George Oscar Bluth Jr. could have been an ideal example of a beekeeper, but his development was stunted by his less than virtuous personality. Born into a rich family, G.O.B. was overwhelmed by all the pressure to be bright, and wound up as a pretty big jerk. Still, he’s a beekeeper. He must have something going for him, right? Let’s find out:

G.O.B. got on board the bee business mostly to spite his family. Even though his business plan isn’t particularly well thought out (“How do you make money from it?” “You know, honey. Or just as gifts.”), he’s stuck with it a lot longer than many of his schemes. For a time, G.O.B. kept his bees in his apartment, keeping them in line with his magic smoke, which is pretty badass. Unfortunately, this only resulted in a very sick swarm of bees (“My bees are dropping like flies, and I need them to fly like bees.”). He kept them at an expensive bee hospital, but got kicked out of there because his bees were a risk to all the other bees in the place. After that, he kept them in a limousine. This is, perhaps, the best phase of his beekeeping career. Not because he’s at all successful, but because he gets to identify himself as a “gentleman honey farmer” and his swarm attacked an entourage of young celebrity jerks (though G.O.B. didn’t even notice). That’s a plus.

Okay, he’s not good at realistic-style beekeeping, but that’s not what I’m about here. G.O.B., like all the best beekeepers, is more than just a beekeeper. His primary occupation is magician. Magic beekeeper? That’s a good combination. Or it would be, if his magic career wasn’t full of failures even more spectacular than his bee business. Okay, but what about fighting prowess? G.O.B. is pretty prone to getting into physical altercations (usually with his brother). But he’s not particularly good at that either. And Beekeeper Rage? Well, G.O.B. manages to circumvent that one by not being beekeeper enough to attain it. He’s got plenty of regular rage, though.

So what is the final countdown of G.O.B.’s score? It’s not good. I gave the beekeepers from the Simpsons a bonus for just being from a great show, and Arrested Development is certainly a great show, but I can’t do that for G.O.B. His failure is just too strong a part of the character. And I don’t think he ever collected a single bit of honey. It’s almost like they were trying to make him comedically bad at the job. Come on!

One Honeycomb out of Five. GOB Bluth is possibly one of the worst beekeepers in the history of beekeepers, but he’s still pretty great. Maybe when the show comes back, he’ll find some success and get the last laugh. He’ll be the laughingstock of the beekeeping world.

By now it is clear that it is too common for beekeepers in the superhero/supervillain world to just be called “The Beekeeper”. Clearly that is an appeal to the pure mythic appeal of beekeepers as a profession, but you’d think they could come up with something more imaginative.

Anyway, today’s beekeeper is called “The Beekeeper”. He appeared on a show called Johnny Test. I didn’t know about the existence of this show until I was researching beekeepers, so I don’t have much to give as far as context is concerned.

Here’s the deal: Doc Beebles is an old man who runs a company that makes honey bars, a healthy snack. Nobody buys his product because they assume healthy snacks are gross. Beebles becomes the Beekeeper and goes on a citywide crime spree, stealing candy so that people won’t have any choice but to buy his products. His plot is foiled by Johnny Test and friends and, though they admit that the honey bars are actually good, Beebles is arrested. In a later episode the Beekeeper is trying to get his revenge on Johnny, but is mostly unnoticed as Johnny is trying to come up with a new holiday. That one ends with Johnny and the Beekeeper working together, with the Beekeeper as a sort of Santa-figure, using his bees to deliver his honey bars to all the kids in the world. The Beekeeper has, as far as my research can tell, remained reformed since. So he gets a happy ending, at least.

Beebles is at the borderline between awesomely competent beekeeper and not one of those. Sure he has good control over his bees, but he also loses that control very easily to Johnny in a bee costume. He owns his own business and makes a good product, but apparently his product doesn’t sell. He’s got cool gizmos (A beemobile, some sort of balloon floatation system, a “honey blaster” which seems to basically be a laser gun) but he is, of course a victim of Beekeeper Rage, as evidenced by his anti-candy crusade. Still, he’s quite active for an old guy, wants people to eat healthier, and he enjoys making bee-related puns. I admit it’s a close call. It has to be taken into account that, while they’re probably superheroes or something, Beebles, especially in the second of these episodes, was foiled repeatedly and casually by children.

Two Honeycombs out of Five. Maybe if he just had a better name than “The Beekeeper” he could have rolled over to a third comb.

Now, I just want to point out that my Beekeepers Reviews are never intended to be a review of the work in which the beekeeper appears, but I need to point out that I don’t much care for Johnny Test. I actually do think, based on these episodes, that the humour of the show could be in the right place, but it has this supremely annoying tendency to make unnecessary noise. Every second of the show contains a sound effect, or a musical sting, or both. I assume this is (the creators’ idea of) an attempt to appeal to kids with short attention spans, but I hate it. So much.

