"Hi! As long as you're visiting, we thought we'd let you know about Sinéad O'Connor's upcoming cd, Sean-Nos Nua, and Joan Osborne's latest, How Sweet It Is. We know perfectly well you can't afford either of them, because we're Amazon, and We Know All. We just wanted to fuck with you is all. Thanks for dropping by!"
Bastards.
All I wanted to do was see if Portable Dorothy Parker was still/back in print. I have decided that smacking warbloggers about the head with Arrangement In Black And White couldn't hurt, and might help.
Ok, it could hurt, but not anyone important. Just them.
Previous link gives you Salon.com's audio of Tyne Daly reading the story. For some reason, RealPlayer 8 for Linux didn't like the .rm version. I could submit a bug report. Or I could whine about it. Or I did get the mp3 version, so screw 'em.
Update: Amazing, the terms that go out of use.
- grass widow
- The usual meaning given in British dictionaries is of a woman whose husband is temporarily away, say on business. This sense is known in other English-speaking communities such as Australia. It has long been used in the USA in the rather different sense of "a woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband", as the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary has it.
Interestingly enough, the feminine form of "straw man" carried double irony before 1850. In the 16th and 18th c. [no 17th c attestations], "grass widow" referred [sez the OED] to an "unmarried woman cohabiting w/one or more men" but the examples given suggest that the woman is passing herself off as a widow, although her community knows she's not. When it got picked up again, about 1850, it carried the meaning Aaron notes.
You are double mean. And I'm double not speaking to you.
But I thought you should know that Monk read the title "a harold's chicken shack fansite" and informed me that I need to start a new blog called "Lainie's Chicken Baby Blog."
Have a nice day. Meanie.
Call me mean again, dru, and there will be more Afro Ken.
So much Afro Ken will there be.
Neo, that's. . . just odd. Has the meaning of straw man shifted in a similar way?
Fortheloveofgod, Dru, please, no more Afro-Ken.
What I find interesting in the 2 meanings for "grass widow" is how I'd lay money on the fact that they're linked by class & class-appropriation. The original meaning lingered longest in dictionaries of "lower class" language/slang/argot/cant [oh, the 18th c.] When it reappears w/a new meaning in 1850, it's 1st cited in Australia, then in India- usage as a state of being [grass widowhood, etc.] appears in the US, too. I'll betcha the bougeois "coiners" of the new meaning picked up the phrase/general context, from a class of ppl whose use of the term stretched back several 100 years- & was not at all complimentary. [& let's not forget how bougie the OED ed policy was/is.]
Oops. Sorry. Aaron has that linguistics thing- I've got that philology thing. Will stop now & not continue w/the history of "straw man".
The real question is...4AM? 5AM?
What are you doing in the wee hours besides blogging?
Sleep is for the weak. And I'm having the coolest hallucinations when I'm awake instead of dreaming, so I should avoid that whole "temporary psychosis" thing, right?
Neo, pray, continue. I miss the free OED access from U of I; there's lots of cites from it in a paper I did on chinook borrowings in English, my only copy of which is sitting on an Amiga-formatted floppy somewhere. Possibly.
Hmm, I actually have the Portable Dorothy Parker
It's the 1973 edition, revised and extended which includes the Constant Reader columns, the main reason I bought it.
*reads*
Ah.
You think they would notice?
I love Constant Reader. Whenever I'm feeling bad about having written a really slam-tastic book review (I get to feeling guilty because I've had a few bad reviews of my own books and I know how it feels to be on the receiving end) I go read some of Dorothy's and realize that even at my meanest, I'm a piker.
For those of you playing along at home, I quoted a bit of a Constant Reader/Dorothy Parker review a while back, and there's a site at U of I Shampoo-Banana that'll let you Read All About It. More or less.
Martin, I think this would be too subtle and cunning for them to get the point. Hence, the accompanying physical violence.
Hanne, yeah, that review in the latest Bitch was all sweetness and light in comparison. But only in comparison; by any rational standard, you tore the poor bastard a new one six ways to Sunday.
