Greg @ 224, I am sorry to disappoint you, but Buttercup and Wesley do not have a healthy relationship. Maybe they eventually grow one - the movie is about the protracted process of the two of them getting together, so it's not impossible.
I get that she's supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and that she supposedly loves Wesley very much. I like the movie too. I just don't think it presents a realistic picture of the way relationships are supposed to work. "She loved him," sure, but could she maybe have, oh, I dunno, ever done anything? Sail with him to the Americas, tell Humperdinck to sod off, yell "it's a trap!" at an opportune moment, say "thank you"? As it is, Wesley's love is demonstrated and Buttercup's is merely asserted. One of these is much more convincing than the other.
In re: male service to women:
I believe it was Peter Wimsy who said that chivalry is, at bottom, based on the desire to keep all the fun to oneself. Harriet let him do all the punting anyway, but it was understood that she was ceding her share of the fun to his better enjoyment, and to let him show off.
I object to the idea that men in general should serve women in general, or even in specific, because it's my experience that such service has high costs to the recipient. In a lot of cases, men expect that if they serve, women will be worthy of their service - whatever worthy means. It's often badly articulated. Unworthiness is punished - which brings us back to honor killings in a swift and vicious loop.
The free stuff is never actually free. It is my experience that when a male person offers me any extraordinary favor at no monetary cost, I am generally better off paying cash. In intimate relationships, the trade in extraordinary favors should run about even, so that everyone's needs are met and no one feels cheated.
To those of you who say that all you get from your female partners is love, and that's enough, I wonder what your female partners would say of that. It's actually a terribly unflattering statement you're making. I direct you to Tom Lehrer's comments on that issue. I have never seen a functional relationship in which one partner contributes nothing but affection, which makes me suspect that y'all are discounting some pretty significant contributions.
Neil @ 71 - I have to cast up a wail of protest at your news that Anthony Stewart Head is playing Sir Walter. The wail sounds a lot like the noise my three-week old son made for most of last night. It is the sound of a soul in hideous torment.
The actor who played beloved Giles, whose absence from the airwaves causes us grave lament, should not, can not, debase himself by offering himself to the public in the guise of the vain and hideous Sir Walter. He should be one of those darling old sea captains (particularly the one with the speech about partings and reunions), or possibly Admiral Croft.
I will take up a collection to pay his rent if, by so doing, I can avert this travesty.
Less artisticly picky parts of me, however, are already cuing the VCR. If this travesty must occur, I want it on tape.
I, too, would buy that book, and copies for all of my friends.
The only problem with Jack Aubrey/Lizzy Bennet plot is that Aubrey is involved in so dizzying a romance with his ship's surgeon that they only way either of them can be involved with a girl is to leave her on shore.
I am going to spend the next week obsessively checking for responses to the less-than-flattering Amazon review I posted today.
Fandom wank, indeed.
Firebug, the business model you describe isn't publishing, it's printing. If AuthorHouse hadn't claimed to be a publisher, they wouldn't be liable for issues related to content. My understanding is that AuthorHouse's mistake (legally) was in purporting to be a publisher - i.e., to exercise some selection about the content printed - while behaving as a printer.
Rush Limbaugh hasn't been sued for libel because libel is only written slander.
I think that, so long as we have free speech, we have to allow people to seek redress for speech that is false and harmful.
A propos of nothing, but for some reason, I suspect this is a right place.
I had grappa for the first time tonight - specifically this grappa.
Why did no one tell me about this before? My husband has been urging scotch on me for years, insisting that I will eventually start to like it and it will taste less like paint thinner, and I don't see why anyone bothers when there is grappa in the world and it is so good!
I have a lot of respect for the Doris Lessing version of this experiment, and none for the retype and resubmit version. Lessing discussed the purpose of her experiment in the intro to the edition of "The Diaries of Jane Somers" with her own name on the cover. The idea wasn't to prove that publishers are dumb, it was to prove that publishing is difficult, and that it really is phenomenally difficult for a new writer to be either published or noticed. Those things are true, and it was nice of Lessing to take her lumps as a newb for a second time to make the point.
