Mybrainhurts

Alexis Denisof held the door open for me when I was going into my local Starbucks--I tried not to squeak too loud when I said "Thank you."

Yeah, that would have been a helluva lot more entertaining than the press conference was. Thanks for letting me know--the wife and I were dying to find out and were yelling at the firemen to hurry up since they weren't saying anything anyway. We only got the end of the idiotic tenant case with Plaintiff Byrd who can't be bothered to buy insurance because he feels safe. It's a shame there are so many stupid people out there but I guess that's why JJ is so damn rich.

What was the verdict in the evil mom/whiny not-working daughter and boyfriend case? My stupid network interrupted JJ for the damn Harrison Ford plane crash, where the firemen spent 20 minutes talking about how they didn't know how the plane crashed while the reporters kept asking how the plane crashed. I can't imagine JJ gave the mother anything but she didn't seem all that sympathetic toward the daughter either. I know I didn't have all that much sympathy for the daughter--I know how hard it is to find a decent place to live, but eight months is a bit long to stay at someone's house if you're going to bitch about how mean that person is to you.

Hope everything gets better soon, Toaster Strudel.

Thank you! Sadly, (or I should say embarrassingly), my name came after a really bad episode of Smallville when I'd swore I'd never watch TV again because it made my brain hurt so much. I just figured it would be the perfect name to comment on bad television and it especially fits when watching JJ, especially after watching the saintly pair of convent schoolgirls on Friday.

In the mother suing son case, did anyone else giggle like a nut when JJ kept saying "pig" over and over again? For some reason, that just cracked me up.

Hooray!!! My copy finally arrived today and it is absolutely gorgeous! Can't wait to start talking about it!

Bullock: I curse you all the time but you never bring me candy.

All I have to say about this is.....HOT DAMN!!!!

How about Herschel? That seems like a good flustered pigeon name.

I like the books a lot less than when I first read them because the illusion of a happy family facing life as pioneers in a beautiful new land is stripped away once you realize that Pa is a problematic character who put his family at risk multiple times for no real reason. However, I like Laura as a person a whole lot more. This is a person who really worked her way through all the crap that life threw at her and came out as a pretty decent person at the end of it all. I wish that she had had a happier life with Almanzo but unfortunately they chose to be farmers, which even under the best of circumstances, is a difficult life to live. As far as being an American classic, I would agree to a certain point. As long as kids learn that this is the way that one person (or two people, if you count Rose's editorial commentary in certain parts of the books) thought about "how the West was won" and that there is a lot of stretching of truth in these books, I definitely think the books are worthwhile reading for children just for a lot of the imagery alone. ETA--This has been so much fun to read with everyone all over again. I loved getting new insights into the books and had a lot of fun talking about the books with other people!

There were parts of this episode that I really liked (everything with Simmons and the Fitz/Ward face-off) and there were parts that bored me to tears. I am so sick of the Ward/Skye nonsense that just goes on and on. The justification that Ward will only give information to Skye is now crap because Fitz got information out of Ward just fine (yeah, he had to cut off Ward's oxygen but hey, it's better than listening to Ward being creepy to Skye). I'm also getting a little tired of Lance Hunter. His constant references to Isabelle Hartley are irritating because Hartley sounds like a far more interesting character than he is and it just reminds me that I could be watching Lucy Lawless instead of this dull guy. It's also annoying that Mack and Tripp are still "guest-starring" while he is considered one of the team. I'm not as bored as I was during the middle of last season but I'm not really entertained either and next week's episode doesn't really make me think things are going to change because their "humorous" episodes haven't really been all that good. I'm trying to make it to Agent Carter but it's getting hard.

Can you imagine Ma giving Laura "The Talk"? The mind boggles.

Before we finish with Little Town on the Prairie this week, I wanted to mention my favorite character in the book--Kitty!!!! I loved that Kitty killed her first mouse before she could barely get around and that she was the most excited (after Pa, of course) about the blackbird pie. Kitty was one of the few things that Pa brought into the house that was a straight up awesome purchase without causing any later problems (except maybe cleaning up dead gophers). I can't believe I'm going to do this but I'm going to defend Pa a little here. In re-reading Laura Ingalls: A Writer's Life, even Laura didn't describe him as a good farmer (she said he was a musician and a poet and a great hunter and trapper) so I think maybe she realized that he did come across as somewhat of a failure as far as his "career" as a farmer went. Maybe that's why she went overboard saying he was the most awesome Pa that ever awesomed--she certainly couldn't say that he was the best provider and she didn't do so. Oh and blackbird pie?? Eww. Just no. Although I guess we should be grateful that gopher pie or roast gopher or anything like that didn't come up in this book.

Well, the plaintiff's witness ran a credit repair company (most of those companies are pretty sketchy) so I'm guessing it could have been much seedier if JJ let the story go on further. That Deandre was a charmer--I can totally see why women fell for his scammer ways.

