Mondrianyone

I'm glad I could make you guys laugh simply by stating the obvious. ;o) Brandi is the (Xmas) gift that keeps on giving--just pull the string to unwrap! Hope everyone is having the most wonderful holiday.

To keep her tampons from falling out?

Yolanda: "I figured if I didn't wear these boots tonight, I'd never wear them!" Too bad I didn't get a vote, 'cause I would've voted for never. There really is such a thing as too thin. Not having calves is too thin. And wearing (ugly) boots that call attention to the absence of any muscles where your calves should be is not a good look. IMO. Really stupid outfit in general. Didn't she make the usual "What are you wearing?" call to at least one friend? Even Brandi was dressed better. Boy, scratch that faint veneer of "I'm just a regular old girl" on Lisa R and you get Hollywood phony through and through. As if it weren't enough that we had to hear endlessly how hard it is to not deal with your parents' health and aging issues in spite of having all the resources in the world, she couldn't even hug her weeping mother without making sure she was facing the camera when she did it. It's easy to see why her daughters are the way they are.

I mistakenly posted about the e-mail business in the episode thread, and Bastet was kind enough to direct me here. I had a suspicion we'd be hearing more about the incident in the kids' tournament sooner or later. I wish I'd saved that episode, because I had an odd feeling about that child at the start of the show. Her answer to Alex in the interview segment was strange and completely unrelated to what he'd asked her. I thought for a fleeting instant that maybe she was over-the-top nervous (I've been on a couple of game shows and seen it happen to full-grown adults once the cameras come on) or maybe she had some sort of general social disconnectedness. If the latter, then subjecting her to that kind of pressure is all on her parents--the producers can't be expected to screen out every child who might implode when things go badly. I think Trebek handled the situation and himself very well, both during the tapings and in the e-mail. Addressing it the following day was a way of acknowledging what we all saw--that something off had happened at the end of the previous game, but without going into embarrassing detail. He doesn't owe anyone an apology. I had the opportunity to meet Art Fleming during a pilot taping. He was a nice man, not a bit different in real life from the guy I watched on TV as a kid. I think he was born to be a game-show host.

Thanks for the link, Bastet. I'll go check out the discussion.

Hi, all. I haven't posted in this forum before, but I have read here from time to time. I came by a couple of weeks ago to read people's comments on the kids' tournament and see what was being said about Gabby's failure to appear at the end of the show after not qualifying to play in FJ because of a negative score. And then I saw her mom posting all over social media that the girl just wasn't feeling well. But I didn't quite buy that, and today I see that those instincts were probably correct. Wondered if any of you had seen the latest Jeopardy-related fallout of the Sony hacking: http://www.mediaite.com/online/alex-trebek-threatened-to-quit-jeopardy-over-stage-moms-tantrum/

I deleted it also, or I'd double-check, but I think she was implying she had some kind of legal document in her bag, ready to mail out--like a lawyer's letter of intent to sue or somesuch. I totally agree that was a pretty outrageous mistake for the CC to make, but it's far from the only one. Sometimes I think somebody's listening in one language and typing in another! (That's actually true--occasionally I'll get a line or two of Spanish in my CC. Huh???) I posted about this in another thread. I think they use language-recognition software to create the captions, so probably there aren't any live people involved to take the rap for any goofs.

Except Sharon didn't say she was going to shoot Joyce. She said she was going to sue her, and the closed captioning got it wrong and had it as "shoot her." I was watching it with the captions on also, and I thought it was a pretty funny mistake. Understandable, though--Sharon wasn't speaking all that clearly by that point.

Assuming none of us have access to Joyce's private financial records, how can this be stated with such certainty? Especially when all indications are that she is and has been dependent on Kandi's money, even before Kandi bought her a huge house with her own personal basketball court. What job would someone of her limited education and verbal skills hold that would pay her to live in the style to which she's become accustomed? I know that Joyce has said she doesn't rely on Kandi financially, but she's said any number of things that are evidently untrue. And Kandi has said exactly the opposite. Common sense and credibility both lean heavily in the latter direction.

