their licenses. (I learned the basics of driving at 14, while we were in farm country visiting family. I didn't drive at home [city/suburbs] until I had my permit the next year, and then only with my parents in the car or during driver's training -- I was chomping at the bit to get my license [I was at the DMV the morning of my 16th birthday], and wouldn't risk getting my permit yanked and having to wait.) And 15/16-year-old kids being able to come and go as they pleased without telling their parents, never mind asking, on weeknights was definitely more common among TV teens than the ones I knew.

Roseanne as Santa and Jackie as Mrs. Claus are terrific. "Remember, possession of cane is a privilege, not a right." And Roseanne saying, "I guess I get a Christmas bonus after all" when Darlene responds to her speech in the bookstore by quietly coming in and pinning her writing up on the fridge chokes me up every time.

I had a friend like that; in fact, she roomed with me for a couple of years when we were first starting out, and this is seriously the list of foods she consumed for those two years: frozen chicken nuggets/tenders, fries, pop tarts, cheese pizza, carrots, grilled cheese sandwiches (with American cheese and white bread), and "sweet and sour chicken" that had no sauce. When we were in New Orleans with two other friends, she would accompany us to all these great restaurants and just have drinks, then go get chicken nuggets and fries at Burger King.

Guys, I didn't even make it through season seven until this year; seasons eight and nine ain't happening. No one who likes the same things/episodes I do likes those seasons, so I'm not buying something I'm not interested in and probably won't like. I am getting more excited for season 11 with each weekend that passes, though - watching football on FOX, I see it advertised a lot, and just hearing the theme music causes a completely reflexive smile every time.

Okay, I'm going in. For years, two friends have tried to get me into this show, assuring me it will join The X-Files as the exception to my dislike of sci-fi, that the creators had as one of their primary goals to make a sci-fi series that felt and looked realistic. "It's a psychological/political drama that just happens to be set in space." I like Edward James Olmos and I absolutely fucking love Mary McDonnell, so if nothing else I could just watch for them, but I know how things end, so do I really want to do that to myself? Plus, sci-fi tends to explore religious shit in which I have no interest, and I know this is no different, so do I want to go down that road? Also, such a dark look at humanity at this point in, well, humanity? Alas, the Blu-Ray set was on sale for $40, so I decided to go for it. I watched the miniseries last night and I liked it. It was obvious a lot had been cut, though, so watching/listening to the special features and learning the first edit ran a full hour long was no surprise. Some of the deleted scenes leave gaping holes. I wish they'd included more of them in the special features. I wish I hadn't picked up so much via friends and offhand references on TWoP and here over the years - I already know who the cylons are, and seeing Boomer walk in at the end of the miniseries would probably have been quite a "Holy shit" moment if I was going in unspoiled. But I dig it. Olmos and McDonnell are great as always, and I'm already yearning for more of Laura Roslin. I've never seen Grace Park in anything before, but I'm impressed by her already. The only thing I recognize in Katee Sackhoff's list of credits is an episode of Cold Case I liked, but I can't picture her in it. At any rate, I like Starbuck. I can't decide yet how I feel about Baltar or Six; I don't think I'm as captivated as I'm supposed to be, but Six definitely has potential to be interesting enough to justify the focus on her. And, hey, Lorena Gale! She played several different small roles in The X-Files (most memorably, the "Howard Graves is very dead" doctor), and I'm oddly excited to see her here. Also, I like Callum Keith Rennie, so I'm glad there are more Leobens. Vancouver actors for the win.

I like that, too. I also liked the friendship between Abby and Susan; that had to evolve, and it did so nicely. I liked that back in the beginning, when they weren't friends, Susan still invited Abby to stay at her place until the neighbor who beat her up was picked up. Yeah, they didn't do any better with that than most shows, which is sad for something that lasted as long as/had as many characters as it did. Mark and Carol developed a nice friendship after Doug left, but is that the only truly platonic friendship between men and women we've seen? Corday and Romano in the sense there was never any dating or sex, but he had a raging crush on her. Same with Carter and Maggie; that was a fun friendship, but he wanted it to be more. Same with him and Maria Bello's character, too. Mark and Susan count as half a platonic friendship to me, too, I guess - I never saw any interest on Susan's part, and I thought the post-divorce interest on Mark's part was a yearning for the comfortable and familiar rather than a true romantic/sexual attraction. I think Abby and Carter were good as friends, so I was glad to see the hint of a return to that after the break-up. And Benton and Corday had a great friendship after their romantic relationship ended.

