Zorral

There were so many successful comic bits in that episode weren't there? Marsters provided many of them! It was a kick too, with Buffy being Mom and Giles being Dad. That worked as well as one would think it might.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – a single episode, from season 4, "Pangs", the Thanksgiving episode, of course. Watched it last night after a couple Nirvana in Fire episodes, and finishing up Hillbilly Elegy. “Pangs” has been one of my favorite Buffy episodes all along. It still remains very good – and it includes ‘plague.’ Or syphilis. Something microbial that kills released by the Native sorcerer who was executed by Spaniards of California's Mission era. The episode got in everything that people do and think about Thanksgiving, from arguments about the real history, to politics, to the mom determined this is going to be the fantasy perfect Thanksgiving with all the people behaving just as she wants them too. It was also notable that this was the Buffy family, and who wasn’t at this meal? Riley, who’d gone home to Iowa for his Saturday Evening Post country Thanksgiving with great big family. Who was there, though? Spike – who had nothing to eat on this day of gorging. But he was there, as he was even through the very end, and on into the Angel universe. Gads Marsters plays his character so very well throughout all his permutations. I have the complete boxed set, which I watched often. But I haven't watched any Buffy in years, but I easily could get sucked back into the Buffy verse.

I read that when it came out last year. It's hilarious that our reactions to this book and Return of A King are just opposite! For me, The Anarchy was nearly up to the form of his earlier City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, and White Mughals. Not as poorly written as his Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan. That one was a real slog that never got off the ground, for this reader. Another really good history of the British army whether for the Company or the Crown is The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905 by Ferdinand Mont. his one is really good for the earlier years: The East India Company: Trade and Conquest from 1600 by Anthony Wild. ~~~~~~~~~~ I've just embarked on the latest biography of Henry Adams, just published, The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams. It's going very well with other current biogaphy, Elain Showalter's The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, whose husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, was as appalling as a husband as Henry Adams was. Both biographies are within the same frames of social circles and history -- as is also this year's biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Cross of Snow. Julia Ward Howe was also a poet; that Longfellow helped her with publication of her scandalous book, Passion Flowers, destroyed his friendship with Howe. One wonders why Longfellow helped her? It wasn't his kind of poetry, neither he nor his wife Fanny, particularly liked or approved of Julia. Perhaps the genuine poetic gift, the real power that was in it, despite her being a woman, who shouldn't have it, or should hide it if she did, was irresistible to another poet?

Guess he's just heard the news that for Man / Person of the Year voting list is out, with Como and Fauci and AOC on it -- So are Biden and Harris, with just about the highest favorable votes. But never fear shoggoth's on ithe list too -- with lowest number of yeses. https://nypost.com/2020/11/27/fauci-andrew-cuomo-aoc-are-time-person-of-the-year-nominees/

That's how BIL likes to recreate! Giving orders and pretending to kill, rape and plunder. A true trumpist, all right. ~~~~~~~~ As of yesterday, according to the ND papers, one in ten of ND's population is positive for Covid-19. ~~~~~~~~~ Holiday season starts under pall of more than 100,000 new Covid-19 cases. And 20 states did not report numbers on Thanksgiving Day https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/27/health/us-coronavirus-friday/index.html

World reaction? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/27/mini-desk-trump-mocked-speech-little-table-diaperdon-twitter-president-furniture https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/nov/27/trumps-furniture-fail-desk-donald-table-tv-dinners

You sound like the NoDak woman who is no longer my friend bitching righteously about single moms with cell phones and no job. How in hell was she to get a job without a cell phone? I am sick unto vomiting of people who talk like such frackin' ignorance, lack of compassion, and lack of understanding of anything outside their own precious superior virtuous selves, whose lives are had lots of help along the way including not being born into poverty. It's exactly like "I'm not a racist, I can't be a racist, I don't wear a white sheet and hood and burn crosses, but those people they bring it on themselves." Balderfrackin'dashwhitesupremacist.

