Missing oVo. . .

Perfectly.

Pedantic pontificators produce prodigiously profligate presentments..

The 6 p's I learned were a little different: Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.

Actually, on the other side of the strip, it is: Proper Planning Prevents Pedants Pontificating Portentiously.

Propitious, but problematic to pull off.

Piffle; it is a plainly palpable procedure, if performed promptly.

Pithy. Your passion for pontificating against pedants is poignant yet puerile.

Putz.

Plonker.

The bard said it best:

(You are) a knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.


(I shift gears as the first alliteration that leapt to mind after yours was one that may have been hard to see the humor in!)

Hard to beat that one, but . . .

'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you
bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! O for breath to utter what is like thee!
you tailor's-yard, you sheath, you bowcase; you vile standing-tuck!

Or one of my favorite subtle-slams from Last of the Mohicans:

"You are a man with a few admirable qualities, but taken as a whole I was wrong to have thought so highly of you."

Two of my favourite Twain's:

"Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation."

"I don't suppose there was much danger. People born to be hanged are safe in water."

Of course, if you are going to pull out Twain, you force me to counterattack with Dorothy Parker:

“If all the girls attending the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised.”

“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.” (Yes, that was originally Parker, not Red Foxx!)

“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say 'No' in any of them.”

"If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;

"Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.

"But I have no lethal weapon -
Thus does fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights in hell."

I know you're not a fan of Rabbie Burns, but he wrote in a letter in 1791 to a critic who had called Burns out for overusing slang colloquialisms and bad grammar.

Burns' response:

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.

Nice.

Of course, Parker also wrote a review of Atlas Shrugged where she said:

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”


And she also had a message for someone:

“Tell him I was too fucking busy-- or vice versa.”


Of course, while non-verbal, Harlan Ellison is the one who in a dispute with a publisher mailed them 213 bricks -- postage due -- as well as mailing a dead gopher -- fourth class.

I love the gopher.

Shifting gears from the insults, that story reminded me a bit of Robert Liston, who was a surgeon in Scotland in the early 1800s. He was noted for having a quick knife hand and could perform some surgery, even amputations, in a matter of minutes. This was a plus in some cases, as quick surgery increased the odds of survival, but there are a few times where his speed didn't help, such as my favourite case where Liston amputated a patient's leg in two-and-a-half minutes, but got so carried away that he also amputated the patient's testicles as well!

Whoops.


I just watched the Blu-Ray for Ridley Scott's The Duellists this weekend, and it has a smashing line that I had forgotten in this exchange between Harvey Keitel and Diana Quick when he react with suspicion when she visits him to plead for him to end the duel:

"I knew a man who was stabbed to death by a woman; gave him the surprise of his life."

She replies: "I once knew a woman who was beaten to death by a man. I don't think it surprised her at all."

Quick wit, but depressingly true.

Gorgeous Blu-Ray, by the way. Paramount sub-licenced it to Shout Factory for some reason, but the transfer is as good as you will get for that type of film.

I cannot remember if I posted this before, but the always wonderful Vi Hart has a mobius music box:




And if you are not familiar with Hart, look up her YouTube channel and prepare to lose the rest of your week.

Will have to do the youtube sleuthing a little later.

It is well worth the time. Vi Hart is a mathematician and creator of some of the most awesome educational videos of all time. She has a great delivery and style. Even when she is talking about a subject of no interest to me, her videos are interesting anyway. She has hit the mobius more than once, including eating dots on a mobius loop.

I'll get 'er done.

I have heard that before. Mind you, I have said it before, too.


Speaking of which, I hope that you enjoy the Justice League discs that I sent. I also included a Miyazaki DVD that I have upgraded to Blu-Ray in my collection -- if you already have it, find another home for it.

The first season is the weakest of the series, since they really had to figure out what they wanted to do with it. Most of the episodes are two-parters, and some are a bit weak. They also struggled with the same thing that everyone does when including Superman in a team-up, namely, how do you keep him from overpowering everyone else. Unfortunately their solution was to have him constantly getting his ass kicked, and after a while it started to be a joke with fans. They improved that by the second season. Where they really failed is in having to recast superman with George Newborn rather than Tim Daley, who had done Superman: the Animated Series. Daley does not exactly own the role like Kevin Conroy does with Batman, but he is still very, very good.

The show may be a bit confusing at first as it jumps right into things, and kind of assumes familiarity with the preceding series. For example, both Green Lantern and The Flash were introduced in the Superman series, and there is an episode that lets Superman confront his demons with Darkseid, which may make little sense if you have not seen the previous series. (Darkseid was ultimately the main villain in the Superman series, and toward the end he takes control of Superman's mind and turns him against the earth -- and the earth turns against Superman in the process. Plus, even when defeated, Darkseid gets his jollies by blithely killing one of the main running characters on the show, which was a shocking first for the DC animated universe. So when you see Superman go completely wild when confronted by Darkseid in Justice League, he has a pretty good reason!)

The best episodes in the first season are when they troll the alternate universe/timeline cliche, but with spectacular results. The first parallel universe story is great, but the three parter that concludes the season is amazing. Let us just say that it involves time travel back to WWII to save the present, which allows the creators to introduce a few wonderful surprises from the DC canon of the era, and one of them is simply perfect voice casting. I will not say which ones, but there are three groups or individuals to look out for.

The second season is an improvement, and it has a subtle through-line running through all of the different two-part episodes that is not clear until the finale, which is a DOOZY, trumping even the finale to season one. The producers were not certain that they would be renewed for a third season, so they decided to treat the finale as if it may be the end of the show as well. Speaking of which, I highly recommend the commentary tracks on the discs -- they are only on two or three episodes in each season, so they will not take long, but you really need to listen to the track on the season two finale to find out some interesting secrets.

All of that ended up clearing the way for seasons three and four, which they rechristened Justice League Unlimited, and after the events of the previous season they really pulled out all of the stops. While the first two seasons limited things largely to a core five JL members, in Unlimited they go hog wild and include, well, damned near everybody, including arguably their most ingenious bit of voice casting outside of Mark Hamill as the Joker: Jeffrey Combs as The Question.

Thanks, Iago.

I have to confess that the only Miyazaki film that I'm familiar with is Spirited Away and I have none of his works in my collection. So, thank you again.

As for Justice League, thanks for the backgrounder. I'm not that familiar with the Superman universe, so this will help orient me. I'm looking forward to it and I will, indeed, check out the commentaries.

Well, if you have not seen the Superman series, then some of the vocal recasting will not bother you as much. Newbern is probably fine when not being compared to Daley. Plus, they recast a few other voices from the Superman series, such as Metallo and The Toymaster. (In the previous series, the former was voiced by Malcolm McDowell, and the latter by Bud Cort, both of whom were fantastic. But they only make one brief appearance in Justice League.) Fortunately, Darkseid is still voiced by Michael Ironsides and Lex Luthor is still voiced by Clancy Brown, both of whom could not possibly be bettered. In fact, the Superman/Justice League version of Lex Luthor is every bit as definitive to me as the Batman version of The Joker.


I believe that the Miyazaki film that I sent was Nausiica, which is one of my favorites. Hopefully you both like it.