Bastet

It's great having a nearby neighbor with backyard chickens. I don't know if living next door would create smells and sounds I'd find a nuisance - although I'd rather listen to chickens than crying babies or shrieking children any day - but being a few houses away means I have steady access to fresh eggs, and the peace of mind that the chickens bearing them are fed, housed, and all-around treated as they should be.

Or that he's not the one who physically assaulted a co-worker. Is there a report out there that this was mutual combat? The articles posted here have all said Gibson kicked Williams, not the other way around. If that's accurate, it's clear to me why Gibson was fired and Williams wasn't.

I'd lose the right to call myself a grown-ass woman if my response to an argument with a co-worker was to kick her/him. I'd also lose my job. In fact, I'd have lost my job the first time around, when I shoved someone. He's lucky they kept him around after that. I've never seen him in anything other than Dharma & Greg, so I sort of think of him as that character; that makes this jarring.

Fucking NBC and their gazillion hours of swimming every night; by the time they got back to gymnastics, I fell asleep after the bars. So the last thing I knew, Aly was in fourth. I was very happy to wake up and read that she'd bounced back with beam and floor and took silver, but I wish I'd seen her and Simone's routines. They're so fun to watch. I felt for Aly when her coach was trying to talk to her about what went wrong in her bar routine and she was just trying to focus on beam. Like, really dude - I think the analyzing can wait until tomorrow.

I've probably shared before that I watched Homeward Bound for the first time on an airplane, and embarrassed the hell out of myself by just gushing tears. But I get chills just picturing that scene when Shadow comes home.

My parents' bathroom has two vanities, and in a really cool set up -- they're across from each other, rather than next to each other, so there truly is room for two people to be in there at the same time without getting in each others' way, plus there's plenty of storage. But they laugh when they see all the HHs on about needing two sinks, because they can probably count on one hand the number of times in 40-some years in that house they've been in there at the same time. As with so many things on this show, it's not that any given HH wants a particular feature, it's that so many of them follow the same script. The percentage of HHs who purport to need to use the bathroom at the same time as their partner just doesn't reflect reality.

Same here. I only watch gymnastics every four years, so all I know about which moves are more technically difficult than others is what the announcers - and top score available - tell me. So I understand the numbers behind why Simone's floor routine was scored higher than Alys, but Aly's was the one I most enjoyed watching. I think I said, "Holy shit!" to my cat when it was done. Simone's was great, too, of course. But Aly's really got my attention, and I normally don't care for floor all that much, because of all the floofy stuff in between tumbling passes. Simone is just incredible, and I can't wait to see her again tonight. Same with Aly, who really seems on fire this year. That move Simone does on the beam, where she spins around while crouched down on one foot, with the other leg out, is mind blowing.

The affair directly contradicts what we'd seen of Christine previously, but the award maneuver was textbook Chris. The ongoing tension between her and Mary Beth over what Chris was willing to do to get ahead was one of my favorite threads of the series. On an unrelated note, one little thing I love in the first movie is that they don't ignore the reality of Mary Beth getting re-certified. She hasn't fired a gun in years; she can't just pop off six rounds into the little paper target and be handed a service weapon, she has to practice.

I think Sharon is spot on in her analysis of their relationship, and that tension in the dynamic - that Christine would die for Mary Beth to save her life, but she'd jeopardize her in other ways - is one of the things that made their partnership so interesting to me. Their contrasting motivations for doing the job - Mary Beth to have a steady gig with good benefits, Christine to pursue a passion, continue a family tradition, break glass ceilings, and advance her career - set the stage for it, and then their differences in what they could justify to themselves, made it inevitable.

ESPN's John Saunders has died. He was one of the few people still worth watching on that network for me.

I like that one, too, with Roseanne having to confront the subconscious prejudice that affected her reaction to that man. It was a nice reminder how wide-reaching the effects of racism are, that we're all vulnerable to internalizing the bullshit with which we're bombarded and thus need to take a step back from time to time and do as Roseanne did here, asking ourselves the hard questions. I think it's telling how many viewers got defensive, insisting she'd have reacted exactly the same way to a white man.

