I’ve been watching “Life In Pieces” (which is absolutely terrific, by the way) for a season and a half now and I only just noticed last weeks the show’s tagline: “One big family, four short stories”. The structure of the show is four roughly 5-minute storylines with various members of the family in each, usually with an overarching theme for the episode. The thing is, the family name is Short. So, four SHORT stories!
Biggs and Antilles sure do show up a lot of different places.
The Paloma Faith song “Smoke & Mirrors” has the lines:
You might think I’m sitting home and crying
But I’m not, oh no
I pulled the Queen of Clubs, there’s no denying
I’m having the time of my life
Since the first time I ever heard the song, I thought of the Queen of Clubs in a flowery literary sense like if a woman was described as the Queen of Hearts (love) or Diamonds (wealth). I figured the Queen of Clubs (soldiers) was someone taking charge of their life.
Yesterday, it dawned on me that I was overthinking it and she’s probably just saying she’s hitting a lot of dance clubs.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
I’ve seen it a jillion and a half times since I was a kid.
Only now, on the wrong side of fifty, do I even notice all the times Arthur is trying to get various sources to get on with it and get to the point and tell him where the Grail is already!
Including the Final Fantasy game franchise, where Wedge and Biggs show up in the majority of the iterations of that game since IV.
This is something that went over my head (and would have gone over the heads of most young viewers), but was more obvious to me as an adult.
In the movie A Boy Named Charlie Brown (from 1969–you know, the spelling-bee movie), Linus gives Charlie Brown his blanket for good luck before he boards the bus to New York. But after a while, Linus follows Charlie Brown (with Snoopy in tow) because the absence of his trusty security blanket is affecting him so badly.
What I didn’t get as a kid was that Linus’ symptoms–dizziness, sweating, weakness, lightheadedness, fainting–were all symptoms of a drug addict’s withdrawal.
And there’s another part of that movie I didn’t fully appreciate until I was grown. There’s a lovely sequence where Schroeder plays a movement from Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata while impressionistic images fill the screen (after we see Schroeder’s piano grow from the little kid-size instrument to a full-size old-fashioned piano like the one the composer himself must have used). I didn’t realize at the time that these were the images flickering through Schroeder’s mind as he played–or, perhaps, he was putting himself in the shoes of Beethoven himself and experiencing the composer’s visions, perhaps channeling his spirit. (We see shots of the skyline of Bonn, Germany, impressionistic nuns flocking through a cathedral much as young Ludwig might have seen them–and, at the end, right before Schroeder returns to reality, a glimpse of the composer on his deathbed and some drawings of other composers, as if Beethoven was reminding himself that others would carry on his work as he passed on.)
In the daily strips, there’s a series equating it with quitting smoking. His grandmother will quit smoking if he gives up his blanket.
I watched Frozen for the bazillionth time yesterday, and left it running through the credits, though I’ll usually shut it off once they start. After all, I’ve seen it so many times…
That was the first time I’d seen that it had a scene after the credits… :smack:
In that classic SUPERMAN arc where our hero reluctantly kills the Phantom Zone villains, mention is made of how Supergirl “is all that remains of a whole universe.” After all, the Kryptonian criminals had killed every human on the planet, and then Superman played executioner, and, well – that’s it, isn’t it? As far as the big guy knows, Zod died and Bruce Wayne died and Lex Luthor died and so on and so forth, such that there was no one else left alive in that pocket universe.
So I was re-reading it just now, and danged if a throwaway line didn’t suddenly jump out at me: “We are free of the Phantom Zone,” says a villain, in best expositionary fashion, “while our fellow Kryptonian criminals remain trapped there!”
Huh. Just flatly declared like that? And so oddly specific a piece of information to get tossed in for some reason; and, in case extra emphasis is needed, Lex then laments that “it looks as if my gullibility has released the worst of the inmates!!”
Before executing them, Superman refers to the escapees as “the three last survivors of the Krypton of this universe.” But – they ain’t, are they?
I’m guessing she was just making a reference to the card game called “Old Maid”
She is taking charge of her life, but not warrior style. She’s just not going to be the “old maid.”
Every time this thread is resurrected, I think about posting, but it seems I have so far kept my shame to myself. Now I will reveal my stupidity:
The first time I read “A Boy and His Dog” by Harlan Ellison, at the end I just thought…“okay, well, alright, that’s the end of the story.” Somehow, I completely missed the blindingly obvious fact that he fed the girl to his dog.
When I read it the second time, and actually understood what the author meant, it gave me chills.
I’ve been following the webcomic Girl Genius for fifteen years now. It’s a steampunk fantasy where Europe has been torn apart by decades of war between mad scientists - imagine The 30 Years War with giant robots and death rays.
Anyway, there’s one inventor - presumably dead at the time of the comic - who is universally held to be the most brilliant mind, the most talented artist, the greatest spark that ever lived, whose inventions are still prized above the work of all others - a man known as Van Rijn.
Just realized last month that the character the comic is referring to is Rembrandt van Rijn.
You can’t really blame me for not realizing it; it’s such a common last name, after all. :smack:
He *shared *the girl with his dog, didn’t he? :dubious:
No, apparently he didn’t eat any of her:
Go to 1:27:31. This is going by the movie and not the novella, of course. The novella doesn't make it quite clear.Oh, okay … the second time I read the story and got the previously missed meaning was while I was waiting to have an interview as part of my college applications. I’m now 58, so what is amazing is that I remember it at all, not that I remember it slightly wrong 
He doesn’t eat any of her at that sitting, but there are clearly leftovers they’ll have later on.
Not necessarily. It could be that only the dog will eat the leftovers of her. That would be more consistent with the man’s attitude, which seems to be that the dog needs the food desperately but he doesn’t.
Rembrandt was just an artist, not a polymath like Leonardo, I think it’s a leap unless Foglio has indicated the link…
I though it was more a sci-fi in-joke reference to Poul Anderson’s Nicholas van Rijn
But it’s a classic story arc:
[ul]
[li]Boy finds girl[/li][li]Boy loses girl[/li][li]Boy gets girl back[/li][*]Boy feeds girl to dog[/ul]
sigh
After hearing the Willie Nelson/Merle Haggard song, Pancho & Lefty, at work a couple times recently, after having heard the song many times over the last few decades, it suddenly dawned on me that, “Whoa, I think Lefty sold out Pancho to the federales!”
Then, after looking up the video to include in this post, I discovered that the video spells it out quite blatantly. To be fair, I’d actually never seen the video until now.
I had always interpreted the song with the idea that the cops had caught Pancho, and Lefty managed to escape with the loot.