This show frustrates me so much because I keep thinking it could be much better than it is. There were a few things I liked about the episode--as a comic nerd, I loved Creel with the ball and chain since that is classic Absorbing Man (I was glad that he didn't have much dialogue either; these writers really have a tin ear for dialogue and Creel's silence meant I didn't hate him), May was awesome as always and I loved Koenig mouthing "Really?!?!?" when Coulson was going on as Talbot. I liked Lucy Lawless' character--too bad it's seems like a one and done for her. I hated what they did with Fitz and Simmons simply because I don't think Simmons would have left Fitz in that state. I hated the Ward/Skye scene because the writers keep thinking that we should feel sorry for Ward and I just can't because he's a murdering bastard. (I must admit, and I'm not the biggest Skye fan here so it's hard for me to say this, she did handle Ward pretty well but I'm thinking that's going to change soon enough given all the love for Ward that the showrunners seem to have). And I HATED, HATED the last fifteen minutes of the show--that was some of the worst writing I have ever seen. They only had two tasks--get the Obelisk and get a Quinjet. They let the Obelisk go for no real reason (why let Lucy Lawless and her crew leave--what hospital can do anything to save her at that point? At least keep them with you so you can deliver both items! ) so the bad guys now have an alien object that no one knows anything about. Why was getting the Quinjet a bigger priority than the Obelisk? It's stupidity like that that makes me question why I watch this show. The writers come up with ideas that they want to happen but they have a poor way of implementing them so the characters look crazy or stupid.

There is one thing that Pa did during the Burr Oak Iowa period that was completely dishonest--he and the family snuck out of town without paying the landlord and may have owed other people money. This was covered in the Donald Zochert biography Laura but never mentioned in the Little House books. Ostensibly, Pa did it because he felt that he was being ripped off by the landlord but that's not something a scrupulously honest man like Pa supposedly was would do. I always felt that was one reason Iowa was completely left out from the Little House books. Other than that, Pa's careless ways and dependence on Laura's wages to help put Mary through school was enough to turn me against him. I mean, what kind of parent makes a fourteen year old girl worry about a job to the point that Laura was worried throughout the last 3 or 4 books? That's just my opinion though.

I always thought this was the most boring of the Little House books, even though it was pretty realistic in describing how awful all those blizzards were. That might actually be why it was so boring--reading about people starving and the daily grind of trying to stay alive gets really depressing so after the first few pages you stop wanting to read and finishing the book seems more like a chore. The only reason I was glad to read it this time around was that it made me even happier that I live here in sunny California and don't ever have to worry about blizzards or shoveling snow again. Oh, you knew that Royal probably complained all that following spring about how much money he could have made selling the seed wheat--even in Farmer Boy, Royal seemed to love the idea of making money more than anything.

I really thought that Emily was a goner with that outfit--it looked so poorly put together with the skirt and tulle underskirt looking sloppy and the weird veil on her model's face. Then when she kept saying that she really felt comfortable about making kids' clothes, that just seemed to be the producer cue that we'd be saying goodbye to her. I mean Sandhya's outfit was really hideous as well (and I didn't mind her leaving), but usually when an ugly outfit comes from someone saying that "I do this all the time", that's the person they kick off. Personally, I loved the fact that Zac Posen knew all about the dolls and was so upset that Rebecca ("with her victrola and her pickle"!!!!) wasn't represented well by Emily's outfit. Who knew that Zac was such an American Girl fanboy?

Hope this isn't too far off topic but Canvas Network is giving a course on Laura Ingalls Wilder (taught by Pamela Smith Hill, the author of Laura Ingalls Wilder, A Writer's Life and the Annotated Pioneer Girl). It's called "Laura Ingalls Wilder: Exploring Her Work & Writing Life". It starts September 22--I'm already signed up and I figured since everyone here are fans of Laura, I'd pass it on.

The two things I liked best about BTSOSL were the train ride (Laura was such a badass not to be scared and to actually be able to walk through the train car!) and Lena. I always hoped Lena would come back--she was one of the better characters in the series, even though she was only in the one book for a short time.

I still love the Garth Williams illustration when Nellie is pulling Laura's hair. Laura's elongated face cracks me up. What I never understood is why Pa thought that a farmer could make enough money to live like a king and planned his life accordingly. As a farmer, you're always dependent on the weather, supply and demand for your crops, pests and a million other things. It's not a career that one thinks of when hoping for instant wealth like Pa always did.

Stargazer3, I still show the release date as November 20 on my Amazon order so hopefully it will be released on that day. I'm guessing that because the publisher is such a small one and the demand is probably larger than first expected (the book was even mentioned on Entertainment Weekly's Bullseye page, which talks about all the hot things in pop culture), they needed to go back and print more books.

That's what happens when an author says everything in the book is true to life when it actually isn't. Carrie actually wasn't born until after the Ingalls arrived in Kansas (which makes Pa's leaving Wisconsin worse somehow because Ma was probably pregnant when they left). That's why Pa really took Laura and Mary to the Indian camp--Ma was giving birth to Carrie and didn't want the girls around during that time. Laura used creative license in saying that she remembered a lot of what happened in LHOTP--she really was only three at the time so unless she had one of the most amazing brains of all time, she probably only heard stories of what Kansas was like.

I actually loved this book although I had to run out and get a pumpkin pie for my wife and I while reading it because every time Almanzo talked about eating a delicious, quivering piece of pumpkin pie, our stomachs would growl. My only problem was Almanzo's whining about working with colts every few pages. After the fifth mention, it started getting a little weird and by the time we were halfway through the book, we would both start laughing each and every time colts were mentioned.