That paint color discussion was the only thing I saw other than the reveal, and I was confused. She was on about painting the door one color on the outside and another color on the inside as if that were bizarre, but every door I have - interior or exterior - is a different color on each side. Unless you paint all the trim in your house the same color (which I don't, as every room is a different color and thus, while most rooms have some shade of white as the trim color, they have different shades of white in order to best coordinate with the wall colors), that's just how painting works. And certainly with an exterior door, since not many people have the same trim color outside as they do in their foyer. That was such a strange thing to get hung up on.

The "Keep Calm, You're Internet's On" commercials from AT&T just get worse. First there was the family who all but lapsed into catatonic schizophrenia because their internet went out for nine minutes (and not because a single one of them was doing anything important or timely online when the outage occurred, mind you). Now there's the mom who asks grandpa to tell the kids stories, then starts swiping and pushing buttons in the air as she rejects each story after about five seconds and demands he move on to another story, as if he's a goddamned YouTube video or something. These people are pathetic. Presenting them as the company's customer base is baffling to me.

At my friend's former apartment, the people above her made so damn much noise that one time when I was cat sitting, trying to watch a football game with the kitties (whenever she's gone more than a couple of days, I make sure at least one visit is more than the usual hour of attention) and it was particularly annoying, I went up and asked, "Are you running a bowling alley up here or something? What is that racket?" I don't remember what obnoxious activity he was engaged in that kind of banged on the floor, but the answer was, "Oh, our son likes to [whatever it was]." Hooray for him. There are things I like to do that I had to refrain from doing when I shared walls, because that's how common courtesy works. You live on the second floor. Be a parent, and a decent human being, and tell him to knock it off! A few weeks after my friend came home, she emailed me to say, "I know how scary you can be, but I was still skeptical it would work, but I haven't heard the little elephant since I got home."

Virtually everything Brenda and Capt. Raydor say to or about each other is a favorite quote for me, and this is particularly true of Living Proof, the two-part Christmas episode about a Serbian war criminal posing as one of his victims. When Brenda introduces her to Clay and Willie Rae as “my Captain Raydor … I mean, my friend Captain Sharon … I mean, my friend Sharon Raydor,” and this ensues: Clay: Friend? We have been waiting to meet one of Brenda’s friends since she graduated high school. Sharon: Well, here I am. And later when Sharon is moping about the airport being closed, and Willie Rae invites her to join them for dinner, because “your friend Brenda wouldn’t have it any other way.” Her reaction – and Pope’s – is so much fun. I love all the pouting about changing holiday plans, and trying to pawn the case off on each other. Like when Brenda gets all excited that Pope’s elevator stunt means Sharon has to interview the boy Brenda isn’t allowed to interview and wants Sharon to ask Brenda’s questions for her, and Sharon says she will, but then she wants a police escort to LAX. And later when roles are reversed, and Sharon gets a reluctant Brenda to agree to add Sharon’s questions to Provenza’s interview with the boy by reminding her that if she can get the lawsuit dropped and make her flight, “then I’ll be gone for weeks.” This is entirely due to Mary McDonnell’s delivery rather than the actual dialogue, because my favorite part of the entire thing is when Brenda protests that the tape is still in Albanian and Sharon responds with complete exasperation, “Of course it’s still in Albanian, it’s always been in Albanian. … Well, where on earth would I get get an Albanian translator on Christmas morning?” It’s not a quote, but Sharon’s eye roll behind Pope’s back when he says, “Chief Delk left this morning on vacation, you’re speaking with Acting Chief Pope” is a thing of beauty. There are a lot of great quotes with other characters in those episodes, too; they did a great job of weaving together a seriously depressing crime and lighthearted holiday hijinks. When Fritz also tells Brenda he's fresh out of Albanian translators, and she mutters, "Oh, I ask you for one thing!" And basically everything Fritz says about Clay and Willie Ray's visit and their plan to move to L.A.

I always thought Kevin was talking about personal prejudice vs. the institutional system that is racism. (That argument went on for a very long time and we saw only portions of it, so I don't know, but from the little context we got and from what we had seen of Kevin, that was my sense.) I remember reading that he admitted to and apologized for having physically abused at least one woman and engaged in other acts of misogyny in the past. The memory is mostly lost to me know, but I vaguely recall it as honest piece of reflection that I was glad to come across - because there had been plenty to admire in his work and activism, but he was also clearly a raging asshole to and about women, so it was nice to see that he had recognized and was working to rectify that.

