You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

Just got around to watching the Glee season finale, and as I was recovering from the fairly spectacular and bittersweet parting of Finchel, I could only think of two things as I watched Rachel arrive all wide-eyed in NYC.

1) If she were taking the train from Ohio, she probably would have arrived at Penn Station and not Grand Central. But of course GCS is a far more attractive setting to shoot.

2) We see her walking up 45th Street, east of 8th Avenue - specifically, past the Booth Theater (not a short walk from Grand Central), and suddenly she's by the Plaza Hotel - 14 blocks up and half the island's width east of where she just was. I couldn't help saying "How'd she get over there?!" I mean, it's not an unreasonable walk with no encumbrances, but with a suitcase? And having already walked from Grand Central to the Theater District? Oh Glee, never stop being implausible. :P

I'm not sure why this is important enough to post about, but I feel the need to write it down somewhere. I've recently been listening to the original cast recording of Les Miserables, and I've always been amused by the lyric in "Red and Black" - "we talk of battles to be won, and here he comes like Don Ju-an." The English lit geek in me loves the "joo-ahn" pronunciation, because there is a poem by Lord Byron titled Don Juan, and because of the rhyme that happens the (I think) first time the name comes up, you're meant to pronounce it as if it rhymes with "true one" from two lines above (i.e., "joo-ahn"). This pronunciation anomaly only applies to Byron's poem, by the way - at least in my world. :P

I never thought about it beyond a smile whenever I heard it in that song, but for some reason a few hours ago it occurred to me to look up the dates and see if it was, in fact, a timely cultural reference. And it is! Most of the story of Les Miserables (the novel and the musical) takes place in 1823. The first cantos of Don Juan were published in 1819 (in other words, four years before), and it was an extremely popular work. It's quite likely to have been known by students like Marius and Enjolras the others, and I could easily see the funny pronunciation being a scholarly in-joke (much like it is for English lit geeks today :P).