DramatistDreamer

Oh wow, I think the last time I saw Carrie Mitchum was during her final guest appearance on B&B!

Marland's health was also likely deteriorating over the last two years of his run. Soaps had a weak to non-existent awareness of the idea of apprenticeship. With all the prestigious pre-professional writing programs in the country, some just a stone's throw away from CBS, you would've thought these writing programs would've provided a feeder for apprenticeships for these soaps' writing rooms but nope. In the worlds of visual art and architecture, the master painters and master builders all had apprentices who learned how to recreate and mimic their style so that they could finish the projects that were started and the master artist could move onto a different project. People don't honestly believe that Michelangelo, DaVinci and Frank Lloyd Wright did all those works on their own, do they? Having a long running-show spanning decades, it should've dawned on these production companies and networks that if they wanted some continuity, they had to create a formal pipeline of trained talent but the soap industry was content to operate in a helter-skelter fashion. And that lack of professionalism is part of the demise of countless numbers of these daytime soaps.

We know that this happens in other industries too. When POC speak out about lack of diversity, they generally get penalized.

Speaking of insane and dangerous... Every day we sink further and further down the rabbit hole of absurdity.

Ineptitude. After Marland died, ATWT was left with a series of hacks, to put it mildly. So much so, that by the time the show got to Hogan Sheffer, it was in dire straits. People praise Sheffer for doing the least (basically making the show watchable) but Sheffer knew nothing about the actual characters, who he wrote as completely OOC-- half the time Sheffer thought he was writing for AMC, as mentioned in his Emmys acceptance speech. After that speech, people should've seen the signs on what was to come.

The Town Hall has officially jumped the shark.

By the way, Trump couldn't win his home state but that didn't stop the snake from slithering into the White House. I suspect that if Trump had held an actual position in public office, people would have gotten a glimpse into his abhorrent governing style and crossed him off the list. Of course, NYers would never have elected him mayor.

Bill DeBlasio campaigned on and boasted of his progressive credentials but many of his policies haven't necessarily followed, so the backlash has been direct and long-lasting. FWIW, many voters are not in favor of most of NYC's mayors. Giuliani and Bloomberg's presidential ambitions came to naught. On the bright side for DeBlasio, I doubt he will ever be detested as much as Giuliani. Speaking of a figure who people really detest right now- Brian Stelter is getting cursed the hell out in response to some condescending comments he made to Amy Siskind some time ago. Well, turned out he was wrong.

From what I read Terry Lester (Royce Keller) was a friend of Doug Marland and after Marland died, things went awry. I guess somehow Lester didn't fit into the newly evolving show structure without Marland. AW had offers to keep it going but P&G didn't want to sell or make any type of agreement that would save the show. Looking back, it's obvious they gradually aimed to divest themselves completely of their entertainment properties and they didn't want to turn over their properties to any other entity. ATWT also had an offer from CBS to save it and P&G refused. P&G gave a limited amount of time to the SoapClassics people to convert some classic episodes from their titles to digital (like, what eight weeks or so, if that?) before they snatched it back. Not even a year. Not even a season. A big part of the problem of what happened to these soaps rests with P&G and the dysfunctional ways in which they operate.

From what I heard, the Osaka/Bencic match was a highly competitive 3 set battle. Why wouldn't that be shown on the main network? Because it's a women's match? Tennis fans can really be sickening sometimes. The sexism and racism inherent to this sport never ceases to amaze me. On other topics involving actual players, not numbty dumpty fans.

I knew Monfils was going to f*ck it up. He's so much better in best of five sets than best of three. If Madrid clay courts in any way resembled Roland Garros, I'd be much more upset.

Chris Hughes is trending on Twitter! I know, not that Chris Hughes but still-

We'll have to disagree about Felix. You're the first and only person that I've ever heard say that. I don't watch TC nor do I care what they do. People are taking an interest in Felix and TC is obviously grabbing onto that for ratings. FAA is in the Top 30 and currently the youngest player in the Top 100--there's no way tennis media is just going to ignore this kid, especially when the sport is hungry for stories. Ferrer is not making the HOF when he's never won a slam title. If TC is pushing that then they're spreading conspiracy theories.

Probably but Fred Trump was not in the area of upscale real estate development that his son Donald became involved in. It was more like the son got his "feet wet" working/grifting with his father after father greased palms for his son to go to Wharton's business school. Then the son tried to present himself as succeeding his father by going into skyscrapers and towers (whereas the father had relegated development to apartment buildings for middle class mainly white families), when in fact, the father still made (and kept hold of) more money than the son, and the son's risky investments and vanity projects lost a lot of money, which his father had to write a lot of checks repeatedly to cover the shortfall. The Trump family as a unit kept cash rolling in by fraud, overcharging tenants, paying the minimum on maintenance and repairs while overstating the cost to their business (which was store in an opaque LLC., of course).

I know you don't like Felix but c'mon, plenty of players lose to Nadal on clay their first time against him. Sure, it's awkward to challenge on Match Point but it's not as if he's the first to have ever done it. He's 18 and he's still developing his game.

One thing that really struck me after reading about Trump's "Decade In The Red" was how much the press has aided and abetted the Trump myth of a successful businessman over decades. In interviews that were more like profiles, Trump was allowed to present himself as the ultimate corporate raider, even as he racked up huge losses. How did he get banks to repeatedly loan him money? The "name" that he had created for himself actually got people to believe that if he even whispered about staging a takeover that somehow that would be a good thing (what fools these mortals be!), so much so that the stock actually went up, until after repeated false claims, investors actually got wise to this tactic and stopped believing Trump's claims. Too late though because by this time Trump had managed to literally trade on his 'good name' by licensing it to companies-- despite continued losses, the Trump name somehow stood for success and some fools were willing to pay to use it on real estate. Is it any wonder that Trump used that same strategy to present himself as worthy of the highest political office in the land? (Nevermind the fact that politics has nothing to do with business acumen and most CEOs have proved poor public servants ). He'd been so successful scamming the media, even leveraging a television show where he could act out his persona on screen. Enough of the U.S. voting base bought 'Don the Con' as a presidential figure and the rest of the vote was 'massaged' through grift (a common Trumpian tactic) to secure the presidency. It's really breathtaking how many people refused to look at actual fact and believe artifice and smoke and mirrors, which is what Trump as a success is, largely smoke and mirrors.

Oh my! I'm not mad at this spicy pic.

It was in a previous Times story that Donald repeatedly lost enormous amounts of money and his father Fred would bail him out each time. Trump hasn't paid taxes since I was a child and judging by his frequent trips to the golf course, still finding ways to make others foot the bill for his excursions.

This is what I've been saying for years now! Sheffer gets credit for simply pulling the show out of its slumber. It was in the doldrums, tbh but his version of ATWT was vastly different from anything resembling the show's classic years. It really did and because Sheffer had added a consistently absurdist element to so many aspects of the storytelling, everyone that came after him seemed to double down on that element. Maybe because Lindsay hasn't really been an actress in awhile that the information, nobody bothered to update the information but it is still up there--her IMDB page and Wikipedia page still lists Rick Giolito as her husband.

Someone should tell Rick's social media that. He still has Lindsay as his wife on his Twitter page, lol. They're probably on good terms since he retweets her.

...and Rick Giolito, who played Nick Castello (1986-1988).

Probably because the people in charge of ATWT during that period knew 'F*ck All' about the show's history.

Given Dimitrov's results as of late, this development was likely to be expected.