Linky Friday: Devil May Care

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

Related Post Roulette

21 Responses

  1. Richard Hershberger says:

    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. Oscar Gordon says:

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

  3. fillyjonk says:

    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

  4. PD Shaw says:

    [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

    • PD Shaw in reply to PD Shaw says:

      [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

    • aaron david in reply to PD Shaw says:

      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

      • Kolohe in reply to aaron david says:

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

        • Jaybird in reply to Kolohe says:

          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

        • Mike Schilling in reply to Kolohe says:

          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

    • rexknobus in reply to PD Shaw says:

      “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. Pinky says:

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

  6. Kaleberg says:

    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