No joke.

(click for large)

It’s clearer on their downloadable PDF form (as opposed to my screenshot of my TurboTax version here).

While glancing at the show’s Wikipedia entry last night, I noticed the title card for the show. It immediately struck me as odd for a number of reasons.

Two landmarks are easily identifiable, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. So first, I think “Okay, Empire State Building, this is a view of the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn side of the bridge.” However, that doesn’t work because a picture taken from around Empire Fulton Ferry State Park (which is where it would likely need to be taken from to get that angle of the bridge) wouldn’t have the Empire State Building in the background, since that’s way up at 5th Avenue and West 34th Street. It would also have all of the tall downtown buildings in the background, which it doesn’t.

CC-by-2.0 photo by morrissey

At this point, I also notice that the East River is wrong, as we can see the reflection of the first bridge pillar in the water, but if we were really on the Brooklyn side that pillar closest to us is on land, so we couldn’t see a reflection. So if that pillar closest to us is reflected in the water, the image of the bridge must be from the Manhattan side.

CC-by-nc-sa-2.0 photo by FromTheNorth

The Brooklyn skyline from that area doesn’t look like the one in the title card either, and I still haven’t figured out where that’s from.

So basically, what we have is 1) an image of the south side of the Brooklyn Bridge taken from the Manhattan side of the East River with a skyline in the background that doesn’t jive with the actual background of that area and 2) the Empire State Building plopped in.

What I can say though, after all this research, is that they fixed issue 2 in the second season’s title card.

That’s progress. Though I do wonder what precipitated the change.

Great book, of course, but now I want baseball season to start already.

In the brief moment he holds the book up, we can see a bit of the rest of the text on the page. From what I could make out, here’s what it said (lowercase use reported faithfully as used on screen):

he has a job that he’s passionate about the chances that he will stalk you when you break up lessen. A busy man doesn’t have the time or patience to try and figure out that the password to your email is awesomesexylady09.

The flip side is that if you do date a guy with a good job he can hire a professional to stalk you [continues off screen]

Other career deal breakers include

governor
comedy writer
charlie sheen
break dancer
repo man
drug mule
las vegas anything
[list continues off screen]

Clearly the comedy writers on the show make these kind of jokes just for me, as no one else has apparently reported it yet. Or (and this is probably more likely) other people noticed but just didn’t feel the need to report it.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but I don’t like the idea that you can’t change things in your past or future. I’m much more on board with the Star Trek way(s) of doing things, and how in any of those ways interacting with and changing the past/future can happen.

Though I did like her use of alternating first-person perspectives that are also at times unreliable narrators.

(This one is a straight Subversive Cross Stitch.)

Note that this is the second one I’ve seen recently.