Yvonne Bradford

The book is typically Wodehouse, and very funny, but there is a major error in it: In Thank You, Jeeves, Pop Stoker barges into Bertie's seaside cottage around two or three in the morning, and demands to know the whereabouts of his daughter, Pauline. When Bertie plays dumb, Stoker replies, "Yes, my daughter, Pauline, my one and ONLY daughter." This is the error, for Stoker has another daughter named Emerald, who, in a later story, becomes a temporary cook at Totleigh Towers and elopes with Gussie Fink-Nottle, a visitor there. It seems Gussie's fiancee, Madeline Bassett, has forbidden Gussie to eat meat, and Emerald Stoker, sympathizing with his plight, sneaks him steak- and-kidney pie. This kindness induces Gussie to fall in love with Emerald and break off his engagement to Madeline. So, in Thank You, Jeeves, Pop Stoker has obviously forgotten all about his second daughter. Which is hard to do, considering Wodehouse later describes Emerald as having a face like a Pekingese. Stoker has a lot of room to talk when he disparages Bertie's mental capacity -- it seems Pop's own capacity's not up to speed, either!

I stumbled across the team of the hapless Bertie & his imperturbable gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves, about forty years ago and I haven't stopped laughing since. If I was told I could read the works of only ONE author for the rest of my life, I'd pick Wodehouse. Three of my favorite laugh-out-loud stories are Comrade Bingo, The Episode of the Dog McIntosh and Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch. Wodehouse is a genius. Thank God for this uniquely talented man and his amazing ability to portray the utterly absurd!

For the life of me, I just couldn't get into this story. The phrase "verbal diarrhea" aptly applies to ALL of James' writing, even his most excellent stories and novels, but in The Great Good Place, our affected friend exceeds even himself. As is his wearisome wont, it takes him an hour to extract the tooth the dentist down the hall could have yanked out in three minutes. I will NOT believe that even the most consummate of James snobs could find this story compelling. I would have loved to have been present at the festive old Boston breakfast table when Mrs. J. unwittingly asked Henry to please pass the maple syrup. There she is, slumped over in her Queen Anne chair, the lace tablecloth impressing its intricate pattern on her forehead, while Henry, oblivious to all but the everlasting Niagara of his voice, takes the request and turns it into a 100,000 word "short" story.

My favorite Saturday evening show! I love the bossy, super-housekeeper Hyacinth, her poor beaten-down husband, Richard (how does this meek and mediocre civil servant afford to pay for Hyacinth's vast & queenly wardrobe and all of her other top-of-the-line, non-stop expenditures?), bone-idle brother-in-law Onslow (who once told Hyacinth her champagne cocktails tasted like fairy pee!), affection-starved Daisy, and the jittery Elizabeth who always prefers a sturdy beaker to one of Hyacinth's irreplaceable Royal Doulton cups with the hand-painted periwinkles. The only two people I could very well do without are the trampy, man-hungry Rose and the utterly irritating, senile old father - neither of them are even remotely funny and the show would still be every bit as entertaining without them.

I was intrigued by the book but can't understand why Alexander didn't mention feeling Jesus' presence in the Core; or why Alexander didn't even address Jesus' role or the Bible's role in "Om"'s Plan for Creation...after all, we Christians believe in a Trinity and are taught that Jesus is not only the Son, but the Word, the Light, and God Himself...that as the Son He was with God and was God from the very Beginning. Why, then, was Jesus so disturbingly absent during Alexander's visit to the Core? Perhaps, while in the Core, Alexander actually sensed Jesus, but purposely avoided mentioning this in his book so as not to offend non-Christians. Any mention of Jesus and Alexander might risk losing credibility with Jews, Muslims, and others who don't hold with a triune God. I would expect and hope that ALL information Alexander was Divinely privileged to gather on such an extraordinary trip should have been offered up in its entirety -- NOTHING should have been suppressed if it was truly Alexander's intent -- and God's Will! -- to present the world with a truthful recount, unbelievers be damned. If Alexander was CHOSEN by God for this purpose, then Alexander failed by omitting such crucial information. God would NOT invite a visitor into his Holy of Holies and find Himself in the position of apologizing for the absence of His dearly beloved Son. Nor would God fail to impart absolutely crucial information about the Bible, particularly in these troublesome days when so many are turning to it for help, hope and guidance. If Alexander made deliberate omissions, wouldn't this be a grievous sin? Wouldn't his entire visit have been for naught? If, on the other hand, Alexander never even sensed Jesus' presence in the Core and received no information concerning the Holy Bible (yet, strangely, other matters, such as the structure of the multiverse, were imparted to him!), then, as a Christian, I must either doubt Alexander's ability to neutrally present all the facts with veracity and accuracy or else I must doubt that his journey ever occurred at all.

If it's a rainy Saturday afternoon, I'm in bed with a severe head cold, and there's absolutely nothing else on TV to divert me from my miseries but Thinner or an infomercial showing how the dead callous and skin cells collect in the waste receptacle, I guess I'd pick Thinner...however, the acting is so wooden that one almost wonders if the actors and director are intentionally laughing up their sleeves at backers who were stupid enough to invest in this embarrassment. If that isn't the case, then the actors and director are most certainly laboring under delusions of their own grandeur. It's a spoof within a spoof. I guess King doesn't care how it was botched -- he made a trade with the Devil long ago.

Lucy Ricardo was a sneaky, manipulative, devious, conniving, lying, morally flawed, unethical human being. She was not funny, amusing or charming. No one in his/her right mind would desire such an untrustworthy, lying sneak as a wife, friend, sister, daughter, etc. I wrote a review over a month ago, which a custodian of this website erased...my review contained no offensive language, unless honesty is offensive...presumably my review was erased because it disturbed the continued placidity and cud-chewing contentment of the thumbs uppers who are so dim-witted and bovine that they can't take an opinion contrary to their own when it comes to their beloved "Queen of Comedy"? At least, this is what the shadowy custodian implies by his erasure of my review in which I lambasted the reprehensible Ball/Ricardo. Was my "thumbs down" opinion so dangerous that it had to be quietened? I see the erasure as an effort to eliminate an annoying moral mirror. God forbid that the sinner be reminded of his brevity...The loss of morality in this country began with "innocent" sitcoms such as I Love Lucy; in half-hour segments we were DIVERTED and fed an implicit message whose sole and far-reaching purpose was to tell us that DECEIT and DISHONESTY is FUNNY and ACCEPTABLE. Look at how far we've come since "They" made it okay to be bad. The Plan is working well.

I'm probably one of the very few who dislike this show and dislike Lucille Ball. I never found her to be funny. Actually, I never found anything to ESTEEM in her character on I love Lucy: she was a deceitful, lying, manipulative, petty, conniving child; always scheming, always sneaky, and always showing nothing but flagrant disregard for decorum and reasonable expectations. To try to depict this fatally flawed woman as a "grown-up" helpmeet (ha!) in a marriage relationship was an insult to the millions of hard-working, self-sacrificing American wives and mothers. "Lucy's" personality traits were NOT humorous or endearing: they weren't the traits anyone in his/her right mind would cherish or desire in a friend, wife, mother, daughter, sister. I feel that in real life, Ball probably never strayed far from the Lucy Ricardo she played on TV. I can't agree she was a great, if not the greatest, comedienne. She was nothing but an embarrassing carry-over from vaudeville, desperately looking for a way to make a paycheck by appealing to humanity's easily influenced retrograde tendencies.