In my experience, people are quite particular about how they like their guacamole. I certainly am. I'm fine with mashed rather than chunky, but if you make it creamy (especially if you do so by adding mayo or sour cream), I'm not eating it. I don't prefer tomatoes in it, but I can hang so long as the tomatoes are in season. I like chunky avocado with minced garlic, jalapeño or serrano peppers, and cilantro. A little spritz of lime juice. No salt; I get that from the tortilla chips.

No, he's the father of a dead girl (I can't remember if it was an OD, suicide, or murder) in Christine's building; the wife goes back wherever they live, he stays in town to clean out the daughter's apartment, and Chris has an affair with him. Even though she's always been firm that she does not get involved with married men. I'm all about the world being shades of grey rather than black and white, but we all do draw bright line rules on certain things, and Christine drew one on sleeping with married men. (As should everyone, IMO, unless the married person is in an open relationship, of course, but that wasn't the case here.) I didn't find it interesting to see her chuck that aside, I found it disappointing. And I just didn't like his character, period, so that didn't help. I'd forgotten Moriarty had appeared before.

Yes, they split up. I think it's in the first movie that she catches him cheating, and then in a later one that they finalize the divorce, but I can't remember the timeline for sure. Sharon and Barney fought tooth and nail over Christine being married (obviously, he won) and she still vehemently insists he should have never written her that way. I agree. (I'm not sure if he's ever outright conceded it was a characterization mistake or just hinted that yeah, maybe she was right.) Yes, they recast Michael. I don't think we see the "kids" again after the first movie, but again I'm not sure. I hate the last one for Christine's story with Michael Moriarty's character, but like it otherwise, and wish we'd gotten TV movies right after the series went off the air, as we were supposed to, rather than having to wait so long for them. But head office changes at the network put the kibosh on that.

That's like when I was in OK for a funeral, and someone in the family raised a question about the "estate" (which probably consisted of about thirty bucks in a checking account and a car worth a few hundred dollars). I said that probate code is state law, so I'd have to check for sure, but on this particular point most states say X. She said, "Oh, I'll ask [male cousin standing nearby]." Who doesn't possess so much as a GED, let alone a law degree, and who has no personal experience in this area, but does have a penis, so, clearly, he would know.

Tonight's Burbank HH, upon being shown the designer's proposed quartz for the countertop: I really wanted white. Me: That is white! I missed the introduction, so for the entire tour of the first house and several minutes of the second, I thought Leonardo was a dog, not a child. It was nice to see someone come up with a slapdash fix for an outdated bathroom to make a minor cosmetic improvement until they could afford to do it properly, rather than going further into debt to keep up with the Joneses, so I'll give them that. "We need to be closer to family" as the reason for moving from Encino to Burbank is either bullshit for "we want a bigger place but can't afford one here" or code for "we want free daycare from our parents and thus need to be just minutes away to avoid inconvenience." Based on their budget, methinks the former. Which, fine. But say it. They spent the money to replace those windows with French doors, then shoved a couch in front of them. Is anybody really going to scoot behind the couch to access those doors rather than just walking through the easily-accessed door that already existed a few feet away? At least they put new windows in the kitchen rather than doing like some other HHR couple and leaving the original windows despite the fact the new counter top was too high for them. No barn door, anyway.

Since we've barely started and I'm ready to watch the Olympics on mute, I must add to my list a good 90% of those whom NBC employs to comment on the games. Starting, as I always do, with Al Trautwig, but he has plenty of company.

Sure, if the ability to zoom is what's new, that "actually" could be fine in a speaking style; with just a sentence to go on, I was thinking it was the ability to see what constituted the dust, but whatever is a development could earn an "actually" for emphasis without sounding weird. But all four could go, and most of them should go, which is the recurring problem with the over-abundance of "actually" in modern parlance -- people don't need to repeatedly emphasize that an action is surprising, make clear something is true, etc. and just come up short on synonyms, they litter their sentences with "actually" when there's no need for it or any other word with a similar meaning.

It's more often not that people can't think of a synonym, but that - like in the example above - "actually" is inserted where there's no need for it. In the BBC example, all four uses of "actually" could be eliminated. Three of them should be eliminated; "what actually is in the dust" could be left in and sound acceptable:

"Toe pick."