Mondrianyone

Cell reception at our house isn't reliable at all, so we have to have landlines. If I saw that kind of notification on my cell, I'd assume it was some upgrade, but it's so weird to see on the landline. I may call the phone company and ask if they're doing something new. They did just get taken over by a big corporate entity, so I guess it's possible. I wonder if the caller knows he's being tagged. And I wonder if I call somebody and their caller ID says "ANNOYING WOMAN."

The weirdest thing just happened. My landline phone rang, and I picked up the handset to check caller ID--which said "PROBABLY FRAUD," with the number underneath. I've never seen anything like that before. Is there some kind of program now that tags the numbers of shady people on caller ID? I Googled the number, and it comes up as an actual person, which is rare, but no real info except address. Maybe my phone is trying to protect me from scammers. 🤷‍♀️

Would somebody please open up the door already??? Okay, his vocal performance tonight was probably the best of the ones we've heard so far, but this song was so awful. According to the article linked earlier, he and the producers fell in love with this writer's songs. For the life of me I don't know why. (And I love jazz.)

Last week I binge-watched a bunch of episodes that I had missed from a few seasons ago, and it reminded me that there's a very definite pattern to this show: two actual patients and one what I call the "clown patient." The first two get the surgery and the clown gets the bum's rush. The clown might not even really want the procedure at all, just the TV exposure.

Uh-oh. This can't mean anything good for Chicken of the Sea tuna, can it?

I hear that salaries are through the roof in another industry. But seriously, Dr. Lee was very tolerant with him. I imagine having a patient like that could be a real pain in the ass. Not sure I would have the forbearance she showed.

Fortunately, filling the generator with gas isn't my chore. But he whose chore it is curses those gas cans to high heaven. @Browncoat, can't you give yourself a break, at least till you can get the mower fixed, and hire somebody to finish the grass this time? High-school kids still do that, don't they?

I'm in this range. But I've never seen anything that size here that wasn't a lobster. Yikes.

What part of the country do these hand-size spiders live in?

That's apparently his pickup line, too. He was telling those ladies at the bar that he went to medical school for three and a half years. I wonder when that'll start to get old for him. And I really wish we'd been told what he actually went on to do for a living.

I like them, too. That may be at least in part because we don't have any of the scary kind where I live, but I've never been afraid of them or inclined to kill them. When I first was going around with the guy I eventually married, we were lying in the grass in a park one day and a spider crawled onto my arm. He later told me he was very charmed to see that it didn't faze me at all. So I have a lot to blame that spider for.

I'm really sad to hear you have such mean "friends," @oliviabenson. I'm constantly gobsmacked by the randomly cruel things people will say to other people. Even to strangers, as if the cruelty is the whole point. If I'd been at dinner with you, I'd have told them, "Don't feel sorry for her. She just lost three hundred pounds of useless flesh. See ya." Don't let it stick with you.

I've always thought this as well, but now I'm not so sure. I hard-boiled (actually steamed, per J. Kenji López-Alt, the man with the most ethnically diverse name on earth) half a dozen eggs earlier this week. After I'd taken the eggs out of the fridge, I noticed I had four from the supermarket and two from our friends' chickens, which would've been much fresher, so it was a mixed batch. When I peeled them, the shells of the friend eggs slid off like they'd been sprayed with silicone. So now I don't know what to believe. We are planning on starting a band called Chicken 16, though, after the hippest chicken in our friends' flock. I won't torture anyone here with the song titles we've come up with so far. You're welcome.

Not. Being. Able. To. Find. Things. Holy crap, what a pain. Last year I wanted to make a birdbath. By the time I assembled all the components I needed, it was too late in the year to be worthwhile. So I decided to do it for next (i.e., this) year. And I didn't have time till now. So I find all of the parts except the solar fountain. Both of us have looked everywhere, but no dice. It's actually become easier to buy the thing again rather than waste so much time hunting for the original one. Which is exactly what I just did. Fortunately, I have rewards points that I can use on Amazon, so if you squint, it seems free. We're going to have to start keeping a list of where we put stuff. Of course then we'll probably lose the list.