Okay, today I’m going to do something a little different: I consider the Venture Bros to probably be my favorite thing on television these days, so sometimes I like to read about it on the Internet. Now, I’m getting into a pretty big spoiler for the show here (though, one from the start of the second season and that was like forever ago), but I want to offer my own thoughts on the topic of the titular brothers, Hank and Dean, being clones. The idea is that the boys are so death-prone that their Super Scientist father has clones of them ready to go when needed and the boys’ beds record their minds as they sleep, so that the clones will have their memories. Simple enough. What I want to talk about today is… well, I occasionally see people on the Internet talking as though the fact that the Hank and Dean of today are cloned from the original Hank and Dean, it somehow means that these are not the “real” Hank and Dean, that they are, in fact different people who just happen to have the appearance and memories (in fact, Dean himself is going through a sort of existential crisis about that in the show as of this writing). So, in the interests of amassing evidence to argue against people who will never, ever see this website, here I will present my case:

Point I) In the universe of the Venture Bros, souls and the afterlife are confirmed to exist. Dr. Byron Orpheus, friend of the Venture family, is an accomplished necromancer and all manner of ghosts have been encountered (Abraham Lincoln in Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner, Major Tom in Ghosts of the Sargasso, and a Native American tribe in Assassinanny 911, for examples). Knowing that the soul, in that world, is an actual thing, we would kind of have to say that who a person is would be defined by their soul.

Point II) The current clones of Hank and Dean have the souls of the previous incarnations. In the episode Powerless in the Face of Death, the episode that reveals the clonal nature of the boys, Orpheus travels to the afterlife in search of the boys’ souls and finds that their souls are not there. Continuing his search for the souls he comes to Dr. Venture’s lab, where he senses the souls within the machinery that Doc uses to record the boy’s memories. While Doc doesn’t believe in using the supernatural designation of “soul” preferring to think of it as just the boy’s “memory synapses,” but Orpheus is the expert in the supernatural and he says the souls are in there. It seems that one’s soul goes where a person’s “memories, hopes, and dreams” goes, and that’s what Doc has on store. Thus, with this information fed into the boys clone slugs every time they die, they are in essence carrying their soul with them.

To further my case, I point to The Family That Slays Together Part One, in which Hank notes that he “I jumped off my roof in a Batman costume. I think. I might have just dreamt it.” That was one of the ways that Hank died. Hank remembers this though it was probably not something that would have been recorded by his bed, and that indicates to me that he has carried a bit of memory from a previous body to his new one. It is especially worth noting that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln was only able to affect the physical world through objects that bore his image (statues, paintings, money, etc.). For the souls of Hank and Dean, their own cloned bodies would be a perfect fit.

To me, it looks like this: When the boys die, their soul goes to those Earthly things that most connect them to the world, their memories in Doc’s machinery, and then on into the clone slugs. That continuity of soul would mean that the clones of Hank and Dean now present are as much Hank and Dean as any Hank and Dean that ever came before. I fully agree that if we took a clone and let it live without downloading the souls into it, it would be a new person (look at D-19, the rejected Dean clone from Perchance to Dean). But the Hank and Dean of Season Four are still the Hank and Dean of Season One (and the dozen Hanks and Deans that died before that).

I wrote an exam tonight. Only three left. I’m sure I’ve already said this, but I don’t like exams. They’re my least favorite part of school, and they’re all I gots left. One thing, though, I think that my chronic procrastination during the school year has made me a little better of whipping together an essay on the spot during an exam. I’m not saying I did particularly well (I need more than an hour to write a decent essay), but I did better than I might have without a year of procrastinatory practice.

Anyway, a new thing to add to my list of things I’d do if I were rich: Take classes at university and just not show up to the exams because I don’t even care because I’m rich.

Haiku!

The king has been born.
Long live the king! Three years pass:
The king is a jerk.

In other news, I have watched Game of Thrones. I watched it. Are you happy now society? I said I’d watch it and I did. Now I only have about a million other super hit shows that I am supposed to catch up on.

In other other news, it is snowing outside. What the chunks! Stop that!

In still other other news, my apartment building has this chute by the elevator down which we are to dump garbage bags. Recyclables and compost and stuff goes down to the basement, but garbage bags go down the chute. It is pretty conventient. But as of Monday that chute will no longer be in use. The garbage has to go down to the basement too. It’s not really that inconvenient, I still don’t have to worry about “garbage day” like some chump homeowner, but I will miss the chute.

Today we’re back in the days of the Second World War in Britain. The fog is so thick that it’s ridiculous to think of flying in it, but then someone does fly a delivery in and it turns out she’s a lady. She expresses a desire to one day get back to Canada and teach flying, then the narrator tells us that she did. Happy ending. This one seems pretty short, comparatively, but that’s probably because it essentially does the “Someone is coming in? In this fog?” setup twice. Not a great use of time, but I’ll never be upset with hearing shocked British officers saying “Hullo?”

Marion Orr comes across as really nice in this one. She’s doing her duty with a smile on her face and all she wants is get back to a simple life. The world would be a good place if it was stacked full of people like Marion Orr. Even ignoring for a moment the landmark of her being the first woman to do what she did, just seeing any person with this attitude achieve their dreams would be enough for me. If she happened to break any barriers while doing so, good on her.

I don’t feel anything in here is great to quote, but I still like it. I easily lump it into the “backbone” category I also put last month’s Heritage Moment into. Four out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake.

Unfortunately, though, somewhere in my youth I lost most of my memories of this Heritage Moment. Well, I didn’t “lose” them, really, they just managed to meld with another commercial I would have seen on television in my youth, also involving a meetup between people on an airfield:

This Oil of Olay commercial stuck in my head better, but I’m still more in favor of the Heritage Piece. For the record. Maybe if the guy Marion Orr had been talking to had been named “Bugsy Brown” I’d know more about Canada. Better luck next time, Canada!