She doesn't seem to have figured out that all these gigs amount to little more than stunt casting and that once the stunt value goes away (very soon, let's pray), so does her career as an aaaactress. I hate to say it, because it's almost hard to imagine Mama Joyce being worse than she already is, but I'm predicting that Sharon's death will give her license to behave even more horribly. Because she knows that now Kandi will be truly terrified to do or say anything that could remotely upset her and send her to her grave. I see the emotional blackmail ratcheting way up.

There was boning. And there was also what looked like curved boning (either that or some kind of trapunto detail), which was the first thing I noticed about the bodice. That was pretty high-level sewing. I was watching on a large screen so the stitching was very clear, and I initially thought, "Wow, that kid is amazing." Except what she did in the studio was nowhere near that skill level. So I'm calling shenanigans on the at-home project. You can see the outfit here: http://threads.projectrunway.com/product/prt106-ciara-look-1/ If you click on the picture and then click on the expanding arrows, you can see the details a little better. Obviously they didn't have that model to fit it on, but they probably could've done a better job of hiking her boobs up into the right place for the few minutes she was wearing it. Iffy fit or not, the sewing was very impressive--by my standards anyway. I don't think it was the child's work. Other than that, I agree with everybody above about ditching both Vanessa and the stupid extra project. I don't know why Christian couldn't take over the mentoring and hosting instead of being a judge. He's terrific with them. The kids, with the exception of a few bratty ones (or bratty-for-TV ones) have been wonderful to see.

Me, too. Half the kids who went to my high school routinely came back to senior year after summer vacation with new noses, so I've seen more than my share. I don't think Mauricio has had his done, both because of the way his nose looks and because of the clogged-up way he always sounds. My husband (who has a lovely nose) had surgery as an adult for a deviated septum because he couldn't breathe and still had the same nose afterward. One of his best friends (who had a fairly large honker) had the same surgery, but they threw in a rhinoplasty as well, which used to be a very common insurance dodge when you wanted to disguise a nose job as something medically necessary. I'm pretty sure if Mauricio had had his nose worked on cosmetically, in the process they would've cleared up whatever has him sounding so congested.

I thought I was a bad person for thinking they cheated on that first outfit. Glad to know someone else thought so, too.

The foie gras that she was calling "faux gras," as I recall. Which probably went well with her "barbarian cream." Along those same lines, I'm thinking Apollo could host a cooking show from behind bars, call it something like Cooking in Stir with the Juvial Child. (Sorry, Julia.)

Do you mean the kind of column dress with several different tiers of fringe? The sort of 1920s-looking dress? If that's the one, I love it, too. It's a Claire Pettibone, and we've seen several brides try it on over the past couple of years, but I think this is the first one who ended up buying it. Loved that one as well, but that segment played out very oddly, I thought. They were going to demonstrate to the father that they could make the dress more acceptable to him by showing less cleavage front and back, and then all they did was lengthen the sleeves! And that changed everything for him. Uh, okay. But thank God for Kate Middleton and the reappearance of sleeves. I also found the bride who had a moral crisis about making her father spend so much money on a single dress pretty interesting. I'm not sure I believe that that's what her tears were really about, but if they were, good for her. We almost never see someone step back and say, "Wait a minute, this is insane." All we ever see is the exact opposite. The bride with four sons marrying the man with four sons? That groom was a very handsome man.

I also thought it was likely one of their parents' home. Not much about that whole story made sense.

Maybe I need to be checked in to the Bravo Home for the Criminally Skeptical, but I'm just not buying the whole Apollogy Tour--and especially not the reaction to it. This is basically a guy who's never admitted to doing anything wrong, despite the fact that he was tried, convicted, and incarcerated. So this is the one thing he's owning up to? It's just not credible. And what's even less credible is how everybody immediately jumps on the bandwagon, most particularly Phaedra, who goes from "Kenya is the Antichrist whore" to such sincere Christian regret, zero to sixty in ten seconds. My theory, to the extent that I have one, is that this show wouldn't have been filmable with everybody hating on Kenya. So to me it seems likely that Apollo was given some kind of incentive (money?) to say--in front of the cameras--that he was lying, whether he was or not, and everyone else was encouraged to hop on board. How else would it have been even remotely credible for Phaedra and Kenya to go to each other's lunches, parties, spa days, etc.? That apology makes the show feasible again.

