Mondrianyone

Am I a bad person for thinking that Carmen's fall was staged and her injuries are bogus? When she fell last week, I thought it looked very choreographed. I figured the reason was getting an extended shot of her ass on the show, but maybe it was to give her an excuse to leave. She certainly jumped up from the floor looking totally fine. I need to find other things to think about.

That whole deal seemed very hinky to me, too. All the things you've mentioned, bioprof, plus--if an elderly woman doesn't answer her door and her dogs are barking their heads off, wouldn't it occur to her daughter and her granddaughter that something might be wrong? And if neither of them has a key, to call the cops to come do a welfare check? She could be passed out on a floor somewhere, but because she didn't answer the door for the TV cameras, the hell with her.

I hope I'm wrong, too, Bratt. My concern isn't that he'll do something right away--definitely not before he gets home on JJ's dime. I'm just worried that he'll wait till the story isn't fresh anymore and do something then. You know the old saying about revenge being a dish best served cold. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who takes well to having his will challenged, especially by women. Let's just hope he finds some other way to be an asshole and leaves ex and dog alone.

I'm concerned he still might be--malicious enough, that is. Hope I'm wrong about that.

I haven't seen any of today's shows yet, but re yesterday's Shaughnessy Fahy (the Irish half of me is so proud), I'm surprised nobody here mentioned the moronic smiley-face tie. Just the thing to wear to court when you want to impress the judge of your sober nature. And never mind the fact that it came all the way down to not even the bottom of his sternum, so he looked like a blow-up clown wearing a kiddie tie and smuggling a watermelon under his shirt. All he was missing was the red ball nose and the giant flappy shoes. I think there might be a market for a book called Fashion Tips for Litigants: How to Style When You File. We could all collaborate. I know tons of publishers.

For FJ, at first I couldn't imagine who it was, and then I had one of those brain-sponge moments where the memory popped out through one of the holes in the sponge, which tends to happen if you squeeze just right, and gently enough. I asked my husband, "Do you know it?" He said, "No, do you?" And I said I thought it was D. H. Lawrence, and he said (a bit condescendingly, I thought), "Oh, did Lawrence travel around in the Southwest?" I didn't have an answer for that, and I started second-guessing myself. So it was a triumphal moment when that turned out to be the right answer. He high-fived me, but I said I thought he should bow. Because that was really hard.

And cleavers? They all seemed to be using chef's knives to remove the head and legs. They'd have been a lot less squeamish if they had the right tool and didn't have to saw away at those poor birds. I actually thought it was pretty disrespectful to the animals' lives to make a creepy joke out of butchering them.

That was my take on it as well. The problem being that when you say something that makes you sound like a caveman and you actually look like a caveman, people can't be faulted for taking you seriously. (I don't actually know what cavemen looked like from firsthand experience. I'm not that old. Just based on Fred Flintstone, whose looks I'm assuming are historically accurate.) The NY bridges and tunnels (except those that connect to NJ) also lead to places that are technically NYC proper, like Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island. And now Brooklyn is probably even cooler than Manhattan, and Queens is on its way. So they can stop looking down their noses already. Does contact with air really make boy babies suddenly need to pee? That would explain why my brother was always getting the poor pediatrician in his face. I learn so much here!

