Words on Wednesday: More on the Lord Peter books

  This post contains an annotated list of the Lord Peter novels.

  But first, a question for you:

  How do the Lord Peter novels and stories resemble the Big Bang Theory TV show? 

Wordless Wednesday: Dancing with the Stars

Boom and Bert and Mary Poppins

Wordless Wednesday: Same Wall, Different Years

My sister is in a rocking horse that my grandmother "rode" in when she was that size.  i wish i knew who had made it.

Max's Progress

Very little has changed here since i last updated this.
 Well, we just got good at the previous routine, when it changed!  But Medicaid

Impasse?

Winter Photos from about 2000

   Max and i have settled into a routine these days.  Again.

It's About the Lion

Wordless Wednesday: Christmas is Coming!

He's Big!

Learning Parenting: Part 2: How Much Choice?

   i am surely the world's greatest believer in choices.
  I still try to not think of

Wordless Wednesday: Gift Box

This is a small mache box, done in colored pencil, to accomany a gift of the book, Gift from the Sea.

Wordless Wednesday: December Trainplay

This is Max, ten years ago, enjoying his Thomas the Tank Engine trains in our upstairs playroom where my blog computer Duckpond now sits.

The TV, the Computer, and a bit of Pop Culture

 

  i hadn't mentioned here our latest computer acquisition, christened "Hearth," because

Tomorrow and Friday the finals of the 

are being aired.  You may want to catch them if you can.
Not only do i simply find Jeopardy! a fascinating program, but i believe one of the finalists is a young woman on the autism spectrum.

Releasing Abed: The Power of Friends

"This time you'll never get out!"

One of my favorite TV shows

   is NBC's Community.  My family doesn't understand why, and my friends don't seem to find it.  It's on Thursday nights, apparently opposite some show with dancing and celebrities?
  The premise is a bunch of diverse misfits attending a community college and melding a friendship.
  Most of them are, quite honestly, jerks.
  Rarely does an episode not involve a group meltdown.
  But.
  They all learn something from each meltdown.  Each episode sees increased self-awareness from one or more characters, and personal growth.

Abed, the character with Asperger's syndrome

  The reason  Community rates a post on this blog is Abed.
  The reason for the post now is the recent episode, "Virtual Systems Analysis," which shows Abed more autistic than he has previously been shown.

Escaping the Hypnogourd

"Technology is not your friend."
                                    ~~Eustacia Cutler

  In Piers Anthony's novel Ogre Ogre, Anthony depicts treacherous gourds.
  Each gourd has a hole in it, and, if you are foolhardy enough to look into the hole, you become trapped

A Date with a Phlebotomist

  Max's new doctor is definitely on the ball.  When i said i didn't remember when, or if, Max had  ever had bloodwork done, the doctor said we need a baseline lab.
  So Max and i went in for it today.
  Now Max is always the first one up in our house.  He gets dressed and goes downstairs to have his bowl of cereal, and settles in for TV until the bus comes.
  i talked to him about the bloodwork and how he needed to not eat.
  And there was The Sign.

Watching Old TV: Four Things to Like About Family Affair

  Recently we've had several different old sitcoms out of the library.

Our 1960s TV

  Flipper was fun, but i didn't really see anything worth talking about in it.
  However, Family Affair seems to transcend a mere sitcom.  There's  a depth to it without being heavy.

  In no particular order, here is hopefully a quick list of four things that make Family Affair exceptional:

DVD/MTM/Signs of the Times

The upgrades to our Computer Farm have left me temporarily unable to access my blog from home, so i'm using my friend Sharon's laptop to publish this draft.  Thanks, Sharon!

So i've been watching too much old TV recently. But i did have a lot of fun with things like, i used to have a dress with a collar like that! Their dish drainer is just like ours - and 3/4 of the ones in the stores today. And - May have been different in NYC, but girls hardly ever wore pants around here in the early 60s.

We had Season 4 of The Dick VanDyke Show out from the library for six weeks. (checked out then renewed once.) Then at Christmas MyGuy was given a Best Ever collection of Dick VanDyke shows. We haven't seen those yet, but i have been comparing which episodes are on that set with the ones in Season 4.

My tastes do not match the tastes of the people who made the collection.

Now every episode of this series is cute & funny, even the waste of airtime one where Sally is embarrassed about her rich boyfriend, but dumps him - not because he's a mortician, but because he treats the help like dirt - before Rob & Buddy can tell her he's married.

But The Impractical Joke (a friend of Buddy's gets Rob to disassemble his phone, then Buddy brings all sorts of hurt on himself awaiting Rob's imagined revenge) is far more deserving of a Best Ever spot than either 4 1/2 or the inaccurately named The Allen Brady Show Goes to Jail. Those seem to have earned a place as Best Ever mainly because of guest Don Rickles.

They're good, fun shows, but not great ones.

Oh, and i would dearly love to see again the one where Rob & Laura discover that the person who married them wasn't really entitled to do marriages, so they need to get married, because they aren't, and the guy they choose to perform the ceremony doesn't want to, because he's never seen a couple who obviously so do not belong together.  That is one of my all-time favorites!!!

And then there's the third Season 4 Episode on the Best Ever collection, Don't Bathe on Saturday Night. Like the other two, it's cute, not as good as others in Season 4.  i suppose i don't mind  having it on our collection.

But we like to watch the Behind the Scenes stuff and voiceover commemtaries. i kept getting angrier and angrier as i did.

The story involves a failed attempt of Rob & Laura to take in a show and have a night in a nice hotel. But Laura gets her toe stuck in the plumbing, and she's locked in the bathroom.

The producer had promised Mary Tyler Moore a Laura episode. Even doing the voiceovers in like 2003, he didn't get why she wasn't happy with his special Laura episode.
Which had her offscreen hollering lines as in a radio show for 3/4 of the program.
While the guys in charge tried to console her with the thought that, while she was offscreen, she would be giving all the men in America a treat, allowing them to imagine her naked in the bathtub.

Am i the only one who sees a problem here?

This was 1964. Everyone blamed Mary's lousy attitude on the fact that she was quitting smoking that week. Rob Reiner yelled at her (not knowing it was in front of sponsors) for her uncooperative attitude. Later they apologized to each other and Mary even sent Rob a peace offering gift. (He said she deserved every word of it, but he should've taken her into her trailer to do it.)

Even in Mary's accompanying interviews, she blamed her temper on the smoking thing.

i say it was MTM being classy. And preserving her reputation as not a prima donna.

i told MyGuy that in 1974, she would've refused to do it.  My thought was, the climate of the times had changed.   He told me that in 1974 she had her own production company and was calling the shots.

Which actually is the best revenge anyway.