Naked People on the Prairie, Ripping Heads off of Chickens, and Doctor Who

Picture of the Day:

TV and Take out.

A new season of Doctor Who started last night.  Oooo!  The only problem is that we got rid of cable, so we couldn’t watch it live.  A few of our friends thought that we got rid of cable in some sort of attempt at morality: “We won’t allow that cable-twaddle in our home.”

Nah.  It wasn’t that.

We’re just cheap frugal.  Netflix is cheaper than cable.  If there’s a way to save some cash, we’re going to do it.

Sort of like how we’re going to continue to hand wash those dishes.  After I posted that the dead dishwasher was killing me, Darling Husband said, in his usual offhand manner when he’s making Momentous Pronouncements, “I don’t mind washing dishes.  In fact, I kind of like it.  The same way I like ironing clothes.”

Yes, people, we are one of the few remaining Americans who own an iron.  I’m not sure they even make irons anymore, being that I don’t know anyone else in real life who actually irons their clothes.  Once this one breaks we’ll have to get one on the black market.  Or else heat up hunks of metal to iron our clothes, like in Little House on the Prairie days.

But you know what?  I suspect they didn’t iron their clothes on the prairie.  If you’re living on the prairie and no one else is within 500 miles of you, are you gonna bother ironing clothes?  No.  In fact, I suspect that they went around naked quite a bit.  I’ve thought about this a lot over the years.  I’d like to speak with a historian about my theory.  Think about it: it’s brutally hot out on the prairie without air conditioning, and those long dresses and pants would have been completely impractical.  If you had to chase a chicken around the yard in a big ol’ dress and then lop off its head with blood splattering everywhere, wouldn’t it be easier to do that naked?  Or at least in your skivvies.

Maybe they just twisted the chicken’s heads off.  I’ve heard you can pop off a chicken’s head with your bare hands.   Remember the day I got to play with the glock? (here.)  Well, before playing with guns, I sat around a table eating a fried chicken dinner with the Elders of the Family.  And they all talked about what good fried chicken it was, and how they remember popping off chicken’s heads when they were kids on The Farm.  And when I said, “What?!?  You ripped the heads off of living chickens?!?” they calmly demonstrated the technique with an invisible chicken.

Pennsylvanian Dutch/German farmer-type people are very calm about these things.

Edited to add:  Hey, look!  I just remembered that I have a picture of the Chicken Killers.  Here they are:

Back to the picture of the day and the cancelled cable:

So, there was a new season of Doctor Who on last night.  But Darling Husband and I cancelled our cable and use Netflix instead, which means no BBC America, which means no live Doctor Who.

Now, we’re true Doctor Who fans.  True fans.  True blue fans.  You know you’re a true fan when you used to stay up until after midnight every Saturday night watching ancient Doctor Who episodes from 1963 in black and white (and then Red Dwarf afterwards until 12:30) even though you had to get up at 6:00 to go to church the next morning.

You cannot imagine our excitement when they started up the newest season of Doctor Who back in 2005.  We were a bit nervous, as was everyone, that it would be a Horrible Disaster.  Sort of like when Star Trek The Next Generation was first on.  How could anything possibly replace the Kirk/Spock/McCoy chemistry?  I remember sitting nervously with my dad on the couch, half-cringing, ever hopeful, when the first Next Generation episode aired.  (It was a Q episode, so it was amazing–disaster averted.)

The new Doctor Who also came through, just like TNG.  That first episode was…fantastic.

Fortunately, Darling Husband’s parents do not have our cheap frugal nature, and are quite content to pay for cable, and are amenable to recording Doctor Who for us.  So…picture of the day: Doctor Who and Chinese take out (or “take-away” in honor of Britain.)

The only drawback was that Darling Husband hacked his way through the whole episode.  Poor Scott wasn’t kidding last night about being exposed to influenza, and has been eating his Vitamin C drops all day today.  Since I’m here living with the Hacking Husband, I followed Scott’s lead and got myself a bag of Vitamin C drops in the hopes it would stave off infection.  I’m tentatively hopeful I won’t get the dreaded cough.  It sounds pretty ugly.  (Hack, hack, hack!)

The only problem with Doctor Who is that they speak really, really fast with their garbly British accents and we miss a few lines here and there.  My Hacking Husband didn’t help, so I missed more lines than usual.

I’ll have to rewatch the episode tomorrow while I hand wash the dishes.