Have I mentioned that I get to wear t-shirts to work? (And tennis shoes and jeans and even shorts if I want to. It's awesome.) If I were to blow a bunch of money on funny t-shirts based on webcomics (which would be a really fun thing to do, especially considering how much I enjoy my dinosaurs on bikes and bearmonster shirts), these are the ones I would get, in no particular order:
This one is from Dinosaur Comics, which I haven't mentioned but look at sometimes. It's funny, as is the shirt.
And here's the best one from that comic I wrote a post about that I left at the top of the page for like a month. And the comic is about history? Remember that one? Well, she has twostrips about Napoleon eating cookies.
I don't read this comic either, but I like the shirt because me and Danica and a couple other people did a mini-play in middle school that involved Baba Yaga. I played (among other characters) Baba Yaga's house on chicken feet. (I wore a large box.)
I'm about 98% sure that it's a coincidence that these are all blue. (Although my sister did once make fun of me for packing a suitcase mostly full of blue clothes, so maybe there's something subliminal going on there.)
1. As I mentioned a little while back, I've gotten back into newspaper comics (although I read them on the internet). And it's all because of The Comics Curmudgeon. It's this guy, see, and he has a blog where he makes fun of comics, hilariously. Here's an entry that's unusually long, but only slightly above-average in funniness.
One revelation the blog has presented me with is soap opera comics. It turns out that Apartment 3G and Mary Worth are secretly hilarious. The problem with that kind of strip (OK, the main problem) is that everything takes forever to happen, so it's hard to know what's going on at all. But ever since the 'mudge has explained the characters and general mission of the strips (via mockery, of course), I've found them pretty engaging. Well, engaging is probably too strong a word (especially for Mary Worth), so let's say amusing. Armed with the knowledge that Mary is a controlling butinsky/biddy and that she's been pushing her young friend Delilah into going home to her husband so they can work on their loveless marriage, I found this confrontation between Mary and Delilah's sleazy ex-boyfriend laugh-out-loud funny.
Look how angry! Mary hates it when you interfere with what she's busy interfering with!
2. As far as internet comics go, I've started reading another one: Octopus Pie. It's not out-loud funny, most of the time, but I enjoy the characters and the long-form story.
3. And in other newish-blog-links-on-the-sidebar news, one of my college friends has started a food blog. She got a real domain name and everything! It's FatGirlEats.net.
Well, I tried to get interested in Henry III, I really did. (I even checked out this hilariously old fashioned and terrible biography of him--seriously, it was written in the 1950s, but with all the melodrama and bias, I would easily have believed it was from the 1890s.)
But it's tough. He came to the throne at nine years old, which is sort of interesting--but then that means for the first 11 or so years of his reign, he was just some kid in a crown while the real work was done by grown-ups. And when his reign started, there was a civil war/French invasion (I forgot to mention that some of John's barons got so fed up with him, post Magna Carta, that they invited the French king's son to come over and rule England. Yeah. King John, ladies and gentlemen). And then there was another civil war later, where Henry and his son got captured by a rebellious earl. But it was Prince Edward, not Henry, who escaped and saved the day. And the first parliament was called during his reign, but it was forced on him by barons who were aggravated by his poor decision-making (like father, like son).
Henry is mostly known for his piety--although he is outshined (outshone? I really can't decide) in that area by Edward the Confessor, Henry VI, and his own contemporary King of France, St. Louis. And then he really liked architecture. He was responsible for building a bunch of cathedrals. Oh, and he was cultured and fostered learning and such; the first colleges of Oxford University were founded in his reign.
But none of that really lights a fire under me, you know? So let's talk about his zoo:
As premier zoo-keeper of Western Europe, Henry kept in his royal menagerie at the Tower a camel, buffaloes, the first elephant in England, a [polar] bear for the King of Norway, three leopards from the Emperor Frederick II, and a lion from Louis IX.
Elizabeth Longford, The Oxford Book of Royal Anecdotes
About this time, too, an elephant was sent to England by the French king as a present to the king of England. We believe that this was the only elephant ever seen in England or even in the countries on this side of the Alps; wherefore the people flocked together to see the novel sight.
Would you consider James Monroe a Founding Father?
I'm reading this book (The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, which I'll tell you about when I finish) that includes Monroe as a Founding Father along with Franklin, Adams, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Those other five guys: no question. But Monroe? It made me figuratively raise an eyebrow. (I lack the ability to literally raise one eyebrow, which causes me no end of sadness.) I asked Neal about this last night, and we decided that a guy can only be a Founding Father if he was in the Continental Congress (and I was thinking specifically of the Second Continental Congress, c 1776) or was at the Constitutional Convention.
