photo by seattle bon vivant [flickr], via our group pool [flickr]

• Business Week profiles [#] Vivace, from its humble sidewalk cart beginnings to perfection-obsessed mini-empire. (via capitol hill seattle [#], who deems them “outside of our normal stomping grounds”.)
• It’s not too late to register for Sunday’s “Chilly Hilly” [bikeseattle]
• The Here & Now edition of Monopoly proves to be prophetic. Although they won’t get the coveted pyramid penthouse view, other people may soon be allowed to live in a condo-ified Smith Tower. [times]
• Can’t wait to see Charlize Theron & co. dressed up as Seattle circa 1999? Some Battle in Seattle stills were posted this week. [movieset]
• Addison might tire of ferry boats and spin-off from Grey’s Anatomy [givememyremote]
• In case you missed it: the ultimate guide to viaduct comment threads [slog]

As of airtime, the ayes had it by a narrow margin. Below the jump, a recap of last night’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy, featuring several panty-related plotlines, doctors getting physical, a few weird patients, and a whole lot of cupcakes.3
Read more

Deterioration of the Fight or Flight Response & Losing My Religion [05-15-2006]

This is something of a team effort at giving you a summary of the season 2 finale of Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t have any screen caps for you, nor was I able to keep a running transcript of what was going on - they lost me in the very beginning with the voiceover. Since I’m doing this from memory, I’ve recapped the general plot lines, and my impressions of the first half. Josh’s take picks up somewhere after the first hour.

Grab your kleenex — after the jump you’ll find the work-in-progress recap of the double episode finale! This should probably go without saying, but here there be spoilers. ;)
Read more

Sunday was the first hour of the three hour, two night season finale of Grey’s Anatomy [abc]. After the jump, a hastily-written recap to get you up to speed for watercooler talk and the special Monday night episode. Why Monday? Why so many hours in this season? Only the ad wizards at ABC can answer those questions.
Read more

After the jump, a recap of last night’s Grey’s Anatomy. One case — hillbillies vs. hospital intern, and the aftermath — dominates the medical intrigue. There’s a little bit of character development and relationship advancement and the showdown we’ve all been waiting for, possibly as a way of setting the stage for next week’s two-night season finale.
Read more

Previously – George looks like Mr. Katimsky, who gave up on Momnesia and Meredith when Mother Grey wouldn’t give up on the hot hot love from the then not yet Chief. However, this lookalike business has gotten George into all sorts of trouble, such as occasional heckling and cuddling with Mother Grey and a long term rental in the Grey House and one night of weepy sex with Meredith. Daddy complexes are fun like that.

And with that, we’re off. A basketball player (#2, Robinson)
wearing home jersey scores a basket. And the crowd, watching the game on
television at Joe’s: the Only Bar in All of Seattle, goes wild. While everyone
cheers, Meredith knits.

Voiceover Meredith says: “A good basketball game can have
us all on the edge of our seats. Games are all about the glory, the pain, and
the play-by-play. And th
en there are the more solitary games we play. The games
we each play all by ourselves.”

And all of a sudden it’s inverse intervention time. Joe, to
no one in particular: “Dude? Is she knitting?” Apparently barroom knitting is a
big no-no, as the customers are scared of it. Dempsey makes it a double-team,
crossing the bar from his background perch to to tell her that she looks a
little weird. He says this as a “friend”. Meredith, not really looking up from
her domestic work, says that can’t have a drink because she’s celibate. They
both think that this Dartmouth grad is having vocab issues, but she doesn’t
mean sober. Well, sort of. For her, sobriety helps with the celibacy since drinking makes everyone look porny, and then her clothes come off, and good
times ensue. Naturally, AddiSatan lurks just around the corner to make it a
full-on triple assault on Meredith’s “just say no” approach to a night at the bar. After a fair share of
“what, you – celibate?” Grey points out the obvious – for her,
every guy turns out to be married or mark or George. She leaves out the guy
with the non-stop erection, which is understandable here. With that, the peer pressure gang lets her go back to her sweater making, which she claims will
help her surgical dexterity.

