Mondrianyone

Nothing like an impending deadline to spur spurious creativity. I stole @CarpeDiem54's idea for screwing with a Beatles title and wrote some verses. I didn't get as far as a bridge, so there's at least that to be grateful for. If I'm not welcome back here, I totally understand. Sung to the tune of "Hey Jude": Hey Judge, your ruling's bad Take a moment and go reverse it. You ruled just the opposite yesterday, And here on the board, we sure did curse it. Hey Judge, don't let us down, All you need are the fundamentals. Then stick to them with some consistency, And we won't be such damn judgmentals. Nah nah nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah, Ca-meuuu Nah nah nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah, au jus (And so on. Rodang. Good for you.)

It's just great minds, under great fruit hats, thinking alike. ;o)

The thing is, they both acted like the toilet-paper holder was an original idea. But wasn't Alex Jacob the first player to say that's what he used to practice buzzer technique? Credit where credit is due. I said both and was then pretty surprised that the one they wanted was her real name, Blixen, which was much less known than her pen name. Maddening.

And every other foreign word that gets thrown at him. He really went to town on "bocce" in the interview segment last night. Even the ancient Italian guys I used to watch playing in Little Italy didn't give it that much old-country spin. (The word, that is, not the ball.) I love that, carpe! Lenny's saying just what I was thinking.

And banana and papaya were both answers tonight!

I just saw that! (Though I couldn't make it through the whole show.) That random shout of "Inertia!" (what . . . ??) reminded me of a story my friend used to tell. She went to a bar mitzvah, and the band was playing the old instrumental "Tequila." Except at every place in the song where the musicians were supposed to yell "Tequila!" the bar mitzvah boy would instead yell "Bar Mitzvah!" But at least that made some sense in context. So if she ever loses this gig, she could show up at bar mitzvahs and yell "Inertia!" I'm also starting to wonder if Zakarian isn't paying her to say "Iron Chef" at least once per show. Maybe there's a sliding scale: She gets 20 bucks for every "Iron Chef," 10 for each "Mandolin Hands," and 5 each for either "He's so dapper" or "Golden Palate." She can't be doing all that for free.

Lenny looked good in everything. RIP (in this case meaning "Rest in Papayas," I guess.) And stop choking.

I think that should hereafter be called the Pranjal Gambit. And speaking of giving official names to things, we had a lot of time to be goofy waiting for the official answer to instaget FJ, and we came up with the idea of renaming it the Carmen Miranda Warning, which would require LEOs to put on a hat made of bananas and mangoes before issuing it. We probably should've FF'd through the think music. On the even stupider side, I read Smilla's Sense of Snow and saw the movie, and I still couldn't remember the right country. All those darn Scandinavians look alike.

Well, to be fair, if two people are going to write a cookbook, you've gotta have at least one who can write and one who can cook. In this case . . .

This is what I said when the question was first posed. I think she thinks that edification has something to do with reinforcing some flavor or ingredient by adding more of the same, like oil on top of an already oily avocado or nonstick spray to a nonstick pan. She's not stupid, but she's also not smart enough to flip open a dictionary and make sure she knows what a word means before she starts using it totally incorrectly--on national TV. I think she's attracted to fancy, shiny words and phrases, partly because she thinks they make her seem smarter and more sophisticated. But they have exactly the opposite effect when you use them wrong. I'm not gonna go to her Instagram and edify her, though.

Maybe he's on the Austism spectrum (get it--Austin? Austistic?). If it weren't disrespectful to people with actual autism, that's how I'd refer to all these clown types. But it is, so I won't.

Or I could drive to any one of a number of local gas stations and grab some lobsters out of the tank and we can call that lunch? Yes, we can buy lobster at the gas station here. Not too shabby for the middle of nowhere. Maybe that would even entice Her Honor herself to join us. ;o)

How could it be anything but sushi? (I don't even like sushi, but this is a tribute lunch after all.)

I was rooting like crazy for Frank to keep guessing--the sooner to get him off my TV. And for once it worked. He still didn't limbo back onto his head, though, which was my main disappointment. I somehow pulled the Pritzker Prize out of my highly architectural ass. I think one of my friends dated a Pritzker, so thanks to her for that. Apropos of almost nothing, I really love being dumped into the hater category when I have a different opinion of something from someone else's. It sends me (and my imaginary walker) careening back to middle school. See ya, Frank.

I haven't seen the work-from-home episode yet, but I work from home, so I'm gonna say that qualifies me to comment. Actually, I have no comment about the case, but the things you folks are saying reminded me of something I've been thinking for a while now. I get the impression that JJ has been laying the groundwork for a new book for the last year or so, with her repeated comments about "Not in my America." She says it so often I'm guessing that's the working title. Somebody owes me a lunch if I turn out to be right. Just bring it to my house. Where I work. ;o)

I was hoping Frank would lean over backwards so far that he'd fall off his box. We need more slapstick on Jeopardy! Maybe it could still happen. Marty was on the verge of getting on my nerves today. Shades of "voice artist" Arthur Chu. How deluded are some of these people? Even I do a better Donald Duck. Actually, that's how I sound when I speak normally.

Wait a minute--"necrophilia and some really unpleasant sexual practices"??? I'll sell you the word "other" really cheap for that sentence. ;o)

It just occurred to me that the women who come on JJ could collectively be "a bunch of girls named Sue." Friends of ours let their cat roam outdoors and lost it to coyotes. Got another cat, same arrangement, same fate. They now have two more cats who go outdoors and have so far managed to cheat death. I love my friends, but sometimes I want to beat their heads in with a tire iron. And now I never get emotionally attached to any cat they adopt. Our cat (who I finally managed to convince my husband to compromise on after our last dog had to be put down and who now has him totally wrapped around her paw) lives indoors, but she really wants to go out. Last summer we replaced our deck, and when the weather warms up again, we're adding on a catio for her. Cats kill something like half a billion birds every year, so keeping them indoors is safer for both the cats and other wildlife.

It is a game. It's called "The Venereal Game," of all things, from the hunters (something like venari in Latin) who used to name particular groups of animals. And then it got expanded to other groups. The way we used to play it, someone would give a particular type of person--or profession, whatever--and we'd try to come up with the best name for the group of those people. Like a clack of typists, say. I guess you had to be an English major.

A whine of women? (I love this game. Used to play it all the time.)

If you've never heard this before, now's the time.

I can't wait till we have a case where someone is suing a contractor for doing a bad job building a brick retaining wall and we can justifiably call him a janky mason!

The only way those rulings make any sense (and that can be a stretch with the kind of judging we've been seeing lately) is if they know he has some kind of speech difficulty that he's dealing with. It still doesn't seem fair, but it might be an accommodation. It also helps to know the name of the Dutch royal house. And then you're a third of the way there.

Odd that they didn't even put a handrail on at least one side of that stone stairway. Probably would help a lot.

Can someone tell me what I'm getting wrong? With what I do for a living, sometimes I spend all day trying to intuit what words an author really meant to use, as opposed to the ones they did use. Sunny used this word completely incorrectly. The closest I can come is that she meant something like "reinforcement"--i.e., reinforcing the nonstick finish with butter or cooking spray so there was no chance the food would stick when she went to unmold it. I think she was confusing "edification" with "fortification" (which would also be wrong, but it's edging closer to what she wanted). She was having a vocabulary moment, if you will. Taking off my mind reader's turban now.