(Your definition can, of course, be different. Wikipedia, for instance, lists him under "Other Founders" along with guys I wouldn't contest, like Patrick Henry.)
Here's Monroe's deal:
was 18 years old in July 1776
fought with distinction in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War (I can't find anything saying whether he was an officer or not)
served in the Continental Congress, but not until 1783-86 (Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown happened in 1781; 1783 saw the signing of the Treaty of Paris and the removal of the last British troops from the US; also, Monroe's stint in the Continental Congress in mentioned on Wikipedia, but not on his official White House biography page; finally, according to a different Wikipedia page, by '83 it was technically the Confederation Congress anyway)
was not part of the Constitutional Convention; was part of the Virginia Ratifying Convention that ratified the Constitution for that state (I can't find whether he voted for the Constitution or not--he was an anti-Federalist, so I'd guess he didn't. Not that being an anti-Federalist disqualifies a guy, but just so you know.)
fifth President of the United States and hey, five is a pretty low number
So, what do you think? James Monroe = Founding Father, yea or nay?
It is just hard to overstate how lame John was. (There are some historians, like the one that compiled my handy royal anecdotes book, who try to rehabilitate his rep, and to those people I say, more or less, Pfft.) Let's start with this:
These were John's domains at the beginning of his reign.
And that's what he had at the end of it.
Sure, it's not like he lost everything in France, but it was a lot. Moreover, it was most of his mother's inheritance of Aquitaine and Poitou; it was the homeland of the Plantagenet dynasty, Anjou; and it was freaking Normandy, which had been cheek-by-jowl with England since the Conquest. And he didn't lose it all just because of a lack of military prowess; sure, he got the nickname "Softsword," but he also showed flashes of military . . . competence. He won, like, this one battle once? It was pretty good. But anyway, the problem was not so much that he lost a bunch of battles as it was that so many of his subjects rose against him (and allied with the King of France) in the first place. Because they hated him.
Take the people of Brittany, for instance, who preferred the claim of John's nephew Arthur, who was also their duke. They didn't like John much to begin with--and less so once he probably murdered Arthur. Or take many, many of his continental nobles who turned against John when, instead of ransoming the prisoners he took at his big victory at Mirebeau or putting them under honorable house arrest, he put them in chains in dungeons. Or, of course, take the barons in England who, chafing against John's military failures and abuses of power, were like "NO DUDE SERIOUSLY. STOP IT" and forced him to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. John saw the famous document less as a foundation for Western government in future centuries and more as an annoying treaty he preferred to ignore.
This is not even to mention John's lust-driven second marriage to a twelve-year-old girl. (Ew.) We also haven't delved into disastrous feud with Pope Innocent III. You see, the Pope wanted one guy to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and John wanted a different guy. Things escalated and eventually resulted in the King's excommunication and an interdict on his kingdom. Interdicts were bad times, yo.
Therefore the king withdrew fromm the negotiations and so did the bishops and everyone else and, on 24 March by papal mandate, divine services were suspended throughout England. Great sorrow and anxiety spread throughout the country. Neither Good Friday nor Easter Sunday could be celebrated, but an unheard-of silence was imposed on all the clergy and monks by laymen. The bodies of the dead, whether of the ordinary fold or the religious [that is, not-monks/not-nuns vs. monks/nuns], could not be buried in consecrated cemeteries, but only in vile and profane places. The king ordered the few monks who remained at Canterbuy, the blind and crippled, also to be expelled, and the monks to be regarded as public enemies. Some fled England, some were imprisoned, some were saved by money, others suffered many afflictions; their woods were cut down and their men were fined and taxed heavily. The whole of England suffered this burden. The people were forced to pay at first a quarter of their money, then a third, then a half. Even the rents of the cardinals and whatever they had in England were taken away from them and Peter's Pence, which the Roman Church had had since the time of Cnut, were withheld by the king. . . . Therefore the rich and poor left England, countelss men and women; theirs was a thankless pilgrimage to aovid the enormous cruelty of the king rather than a devoted one.
Ralph, abbot of Coggeshall; via The Plantagenet Chronicles, ed. Elizabeth Hallam
Eventually, John gave in, even paying homage to the Pope as overlord of England and Ireland. (What was with those Plantagenet brothers, acknowledging every Tom, Innocent, and Harry as their overlords?)