It's so different now. People who were around at the time (or who are car buffs) can look at an old car and say that's a '57 this or a '62 that, but I can't look at an Accord and tell you what year it was; cars just aren't distinguishable in my time the way they were in my parents'. There are so many more of them, the changes from model to model are much less noticeable, etc. For a couple of years, my best friend lived in a new home in a development near Orlando; when I went to visit her, it was only the fact she lived on a corner and had gotten special dispensation (a single family home subject to CC&Rs is on my "Seriously, what?" list, btw) to install a fence (fenceless backyards have always been a big ball of WTF to me; when we'd travel to an area where that was the norm, I was quite taken aback, and I've never really stopped) that I could find my way "home" when I borrowed her car to sight-see while she was at work. Her car then was a beige SUV, and I could never find that damn thing in a parking lot without making it beep, because it looked like everyone else's. I am so not into the cookie cutter thing. One of the things I love most about my neighborhood is that you will not find two homes with the same exterior look or interior layout; a tract where a handful of homes are pretty similar is one thing, but living someplace where every home for five square miles is one of four options (all painted in one of only a handful of colors, all with similar landscaping, etc.) is pretty much the opposite of what I want. But, hey - different strokes.

And I loved that. Christmas episodes are just awful on most shows; I only like them on the shows that dare do non-treacly ones. I don't want mystical shit, I don't want some old white dude with a beard who may really be Santa Claus, I don't want lessons in the true meaning of Christmas, etc. For a show to pick not Christmas, not Thanksgiving, but Halloween as its annual tradition of special, themed episodes? Reason number 82 of 217 I love this show. (Or something like that.) And I don't even like Halloween! I went trick-or-treating once as a kid, thought it was stupid, and just stuck to dressing up each year for the carnival we had at school, and then as an adult I was - and remain - rather "Really?" at the idea of adults donning a costume unless performing in a play/show/etc. I hate kids, so I don't hand out candy; my lights are off and I'm out in the back. So it is not at all a "Hey, that's my favorite holiday, too," connection. I just appreciate it for being different, and being done so well.

Morris is the one I cannot even deal with; he's annoying and incompetent, so let's not keep him around a bit for humor at his expense and then dispatch with him, but instead keep him around and around and around and then make him Chief Resident. Huh? Ray is annoying, too, though. John Leguizamo's character I can't get a read on; I'm not sure the writers really know what to do with him. And I've never remotely connected to the surgeon (I don't know his name, but played by the guy who did a great job in an episode of SVU, as Tate's dad), so in a weird way it's like the surgery side of things doesn't exist any more for me, which after Benton and Corday is a big change. I kind of liked Eve, despite being the usual "outsider tries to make changes, but she just doesn't understand how our heroes work" caricature, but they never developed her, either. It's what virtually always happens on long-running shows; characters are more one-dimensional representations of types than actual characters. Another reason I find it comforting when Kerry, Luka, or Abby are the ones on my screen.

Yes, as noted upthread, she has appeared on Chopped a few times.

There has always been something mildly creepy - well, maybe not even creepy, just desperate - about Luka's quest for a second chance at fatherhood. He seemed more enamored of Carol's fetuses than her, he was all in when Julie Delpy did whatever the hell she did, he fell in love with Alex as much as he did with Sam, etc. Reason number 17 abortion would have been the better option for Abby, but once there's an actual child in existence I suspect he'll be a decent to good father. And I'm glad to hear he respects terminating/continuing as Abby's choice to make, whatever his choice would be if it existed in an alternate reality, as he's always struck me as a basically good guy, other than his violent temper.

I'm glad you liked it, @JTMacc99. I think it's a really enjoyable combination of flavors.

