Bastet

I can't choose a favorite, but France is certainly a contender. To this day, when a friend and I go wine tasting, we do the "This one we didn't like, the empty one" routine. (This same friend and I, when younger, were also known to open our mouths and let wine rain down while cackling like Eddy.) I love everything that happens at the "chateau," everything that happens among Saffy, Gran and Bubble back home, and really love when they get to Customs - Patsy's realization she actually enjoyed playing ping pong and her outrage at having paid good money for what turned out to be talcum powder. "Shit! Someone has taken the steering wheel!"

From badfic only Padgett would love to stories you'd pay good money to see made into an episode, discuss XF fanfic here.

Yeah, about 15 years on the first one (and it could have gone longer) and I'm at year 16 on my current one. But even if I was only going to drive it for five years, I'd want to choose its features. I just don't get the concept of a car as a surprise gift. A gift, in that someone else pays for it once the person has picked it out, I'm familiar with. But I've never known anyone to do the walk out into the driveway and find a car with a big red bow on it routine, yet it's a total theme in commercials.

I'm quite perplexed by the number of car commercials - especially luxury cars, and especially at the holidays - in which someone surprises their partner with a car as a gift. I'd feel like an ingrate, but I'd be annoyed if someone bought me a car without my input (and particularly uncomfortable if it was a partner); it's not like a sweater I can exchange for one more to my tastes, and if I'm going to be driving something for 15-20 years, I want to be the one choosing its features.

Maddie is remarkably well trained, as was my late Baxter (they were adopted from a shelter 13 years ago, Baxter at just six months old and Maddie at probably around three years, both having been turned in as strays). People think I'm some sort of cat whisperer, but I'm convinced I just got lucky; although these were the first who were only mine, I had family cats all my life and co-parented a roommate's cats when I was first starting out, and none of them were quite so easy to manage. Certainly being able to let cats outside and know they'll either stay in the backyard or venture no more than one house away and immediately return if I simply call out, "Come back here, please" was NOT the norm in the past. My next two will probably be holy terrors.

Let's make actor threads (for their social media activities, other projects, interviews, etc.).

Favorites: Monty Python's Life of Brian, Mixed Nuts, The Apartment, Better Off Dead, In Bruges, 8 Women and The Thin Man (with the second Thin Man film being a New Year's Eve staple). Basically, I like laughs or suicide. Least favorites: Every single thing Hallmark Channel airs when they suspend regular programming for two months each winter to air holiday dreck on a constant loop. I want my Golden Girls fix, dammit!

I haven't seen it in a long time, but I love that episode. My favorite parts are Miles diving under Murphy, Jim looking at the contraction monitor and saying, "Good lord, she's going to blow" and Murphy noticing that the baby has a little hat and saying, "Mother would have liked that."

Yes, per the promos I've seen on HGTV, "Off the Grid" is the theme for this week's HHI episodes.

The stunt double, or the actor's stand-in? I don't know; I hardly ever watch that episode.

I remember Mary J. Blige being one of them, but that's all that is coming to me right now. I'd put Myrna Loy on the "unhateable" list, too. I mean, I love Katharine Hepburn just as much (they're my two favorite classic movie actors), but I can understand her rubbing someone the wrong way. Actively disliking Myrna Loy is unfathomable to me, though. I can't think of many others. Helen Mirren, maybe.

I think that comes into play, but, good lord, if I can do the math then so can she. As I said above, my first step with any Ina recipe is to cut it in half. And that's if I'm serving it to guests; if she says it serves six, it serves at least ten and usually twelve.

Bwah -- it's the "Gillyramp" hashtag* that makes it art. And that line about her feet reaching the pedals is one of the few snippets of dialogue Gillian remembers from the series, so - nicely played, DD. *I got that right, didn't I? The purpose of Twitter eludes me, but I think I know the lingo.

Sacré bleu! Now I'm craving a piece of mango mousse cake from Porto's.

