I don’t have a theme for this today: it’s been a bit of a week. Honestly, it’s been a bit of a week all month. One of my favorite poems, Poor Timing by Phyllis McGinley, points out the irony of Valentine’s Day being in the unromantic month of February, which is a good point. To counteract this, here are a few things I’ve laughed hysterically about of late:
I’ve been reading chapter books with my daughter before bed: lately we’ve been going through a series about girls who work with magical unicorns. In one chapter, a unicorn named Star yells at a magical plant to let go of her companion Ava, and it reads like this:
“Let go of Ava right now! ” snorted Star furiously.
I get the idea, I do. I’m not trying to nit-pick. It’s only that my mind went, how do you do that? when I read it, and then I attempted it, and we cracked up. 1
I wonder about things, you see. I’m the kind of guy who watches M*A*S*H and notices that yes, there are more Christmas episodes than Christmases in the Korean War and yes there are plot inconsistencies like Margaret Houlihan’s father being dead in one episode and alive later on, but that was before I worked out that M*A*S*H actually exists in a weird sort of time rift where the war just repeats and repeats and repeats. Outside the rift, sure, Houlihan’s dad lives, or maybe he dies, or maybe he’s dead again. One season Hawkeye’s from Vermont, later he’s from Maine. It’s the rift, you see.
Incidentally, one of my favorite M*A*S*H moments ever is in season one, The Army-Navy Game. A bomb (“an unexploded bomb!”) has landed in the camp, and the doctors have finally gotten orders on how to defuse it. Henry Blake, bless him, is relaying these instructions to Hawkeye and Trapper over a megaphone as they work on the bomb.
Henry: “And carefully cut the wires leading to the clockwork fuse at the head.”
snip
'“But first, remove the fuse!”
slow dawning horror from everyone
The thing does go off, but happily it’s a propaganda bomb, dropped by accident by the CIA. “Give yourselves up: you can’t win.” Cue exit theme.
There was a similar moment in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as I recall: the Scooby Gang was trying to prevent some demon or other from materializing and Giles was reading from a book, “Smashing the mark of Gagnar”-
Buffy smashes the insignia
“-should not be done under any circumstances and will in fact immediately bring forth the demon!”
[I don’t think the entity’s name was Gagnar, but it’s not important anyway].
These kinds of things are hysterical.
Unrelatedly, I don’t know whether Toy Story 5 is going to be good or not: to be honest, I haven’t even seen Toy Story 4. (Toy Story 3 was a tearjerker, and maybe it should’ve stopped there, but I couldn’t comment on that). I will say, though, that I just watched the trailer for the movie, which involves the toys confronting the fact that Bonnie, their kid now, has started playing with A Device. Rex, the dinosaur, bewails this development: “Oh, no, extinction! Not again!”
Which made me laugh.
Until next time,
Michael
Seriously, try to snort anything verbally with any emotion at all, not to mention furiously. Maybe if you’re a magical unicorn you can do this. I don’t know.
Unicorns are horses, and horses will often snort as a sign of contempt or dissatisfaction.
And regardless of where he really came from, Hawkeye Pierce will always be a New Englander.