I think season ten was good, on average, and have zero interest in watching gestating Scully, coy paternity bullshit, William, and a couple of new people, one of whose most notable characteristic is singing whale songs. It wasn't until this re-watch that I made it through season seven in its entirety (I had originally started drifting away in season five, and threw in the towel completely at some point during season seven); the show was limping along, at least in terms of the things about it that interest me, and a limited-run season after some time away is much more up my alley at this point. For season eleven, I anticipate suffering through the mytharc episodes, and generally enjoying the MOTW ones - just as I did in season ten, and in so many seasons before that. That's why I love the promo that's just banter and monsters; that's how I like my Mulder and Scully.

My motion sickness is so bad I could get queasy just from thinking about that too much. Holy crap, I am watching a show on Animal Planet about fat pets, and these owners are my latest peeve! Their pets are morbidly obese - four and five times their maximum ideal weight - because they're feeding them four or fives times as much as they should be eating and doing nothing to encourage exercise, and the host gives them all kinds of information and tips, and they just wishy-washy "Oh, but she loves food so much" ignore 90% of it. Worse yet, they complain about the few aspects they do implement by saying, "She doesn't eat as much that way." THAT'S THE IDEA. I don't think this is a good show for me to watch; these aren't portly pets who, sure, could stand to be a little thinner but are doing just fine as they are, these are unhealthy pets who are going to die early - not to mention being tired and uncomfortable while they live - for a completely avoidable reason! Grrr ...

Of the three houses my best friend has had, two of them were like that (including the one she lives in now). She doesn't particularly like it, but it doesn't bother her. Another friend of mine has a layout that would have been an absolute deal-breaker to me: You enter into the dining room (I mean open the front door and, boom, you're in the dining room), with the kitchen straight ahead (divided by a peninsula). To get to the living room, you have to go through the dining room to the hallway, walk all the way down the hall (past the bathroom and extra bedrooms), where it opens up into the living room, and then the master bedroom suite is to the right, off the living room. So any time they have people over, the guests are traipsing through their whole house. It's nuts to me (it was originally a tiny little box of a house, and someone added on). Which is what brings this back to a peeve - making major changes that don't match the style of the home and neighborhood, rather than just going someplace where what you want makes sense.

Having just watched My Struggle II, this would work for me. My major problem with that episode is that the huge and public nature of things feels out of step with XF to me; it's always been covert actions easily denied or covered up, thus the unending quest for proof, but this is a global contagion playing out on international media (and a spaceship over a bridge in the middle of D.C. rather than out in the middle of nowhere). So if it didn't actually happen, it's just Scully's dream/premonition/whatever, that would make more sense to me, as much as my reflexive reaction to any sort of "it was all a dream" revelation is to roll my eyes and start muttering about Bobby Ewing in the shower. Plus, while I didn't watch seasons 8 and 9 and thus have no feelings on Monica Reyes, I know many viewers were upset that she was aligned with CSM, so if that was just part of Scully's nightmare, the character would be salvaged.

