Bastet

I'm glad it was addressed on the show, but I'm also glad I didn't watch; people with that attitude drive me crazy.

Thanks for this; I didn't watch the episode, but my friend is going through something similar with her three cats (one bully, one who fights back and one who won't come out from under the chair when the bully is in the room) so I will tell her to look for this episode in the hopes of getting some useful tips. By the way, her bully cat? Is almost 17 years old, and other than the two months between when her other cat died and she adopted the first of two new additions, he lived his entire life in a multi-cat household without issue. He was the youngest of three for most of his life, then one of two for about two years when the oldest died, and then an only child for just a couple of months. But when she brought 12-year-old Sherman home, Pharaoh acted like the idea that he should have to live with another cat was pure ridiculousness. We get that he's old (but healthy) and entitled to be set in his ways, but his ways included being part of a multi-cat family and she did the usual gradual introduction routine rather than just tossing new cats into his domain, got adults rather than kittens, etc. It has been a year, and she still has to separate the apartment into two wings when she's not home.

O is for Jerry Orbach, who played Glenn (the married man with whom Dorothy had an affair) the second time around. P is for Paul Dooley, who played Isaac Q. Newton (and the husband in Empty Nests).

The fact those kids are being taken on an island vacation and apparently plan to spend the whole time glued to their phones is disturbing, but the parents crack me up, especially with, "Can't leave a bag unattended."

Many forums have "All Episodes Talk" threads, but we basically already have that, just split into eras (the high school years, college, and beyond). (As a PS, I'm grateful to whoever had that idea, since I only watched during high school; it's easy for me to follow the discussion in which I can participate.) But an "All Episodes" thread would be good for posts like you described above.

I assume this goes without saying, but just in case ... that was a (hideous) remake of the last Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy collaboration, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which was entirely about the familial ramifications of a young interracial couple's intended marriage.

Received Pronunciation

In another thread, someone reported the success achieved by a redirection training technique, and it got me thinking that Jackson ought to - and perhaps he has in episodes I have not seen - get explicit about what different training methods mean. They're thought of more in terms of dog training, and certainly the specific stimuli vary between dogs and cats, but the concepts are the same: using either positive or negative reinforcement to increase a behavior and using either positive or negative punishment to decrease a behavior. But the terms get muddled, with people thinking of positive and negative in terms of good and bad, respectively, rather than adding or subtracting.

I was over at my parents' house and watching with my mom; we both heard "Berlin." It reminded me of Steel Magnolias when Clairee refers to Anne Boleyn and Ouiser asks, "Who's Amber Lynn?"

Cindy Birdsong. You and your husband can come hang out with me; I use "some white girl" as the answer to who did something whenever it wouldn't be inappropriate to do so. I usually have to explain the reference - <sigh> - but every once in awhile someone recognizes it.

I got the sense Sophia and Sal's personal savings didn't amount to much, so she was living on her benefits, supplemented by Dorothy. Neither of which amount to much, thus renting rooms in someone else's house. It does make one wonder if Shady Pines really was as bad as Sophia made it out to be; I don't think she was there terribly long, and I don't know how long she needed skilled nursing and then assisted living after her stroke before being moved into general population, but those places eat up assets fast. Once the assets are essentially gone, benefits kick in, but not enough to cover the good places.

I got all but one correct; I didn't know how many multiple-part episodes they had done. (Although I got it, I take issue with the wording of the correct answer in the dirty talk clue.)

I love a number of Kenny Rogers songs (and just recently discovered Dolly Parton's latest album contains the most recent of their fabulous duets, You Can't Make Old Friends), and The Gambler is probably the one most likely to get randomly stuck in my head, so I love that commercial. And he does look less freakish than he has in years.

Similarly, thanks to 50 Nifty United States, I love when a clue or category involves knowing the states in alphabetical order.

Ha! Now I'm having flashbacks to the Seinfeld episode where George and Jerry attempt to use the lyrics to suss out Mr. Wilhem's instructions.

"Down there"? "V"? Christ, advertising execs; it's bad enough you market useless products designed to convince women their vaginas are dirty netherworlds in need of special, industrial-level cleaning, but it's made even more annoying by the fact you feel compelled to resort to these ridiculous euphemisms. It's a body part, not Beetlejuice; it won't come to life and torment you if you say its name.

I hear it in a lot of European cities, but in America it is as you say -- whatever the city, I generally hear its core described as downtown.

Charlene was my least favorite of the original characters. I came to like her as the show went on, but she was just too dumb to live in the first couple of seasons. Fundamentally, that's not my type of character, and very few actors can make it work for me (perhaps no one other than Betty White as Rose on Golden Girls). What made it worse was we were supposed to find it endearing that her friends had to keep cleaning up her messes; instead of telling her to get a clue, they'd just tell her it's sweet how trusting she is. Even if it got them arrested.

She's talking to them about an article she's reading, as she so often does, and says, "I can't believe it. Did you see this? Droves of vicious killer bees are headed toward the United States. They're from South America and are expected to arrive in three to four years. That is terrible; can you imagine? I'll bet our bees are scared to death."

"And which side are yours on?" "Both." Bernice's Sanity Hearing makes me laugh from beginning to end.

I don't take the State Farm husband's reaction as homophobic. In fact, his even-keeled responses are among the reasons I don't hate the commercial like I otherwise would. I don't read him as being grossed out by the idea of a man finding him attractive. I don't see any reason he'd think Jake was doing anything other than helping him with insurance, and he's so unaffected by his wife's misinterpretation of the situation that he just delivers a deadpan response to her "She sounds hideous" line.

That annoyed me, too. I don't dislike heels, but I don't get giddy over them, either (okay, the fact I have a pair of red heels that are as comfortable as they are cute does make me rather happy). I have no problem with any individual woman being shoe crazy, but I do have a problem with 95 percent of women on television being that way. To have a character who has explicitly stated a dislike of high-heeled shoes - a dislike that fits in nicely with her overall personality - suddenly start prancing around in any way other than mocking the entire concept was just dumb.

The State Farm woman cracks me up in spite of herself when she says, "She sounds hideous." All three characters have such great lines in that commercial; the husband with "Well, she's a guy, so ..." and Jake with "Uh, khakis." In the context of women being so often portrayed as jealous, nagging wives in commercials, it is certainly problematic, but taken on its own I can stand it.

Has anyone made Ina's buttermilk ranch dressing recipe? I really only use ranch dressing as a dip for onion rings, which I don't make very often because they're a pain, so I keep in the pantry a couple of those Hidden Valley packets that you combine with mayo and milk. But I have Ina on in the background while I paint my new patio doors and she's making ranch dressing, so I'm reminded that I really ought to make the real thing. She used mustard, which I loathe -- if it's an important component, I'll use half of what she called for and see how it comes out. Otherwise, I'm skipping it.

I've already expressed the main themes I hate about Titanic, but now that it has come up again let me offer up a petty reason behind my dislike: Rose trying to wake Jack up when she hears the life boats coming back. Fool, he's dead. I get that you are traumatized and half frozen, but you know he's dead. So wasting a bunch of time saying his name over and over only leads to you wasting a bunch more time repeating "Come back" until I want to harm either my eardrums or your vocal cords. By the time she gets her shit together and grabs the dead guy's whistle, I'm kind of hoping for her to choke on it.