Mondrianyone

You must be a very even-tempered person, @mlp. 'Cause Laith annoys the fuck out of me. I'm so tired of his extended audition for voice-over work that I could thcuh-REEEEEEAM! (That's my Daffy Duck, complete with lisp.) Tonight made my editor nerves a little twitchy. I get that some people just don't know when it's "Anne and I" versus "Anne and me," but Bobby got it wrong at least twice tonight. Just take the name out and you know which pronoun to use. And the fact that Chef Anne doesn't know how to pronounce Groo-YARE is bad enough, but she kept correcting people to mispronounce it. It's not Groy-air, for Pierre's sake. Father Adam's joke about making water holy by boiling the hell out of it actually made me laugh out loud.

She looks like she has a case of conjunctivitis so bad that it's spreading from her eyes out to the rest of her face. Including her lips. And speaking of makeup, although probably OT, there was a promo for RHoD during this episode showing Brandi talking to one of her two girls (Brooklyn or the Bronx or Broadway or whatever their names are), and the child had dark orange foundation on her face over a neck as white as typing paper. Do they actually make up the kids for filming? Or is that household even crazier than I think it is? (Rhetorical questions, obviously.) Katie clearly needs this paycheck, but I feel complicit in something very exploitative watching her on TV.

So this means I made slightly more money off those books than you did! Just slightly. ✍️

Now my head is starting to hurt. So it still is on TruTV for its initial airing? No, don't tell me. I think that's what I said, but it really, really doesn't matter.

Yeah, I didn't see a date either, but what I wasn't clear about was which network it's going to be on. Doesn't matter, though. I'll find it when the time comes, I'm sure.

I agree that that's exactly what she meant, although the way she said it was funny. The implication is that when you're talking behind someone's back, you're saying things you wouldn't say to that person's face. We know that Katie is 100% willing to say the exact same thing to Ashley's face--because she did! And good for her for that.

That's good news! Are you sure it's Netflix, though, @biakbiak? I just Googled, and all the hits seem to say it's still on TruTV. It could be season 1 that's on Netflix. Either way, I'm happy it's coming back! (Still waiting for the blind guy in the coffee shop to be outed.)

Very good point. I hadn't seen the second episode yet when I posted above. I wonder how many of these people on the unpaid team would've signed up to be part of the business without the presence of cameras. I don't really think this is all that credible, but I'm still interested enough to watch.

This isn't the kind of thing I normally watch, but something about the previews sucked me in. I was liking Glenn and finding the story pretty believable till he got sick and had to go to the emergency room. At that point I was thinking, uh-oh, this is where it falls apart--he won't have health insurance, and there goes what's left of his bankroll. But I guess he used his actual name and insurance card to get treated, or am I misunderstanding something? I also felt a little cynical about the tire transaction. Why would he have the buyer come to the yard where he'd just culled those tires for free so the buyer could see where/how he got them? And why would the buyer pay $1400 for tires he could've taken for free himself? There are some holes in this scenario that are making it hard for me to buy into the whole deal.

He did a serious look (but also with jokes) at discrimination in medical care and research, which is worth watching just on the strength of that. And he managed to work in a very funny reference to RHoNY. Here you go:

Thanks, @wilsie, that's very sweet of you! We've been gorging on fiddleheads for years now. We live surrounded by native Mainers who are experts on them, we buy them from a very reliable forager, plus we both researched ferociously before we first cooked them and then before we first froze them (which we had heard wasn't a good thing to do, but if you do it right, it's fine). Fiddlehead Fred (not his real name) eats them all year long and hasn't keeled over yet. This is a pretty good summary of how to prepare them. Anyone who has a bad result can blame Canada. 🤢

I forgot about another use for the strainer insert: blanching. My husband goes insanely overboard when fiddleheads are in season--he usually buys 25 pounds of them. And of course they have to be frozen, because who can eat 25 pounds of fresh fiddleheads? You have to blanch them first, and getting them out of the pot and into ice water is so much easier with the insert, rather than fishing them out with a spider or a slotted spoon a few at a time. So anyone else who's married to a crazy person might find this useful.

I have one as well. You can also use it to steam vegetables when there are too many to fit in a normal steamer and also boil potatoes (although I use the Instant Pot for cooking potatoes now). I think if you have a standard 8-quart stockpot, you can get an insert that will likely fit in it, even if your pot didn't come with one.

I knew it because I was the person who line-edited the first four books of the series. The ghostwriters weren't all that good, so their work mostly needed to be completely rewritten. I think I got a hot 11 bucks an hour. I was aware that the series became huge, but I never read another book after those first four. They're her characters and her plotlines, but most of the actual words on the page are mine. The more you know . . . 😎

To me it looks as if the girls in reform school who all missed their First Communion because they got knocked up decided to have it belatedly thirty years later. All they're missing are the little veils. Disclaimer: I lived in Washington Heights for years, and I loved seeing those sweet girls in their Communion dresses. It doesn't translate all that well to adulthood. And I use the word loosely. 👰

Pretty much every recap of this show could contain the phrase "but things go sour when Gizelle confronts . . ."

There's so much that's so wrong about this. The FU to Jason (and presumably the court, which . . . how is that smart? Frankel-y, my dears, I don't give a damn) and the incredibly creepy masking. But also, when the child's face is obscured, it's her body you're left to focus on, and the body shots always seem to feature her ass aimed most prominently at the camera. It almost feels like an invitation to pervs and pedophiles. And the other thing, the layer under the layers, is that we know Bryn looks so much like Jason's family, specifically his mother. So it's like putting a creepy face over the face we know Frankel hates. That's gonna be a lot for this little one to unravel when she's not so little anymore. Crazy sick that this person with every resource to get herself healed is instead choosing to ramp up the cycle of cruelty and derangement and dump it all over her child. Imagine what she'd do to a kid she professed not to love.

For sure. So many wonderful old songs, and stars who weren't really singers, like Mae West and Sophie Tucker, Rusty Warren, Mabel Mercer. The difference is, they brought a healthy dose of irony and a sense of humor about themselves to their work. And a great deal of intelligence underpinning their performances. I don't think the countess has that in her.

I dunno, HH. If they need some anonymous dork (me) to tell them about this song, they're definitely in the wrong business. And if the countess has so little curiosity about her own art, well . . . I hope they never put the song in her act. Dietrich was such a hero (literally, against the Nazis) that I can think of a million better ways to "honor" her.

Maybe we've finally stumbled on the one thing that the countess really does have in common with a truly great cabaret star.

You probably have enough time to order speck online if that's what you really want. Zingerman's, iGourmet, even do a pickup at Walmart.

LuAnn misspelled "niece." It's funny she doesn't know the "I before e" rule. I figure that in her world it's usually "I before everything."

Oh, no! Don't apologize! (Not even sarcastically!) I thought the n made it funnier, whether it was a typo or not. It's much more logical that some poor unsuspecting man would've thought she was talking about wine all night, because who's nuts enough to go on and on for hours about cabaret?

I love the taglines precisely for the reason you hate them. They're so tacky and ridiculous, they set just the right tone for the show and the "stars."

I try to pinch-hit as the class elevator whenever the countess is in the joint.