Bastet

During a primary debate, Perry said he wanted to eliminate three departments, but could only remember two (Education and Commerce); he later said the one he forgot was Energy. I wish Molly Ivins was still alive on general principle, but especially to read what she'd have to say about Gov. Goodhair (as she called him).

Ha; I wouldn't last long as a real estate agent, either, given how often I'd wind up screaming "Buy a can of paint, then, you moron!" at my clients.

Well, it's Temecula. It's an affluent community for the area, and it's nowhere near as "in the middle of nowhere" as it used to be, but there's still the "Oh, yeah - that wine place near the big casino" sense in both L.A. and San Diego.

Oh, I was hoping she was crying because she realized her boyfriend was obnoxious and wished she had someone else with whom to attend prom.

With that cut-off, I have to eliminate the titular Carrie and Mrs. Voorhees from Friday the 13th. In no particular order (and assuming we're doing most interesting, encompassing both those we love to hate and those we enjoy because we feel sorry for them despite their actions): - Baby Jane Hudson, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? - Norma Desmond, Sunset Blvd. - Norman Bates, Psycho - Phyllis Dietrichson, Double Indemnity - Eve Harrington, All About Eve

I don't watch Bad Blood, or any of the seasons referenced on that list other than Seattle, but I wholeheartedly agree with that one: Fuck leaving it to the roommates, Stephen's ass should have been gone.

They certainly wouldn't be the first couple to opt for a "Band-Aid" baby, as if having a kid fixes a struggling relationship, rather than adding more stress -- and as if it's a good to bring a kid/another kid into a relationship that shows signs it may very well implode in the immediate future. (I obviously have no idea if that's what they did, but based on his age and the time of year they took up separate residences, that means the time between that kid's conception and their split makes it entirely possible they already knew the marriage was having some serious issues when they decided to have another kid.) As I've said several times, I can only watch this show sporadically, because the fact they're renovating for immediate resale means the design choices are all similar - and pretty boring, to my taste. If they can, indeed, continue to work together, I'd probably continue to tune in occasionally, because I just watch for the housing, not them -- but the fact Tarek has an arsenal, in a home with kids, and opts to head out in public with one of those guns, doesn't exactly endear him to me, so I'd just as soon watch someone else renovate. (Not those Fixer Upper people, though; I know nothing about them, but they give off a vibe I find creepy, so much so that I cannot watch the show.)

My mom's cousin sometimes adds "kins" to my name; I'd forgotten about that. I sometimes called Maddie "Maddiekins" because of that. And, for reasons unknown even to me, I sometimes call Riley "Riley Roo." It would make sense if she in any way resembled a kangaroo, I suppose, but since she doesn't -- I don't know. One of my best friends is sometimes referred to as "Booger" by my parents - and she'll refer to herself that way when talking to them. One time, when we were probably about 15, she was walking down our hallway and overhead my parents in the office; my dad was describing someone to my mom as being "like a booger you can't get off the end of your finger." She - who was over at our house all the time - asked, "Are you talking about me?" He wasn't, but it stuck; she's still Booger. My grandpa called people by their names when speaking to them, but often referred to them by nicknames otherwise. So there were people who I had no idea what their real names were, because I only heard about them from him, and he always used his nickname for them. I remember one guy was "John Dixon" because he looked like Larry Bryggman (who played John Dixon on As The World Turns).

I miss Sen. Paul Wellstone now more than ever.

Yes, I rinse and dry after brining.

I love every time Pope reacts to one of the Flynn/Provenza mishaps. Pope: So we do have fingerprints? Brenda: We're having to wait on that. Pope: Why are we waiting? I'm the Chief of Police. I'll call the Prints section, and we'll put a rush on it. Sharon: The glove is not with Prints section. Pope: Of course not. Where is it? Brenda: Lieutenant Provenza's ex-wife Liz was with him at the store, and her dog, Frank. Frank got to the glove first and ... consumed it. Pope: So, if I understand you correctly - and I fear that I do - Lieutenant Provenza's ex-wife's dog ate the evidence. Brenda: And we're ... we're having to wait for it to reappear.

I always brine the turkey breast for Thanksgiving, and always brine my pork chops because I prefer the super thin-cut ones, and those are hard to keep moist. I've never bothered to brine a whole chicken before roasting it (I've brined chicken breasts when just using those, but not often), but it couldn't help but be anything other than good, so go for it. I use a traditional wet brine, so I have no tips on dry brining, but look forward to hearing how it goes.

I'm with you on that one, lordonia. I hate when I click on what I think is a written article, only to find out the story is told in pictures. I don't want to watch a video, I don't want to click through a slideshow, I simply want to read the information.

Right? Last season, the defense kept me in a state of perpetual disgust, and this season they're completely reliable -- while the offense has me tearing my hair out. So excited by this win; whatever else happens, we beat the Cowboys twice.

My dad -- when he comes back from his walk, he makes coffee, grabs the paper, and he and the cat head for the backyard to enjoy the morning sun. But that's because he's retired; he certainly wasn't leisurely sipping coffee on the patio when he was working. I, too, laugh about all the "Oh, I can see myself sitting here drinking my coffee" comments. Maybe they mean on the weekends, but it sounds silly to me. Especially when it's a little balcony off the master bedroom in a two story house. You're going to go downstairs to make coffee, then go back up to drink it?

