DramatistDreamer

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Both Andrew and Melanie raised eyebrows and gave serious side-eye when they were told that Paul and Emily ended up together. I think, in the eyes of many, especially back then, Paul and Emily were never meant to end up together. It’s still odd to me that this ultimately happened. Then again, I would never have thought to put Barbara with one of James Stenbeck's spawn. Just really odd. Revisiting this Casey euthanasia storyline made me wonder about the impetus for the story surrounding Casey’s sad and brutal decline. The more I see of this era, the more I think that death may have been a consistent preoccupation for Marland. It’s as if he knew on some level that he had just a few years left and he wanted to grapple with the implications of a life cut short.

It shouldn’t take Mo Farah telling the world that he was trafficked as a child to humanize the undocumented migrant but hopefully people will listen to his account and reconsider the inhumanity toward undocumented people whose labor benefits every “advanced” and “industrialized” nation on this planet.

It’s good that CBS keeps this in mind.

Thanks for posting, as I have never heard of this channel. I think I will go to the earliest videos posted on this channel and work my way forward. I think I saw a teenage Donald Faison on a Folgers commercial but the picture quality is so bad that I can’t really tell for sure.

Ooh, @Soapsudsis this the conclusion of the Brock Lombard murder storyline? Several of those episodes are missing from YouTube, which was so frustrating when I tried to watch a couple years ago.

That Sasha Bajin news is as predictable as yesterday’s final.

The braying at the player’s box, the grass eating..I’m over it…all of it. Nick needs to get over the fact that the ATP in its present state doesn’t have 1/10th the cool factor of the NBA or even half the cool factor of the players in UEFA. It just doesn’t and he needs to accept it and stop carrying on and acting out. Tennis is a niche sport for a reason, everyone has to accept that. And describing only one man as controversial without mentioning the other is ridiculous.

I am particularly tired of them feeling it’s okay to go after Black women in, or Black women who aspire to higher office.

There are software programs that can track this for you. It was pretty impressive back in the day though, when writers didn’t have these tools.

Fortunately, I had special plans today and had to leave after the second set. The match went pretty much the way I suspected it would.

And in the run up to the Ladies Singles final yesterday, Hantuchova very astutely noted that sometimes when Ons gets frazzled, she has a tendency to rely too much on her drop shot and it becomes predictable. Maybe Rybakina’s coaches were listening to that broadcast, lol. In any case, by the second set, Rybakina was able to anticipate most of those drop shots and use her long legs to get to and make plays on them.

Neither does Rybakina from the looks of her game but she is stronger and more aggressive and could really hurt Ons with her stroke production, whereas Ons doesn’t really have much to hurt Rybakina on grass. Guile can only take you so far when your opponent can blow you off the court with her shots. She could have tried to rush Elena but Elena doesn’t have to be as fast because the grass is slower than it used to be and Rybakina has long limbs. Ons would have to keep tricking Elena, with new shots every point—sounds exhausting and not really a successful strategy Ons grass court. Edit: on a grass court.

I do think this has the potential to be a protracted legal dispute that gets very messy.

Thinking of Y&R’s climb to #1 and the promotion that it took to get the show there, what you said makes so much sense. On such a conservative network, the show that is doing the most risky material was unlikely to get The Tiffany Network’s seal of approval at a time when it was likely necessary if the show wanted to push for the coveted top spot on the network and eventually of all daytime drama. They were going to need the force of the network backing them. Otherwise, I think WJB fit perfectly with what CBS wanted a family man, creator of his own show but the content had an edge of daring but couldn’t be too edgy.

I did feel badly for Ons, especially the fact that her parents couldn’t even get visas in time to be there to watch her match in person. People were hissing at the Tunisian embassy on social media in response to a good luck tweet they sent to Ons this morning.

It’s a contract, so whoever is proven to be the one who bailed out of the contract must pay the $1B breakup fee. Musk is trying to make Twitter be responsible for the fee and Twitter is defending their position, so the only real option is pay or sue so as to not to have to pay. I could be mistaken but I don’t think there is an option for both parties to walk away without either party paying the fee.

@Soapsuds, I definitely think greater accessibility had everything to do with the rise in ratings. I usually watch via ESPN3 that comes with my ISP and in previous years I wouldn’t get to stream the SFs or Finals on that platform but this year, I watched on ESPN3’s Spanish language stream, which had me giggling 🤭 (one commenator exclaimed “¡Muchas faltas!” at the sheer volume of Rybakina’s faults and errors in the first set) but in previous years, I wouldn’t have been able to get in. On grass, the better athlete is usually going to win, as would the bigger hitter, unless they make frequent errors (a la Madison Keys under pressure). It looked that way at first for Rybakina but once she got her errors under control and was hitting freely and confidently, it was over for Ons, who had no weapons to really hurt her. Ons would have needed to continue mixing up her shots with no recognizable patterns for Elena to pick up on (a challenge under pressure for a first time finalist) and hope that Elena wouldn’t improve her strokes during the match. Whereas Rybakina’s game is much simpler (“see ball, hit ball…hard!”) and all she really needed to do is hit the ball hard and fast away from Ons without the numerous errors that she made in the first set. She could overpower Ons. If this were clay, it would be a different story as the speed of Rybakina’s strokes would be somewhat muted on the dirt. Ons did indeed squander a few opportunities that she had to get back on serve in the second and third sets but she had very few opportunities to do that once Rybakina began to get her shots flowing. Maybe Ons could have hit more balls at Elena’s feet to see whether she could adjust with her height? Although, eventually you’d think even that Elena would adjust to. I do think that Ons felt she was out of options and panicked, hitting the same drop shots over and over.