At least, I think it was nice. I don't know how her agent felt about it.
My grandparents have done a great deal of genealogical research, and the most fascinating part of it for me is the increasing respectability attributed to my ancestors as time goes by.
I was told when I was very young that my first ancestor on my father's side on this side of the pond was a man who was the adopted heir of some sort of minor nobility in Britain somewhere circa 1720. The minor nobility sent him to university in Glasgow or some such, where he got drunk one night and woke up in the British Navy. Subsequently, my ancestor jumped ship in Braintree, married the girl who hid him in her father's barn, and lived a quiet life in Massachusetts, having loads of kids, being somewhat broke (there are records of his debts), and never making any attempt to contact his family or lay hands on his hypothetical fortune.
When I was in my teens, it was explained to me that he never went back to Britain because he had come, through his experience with impressment, to see the Empire as an oppressive and tyrannical state and he preferred the freedom of the New World.
Last year, I was told that he jumped ship along side an ancestor of either Rutherford Hayes or Millard Fillmore (I confess that it didn't occur to me to pay much attention to which).
Coincidentally, I am descended on my mother's side from a man who deserted the Confederate army sometime before Gettysburg, and married the girl who hid him in her father's barn. It was explained to me that he deserted because of his highly developed moral sense, and his awareness that the cause for which he fought was unjust.
If I ever have daughters, I am not building a barn.
I have a question that may be about a rather old particle. Someone told me that there had once been a Tough Guide to Regency Romance Land (or Heyerville or Regency Romanceville) posted among the particles here, but I have been unable to find it, and google searches haven't gotten me anywhere. Does anyone recall this item, or have any information concerning it's existence or whereabouts?
Thank you!
Thank you for the laugh - my monitor has been baptised with Earl Grey tea.
The Orson Alden's of the world always have all the fun. They're savaged by dogs, drowned in ponds and run over by horses, but at least they don't sit home and whine.
Melissa, your white rose sounds like Iceberg to me (pink buds, white blooms), except that I'm told that Iceberg isn't strongly fragrant. The one I planted is, but the catalogs insist it's not.
Kizmet, one of my uncles, who died of heart failure some years ago, when he was around forty-five, had severe Downs Syndrome. I've done my time. I've earned my clue.
And I still don't see what Terry Schiavo, whose cerebral cortex was utterly destroyed, who had been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years and was not at all concious for any of that time has in common with a person with Down's Syndrome. My uncle was perfectly capable of stating his wishes, even when he was suffering from severe dementia. His wishes might have been impossible to fulfill, or totally irrational, but he stated them, often, and at high volume. There was no need to run tests to determine whether he might be concious at some level, because you could just follow him around for a while and watch him respond to stimuli (incidently, I am quite certain that a persistently vegetative patient is easier to keep tabs on than one suffering from dementia).
Terry Schiavo was not killed because she was a drain on society (although law in Texas does allow indigent patients to be removed from life support at the hospital's discretion, and I don't understand why that fact hasn't received more attention and outrage). Terry Schiavo was removed from life support because the courts in Florida, after extensive investigation, found the testimony stating that she would not have wished to be on such support to be credible, and found opposing testimony not to be so.
Tangential...
There's an evangelist I run into periodically, who I actually don't speak to anymore since the day I spent two hours trying to convince him that condoms were not prohibited by the Ten Commandments. Anyway, it eventually started to snow and I decided not to be that dumb again.
Lately, he's taken to wearing a sign that reads "Jesus says... If you are not with Me, you are against Me."
I'm not even Christian and it makes me want to cry. Or alternatively, it makes me want to loudly and publicly take him to task for misrepresenting the word of God. The problem is, I see this attitude a lot, and I too am at a loss to explain how intolerant prudes got such a firm grip on a loving, egalitarian message.
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