I, on the other hand, lived in abject terror of having my name come up. The show that scared me wasn't Romper Room, but I can't remember what it was called. On this particular show, some guy in a space ship would read off kids' names and they would magically appear in the ship with him. The show was on early in the morning, so I was always in my pajamas, and the idea of suddenly being teleported onto TV in my pj's filled me with fear. I couldn't relax until I was sure I was still in my living room. Romper Room just let you be, so I was cool with that.

We had the rabbit ears, too, with the requisite ball of crushed aluminum foil stuck on top of them. God knows why we had such lousy reception, on Long Island with no obstructions like mountains between us and the Manhattan broadcast towers about ten miles away, and yet we did. At some point one of us discovered by accident that if you stomped on the floor in the den, the reception would clear up for a few minutes. So we would sit there as a family and periodically all stamp our feet simultaneously. Any stranger observing this from a distance would have to think we were members of some bizarre religious cult who showed our devotion to Ed Sullivan by this weird foot slamming. Ah, the crazy old days.

Yes, you're right. I got their details switched.

But a lot of the GBBO bakers (not even necessarily winners) have gotten books, TV shows, businesses out of their participation. So they know that's a real possibility, which makes it worth the effort. The GBBO hosts and judges are a major asset toward that end, helping to bring out the best in the contestants, so viewers get to know them and like them and have an accurate idea of how good they are at what they're doing. Can't say that's gonna happen here. The notion that it's a good idea to keep all scoring secret is beyond me (unless the scoring doesn't really figure into the final choice, which I strongly suspect after last night). I'm not saying I think money should always be the goal. It's just that this show is so . . . dreary and pointless that you have to wonder why do it at all?

Somehow I don't see these contestants being able to monetize the win the way they do on the GBBO. They're not nearly as engaging, and the challenges are so vague that there's nothing for viewers to hook onto. You don't even have to win the GBBO to make money off being a contestant. I didn't watch the previous season of this. Did the winner of that one manage to make a career out of it?

No, she was from Queens. Of Guyanese heritage, I think. Relle was the Hawaiian, and she was on top in several challenges. I didn't like her, but the judges seemed to like her food more than Leanna's. Bored me, too. And the prize for all this work is extremely underwhelming.

Well, Leanna was certainly a surprise. She seemed to be in the bottom more often than not. I came away with the feeling that the finalists were ethnically and otherwise curated for a balance that would make everyone feel good. I don't think I'll be back for another season if there is one.

Maybe it's just me, but I've been thinking that $50 grand is kind of a chintzy prize for all that work. I mean, if you're good at Jeopardy!, you can make that much in two short games. This was, what, eight weeks (or TV weeks anyway) of hard, hot cramped-kitchen toil, long days, being away from home--and then theoretically you split the cash three ways. I hope the exposure is worth it, because I'm not sure I would sign up for that money. If I were FN, I'd double the purse. I think they can afford it. At least Khana ended up doing it all for nothing. Yay.

I don't have YT TV, but on our smart TV, a global search takes me to her individual YT videos with that same title. At least they're consistent within YT, so that makes sense. Maybe she can't legally use the TLC title on YT. 🤷‍♀️

I'll settle. I didn't get asked to confirm. So that's the excuse I'm sticking with.

Funny, I had a similar issue with this show, but on Dish satellite. I had to go back and find the ones I'd missed by searching On Demand, even though it was programmed to record. I just checked the Bad Skin title, and what came up was Bad Skin Clinic on YouTube but no indication of a name change on TLC. I watched a couple of them (each is one case, treatment and follow-up, about nine minutes long), and one I'd seen before on the regular show, one I hadn't. No idea what's going on here.