the groundhog day project

Something I didn't know: a Broadway revival of The Pirates of Penzance had apparently done quite well in 1981. Universal pushed for a film version, but it wouldn't come out until 1983. In the meantime, Fox pushed out the send-up The Pirate Movie , beating the straight adaptation to the big screen. But, I really didn't want to talk about the pillaging of the theater but rather the pillaging of women, the patriarchy, and all the usual stuff I might talk about. The "noble custom" that dictates that the eldest daughter marry first, the youngest marry last, with nary a question of whether or not any of them want to marry. But, even on the other side, Frederic asks of Ruth (apparently before he's met other women, even though I'm sure he and his shipmates have raped and pillaged and plundered plenty) if she's beautiful. Almost immediately after meeting Mabel, he declares that he loves her and may want to marry her, because that is what he thinks non-pirate...

Stray observation: The title card for A Christmas Story is all caps (or pseudo-caps) except for the “h”—that is lowercase. Is that, perhaps, because that’s Jesus’ traditional middle initial? OR just an aesthetic choice? Speaking of tradition, there was an interesting note in the BoJack Horseman Christmas special (on Netflix this week). Todd (voiced by Aaron Paul) was promoting Christmas tradition and BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) told him just because something’s tradition doesn’t make it good. Todd’s response was something like, because something’s good it becomes tradition. In my philosophy of religion class a few years back, my teacher liked to talk about apotropaic practices. By definition, such practices have the ability to ward off evil, but more importantly (as she put it) the key to such practices surviving was that they took little energy and did nothing particularly negative. Nailing a bit of iron, perhaps a horseshoe, over one’s door, took little work, but provided peac...