I mean, I don't want to go into a vegetarian thing because to me it is very simply across-the-board borderline, but only because it's very important to me to draw the line between intellect as quality and intellect as virtue, one of the reasons I find it very easy to love Jason Stackhouse but something that's really hard and gets harder the smarter you are. If one of the strongest struts in your scaffolding is your intelligence (or your beauty, or your rage) -- and especially if you feel like it's all you have -- you're going to look at that thing as a virtue; as an excuse for your existence. Like that old joke where the woman screams at the mugger, "Don't kill me, I'm a writer!" WTF. But -- and I'm talking about Tara as much as anybody else here -- it's a lot easier to get over yourself when you look at intelligence the same way you look at beauty, or height, or eye color: being smart is easy, but being good is hard. If we each said that ten times in the mirror everyday I daresay we'd all be a lot more compassionate: being smart is handed to you, being good is handed to nobody.

Eric smiles joyfully at Bill, with his, "I don't think about the taste of TruBlood, it's sustenance," and as usual Bill doesn't understand irony or delight until it's explained to him: "If you're their poster boy, the mainstreaming movement is in very deep trouble. TruBlood: It keeps you alive, but it will bore you to death." Bill sits, following his lead, and asks to cut to the chase. Specifically, what is the Sheriff of Area Five going to do about the vamp-on-vamp crime that just happened? "I'll take the girl," Eric suggests, and Bill -- too fast to stop himself, and despairing the second he's said it -- shouts, "No!" Eric looks at him appraisingly, as though any of this is a surprise to him at all, and Bill shakes his head, looking down. "You can have anyone you want, why do you want her?" Um, because she's magic? Eric is like, "You totally like her in that way!" and Bill refuses to answer: "Sookie Must Be Protected." Eric grins, talking about shit we don't get but with vocalized capitals flying: "Now, that sounds like an Edict. But it couldn't be, because I would know about that." Bill won't look at him, because to look would be to answer the question Eric already knows the sunshine-sucking answer to. He tells Bill to admit his love for Sookie, but he changes the subject again: "If I hadn't done what I did, would you have let his disloyalty stand?" Eric points out that whatever he did do, he wouldn't have done it in front of witnesses, especially vampire ones, because Eric is smarter than Bill, because Eric watches Gossip Girl, which is to say Eric knows that the difference between what we do in front of people and what we do when we're alone is as different as night and day and life and death, especially for the undead. Bill feels dumb, which he should, because Gossip Girl is awesome.