In Angel (not spoilery, I think, but I'm whitefonting anyway):

ALIBELLE: It's like, one girl in all of Sunnydale who has the strength and skill...oh no, wait....one girl in all of the Summers' Home who has the strength and skill...oh no, wait again...one girl in all the world who happens to be named Buffy with the strength and skill to defeat the vampires.

Soooooooooo many COMMable Bitches last night:

TRUDY: I've now been reduced to completely petty behaivor. I swiped a pint of Ben and Jerrys from [my sister's] freezer and am eating it. I'm enjoying the theft as much as the chocolate.

ELENA: Steal her food? Why, does illgotten food taste better?

TRUDY: It does!

I'm turning to a life of junk food crime! Bwah ha ha haaaaaa!

Super Porny Pants and the Junk Food Bandit! Now I have TWO alias-es-esss

BILLYTEA: I don't think that's entirely fair. In this troubled economy there are all too many people trying to get by without even one. I think you should opt to be known as the Super Porny Junk Food Pants Bandit, or else relinquish one to an unemployed steelworker.

TRUDY: You have a point, Billytea...

As a good capitalist, however, I am going to hire some unemployed schlub at the currently depressed market rate to wear the outfit and steal the junk food for me.

-----

TRUDY: Editing this story is making me bats. I have too much porn! I need to cut out whole swaths of delicious sex acts in order for this thing to have some sort of narrative arc.

REBECCA LIZARD: I'll take some of that porn, Trudy. Mine is stubbornly refusing to be sexy in the right place.

Me: C'mon, Emma. Just jerk off in the shower. A hundred words. All I'm asking.
Emma: Get out of my face, bitch, or I'm calling the cops.
Me: I'll take away your coffee.
Emma: That's just a stupid gimmick anyway.

---

ELENA'S HUSBAND: Pork can too be a garnish. Imagine a large pile of apples. Can you think of anything more appropriate than a dead pig amongst them? I would think not!

---

ELENA: You know what's a traditional Thanksgiving gift in Canada? X-Men slash.

ELENA'S HUSBAND: ...So a turkey, Wolverine and Magneto walk into a bar...

The ever quotable billytea, Nature Freak (in Natter):

octopi are perhaps the coolest things in the ocean. The only thing that limits their ability to squeeze into crevices and such like is their beak - they'll comfortably fit into milk bottles, for instance. Being soft-bodied, this is a defensive feature; some species can mate while the participants are safely ensconced in separate crevices. The male inserts a specially modified arm into the female, then shunts sperm packets along a groove. (Other, free-swimming species tend to be more scattered, so finding a mate is something of an event. The males celebrate by filling an arm with sperm, breaking it off at the base and promptly dying. The arm, meanwhile, wriggles into the female's gill cavity. Hallmark cards will never seem quite sufficient again.)

Madrigal, in Angel (also spoilyish for Buffy):

For a moment I thought they might kill Gunn, since they've introduced a recurring black man on Buffy, and there is that whole, "One brother dies, another rises" thing. And now I'm picturing some future Buffy episode where Dawn brings home her new friend Keisha, proudly wearing a rainbow pin, who lasts all of five seconds before being torn apart by zombie parrots.

From Natter:

Betsy: "The Mad" and "The Butcher" are never promising nicknames.

Nutty: No, and neither is Eirik Blood-Axe. But I'd be OK standing next to Ethelred the Unready.

ita: Wait -- what's wrong with Blood-Axe?

Nutty: I don't remember the specifics, except inasmuch as he and his kin were bad enough that a whole population of Scandinavia decamped to Iceland to get away from him. (Okay, because they wanted democracy and he was the king. But I bet he let them know he was king in not-nice ways, involving an axe.)

Also, axes are heavy, and if they're bloody, I bet they drip all over the carpet.

ita: But Nutty, those sound like they belong in the plus column (assuming you have enough Resolve).

billytea : For a Viking, 'Blood-Axe' probably suited pretty well. (You probably know this already, but 'Unready' actually meant the guy lacked counsel (good advice), 'rede' in Old English. One site suggested a decent translation would be "Ethelred the Clueless".)

Nutty: Like I said, I could stand next to that guy and feel relatively safe.

Well, from his evil mastermind plans, if not from his big scary knife.

[Edited to include the whole exchange]

ita: Lots of things that squick me have plenty of precedent.

Hec: Sure. Vivisection, Steve Gutenberg, soy-based meat products.

Damn, I love COMM. Although I very nearly died here, choking on my brioche as I laughed in a most unsightly fashion. Not the most embarassing way to die (the guy who was electrocuted to death whilst pissing on railroad tracks is pretty high on the list), but still fairly embarassing. And untimely. Anyway, unspoilery discussion of Fred/Gunn over in the Angel thread:

victor: Am I wrong to think Fred is hot?

p.m. marcontell: She's pretty, but I think she'd boil your bunnies if you dumped her. IJS, she's not all there.

Besty: I just imagine her putting little fuzzy hand puppets on his penis.

Going out for a brainwipe. I may be some time.

Nutty (whom I seem to just follow around and COMM today), in Natter:

The New Testament is slightly hampered in its unified message by its being translated badly several times, and the bad translations being taken as earthshatteringly Right And Infallible, which is just cruising for a Greek nerd to get all "um, actually".

Moral of this story: Primary sources are our friends, and make us not look like morons lo those 1100 years later.

I sometimes have to remind myself that most of you come by these things from a completely different angle - mostly, you know so much, that I need to remind myself that I can't use a Hebrew word when I'm missing an English one, because no, you won't understand it (that's why I was so startled the first time ita wrote 'Krav Maga', both Hebrew words - it was like the very thing I was trying to avoid doing jumped in my face and said 'ha, I'm here anyway, from your subconscious to computer screens worldwide').

-- Nilly

It's like anthropology in miniature - - putting on your coats/jackets . . . see what you were doing last time it was cold.

--Sumi