Somewhere in the Wikipedia page for M*A*S*H is the minor detail that the lovable scamps of the legendary 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital are based on based on author Richard Hooker’s actual experiences in the 8055th.  I’m certainly not claiming that the cognitive dissonance of trying to keep all those numbers from falling into a chunky soup of numerals in my head is the cause of my many number-based errors in this episode, but it’s certainly a thought.

MASH is included in a number of top comedy lists, including Empire magazine’s Top 50 (#29), Paste magazine’s Top 100 (#24), and the AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Laughs list (#7).  Not sure where I made up that #43 ranking…

(Oh, wait, it’s part of Gittell’s article, sourced from this BBC Culture Show list.)

Well, I can at least point out that in the recent past, I’ve gotten in the habit of tacking a few extra years onto my memory, because I’ve discovered that whenever I say, “Oh, that happened a couple years ago…” it inevitably turns out to be an event that happened five to seven years in the past.

That is the only explanation I can come up with for discovering that, when I recorded this earlier this week, I claimed that René Auberjonois, who died in early December 2019, had died a year or two ago.  I certainly prefer that explanation to the dominant narrative of the moment, that under current political, cultural, and environmental circumstances, every bloody month feels like it’s been a year.