Restaurant tipping
 

Short of never eating with her again, order yourself a glass of wine before she orders the bottle. When she suggests a bottle, point to your glass, and demur, suggesting she order some classy california cab. for herself. Then order three more glasses for yourself to get through the rest of the meal with the bitch.

Restaurant tipping
 

This is the perfect answer. Miss Manners smiles upon you in her benevolence. Less perfect, but "I'm afraid just I can't do that - I ordered according to my means" gets across the same message, really, with a usefully curtailing statement of impossibility, but without directly saying anything about what THEY are doing.

Ah, the benefits of learning to just say "no, thank you" and repeating it until the offender gives up. Absolutely.

Survivor
 

You missed a marathon of WNTW yesterday. BBC America is great. You have to start watching Graham Norton (he is so cheeky) and all the Britcoms. I got hooked years ago and simply cannot live without Ground Force, Ab Fab, Are you Being Served?, etc. Try it one day, you will love them all.

survivor and 90210
 

For a drama, there are generally 22 episodes in a season, which generally runs from mid/late September until mid/late May (about 40 weeks). There are three advertising sweeps periods in that season, November, February and May. Usually, the network wants to build up a show right before sweeps so people are compelled to watch, so they bunch up good episodes around those periods. The filler episodes tend to be scattered around the rest of the season, and the rest is filled with reruns. Then, of course, all the "specials" air during sweeps, so things that may not get as high ratings get moved around for something else.

Survivor
 

I have a seasons pass for Survivor and my tivo automatically recorded the reunion special for me. Your tivo must hate you. Did you make it record porn or something that might have offended it? (tivos have very delicate sensibilities -- when I got a seasons pass for Mr Personality, it punished me by recording every episode of Ex-treme dating for weeks).

Bahamas
 

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Originally posted by Gattigap
You say this as if it's a systemic problem. Is it? If so, is bad service specific to restaurants, or services there generally?

I have never been, but am looking for an analogue to Hawaii (which is fantastic, but from the East Coast is simply too freakin' far away.) That leaves the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, etc. From what I gather, the Bahamas is a mixed bag.
____________________________________________


Whether or not you'll like the Bahamas depends on what you are looking for. Service was horrendous - we waited 20 minutes to be checked into our cabana while the desk clerk talked on a personal phone call and gave us dirty looks. Had similar experiences at restaurants, etc. The finale was when we were waiting at the airport only to be told that the airline (a big one that is currently coming out of bankruptcy) realized that it didn't have enough fuel to get to our location and then back to Fla. We then had to retrieve our luggage from the runway pile six people per cab for an hour long ride, etc.

However, the snorkeling, etc., is much better than the Virgin Islands.

Here's a Shocker
 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,86625,00.html

Spree: Looks like JFK had his very own Monica -- a 19 year old intern who apparently had no job other than to provide sexual release to the Jackster. Oh yeah, there is belief that she knew how to answer a phone but uncertainty as to whether or not that skill was ever utilized.

Survivor
 

I love that show too. It's on Tuesdays at 10:00 and rerun on Sat and Sun mornings. I think they give good advice. They have a book coming out (in August). There is a US version on TLC that is just terrible (the hosts). They try to be like those two chicks and can't really pull it off.

One show I am rapidly becoming a fan of is Coupling, also on BBC america. And today I read in the WSJ that there is soon going to be a US version of it. I hope that they can duplicate it, because that is one funny show.

The one show I think that the Americans did a much better job of than the British is Sanford and Son. The UK one is not nearly as funny as the US one. But that is about the only one I can think of. And I suppose they did a very good job with Three's Company, but I don't think it is actually funnier than the UK version.

What Not to Wear
 

I don't get BBC America (because my town is still pissed off at the Brits for oppressing us in pre-Revolutionary America apparently) so am only getting the American ripoff What Not to Wear. One of the hosts has no business criticizing anyone else though because he has long gray-brown Fabio locks and a goatee and dresses in the same rugby shirts he wore in college in 1983, except they sometimes are a solid color with a fabric-tape cross sewn on the front.

Yesterday's, where they tried to teach a South Beach bimbo not to dress like Christina Aguilera and to wear a bra so her giant boobs wouldn't heave up and knock her in the head when she danced, was hilarious. She still spent a significant amount of her $5000 windfall on ho-wear but did manage a couple of items that were merely quasi-ho and about one outfit that made it all the way up to "classy."

Here's a Shocker
 

"I like the fact that the source of this information is someone's oral history," said Kafka with a lookingformarket-esque one-liner.

What Not to Wear
 

Calling the cable company to request a channel actually works.

My mother pestered her local cable company to add OLN so she could get live coverage of the TdF. They logged every request she made and added the channel. They told her that they heavily weight requests because they figure every request represents 10,000 viewers who would watch the channel but don't care enough to call.

BBC America is well-worth a call.

Even(sometimes checks out East Enders on lazy Saturday afternoons)Odds

Survivor
 

I haven't seen the Beeb's WNTW yet, but even the US version is OK. The hosts are annoying rather than catty, but the advice is pretty damn good.

I'm dying to see the Beeb's version, but we don't get BBC America on our cable program, and when I told the Mr. to figure out how to get it he refused unless he got center ice hockey too, and if he gets that I'll never watch the TV again anyway.

Actually on the weekend I saw a Makeover Story on TLC. NOT a good show, since they sort of race through it and there is no explanation of much of anything being done. But, anyhow, the women they did on the one I watched were a mother daughter getting done for their St. Patrick's day party, and the improvement was HUGE. It was brave to take them on, because these women had been hit with the fugly stick bigtime. (The daughter actually came out looking sort of attractive, mainly because she was thin and, if she didn't touch it, they got her hair to stop looking like most of it had fallen out.) They both seriously looked like hags out of a Gustave Dore engraving of outcast London.

Survivor
 

Originally posted by Barely Legal GASP! You :eek: could be right! My Tivo hates me! It didn't want me to see the winner as punishment for recording Mr. Personality and not watching it yet. So there it sits on the hard drive - day after day after day...

Restaurant tipping
 

Bilmore, truer words have never been spoken. I have often tried to articulate this very thing, but have never quite gotten it down to the pithy 2 sentences you just wrote. Bravo!

Do you mind if I needlepoint that onto a pillow?**



*doing them really inconvenient "favors" or imposing on you in any variety of unseemly ways

**And give it to my mother for Mother's Day? (Actually, I should give it to myself for Mother's Day -- to remind myself how to stand up to my mother...)

Survivor
 

I have a solution. Dump the silly cable, get a dish and a couple of receivers and tell the hubby that he can get NHL Center Ice (which I must say rules). The race for the Cup is almost over so there are a few months before you have to actually order Center Ice anyway. Dish Network can give you 150 channels (including BBC America) plus like 10 movie channels, and extra receiver and local channels for $65. I do not work for Dish Network.