TV Quote of the Day (‘Parks and Recreation,’ on a Pivotal Moment in a Beauty Pageant)

[Serving as a judge in the Miss Pawnee Beauty Pageant, Leslie hopes to weed out one contestant whose lack of cranial matter is cheerfully overlooked by the male-dominated panel.]

Leslie Knope [played by Amy Poehler]: “Trish, Alexis de Tocqueville called America ‘The Great Experiment.’ What can we do, as citizens, to improve on that experiment?”

Trish Ianetta [played by April Eden]: “Uh, well, uh, I think America is the land of the free, which is a wonderful thing, and also the brave, where people can live. And nobody can ever take that away from you, and it never gives up. But the high birthing rate of immigrants frightens me! No offense to anyone out there, but if it were up to me and my family, I would actually call it our America, and not their America! Thank you.”

[The audience applauds enthusiastically.]

Leslie: “Don't applaud that. She didn't—she didn't answer my question.”— Parks and Recreation, Season 2, Episode 3, “Beauty Pageant,” original air date Oct. 1, 2009, teleplay by Katie Dippold and Harris Wittels, directed by Jason Woliner

This is a scene in which the full vacuity of a character can only be conveyed by watching an actor rather than by reading the admittedly clever dialogue.

In a few years, it sounds like Trish and her family would be among the original, hard-core MAGA contingent.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Irish Ice-Cutters in New England Winters)

“A hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and ‘cradle–holes’ were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty–five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss–grown and hoary ruin, built of azure–tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac—his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty–five per cent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars.” — American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden (1854)

One of those jobs that despised immigrants performed years ago...

The image accompanying this post, showing ice-harvesting in Massachusetts in the early 1850s, appeared first in Gleason's Drawing Room Companion (1852), p. 37.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Modern Family,’ on an Outcome of the Citizenship Process)

[The household is anticipating the citizenship process for Colombian-born Gloria.]

Jay Pritchett [played by Ed O'Neill]: “Gloria's about to take her citizenship test. This little jumping bean is about to become an American.”

Gloria Delgado-Pritchett [played by Sofía Vergara] [indignantly]: “Jumping beans are Mexican!”

Jay: “Once you're an American, you won't see the difference.”— Modern Family, Season 6, Episode 22, “Patriot Games,” original air date May 6, 2015, teleplay by Christopher Lloyd, Steven Levitan, and Vali Chandrasekaran, directed by Alisa Statman