Woke this morning to e mail and text messages from near and dear, one and all deeply depressed and distressed. This Day is throwing into stark reality, what we cannot have, what we've been denied, everything we most value, and which in Before times this Day was all about for all of us. And thanks to consciously evil monsters and to idiots, we've been denied it for nearly a year, all year, already! But most of all, I think, the distress isn't about losing this Thanksgiving's festivities with those we love, respect, admire and with whom we enjoy making merry the most among our ever revolving, evolving, shifting kaleidoscope of people, old, true and new. What it is, is we're acutely frightened. That so many people are traveling and saying the hell with it, while all around us, now, unlike March, etc., so many we know are now sick, and are even dying (well, we knew and were surrounded, since our circles include so many musicians and African Americans, including the students and their families). So many infected and contagious, how can we and our loved ones not become infected as well? Then, you know, employment and all the rest. Friends who have been cheery, busy and staunch all along -- well, today, they are not. And even on this Day, we see how much more is coming as Barret's SC struck down NY's limitations on religious gatherings (though the governor says it means nothing since the suits in question were from institution for whom the restrictions had aleady been lifted). You heard about those two Hassidim 'secret' wedding celebrations of three days +, this month, with 7000 + guests, right? So, ya, scared and feeling hopeless and helpless. We're pathetically attempting to mask and distance ourselves as flimsy rafts by which we struggle to stay afloat in the raging sea of virus, with the hospitals collapsing all around the country. Yet my BIL was determined to fly to Minnesota to spend the holiday weekend with his son and family -- except son said, NO. Now BIL is raging, because none of his sons and family will be spending the Day with him and he can't play pirate ship captain. I kid you not. This 70 year old man puts on costume complete with fake sword and beard, pretending garden shed roofs are ships and plays pirate, with his sons and grandkids as his crew. If one wonders why this nation is run by idiots, just think about him. The grandkids would rather play video games and his sons just hate it, but you know, keep the old man from sulking. At least we get to drink a whole lot of rum, otherwise we might have made him walk the plank, one of the nephews wrote today, because Sis is in a state, because he's in a state, and she called him, crying.

Where's the Republican outrage over, well, all those Big Beautiful Wall contracts that are flimsy bs at best and nothing at all generally, yet figures like rethug ND corporation got Billions, literally, of tax payers' money money. Wheres the Repub outrage for Trump himself managing to siphon millions of taxpayers' into his own business and operations? Not to mention him giving government contracts to hosts of bs pharm companies for antidotes to covid-19, in which he himself is invested? And that's just for starters. Where O Where is the REPUBLICAN OUTRAGE? Also where o where are his tax returns? Where is the REPUBLICAN OUTRAGE, hmmmnmmmm? So, lolly, give it a rest. You cannot win - convince with M4A outrage here.

Maybe end it with Andrew meeting Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton, and you know, that NY reality tv show guy, and they all hangin' out together like guys do at Victoria's Secret model events and Miss Universe in Russia? No. They'd do a lot better sticking to the 5 season plan and a redemption learning arc conclusion for the Queen to be more caring.

Not really, there's way too much competition and the big ones have either bought up or driven out the small ones, and there's still the cheaper 'import' from Mexico and South America. Everyone we know who thought have a pot farm was a good idea at the end of the last decade lost their shirts. What is massively profitable are producing products, medical and recreational, for retail dispensaries. Everyone we know who is in this business was already wealthy. Covid-19 massively increased that too.

One does get almighty bored with the great Poirot after a while. Britbox though seems to agree with the poster who says all anyone needs is Christie.

Hillbilly Elegy -- just not working for me, for whatever reason(s). His Dark Materials is pretty dull. I put the first ep of the new season on pause about half way through, and just haven't returned. Only Pan, and Lee Scorsby, who I barely glimpsed in that time frame -- but my goodness did that leap out in contrast to the dreary of what was before that, had any effect/affect -- for me. Others here, as one can tell from its own thread, really love this series. Also, the flying -- the martial artists from Pugilist World in Nirvana in Fire, provide a real sense of what it might be like to have a body that can fly -- it actually provokes the same sense of weightless flying when one does in one's dreams. Whereas Sarfina has to stress and strain to keep position and fight through the relentless weight of atmosphere.

Partner called me over this AM to see this. Terrific. Do ya think (some) Dems are finally gettin' the hang of this tv thang?

"For the African Women Who Love Diana, ‘The Crown’ Feels Personal In her lifetime, the Princess of Wales was adored by many women in Africa and the diaspora, who then passed that loyalty on to their daughters." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/arts/television/the-crown-african-women-princess-diana.html?