My grandpa was not a football fan, but if a game was being played where it was snowing or pissing with rain, he was in. In his final couple of years, when he could still live alone but needed a daily visit for various things, my mom and I would take turns; I'd take Sundays during football season and hope I could find a foul weather game to entertain him with. He's been gone nearly 15 years now, but when we see a particularly ugly field, my parents and I will always say, "Grandpa would have loved this game." I'm watching Washington/Philadelphia, but it's all just killing time until the Giants face the Cowboys tonight. I'm going to my parents' house for dinner, and we'll be eating on TV trays rather than at the dining room table, because I'm not missing a down of that game. I'm nervous - if the offense isn't profoundly different than it has been the past couple of games, I'm going to need a lot of wine.

Oh, yeah, that will end well [/sarcasm] - drunk football fans and guns (and I say this as a drunk football fan).

Craftsman and Spanish are my favorite of the housing styles common in the older neighborhoods I was looking in, and I wound up with neither. My house better met my needs and wants than the Craftsman and Spanish homes available at the time, and I liked the look of the exterior just as well, so the fact it wasn't one of my preferred styles was a non-issue. I'm not a huge fan of ranch homes, but I don't hate them (I grew up in one) and wouldn't have dismissed one on that basis if I liked everything else (but they generally came into vogue post-war, and the neighborhoods in which I was looking developed pre-war, so it wasn't really an issue).

Jim Hightower has been talking about "kleptocracy" and "kleptocrats" for at least a decade. Thieves in High Places is a good read.

My detached garage is set back from the house, so I walk across a short stretch of driveway and enter through the back door, into the service porch (that then goes into the kitchen). My late cat Maddie, so incredibly easy-going in every other regard, would pitch a fit if I came home smelling like dog (other cats were fine, but no dogs!), so whenever I came home from my best friend's house - where one of her dogs spent my entire visit basically attached to me - I stripped down in the service porch rather than going to my bedroom.

I know! I get that the days when we were in car seats as babies and then progressed to being held on someone's lap as toddlers were not safe, but I do think the requirements (until X age or Y size) in some states are insane for how long kids are kept in car seats. So when kids who look like puberty is on the horizon are in a car seat, it sticks out to me, and that one kid looks way too old to be in one.

I worked in a department with two Karens, so one was Karen and one was KB, for her initials. A few years later, we hired a third Karen into the department, and she was also a KB. She was incredibly short, so she promptly became Little KB. Names in common was a recurring theme with that group; among the original five members, four had the same middle name (with a 50/50 split in how it was spelled). The two main reasons my parents chose my name - beyond the obvious fact they liked it - were that no one else in either family had it, and it did not have an obvious nickname or shortened version. One friend managed to make a nickname out of it anyway, but she's the only one (and it sounds fine, so I don't mind).

Holy shit -- seeing a former skinhead, of all people, talk about how having to eat what he'd fed caused him to wake the hell up, and how all the good he'll do in the world won't erase the hate he carried out, was exactly what I needed right now. The Detroit segment helped illustrate just how overwhelming the problem is. I think the scope doesn't always get clearly illustrated on the show (possibly because the audience would want to go jump off something if it was repeatedly driven home), so I like anything that remotely hints at how.fucking.many homeless pets there are in this country alone, in far greater numbers than there are homes for them (best estimates [as there is no central database] indicate anywhere from 4 to 7 million animals are euthanized in U.S. shelters each year simply for lack of space/adopters), and how particularly dire it is for pits. The kissing booth! I actually hate big doggy kisses (I know, sorry, but their tongues are big and slobbery as compared to cats, whose kisses I love), but that's an adorable idea and I'd totally get licked under those circumstances. It's always nice to see someone choose to adopt rather than buy from a breeder ("don't shop, adopt"), and P.J. is adorable! The adopter touched my heart crying about losing her two dogs within two months (to the day!) of each other, the second one being completely unexpected as a result of a post-op infection that couldn't be controlled. I've probably mentioned this before, but there as a chunk of less than a year - and I think right about six months - when my mom's best friend lost every single one of her pets (several cats and a dog). She's gone on to love and be loved by more pets, but she never truly got over that (and how could you?). I must publicly confess I used to - long ago - judge people who got a new pet shortly after losing one; because I needed a fair bit of time in between, I myopically regarded doing it quickly as "replacing" the dead pet. Thankfully, I got over my damn self, and seeing people like P.J.'s adopter always reminds me of how fucking stupid I was. Given the circumstances to which we've seen them return found dogs - Roscoe to the backwoods guy living in a shack, Beast to the homeless woman squatting in a hotel, and less extreme examples - it seems they take a very realistic approach to determining whether a lost dog would be better off with her/his owner or with them, and generally conclude the former; their goal is to reunite unless it's unequivocally not in the dog's best interest. They ascertained how Diamond got out, and since it was the result of an accident rather than assholery, they happily returned her (and worked with the owner to identify and make some improvements that could be made to avoid a similar accident in future). Nothing but applause from me.

In fact, inspectors explicitly said Hussein did not have WMD. The many lies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. almost seem quaint now.

Here's the video Kourtney Gleason (yep, the wooden moppet from Have I Got a Steele For You, all grown up) put together for Michael's memorial service. There are several pictures with Stephanie (from the time of the show, and from later on). (I checked Pierce's Facebook and Twitter pages, and was a little surprised he never posted anything about Gleason's death. He posted when Leonard Cohen died, but not about the guy who gave him his start in America? Weird.)