Mondrianyone

I think she's both dim-witted and delusional, but maybe not quite that delusional. She clearly resents the continued expectation of money, and she's not having any fun. I've got a feeling she's very close to bailing, and I also suspect that TLC won't be sorry to be rid of her. They're both dreary to watch. I'll be interested to see if she still has the pizza place and her belongings when she goes back home. My suspicion from the get-go was that she never unloaded any of her stuff. So maybe she's not all that dim-witted either.

Maybe also jewelry. I noticed he was wearing a fairly substantial chain and a huge watch and ring. If those are all real gold (and maybe they aren't), that's a pretty expensive collection for a guy who doesn't care a bit about money.

I think it might be fillers--or fillers in addition to Botox. She had a big lump of something over her left eyebrow, maybe filler that hadn't had enough time to settle. Whatever she's had done has really deformed her face.

Well, that was embarrassing for everyone concerned. Guy thinks he's doing his son a favor, but what he's really doing is ensuring that the kid goes through the rest of his life with a raging case of impostor syndrome, because he'll always know he doesn't deserve to be where he is. I can't believe that more impartial heads haven't prevailed at some point along this continuing (but very short) promotion and told Guy the kid needs to go slower and earn his place. But apparently money talks very loudly and drowns out any sense.

Oh, no question, useless Bini. But from what we know of Ari's life pre-Bini, having her parents--or I think more precisely her dad--fund her vagabond, job-free lifestyle isn't anything new. Also, it just occurred to me that there's one thing Kenny's kids don't seem to share with him: a yearning to get married. Back in the day, he couldn't, but they don't have that obstacle.

And how loaded are these people anyway? Dr. Weinberg is already past normal retirement age (which is fine--lots of folks prefer to keep working forever because they enjoy what they do), but I wonder how much is that he needs to continue producing income to fund Ari's useless life (and pay for her mother to follow her). I hope he has his own cardiologist.

I don't know if it's unpopular, but I share it. She seems to love the camera way too much, and she uses every psychobabble cliché in the book. My least favorite of the therapists by far.

It turns out that there's a practical reason for all that gibberish before the actual recipe. I stumbled on it not long ago when I was searching for . . . a recipe. And then I got it in an email from my WaPo subscription. The short version is that a mile and a half of text makes the recipe more findable by Google--the technical term is SEO (search engine optimization). The scrolling doesn't bother me as much now that I know they're doing it to stay alive. It's how we pay for something we otherwise get for free. I don't know why some of them leave out the jump button. Maybe there's a real reason for that, too. The longer explanations: https://the-delve.com/2020/09/27/why-recipe-blog-posts-are-so-long/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/03/30/mindy-kaling-complained-about-stories-in-online-recipes-and-the-food-bloggers-let-her-have-it/

Plus, she looks like she was teleported from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, straight out of a Walker Evans photo. Except those people had really suffered. I keep wondering what her excuse could possibly be.

Just to be clear, I was talking about very thin slices of orange and lemon, not whole fruits. Should slices take days? I did eventually move them into a low oven and got them done that way.

If you all can stand it . . . I just got this link in an email from Food52, and there's a bunch more stuff about chocolate-chip cookies and Dorie Greenspan. It's nice that she credits the original Toll House recipe on the back of the bag, not so great that that was how Nestlé established itself in the US. Fortunately there are better chips available now.

I have a dehydrator that I've almost never used after trying to dry fruit slices to make potpourri and having the fruit still not dry after more than 24 hours. I think I must have a cheap piece of junk. I did make wonderful orange powder without using the dehydrator at all. Just peeled off very thin slices of zest and made sure there was no pith on them. I set the pieces on a paper towel in the bright sun, and they were brittle in hardly any time. It still smells heavenly. You're inspiring me, @ethalfrida, to give it another go, maybe upgrading the equipment. I make all sorts of spice mixes and rubs, and I'm betting they would be even better with fresh-dried ingredients.

Nazis, maybe? Is that what they mean by German potato salad? I could be wrong.

Oh, definitely! That was the whole point of starting a list. If enough people add their own excuses, I'll update it periodically. Sumit for sure has much potential as a member of the clergy. Regardless of denomination.

The aforementioned T-shirt:

Maybe we should start a pool of possible excuses. He has a fatal disease that will kill him within the year. He's an astronaut in the Indian space program, and he has to leave for Mars next week. He's a werewolf. (That would also possibly explain the hair situation.) He's in the witness protection program. He faked his own death so previous wife couldn't find him, and notice of a new marriage will allow the assassins she's hired to track him down. He's overtired from sweeping leaves on the patio. He's much too focused on his career.

That's a good idea. And it's no big deal if you can't find ready-made oat flour. All you need to do is whiz regular rolled oats in a blender or food processor to make your own. I love oats in any form in chocolate-chip cookies.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I can deal with the visual stuff if I don't have the pain and vomiting to look forward to, and I never have.

I get migraines, but without the headache. They're optical migraines--I call them "eyegraines"--with just the visual field disturbance. I've only ever gotten one once when I was driving, which scared me, but I pulled over till it went away. My husband taught me this technique called "palming" where you lie on your back and cup the lower part of the palms of your hands over your eyes. When I do that, the jagged light usually goes away in about ten minutes. Never had the pain or nausea, thank goodness.

My hunch is that he didn't/doesn't have an exit strategy as such. I don't think he's been actively planning to leave Jenny, because that would take a degree of decisiveness he's not capable of, or finding a way to force her to leave, because that (like deciding to leave himself) would end the Social Security/TLC gravy train. Either way he'd have to go back to work at an actual job, because I don't see his parents allowing him to schlump around their house while they support him indefinitely. So my vote is that he's trying to keep things as they are for as long as possible. The pure panic on his face and in his body language when he realized there was no current hindrance to getting married was indescribably fun to watch.

I prefer to think of myself as knowledgeable and well educated, thank you very much.

I've been accumulating peeves all week, and today was a particularly crappy, peevish day. And then, strangely, an image of Carol Burnett popped into my mind, singing a song. I couldn't remember the title, couldn't remember the name of the person she was singing about, but I knew it would cheer me up. So I Googled and found a clip. Maybe it will make someone else laugh, too. Then again, I may be the only person here with the vaguest idea of who John Foster Dulles was.

This is not on topic, but I just have to wonder when was the last time the word "sanpaku" popped up twice within a couple of hours. There was a photo of a guy on the news a little while ago, one of the ones who was subpoenaed, and he had big buggy eyes and looked even more nutso than that gang in general. So I said to my husband, "Remember that book You Are All Sanpaku?" And we both burst out laughing. Now it feels kind of eerie. Okay, sorry for the distraction.

Do Ed's woods have a neck??? All the rest ^, well said.

Do you have a Twitter account? If not, it might be time to open one. I've seen it happen more than once that when someone has gone through all the "proper" channels the way you have, with no satisfaction, a single tweet aimed at the corporate office gets results. They don't like getting called out where everyone can see.