Archery

I love the fact that when Malva accuses Jamie, Claire's response is "let me leave this room before I choke a bitch." And her overarching feeling is one of betrayal -- that Malva was her protege and she would not have expected her to do this in a million years. That rang so true to me, and I'm glad DG didn't do the trite "romance novel" thing of having the heroine actually believe, however briefly, that the hero has been unfaithful, despite all that they have been through.

"Odyssey, this is Houston, do you read?" "That's four minutes, standing by." "Odyssey, uh, Houston, do you read?" [pause, crackle] "Hello, Houston, this is Odyssey. Good to see you again." "Odyssey, Houston, welcome home. Glad to see you." --Apollo 13 Had Astronaut Ken Mattingly not been misdiagnosed with measles, they would all have perished on that mission.

I thought Greece should have been top three. It was gorgeous. My 11 year old was upset at how Joseph shut Merline down and disappointed that he did not go home. And someone should tell Sourpuss Boy that you don't have to attack your partner if you are, in fact, in the top three.

I thought for longest time it was "and once we start, we need to click." Apparently, I have a hearing problem when it comes to Cyndi Lauper.

Just finished Fiery Cross re-read. I had read it when it first came out, and, honestly, I didn't remember a lot of stuff that happened in the book. As in, it didn't even feel familiar. I have to confess that when it comes to DG's writing, I'm often torn between Why do I need to know this - just move on, already! and Let me file this detail away because it might be important two books from now. That was a lot of this book for me. I'm a sucker for those rare times when DG breaks Jamie. Obvs, in Outlander. In DIA, when he is trying to honor Claire's wishes with respect to Frank. In Voyager, when he is studying the photos of Brianna. And in Fiery Cross, when, after Jamie keeps a brave face on during the snake bite treatment (because, OMG, she's injecting distilled alcohol into the tissues of his wounded leg!!), DG give us this: "and finally, he wept." Undone. There's another part when Claire observes that Jamie has probably never had a day without pain since Culloden, and nobody would ever know because he would never say so. That is why I love Claire. She totally gets it. And one more thing, which probably gets lost in the Return of Young Ian: Wee Jemmy charging the "big pig" with Jamie's dropped dirk, intent on killing that thing. Love.

THIS! I was trying to figure out what that thing reminded me of! All it needed was a sad little chest-length necktie.

Kelly's '90s look isn't any more twee than pointed nails, cross-dressing, or any of the million other "artistic personality" affectations that have popped up on PR. What I do like about her is that she comes across as sweet and humble. Her story about learning to alter her thrift-store clothing so that other people wouldn't recognize the clothes they'd donated was really touching. Note to Blake: Just don't make fun of people's accents. It isn't adorable, ever. I would have been pleased with Swapnil or Edmond winning. Swapnil's was impeccably made and really beautiful, but normal-looking. Edmond's was a wow-moment meant to emphasize Hallmark's connection to special occasions. I think it was very smart to keep his thoughts and plans to himself; all it takes is for a competitor to throw subtle shade at your unfinished design to make you second-guess yourself and fall apart. Over the years, the judges have gravitated to unconventional materials challenge garments where you can't necessarily tell what the material is. Like Korto's (I think) woven seat belt coat. They often criticize contestants for using materials that are too fabric-like, such as tablecloths or napkins. They have no problem with flowers and beads or pebbles hot-glued to muslin, so long as they (and not the muslin) create the fabric effect. (Which is why I cannot fathom what David was thinking with his well-made muslin hoodie.) They have typically praised designers who use the unconventional material to create a textile and then create a garment from that. If you didn't know Swapnil's dress was made of paper, you probably wouldn't see it, unlike most of the others, which looked like the rectangular paper or envelopes that they were (see Merline's and Pistachio's, respectively).

