Had Harrison donned gaudy eyeliner and blue hair, he could almost be mistaken for Caesar Flickerman, the love-happy master of ceremonies so excellently portrayed by Stanley Tucci in the "Hunger Games" films.
The most mundane tasks -- the ones that actually bore the hell out of you in reality -- come at you in the computer game with relentless insistence, and if you are going to be a happy Sim, master of your tract home, lord of your lawn, sultan of your suburb, you have to get organized.
As the concert celebrating Mr. Sondheim's 80th birthday hurtled along, you had to sympathize with the singers as they struggled to keep up the pace and not deter Mr. Reineke from playing the happy parade master.
A far better picture to ponder is this one, golfer Rory McIlroy appearing genuinely happy for Masters winner Charl Schwartzel, even though it required McIlroy to cough up the final round in such a painful fashion.
Impossible choices bring impossible burdens; he served his country in the best way he could not by futile resistance, but by doing what had to be done to keep the imperial master happy.
King Kamehameha I (it required a beachside yoga session and happy hour to master that name), the warrior king who launched a European-styled monarchy after unifying the islands, must have seen a kindred spirit in the ambitious interloper; he let Parker marry his granddaughter and buy two acres of land on the slopes of Mauna Kea.
But the other stereotypes of the plantation myth -- kind masters, happy slaves and victimized South -- remained in the film, and remain to this day in the minds of many whites as dominant images of the Old South and the Civil War.
His skill was his ability to keep two masters happy, balancing the needs both of his party leader and also his party's peers.
Michele Bachman thought the Battle of Lexington, Massachusetts, which started the American Revolution, actually was in New Hampshire, and, in assessing the Civil War, asserted that slaves were actually happy and their masters merely misunderstood.
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But I'm not happy with the whole master plan.
