Happy post-Election, commenters. Lots of suggestions this week! Like:
On Lily Rothman’s list of suggestions for TGIF spin-offs in the Girl Meets World mold, Jason Werden points out that we missed a Saved By the Bell opportunity, with “Zack Morris and Kelly Kapowski’s 16-year-old hipster son,” who he calls Trey. We’re particularly taken with this detail from the suggestion:
Director’s Note: In Season Three, the gang will work at a Laguna Dunes Beach Club for the summer, where Trey will fall for the daughter of the club’s manager, played by Leah Remini.
We’re also taken with gurliekangaroo’s suggestion, in response to James Poniewozik’s piece about Karl Rove‘s initial denial of the vote counts on Election Night:
I’m setting my DVR to tape Saturday Night live
And there was a long suggestion from crows, an 8-time participant in the event, in response to Graeme McMillan’s analysis of National Novel Writing Month, which makes us a little sad we didn’t start writing a novel last week:
I recommend NaNoWriMo to people as what it is for me: a challenge to process. It is opportunity, permission, and pressure to try new things, both in your material by treading the unknown and your procedure because a several-thousand-word-per-day habit is not one that many people cultivate. It is, however, a very healthy one, and even if we only manage to do it one month out of the year, the challenge, the brain exercise, stays with us. Criticisms of NaNoWriMo seem focused on what is produced, which I think no one will argue against being a great many hastily written words. I will also not argue the point that it’s short-sighted to turn around on December 1st and submit your draft to an agent or publisher. This naivete occurs year-round, however, without any assistance from the Office of Letters and Light or anyone else. It would be nice if everyone in every industry knew what they were doing, prepared themselves, considered their choices, did their research, and never jumped the shark or the gun. However, I think it’s fair to say that this doesn’t happen often, anywhere. Developing a good set of tools (or friends) for revision, editing, proof-reading, and understanding whether your work is finished (enough) and how it fits into the market you want to sell to is an entirely different procedure than producing the work in the first place, and takes different refining. It’s important, but so is the work.
We do not, to my knowledge, begrudge athletes their practice. You expect a marathon runner to run daily, and to train harder when an event is in sight that will test their skills and limits. Do you ridicule someone who picks up a jogging habit because they’d like to improve the sensation of being inside their own skin, and says dreamily, “I think I’d like to run a marathon some day.” I hope not. I’m not in any circles of professional or aspiring-professional athletes, but I would feel rather poorly about someone who turned up their nose to sneer, ‘not everybody has it in them, you know’.
And finally—though not a suggestion so much as a word to the wise—in response to Richard Corliss’ piece about how Lincoln is an urgent message for our times, TerryMcIntyre has one thing to say:
Lincoln would drink your milkshake.