She didn't go to Columbia for her undergraduate degree, although she seems to go out of her way to create that impression. Apparently she went to Monmouth University (maybe Marblemouth University would be more like it, given how she mangles the English language), which is where I think she met Melissa. And then she got a graduate degree in exercise physiology, where I'm assuming the academic bar was set somewhat lower than at Columbia College.

I do, too. Not because I have hearing problems but to keep from bugging (or waking up) my husband when I watch late at night. And also so that if I miss something somebody says, I can rewind and read it rather than try listening again. I think the job is mostly outsourced. Sometimes there's a credit at the end of the show (in the captions, not on the rolling credits) that says something like "Captions courtesy of WGBH" or some company name. Usually when it's a private company contracted to do them, that's when you see the worst errors. The ones on the classier channels are usually pretty accurate. But sometimes it's as if a chimp is typing. And just the other day I realized why some of them are so terrible. I'm almost positive that they don't use human beings--I think they must use one of those speech-recognition programs. I bought one a few years ago to try to speed up one aspect of my job, and if you don't spend a lot of time training the program, you get some really hilarious mistakes--kind of like spell check on acid. I've started keeping a list of some of my favorites.

I hear Mama Joyce has an excellent jump shot. Or maybe I mean a wedge shot. So she probably needs a golf course, too. Unless I mean a wedgie shot, in which case she needs an on-site shoe store. How does she square this ginormous house Kandi's buying her with her standard story that she has her own money and pays her own way? 'Cause that's what she says every time she's been confronted about living off her daughter. That was some really ugly, scary face on Mama in the staredown with Kandi. I wouldn't want to see that face in a dream. Or peering through my window, which is what I think Kandi and Todd have to look forward to once she's settled in right down the block. Shudder.

That's true, but in many strip clubs there's a fair amount of overlap--backroom sex and deals made on the premises to go out with clients after the club closes for the night. We don't know what she personally did, but it's far from unheard of for strippers to be hookers as well. Whatever she did or didn't do, the wide-eyed innocent act is ridiculous. This I totally agree with. I think it's hard for a narcissist to be a truly sexual person. You have to care at least a little bit about the other person's feelings to be genuinely sexual. When Cynthia was going into the restaurant, she said something about being hungry, and Peter told her, "Your ass doesn't need to be eating anything else." For someone with nothing apparent to offer in this relationship (or nothing I can see anyway--hard to believe he's great enough in the sack to offset all his negative qualities), Peter sure seems confident enough to be a controlling, snotty little weasel. Me, too. The parts we got to see were embarrassing--badly written, vulgar, and low-rent. Nene's speed maybe, but kind of a comedown from Cirque du Soleil's much more high-class past. And I wonder about her drawing power with half the seats empty.

You just asked pretty much all the questions I was planning to ask about that very bizarre episode, joanofarch4. Apparently Mom couldn't let anyone else supervise the younger daughters' highly advanced school project, building what looked like an Egyptian temple out of cardboard paper-towel rolls, so that she could go buy an actual house. Because, you know, priorities. It also seemed a little odd to me that Dad was the driving force behind the late-in-life adoptions, and they adopted only girls. Not that my mind goes there or anything, but . . . I even Googled the eldest daughter, thinking she'd come up as a pageant girl or an aspiring actress, which might explain things at least a little bit, but I don't think she is. When your story seems guaranteed to raise more questions than it answers, maybe you should rethink going on TV.

Hello, everyone. I'm a late-to-the-party refugee from TWoP. I'm happy to see a lot of names I recognize along with a bunch that are new to me. Speaking of names I recognize, I wonder if anyone else spotted a semi-famous name/face on an episode from last week. It was the one with the recent archaeology grad moving to the Marshall Islands. One of his friends back in Arizona, before he left home, looked really familiar to me. Then I realized it was Leszek Pawlowicz (I had to look up the spelling!), a former Jeopardy! champ who was just shown again on the Battle of the Decades. It was so weird to see someone so totally out of the expected context! Anybody else see him, or am I starting to hallucinate Jeopardy! contestants? Look forward to snarking with you all again.