Ex-temporate!

Day 23 - Most annoying character

Lots of landmined ground to tread through here.  Traditional fanfoils like Wesley Crusher and Charles Emerson Winchester III. Minor ones already mentioned like “Shut Up Meadow” Soprano. Obscure ones like Gushie from Quantum Leap (if only on account of the bad breath).  Even obvious ones from shows I never watched: Jerry from Seinfeld leaps to mind, except he wasn’t really acting.

So can I wimp out and pick an entire alien race?

The Doctor needs the Daleks, and the feeling (or lack of it, on their part) is mutual. They provide some needed continuity and some sense of old-school to a franchise on its eleventh lead. Still, couldn’t you guys freshen up the act a LITTLE?  Other than getting decked out in the current series as a bunch of armour-plated Skittles, the look is the same, the language is the same, the whole schtick’s the same.

You can’t blame it on their machine-like status. HAL sang. Data evolved. The Borg assimilated enough life to become something different by the end. Hell, Ziggy did a complete gender-bender on Leap.

I don’t expect them to go all Oprah on me, or start dancing the tarantella (although that would be rather amusing), but I wouldn’t mind seeing either some evolution of their villainy or, possibly, their eventual replacement with someone/something more up to the task, with more of a repertoire than just running a continual commercial for Raid.

Passing the catchup to my sister

Dear Sandy,

Today would have been your 71st birthday. Not one of those milestones that gets a lot of press. "You're 71- go have fun!" is about all the greeting card industry could come up with. (That, and a lot of incontinence jokes.) Still, you would've had fun, even if they hadn't told you to.

It's been quite a year since we last talked this formally. (I know, we talk between ourselves a lot more.) You've witnessed your first grandson's birth, and christening, and a lot of togetherness among us, last summer, fall and spring.  Your niece has graduated, is off to the college of her dreams, and has both the car to drive there and the drive to succeed there. Your mother-in-law seems determined to survive all of us, and is blessed to have family so close to her again.

Back in our generation of family, we're good here. We have what we want, and don't want what we don't have. You'd love being among the beauty in the back yard, even if the bees would have scared you (and Mom) half to death. Donna's been through a lot of changes with health and home, but like the rest of us, she gets at it and gets through it.

We all have our passions, our aggravations, our moments of grace. You remain a part of those lives, and as long as each of us has breath on this earth, so do you.

Love and happy birthday,
Ray

I KNEW it, I KNEW it....

I took the Kara challenge-

1. Go to Google (or Yahoo) and type, "You know you're from (your state) when...."
2. Cut and paste the list.
3. Bold or italicize the items that apply to you.

-and suspected my results would get seriously skewed by that $24 rock of cheap trinkets 400 miles to the southeast.

( But not completely.... )

11 out of 34. Or, roughly, "a turd."

Then, just for shits and giggles, I decided to google the decidedly "Upstate New York" version I've seen, just to see which wins after almost 51 years, spent almost exactly two-thirds up here and one-third down there:

( Meme 2.0: )

10 out of 30. Exactly the same. So much for nurture over nature.