There's a reason opera is one of the "Identifiers" in the NUPTIALS scoring system, folks.
I think that means that oudemia or smearcase could get their weddings in the NYT if they only had them. We could start a campaign!
I would consent to such a thing only if I were in fact marrying smearcase. No -- smearcase AND jesusmcq.
I've got some awesome tips for their first date.
They are aware of all epic love story traditions.
(I saw this at LGM last night and wondered if it would make an appearance here.)
I've got some awesome tips for their first date.
IYKWIM
A game I like to play while reading the Vows column is "Spot the night they hooked up." There are sometimes hilariously roundabout descriptions of a turning point when they spent the night together "talking" or they "got separated" from the rest of their group.
2: Well, my boyfriend did perish tragically a few threads ago, which would free me up, but then so did I. I guess as long as we're four-way-marrying, might as well épater le bourgeoisie by being dead-married in with the bargain. Any of you other opera-loving corpses want in?
s/b "la bourgeoisie." Let nosflow correct me from beyond the grave.
Lest. Lest. Lest dammit. Today is not my day for typing.
6: Shelby Knox was a baptist high schooler in Lubbock who ended up campaigning for comprehensive sex ed, and then they made a documentary about her.
The documentary came out just as she was coming to UT to start college, and the school paper did a big story about her, including the awesomely amazing line "She wore a promise ring to symbolize her pledge to God to be a virgin on her wedding night, until she lost it at a swim meet."
6: The very, very best is when this happens while one or both are dating or married to other people. That is the most awesome Times tiptoeing of all.
||
I am having the most frustrating email exchange with a student. It goes something like this (edited for length anonymity, and snark.)
Student: can you let me know if I am missing any assignments at this point i cannot tell if I am missing anything? and let me know
Me: You need to complete items 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. You can always go to the grade report section to check your progress.
Student. In reviewing what you said I am missing items 2 and 3 are ther for all five items an I printed out the completely unrelated item,so I wonder if you are not seeing this work can you contact me again.because from my end all of it is done.
Me: You still need to complete items 1, 4 and 5. Also you didn't really finish item 2 and 3. You need to earn 10 points on them, and you have only earned 5 and 2 points, respectively.
Student: did you see that i earned five points on item 2?
|>
I knew I should have cultivated an interest in the fucking opera.
And the nuptials she references in support Lois Smith Brady's weight fixation is something to behold.
She introduced him to her mother, Joan Moore, who is 95 and lives in Montecito, Calif. "We were on this beautiful terrace," Ms. Coffey recalled. "My mother turns to him and says, 'Have you always been fat?' That was a little introduction to my mother."
He lost 15 pounds and told her he was prepared to propose. She said he had to lose more. Then he got serious about dieting. "He started exercising, walking two miles a day," she said. "He stopped drinking and he stopped snacking."
As he lost weight, it was as if he were a blur coming gradually into focus. "His eyes turned out to be big and blue," she said. "Before, they were these little squinty things in his face."
Also, am I a being an annoying prescritivist grammarian for noting that "In reviewing what you said I am missing items 2 and 3 are ther for all five items an I printed out the completely unrelated item,so I wonder if you are not seeing this work can you contact me again." is not a proper sentence. (All I have done in editing it is change the names of assignments to "Items 2 and 3" "all five items" and "completely unrelated item.")
an annoying prescritivist grammarian
When poor grammar impedes meaning, prescriptivism is completely warranted.
But the real gem of a paragraph in the weight one is:
She had moved to New York in 1987 after becoming restless in San Francisco. "I sold all my earthly goods," she said. "I had a condo on Russian Hill. I sold it. I had a Mercedes. Sold it. I sold my Cuisinart and the little thing that turns radishes into roses. I moved to New York with two suitcases, which is very liberating, by the way."
As he lost weight, it was as if he were a blur coming gradually into focus. "His eyes turned out to be big and blue," she said. "Before, they were these little squinty things in his face."
Good lord.
6: The very, very best is when this happens while one or both are dating or married to other people. That is the most awesome Times tiptoeing of all.
Wasn't there a TAL episode about precisely this?
I knew I should have cultivated an interest in the fucking opera.
Because you want to be in the Times or because you want in on the quadruptuals with me and Jesus and Oudemia?
I noticed the fathers are mentioned, but the mothers not so much.
I knew I should have cultivated an interest in the fucking opera
Is fucking opera in the same relation to porn as space opera is to science fiction?
18: I dunno! I can think of two illustrative examples from the Times, though. One older couple with kids (they met because their children were friends) was open about the fact that they knew they were in love and needed to be together whilst married to other people, but swore (fantastically) that they never acted on their attraction until they were each separated. Another was a young couple who were dating other people during all of their middle of the night soul-revealing "conversations," which they kept managing to have coincidentally despite living in different parts of the country. They too insisted nothing happened until they were free of their previous partners. Both columns I believe resulted in other columns with the wronged parties or their surrogates calling bullshit.
21: A game I like to play while reading the Vows column watching opera is "Spot the night they hooked up." There are sometimes hilariously roundabout descriptions of a turning point when they spent the night together "talking" or they "got separated" from the rest of their group.
19: Because you want to be in the Times or because you want in on the quadruptuals with me and Jesus and Oudemia?
I dunno. It just seems to open a lot of different doors.
Don't mind me; I have my mid-term review in an an hour so I'm just prepping for it. I'm too old for this shit*. If I had only cultivated an interest in opera at an early age I'm sure I would not have to put with such indignities in my dotage.
*Maybe that's what I'll find out!