I wondered about that, too. I was also surprised that she didn't make him specify what "public service" meant--she usually doesn't have much patience for vaguenesses like that. The other oversight that surprised me was about the amount of money he expected to earn in the amount of time that job was supposed to take. He said at the outset that he was allowed to earn $720 a month without having to report it to SSI. But he started that bathroom job at the beginning of January and projected finishing it at the end of March. So that's three months into $3,850--which comes out to $1,280+ per month. Almost twice what he claimed was legal without reporting it. If she was so disgusted with his fraud, she should've made him say out loud on TV what he was earning so that anyone from SSI who was watching could make the necessary adjustments. The crazy thing (and what always amazes me) is that this is the guy who brought the suit, and this is the guy who'd be admitting on TV that he was scamming the system--and yet he seemed to have no problem with that. Do any of these people ever consider the skeletons they'll be letting out of their own closets before they show up in America's living rooms? It's nuts. When we were still living in NYC, we used to see a cat sitting in a window right beside the basement entrance to our building. One day we saw a cat who looked very much like her crying and pacing frantically on the sidewalk outside that window with one of her rear legs dangling behind her. She'd obviously gotten out through the screen and been hit by a car. We scooped her up and brought her to the door of her owner, the building drunk. He vehemently denied she was his cat. This in spite of the fact that he couldn't produce his cat when we asked to see her. So we took her in and determined to get her to a vet, even though we were young and poor. We found an organization that helped strays, and one of their vet affiliates set her broken leg and put her in a cast, for half his normal fee. We kept her until she was as healed as she was going to get (we named her Peg, for her peg leg), and then we found her a good home. Sometimes I think there was a little hitch in the evolutionary path of people where most of us went one way and the ones who didn't get their full dose (or any dose) of humanity went the other. I'm always so happy to hear stories that confirm my faith in the larger group.

I really like this show a lot, too. The daughter isn't a typical sitcom kid, tossing off one-liners and smarter than her parents. She's just a real kid, which ends up being much funnier. And I love the character of the husband (and the very cute actor who plays him!). He's not the stock sitcom dad/husband who's too stupid to work the toaster. Just a smart, tolerant, bemused grown-up who's happy to let his loudmouth wife take center stage but isn't a fool because of it. And I'm very happy to see Kathy Baker and Martin Mull getting to use their talents again. Not to mention Andrea's friend, played by Alison Tolman--if there were any sense in the TV world, she'd still be starring in her terrific show Downward Dog, which I'll miss a great deal. Eventually we're going to find out that the "blind" perv isn't really blind. Someone is going to notice that he only asks for help from women and never men because he can see them. I'm so glad this was renewed.

Adrian, who is unfailingly kind to the HHs, no matter how annoying they get, definitely had an "I want to punch her in the face" look by the end of the dancer episode. We get it, you have long legs. Enough. They kept showing the Moulin Rouge exterior. I've been there, though not since the '90s. Back then it turned out to be a really dreary, depressing naked-dancing venue, with most of the dancers barely (pun intended) able to stay awake through their routines. I hope that's not Cara's dream job. Unless it's come up a lot since then, it's nothing for Grandma to be proud of.

Kenya's been robbed three weeks in a row. And now I'm starting to wonder why that is.

Did he take his own life? That must have been mentioned when my husband came into the room to talk to me (the nerve!). I wonder how that worked, because, I also thought suicide was precluded as a cause of death. Slightly OT, but we watch a lot of Forensics Files around here, and we're constantly amazed by how many spouses take out huge life insurance policies on their other half just before that other half meets some sort of tragic "accidental" death. And then it turns out that the victim never knew that the beneficiary had taken out the policy. If it hasn't already been made into law, it should be: Nobody can take out a policy that allows them to profit from another person's death without the verified knowledge of the insured. It's the best motive for murder ever, and insane that it's actually allowed.

It's scary how many people are just wired wrong. Or not wired at all. Like that grandma. She wanted to punish that girl for God knows what, and I don't think she's done trying yet. I also don't get what the deal was with taking life insurance policies out on all her grandsons (not granddaughters, if there were any?). How on earth would the boys benefit? It feels weirdly like a lottery, where the payoff is that the young men die.

I thought maybe it just seemed longer! This is one of those shows I'm not sure why I keep on watching. They seem like nice people, but with the mother cackling at everything, the daughter's nasal vocal fry, and rooms that look like a Home Goods store threw up in them . . . Might be time to pull the plug.

Did they cut the length of it? All the episodes I've seen have been a full hour--I think. I have to go check the ones on my DVR that I haven't watched yet!

