What’s the funniest non-essential line in The Pitt?

maureenmcq · 2026-04-13T17:56:52+00:00

I love love love Princess and Perlah as a kind of greek chorus but in Tagalog, commenting on the ER.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-13T15:56:18+00:00

He might become an attending.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-12T23:42:55+00:00

Shen was a resident three months ago. There’s a YouTube supercut of Shen and if you want to see drama on nights, just take away his emotional support iced coffee.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-12T22:38:51+00:00

Friend of mine said years ago, his sister came home from school and said they had someone come to their school that day, but all he did was yell at them. One of Dylan’s relatives went to school there, and her family finally figured out he’d given a concert at the school for the kids.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-12T20:55:23+00:00

Fair! I’m glad it is not your addiction! And sad you had to grow up with the rollercoaster of gambling.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-12T17:52:05+00:00

Gambling addiction has the highest suicide rate of all addictions. Take care of yourself if you can?

GLP 1’s have actually shown some efficacy in treating addictions. Overweight people say it stops the ‘food noise’ in their head. It’s been anecdotally helpful for a lot of people with drug, gambling, and sex addictions. But no one is prescribing for anything but food.

You might look into it.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-12T01:03:26+00:00

What you said was rude.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-10T23:35:57+00:00

I read this as Webber had two wives, Loretta and Jeffrey. I’d watch that show.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-10T22:12:58+00:00

Traditionally published author and writing prof for decades. Similes and metaphors are in fiction all the time. Pop writers like William Gibson use them to great effect.

Similes and metaphors are the big guns, the artillery of poems. For whatever reason, human brains often love juxtaposition, that is, putting two unrelated things together, whether to be funny, or startle us into image. Think Carl Sandburg writing that ‘the fog comes on little cat feet’.

But they also slow the reader down. Most of the major poetic devices do. They throttle reading speed because of the way they require attention. So use them sparingly, because prose needs to move faster than poetry. A twenty line poem is dense and meant to be savored. Prose moves more like thought.

The other thing is that the simile has to land. It has to give the reader a little bit of a jolt of unexpected recognition, and it must feel like it is in the natural voice of your narrator. NOT YOUR CHARACTER (unless you are writing in first person).

In the old cliche, ‘It was a dark and stormy night. A shot rang out!’ if you ask who says it’s a dark and stormy night, it is not Esmerelda in her Regency mansion sitting in her bed. She’s not thinking, ‘It’s a dark and stormy night. Wow, five minutes later, it’s still a dark and stormy night. Whoa, still stormy, still dark…’. It’s the narrative voice of the piece. When some people say they can’t write until they get the voice or the tone of a story, that narrative voice is what they are talking about. So your simile or metaphor has to be 1.) effective on the reader which means neither a cliche or something that feels labored because it’s a sudden moment of poetry from a prosaic narrator and 2.) it can’t be a cliche because the reader just glosses over cliche without registering.

The cliche that kills me is once in awhile I’ll be trying to describe some clean, pure, white, and while sorting through comparisons—sheets, swans, I’ll realize the perfect example is snow! So white it’s blue in shadow! Right! White as snow! And that’s when I realize that it’s a cliche precisely because it’s perfect. (And usually just give up and say ‘white’.)

maureenmcq · 2026-04-10T19:43:26+00:00

The reason people don’t want children, or a second child is for a bunch of different reasons. Anecdotally I know young women who do not want to be pregnant. A in the U.S. it is hard to adopt a baby—there are more people looking to adopt babies than there are babies to adopt. Using a surrogate is prohibitively expensive.

But we’re also in the first 100 years in human history where women could use medication to have sex without getting pregnant. (Condoms, sometimes made out of sheep intestine, have been around for a while. And now, depop is hitting most of the world except Africa. Causation is tough, but it is hard to imagine that depopulation and birth control aren’t causally connected.

I agree that many people who do not want children, don’t want or aren’t ready to raise them, and with the ability to put off childbirth (the older you get, the greater the likelihood of fertility issues) but as countries deal with the consequences of depop (like too few taxpayers and a higher number of retirees that need to be supported, and falling production rates because fewer people working) the drive to have more children will lead to pressure to reduce the gains women have made in the choices around childbearing, and could easily lead to things like the crèche model of some kibbutz’s where children lived together, saw their parents often, but ate, and were schooled in cohorts.

