Mondrianyone

If you have a free HDMI port (see photo below) on the side of your TV, you'll be able to plug in the Fire Stick.

None taken. That would be you and me on the ends and my husband in the middle. (He'd need a place to live, too, if I burned down the house.) I loved The People's Couch, especially those three. I thought it did well in the ratings, but . . . sigh.

They have! We just got a notification last week that it was going down by $2. How unusual is that? There's a British series called Blue Murder that I watched recently. I wasn't expecting a lot, but it stars Caroline Quentin, who I loved when she co-starred in Jonathan Creek (about a crime-solving magician) and also because she looks exactly like my longtime best friend, who I sadly don't see anymore. It surprised me by being a lot better than I expected. There are two seasons of Thorne, which is very good. Waking the Dead is about 11 or 12 seasons, I think. A bunch of old ones--Second Sight, Touching Evil. Bodyguard was excellent. Secret City is an Australian series that's having its second season sometime soon. And Shetland is just about perfect. I'm about to pop for BritBox, since it seems to have more of the things I'm interested in than Acorn, but we'll see. If Scott & Bailey were on an endless loop on my TV, I'd be perfectly happy. P.S. If my house burned down and I had to go live with Reality Police, I think we'd be great roommates. We definitely wouldn't argue about TV shows. 📺

It's the Pooch-hausen by Proxy of Season 9. I honestly don't see the point of all the hairsplitting about kill shelter/no-kill shelter. The dog was never supposed to end up going to any kind of shelter. Period, end of story. LVP made a huge tactical (and interpersonal) error by claiming that Erika's note wasn't good enough. Shockingly bad manners, especially for a proper Englishwoman. She knows that she and Erika aren't friends--quite the opposite, if how I perceive them means anything. I'm barely willing to cut her any grief-related slack on that, not for thinking the note was cold and inadequate but for saying so. Nonetheless, Erika probably could've sold one of her ugly anime dresses if she needed to, so she could afford to send both flowers and a card. She made the most minimal effort possible, and that's not how you treat someone you may not like but should want to maintain cordial relations with, for work's sake and for the sake of at least appearing to be a human rather than a barely functioning animatronic fellatio doll. They may not be friends, but they're hardly just nodding acquaintances. Also, I can't believe that flowers are considered to be impersonal. When I send flowers to mark a loss or for any other reason, I agonize over the choice for hours, so that the recipient will know that I picked them with him or her specifically in mind and to show how much I care. To me that's the furthest thing from impersonal. I don't know if we have any info on Lucy the dog's biting history. But if she doesn't have one, it's entirely possibly that she bit in the Kemsley home because someone tormented her--not unusual for young (and not well supervised) kids to pull ears, tails, hit dogs, pinch them. So maybe she did what she had to do to defend herself. Sorry if I'm repeating things already mentioned. I haven't made it through the whole thread yet. If Erika's ponytail is really 70 inches (almost 6 feet) long, wouldn't she have to be about 9 feet tall for it to hit her at butt level? And can Kyle stop touching her hair as if she never had any before and is mesmerized by the novelty of it?

Wow, that was fast! I barely hit Submit!

I wasn't bothered by the remarks about the daughter's friends. It's the kind of thing you say to your partner (when you trust your partner completely) that you'd never say to anyone else in the world, because you both know it's insane and you both know neither of you believes it. But in the moment it's funny. If my husband is secretly recording our conversations, I'm totally done for. I don't think any pedophiles are going to use this show as permission to go molest little girls.

I thought tonight's episode was terrific, and I'm hoping we see Alison Tolman more often. The friend scenes were wonderful, ditto the scenes between Andrea and Mike--it's nice when Andrea is just an almost regular human. I keep meaning to ask my sister about this. She was a volunteer lice-inspection mom in her kids' school (the very idea gives me the full-body vomits, so yay her), and I assume she's the repository of all knowledge about head lice. If I remember this weekend, I'll do the lice report here.

New genre: o-bitch-uary. I wonder if I can copyright it. Seriously, what amazes me is less that some hack with a personal grudge or who thought he was being cute wrote an obituary like that than the fact that some editor actually signed off on it. The obits are one area of most papers where mean-spiritedness normally takes a brief vacation. Still shaking my head at the gratuitous venom.

I read it earlier, too. I don't think I've ever seen such a bitchy obit about anyone who wasn't a dictator or a serial killer. Just a long list of every endeavor she tried and failed at and how she lived her whole life in the shadow of her sister. Lee (and Carole, the actress) must've really pissed off someone at the Times for them to go ahead with something like that. I've heard Lee wasn't a nice person, but I kind of felt sorry for her for this nasty send-off. I posted years ago about how I came within an inch of hitting both Lee and Jackie with my car as they were crossing the street. It might've been a mercy in retrospect if I had. (I'm not serious.)

