Stills from my two favourite shows at the moment, The Good Wife and Rubicon. I love yellow legal pad.
Temple Grandin is an HBO biopic which swept up seven Emmys in August. Claire Danes plays the titular autistic cattle expert who invented the squeeze machine. It is a spectacularly skilful performance, far beyond the days of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man. Watching the movie, I had to wonder whether I was borderline autistic myself. Temple is completely unaware of her own facial expressions, and is delightfully surprised studying them through polaroids her aunt takes. She is hypersensitive to touch, suffers high anxiety, balks at innocuous triggers such as sliding doors, and is emotionally shut down towards people. Her conversation lacks segues, but when she waxes passionate, I recognize her genius, because she speaks like an eminent secondary school classmate I had.
If there was one convenient snap judgement to be made from the first few episodes of Top Chef: Just Desserts, it is that pastry chefs are nuts. Almost every single person on the show is on edge, even head judge Iuzzini, who can be quite the emotional jerk. The sanest of them, Eric ("the Zen Baker"), turns out not to be in fact a chef of sweets so much as a baker of savouries. The scene which really struck a chord was of Korean-born Heather Hurlbert snapping from the kitchen counter while a nerve-racked colleague retreats upstairs: "She needs to suck it up!" Beware of Asian fury. But I do that a lot, shouting down people, even if just in my head. It's uncalled for, and it's definitely bad for health. I get incredibly incensed sometimes when someone is hated on. It used to be that I'd imagine lecturing the whole lousy flock. Recently I just want to punch their faces in. I need a squeeze machine.
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