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herewiss13Staring at the ceiling the other night, I finally figured out why we call it the "double u". When you say what 'w' sounds like, it's two 'u' sounds put together: oo-uh. This was, in sequence: cool, obvious and then inspired paranoia (does everyone already know this? am I a moron? Am I thinking about this too hard (answer to the last one: yes).
______
Flipped through the first few pages of Al Franken's book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" and I think I've discovered _the_ fundamental difference between the Right and the Left.
The Left can, on occasion, be funny. While I haven't actually read their books, I have a hard time believing that a hardcore conservative sits down with Coulter's latest oeuvre or 'The O'Reilly Factor' and falls out of their seat in hysterics within a few pages.
I'm not exactly sure what the prevalence of humor on the Left really says about everything, but as someone on the Left, I'd like to think it's much healthier.
_______
Buffy Turning Point:
A surprising dearth of fanfic has surfaced involving one of the more pivotal moments in all of Buffydom, one which would radically alter all that came after it. I am, of course, talking about the first scene of "When She Was Bad", the S2 premiere, when Willow and Xander come within millimeters of kissing, before being intertupted by a vampire. Remember, this a an entire season earlier than their actual first kiss and the whole 'Fluke-arc' starting with 'Homecoming'.
I haven't yet run down _all_ the changes an unintertupted kiss would have caused, but here are some highlights:
No "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered", much harder introduction/integration of Oz into the Scoobies (hence no werewolf episodes), No 'Lover's Walk' and hence no 'The Wish' and therefore no Anya (a really big one there). Anya's info about the Ascension may or may not have had an impact on the actual Graduation Day battle...you could spin that either way.
In fact, Xander would have been in an entirely different place during the events of "The Zeppo" so the school would probably have blown up prematurely.
Moving along to s4, no Oz relationship means no heartache for Willow, no 'Something Blue' and _probably_ no relationship with Tara. Obviously, in a Jossian World, Willow and Xander would _never_ stay together that long, but we aren't trying to speculate here, just trace events and their ramifications.
By the time you hit an Anya-less, Tara-less S5, the whole thing becomes completely foreign and unpredictable. It just shows how important the Willow/Xander relationship (platonic or not) has been to the whole framework of the show. It's rarely placed front and center (other than during the Fluke), but it's always an important B-plot.
Now, given that a brilliant A.U. 'Cicatrix' has been written about the awesome and terrible consequences that would reverberate from Xander not being able to revive Buffy waaaay back in 'Prophecy Girl', you'd think that someone would already have snatched up this crucial pivot point and done great things with it.
Alas, I think that by the time awesome Buffy fic began to appear (as opposed to the early, cloying, pre-curse B/A shippiness), most people were over the Willow/Xander ship...which I think is a crime.
_____
I don't often curse my old high school. I was in an International High School program and it was quite rigorous academically speaking. Mostly. On the down side, I learned more about the Mexican revolution than I did about the Revolutionary and Civil wars combined. I think we actually skipped directly from the "antebellum cultural context" to the Jim Crow laws (the Civil Rights movement, not _that's_ something I've learned a lot about).
Having just listened to "A Short History of the Civil War", I'm finally in a position to make an informed judgment on the whole "States Rights vs. Slavery as Causa Belli. Big surprise, the answer is: both. You can't actually even separate the two because slavery was a state right and one deeply interwoven with the economic structure of the South with was at odds with that of the North on an entirely different level than the political disagreements. You cannot say slavery wasn't the cause because there had been a lot of extremely heated controversy over the admission of new "slave states" in the 1850s. And you can't say slavery was the cause because Lincoln didn't even consider the Emancipation Proclamation, let alone agree with issuing it, until the war was already well advanced. Nor were the reasons behind the Proclamation all high and mighty.
It's an extremely interesting set of circumstances, and I only wish we'd covered them as well as we covered WWI and WWII the next year.
______
Flipped through the first few pages of Al Franken's book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" and I think I've discovered _the_ fundamental difference between the Right and the Left.
The Left can, on occasion, be funny. While I haven't actually read their books, I have a hard time believing that a hardcore conservative sits down with Coulter's latest oeuvre or 'The O'Reilly Factor' and falls out of their seat in hysterics within a few pages.
I'm not exactly sure what the prevalence of humor on the Left really says about everything, but as someone on the Left, I'd like to think it's much healthier.
_______
Buffy Turning Point:
A surprising dearth of fanfic has surfaced involving one of the more pivotal moments in all of Buffydom, one which would radically alter all that came after it. I am, of course, talking about the first scene of "When She Was Bad", the S2 premiere, when Willow and Xander come within millimeters of kissing, before being intertupted by a vampire. Remember, this a an entire season earlier than their actual first kiss and the whole 'Fluke-arc' starting with 'Homecoming'.
I haven't yet run down _all_ the changes an unintertupted kiss would have caused, but here are some highlights:
No "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered", much harder introduction/integration of Oz into the Scoobies (hence no werewolf episodes), No 'Lover's Walk' and hence no 'The Wish' and therefore no Anya (a really big one there). Anya's info about the Ascension may or may not have had an impact on the actual Graduation Day battle...you could spin that either way.
In fact, Xander would have been in an entirely different place during the events of "The Zeppo" so the school would probably have blown up prematurely.
Moving along to s4, no Oz relationship means no heartache for Willow, no 'Something Blue' and _probably_ no relationship with Tara. Obviously, in a Jossian World, Willow and Xander would _never_ stay together that long, but we aren't trying to speculate here, just trace events and their ramifications.
By the time you hit an Anya-less, Tara-less S5, the whole thing becomes completely foreign and unpredictable. It just shows how important the Willow/Xander relationship (platonic or not) has been to the whole framework of the show. It's rarely placed front and center (other than during the Fluke), but it's always an important B-plot.
Now, given that a brilliant A.U. 'Cicatrix' has been written about the awesome and terrible consequences that would reverberate from Xander not being able to revive Buffy waaaay back in 'Prophecy Girl', you'd think that someone would already have snatched up this crucial pivot point and done great things with it.
Alas, I think that by the time awesome Buffy fic began to appear (as opposed to the early, cloying, pre-curse B/A shippiness), most people were over the Willow/Xander ship...which I think is a crime.
_____
I don't often curse my old high school. I was in an International High School program and it was quite rigorous academically speaking. Mostly. On the down side, I learned more about the Mexican revolution than I did about the Revolutionary and Civil wars combined. I think we actually skipped directly from the "antebellum cultural context" to the Jim Crow laws (the Civil Rights movement, not _that's_ something I've learned a lot about).
Having just listened to "A Short History of the Civil War", I'm finally in a position to make an informed judgment on the whole "States Rights vs. Slavery as Causa Belli. Big surprise, the answer is: both. You can't actually even separate the two because slavery was a state right and one deeply interwoven with the economic structure of the South with was at odds with that of the North on an entirely different level than the political disagreements. You cannot say slavery wasn't the cause because there had been a lot of extremely heated controversy over the admission of new "slave states" in the 1850s. And you can't say slavery was the cause because Lincoln didn't even consider the Emancipation Proclamation, let alone agree with issuing it, until the war was already well advanced. Nor were the reasons behind the Proclamation all high and mighty.
It's an extremely interesting set of circumstances, and I only wish we'd covered them as well as we covered WWI and WWII the next year.