No- Hanne, claws out, chica! Slammin where slammin is due! In your reviews you make reasonable, firmly stated criticisms- what author can ask for more? [We've all had screeners & reviewers who were much less straightforward & helpful- & did you appreciate it? No.]
Oh- & Aaron- checked & the term "straw man" postdates the 1st attributed use of "grass widow" by 3/4 century- and carries the same meanings as it does today.
i will fear no afro-ken. ha! bring it on.
*whimper*
Just call him a meanie, kd. He doesn't like that.
Or maybe he does...
hmm... ok, so I'm too lazy to mess with my own pages any more, but what I am about to say does contain ACTUAL cracker content, and thusly - I deem it appropriate:
ORLANDO, Florida (CNN) -- Orlando police said Tuesday that Noelle Bush, the daughter of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is under investigation after staff at a drug treatment facility said she was found with a "white rock substance" that tested positive for cocaine.
Now, I never got into the powders... so the only things that i know of that are whtie and rocky are crack and speedballs...anyone have more info?
white and rocky is crack. a speedball is injected powder cocaine and heroin, mixed.
of course, on the wrong corner of town, white and rocky can be a hunk of soap, or a lemonhead, or an actual rock. but if it tests positive, well, there you have it.
see, i have done a lot of reading on the subject. have no actual personal knowledge of these things. really.
no, no, no.
This isn't crack, this is a white rock substance which just happens to test positive for cocaine. Noelle Bush needs a stern talking too and another stay in a kind and gentle clinic. No, not the one in which they force you to wear the same underpants for a week or longer, even during menstruation. That's for the unpeople. (i.e. everybody not called Bush and with an income
uppity-shinob,someone could make a joke about Federal sentencing disparities (enacted in 1986 and 1988, when guess who was V.P.?) between crack and cocaine posession, but I'm far too kind.
Chickens coming home to roost? Nah.
Martin, yeah, I had to look that one up, because it confused me a bit, too. Does explain a half-remembered conversation I heard as a child, where my relatives expressed a certain hatred for Lilian Hellman's guts, though.
The reason that Dorothy Parker's *everything* is currently (and probably always will be) copyrighted to the NAACP is that she, as a great admirer of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, bequeathed her small estate to Dr. King when she died of a heart attack in 1967 at the age of 74. When Dr. King was killed the following year, a great deal of his estate went, via King's estate, to the NAACP, including the rights to the Parker estate.
In an interesting side story, the NAACP headquarters here in Baltimore are also Ms. Parker's final resting place. She was cremated after she died, but Lillian Hellman, who was the executor of her will, never told the crematory what to do with Parker's ashes. They held onto the unclaimed 'cremains' for six years until someone had the bright idea to send the box to Parker's attorney, Paul O'Dwyer. In 1998, someone figured out that Ms. Parker's remains had never been officially claimed and that she remained uninterred. The New York papers had a bit of a field day with this until finally the NAACP stepped in and took the box of ashes from the filing cabinet in O'Dwyer's office where they'd been, er, filed, and interred the ashes in a rather nice little memorial garden at their national headquarters.
Pardon the unparseable nature of that last sentence in the first paragraph, I'm undercaffienated. It should read: "When Dr. King was killed the following year, a great deal of his estate went to the NAACP, including the rights to the Parker estate."
It's always nice when a writer you admire turns out not to be an asshole in real life.
Unlike say, H*rl*n *ll*s*n
And yet, H*rl*n marched with King, and possibly mentions this more often than is really necessary.
If my brain was working, I'd suggest there's a moral here somewhere.
"uppity-shinob,someone could make a joke about Federal sentencing disparities (enacted in 1986 and 1988, when guess who was V.P.?) between crack and cocaine posession, but I'm far too kind."
I'm pretty sure that the disparity even exists is a joke unto itself. officialy, there is no white rock with traces of cocaine in Kansas.
On the upside, there is a neat show running on the History International channel about the social structure and wars (fought) by the scottish clans. the abbey hoffman movie i saw on HBO was almost good too.
amazingly enough, i learned more in two hours of tv watching than 4 years of college. i'm going to guess the tv was the more accurate of the two.