Linky Friday: Devil May Care

21 thoughts on “Linky Friday: Devil May Care”

1. Dv19: Same thing I always respond when the topic comes up. Weddings are cheap. In their barest form, they only need three people: the people getting married and the officiant. Your state may require one or more witnesses. But that is it. Everything else is optional. So too is the party afterwards, which is what people really are talking about when they talk about the cost of a wedding.

   So how do people pay for it? The smart ones by looking at what they have available to splurge and planning the proceedings accordingly. The dumb ones by going into debt. Easy peasy.Report

2. Dv5: Typically Arkansas, lighting their farts on fire and then acting all ignorant about it.Report

   1. true Arkansas story: I join the military to get out of WV and they send me to Arkansas. I’m sitting with my tech school class as they hand out first duty assignments for after graduation, 9 get Ramstein, Germany 2 to Yokota, Japan, 1 to Travis, California and I get Little Rock. Figures.Report

      1. Send Andrew to Little Rock, he’s from WV, he’ll fit right in.

         If only military assignments followed such logic, rather than just being the toss up between the Fairy Godmother Department and the Practical Joke Department.Report

         1. Should have been there when my troops found out their sergeant who doesnt drink drink or gamble got orders to Vegas. They were crestfallen.Report

            1. The Practical Joke Department does occasionally knock one out of the park.Report

3. I figure Dv5 is some dude who tried to get the “critter” to come out of its hole, but is also shockingly smart enough to keep his mouth shut after doing it.

   Though, IDK, some kind of weird anaerobic decomposition process that led to methane buildup would be more interesting….Report

   1. More likely something to do with frakking.Report

4. [Dv11] I assume the first hundred pages of Dracula that were removed by the publisher were part of a framing device; it was a convention of gothic literature to have stories-within-stories, which was believed to make the narrative more authentic. In the published book, there is a very short prologue describing how someone (the author?) had assembled the following materials from a variety of contemporaneous records, and have only been edited to remove irrelevancies. Each chapter is from a journal, diary or letter.

   I’ll speculate that the reason for removing the first hundred pages had more to do with it being boring and defeating the purpose of the framing device because now we are wondering whether the person that gathered these records is a reliable narrator.Report

   1. [DV12] As a two-fer from taking a course in Gothic literature in college, anti-Catholicism was also a convention of the early English gothic. See the Monk.Report

      1. Check out The Little Professor at http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/

         She’s probably the world expert in 19th century anti-Catholic literature. Scan down for some of the plot synopses. She really reads this stuff so we don’t have to.Report

   2. This also happened to Golding Lord of the Flies. By luck, a junior reader at the publishing house picked it up and flipped to around the 100th page. From there it was gold, but massively boring up to that point.Report

      1. and was the conceit used in the book version of the Princess Bride.Report

         1. Such is the problem with life. It doesn’t get interesting until… what? Marriage? That’s somewhere between 24 and 38! And that kludgy rule doesn’t cover some people at all!Report

         2. Which starts with a really elaborate framing story, and every 10 years or so an edition comes out that elaborates it further. My favorite bit so far is Steven King considering this version of the story cultural appropriation because Goldman, unlike King, isn’t ethnically Florinian.Report

   3. “Dracula” is the Victorian Era version of a “found footage” story, as you say. All gathered from first person diaries, etc. It’s also a “super advanced tech” story, describing the cutting edge use of typewriters and recorders. Both of those things seem to get lost because time moved on and the tech seems quaint now, but I imagine at the time those advances added an strong element of cool.

      Note 1: It’s rather amazing how little The Count actually appears in the book, and how the climax is basically a chase scene as opposed to thrills in a dark castle or cemetery.

      Note 2: Carfax Abbey is modeled on St. Mary’s Cathedral in Whitby, England. But directly in the shadow of St. Mary’s is the little sea coast town of Sand’s End — honest-to-god one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been. Looking up at the shadowy cathedral in the distance and dealing with the people in that town almost made me a believer in the Count’s spell. Brrrrr.

      Note 3: Off-topic: “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was a mystery, not a thriller, with a Big Twist at the end. None of us ever got to have that shocking “don’t reveal the truth” effect because it got so popular so fast. Bet a lot of people had a hell of a great moment when the truth of the mystery was revealed.Report

5. DV16: “1000-1300. For centuries, the idea of hell was confined to cloisters.” Huh?Report

6. My favorite is Wolfgang Pauli’s: “God made the bulk.; the surface was invented by the devil.”Report

7. Dv11 – This is something I’ve always found peculiar about children’s television as well. The show hardly ever starts just with the beginning of the action that I personally found interesting. There’s always some ridiculous setup first. Guys in costumes or clowns or Mr. Rogers putting on his sweater. Then after all that happened, FINALLY the part of the show I wanted to see would come on. They’d roll the cartoons or the puppet show and it felt like it took forever to get there. I remember thinking with crystal clarity “Can’t you put your shoes on earlier, Mr. Rogers, and just get to the puppets already?”

   So according to the logic of Dv11 maybe that gimmick is meant to ensure children don’t get too mixed up about what is real and what isn’t? The setups before the cartoons roll is some sort of dividing line between reality and fantasy, maybe?Report

   1. That is an interesting angle to take. I suppose someone somewhere probably made the argument that steady routine is a good thing for children, and may well be. In general I’m of the opinion that you should get airborne with as little runway as possible.Report

      1. I’ve seen this as advice for beginning writers: Once you’ve finished a story, throw away the first 10 pages.Report

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