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PrincessLuceval

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Everything posted by PrincessLuceval

  1. This book is one I reread as fall comes on. It just goes with it. I'm wondering if so much of the food memory is because Laura was so young, and therefore didn't remember a lot else (think back to when you were five). The descriptions of the various foodmakings was great, but had to be fleshed out too. I never thought of the corncob doll not being fair. I picture it as Laura using her imagination until Ma could make a doll. (And the corncob would have been dried corn, not a freshly eaten corn on the cob one). Maybe Ma observed Laura playing with it and went to work making the doll, but saved it for Christmas, because...Christmas. Loved the sugaring off descriptions! The syrup, the sugar, making the syrup candy. Yum. I also love how Laura depicted Charlie as a brat. He's the one who later nearly raped her in real life, no?
  2. Chains and padlocks? Or maybe just take them to bed with you? :)
  3. Hmmm, maybe that's why Laura wrote the story about Tay Pay Pryor so amusingly. Which leads me to another thing - TP Pryor was actually Mary Power's dad, the tailor. He had a drinking problem. Laura just changed the name a little to protect her friend's reputation.
  4. I always thought that Lena and Gene were Hiram's kids, and Docia married a widower. Actually Lena and Gene were hers from her first marriage to a Walvogel. I can't find whether or not he died or she left him. Hiram's her second husband. And then in some other reading I found that she and Hiram tried to leave Lena and Gene at different orphanages. Really, this family was screwed. up. Oops, found out about the first husband. He accidentally shot someone breaking into their house, and was sent to prison. Docia divorced him. She was pregnant with Gene. Now in the game of fact vs historical fiction, Laura makes no mention of Lena until the move to De Smet. However, Lena's a year older than Laura, and they all lived together in the Big Woods. I'm learning so much revisiting this!!
  5. Flour, dried apples, raisins, baking soda (saleratus) and yeast, sugar....that's just off the top of my head as to what they were making for the "feast." Pies and cakes, light bread, cranberry jelly. I wonder what it was like at the store when Pa went - were there so many supplies that people didn't feel the need to knock each other over to get them? Wouldn't that have run out too? I realize the trains had been frozen in, but I wonder if some of the supplies had spoiled? And another Pa moment, when he's being generous with other people's stuff: when they open the barrel from the church back east, and they're pulling out the various items, there's a dress for Ma. Pa generously gives it to her. "This looks to be your size," he beamed."Here, take it!" Why, thanks for letting her have it, jerk. Like it was yours to decide who gets the charity. GAH.
  6. Actually, I think it's written somewhere that the railroad really let them live there, but they had to pay for the use of everything and all of the food that was left. I'm not sure where I read it, probably in the same place I learned about the real long winter and the lazy ass boarder and his knocked up wife they had living with them. When it's dissected, the Ingalls family's lives certainly take on a darker turn.
  7. OH! That reminds me of another time Pa's talking out of his ass. When the Boasts are there for Christmas dinner, Mr. Boast says something about "I never hope to eat a better Christmas dinner," complimenting Ma's cooking. And Pa goes off on this tangent: "Well, it's the first Christmas dinner anybody ever ate in this part of the country. I'm glad it was a good one. In time to come, no doubt a good many folks will celebrate Christmas around here (ooh, he's a soothsayer!) and I expect they'll have fancier fixings in some ways, but I don't know how they can have more solid comfort than we've got, and that's a fact." Because the "solid comfort" is the surveyors' house, which they're living in, free, eating the surveyors' leftover peaches and pickles.
  8. Oh, goodie, more of my people here! I always thought that Laura tried to show Pa in his best light, because she was his favorite. But Pa was a blowhard jerk quite often. Oh, look! Pa is the funniest minstrel! Oh, look, Pa wins the spelling bee! Oh, look, Pa was the best at charades! Oh, listen, Pa knows that it's going to be a hard winter, because things just feel off. And the muskrats' house is extra thick. And the irony is so heavy sometimes. Pa talking about (in BTSOSL) how he thinks that winters are going to be milder there, because they moved west, which supposedly is as good as moving south (insert the anvil trombone sound). And then passively making Ma out to be a bitch, and Mary, too. One of my favorite examples is when Laura helps Pa shoo the cattle that had wandered in after the first snowstorm in TLW. Their heads had frozen to the ground, and it had to be a really grotesque image to Laura, who tried to tell the story back at the house (because she was Mary's eyes and ears!). What do Ma and Mary do? Call her a liar, pretty much. Ma: "That can't be!" Mary (knitting busily, because my God she has to be shown doing something productive): "It must be one of Laura's queer notions. How can cattle's heads be frozen to the ground, Laura?" GOD, I wanted to just slap her silly right then. And THEN, Pa comes in, and corroborates the story. No apologies to Laura for not believing her. I'm glad we have this thread here, because the snark potential for the books is huge.
  9. Right here! http://forums.previously.tv/topic/7301-laura-ingalls-wilders-little-house-series/
  10. I love "The Consultant," where the crew all has to change personalities to go against what they are, and to play to what their stereotype is. Jennifer's the dumb blonde; Bailey is spacey (her Nestle's song is great); Herb and Carlson are competent. Just a fun episode.
  11. I love how Radar didn't know how to deal with him at first. He'd just lost Colonel Blake, who was like a father to him. I have to remember that Radar was pretty much a kid. But he ended up bending over backwards to do anything for Potter. Major Houlihan also.
  12. Drunk Margaret, to Trapper at his going away party: "You....aminal." (smiles blindingly)
  13. Boy, DoughGirl, you said it. Fire at the mline school. Old dude sets himself on fire. Creepy woman kidnaps Laura. (But it did spawn one of my favorite things to say: "Well, lock me in the cellar and call me Ellen!" along the lines of "Well, I'll be darned.") Ma contemplates cutting off her leg.
  14. "For a minute there, Frank, you almost had a chin!"
  15. Chris Jerk, er, Burke, getting the smackdown on his episodes was golden.
  16. Klinger was great as a background crazy; when he went "normal" and had expanded storylines he became boring. That episode where he wanted to decorate his office with all of his stuff from home? Horrid. "Bugout," where he had to trade his collection of dresses to the prostitutes for their building? Awesome.
  17. Grandma was Sophie, the New York maid, in the June Allyson version of Little Women.
  18. Later with that same horse (now Colonel Potter's Sophie) needs a "cleaning out": Hawkeye: "I'm not a veterinarian!" BJ: "You're a veteran." Hawkeye: "Close enough for jazz." I use "close enough for jazz" in my accounting job more often than my coworkers probably would like.
  19. And she goes through the whole made up story of how it saved her life. When Margaret goes against character, whether playing jokes or drunk, I like her. One of my favorites is "Movie Tonight." And another, when it's showed in full (not cut up for TV) is the two-parter, "Bug Out."
  20. And when Radar got his old toboggan cap for him, secretly. One episode I really like is when he comes back from r and r in Tokyo completely hungover, and his "wife" comes to see him. He doesn't remember marrying her. It's one of the better, more fun later episodes.
  21. The tornado episode, with the Japanese tourists (very, very un PC stereotype with their cameras around their necks). One of the tourists excitedly points out the window (at the coming tornado). Carlson mutters to himself:"He probably spotted a Fotomat."
  22. Forgot about Aaaaaaaarrrrrooon. He is so pompous. And it's funny when he and Geoffrey are judging together. Aaron wants heat in his dish, Geoffrey complains about it.
  23. Neil Patrick Harris is my favorite guest of his. They have such a good time together.
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