ddawn23

He was indentured to a guy who liked to punish him by boxing his ears, which severely damaged his hearing and rendered him functionally deaf. Having his tonsils out improved his hearing, although it’s not clear how much.

Good lord it’s tiring to have to wade through this again. Not to mention how laughably anachronistic the season one witch trial was. And that was a quarter century ago at this point!

This is correct. In addition to ordination the Church of England requires parish ministers to be licensed. Without his license Leonard is barred from any work as clergy.

I want to know what sort of phone battery lasts as long as the police officer’s. I kept waiting for his phone dying to be a plot point.

The music during the ball was diegetic. There was a live band with three white-clad singers.

You waited patiently through three seasons to whip this bad boy out and I. am. here. for. it.

It was a disjointed mishmash of Revelation 21:4, Isaiah 41:10, Isaiah 40:11, Zechariah 8:5, Malachi 3:17, Revelation 7:1, and Revelation 14:13. All KJV, of course.

It’s 1771. Claire says it’s 157 years before the discovery of penicillin, which was in 1928.

I can’t speak to the aging of the children or the buildup of the settlement, but if it’s 157 years before Fleming discovers penicillin in 1928, that makes it 1771.

In what way is it higher end? There is absolutely no way a person who says "I want to start a side hustle. I know! I'll join this startup and teach flower arranging" is more experienced than the person the local craft store brings in to teach classes. I also don't understand how one could be considered more local than the other. They're both area residents who work for larger companies. We're not talking about the difference between McDonald's and Joe's Burgers. We're talking the difference between a woman who sells Mary Kay and a woman who sells Estee Lauder. They're equally local and the woman behind the counter at Dillard's is almost certainly more experienced.

The second hour was the episode of solving problems that don't exist. Lactation bars and cookies are as easy to make as chocolate chip cookies, and there are a million recipes on Pinterest. Ain't nobody drinking six cups of lactation tea a day. And flower arranging classes are like $10 or $20 at your local Michael's or Hobby Lobby. I'm not sure how the flower class business was actually supposed to work with the stated goal of empowering women to open their own offshoot businesses. Flower classes was just supposed to be a test market of sorts. So what, 1: Get women to do MLM-style party flower arranging events. 2: ??? 3: Multifaceted women-centric national business with a bunch of non flower-related income streams. What am I missing?

I can't even with that first paragraph. From the earliest age girls with an interest in science and math are discouraged from pursuing it. Remember that old Simpsons episode with the talking Malibu Stacy doll who says "Math is hard! Teeheehee!"? It really is like that. It's subtler, but the effect is the same. We as a society benefit when everyone is able to contribute to their fullest potential. Diversity is important, and one way to promote diversity is to stop telling girls that STEM is for boys. And STEM remaining the domain of men is a huge factor in the gender pay gap. I fail to see how encouraging STEM-minded girls to explore that interest is pushing them into fields they don't have the inclination for. Absolutely no one is advocating that we force coding down children's throats. The push to see more STEM-type toys marketed to girls is about telling the brainy girls that it's okay to be interested in science-- that they don't have to choose between their gender and their interests. Of course JavaScript isn't the first lesson. You start by teaching the concept that coding is writing a set of instructions for a computer to execute. When I was in elementary school in the early 90s we played around with Logo with turtle graphics. This is the same thing, but manipulating an object IRL instead of on a screen. And the interface looked functionally identical to basically every other coding program geared toward children. Example: Google's Blockly.

The wine-enthusiast group Kevin is in is Chevaliers du Tastevin, literally Knights of the Tastevin. A tastevin is a small shallow silver cup that was used in the middle ages to judge wine quality. The way everyone immediately reached for their glasses whenever the Chevaliers du Tastevin was mentioned makes me think footage of the sharks agreeing to make a drinking game out of it was left on the cutting room floor. Obvious problem with the lawn mowing robot: I don't know how it is where you guys are, but here in Oklahoma I'd say 95% of houses have two yards: a front yard and a backyard, and the backyard is usually fenced. I would need to either always keep the gate open, which would mean keeping my dog in the house at all times, or I would need two mowerbots. And the front yard mowerbot would definitely get stolen. About the bot only mowing a little bit each day: They tried to frame that as a product feature, but I'm not buying it. Cutting only a little each time means the bot can be smaller without gumming up the works. It also allows the consumer to rationalize the expense-- "Yeah, it was expensive, but look! I use it every day!" On to the stuffed animal ladies. "It's half stuffed animal, half blankie! We call them loveys!" No. You don't call them loveys. That's what they are. That's their name. You did not invent loveys. All you did was add a storybook and raise the price by an order of magnitude. And I'm sorry, but your line of loveys all look like dog toys. I got the sense they were justifying the ridiculous price by promising the toy would be the one the kid loves the most. That's not how it works. Your child will have many stuffed toys. One of those will be the favorite-- the one they take everywhere, the one they cherish even into adulthood. You as the child's parent will have absolutely no say in which of their stuffed toys becomes The One.

That would be an excellent argument if telenovelas were known for giving adult-level cognition to children young enough not to have object permanence, but they’re not, so it’s not. Jane the Virgin’s ability to incorporate ridiculous soap opera tropes into the plot without seeming insane or losing any of the show’s intelligence or charm is one of its biggest strengths. You won’t see me dissing that aspect of the show. It’s perfectly fine that Mateo and Adam’s talk didn’t bother you. It’s also perfectly fine that it did bother me.