I got your point, @Spunkygal. It doesn't have to be at absolutely #1 on a consistent basis to be a valuable ratings asset. Which it obviously is. And I agree that a lot of that has to do with the time slot. If you don't want to be sitting in front of the TV on a late Saturday morning, and you're too old for cartoons in the background, it's an easy show to tune into. You never know when a particular recipe might grab your attention. I've been watching this two-hour installment in shifts of about twenty minutes each. I like to see Alex Guarnaschelli when I get the chance. (We knew both her parents--I worked with her mother, who was also my husband's editor on one book, so her face brings back memories for me.) I haven't seen her pasta dish yet, so I have to do another shift at some point. ⏳

I thought this was going to end up being a major piece of evidence, and then . . . nothing. I know that high-end watches have serial numbers that can be traced to the purchaser, but I don't really know if that's true of all watches. Still, the old theater adage about if there's a gun on the mantel in act 1, it had better go off in act 3 apparently doesn't apply on Dateline. If I believed in hell, I'm sure I'd be going there after saying this, but every time I see the church group of the accused rallying around him/her, that's tantamount to proof of guilt for me.

Thanks so much for both answers. I thought maybe I was some kind of outlaw. 👈

I just noticed that at least one show that was on my homepage a few hours ago is now gone. I went to the show list to add it back, and it's gone from there as well. Are shows still being culled from the master list, or is this a glitch? Also, on a different subject, when I came here to post this question, I got a message in red saying my content needs to be approved. Does everyone see that, or did I commit some indiscretion that means I can't post without review? I have no idea what that might be, if so. Thanks!

If "go back up north" was meant to be racist, wouldn't it make more sense to say "go back down south"? Maybe he's speaking in some kind of code that I'm not in on. You'd think blind people wouldn't be racists. Does someone have to tell them the other person's color? Why was Uncle Fester training his camera on the neighbor's backyard in the first place? I might've missed that. If I were her, I wouldn't get just one light and aim it at his camera. I'd get a whole array of baseball-field night-game lights and aim them at his bedroom window. As a security measure, of course. Challis Hopwood and Jessyca Brockington--this week sure was a treasure trove of Harlequin romance character names. Both really bright girls, too.

We have a similar story up here, but no one's ever been arrested, no body found, and the father has moved out of state and clammed up. I have vivid memories of divers going into the freezing river, in December, in Maine, day after day. Every Christmas I think of this sweet baby and what she must have gone through, whether she somehow wandered off into the snow or was taken by someone. Maybe there'd be some answers if Dateline shone a light.

Aside from a few bits of repeated info (Ashton liking to show off his body, for example), I found the episode interesting, and I learned a bunch of stuff I'd always been curious about, so I didn't find this a waste of time--no more so than watching the show in the first place!

Verbatim what I was thinking while I watched the most recent episode. Was she like this all the time during the first season? I don't remember it that way, but maybe I just blocked it out. If they don't dial her back a little, she's gonna wind up being pretty unlikable.

Maybe Brent the cameraman swam out and rescued it. He's the one with the track record.

If the DNA testing is expected to be done in a few months (and what's the delay, I wonder?), per the printed info given at the end of the second episode, why not wait till it's been done and then air all this? So that it comes with a resolution? I felt after watching that there's two hours of my life I'll never get back. Probably not the best choice of words given all the years that Kevin Cooper won't get back, but still . . . Wasn't there any other case that could've filled this gap until the full story could finally be told?

I put parchment in the dutch oven. Today I used a proofing basket to raise the dough after it came out of the IP. Looks very pretty!

You mix up the dough in a bowl that will fit into the IP, standing it on the trivet. Cover with plastic wrap, put the lid on, set for Yogurt, and let it go for about three and a half hours. No pressure involved, obviously, and it seems to be the perfect proofing environment. Then you bake in a dutch oven. Here's a basic recipe.

Absolutely, on both counts. Cuts proofing to a third of the usual time, so you can start at lunch and have bread for dinner. Love that.

I bought an Instant Pot last year, based on advice I asked for here, and I've been loving it. Every time I'm skeptical that a particular dish won't work in it, I try it anyway, and I'm always pleasantly surprised. Like lasagna, which I convinced myself was going to be a flop and was excellent. And it's a perfect way to proof no-knead bread, which I haven't had great success with in the past. I've made two different loaves in the last two weeks, and both came out fabulous. So thanks for the good advice, and next week I'm making yogurt and maybe risotto--without all the stirring. P.S. I've bought a few little accessories for it. My favorite so far is a silicone steam diverter, which lets me vent the pot without blasting the bottom of my cabinets or the bulb in my pendant light fixture. Or my face. Very useful little gizmo.

Cameron = Kamuran, I think. Because . . . creative spelling run totally amok. If women don't handle workplace sexual misconduct by speaking up on their own behalf and telling abusive and/or clueless men to cut it the fuck out, the alternative is to kick the problem upstairs to a group of men in a higher position and rely on them to handle it for the weak, incapable women. Which to my way of seeing things keeps women infantilized and under the protection (or not) of men. This is not a win as far as I can tell. Reporting a problem to workplace authorities is only part of the solution. The arguably more important part is to "open a mouth," as my mother used to say.

Thanks, @Byrd is the Word (which I'll now be singing in my head all day). I think I might've been conflating two cases, at least re length of tenancy. What still puzzles me is that the signature on the "later" lease they produced seemed to have the unmatching signature (the landlady's, that is). Her signature on the previous lease and some other document (HUD application?) appeared to match. So I'm probably more confused than I was before. Good thing I don't have any problems in my own life that need attention. ;o)