BSR

Gotta click on the photo to get it ...

Best of luck with your roscón de reyes. Here's a great recipe and video done by a guy who's been making roscón since he was a little kid. It looks a bit messy if you're kneading the dough by hand; probably much easier if you have a stand mixer. PS: what series featured roscón? Velvet?

In our family, ube halaya was the traditional Christmas specialty. Since back in those days ube jam was quite expensive and difficult to get, we made ube halaya only once a year. Nowadays, you can find frozen ube (much better for halaya than ube jam) for a very reasonable price at the local Filipino supermarket. For those unfamiliar, ube is a purple yam grown in the Philippines and Indonesia. Ube halaya is a dessert made with ube, condensed milk, and either evaporated milk or coconut milk. Pictures of the raw yam & the finished dessert:

I shan't give away any spoilers but will say that it all makes sense once you see the final episode of the original Merlí.

"I have money arranged for the bail, but since it is from out of state, a California resident is required to co-signer." Huh, he must have omitted the step involving the Nigerian prince.

JJ Wolf lost today's final in Florence, but at least he looked good doing it. Because tennis demands height (for the serve) and speed, most players are long and lean. If you like shorter guys with more curves, it's slim pickins. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions ...

Bruno and Pol are the sexiest gay couple I've ever seen on screen. Fortunately, I found the skinnydipping scene from the first episode of Sapere Aude. The English subtitles aren't the best, but no self-respecting gay man watches this scene for the dialogue, LOL.

The pictures of the rentals look beautiful and historic, not really spooky.

I just finished binging the original Merlí and loved it, even more than Sapere Aude. First, some insight into the 2 series. The original Merlí was made by the Catalan branch of TV3, one of Spain's big broadcast networks. It was so popular in Catalunya that TV3 decided to dub it into Spanish (Spaniards hate subtitles) and release it nationally. It was so popular in Spain that Netflix bought the rights to release it internationally. Then it was so popular in South America (specifically Argentina, Chile, and Peru) that Netflix decided to make the sequel Sapere Aude. The writer & showrunner Hector Lozano always planned for the original to run 3 seasons (40 episodes) and Sapere Aude to run for 2 (16 episodes). I marvel that the original Merlí was so good despite its shoestring budget. The quality of the scripts and the level of the actors are impressive as hell. The high school students come off as real people, not TV characters like in some American teen-oriented series. The show is lucky to have 2 charismatic protagonists -- Merlí Bergeron, the unconventional philosophy teacher, and Pol Rubio, his best student -- who really hook you in. Pol's previously discussed sex appeal certainly helps as well. If you want to catch the original Merlí on RTVE, best hurry because it's only available until Dec 14. Fortunately, thanks to streaming, old TV shows never die. They just sit around waiting to get picked up by Netflix/Hulu/etc. If one of the streaming services does pick up the original Merlí, I highly recommend it. PS: I was probably the only one wondering, but the reason Pol's family is Spanish-speaking is to give some background for the family's dire financial straits. Of course not all Spanish-only speakers in Catalunya are poor, but if you lack education or an exceptional skill, like Pol's father, you might struggle anywhere but all the more so as a non-Catalan speaker in Barcelona. PPS: the recent death of Angela Lansbury made me think about Maria Pujalte's old show Los misterios de Laura because Jessica Fletcher and Laura Lebrel are 2 peas in a pod. The protagonist Laura is a police detective, not a writer, but the way she goes about solving whodunits will remind you a lot of Cabot Cove's most illustrious writer. Again, if one of the streaming services ever picks up Los misterios de Laura, I highly recommend it.

IMDb lists 112 acting credits for Angela Lansbury, every role under the sun, stretching from 1944 to a movie released this year. I didn't know she was in such great films as Gaslight, National Velvet, and Dorian Gray (1945). I admit that Murder She Wrote was a guilty pleasure of mine , but my favorite Angela Lansbury performances were in The Manchurian Candidate and Something for Everyone. A truly great lady, a legend, R.I.P.

If Pfizer never claimed that the vaccine would reduce transmission, then why did Anthony Fauci say that we need people to get vaccinated "to break the chain of transmission"?

The entire justification for the vaccine mandates was that the vaccine prevented or at least reduced transmission. Thousands of people were fired. Every person who lost their job for refusing the vaccine must be reinstated and compensated. Every politician, bureaucrat, and corporate executive who mandated vaccines must be held accountable. Let the lawsuits begin.

My first day as a pizza maker.

I dont know who this woman is or what exactly her position is at Pfizer, but a Pfizer executive testified to EU Parliament that no prelaunch testing was done to prove that the vaccine reduced transmission, even though many were forced/pressured to get the vaxx because it purportedly stopped transmission.

Here's one case where the guy didn't jump ...

I enjoyed the ducks as well during my one stay at the Peabody. The entertainment was not the duck procession itself but the reaction of kids to the ducks. Little kids giggle, scream, and jump up & down with delight while watching the ducks, and the whole scene is just adorable. I think the Peabody ducks live a pretty good life. The hotel staff does their best to take good care of them. Whatever downside to their hotel life, it sure beats getting eaten by a fox or coyote.

A number of other gay-themed movies have done stellar box office: Philadelphia, The Bird Cage, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman. American moviegoers accept gay protagonists and gay stories just fine. But a gay rom-com is a different beast. Straight women love rom-coms (and drag their husbands/boyfriends kicking & screaming) because they aspire to live the same romance as the female protagonist. These moviegoers simply don't identify with a gay male protagonist. I hesitate to talk about the big box office of Crazy Rich Asians because I haven't seen it, but I will say that regular comedy is far more universal than the romantic comedy genre. You don't have to identify with Asian (or black or Jewish) characters of a comedy to get a good laugh.

If those 2 hotties are selling kisses for just a buck, they're selling themselves awfully short.

Aberrations aside, as a general rule, yes, moviegoers do need to identify with the protagonist. Straight women go to rom-coms with female protagonists to feel the thrill of falling in love; men see action/adventure movies with male leads to fantasize about feats of derring-do. Exceptions of course, but the exceptions have to be particularly well done to hook in an audience. By the way, I heard the marketing for Bros was $30 million, not $40m. Still, an eye-popping marketing budget for a movie that cost only $22 million to make. $30 million to make just $4.8 million in its opening weekend? Oy. I don't think America is a homophobic country. Yes, some people here are homophobic, but as a general rule, no. Of course, the Cult of Victimhood disagrees.

How does he switch hands yet still maintain perfect balance? That doesn't seem humanly possible, but he makes it look effortless.

Yikes, the studio spent $40 million on marketing! No wonder Billy Eichner is so upset by the opening weekend bomb. I agree that the movie has limited appeal beyond gay men. Straight women are the biggest audience for romantic comedies because they want to identify with the protagonist and enjoy the romance fantasy. Since few will identify with a gay male lead, they won't bother to see Bros no matter how big the marketing budget. It's not that the movie-going public is homophobic; it's that the studio execs simply lacked common sense.

Back in 2005, Brokeback Mountain took in $83 million in the US and $178 million worldwide. I'm not buying Billy Eichner's charge of homophobia for the movie's flop at the box office.

Hopefully I have better luck with this one:

Sorry, I can't recover the tweet. It was a hamster running furiously on his exercise wheel for ~10 seconds, then lying down in the corner for a nap.