Bastet

For years after that episode aired, my mom and I would just look at each other and burst into laughter any time we entered a restaurant with a salad bar.

I remember a coworker using Priceline obsessively back around 2001, and she got some great deals and was always happy with the airline/hotel/whatever she wound up with. I'm way too picky a traveler to be surprised like that, though.

I mentioned the litter box in one of my rants about the episode, but forgot to ask, and maybe since it's fresh in your mind you'll remember: Did Jackson say anything about it? I know there were bigger fish to fry, but that was appalling, especially since he was shut in the room with that stinky thing.

Unless they've changed it, it's "Who's behind those Foster Grants?" -- their tag line since the '60s. I loved when Raquel Welch - one of the many celebrities featured in those ads - reappeared semi-recently, this time wearing Foster Grant reading glasses.

I feel the same way about each of them. Henry and Matt I liked initially, but Matt turned into a total ass. Henry I didn't come to hate as a character, but I sure hated his storyline and thus wanted him gone. Walter and Gio I never could stand, especially Gio.

I thought the first season was spectacular, the second a jumbled mess, and then the show was just sort of there from season three on -- an enjoyable enough way to spend an hour, but not appointment television. Betty's love life was always the weak point for me - which is usually the case; in life and on television, I find that the least-interesting aspect of people's lives, so when it's a focus I get bored - but I liked watching her find her way professionally. And I loved the wacky cast of characters at Meade, especially Judith Light's character (Claire?). Betty's family, other than Justin, drove me nuts much of the time, but in a realistic way that was necessary for the show. I could not stand Gio, so the episodes with him are definitely not my favorites. I was prepared to hate the ending for the suggestion of Daniel and Betty possibly dating in the future, but it wound up being ambiguous enough to pacify me.

I had this on in the background while painting my dining room, so I didn't pay much attention to it. I did, however, absorb enough to yell, "Shut up, Angela!" over my shoulder. She needs to back the hell off. Why would Jane want to be Daphne? Danger-prone Daphne never figures anything out; all she does is fall through trap doors and wait for the gang to rescue her. Velma can be annoying, sure, but at least she can put clues together. First mooning over high heels, and now wanting to be "the pretty one"?

Monkeybread, you can put it in the episode discussion thread.

D is for Deadbeat, as in Michael (or not, depending on which episode you watch).

For me, it's Jean Smart's delivery on that one.

Wal-Mart and sexism? I'm going to go with "doesn't care." Among its workers, women are disproportionately placed in lower-paying jobs and, regardless of position, earn less money than men with the same title. The majority of its workers are women, but the majority of its managers and higher-ups are men. And then there's that weirdness when it deemed a shirt with a cartoon character proclaiming "Someday, a woman will be president" offensive and refused to stock it. The list truly goes on and on. The way many of you are with ice cream is how I am with potato chips. I like sweets, but my real kryptonite is salty/crunchy. So I can easily eat their silly "serving size" - or less - of ice cream and put it back in the freezer. But a bag of chips? I cannot even buy, because I'll have eaten the serving size before backing out of the market's parking space, and the entire bag will be gone by bedtime.

They've cycled through a lot of celebrities - and "celebrities" - in their ads already, so his series is probably done, although I don't know for sure.

How they write her handling of the situation is annoying (advertising execs really think all woman are irrational, jealous nags, don't they?), but her initial "Who are you talking to?" suspicion isn't as far-fetched as her later persistence; he's not just speaking in hushed tones, he's saying, "Yeah, I'm married; does it matter?" and "You'd do that for me?" at 3:00 in the morning. Speaking of annoying State Farm commercials, I loathe the one with Jimmy. Of all the made-up jingles characters use to try and summon their insurance company, "I have blah blah insurance, so person come help" is my favorite. But Jimmy is awful. He rear ends someone and his mother teleports herself to the middle of nowhere to sit on hold while he stands around griping and discouraging his son's love for his grandmother. "You're not helping." Really? Because she's filing a claim while you do nothing, jackass.

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.)