@ #54 That would be Vimes who drew the short straw then.
I was thinking about the Williams sisters too. I've heard that their father actually forbade them to play more than two hours of tennis a day while they were growing up so they always left practice wanting to play more. This does seem to have been a most successful strategy.
Back to Michael Jackson I feel it wasn't just that he was at that rarified height of wealth and fame that there was no one who could, or would tell him "No" but that as a child and rising star the discipline he was exposed to was abusive.
There's a pattern I've seen (in myself and others) that makes it hard to establish effective self discipline when one has been motivated in childhood by fear of punishment and has in consequence spent more time learning strategies for getting away with things than developing an adult sense of morality. Indeed self harm, in it's many manifestations, may be another result of this kind of upbringing where people seek to punish themselves for their shortcomings rather than tackling their own behaviour.
Obviously many if not most people can find a way out of this morass but fame and fortune don't seem to be much help.
A final thought, I've been cringing at the coverage over here in the UK of the performance of British child star Shaheen (12) at Jackson's funeral. Apparently he's going to headline the MJ tribute at the O2 arena and he's been photographed with Lionel Richie etc etc. So it begins all oevr again for another kid.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan's posts. particularly #23 put me in mind of this:
Epitaph on a Tyrant
by W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Re shopping carts on wheels, I've just started using one that folds
up into a small "bag" when not in use, excellent for taking to work to
use for your shopping on the way home.
At #255 as it's not a play I'm just taking the opportunity to mention one of my favourite books: Barbara Comyns' Who was Changed and Who was Dead. Following a catastrophic flood a village is afflicted with ergot poisoning causing all kinds of shenanigans. From the ingenuous young narrator's point of view the things, including deaths and a miscarriage, that happen to her family and circle of acquaintance have essentially benign effects. A deliciously macabre book,
And then and only then I finally notice the sidebar that lets me alter text size. That's the last time I delurk anywhere.
Frankly, no. I don't even get to the decoding stage, as the text size is so small that it's too much of a struggle to read. It's made me realise that I normally read this site on partial guesswork and finally delurk to ask why you have set the site up so I can't alter the text size on screen.
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