I re-watched this season recently (first time I'd watched anything other than the Weremonster episode again). I came away with the same impression I had the first time around - it's good. Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster is excellent, Founder's Mutation is great, Home Again is good (and could have been better; the case is great, as is the interaction between M&S, but the Margaret/William stuff ruins the pace and just drags it down overall), My Struggle is okay, My Struggle II is sort of okay, and Babylon is bad. So, on average: good. And, notably, had CC been banned from writing any episodes of his own show, it would have been great. My Struggle is okay, as I said, but after all this time our reintroduction to the show is via the always-bad CC combination of voiceovers and stock footage? He had EIGHT YEARS to come up with a better way of handling the exposition. It does a good job of establishing why their relationship is in a different place than we left it in IWTB, while showing it's still an intense and affectionate connection, and of bringing them both back to the FBI, so it does its job as a bridge between what came before and what's to come. It's also fast paced; when it ended, it felt like I'd only been watching for about half an hour. But, my gods, the mythology. Watching this after having marathoned the whole series (well, minus seasons 8 and 9) in the past month or so, it was particularly obvious - and annoying - how every.fucking.time someone tells Mulder that what he'd believed before was wrong, and the truth is actually this new thing, he believes it. Immediately. I lost count of how many "keys to everything" he's gone through by this point, but he's gonna need a big chain to hold them all. So how can I possibly get invested in believing this latest theory, or that Sveta is the key to everything? Until the franchise is 100% guaranteed to never be coming back - which CC will never admit - each "No, really, this is The Truth" story is destined to be discarded. And the new theory is just about eleventy steps too far into Crazy Town. I like that they dropped the warring alien factions roaming the earth stuff and went back to government cover-up of experiments using alien technology; as Rance Howard laid things out for Mulder, I let out a big sigh of relief that the mytharc was going to be simpler and more realistic this time. And then Mulder, Tad Whitney, and Sveta let loose with their giant ball of conspiracy theories and I was suddenly wishing we'd go back to alien-human hybrids and faceless alien rebels setting folks on fire. "It's fear mongering, isolationist, claptrap, techno-paranoia so bogus and dangerous and stupid that it borders on treason," indeed, Scully. My other big problem is the scope and scale of it in part two don't fit with XF; it has always been about the clandestine actions of a cabal that go unreported/buried as something else, so a global pandemic creating apocalyptic conditions playing out over international media feels out of step. And, while I agree CSM was a fantastic villain for nine years, I just cannot with bringing him back. The man wasn't just burned, he was a flaming skeleton when we last saw him! Yes, it's a shame that you killed off your villain in the final episode and then, oops, that wasn't our final episode, but live with it. The reordering of episodes doesn't count as a big problem, but adding the "Welcome back, you two" line does not succeed in making what was supposed to be episode five feel appropriate as episode two; the office is all set up, and they're totally back in the XF groove. So you have the "Wait, what?" disconnect when, in the next episode, the office isn't much further along than it was when it sat abandoned, and Mulder is rattling off all the old X-Files he was wrong about and questioning his entire professional existence. The emotional and logistical flow of the season would have worked much better as originally planned: My Struggle, Home Again, Weremonster, Babylon, Founder's Mutation, My Struggle II. The gag reel for this season is my favorite yet, though; they were clearly having the most fun they've ever had playing these roles, and it's a lot of fun to watch.

I don't know how many times I've heard someone "had to" get an SUV because they had a second kid. Even allowing for the fact kids now have to be in car seats until puberty, two kids fit in the backseat of a car just fine. If you want an SUV, dandy; I'm complaining about the "had to" part. Especially because it's usually in the context of complaining about how much it cost them.

That's interesting; my house was built in 1938 and is around 1600 square feet, so that would suggest it was huge for its time (I looked up the data from the same source, but going back further, and from 1900 to 1950, the average square footage stayed about the same), but that's a typical size for homes in the area (all built between the '20s and '40s, in a solidly middle class neighborhood). Now it's considered small, but my condo was 1200 square feet, and the extra 400 square feet feel huge every time I clean the house. My parents' house is 1800 square feet, and that was big for a family with only one child. Unless you run a group home, homes larger than 2000 square feet confuse me.

Same here. And you can see it coming from a mile away, because pretty much all sitcom scripts go this route, but when Bev's scolding turns out not to be because they are decorating their sleeping grandma but because they aren't stringing the lights correctly, I love it.

Although I never did pinpoint when I quit watching, it has been so long since I had any spark of recognition that we are well into all-new-to-me territory, and thus far my opinion of her hasn't changed, either. I like her, Luka, Kerry, and Sam, mostly like Neela, don't like Pratt but don't hate him, and then there are all these other people I barely even know the names of. So, on top of liking them as I always have, at this point I'm also finding Kerry, Luka, and Abby comforting because they've been around so long. I could do without another "oops" pregnancy, though, and it's beyond tiresome how women on TV who don't want kids almost always change their mind. Having the abortion would have made a lot more sense for the character, and it would have been refreshing to see. But, of course not - it's still TV's third rail to an extent, never mind back then. Boy, if that doesn't illustrate the crazy pace created by airing three episodes a day, nothing does. One Friday we learn she's pregnant and by the next Friday we'll be looking at a newborn?