The Vineyards

I considered not writing this. Last year was mostly terrible and only had a handful of posts, most of them with their quotes already explained. But I will do it anyway.

January 1st – “She gained down and down and, and then, um, she bounced! Yeah, she bounced right back up and landed back in the chair!”
From an episode of the old TV series “Dinosaurs”, possibly the first episode, when Earl Sinclair has to explain how his mother-in-law is still alive after reaching the age where she is supposed to be thrown into a tar pit by him. I honestly have no idea why I picked this quote – maybe something to do with tradition – but I know I went to great lengths to find it: it was available nowhere on the internet, so I went after a torrent of the full series, downloaded this episode, found the quote and transcribed it with much difficulty.

February 13th – “Are childhood online friends considered childhood friends?”
No mystery there, it was in Will’s comment about the previous post. This year had quite little mystery in its quotes.

March 31st – “Reticulating splines.”
Nothing says “SimSomething” better than “reticulating splines”. It is completely meaningless but has been in every Sim game I can remember. I recall recreating the terrain in SimCity 2000 some thirty times one day to understand that line, which was spoken. Sim games were an important part of that post. (An apology: I think I only saw Calebe’s comment on it today, eight months later. Which is…)

April 30th – “But someday I shall!”
…funny, because he mentions Ultima 8: Pagan in his comment, a game I wrote about long before that, and from where this quote comes, despite the post itself having nothing to do with the game. Coincidence? Specifically, when the Avatar sees a morphing cube (that becomes a sphere and a pyramid, and changes color) in Mythran’s home, he kneels in front of it, says “I have neither the power nor the wisdom to control this…”, turns to face the camera and concludes, “But someday I shall!”. I risk believing the morphing cube appeared in other Ultima games, like the name Bentic. I really liked that scene. I liked pretty much everything revolving around Mythran, except those times I miscast a spell he had just taught me and he thought I was attacking him, and summoned demons and rained fire and meteors (inside his house!) to kill me. It happened too often.

May 19th – “I’m sixteen years old – I’m not a child anymore…”
Ariel, the Little Mermaid, says that to her father to argue she is old enough to decide what is best for her life – like becoming human to get married and pregnant. This post gets a great share of my visits coming from search engines, when people look for “benny mardones pedophile”. Why do people even look for that? I hope they, too, were writing posts on their blogs to say how silly they think this notion is.

June 24th – “I find that you maintain an impressively consistent level of annoyance at all times.”
I went looking on IMDb for a quote with “annoyance”, found this one from “Bones”, a series I never watched.

July 9th – “10,000 deaths are not good enough for you!”
From Valkyrie Profile, this is Princess Jelanda’s trademark line. Whoever made the PSP version of this game deserves to hear it. Just a post to complain about games, even though I know no one likes them but me.

July 27th – “Mó nu pa tropi abençoá po De.”
This line making little sense is actually a landmark. If I am not wrong, it is the first time I used a verse from a song (not counting musicals) as a title; also, the first title in Portuguese (sort of). A post about how compound words in English are cut in half when used in Brazil (and the wrong half is kept) deserved a line made only of half words. From the song “País Tropical”: it was too short, so the composer repeated the whole thing with only the first part of each word. Yeah.

August 28th – “Moving on.”
I was sure it was said just like that in this Sluggy Freelance comic, but I was wrong. No matter, it is obviously said just like that in a hundred other places. Sluggy’s simply had a slightly different meaning I do not hate.

September 27th – “You don’t realize how dangerous this is. If you fail, you could be pulled into the Netherworld with it.”
From Xena episode “Lifeblood”, spoken by amazon priestess Yakut. But it only makes sense if you can read the post in Portuguese. (Fine, a quick explanation: part of the post is about a myth that drinking two bottles of Yakult on the same day can kill you. Yakult is a a milk-beverage of sorts sold in Brazil, possibly somewhere else in the world.)

October 8th – “Like you should talk, look at your getup!”
In the PS2 game Rumble Roses, Candy Cane, the high-school girl, says that when Miss Spencer, her teacher, meets her on the ring and points out her clothes are too revealing. I spent many days finishing story mode with all fighters and unlocking all outfits and galleries in this game, as I know many others have (and in hundreds of other games). Doubly fit for a post that talks about how MMORPGs are singled out among games to be bashed as a waste of time.

November 24th – “Ler é mais importante do que estudar.”
A quote from Brazilian author Ziraldo, as explained in the post itself. “Reading is more important than studying.” I had just taken the biggest college entry test in the country and noticed yet again how pointless it is, a contest of who can remember the greatest number of trivial stuff that will never be used again. For the record, I did not pass this test, my score was one point (out of ninety possible) lower than I needed. Given it had been eight years since I last touched any of those subjects, I believe I did damn well.

November 25th – “One day, whilst sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of murmuring, half aloud, these customary syllables.”
I just turned a few pages forward in the same book I used for the meme and picked another line. This one is from “The imp of the perverse”. Maybe because sometimes I do murmur half aloud something from Poe.

December 25th – “At Christmas play and make good cheer, For Christmas comes but once a year.”
A Christmas post, even if it was late. “Hey, everyone, I hope you find that thing in which you are the best in the world.” Quote by Thomas Tusser, from “A Hundred Points of Good Husbandry” (1557). Most of the previous posts were complaints – in fact, most of the year was very bad. At least Christmas should be good.

In the last two January 1st posts I said “last year was bad, I hope this one is better”, and the opposite happened. I will just not say a thing this time. Happy New Year.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.