Statuses

📺 “Blue Bloods” Past Tense | CBS

Watched "Blue Bloods" Past Tense from CBS
Directed by Rachel Feldman. With Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, Will Estes, Len Cariou. After a woman is murdered in her apartment, Danny and Baez turn to her daughter for help, but instead she complicates the investigation; someone from Jamie and Eddie's past launches a smear campaign against them.

📺 “Kids Baking Championship” Desserts Doing Good | Food Network

Watched "Kids Baking Championship" Desserts Doing Good from Food Network
With Duff Goldman, Valerie Bertinelli, Paige Goehner, Meadow Roberts.
It drives me a bit crazy that these shows always pick their winners on a single episode performance rather than an overall season-long performance. I don’t think I can keep watching this show even as a guilty pleasure.

📺 “The Americans” Dimebag | Amazon Prime

Watched "The Americans" Dimebag from Amazon Prime
Directed by Thomas Schlamme. With Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Lev Gorn, Annet Mahendru. Philip faces a moral dilemma while developing an asset. Philip and Elizabeth's friction escalates. Stan develops a theory with serious reprecussions for national security. Paige makes a surprising birthday wish.
★★★★☆ Brief review of Ungifted by Gordon Korman​​

I think Amazon had a review that said if you’re a fan of Louis Sachar, you’ll love this book by Gordon Korman. I think that Korman has been writing great stuff for so long that it’s really more appropriate to say that if you love Gordon Korman, you’ll probably like a lot of Louis Sachar.

Like all Korman’s books, this one has a lot of heart. It wasn’t quite as laugh out loud funny as some of his other efforts, but it’s definitely got some great humor.

Typically I don’t like narratives that are told from multiple viewpoints, but Korman manages to pull it off incredibly well by starting each chapter with a title that uses an “Un-word” followed by the narrator and their IQ score. As a result we also get a much more nuanced picture of all of the characters which are incredibly well done.

As one of the “smart” kids growing up, I wish this book had been around to have read then, but it’s still great now and everyone is sure to appreciate it. While the protagonist is a boy, I really appreciated that there was lots of great female representation here.

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📺 “7 Days Out” Kentucky Derby | Netflix

Watched "7 Days Out" Kentucky Derby from Netfix
Directed by Robert Richman.
This episode is a little less interesting because it features a big event, but at a venue at which the same sort of event is done on a daily and even annual basis. Thus more of the emphasis of the piece is put onto the handful of characters that are participating in the event itself. It was also tough to get into a bit knowing in advance that there was a triple crown winner in 2018 and so the build of of tension just wasn’t there at all for me.

📺 “7 Days Out” Eleven Madison Park | Netflix

Watched "7 Days Out" Eleven Madison Park from Netflix
Directed by Michael John Warren. The Eleven Madison Square Park restaurant is the number one ranked restaurant in the world. Following audacious renovation plans the staff work to maintain the level of quality the world has come to expect.
An interesting documentary series, but I think I can tell from the titles of some of the episodes that some are going to be more interesting to me than others.

While this one paints perhaps an overly rosy picture, it’s interesting to see some of the work behind pushing a major restaurant into existence. I might have liked to have seen 7 weeks out to have a better view of what was going on here too.

Replied to a tweet by Khürt WilliamsKhürt Williams (Twitter)
“@ChrisAldrich figuring out how to attend an IndieWebCamp online session is about as frustrating as using the tools themselves. Can you help me out? Where can I find a video feed?”
They’ve all been listed at https://indieweb.org/2019/Online/Schedule with appropriate links. The chat channels are the best place for immediate help. Most of the sessions have been recorded, so you can catch them after the fact.

Hopefully you got things sorted before seeing this. There was a small bump in getting things started because the video server they had planned on using had some last minute problems that prevented recording, so they switched to Google Hangouts at the last minute. Other than that, most of it has gone fairly smoothly. Sorry to hear you had issues.

I’m curious if you could document the exact problems you ran into so that we can fix them in the future. Were there things you couldn’t find on the wiki? Was it bandwidth problems? Others?

📺 “Beverly Hills, 90210” Slumber Party | Amazon

Watched "Beverly Hills, 90210" Slumber Party from Amazon
Directed by Charles Braverman. With Jason Priestley, Shannen Doherty, Jennie Garth, Ian Ziering. Brenda throws a slumber party and invites Kelly, Donna and Andrea over for the night. But the evening turns sour when Kelly's bad girlfriend, Amanda Pacer, crashes the party and plays a game which brings out secrets that threaten the friendships between all of them. Meanwhile, Brandon and Steve go out together for a night of cruising and club hopping in which they end up getting duped by two ...
An awkward, likely unrealistic plot, but it makes for a relatively interesting teachable set of moments. I wonder what the post-modern Twitter version would look like?