millennium

I never bought Rick and Michonne as a couple. Seemed totally contrived. The new show is giving Danai a little more room to exercise her acting skills and show her personality. That's something I guess. Rick is a grizzled bore. Now that she and Rick are both part of whatever the dystopian city is called, I suspect the show will rapidly start looking like the last couple seasons of TWD. Nat was good. I liked him as Anthony in Sex and the City/And Just Like That, too.

I know Scarborough gets a lot of grief, but I found him really funny this morning, especially the faux self-deprecation: "If you polled the viewers of this show and asked them, Does Joe Scarborough talk too much? , 85% of them would say YES! And if you asked them, Would Morning Joe be better without Joe Scarborough?, the same 85% would say YES!" Then he played the Trump gaffe supercut three times in a row!

My only question is how Nicole Kidman was talked into starring in a first-year film school project. I didn't know whether Margaret-Hilary-Mercy were speed dating, doing testimonials for Balance Of Nature, or sharing the same dream. This is probably the only show where a Che Diaz comedy concert would have been a welcome change of pace.

Is there a rule requiring players to refrain from wiping the mud and sand from their faces after a challenge? To walk around with it caked on your cheeks, forehead and eyelids for hours after? I would be livid if I got that sand in my eyes because production dictated that it can't be washed off. I have a technical question. I subscribe to Paramount Plus through Amazon Prime. When I went to watch this episode two nights after it aired, Paramount Plus had it locked with Buy only access. This has happened with The Amazing Race in the past, too. As a PP subscriber, shouldn't I have immediate access to shows like Survivor and TAR without paying extra? Hoping Bhanu and Tevin are voted off next because I think in their own ways they're both a couple of phonies. Very happy that Monica Jalinsky (because he blew it) is gone.

Wondering myself, I googled it. Apparently there was a negative fan reaction to the previous Cortana. I was surprised that there were actually enough people watching this show to make a difference. When they said Madrigal had been glassed -- either in this episode or the last, I forget -- I thought, no more Kwan, well that's good. Prematurely.

I just want to add, I think the single worst element of The Challenge (and spin-offs) ... worse than even the lackluster casting or Jay's hairline ... is the forced party. It's so cringe that I can't stand watching it anymore. "Hey, here we are, making asses of ourselves pretending to have a good time. Hey, cameraman, can you get in any tighter on Moriah's ass or Nurys' boobs while they pretend-dance?" But the worst part is that it's a sore reminder of how much spontaneity the show has lost. Club night and the drunken bus ride home made for some very unexpected and memorable moments over the years. This charade they've replaced it with is insulting to viewers.

This episode was The Ice Storm made in China. The overbearing music was unbearable. Just came off another show (True Detective) where the showrunner mistook the series for her personal Spotify. Is this going to be a thing going forward? That choir scene in the beginning was OTT. I was ready to abandon the show on the spot and never regret it. So fucking pretentious. I'll watch the final episode, but this show is pretty awful. The only reason I started watching it in the first place was because I read a glowing review. That'll learn me.

This show is rapidly morphing into Survivor, from the inclusion of Jay and Michele to the Survivor-like eliminations, to the inevitable groaning realization that someone you can't stand is probably going to win. Where did the physical eliminations go? Where's the pole wrestle? The hall brawl? The immersions in freezing cold water? wtf? I get they can't do any of that now because we have an elimination format that pits males vs. females, but what about earlier in the season? Those complaints aside, as much as everyone seems to hate this episode, it did seem to me the best episode thus far, and the closest in spirit to previous seasons. We had a self-important prick in charge of deliberations, shameless betrayals of friends, a hero (Olivia) go to zero in the space of a moment, and an inspiring yet heartbreaking/heartwarming final elimination. That said, this remains the worst, most vapid and empty-feeling season of The Challenge I have ever sat through. And there's no hope anything can redeem it. When we were looking at the DVR list to catch up on episodes tonight, my Challenge ride-or-die suggested we watch instead the interviews with CT, Cara and Darrell, since they were bound to be more interesting than any of this season's episodes. Jay will probably win, but it won't be a true win in spirit because he hasn't had to withstand the machinations of anyone who really knows how to play this game. He's an amateurish asshole among sheep, basically. We have seen in previous seasons what happens when Jay faces real competition: he gets chewed up and spit out.

This is the start of the cop-out. And the way it was presented was like, "oh, by the way, it was an avalanche killed them, so just forget all that weird supernatural shit we've been spoon-feeding you for four episodes now. Why did the guy say 'she's awake?" Truth is, we don't know. Thanks for watching, suckers."

What irks me is the idea that you'll make money. Aren't most of the clothes in anyone's closet clothes they have bought themselves? Isn't it more accurate to say that selling those clothes on Poshmark is a way to recoup money you already spent, rather than actual income? I just saw another Botox commercial ("I'm still millennium.") Being of a certain age, I find myself laughing at these 30-year-old idiots injecting themselves with bio-toxins that have the potential to impair their neurological systems for the sake of smoothing "fine lines" that are nothing, NOTHING, compared to the skin inevitably waiting for them five or ten years down the road.