Season two is when I started watching; The Host was my first episode, and I found it wonderfully bizarre. Since the show aired on Fridays then, and I was young and thus usually out, I didn't see it again until Duane Barry. For obvious reasons, after that I was hooked and started recording it weekly -- an obsession was born. I like the first season - and came to hate the mytharc - but I'm not sure how sustainable a series of MOTW episodes was, so I think Gillian's birth control issues saved the show in a way. Among the MOTW episodes, I love Irresistible, Die Hand Der Verletz, Fresh Bones, Dod Kalm and Our Town. And I have such an appreciation for Humbug, the first humorous episode. I'd seen the Jim Rose Circus as an opening act at a concert, so seeing them pop up on what was now my favorite show was a hoot. I'm glad it came together so well even though it was a departure for the series, because future humorous episodes wound up being among my favorites, too.

My stupid satellite receiver decided to have an issue about ten minutes into it, so that's all I got on my recording. I know I've seen it before, but I barely remember it. I hope TCM airs it again. I'm also recording this afternoon's special about 1939 as Hollywood's greatest year, because there sure were a lot of good films that year.

I make that tequila lime marinade a lot, because it's made up of ingredients I always have on hand. It makes for good seafood tacos, among many other things; quite versatile.

Our thread for rumors of a third movie. I'm blatantly stealing the title from Roxy at TWoP, but there couldn't be a better one. So now, like the movie threads at TWoP, we have someplace to collect years worth of Gillian reiterating she has always said if there is a movie of course she will do it, David dropping the occasional "it's in the works" quote, Chris admitting he hasn't even written a script, and studio execs reminding us you're only as good as the gross of your last project. But, hey, maybe at the end of all that something unexpected happens - like the WGA strike that led Fox to greenlight IWTB - and we finally get that colonization film ... even though we're going on two years since The Big Day came and went. I hate colonization stories - and William, Mr. Key to Everything - so I'd be fine leaving M&S as we last saw them. And I really don't want the franchise to go out on yet another disappointing film. However, I hold out this fantasy of a script co-written by Frank Spotnitz (with Vince Gilligan as a consultant to make sure the relationship is written properly) and directed by Rob Bowman that really knocks our socks off and takes them out on the high note they deserve. As long as there is no reboot in my lifetime, I'll be fine.

It's a British term not often heard in the U.S. but it means comfort food reminiscent of childhood. Which always makes me laugh when applied to this episode, because I'd have hated that menu as a child (I'd have to be pretty hungry to eat it as an adult). I'm pretty sure that's the episode where they actually made a storyline out of the "lighting design" that my cat could come close to pulling off. Between that, the menu and the presence of children, it's an episode I skip.

Although I absolutely loved this show up until the last season or so, I also love this MadTV parody of it (especially the ghost's admonition that Lilly fix her hair):

I can't say I ever noticed Laura doing the bulk of the driving (perhaps because the driving duties in my family were shared far more equally than in yours?), but I suppose the reason for that would be two-fold: a bit of a control thing, but mostly that having lived nearly all her life in Los Angeles she knows her way around better.

The Kirkland brand organic extra virgin olive oil at Costco is really good for the price, too. It has been praised in several articles, such as this one from CBS News:

Although I wasn't watching the show by this point, I kept up with the major developments, and I could never wrap my mind around Scully having any reaction other than this to mysteriously turning up pregnant despite being, you know, infertile. (I also couldn't understand her carrying through with said pregnancy, so it was a good thing I wasn't watching.)

I've only ever read about it as opposed to actually having seen it, but that has pretty much been my reaction (right after "WTF?"). They actually go with the one plausible resolution, that she's dead, and then muck it up with this starlight silliness.

I remember discussing that one at TWoP when it first came out, and I still say there's just no way that's a truly unintended message. Now, I don't mean that someone set out to write that implication into the line, but that there's no way no one involved realized the double entendre once it was written yet they decided to go ahead with it.