Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I just had a revelation about Gilligan's Island . Regular fans will remember that Gilligan would from time to time mention his favorite rock group The Mosquitoes. Eventually, the group itself visited the island, looking for a relaxing getaway after a difficult tour. Like all guest stars, the band left in a manner that didn't help the core seven castaways at all.  Anyway, it is obvious that the group was conceived as a Beatles parody. The insectile name, to start with,  The fact that the group appears to have had a single with the lyrics "don't go in there, yeah yeah yeah." It was not subtle parody.  But what only recently occurred to me was the clever way that the names of the members of the fictional group mirror the real-world names of the Fab Four.  The Mosquitoes had four members (of course): Bingo, Bango, Bongo, and Irving. Note that three of those names would be quite unusual for any of the men one meets on the street in any city in the Anglophonic world. ...

My favorite flavor of ice cream, and coffee, is ... French vanilla. For those of you who are uninitiated, French vanilla is somewhat caramelized and eggy in comparison to plain vanilla. This preference may have its origin in too much youthful viewing of Gilligan's Island. In one episode, Gilligan finds a wish-granting stone. The skipper is inspecting it in the photo I've pasted in. The professor is saying something skeptical. As the recent discoverer of the stone, Gilligan is supposed to have three wishes. The skipper explains this to him, because apparently the story of the "eye of the idol" is well known to old Salts. One of Gilligan's wishes is for vanilla ice cream. Mr Howell says, "you might as well make it French vanilla." MaryAnn reports finding ice cream floating in the lagoon. Gilligan dips a finger into the box and asks Mr Howell, "Does French vanilla taste kind of smooth and creamy?" Howell: "And rich and ful...

Whatever your own aspirations, and whatever are the difficulties in reaching them, you can if you like call the latter your condition of being stranded, the island on which you are stuck, and you can refer to the former as the task of "getting off the island." Thus the situation that provides the plot of most of the series' episodes is quite generalizable. The heart of the philosophy of the show is this: to achieve anything in life, you have to suppress your inner Gilligan. Some part of you probably has adapted pretty well to your island, to the limits of your life, to the frustration of your ambitions. That part of you will frustrate efforts to get off the island. But it (he) will do so in an amiable way, a way that doesn't look like sabotage, and that may even seem ... funny. DON'T TOLERATE THAT. Be tough on your inner Gilligan.