Not to double-post or anything, but: The one thing that bugs me the most about Drums of Autumn is . . . Brianna. She jumps into the past to find her parents because she finds an obituary saying that they died in a fire. And, . . .what? She's so stupid. No matter whether they died in a fire or died holding hands in their nice warm bed at a hundred and ten years old, they are still dead in your lifetime, you git. Does she think that by going back to warn them, they won't actually die, ever? I get that there had to be some catalyst to having her (secretly -- again, she's so stupid) go back in time, but that reason is just dumb. Roger's reason (she's too dumb to live back then, and, oh, yes, I love her) makes much more sense.

Over in the "Getting Music Past the Censors" thread, there were these lyrics from Cuddly Toy, by the Monkees, which I've been singing ever since my sister and I sent away for the double album -- paid for with a money order -- which was advertised during the weekday afternoon reruns of the show (that is to say, for more than forty years): You're not the only cuddly toy that was ever enjoyed by any boy You're not the only choo choo train that was left out in the rain the day after Santa came. And every one of those years, I've been singing, You're not the only choo choo train that was left out in the rain the day of this hurricane. Somehow, it made sense to me. I also thought the song was about being lonely, as opposed to being, erm, used and tossed aside.

I didn't say it was. I put the number in there so that one wouldn't have to peruse the whole list looking for the blurb.

NPR included Outlander in its Swoonworthy List of Romances (at #3): http://www.npr.org/2015/07/29/426731847/happy-ever-after-100-swoon-worthy-romances

I have such a vivid memory of this: my mom's car, she's driving and my godmother is sitting in the front passenger seat. I must have been sitting in the "hump seat" -- the middle of the back seat where the gear box makes that lump on the floor so you can't sit comfortably -- and staring at the radio dial while Carole King sang "It's Too Late." I still remember that sad, hollow feeling I got when she sang, "Still, I'm glad for what we had, and how I once loved you." That remains the single most melancholy song lyric I've ever heard, and I regularly tear up when I hear it. That album, "Tapestry," came out in 1971, so I was probably 4 or 5. Not so irrational. My kids and I call it "the Dino song," because her riff at the end sounds just like the Flinstone's pet dinosaur when it would get excited and "bark."

Well, yes and no. Readers nominated, but the panel of four decided whether the book met all of the criteria: a Happy Ever After where the protagonists have grown, over the course of the book, to be worthy of each other romance has to be the main plotline stands the test of time represents the best of the genre

Diana Gabaldon may not consider Outlander an historical romance novel, but National Public Radio disagrees. Check out Number 3 on the list. [small voice]My other all time favorite, Flowers From The Storm, by Laura Kinsale, is also on this list.[small voice]

Hey [insert real name here], One of these days, over a wee dram, I'll tell ye about the time I worked until the cock crowed to finish a brief that I'd let languish because I couldna let Jamie and Claire rest long enough to write it. I didna charge for the overtime, though. Like Ned Gowan, despite my profession, I do have some morals, ye ken.

Seems to me that if people know so much about Taylor Swift's dating habits (and the dating habits of her former boyfriends and the girls they allegedly cheat on her with) that they can identify the in-song code referring to said boyfriends and said girls, it says more about those people's obsession with Swift than about Swift's personality or song writing. As in, I'm not interested in her personal life, so her songs are just songs. And, another UO: Good on her for making an actual apology, and not an "if anybody was offended" non-apology.

UO: I missed all the behind the scenes showrunner drama on Sleepy Hollow. I just binged Season Two, which I'd DVR'd but never watched. I liked it almost as much as Season One.

It took closed captioning of a Cyndi Lauper concert on PBS for me to find out that "What in the world can they get done," was really "When the working day is done," in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I had been singing it wrong for more than twenty years. Loudly.

I think I am just about the photo negative of a typical Taylor Swift fan. But I like her music (disclaimer: I only have her actual albums because they were loaded on an iPod I bought second hand) and, since I'll never see her perform in concert, I don't care if she's autotuned. All I know is that the first song of hers that I heard, "Fifteen," gave me goosebumps with its maturity. I don't follow her on social media, so I have no idea whom she's dated or written songs about or whatever. From the stuff that pops up on my Facebook feed (TIME is obsessed with her), she seems like a generous, kind person. And she looks good in a crop top. I just think its silly to whip up a tempest in a teapot and then complain about the storm. As to Nicki Minaj, she has a bit of an ego-centric vindictive streak (I remember her canceling a headliner concert because a DJ made a crack about one of her songs), so she's not exactly one to let it go, either.

