I frequently use my dutch oven in the oven, and when I pull it out I usually put it on the stovetop (metal grate over a gas burner that’s off) instead of a trivet/cooling rack. About 10 or 15 years ago I was cooking brownies in a pyrex dish, and out of habit when it finished baking I placed it on the stovetop grate,…

Paul and Prue have been pulling their punches on the pandemic seasons of Bake Off, which seems to lead to a lot of “unfair” seeming eliminations. This week, they described fully half the signature bakes as “perfect,” and had seemingly minor quibbles with the others, but I suspect the range of quality was actually…

At some point, should “the joke is that Bowen Yang does an over-the-top flamboyant impression of [fill in the blank]” be its own category? Takei was good. The spider was good. The oompa loompa was good. Each sketch, on its own, works. But it kinda feels like we’re getting the same joke over and over.

The problem is less that the store keeps the money for itself or for some kind of tax shenanigans and more that it uses it as a kind of marketing. Companies love claiming “we support the local community,” getting the CEO’s picture in the news holding a giant novelty check, and funding those campaigns with checkout…

These are all great shows that were still entertaining in their final seasons, but it’s hard to say that shows that ran for 6+ seasons really “ended before their time.” Six seasons is a lot of television!

Am I the only one who took that final sequence to mean that the real Elliot is the viewer? The four personalities sit down to watch... something. Something where the camera is. The camera doesn’t directly show us what they’re looking at, but the image on the screen they see is literally just a reflection of what’s…

The line of the night for me came in the monologue, following the “half of Netflix budget onstage right now” line.

I’m of two minds on this. Yes, I’m on the edge of my seat. And if they stick the landing, a la The Leftovers, then I’m right there with you, that I have absolutely no idea where this is going to go, in a good way. But there was already so much mystery about what was going on in this show, and this episode introduced…

It seems like time is frozen still in the alternate reality: Elliot's alarm goes off at 11:16, and then a long scene plays out, and then his father finds his phone, and the time is 11:16. 

When we were nearing the halfway point of the show and all we'd had were "JLo is too fabulous for premise" sketches, I was really rooting for a kind of concept show where every single sketch followed the same formula, just with more and more absurd premises. Alas, apparently the writers room just decided those three…

We managed to stave this off until this year. My 5-year-old came up with an adorable Christmas list a few weeks ago (three items, the most expensive of which was a $15 book). Then the new sporting goods store opened. And the conversation has shifted from “I think that’s a good list” to “the list is just for ideas,…

Every company I’ve worked for in a professional role has handed me a contract on or before day 1 saying something like “This is an at-will employment contract; either party may terminate the employment relationship at any time. These terms may only be modified by the agreement of the employee and a vote of the board…

The name of this episode isn’t “Method Not Allowed,” it’s “405 Method Not Allowed.” All of the episode titles this season have been 4xx http error codes (errors web servers throw when there’s a problem with the user’s request), in order:

The credit card company wasn’t the most receptive to a random person calling up and saying, “I don’t know the account number or the address you have on file, but can you please give me control of the account?”

Does moo goo gai pan count here, or is that too authentically Chinese? I'd always assumed it was an American Chinese Food thing, until my wife (who grew up in Beijing) made it for dinner one day, and said it was something she ate growing up. Admittedly, it was a bit less goopy-cornstarch-muck than my local takeout…

Cut it out with this autoplay video bullshit.

Does this, like, work? It seems like you’ll get it sealed 95% of the way around, but won’t seal at the corners. And if you don’t need it sealed at the corners, the bag’s not sealed. In which case, what’s the point of using a zip-top bag?

I’ll take a musical guest with a guide track and some entertaining choreography any week over Billie Elish’s “this would be really cool, but someone forgot to turn on the mic” or Taylor Swift’s just-another-sit-n-sing.

I don’t carry a credit card balance, so credit card interest rates are generally irrelevant to me, but I have a different reason for not getting a card at the register: I don’t want to rely on some random store clerk to type up the info on my application.

Most of them. All the major California fires of the last few years, except for one, have been officially blamed on PG&E, and that last one (Tubbs fire) was officially blamed on privately-owned electrical equipment, but there’s a court case saying that PG&E may be responsible.