“The social games, the mind games, we use them to pass
the time, to make life more interesting, to distract us from what’s really
going on.”

After the jump: the Chief and Sandra Oh face off in the classroom, a spelling bee champ visits the O.R., something of a 1990s ABC primetime reunion, Alex talks tough, a whole lot of knitting, a little background basketball, and much much more!

Read more

The pretty, pretty cast, since I don’t have a screen shot from the show.

I pulled Grey’s recap duty this evening, and Michael is a friend helping me out - mostly with the commentary. It’s my (our) first time doing this, so be kind!

Previously on Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith admits she is a horrible person, Izzy makes the moves on Denny, George moves out, and in with Preston and Cristina.

Voiceover: As drs, patients are always telling us how they would do our job. Just fix me up, slap a bandaide on me, send me home.

And during the voiceover, we see McDreamy and Meredith walking outdoors with McPooch. The location looks like Carkeek Park, and then seems to switch to a more mountainy area.

Grey talks, George cuts his hair in the bathroom sink (yes, Cristina and Preston’s sink), George and Preston come back from running five miles, Christine makes coffee and grumps. And did you know Preston could juggle (eggs)? Me neither. There’s some serious male bonding going on here, and Cristina looks like she’s going to rip eyes out.

The scene cuts to a gratuitous fly-by shot of Seattle, showing off one of the shinier downtown office buildings as the camera flies south, then west to the water. We come down from the water, to find Cristina bitching to Meredith and Izzy about how George and Preston are bonding, while Izzy knows things suck between Meredith and George, she isn’t calling Alex back, and Alex thinks George looks like a hobbit with his new haircut.
Read more

The cast of Bones.

As Josh noted in one of his ever-popular Grey’s Anatomy recaps, singer-songwriter Mike Doughty is well-liked by whomever picks the music for their show.

…or so we thought.

This afternoon, I opted to relax and watch a few episodes of the new television show Bones. I started watching the show in the fall, but then ended up spending my Tuesday nights grading papers with colleagues, so no David Borea-ahem, I mean, no excellent new television show for me. So I’ve been hoarding episodes to watch for that point in time when I, er, had time. It came this afternoon. I pop in episode 4, “The Man in the Bear” and kick back. The show opens in fictional Aurora, Washington, and I’m already grinning - yay! Washington state gets a plug. And hey, even better - Bones and her partner, Booth, are being sent to Aurora to investigate the arm pulled from the stomach of the bear.

After the cut, we’re back and have moved from Washington, D.C. to Washington state - you can tell because of the trees. Booth is driving the apparently F.B.I.-required SUV, and the music is oh-so-familiar. …waitaminute, it’s Mike Doughty! In fact, it was “Looking at the World from the Bottom of the Well”, which is one of the two songs also features on Grey’s Anatomy (and if I remember right, on the season one soundtrack).

Maybe people just associate Doughty with the Pacific Northwest. I had a chance to ask him a while back what was up with the Grey’s Anatomy “appearances”, and he said he had nothing to do with it (and wasn’t aware his music had been featured until I mentioned it), so I suspect he was probably out of the loop about the Bones “appearance” as well. But maybe someone should tell him; perhaps he’d take it as a hint to follow-through on the idea of moving to the PNW.

[Yet again life intervenes--this time the actual trip to Amsterdam to visit Josh [#], catch up schoolwork, and more Olympics–really, I had to fight my roommate last night to watch the Grey’s Anatomy tape instead of the Olympics. A very quick summary of what occured below.]

More sex with Izzy and Alex, George gets some balls gumption, Meredith sees her father for the first time in twenty years [in an oddly anticlimactic scene], a ghost from Addison and Derek’s past, and Burke says his piece to Christina . . . after the jump in “Yesterday” (season 2, episode 18)
Read more

take that nicolette sheridan. grey’s anatomy appeals to the superbowl demographic

Although I think Seattleites would agree that “code black” ought to be the code name for the Seahawks losing the Super Bowl, it actually involves Alex and Izzy getting it on, the Nazi about to give birth, a guest appearance by Christina Ricci, and other events marking The End of the World as We Know It (Part 1) . . .
Read more