Category: Uncategorized
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MASH Revisited
“Henry Please Come Home” (S. 1, ep. 9) This episode gets its own entry because it’s at once a throwback to the film, and a step forward in the development of the characters. The premise is simple: Henry Blake has impressed General Hammond by the efficiency and good results achieved by the 4077th, the highest […]
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MASH Revisited: “I Hate a Mystery”/”Germ Warfare”
S. 1, Eps. 10 & 11 Remember back in “Requiem for a Lightweight” how Trapper John ended a surprisingly nice conversation between Maj. Houlihan and Hawkeye by calling her “Frank’s bag?” Well, that slightly nasty streak comes out again in “I Hate a Mystery,” and Trapper turns it on—surprisingly—Hawkeye. Ok, a little plot recap, for […]
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Epicurus on the Hudson: A Sermon on Luke 12: 13-21
Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NYC, July 31, 2022 New York City is not an ascetic place. You don’t find a lot of fasting, wearing drab clothes, or people living well below their means as an act of committing to modesty, sobriety, or simplicity. Sometimes the Amish visit the City to sell their wares at a farmer’s […]
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MASH Revisited:
The Matter of Mulcahy (Not Season 1’s Mulcahy; but actually is Season 1’s Mulcahy) Many years ago, when I was in high school in the 1980s, the Catholic League riled me. You see, my primary memory of the Catholic League in high school was its consistent denunciations of the television version of MASH, based on its […]
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MASH Revisited:
S. 1, Eps 7-8: “Bananas, Crackers and Nuts”/”Cowboy” This idea of pairing up episodes has (so far) been fortuitously effective. In the Beginning, there was the Deluge. No, I don’t mean the biblical one, but rather a portion of “Richard Hooker’s” MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors that depicts the 4077th MASH under siege, a two […]
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MASH Revisited:
S. 1, Eps. 5-6: The Moose/Yankee Doodle Doctor Yung Hi apparently got off lightly. It seems that the “moose” (a corruption of the Japanese word “musume” (“Girl”) was a real phenomenon. (There’s a singularly unedifying section on the relationship in Japan during the Korean War in a Korean War veteran’s online memoir, which asserts that the relationship was […]
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MASH Revisited: S. 1 Eps 3-4
No, no; I don’t intend to force episodes together into mini-reviews. It’s just that these two go together so naturally that it’s hard not to look at them together. That’s partially because the first focuses more on Trapper John, while Hawkeye is the focus of “Chief Surgeon Who?” We start seeing some differences between the […]
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“Requiem for a Lightweight”/ “Chief Surgeon Who?”: MASH Revisited, S. 1 eps. 3 & 4
No, no; I don’t intend to force episodes together into mini-reviews. It’s just that these two go together so naturally that it’s hard not to look at them together. That’s partially because “Requiem for a Lightweight” focuses more on Trapper John, while Hawkeye is the focus of “Chief Surgeon Who?” We start seeing some differences […]
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MASH Revisited, S. 1, Ep. 2: “To Market, To Market”
The surrealism of Henry Blake’s “handmade American antique” desk sailing through the air as the dazed C.O. watches from below (while still recovering from the disappearance of the entire back wall of his office) is all the more irresistibly funny for McLean Stevenson’s surface calm through the whole sequence. He underplays it beautifully, leaving the […]
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MASH Revisited: Pilot
Korea, 1950: A Hundred years Ago. Having obtained a set of the DVDs , I once more watched the first episode of a show that I was a fan of from childhood through high school, until it vanished, as 70s and 80s TV shows did, prior to the modern age of streaming video, that is, […]
ANGLOCAT ON The Prowl: A Deacon's Miscellany 