So Charlie Brown’s troubles are not because he’s a loser, they’re because he’s shallow: He’s in love with a girl because of her looks. He wants to kick a football because his ego won’t let him fail (or learn that Lucy is a sociopathic liar). He is a child, but his dog has a much richer inner life.
I don’t think this explains the kite-eating tree.
In 1170, King Henry II says, “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house, and not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk.” Said fools and dastards decide that this means they should kill Archbishop Thomas Becket.
In 1600, Queen Elizabeth grants a formal charter to the London merchants trading to the East Indies. This doesn’t work out very well for the East Indies.
In 1777 George Washington’s Continental Army is given “cozy winter quarters” at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
In 1888, artist and talented loon Vincent Van Gogh cut off the lower part of his left ear, to give to a prostitute named Rachel, who worked at a brothel nearby. Um, thanks, but does it come in, like, not bleeding?
In 1912 the Parisian literary review, Nouvelle Revue Francaise, rejects an excerpt from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Doh!
In 1915 Sir Douglas Haig is made the commander-in-chief of the British army in France, and eventually gives his soldiers the thoughtful and exploding gift of the Somme.
In 1972 Pepe Lopez is invited to join the Stella Maris rugby team, and gets a free trip to Chile on Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 over the Andes. He proves to be very tasty.
Sad Spaceman contemplates lunch.
It seems like all the lights are up in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d post this hilarious Christmas routine by Patton Oswalt:
Also here on youtube.
More Sad Spaceman here.
This is one that has been festering for some time, so please forgive the Phrase Freak if he goes “off the Bale” a bit. Like many changes to the English language, the meaning of this word has become twisted. Once, it defined something that was done without a method or choice, something determined by chance.
It did not mean something unexpected, strange, improvised, capricious, absurd, and cheese-eating monkeys flying out of my butt. (See that last one was absurd, a non sequitur for sure, but it was not random, even if it might have seemed that way to you.)
Now the Great Beast (Facebook) has slouched its way into the Bethlehem of my daily routine with an epidemic of lists (which by their nature tend to be the opposite of random) giving me supposedly “random” facts about the people I love and admire. Many of these people are incredibly literate. Way smarter than me. Yet they have fallen under the sway of the googly-eyed siren that spawned the phrase, “that’s, like, so totally random.”
It is easy to mistake great complexity or subtlety for randomness. I’d be willing to bet that most of those lists are:
I’m afraid this usage gets eight gobsmacks out of ten. We’re on full alert now people!
Shovel Ready | specific timetable | full patch | IED | on the ground