Working at the library (and winding down as a grad student, since whenever I'm in school I feel like I should be reading "serious" things) has gotten me back into a groove of reading for pleasure.
The first things I got were collections of comics, since I've also gotten back into reading newspaper comics (albeit on the internet) for reasons I may explain in a separate post. I got some Pearls Before Swine and some Get Fuzzy. I like Get Fuzzy a lot better and will probably get more of it in the future.
I next moved on to getting a whole bunch of P. G. Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster books. (Seriously, I went a little overboard.) I'd read a few before, but Neal hadn't, and he was interested since we've been watching the TV version. I'm still amazed by how closely the TV series sticks to the books. Sure, the TV show mixes and matches the plots quite a bit, and maybe changes a character or two, but I think it really embodies the spirit of what Wodehouse wrote. And even lifts some of the dialogue right out of the books. Anyway, the point is, those books are hilarious. Highly recommended! Eleven stars!
Remember when a real live author commented on my blog? That was crazy. I decided that the least I could do was check out one of her books (the choice of which one was random--it happened to come across my work station as I was checking in books one day). And it was pretty good! I know that doesn't sound like high praise, Ms. Chadwick, if you're reading, but considering that I have an aversion to historical fiction, I was very pleasantly surprised. In fact, I checked out two more and have them waiting on my shelf. (They did have to get in line, after all.) Let me share two things I liked about The Love Knot in particular: 1) There's a male lead and a female lead, so obviously, they will get together. But instead of the hoary old structure of "They fight, but then they make out!" it's more like "They don't really like each other, but then they build mutual respect, then acknowledge that they are mutually attracted to each other, and then they make out!" which is a lot more realistic. 2) There's a BIG TWIST! in the middle. I got to it and I was all, "OH MY GOSH THAT WAS A BIG TWIST!" (It was surprising.) And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I liked the history part, too. Most of the real-person characters weren't in there very much, but all of them were (as far as I know, and it's not like I'm a big medieval scholar or anything) faithfully portrayed. That was good.
Neal and I really like to watch Rick Bayless's show on PBS. So when I saw that he (and his daughter) had written a cookbook that my library carries, I decided to check it out. So far, we've only made one of the recipes, but we were very excited about it. We bought a whole bunch of vegetables, beef stew meat, corn tortillas, and even a food processor. (All of Rick Bayless's Mexican recipes require a food processor.) We cooked the meat for an hour, we chopped and then processed the vegetables, we made salsa--oh man, it was fun. But then the actual food was pretty lame. I found our shredded beef tacos to be far, far less delicious than regular ol' ground beef tacos in cheap crunchy shells. Also, we got the corn tortillas because Rick Bayless makes a big deal about how that's what people in Mexico eat; it's Americans that eat flour tortillas. But, upon eating the corn tortillas, I recalled that Rick never actually said the corn tortillas were better--just more authentic. (I thought they were terrible.) So anyway, it was an adventure, but we're not going to make that particular recipe again. I want to give something else from the cookbook a shot, though.
In other "it came across my work station, so I thought 'why not' " news, I checked out a DVD called The Reduced Shakespeare Company: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), claiming to be all of the plays of Shakespeare in 90 minutes. It looked like a rapid-fire, clever comedy! It was not. It was remarkably slow and dull, dull, dull. I skipped some scenes, trying to find something good, but gave up pretty quickly.
So those are my recommendations and dis-recommendations so far. I'm working on some things now about which I have already formed opinions, but I feel like I should wait to finish them to make sure I'm right.
In general: Objectively speaking--or as objectively as one can speak when dealing with something as subjective as entertainment--this is the best season of Friends. (It's not my favorite season, but we'll get to that.)
As I have previouslyargued, story arcs (as opposed to plots entirely contained in one episode) are indicative of a show's quality. They show that the writers trust their audience to watch every week and to care about the characters enough to watch them go through extended stories. By my count, the fourth season has the most in number and most substantial arcs of any season so far (and maybe any season at all--I'll keep counting as I go). While my rough count of arcs for the first three seasons is three, four, and five respectively, Season Four has eight--and they're good, too. (1: Chandler and Joey get robbed and only slowly re-accumulate furnishings; 2: Joey dates and Chandler falls in love with Kathy [who then dates and cheats on Chandler]; 3: Monica and Phoebe run a catering business; 4: Monica gets a new job where everyone hates her; 5: Phoebe is a surrogate mother for her brother; 6: Monica and Rachel lose their apartment to Chandler and Joey [and then get it back]; 7: Rachel clumsily pursues and then dates Joshua [ok, that one's not so good]; 8: Ross conducts his over-hasty courtship of Emily.)
