Very good piece by my friend Alice Bachini about Friends. Personally I read all Alice's stuff but apparently not that many others do, presumably because she is often in what they presumably regard as incoherently egocentric mode. I like it all, but many seem not to. All the more reason, then, for a blog like this which is slightly less obviously egocentric to link to Alice whenever she does a piece which is definitely About Something, other than herself and her worries, ambitions, mood swings, parental obligations, ethical views, etc.

Read the whole thing, but if not then at least this:

Phoebe's character is parallel to Joey's in that she too is considered odd or eccentric, and is apparently entirely happy with this. In this show, she has lately had a sexual encounter with an "old friend", and ends up set to have another one with the grey-haired guy. So if she did that every few weeks, it would add up to a lot of people after a few years. I looked up some statistics lately on average numbers of sexual partners, and my reckoning would definitely place characters like the ones in "Friends", "Will and Grace" and "Seinfeld" in a tiny extremely high top percentage. I think when we watch these shows we focus on individual episodes and tend not to notice the fact that they are way, way more sexually active and successful than most of us here in Ordinary World. But the thing I only got recently is that this is not a mere unrealistic dramatic device: it's a coherent portrayal of a specific kind of person, who is very interesting, and whom we want to learn about, which contributes to the popularity of the shows. Who wouldn't want knowledge about how to be better at attracting the opposite (or indeed same) sex? Even if you never use it, maybe one day you might want to, and it's certainly nice to know you could.

Lastly, I want to note that Phoebe and Joey are the characters whose sexual openness is greatest. They do not dump people for being slightly differently aged to themselves, or not conventional enough. They enjoy people older and less conventionally beautiful than themselves, and are able to enjoy the good things without letting prejudices get in the way. This is another kind of sexual behaviour – like having lots of partners – which is traditionally sneered at in some quarters, as a sign of indiscriminateness or desperation. But "Friends" doesn't endorse that view, even though it does present Joey and Phoebe as oddballs and therefore somewhat unfathomable.

I was going to write this post about the use of irony in language, especially urban language, but then it went another way. Maybe later.

And maybe not. That's another problem for some with Alice, I guess. She constantly announces things she's going to do or write about, but then doesn't do or write them. Instead she writes about something completely different, and presumably does something completely different, like eat cakes or buy shoes while agonising about the rightness and wrongness of rightness and wrongness. Which I don't mind at all. What the hell is she, a train timetable? Are you saying you depend upon Alice Bachini writing what she said she'd write about? That's an absurd way to live. Alice Bachini is an oddball and somewhat unfathomable. Deal with it as they say in America.

Ross who wishes he could add a heavy dash of Joey sums me up exactly, except that Ross is far better looking than me.