ICYMI, this is an ongoing situation in Sri Lanka for quite some time and the volatility level has ratcheted up that much higher. Hunger will do that to people.

Okay, so it’s not just me who found this year’s women’s final a bit anti-climactic? The level of play started out decent in the first few games of the opening set but proceeded to taper off from there. I expected nerves and bouts of sloppy play to factor into the match but it never ended. There were moments where Ons played well and there were moments when Rybakina hit some powerful shots but never the ‘twain met. Considering how poor Rybakina’s volleys are, it really is a credit to her ball striking and Ons’ sense of panic that Rybakina could manage to win a tournament where properly executed volleys used to be a must in order to win. Rybakina has a subpar net game and little to no good volleys and still won the title. That must give Karolina Pliskova some hope. And yes, a Russian did manage to win the tournament as Rybakina is one of those players who changed nationality for expediency and money. I mean, it’s something that athletes often do in sports, not just tennis but I never expect there to be much introspection about it, nevermind an honest conversation about it.

Apparently Twitter has ordered its employees not to tweet about the deal anymore. This sip of tea was tweeted before that mandate though.

I have fallen behind on my viewing of these uploads but I saw Caroline’s story arc in real time when it originally aired so it won’t be a spoiler to me. Even as a kid, I found Johnson really impressive, right up to her final scenes. I do think that there was an enormous amount of competition in what would have been her category back then and Joanna Johnson gave understated performances (beautifully understated) and I have given my thoughts on how Daytime Emmy awards committee/academy seemed to be biased against understated performances, seemingly in favor of performances that veered toward being more melodramatic. No knock against those performances that can come off as more exciting in clips, but an understated performance reveals its depth and power over time, not necessarily in a 10 second clip, which is how most voters are judging (do we really believe that the voters are taking the time to watch entire episodes of these shows?) Another aspect that I wonder about is whether people in nominating process of the Daytime Emmys had doubts about the sustainability of B&B and opted to “invest” nominations in the series that they believed had assured longevity. As a 30 minute serial, it may have caused a bit of doubt as to how long it could last on air. Capitol and even Ryan’s Hope ending before the end of the 1980s may have planted seeds of doubt.

It would be very interesting to hear the thoughts of your friends and former colleagues in future when they’ve had the chance to process this all and after they have been able to collect themselves but now they are plunged into this tragedy, my condolences go out to them right now. Hi @Cat, my friend’s piece was very poignant, it was a theatrical piece, as we were in a multidisciplinary graduate writing program for the dramatic arts. I was fortunate to been in a very diverse program (which changed years down the road for a number of years unfortunately) and I learned a lot from a number of my colleagues who drew from many theatrical and film traditions worldwide. but I digress. It is good to see the Biden administration take action, but they have been engaging with the public on this issue, the media has been paying almost no attention to this. VP Harris was speaking on this issue and others at talks at the Essence Fest a couple weekends ago. Stacey Abrams was also in attendance. Harris and Biden have likely been having some in depth discussions about the matter.

A few weeks ago, one of my brothers who works at an international shipping company, told me that the shipping containers that had been held up for several months, were being released and were coming in and it was a constant barrage of deliveries. Recently, I am reading that inflation could be abating and the concern is that the Fed won’t adapt, opting instead to continue to raise rates, causing an overreaction, which would not be good. Also recently read that house sales have been declining, causing the market to cool. This morning, I am seeing that there will be a glut of merchandise in stores and that there will be price drops because retailers will need to move merchandise. Now, the prognostications that gas prices will soon fall, but suspiciously, no prognosis on when drivers will see it reflected at the pump. Now, seeing the jobs report. Maybe it’s just the suspicious way my mind works but I have suspected for some months, that many of the price increases have been manipulated and that it is part of a lot of manipulation going on to benefit a relative few, especially seeing the midterm elections are coming up. Hopefully these issues can get sorted for the better soon.

Years ago, I recommended NHK World news and PBS NewHour as viable alternatives to the mainstream news media here in the U.S. NHK has evolved from the late night news programs that I used to watch, on occasion when I would keep some late nights during grad school in the early ‘00s to the extensive coverage they provided during the Indian Ocean tsunami a few years later. By the time of the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami/Fukushima Daiichi tragedy, I was already a daily viewer. Yes their other programming is also very interesting (you could easily find yourself watching Somewhere Street or a special on the famous Tsujiki fish market (which moved to a new location). I actually requested that they get back on the Roku to increase their accessibility. They politely responded that it wasn’t a priority but they would keep it under consideration. To my surprise, a couple years ago, they returned with their own channel on Roku. Of course, now I mainly watch them on tablet and mobile devices. It is very odd to hear U.S. news media refer to Abe as a right-winger, since right-winger has an entirely different connotation here in the U.S. Anyone confused about what I refer to only need look at video of that infamous handshake between Abe and Trump from years ago and the expression on Abe’s face afterward. In terms of the Comfort Women issue, a fellow writer/friend of mine who is a Korean woman wrote a piece while we were in Grad school in the early’00s when almost no one outside of the southern Korean Peninsula was talking about this (she educated me on the issue) and yes, the anger is and remains very real. My experience in England, as alarming as it was, apparently is not uncommon, particularly for other Black women in Europe. In England specifically though, I talked to other people, students, artists of South Asian and West Indian and a few African people and even among those who were born and raised in London, the sentiment often was that, even if you were born in England, if you were of color and stood out as not being of English identity, you were treated as a guest in the country, no matter how long you lived there. The big joke was they’d always say “I’m British but…” the but was always a mitigating factor in othering someone’s identity. I suspect, similar to the U.S., people have become more assertive about hyphenated identities.