Gus' abduction is totally on Nicole. Probably her hysteria is a product of guilt, knowing that she's to blame, that she finds him annoying, and maybe, in the dark chambers of her heart, is just a little relieved he's gone as she marinates in her plastic tub. "Somehow, child abduction feels good in a place like this."

The soundtrack is annoying AF. And it almost never lets up. A little silence would go a long way towards establishing they're in the frozen wastes on the edge of the earth. No way can they wrap this up in a satisfactory way in two episodes. My guess is the supernatural stuff will prove a red herring, much like Season 1. If anyone needs me I'll be at The Brick.

Jardiance again, but this is funny (apologies if this has already been posted): The ‘Once Daily Jardiance’ Commercials Are Making Me Lose My Mind I wondered the same thing when I watched The Mothman Prophecies.

I'm not sure "mad" covers it. Or perhaps it does, in the other meaning of the word. That's how I feel. I want to scream. We're living the movie "Don't Look Up" in real life, with the same delusional public reaction, and the same self-serving media reaction. But instead of an asteroid it's an election. Precisely.

"Please sir, I want some more ..."

I didn't watch this episode -- it was all pixelated on my DVR and On Demand. At first I was disappointed, then I remembered it's Season 39 and I'm not missing a damn thing anyway. So I just watched the Cara-Michele elimination. I watched in on youtube, with Cara and Darrell commenting during the playback. I have to say, Cara looks better than ever. And her old self-deprecating sense of humor seems to have returned too. Even it was just for a few moments, it was the Cara Maria I love to watch.

Jay is 34 years old. I know this only because I looked it up during the episode to answer my own question, "How many more years will we have to endure this annoying piece of shit before he ages out?" I saw a sci-fi movie once -- I think it was John Carpenter's The Thing -- where the heroes kill a shape-shifting alien who can pretend to be anyone. As the dying alien writhes in agony, its face keeps changing in a montage of all the people it has impersonated. If Jay were to find himself in a similar plight, I imagine his face would morph from Devin to Bananas to Wes to Emy and all the other players he's desperately trying to be (and failing miserably) every episode (I threw in Emy because she was annoying AF, too). The only reward I took from this episode was seeing Jay's upper face go hypertension beet red in the moments before and after it became clear that CT was giving him a pass. Never have I seen anyone go that red on this show -- not even Abram when he worked himself up into a nosebleed. I guarantee you that when Jay literally broke down in over-the-top tears during Asaf's departure, that wasn't about Asaf. It was the flood of relief from realizing that only in his nightmares would he have to face CT again. The elimination didn't seem like much of a challenge, but at least CT won. Two weeks in a row of watching old friends fail would have been too much.

Inside Biden's obsession with Morning Joe In other news, I hate Steve Kornacki. Doesn't matter what the topic of a poll is, he's always excited about the outcome. There could be a poll like, "78% of Independent Voters favor female circumcision" and Kornacki would be into it. And I just want to yell at him "Stand up straight, damn you!"

I was in the toilet paper section of the supermarket yesterday and saw something that made me look twice, even though I didn't want to: Dude Wipes. I just can't.

I thought that was Skunky.

Did I miss something? Shannon Klingman of Lume doing Mando? huh?

I hate to drag Save The Children ads, but ... there's one spot right now played again and again on MSNBC showing a kid ostensibly from Africa lamenting the severity of the droughts there now. The other kid they use is a little white girl in a pink winter coat who appears to be from a war-torn country, accompanied by footage that looks like it came from Syria. The thing is, both these little kids, the one from Africa and the one from probably-Syria, have over-the-top British accents (the little girl in the pink jacket sounds like she's from a road production of Oliver Twist). The first time I heard her voice-over with the images of buildings on fire, I was like, "What? Was Liverpool bombed?" Upon a closer look, you can see that her voice, and that of the other kids in the commercial, have all been dubbed, as the movements of their mouths don't match the words. I don't know what they were thinking making this child sound like an inmate of Miss Minchin's seminary for young girls. Or dubbing the spot so amateurishly that it looks like a Godzilla movie. But it's so distracting that I would think it weakens the message of the commercial.

Like I need one more reason to dislike her.

I couldn't find a definitive answer within 5 minutes and refused to devote any more of my life to the question. The kid in one of the commercials is addressed as Santiago and her actual son's name is Santiago.

Watched Joe and Mika give Ron DeSantis a softball interview on Morning Joe Weekend. Nothing about his anti-LGBT stance, his hostility towards corporations who treat employees like human beings, his antics with using migrants as political pawns, or his authoritarian tendencies. Nothing. Instead it was "How do you feel about Donald Trump's characterization of you?" Terribly disappointing. ETA: They also asked DeSantis' thoughts on Trump having the power to deploy Seal Team 6 to take out political opponents like him. DeSantis' reply was something like, "Trump says a lot of things, it's all bluster." Mika and Joe were like, "okay."