Saturday Grab Bag Cheers and Jeers

So it’s been just about a week since the internet flipped its collective chamberpots over the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones (Season Three). As I knew they would! I still recall how everyone blew it up in the aftermath of Season One’s penultimate, and since then the audience for the show has only grown. Including, of course, my wife and myself, though we are a season behind. I think my wife was impervious to spoilers about Season One’s big shocker at the time because the show was at the beginning of its rise and not on her radar at all. But now, it’s all but inescapable. So I was keeping an eye on the entertainment news as best I could, trying to figure out when the bomb would be dropped in Season Three. When I heard a preview of last week’s broadcast episode, I knew what was coming, and I warned my wife accordingly: GoT is about to infuriate everyone again. Steer clear of spoiler-y links online and whatnot. My wife appreciated the heads up and tuned the furor out.

Then on Wednesday night we managed to stay up to watch The Soup, which almost always amuses us. And we did in fact get some good giggles out of this week’s show. But R'hllor-dammit! They spoiled Game of Thrones! TO MAKE AN O.J. SIMPSON JOKE. I know it’s extremely petty, but man that stuck in my craw. Grrr.

(Technically, The Soup only partly spoiled the future (to my wife) developments. So if you happen to be talking to her, please continue to avoid the topic of GoT S3, kthx?)

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I know I’m already at risk of driving this into the ground, but I can’t help but continually find it amusing: the little guy continues to tell anyone who will listen that Toy Story is his favorite thing in the world. (Although he did admit to me that he doesn’t particularly like Toy Story 2 as much as 1 or 3, because he finds Emperor Zurg a bit too scary.) And lately the person most likely to listen (read: least likely to be able to change the subject or get away from him) is his little sister. So he’s been roping her into his re-enactments of scenes from the movie. And that in and of itself would be super-cute, but which scene is he re-enacting? The cowboy adventure of Sheriff Woody thwarting the bank robbery? The thrilling escape from Sid’s yard? The desperate chase after the moving truck?

Nah. The little guy’s favorite scene is the staff meeting in Andy’s bedroom. Which makes perfect sense, honestly. The little guy loves rules, not so much following them of course, but he loves handing them down and/or pointing out when other people aren’t abiding by them. He’s a Virgo. So he gets his sister to sit on the floor with a bunch of toys sitting around her and he stands in front of all of them and pretends to be Woody, methodically working his way through the meeting agenda, telling everyone that they need a moving buddy and so on. It is hilariously and adorably weird.

To be fair, he also is a big fan of the tea party scene. He snagged some of the fancy dress up clothes belonging to the little girl’s Minnie Mouse doll and held them on to his Buzz Lightyear action figure and said “I’m Mrs. Nesbitt!” about a hundred times the other day, cracking himself up uncontrollably every time.

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So now we’re like a little more than a third of the way through the baseball season, which continues to be the anticipated dogfight in the AL East. The Yankees went on a bit of a tear this week, but that came after a doozy of a slump, so they’re now playing catch-up to the Red Sox and the Orioles are nipping (pecking?) at their heels. If the season ended today the Yankees would be the lower-seeded wildcard team, and the O’s would miss the cutoff despite having a better record than just about any team in the AL Central (or the NL West, for that matter). But fortunately there’s a hundred more games to go!

Which is plenty of time for the Yanks to get back to being the "real" Yankees, as the franchise starters who were out with injuries on Opening Day are still slowly being brought back from the DL. I'm pleased of course with the way they've managed to hold together a winning record despite the health issues (of their decrepit roster of golden oldies) but I still have been moderately disengaged from the baseball season thus far because it feels like it hasn't truly started. (OK, having three kids including a twelve-week-old has been a bit of a distraction as well.) But hopefully it will be all good soon.