through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered . . .

Chuck to Blair in the latest episode of Gossip Girl, regarding her British lord boyfriend:

"You can't tell me Bertie Wooster is satisfying your needs."

A: BAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

B: See A.

C: It's been way too long since I wrote any exceptionally absurd crossover snippets, hasn't it? Man, Jeeves would have his work cut out for him getting rid of Blair Waldorf.

I love you, Chuck. Especially since now I have this awesome image of you sneaking reads of PG Wodehouse when no one is around to see you voluntarily opening a book.

A bunch of random discussion and observations.

* I would like to start with the fact that working at a sandwich shop near a minor league baseball stadium is going to start being hazardous to my baseball RPS health. I've been at Amato's for about a year, now; much longer and some of the rookies with the Red Sox are gonna start being guys I've met. One guy who I believe is a pretty major prospect for the Red Sox, Iggy Suarez, is in all the time. I've taken his orders and made his sandwiches. And he's cute. (And today, when my rather gorgeous assistant manager mentioned to him that she's leaving, he gave her his phone number. Heh.) And whenever he comes in, I think, "Oh man, if he ends up in Boston, there is no way there won't be fic about him." And that just breaks my brain a little too much.

* Work has been dead all week. And it has been hot and gross and stormy and I do not like it.

* My MP3 player, which is apparently on my friendslist, has started spitting John Barrowman's "Every Little Thing" cover at me when I put it on shuffle. And then I listen to it like five times in a row, because it's just so hypnotically awful. I keep waiting for it to suck less or reveal hidden charms, but it doesn't. It does keep getting funnier, though.

* DOCTOR WHO TOMORROW. I AM SO EXCITED YOU GUYS. OH MAN. And next week, I'm scheduled to be out early, so I'll have my hands on the finale hours sooner. And then Doctor Who will be over and that will not be okay, but one thing at a time.

* I have found (well, been linked to) two different recs for "Supply and Demand." I can't remember the last time I wrote something people were that enthusiastic about. It's pretty exciting.

* Yeah, I have to blather about soap now. ( Cut for length, and because I mean literal soap, from a particular soap company that I adore, and I'm not just saying that because the company's owner is on my friendslist. )

* I am a verbal chameleon. I have known this for some time. My grammar and vocabulary have borne traces of British influence for years (I started when I was young; oh, James Herriot, I had to be the only eight year old in my country reading your books).

And now, of course, I've been reading Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books. This is starting to become problematic. The use of slang in those books is really heavy and takes a bit of getting used to. Today, without even thinking about it, I swiped a phrase from them. And not just any phrase, no, not something obviously archaic and out of use. It was "ticked off," which the books use to describe the act off ripping a strip off someone. Naturally, my telling a coworker "I've actually been ticked off over it before!" didn't carry quite the meaning I was going for. Maybe I should read something else for a while.

* That said, let me now go on about how Thank You, Jeeves is clearly the pinnacle of literature and I should just never bother with opening another book again because I am bound to be disappointed. ( Okay, not really, but anything that has me in unself-conscious hysterics in the middle of Dunkin Donuts has got to have something going for it. )

Oh, man, that all took like a year and a half to write. My brain is cooked. I'm not even proofreading. The hell with it.

So I've been working slowly through my library's collection of Jeeves and Wooster, which is more complicated than it needs to be as the majority of it is located at a different branch. Why wouldn't they keep them at the main building? I don't know. To ensure that I lose my patience and spend money I don't have yet on the box set, I guess.

Anyway, one of the DVDs had arrived at the main building, so I went to pick it up. The librarian grabbed it from the rack and positively swooned her way back over, all, "Hugh Laurie!" Hand to her chest and everything.

Me, brilliantly: "Yep." (Happily, I was mostly thinking about something else, so it didn't occur to me to laugh at her body language until I was out the door.)

She asked if I watch House and I said I did, then professed myself to be more of a Stephen Fry fan. That seemed to put an end to things.

This left me feeling much less dorky than my visit a couple of days ago, when I got two J&W tapes and four of Wodehouse's books, then didn't know what to say when the librarian that time around asked if I was a Wodehouse fan. How do I even explain the thought process behind checking out four books by an author who did absolutely nothing for me last time I tried his work? I said something inane about testing how much British farce I could take before my brain exploded, because it required less explanation than my packrat mentality about library books.

And it's a good thing I took four, because whatever problem it was that kept me from being interested in Wodehouse a few years ago (probably the lack of patience required to sort through the language; I wasn't nearly as good at reading older books with arcane vocabulary as I pretended to be) has ceased to exist. I spent an hour or so today in one of the eighty-seven gelatto places that have inexplicably appeared in Portland in the last couple of years, drinking a chocolate shake and reading Carry On, Jeeves, and I can't think of a more relaxing thing I could have done with my free afternoon. (More productive, yes. More relaxing, no.) I highly recommend this course of action if you are stressed, especially if you can find a gelatto place with squishy, cushy couches like Maple's has.

Along with Jeeves and Wooster, I've also been making my way through Videoport's almost-complete collection of A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I'd forgotten how much I love good sketch comedy, and that show is fucking excellent sketch comedy. I love the format - frequent bits of complete randomness stuck in between longer skits that, more often than not, just sort of trail off without laboring to contrive a punchline or explain themselves. Plus, lots of meta humor, with the concluding joke being that the skit is, in fact, a skit. (A bit of mediocre physical comedy in series one, for example, comes to a screeching halt when Hugh cries out, "You hit me too hard! No, I'm serious, forget the skit! That really hurt!" Stephen, to the camera: "He's such a baby.") I am, as I have mentioned before, a complete sucker for even the lamest of meta, so that invariably cracks me up. Plus, the majority of the humor is general, rather than being rooted in the pop culture of the time, which allows my American self (who was six when the show started airing) to follow it. There have only been a couple of times when an entire skit just went right over my head because I had no idea what the reference was. I think we all know that that's the mark of good comedy, so I won't belabor the point. I'm just really glad I FINALLY got around to trying it, because it is effing hilarious.

(By the way, in regards to the Torchwood/Jeeves and Wooster crossover that is now refusing to leave me alone: Jeeves would totally know all about Torchwood, Y/Y?)

DRABBLE. In which my apparent quest to find the world's most cracky-yet-plausible crossover continues. (Seriously, I have WAY too much time to think at work.)

Torchwood/Jeeves and Wooster.

( lucky for Bertie Wooster that Jack's days as a conman are over )