Ducklings!

First, if anyone needs cheering up: adorable photos of ducklings! (The article persists in calling them "baby ducks," which is just silly. Ducklings is a perfectly good word!)

And second, the grocery store has baked beans in cans with pop tops now! Which is probably exciting only to me, on account of my epic losing battle with my can opener - FUN FACT, when canned food was first invented you had to open it with a pick, on account of can openers had not been invented. Whenever I have shredded another can in my quest to extract its contents, I recall this fact and try to feel less downtrodden.

Mostly I just feel awe at the competence of Victorian housewives, though. I am pretty sure that if I tried to open cans with a pick I would destroy everything in the kitchen aside from the can.

BUT NOW IT IS A MOOT POINT because I can open baked beans without recourse to a can opener. Om nom nom.

Firefly Wednesday: War Stories

"War Stories," otherwise known as "the episode where Wash acts like a bratty five-year-old, seriously, my opinion of Wash has gone way down in this rewatch." As my already-high opinion of Zoe has only gone higher, this makes them seem far less well-suited for each other, which is so sad because I loved Zoe & Wash the first time around.

But it's hard not to feel that Zoe could do better than a guy who reroutes the shuttle's ignition sequence so he can strong-arm Mal into taking him on the mission rather than Zoe, because he's jealous of Zoe's friendship with Mal.

And I do think it is and always has been just friendship: they just don't seem like exes to me, although I'm not wedded to this interpretation. I could see them having a "we're going to die in this miserable rebellion!" fling, but I don't think they ever dated. If Mal treats all women he finds attractive like he treats Inara, doubtless Zoe wanted no part of that.

Mal does not interact with Inara at all in this episode, and thus continues the "being likable and menschly" trend that he started in "Out of Gas." I have concluded that Mal simply does not know how to interact with women whom he finds attractive and tries to compensate for this fact by being totally jerktastic in the hopes that this will convince them never to like him back, thus solving the whole "but if I have an actual relationship with a human being, will I be cheating on my spaceship?" problem for him.

And now I really want some Zoe backstory. How did she become so badass? What led her to join the rebellion? Why does she seem so much less crushed by its failure than Mal? I think perhaps Zoe is loyal to people rather than causes, and therefore found the rebellion's failure less devastating than Mal did because, after all, Mal survived, and he's the one who is important to her.

Still curious why she joined in the first place. Maybe she just wanted to see the world and have some adventures? That's a surprisingly common reason for American soldiers in WWI - they're like, "Either I could stay down on the farm forever OR I could go see Paris and possibly get shot. *eyes endless wheat fields shimmering in the heat* Paris and possible death it is!"

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(I didn't post about "Ariel" last week because I didn't have much to say about "Ariel." Except that if I was Mal, I totally would have left Jayne to be sucked out of the airlock into space.)