Another impressive thing about this season is the willingness to change up the status quo (in, of course, relative terms--it was a network sitcom, after all). They married Ross off, for one thing. I also admire the commitment to the changes in set dressing required by the robbery and apartment-switching storylines. Also, the Kathy storyline is great if only for its showcase of Chandler's emotional depth.
But commitment to keeping the status quo isn't always a bad thing--the way the writers handled Lisa Kudrow's pregnancy avoided almost all the pitfalls of TV pregnancy and kept it in Phoebe's character . . . but I'll come back to that later.
Also, this is the first season to feature The Joey Special (two pizzas), Ross's hand gesture, "How YOU doin'?", and Monica's "I KNOW!" (the latter of which is part of my daily vocabulary).
Little things that drive me crazy: Despite the overall commendable commitment to keeping up continuous storylines and situations, they did drop the ball on a couple of promising things: most disappointingly, Joey's bargain with Phoebe that he'd be a vegetarian while she was pregnant so she could eat meat guilt-free. (This comes up exactly once after it's brought up, in the first episode of Season Five.) Wasted potential, I think.
Wait--if Chandler hates Thanksgiving, why does he love the parade?!
Michael Vartan (who plays Richard's son in "The One with Chandler in a Box") is pretty, but not a good actor (at least not here.) Tate Donovan (who plays Rachel's obseesion, Joshua [and who was dating Jennifer Aniston at the time]) is an OK actor but, in my opinion, definitely not pretty.
Little things I love: Chandler's evil plan to get Phoebe to name a triplet after him
It's mentioned in the first episode that Joshua appears in that Rachel loves the name Joshua. And Aniston remained committed to pronouncing the name with relish in every episode after that.
The "Morning's Here!" guy:
When Phoebe tries to write a holiday song for her friends, it's Rachel and Chandler who point out problems in the first two versions, and it's they who get a mumbled nonsense line in the final version. (And, for the record, I think "Rachel" and "dreidel" is perfectly serviceable as a rhyme.)
There aren't many hints in "The One with Ross's Wedding" that Monica and Chandler are going to hook up, but there are two little tiny acknowledgements that the director slipped in--there are two shots in the episode where Monica is in the foreground and Chandler is included in the shot in the background, framing them together even though they're not interacting. (Yes, I've thought about this too hard. Nobody's arguing with that.)
The cute bit in "The One with the Dirty Girl" where Ross is putting on a tie, but then he hands it to Joey so he can put it on pre-tied.
What is this, Seinfeld? There are a few things this season that are just weird in the Friends universe and seem lifted from Seinfeld's. Namely:
Rachel's boss, Joanna, promises Rachel a big promotion. But then before the paperwork goes through, Joanna is hit by a cab and dies.
When Phoebe finds out she's having triplets, Frank and Alice freak out about money and Phoebe tries to think of a way to help out (so Frank doesn't have to drop out of refrigerator college). So she (and Rachel) invent the Relaxi Taxi--Frank can drive people around while they get a massage from Phoebe. (This ties together the money, Phoebe's inability to carry a massage table as she gets bigger and bigger, and Phoebe's ownership of a van that she and Monica had planned to use for catering.) To be fair, I can't decide if this was actually too weird for Friends, or if it was a really good idea that I wish they had brought up again ever.
The big one is when, to get out of dating Janice, Chandler pretends to move to Yemen. (I do not like the Yemen plot.)
Lines!:
Joey: "If I had to, I'd pee on any one of you."
Phoebe: "It's been a really bad day, whore-wise."
Monica encourages Chandler to talk to a pretty girl: "What's the worst that could happen?" Chandler: "I could die."
Chandler: "Oh, man, I am so excited I may vomit!"
Joey, after Monica fires him: "It's gonna be a lean Christmas at the Dragon house this year!"
Chandler: "You don't want to be guys. You'd be all hairy and you wouldn't live as long."
Phoebe: "Yeah, definitely I don't like the name Ross." Ross: "What a weird way to kick me when I'm down."
Rachel: "Well, maybe there was a dog lookin' at him."
Monica, to everyone in turn: "Fine, judge all you want to, but married a lesbian, left a man at the altar, fell in love with a gay ice dancer, threw a girl's wooden leg in the fire, live in a box!"
And there are a ton just from "The One with the Dirty Girl":
Rachel, on Ross's impossibly hot date: "Well maybe she and her friends are just having a contest to see who can bring home the biggest geek." Ross: "Fine by me, hope she wins!"
