Attempts To Avoid Battle
Captain Blackadder's various attempts to avoid going over the top, by episode, include:
- "Captain Cook": Posing as Italian chefs while claiming Pope Gregory the Ninth invited the original cook away, with Baldrick as cook (thereby nearly poisoning Melchett and Darling).
- "Corporal Punishment": Feigning communication problems by imitating static on the telephone and shouting out orders in German, disregarding a telegram ordering him to advance on the grounds that it was wrongly addressing one "Catpain Blackudder" and shooting General Melchett's favourite carrier pigeon with its orders to attack, and then eating the evidence (i.e., the bird). This series of evasions got Blackadder court-martialled with the furious General Melchett himself acting as the trial's presiding judge, finding Blackadder guilty of killing the pigeon (as well as disobeying orders, as a side-note), and sentencing him to death by firing squad. Blackadder is saved when the Minister of War, Lieutenant George's uncle, pardons him, without any particular help from the incompetent George.
- "Major Star": Organising a music-hall performance under Melchett's suggestion, with Lieutenant George as the drag act "Gorgeous Georgina" (this plan was aborted when General Melchett fell madly in love with 'Georgina' and Blackadder was forced to fake "her" death, even after he got a genuine female for the act, Melchett then thought it was a horrible drag act).
- Private Plane: Joining the Royal Flying Corps under Lord Flashheart (not knowing that green pilots had an even worse survival rate). He later accepted capture by Baron von Richthofen so as to escape through the 'humiliating' punishment of spending the rest of the war "teaching home economics in a German convent outside Heidelberg."
- General Hospital: Working on a counterespionage assignment in a British field hospital under "Operation Winkle"
- And perhaps most famously: feigning insanity by sticking two pencils up his nose, putting underpants on his head and saying, "Wibble."
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“For a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age; which attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion known to humanity; to tell, without a mincing of words, of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, I am not aware that there is anything in the handling to which exception can be taken.”
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“Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him; he has become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To avoid discord, never put two wise people in the same room.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)