Time to crowd-write the "Vows" entry for Tristan and Isolde. Smearcase, go!
Extra credit: Spot the night Siegfried and Brünnhilde hooked up.
27: smearcase had better do this right now, or he will make one of his brides cry.
This reminds me: I was wondering if there was any Gwyneth Paltrow/Martha Stewart slash fiction.
28: Oh god. Also I'm not entirely sure our dear Jesus will take gladly to the designation "Bride of Smearcase."
29: I AM INTERESTED IN YOUR IDEAS AND WOULD LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR NEWSLETTER.
Ms. Mehta's dad, Ved Mehta, was the subject of a classic Spy magazine expose:
Without reading the link in 32: Did it turn out he's not blind?
Ved Mehta! I read something by him once, possibly about Oxford philosophy. It was terrible, and he seemed like the worst sort of class-obsessed, kiss-up, kick-down person.
11 6: The very, very best is when this happens while one or both are dating or married to other people. That is the most awesome Times tiptoeing of all.
I'm reading the book Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson, about the project to build a computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, and it has a chapter on how von Neumann met his second wife Klári which is exactly of this form. Oh, so they were staying up late talking at Budapest coffee shops every night, were they?
Quadruptials hooray! Let's have the band at the reception play Lulu.
Also, I miss Veiled Conceit.
36: Accounts of Einstein getting together with his second wife/first cousin often have this flavor.
37: Indeed. Wedded Blitz is fine, but Veiled Conceit was on a whole different level.
I'd rather suffer through another Lois Smith Brady simile-cide than read this sort of cutesy, clumsily constructed chiasmus that serves less as a clever intro and more as the verbal equivalent of ipecac syrup.
and
It shouldn't be surprising that they met at a crossword competition. I can't think of a better place for scoring some like-minded tail. I suppose if the spelling bee took place at a college level it'd be like fucking Caligula's Rome. As it stands, crossword tournaments, and Scrabble . . . are like a Nerd Club Med. Will Shortz could walk into one of those events and immediately be showered in Hanes Her Way.
I suppose if the spelling bee took place at a college level it'd be like fucking Caligula's Rome.
And yet quizbowl, not so much.
Oh, I could tell you some stories.
This post was one of the most helpful I've ever seen on any blog. My son is marrying in a few months, and partly because of his educational background but much more because of the family he is marrying into, I now realize that there is a positive probability that the 2 of them will be portrayed like this.[1] To tease him, I emailed him a link to this post, and mentioned that I was looking forward to reading the Sunday Times after the wedding. He responded in kind, saying "Hope you and Mom are looking forward to being interviewed."
This had not occurred to me, and without his snarky response, I would have been completely unprepared for this. Now, should it happen, my wife and I will be ready.
[1] He tells me that he knows 1 (maybe more) of the couples listed in the linked post, and can think of at least 1 other that belongs in this list.
43: Hmm, I don't know if you can get by with just saying you like opera or if they actually quiz you.
43: Unfortunately, you'll have to email me the link and get roasted here, once it appears. Now be a good sport.
32.--I interviewed for that job many years ago. He asked me all kinds of personal things, I answered honestly that no, sometimes I didn't sleep well, and yes, sometimes I did have personal things on my mind, and he said that he needed somebody absolutely mentally stable (and lacking a personality or life, apparently), and so that was that.
That is, after Me/hta left the New Yorker.
Tristan and Isolde do not seem to belong to the Facebook generation that expresses itself in sentence fragments. In conversation, their sentences are extremely loud and several minutes long and sound as if previously written. By Schopenhauer. Both are medieval nobility, and care deeply about cooking, stick-shift cars, incorrectly labeled potions, and death.
Isolde is slightly built, graceful and soft-spoken. Yet she has also been known, when cross-country skiing with friends, to deliver a twenty-minute narration of the history of her betrayal by Tristan ending with a furious call for vengeance and death, and capped off with a high C.
The two met on the Irish Coast in the twelfth century. She was Princessing around on the beach; he was mortally wounded and drifting around in a boat under an extremely transparent pseudonym. For her, he was an anomaly: a boy she could talk to for hours (and hours) after almost killing him to avenge his murder of her intended husband.
Years passed. She graduated from Princeton. He abducted her to force her into marriage with his uncle. He got a master's degree, and then moved to Paris to write.
By November 1109, both were living in Cornwall. They ran into each other at a hunting party given by a very popular Cornish monarch. He recalls thinking that Isolde had grown up to be astoundingly morbid and verbose. They made a plan to betray lots of moody people with torches and not much sense of humor, and catch up.
They met at Lucien, a French restaurant downtown. He arrived on a black Bianchi bicycle. They talked about the false realm of daylight and being eternally united in the long night of death.
[...and so forth. Happy now, Flip?]
Nice, go out and have a quick taco on me.
In conversation, their sentences are extremely loud and several minutes long . . .
Awesome.
43-45: "The groom's father is an ardent opera fan, declining to name a favorite work, composer, tradition or era because he 'loves them all equally'. He did allow that he had recently enjoyed seeing them transformed into other media."
The next challenge one of the wedding stories as opera. Far beyond my skills, but a modest start.
VOICE OF A YOUNG SKIER
Westwards
the gaze wanders;
eastwards
skims the trail.
Fresh the wind blows
towards home:
my Indian child,
where are you now?
Is it your wafting sighs
that slow my skis?
ALEXANDRA
(stopping sharply)
Who dares to slow me?
(She looks about her, distractedly)
Brandy, you?
Buck up!
Now you have gone and done it. I am putting on Tris & Is at 10:54 pm.