Chaucer’s Knight, by Terry Jones

Awesome

Blogging for a Good Book

knightFirst, a series of confessions.  This book isn’t in the library’s collection, so I don’t have a link to it.  I’ve written about Jones’ take on Chaucer before, so I may be replowing the same field.  And, even though my wife doesn’t understand it, Terry Jones makes my heart race.

Like his work with Monty Python’s Flying Circuses, Jones takes a flying leap feet-first into a settled world and turns it on its head.  Chaucer’s Knight was almost universally praised by Chaucerians.  After all, look at how Chaucer begins his description:

A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.

Along with calling him “a verray, parfit gentil knyght,” there was, in the minds of literature scholars, little else that Chaucer could have done to hold the Knight up…

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Ten things not to say to a pregnant woman

Is This Thing On?

1. “I knew it!”

Even if you did know it, please pass on the opportunity to tout your psychic abilities (or your weird  claim that you unconsciously  smelled my pheromones.  ew).  When women say this, it usually means that they noticed your waist got a little bigger, or as one woman told me, “you had the waddle.” If it’s a man telling you this, then he might as well just say “Boobs,” because that’s what he noticed.    I promise.

2.  Any version of that horrific birth story you heard/witnessed/experienced

Just don’t.  Even if you think you are going to save your pregnant friend from pure disaster by recommending that she skip the epidural, or run screaming from the birth center, you won’t.  Chances are she has read all the horror stories and is staying awake at night thinking of them.  But as soon as you tell her those stories…

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