{"id":1044,"date":"2010-11-18T14:05:48","date_gmt":"2010-11-18T20:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=1044"},"modified":"2010-11-18T14:05:48","modified_gmt":"2010-11-18T20:05:48","slug":"how-i-know-that-troys-birthday-is-this-thursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2010\/11\/how-i-know-that-troys-birthday-is-this-thursday\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Know That Troy&#8217;s Birthday Is This Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Tuesday, 16 November 2010<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Eleven months ago, <a href=\"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2009\/12\/decade-at-a-glance-tv-shows\/\">I made a list of my ten favorite TV shows from the 2000-2010 decade<\/a>. If I were to amend that list, it would be to add <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nbc.com\/community\/\">Community<\/a>, a comedy on NBC that is now in its 2nd season.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve seen plenty of sitcoms, but most of them are just, well, okay. If you click on the link to my list (above), you&#8217;ll see I only have 3 sitcoms listed in my top ten. And one of them &#8211; <em>The Office<\/em> &#8211; isn&#8217;t even very funny anymore. Perhaps <em>Community<\/em> will go the way of <em>The Office<\/em> at some point, but for now, it&#8217;s my favorite current sitcom. Modern Warfare, an episode from the end of season 1, has got to be one of my all-time ten favorite TV episodes from any TV show &#8211; sitcom or drama &#8211; ever. (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Modern_Warfare_%28Community%29\">Here&#8217;s the obligatory link discussing the episode<\/a>, but don&#8217;t read about it if you haven&#8217;t seen it. And don&#8217;t bother to just dig around online and find that one episode, like most TV show episodes, it&#8217;s not as rewarding if you haven&#8217;t seen everything leading up to it.)<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t start watching Community right away. It wasn&#8217;t until mid-season, when a couple people directed me to some funny clips, that I began to watch the show. Jennifer and I watched the episodes together, trying to catch up on them. Somehow, during the spring, we lost track of the show and didn&#8217;t see the rest of the season. Two weeks ago, however, a co-worker let me borrow his copy of season 1 on DVD. Jennifer and I quickly watched the ones we hadn&#8217;t seen (I think we watched four episodes in a single night) and then we watched the season 2 episodes that are available online. I&#8217;m happy to say that I&#8217;ve now seen every episode, and I&#8217;m gonna make it my aim to keep up with the airing of new episodes.<\/p>\n<p>I know that this doesn&#8217;t prove my thesis that Community is the funniest sitcom on television, but I think it&#8217;s pretty hilarious\/interesting anyway:<\/p>\n<p>In the recent (04 November) episode &#8220;Aerodynamics of Gender,&#8221; we are shown the point of view of the character Abed. But it&#8217;s not just a typical point-of-view, it&#8217;s a Terminator-style view wherein Abed merely has to zero in on a person and all sorts of data begin popping up on his &#8216;screen.&#8217; Here, take a look:<\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-1046\" href=\"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2010\/11\/how-i-know-that-troys-birthday-is-this-thursday\/annie-t-800\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1046\" title=\"Annie T-800\" src=\"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Annie-T-800.bmp\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here we see Abed focusing his attention on a lady in his school. Our attention, meanwhile, is focused mainly on the list of &#8216;flaws&#8217; this lady possesses; out of style jeans, and heavy mascara, among others. But notice the other info on the screen: on the far right, we see what is called a &#8216;Current Synopsis.&#8217; And, in fact, it is a synopsis of the episode. More specifically, it is a <em>current<\/em> synopsis, in that it is exactly how I would&#8217;ve described the episode had I stopped watching it at this point (~10 minutes into the episode). Notice, too, that the display on the left indicates Annie (not the woman pictured) is projected to &#8216;cycle&#8217; on November 11th. And, yes, that means exactly what you think it means. And it&#8217;s also what happened: one week later, during the episode &#8220;Cooperative Calligraphy,&#8221; it is implied that the character Annie has (or is just about to get) her period.<\/p>\n<p>Now check out this still, which I grabbed from ~18 minutes into the episode:<\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-1047\" href=\"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2010\/11\/how-i-know-that-troys-birthday-is-this-thursday\/shirley-t-800\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1047\" title=\"Shirley T-800\" src=\"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Shirley-T-800.bmp\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>Look! The &#8220;Current Synopsis&#8221; has been updated, and now it reflects a more refined description of the episode. Meanwhile, we are now privy to Shirley&#8217;s &#8220;Projected Cycle,&#8221; which just happens to be the date the episode aired. This also comes into play in the next episode, in which we learn that Shirley has just picked up a pregnancy test &#8211; something a woman could be predicted to do when they are a week &#8216;late.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>So, I&#8217;m going to use these two images to make some predictions: The first image states that Troy&#8217;s birthday is in 14 days (18 November). I&#8217;ll be curious to see if his birthday is mentioned in the episode &#8220;Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design,&#8221; which is scheduled to air on November 18th. Meanwhile, the second image indicates Abed wishes to &#8220;Get Rudolph for Xmas&#8221; and make a blanket fort. I&#8217;m gonna hold the writers to this and see if both memos come to fruition in the next few episodes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tuesday, 16 November 2010 Eleven months ago, I made a list of my ten favorite TV shows from the 2000-2010 decade. If I were to amend that list, it would be to add Community, a comedy on NBC that is now in its 2nd season. I&#8217;ve seen plenty of sitcoms, but most of them are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1044"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1049,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions\/1049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}