Phoebe, on Chandler's thoughtful gift for Kathy: "What a great way to say 'I secretly love you, Roommate's Girlfriend!' "
Phoebe: "You sound like Monican't, not Monican . . . ."
Joey: "Man, it is so hard to shop for girls!" Chandler, seeing Joey's bag: "Yes it is, at Office Max."
Rachel, on what Chandler should do about the gift: "Return the book, let Joey give her the clock pen, and you just give her something worse than that, like . . . a regular pen."
Ross, on the dirty girl's apartment: "You know how you throw your jacket on a chair at the end of the day? Well, like that, except instead of a chair, it's a pile of garbage. And instead of a jacket, it's a pile of garbage. And instead of the end of the day, it's the end of time, and garbage is all that has survived."
Let's talk about Phoebe: I'm actually not very excited to talk about Phoebe, but everybody gets a turn.
Why don't I like Phoebe very much? Like I said, I adore first-season Phoebe. But over the course of the series, she is the single most inconsistently-written character on the show. She starts out sweet and weird but slowly becomes mean and weird. For example, take this clip from Season One's "The One with George Stephanopolous" (from about 2:00 to about 2:13 in particular). Phoebe is shocked that she said something angry to a woman who couldn't hear her. Compare that with a clip I chose basically at random from Season Nine; the first 45 seconds of "The One with Phoebe's Birthday Dinner" shows typical late-series Phoebe who isn't ditzy, just callous and rude. It's true that all of the characters became one-dimensional and less likeable near the end of the show, but Phoebe is an extreme case.
It also doesn't help that at some point, Lisa Kudrow stopped caring about acting. During the first half of the series, you will occasionally be able to kind of tell that Kudrow is having a little bit of a hard time keeping a straight face after jokes. In later seasons, she doesn't even try to keep from smirking after she delivers a punchline.
Of course, there's a lot to like about Phoebe. Her wacky life story could always be milked for laughs ("I had a similar problem when I lived in Prague. . . . So much you don't know.") or not--I just love her speech in this clip starting at 6:40 about how lucky Ross's baby is for having three whole, loving parents. Phoebe is also a useful plot-mover in that new one-off characters are often friends of hers, since she's the only one who believably has a social life outside of what we see.
This is an important Phoebe season, mostly because of her pregnancy. Like I said before, I think the writers dealt with Kudrow's pregnancy extremely well. They didn't pretend that she wasn't pregnant (which is always obvious) and they didn't write in a baby for her (which wouldn't have jived well with her character or with the show itself at that point). Most importantly, the way they did use it, by having her be a surrogate for her brother, was totally in character for Phoebe. It's a weird thing to do, to have your brother's babies, but Phoebe is generous, deeply appreciative of the family she has because of all the family she doesn't have, and above all, weird.
Top six episodes: "The One with the Jellyfish" or: "The One with Phoebe's Birth Mom" or: "The One with Rachel's letter"
"The One with Joey's New Girlfriend" or: "The One with Phoebe's Cold" or: "The One with Ross's Non-Girlfriend" or: "The One with Rachel's Young Boyfriend"
"The One with the Dirty Girl" or: "The One with the Velveteen Rabbit" or: "The One Where Monica and Phoebe Become Catering Partners" or: "The One where Rachel Does the Crossword" (It gets demerits for the crossword plot, but you remember that list of hilarious lines, right?)
"The One with Chandler in a Box" or: "The One Where Monica Dates Richard's Son" or: "The One with Secret Santa"
"The One with Ross's Wedding" or: "The One with All the Hilarious English People"
including the total classic: "The One with the Embryos" or: "The One with the Game" Awesome!
Rachel: I am very enthusiastic. I am such a nerd that I love reading, school, and was once on Jeopardy!. I am a Fightin' Texas Aggie. Many of the actions of historical figures make me laugh. I eat fruit-flavored candy with reckless abandon. "Weird Al" Yankovic is my hero. I like Jesus.
Neal: In addition to being an Eagle Scout and a real-life Kentucky Colonel, Neal graduated from the University of Tennessee after reading a lot about history. Now, he is studying even more history at the University of Wisconsin.
We met at the University of Wisconsin and then a couple of years later we got married in Wisconsin. Adventurous!
This one is from Dinosaur Comics, which I haven't mentioned but look at sometimes. It's funny, as is the shirt.
And finally, here's one from Questionable Content that I've had my eye on for a while. It's funny and library-related.
