u/AmySueF

I see this online a lot. Someone will write an article with, for example, the topic “Traveling with your pet”, but “pet” in this case means “dog” and only “dog”. You can read through the article looking in vain for a mention of cats or any other type of animal, but all you see are discussions about dogs, and yet the author keeps saying “pet pet pet pet pet” as if dogs are the only pets anywhere.

I love dogs, but c’mon, how hard is it to say DOG when you only mean dog, and not imply that you’re talking about all pets?

Sports Illustrated posted their choice for the 25 greatest baseball players ever on Facebook. The list included some of the usual greats like Rogers Hornsby and Hank Aaron. In the past, no such list would have been considered without the inclusion of Hank Greenberg or Sandy Koufax, or both. But this list doesn’t include either one. Was this antisemitism, someone who thought they genuinely weren’t good enough to include in the list, an actual oversight, or someone who for some strange reason never heard of those two players?

In any case, it just feels like Jewish people are gradually being erased from history as well as from current public life. 🥺

I’ll start.

Petting zoo

Let’s say you’re an American chopper pilot in Korea during the war, and you give away your flight jacket. How easy or difficult would it be to replace it?

Actually, I think maybe the pilot got it back because I don’t remember seeing Potter wear it after this episode.

I have lots of them, but one of them is when restaurant owners refuse to add vegetarian items to their menu by saying they don’t want to “misrepresent” their restaurant. Trust me, when you have 20 different kinds of burgers on your menu, half the sides are cooked in lard, and even your house salad has meat in it by default, nobody is going to assume you run a vegetarian restaurant if you add a veggieburger to your menu. What you really mean is that you’re convinced that if you add something vegetarian to your menu, hardly anyone is going to order it, and it’ll end up as a wasteful expense. So you’d rather run a restaurant that’s flat out hostile to vegetarians than expand your customer base by adding one measly item they’re able to order.

Fershimmeled (often spelled farshimmelt) is an informal Yiddish-derived word meaning shaken up, rattled, confused, or in a bad, worn-out condition. Literally related to the German word for moldy (verschimmelt), people use it to describe feeling mentally fuzzy, overwhelmed, or flustered.

This is what Sidney Freedman called Hawkeye, a little fershimmeled.

This was also Hawkeye after the jeep accident in “Hawkeye”. Taken individually, it’s a state in which you can shake it off or take a couple days to recover. In Hawkeye’s case, these are serious tugs on the threads that keep his mental state together, before he begins to unravel completely.

Thanks to Aaron Parnas, I just discovered “The Good Liars”, and hoo boy, their videos are something. Here they are interviewing some MAGA supporters, and at 0:53, one lady asserts that we’ve been under the thumb of the British for the last 125 years, until Donald Trump came along and “freed” us.

I was reading about Temecula wines and the word “terroir” was used. I’ve never seen it before, so I looked it up. Proof that one never stops learning at any age. I’m 67 and never encountered this word before today, and I live in California, where wines and wine culture are huge.

ter·roir
/ˌterˈwär/

noun
1. the complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including factors such as the soil, topography, and climate.

2. the characteristic taste and flavor imparted to a wine by the environment in which it is produced.

Word Origin
French, ‘land’, from medieval Latin terratorium.

I don’t remember which episode this came from, but I’ve never forgotten the scene in “Maude” in which Walter assures Maude how much he loves her: “I love you more today than I did yesterday and less than I will tomorrow.” I’ve always thought that was a VERY romantic thing for him to say. And Maude was very touched by it.

What other sitcom moments can you think of that are very romantic?

As someone who lived through some of those decades, I assure you, they were not simpler times. They were just as difficult and challenging for those of us who lived through them as the current decade is for the current generation. We had different experiences, a different attitude and different culture, but nothing was simpler. (Try being on the spectrum long before anyone was testing for it.) And if you think the decade when you were young children was simpler, it’s because you were children. All you had to do was be children. The adults around you had plenty of adult responsibilities and went to bed worried quite a lot.

One additional thing: Those attractive, happy young women you see in old photos from the era of your mother or grandmother are very likely models in staged photos. Even when they weren’t models, the photos were staged, because unlike today, most people didn’t carry a camera around at all times; it was mainly professional or amateur photographers who did. These women in the photos didn’t represent all women and the photos didn’t necessarily represent a typical day in those women’s lives.

The “Bionic Man” of 1970’s baseball passed away on August 15.

Since “Private Charles Lamb” has just aired on METV, I was reminded of an old bank commercial with the wonderful Greek actor Titos Vandis, who played Colonel Andropolis in “Private Charles Lamb”. He played many fine roles in his career, and this commercial is just one in a series of humorous United California Bank commercials featuring a perky blonde actress who got everyone’s attention. Even though it’s a short commercial, I thought everyone might like it.

Yep, that’s Sandy Duncan early in her career.

So let’s say a catastrophe has occurred and Nabisco announces that they are no longer going to make Oreo cookies. Everyone worldwide goes into a hoarding frenzy and you can no longer find Oreos of any kind on the store shelves anywhere. Other food companies follow suit and stop making their Oreo-knockoff sandwich cookies, and you can’t find those, either. What Nabisco cookies would you get as a replacement for Oreos?

I’m partial to Nutter Butter cookies myself.

I’m geographically challenged and have never visited Malibu Creek State Park. Does anyone know the location and name of the exact spot at the filming site that stands in for Rainbow Bridge, where the bus stops and the Americans and Chinese approach each other? Is this a spot that’s accessible to M*A*S*H fans visiting the area?