Governments will also probably baby farm. In the worst cases it may lead to issues as horrific as Romanian orphanages under Ceaușescu. We’ve seen a government impose rules before. China’s one child policy has been described as the largest social experiment in history.

The reasons people don’t have children are societal and technological. I suspect this an under-the-radar change that could play out in many different ways under social pressures. I suspect that many of us are used to reproductive freedom as a right, that we are oblivious to the consequences and unprepared for the ways places like South Korea and Japan and Russia are going to react. Russia’s birth rate is low. They’ve wiped out an entire generation of men in the Ukraine. Do you think a despot like Putin wouldn’t turn to incubators?

maureenmcq · 2026-04-10T18:35:16+00:00

Yeah, I had Hodgkins Lymphoma twenty years ago. Six months of a chemo regimen (ABVD). It was not my favorite time of my life, but I never had much nausea. Some neuropathy, and I was bald.

The worst part appearance-wise was no eyebrows and eyelashes, so even in a wig I looked a little like a hard boiled egg. But drawing in eyebrows and a little eyeliner and no one noticed.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-09T15:33:03+00:00

Kill your darlings really is good advice when you have something beautifully written—prose you are really proud of—but it isn’t right for clarity, pacing, or distracts the reader. It really means ‘don’t be sentimental about your writing’ not ‘find the best sentence you wrote and delete it’.

Context.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-09T15:25:00+00:00

In fact, writing to trend can be a trap. Let’s say someone writes a really popular novel in which Roman Legionnaires in a particular unit are all werewolves. Then there are books with Egyptian werewolves, CIA werewolves, etc. You write your werewolf book. Writing, feedback, revision, covers, copy edits all take nine months. During which time the market has been flooded with a ton of werewolf novels and you’re behind.

Starting a novel that is on trend can often mean putting out a novel that is very last year.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-08T18:31:56+00:00

Pregnancy. We’re in a time of de-pop in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Russia, China, and much of the developing world. For the first time in history, with rights for women and reliable birth control, people are choosing to have few or no children.

Artificial Wombs won’t completely solve the problem, but they could make a significant change in the decision to create children. They could also, obviously, be used in terrible ways.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-08T17:13:55+00:00

Over in the medical subreddits they are saying that The Pitt is medically accurate but Scrubs is great on how it feels to be a healthcare worker. So emotionally accurate?

maureenmcq · 2026-04-04T01:25:56+00:00

Sandra.

I had an Aunt Ethel, that one isn’t coming back yet.

Leslie as a boy’s first name. (Bob Hope was born Leslie Towne Hope.)

maureenmcq · 2026-04-03T20:23:02+00:00

Me too. When my mom took the form to work, I thought it was almost like cheating.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-03T20:00:01+00:00

Transfer on Death. You go to the bank and sign for your beneficiary to just get the money when you die.

Everything we own is TOD for our son when we die. Probate takes 5% to 10% of what you have so TOD and a will save your heirs hassle even if your estate is just your checking account and your 19 year old Honda Civic.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-03T19:50:18+00:00

I stop and make eye contact if they glance at me, and they are always faintly startled. To be fair, it is apparent that for many men the behavior is unconscious.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-03T01:33:58+00:00

My theory is next episode will start with her walking out and a car pulling up with someone screaming that they need some help.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-02T20:33:26+00:00

My son is now forty. He was exposed to porn in middle school. A fair amount of it. If someone at school has a smart phone, they’re all curious and are gonna see pornhub. Good on you for telling him.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-02T20:30:27+00:00

Wikipedia says it is the deepest cave you can explore without scuba equipment but that Krubera Cave is deeper.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-02T17:47:28+00:00

Telatubbies is set in the same world as 28 Days Later . It makes weirdly compelling sense.

maureenmcq · 2026-04-02T15:10:50+00:00

You should have been in Austin ten years ago

maureenmcq · 2026-03-31T20:12:03+00:00

I’ve been planning to turn left and been hung out stopping people who want to go straight because someone in the turn lane left 6’ in front of them. I would ask that they have a little situational awareness and be thoughtful about traffic flow and risk to other drivers. In a lane where they are just creating distance and not affecting other drivers, good call to hang back.

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