Teresa - I know this is a silly, silly point, but I really like the phrase 'dead-fresh pecans.' Obviously I know what it means, but the adjective 'dead-fresh' is just so vivid. It wants to be a contradiction, but it isn't. I like.
I second Emma's suggestion of Sturbrige Village. At the art museum I work in now there are a pair of rooms brought from a colonial era house built in Branford, CT, and it's incredible to wander through them when the place is closed and wonder what it would have been like to stand on the heartstone barefoot in winter.
Of course, though, then there's the Robert Lehman gallery in the MET, which is set up to look like an opulent living room. Very Dorian Grey.
So I've read most of the Child ballads, but can anyone recommend a solid recording of them (or of similarly authentic ballads)? Perhaps one relatively easily obtainable? Much obliged.
So, this may be a silly question, but I'm curious and don't know much about NOLA geography. How easy was it for people to actually get into their cars and leave if they had the available financial resources? I mean, I'm trying to imagine a need to evacuate the island of Manhattan - it just wouldn't be physically possible to get all the cars away in time. Was that a problem in New Orleans? I know there were traffic jams, but how bad were they?
My point in asking this is the perhaps point out another flaw in FEMA's emergency preparedness: if a city that seems to have a reasonably large number of highways leading from it couldn't be evacuated, what would they do for places like NYC or Long Island that have a very, very finite number of exits?
I'm fifth generation on one side, third on the other (grand parents and great grandparents). Apparently when my great-great-grandparents were coming over from Poland, they got the money for their tickets by essentially selling my great-grandmother to rich but childless relatives they had in London.
She then, family legend has it, threw such a fit that said childless relatives shipped her off to New York, where my family's been ever since.
My grandmother on the other side (who immigrated from Lithuania after WWII) went back recently to try looking up our family's history. There weren't any Jewish community records left, so she looked in official Lithanian records (which apparently were pretty accessible if you know Lithaunia) and managed to trace it back only to the 1700s, when some carpenter ancestor got a small contract to fix a hole in someone's roof.
Quasi-immoral great-grandparents, a pushy great-grandmother, and an 18th century contractor. Not exactly DAR material there, but I rather like it.
Patrick: I don't think there's anything particularly surprising about a mother getting envious of a 20-something unmarried woman and then trying to retaliate against the younger woman however possible (in this case, then, firing serves the dual purpose of punishing the young woman and removing her from the older woman's presence, thus allowing the older woman to more easily repress her jealous feelings).
Yes, it's a quintessential comedy of manners and while its particulars are interesting (e.g., the whole idea of whether nannies need to be morally upright, and the idea that a young mother would be so torn between the desire to raise her kids and be a stupid 20-something again), it's not surprising that that's how the situation played itself out. What surprised me more was that the nanny didn't think of that when she choose to share her blog. (Also, and this isn't an original thought, I know, but the blogging/non-blogging gap, which the nanny I think didn't consider, is also intriguing, specifically in how comfortable the nanny apparently was in telling her boss about her personal life, but in how ultimately uncomfortable the boss felt about reading such details.)
At the same time, while I agree wholeheartedly with Majikthise's comments on the NYT article, I'm still having trouble with the nanny's decision to share her blog with her boss. I mean, it's one thing to talk about your work on a blog, and another thing to rant about your place of work on a blog your boss reads. I want to be clear: I don't think anyone should be fired for things they write on a blog, and I think the columnist's reasons for firing the nanny are atrocious. However, I don't see the difference here between the nanny criticizing her work on a blog her boss reads, and the nanny perhaps saying to her boss' face how much she dislikes working there. And I think that few people would rant in such a way to their employer. [Mind you, I have very limited experience in the workforce, and that experience I do have was in an office which I gather was somewhat unusually awesome, but still, I'd feel really uncomfortable discussing with an employer some of the things that nanny had blogged about.]
As much as I agree with those who are pointing out that the number of casualties in London now is relatively small and needs to be put into perspective, I really disagree that the effectiveness of this attack ought to be measured in terms of how many casualties.
The point of a terrorist attack isn't necessarily to kill people, but to terrorize and hurt those who aren't caught in the actual blast. So yeah, maybe fewer people died in this attack than in a week of traffic accidents, but think of how they died -- they were killed while taking public transportation on their communte, something everyone does, usually without much thought, and something most people therefore take completely for granted.
In a way, I'm kind of more freaked out by this attack than by 9/11 (and I'm from NYC). Yeah, 9/11 shook me quite a lot, but there was always the (somewhat) consoling thought (repeated a lot during the Freedom Tower debates) that the WTC represented something special and that that's why it was hit. You could box off the Towers as a "special" place, which meant that the rest of the city was still safe, still okay, because where else in the city was there such obvious and alluring symbolism? Maybe if I worked at the NYSE I'd have been worried, but other than that...
But trains and buses! How utterly mundane. If even an underground subway tunnel isn't safe from evoking the ire and murderous wrath of a terrorist, really, then it can be hard to see what is safe. Subway riding isn't supposed to be a political act, and so this act of terrorism, by turning even a relatively unremarkable element of urban infrastructure into something politically-charged, has the potential to make life that much more terrifying and stressful and horrifying for everyone everyday. (I say "potential" because I don't how Londoners - who by all reports are coping wonderfully - will actually react. All I do know is if this had happened in New York, I'd be more than a little shaky, to put it lightly, the next time I rode the subway/bus.)
With regard to Tom's earlier comment about the new veterans...
...there's this one hall at my school, one of the prettiest buildings on campus, whose walls are inscribed with the names of students and alumni who fell in the Great War. With each listing - and there are easily hundreds - is included the man's class year, and it’s striking just how many members of the class of, say, 1919, died instead in 1918 or 1917.
I can’t begin to describe how almost creepy it was walking through that hall this morning, thinking about how those dates would look were they altered a few decades to reflect the fallen of today’s war.
Oh, dear, the IRC stash. Perhaps if you took it to the main post office a few blocks uptown they would at least know what to do with it, even if they're probably really swamped with customers.
And I think another question worth considering is what exactly you plan to do with the not insignificant number of stamps you'll get in return. I mean, you could probably paper a small room with the number of stamps you're going to get for those IRCs.
Robert - you maybe be more accurate that you thought when you called Adam Yoshida a "loon."
According to his weblog's archives, as of a year ago at least, he was a Canadian citizen from British Columbia.
Go figure. It sort of puts his post in a different light when you realize that he probably couldn't even vote on Tuesday.
Marilee: The custom of bringing bread and salt to a new home stems from, in part, an old Jewish custom. The theory (as far as I've been taught) is that bread and salt reflect the tradition of welcoming new neighbors with a meal.
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