You're right, sorry. She didn't go with her, but she definitely discussed the subject as if the whole thing wasn't already familiar to her--from personal experience. It's one thing not to want your own fertility business out there, but as a "friend" (even in quotes), it's beyond shitty not to confide offstage about what you're doing. And if you don't want to confide to a trainwreck like MJ, just avoid the subject entirely. Goddesses aren't usually that shady.

Well, she kind of opened the door to it by going with MJ on camera to freeze eggs and acting as if it were all something she knew nothing about. Lots of things on this show shouldn't be story lines, but that's the price they're happy to pay to be on TV and collect a check. Most of them seem to have ditched whatever jobs they used to have. The editors really don't seem to like Asa at all anymore. That sequence alternating her complaints about how everyone abandoned her to her hellish pregnancy in Israel with the others doing everything they could to be solicitous and helpful was pretty funny. I'll be interested to see how the reunion handles all her kvetching versus the reality. I hope none of these people become parents. (I know Asa already is--I should've wished sooner.)

I believed him at first, too. But I don't claim to have those magical neck hairs that give me the power to zero in on liars every time. It's her shtick, I get it, but sometimes it just annoys me. And it never seems to deter people from lying to her. Maybe if I made $40 mil a year, I bet I could afford to buy some of those truth hairs! Where's that Powerball jackpot when you're trying to fight for truth and justice?!?

This case made me think (not for the first time) about JJ's alleged "truth machine" abilities. When the def first told his story, she told the plaintiff that what def had said was absolutely true. Then the details started emerging--like how he stole at least $600 from plaintiff by inflating the real cost of the car--and suddenly the truth wasn't so true anymore. I guess what I'm saying is that what looks like the truth one minute can pretty quickly morph into a convincing lie. And that if you're (meaning JJ) the one who gets to "feel the truth through the hairs on the back of your neck" and you're also the one who gets to rule on what the truth is or isn't, the definition of truth and your vaunted abilities as an infallible truth detector are extremely subjective. You forgot the very fetching (and presumably not cheap) chest tats. I Googled Moline, and I'm 99% sure they're not the same person. I did learn, though, that Moline has lost lots of weight and graduated from Columbia. I couldn't determine whether it was a legit division of the university or the School of General Studies, which is a kind of back-door way of saying you graduated from Columbia. If he did it the hard way, good for him. Me neither. My animals get medical care before I do. I mean, I'm lucky that I don't have to choose, but there were times when I did have to prioritize, and I figure they can't get a job to pay their doctor bills, so they can get ahead of me in line, since I can sign a credit card. At least I hope they can't use my card.

I was just thinking that by the same principle of verb conjugation . . . "make" would be "mooken" "bake" would be "booken" "rake" would be "rooken" "wake" would be "wooken" and "fake" would be "fooken"--that one would probably come up a lot on this show!

Yep, or at least that's how the story went. I found it a little hard to believe that someone would move into a house and on that very same day chop down his neighbor's tree before he even said hello, nice to meet you. But I guess it takes all kinds!

And the garage sale she held, and when the neighbor chopped down her tree. We've seen it quite a bit.

I'm a kitchenware/gadget hoarder, so I really like the stacked cabinets. In our current house, we have a cold-storage room in the basement, and that's where I keep all my extra stuff, but I'd love not to have to trudge downstairs to get something I need. If you could build something like a library ladder into a renovated kitchen to make it easier to access items in those upper cabinets, that would be my ideal setup. We also have very high ceilings, so I like anything that makes full use of the vertical space. That last house really was essentially a teardown. It seems they were paying for the land more than the actual house. By the time they were done clearing out rotten wood and loose foundation bricks, there was very little left of the original structure. Did they have two full bathrooms on the main floor and none upstairs? That seems silly for a house that small.

I think I must be having courtroom-TV-induced hallucinations. In today's "smoke damage" insurance case, there was someone in the gallery who looked exactly like Amy Schumer. When I start seeing dead celebrities, I'm gonna get some help. (Somebody tell me I'm not totally crazy.)