Last night I came upon The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith. I had to pick another show on a different channel just so I would have something to change over to with the remote when it all got to be too much. Smith plays a real life father (Chris) whose wife leaves him with their 5 year old son (played by Jaden Smith), and he gets into an unpaid, competitive internship program to try to land a job as a stockbroker at Dean Witter. Basically whoever sells the most after six months will get offered the job. Chris sells medical scanners to make ends meet, and he and the boy are often homeless, running across town after work to get in line for a place in the shelter, sleeping in the BART station bathroom when they have no place else to go, carrying everything they own in a suitcase and a plastic shopping bag. Nobody at work knows he is homeless. What's so brilliant and heartbreaking about Smith's performance is that he wears this jocular, everything-is-fine-sir mask to get through the corporate day in order to stay in the running for the job, but whenever nobody's looking, we the audience can see the stress and anxiety and fear about where the next meal is coming from, or where they're going to sleep that night. He's trying so hard to keep it together, that the moments when he snaps at his kid because he's at the end of his rope are almost physical. I lost it completely at two points. One is a voice over where Chris says [paraphrasing], "You know, when I was in school, everytime I got an A on a paper or test, I would tell myself that I could become this great person who did amazing things. And then I never did." And the payoff at the end, when Chris just walks right out of the building, so overcome that he cannot speak.

I do wonder how much input DG has in mapping out the actual story arc, because -- love her or hate her -- DG tends to put in details and scenes that seem not to have any point, but that figure hugely later on down the line. I would think that DG would spend a lot of time saying, "Oh, you can't cut that out because X has to happen later on." Here's an example. I had the abridged audiobooks for Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber (wonderfully narrated by Geraldine James) back in the 1990s. The DIA audiobook left out the whole battle of Prestonpans, including the encounter with the 16 year old English soldier in the wood. Without that scene, Voyager cannot happen. Considering how much has to be cut out of the novels for television, I'd be terrified that they are leaving out some detail that has major repercussions later on. As to Jamie or Claire being a "Mary Sue," one of the defining characteristics of a Mary (or Marty) Sue in fan fiction is that this perfect, idealized character replaces one of the main characters as the focus of the story. E.g., the practically perfect present-day girl who somehow finds herself on the bridge of the Enterprise, and who solves problems better and faster than Mr. Spock does, and everyone spends a lot of time talking about how smart/perky/beautiful, etc., she is. Jamie and Claire are both smart, capable, and strong-willed, and neither one is a Mary/Marty Sue.

On nights when I "do" my daughter's hair, she gets to pick the movie we'll watch while I comb and braid it. Tonight she picked Popeye. This came out when I was young, and I don't remember it being so terrible. Robin Williams was a comedy genius, and Shelly Duvall was inspired casting, but OMG, I have never braided so fast to get out from in front of that TV.

I guess the point I'm making, though, is that "Jessica Gutenberg," being fictional, could have been on par with Gunne Sax, or could have been more 18th century realistic. To say, here are some examples of Gunne Sax dresses from that period and they wouldn't really work, so it strains believability, isn't really fair to the author, since fictional Claire sees a fictional dress in a fictional store that she thinks is close enough.

Claire's dress was a Jessica Gutenberg, not a Gunne Sax, at least in the original version of Voyager.

I actually DVR'd A Princess for Christmas because I wanted to see SH in another role. It's a Hallmark movie, and that thought, along with a nice glass of cheap wine, is all I needed to get through it. My one takeaway: OMG, that dude is beautiful. With his corporate hair and soft voice and no been-sleeping-in-the-bushes chin scruff? Sam Heughan is one beautiful man. (And, like a lot of actors I've come to like (*coughScottBakulacough*), is completely capable of being the best thing in a bad movie.)