I assumed the narrator meant one of those characters would die by the end of the season. I’m surprised everyone seems to have liked Mateo’s talk with Adam. I hated it. Remember in About a Boy when Hugh Grant’s character makes up a kid and it’s obvious he made the kid up because he attributes absurd interpersonal insight and English language mastery to a toddler? That’s what this was. We’re supposed to believe that a one-year-old noticed his mother crying a lot, correctly attributed her upset to the loss of her romantic partner, retained this information three years, surmised that a breakup with her new romantic partner would elicit the same response in his mother that the death of the last one did, asked to speak with the new partner privately, and expressed his concerns in a few concise and perfectly constructed sentences. Nope. That’s hack writing. They chose to obliterate the already tenuous suspension of disbelief in regards to Mateo’s characterization in the name of being cutesy and twee. Ugh.

So they set aside, what, like $10 in the production budget for the Zoo song? I mean I liked it, but it won’t have much rewatch-on-YouTube mileage for me because I found the production values so distractingly low.

Well that was lovely! There was the perfect amount of time spent acknowledging the dead. We checked in with basically everybody, and the whole thing had an onwards and upwards feel to it. Nicely done. And I am very happy to have been wrong about Angela dying.

I thought it pretty obvious that Angela died in the explosions. She's the only one of the four caught in the blasts that didn't appear in the preview, and all episode she kept saying things like "I spent so many years searching, but I finally realized I love my life just as it is." and "Oh Brennan, we've had some great times together. And we will be best friends until the end." The only thing missing was her being one day away from retirement. Also, the possible blindness of a new baby is a really odd plot thread to introduce in the penultimate episode unless they're planning on resolving it in the finale. So Angela and the baby survive and there's a time jump at the end or Angela and/or the baby die. Edited to add after watching the finale:

The marital conflict was so manufactured. It arose for nebulous, unconvincing reasons and was resolved for equally nebulous and unconvincing reasons. Also, I don't care that Brennan says you should go to Canada, Booth. The correct answer is "Two of my children just lost their caregiver and last remaining grandparent. If you need space I'll leave you alone, but I need to stay here because my children need me." (Welcome to the forum, Lizzy!)

That big ball of yarn in Alba's apology basket sure looked like a jumbo Red Heart Super Saver ball of yarn. Does Rogelio know his assistant is cheaping out on the apology baskets? I mean, com'on. Who do you have to screw to get some Vanna's Choice up in here?

Hotels by Day's target market is hotels that cater to business travelers and its biggest selling point is that you'll be able to use a room without having to pay for the whole night. This displays a fundamental lack of understanding of how the industry works. There's a reason mid-range hotels offer free wifi and business traveler hotels charge $40 a day for it. The kind of business traveler that would rent a hotel room just to freshen up before a meeting is the kind of business traveler with a corporate credit card and an expense account. They'll pay full price for the room anyway because they'll just expense it to the company. Librarian here. This is exactly where the industry is heading right now. Maker spaces, 3D printing, coding classes, and more are popping up all over the place. Libraries are buying more ebooks and fewer physical items, and they're using the extra space to change the library from a place where information is consumed into a place where information is created. There's really no need for a subscription service to teach kids to code when there are more and more places they can cultivate those skills for free. Hell, I taught myself python by watching tutorials on youtube, and even Google is in the teaching coding to kids space.

So the killer in this episode had grown nearly to adulthood as one half of conjoined twins joined at the base of the spine. At some point there was an attempt at surgical separation that left his twin dead, but left him so great he was able to walk around and show absolutely no evidence he'd grown up sharing his legs with another person. The only evidence on the twin's remains that pointed to him having been a conjoined twin was a very subtle deformation of a single bone. This is the most ludicrous bullshit I've ever seen. Conjoined twins aren't one regular person with another person sprouting out of them. Twins joined at the waist would have extreme and extremely obvious spinal and rib cage abnormalities. This show has always demanded a lot of the viewers' suspension of belief, but this is insane. And to top it all off when Wendall points out that the tiniest amount of research into this extraordinarily rare surgery will give them the killer's identity, Brennan says "No, no. That'll take too long. It'll be much faster to have Angela age up the dead twin's facial reconstruction and let us see if we recognize him." *headdesk*

The calculators on iPhones wait until you hit equals to do the calculation, so turning the phone to the side to get the open parenthesis is unnecessary. Dude still obviously used Toxic, but it works just fine without having to come up with a reason to turn the phone sideways. You can even preload it onto a friend's phone when they're not looking, then later have them run through the motions and it looks like you did it without ever touching the phone. One smart move Ben Young made was just holding the phone up to Penn, who put in the first number, instead of handing it to him. I don't know about Penn, but I'm the kind of person who has to tap C a couple of times before starting a calculation, which would completely tank the trick.

So it's pretty clear the card in the teabag trick was just a force with a really elaborate reveal, right? He's practiced tearing the card in the exact same way each time and really did have an identical card in each of the 100 possible teabags. He made a big deal out of Penn completing the tear to lend a sense of authority behind the idea that the card in the teabag really was the one he tore at the beginning, but if that were the case he could've had Penn do the tear instead of controlling it himself. I thought having Alyson hold the cup up in the air was strange, but of course that was to up the drama of the reveal, since had she not been holding the cup above her sight line she probably would have noticed, and perhaps commented on, the teabag dissolving in the hot water. As for the pool trick shot guy-- it looked like he was using the trick shot to hide him jabbing the card onto the pool cue. His cries of "Hit the hat! Hit the hat!" were a pretty subtle use of misdirection to make it seem to us that he was concentrating on the trick shot too, when of course he was concentrating on jabbing the card onto the pool cue. The jabbing bit was what Penn was talking about when he said Anton used brute force instead of a gimmicked pool cue. Dude's pool shots are fantastic, but he needs to work on his sleight of hand. I usually can't see sleight of hand happening even when I know exactly when and where it's happening and am looking specifically for it, but even I noticed his steal and load.

And he really only needed two subtly different kinds of Sharpie. I noticed he carefully handed cards to two of the volunteers in portrait orientation and the other two in landscape.