Reading todays entry and looking up what goiter was, it’s a thyroid condition…. Which means that what Jonathan saw from the coach was people probably covered or had wounds on their necks.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense! And goiters were a much more common thing back in the day, so the readers of the time would have likely caught that.
What the fuck is “London style cat’s meat” ???
I wondered that too! Because the first possibility that springs to mind is not at all appetizing…
Phenomenal sound design in this episode! Also "God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me" is such a great line and the delivery was superb
That was my favorite line too!
it used to be 2007 you know
All the adults should put in the tags how old they were in 2007
What I love about this, though, is that the little nails will become an outline of where the water was. It will trace the shape, show someone later what was there once upon a time. It will be a testament to how much this guy wanted to capture the amazing things he saw and experienced, and though it will never truly keep it, it will hold a memory, something that in itself is beautiful and worthy of experience. We cannot describe the indescribable, but we can trace its outline, give some idea of what we experienced.
official linguistics post
dracula is considered a classic because it covers timeless human emotions such as "this food is not good for me but I'll eat it again because it's delicious" and "i ran to the train and of course it was late"
I signed up for Dracula Daily this year, and I am ridiculously excited about it!
You were the caretaker for the mythical beasts of the royal family. Yesterday they decided to replace you with some incompetent noble, before kicking you out of the castle. You then spent the night in a nearby forest. However today you were awakened by the beasts who chose to follow you.
I’m not good with people.
I never have been. I’ve tried, but I’ve never been good with people. I’m always saying the wrong thing, and usually I don’t know what the wrong thing was until a lot later, until I’m thinking about what I said. In the town I grew up in, I was known for being simple.
I don’t think I am, but I understand why they think that- I’m not good at making the words in my head match the words I say.
But I am good with animals. Always have been. Lots of people are, I’m not special, or anything. Mam taught me.
Animals speak their own language, and it’s a lot simpler to figure out. They’re not people, they don’t understand us. A lot of people who are bad at animals expect that. They think an animal should understand them perfectly. They think animals have human impulses, human urges, a human understanding of the world.
And they don’t.
Two households, both alike in dignity,
today I learned that in 2008, the city council of florence overturned dante’s sentence of execution if he returned from exile. yes, dante’s inferno dante, who died in 1321.
but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.
the funniest part is that the vote was 19-5. five people voted to uphold dante’s exile.
The objectively funniest part of this is actually that the city that holds his remains, Ravenna, refused to give his remains back. This was a ploy from florence to have his remains moved back for the tourist money and its been ongoing for a long time. Florence had a fake tomb built in the city to trick people into visiting, and have tried to force the return of the remains.
His actual caretakers have been very steadfast in keeping them hidden, moved, or generally out of reach to respect his choice in life to never, ever, ever return to florence, even when he was first offered the chance to return. This is at this point an almost millenium long feud that florence is really, really mad about losing
so basically the five people who wanted to uphold his exile were in the right
Captain Wentworth had no fortune. He had been lucky in his profession; but spending freely, what had come freely, had realized nothing. But he was confident that he should soon be rich: full of life and ardour, he knew that he should soon have a ship, and soon be on a station that would lead to everything he wanted. He had always been lucky; he knew he should be so still. Such confidence, powerful in its own warmth, and bewitching in the wit which often expressed it, must have been enough for Anne; but Lady Russell saw it very differently. His sanguine temper, and fearlessness of mind, operated very differently on her. She saw in it but an aggravation of the evil. It only added a dangerous character to himself. He was brilliant, he was headstrong. Lady Russell had little taste for wit, and of anything approaching to imprudence a horror. She deprecated the connexion in every light.
It's interesting to me, Persuasion is the last novel Austen wrote and she had this trend prior of "W" being a villain (Wickham and Willoughby) and this paragraph about Wentworth makes me think about her other dubious men. He's gambled or spent all his money away, just like the other two, he's confident he'll get more. Wentworth and Henry Tilney are the only heroes with wit, but only Wentworth has this magnetic charm that seems to draw every woman in the room. Very Wickham of him, recall how drawn every female was to him when he came into Meryton. Wentworth feels a lot like Austen's villains, especially at first.
It makes me feel that Lady Russell was right to be worried. This sort of magnetic person, with very pretty words but no substance to back it up. It could have been a Willoughby-esq whirlwind romance and left Anne with nothing.
You make a very good point with this post and your post about Wentworth being lucky.
At first glance the narrative seems to lean towards depicting Lady Russell as being somewhat in the wrong:
"Anne, at seven-and-twenty, thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen. She did not blame Lady Russell, she did not blame herself for having been guided by her; but she felt that were any young person, in similar circumstances, to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive any of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good..."
Anne doesn't blame Lady Russell, but in Anne's regret, she thinks, "If I were in her shoes, I wouldn't be telling a young person in love that the future was for sure all doom and gloom." Which is fair I guess.
We know now, that everything worked out really well for Wentworth, but Anne has the benefit (and regrets) of hindsight.
I think @bethanydelleman, you might have also posted at some point that the other naval peers of Wentworth are narrative foils that show the equally plausible fates that Anne and Wentworth could have had:
Captain Harville is wounded in battle. He's married and now lives a simple life with his wife and kids but his health is affected for life.
Captain Benwick and Fanny were engaged but she dies before they can ever marry.
With such uncertainty as a naval position during a war, with injury and death being very possible outcomes, and Anne being so young and Wentworth coming across as so cocky, (and maybe this was the first man she ever loved or the first one that ever pursued her), no wonder any level-headed mentor would be like ABSOLUTELY NOT! YOUR SENSIBLE MOTHER, MY BFF, ISN'T AROUND TO GUIDE YOU SO I AM NOT GOING TO LET YOU THROW CAUTION INTO THE WIND SO RECKLESSLY!
Anne clearly still loves Wentworth, so she of course feels like it would have been better to have been engaged no matter the outcome, but Lady Russell had a very good point.
Especially with the parallels you pointed to with the similarities to men like Willoughby.
Time, at least, showed what sort of man Frederick Wentworth really was. One worthy of Anne Elliot. (Once he begged her forgiveness for his bitterness)
100% Disagree
It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.
The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.
But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.
It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.
(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)
It’s so easy to underestimate the significance of the fact that all of Johnny’s songs are classic folk-americana tunes, honestly! Like, of course thematically what matters is meeting “technically challenging but obnoxious” with “genuinely skilled and beautiful, you just didn’t expect him to be good because he’s poor,” but the music choices are significant for another reason.
Bluntly: Standards.
Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate....but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.
But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.
All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap.
Johnny had more heart, of course--that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.
(Also he didn’t summon an entire goddamn backup band to do the heavy lifting for him, but like. Of course this is the American folklore Devil, the trickster-spirit archetype figure who is really more akin to the Fae and not the actual Christian concept of Satan, but “the Devil cheated” still isn’t exactly an instant disqualification. That’s kind of a given. He is, after all, the Devil.)
I would like to note my mother got to see Charlie Daniels play this live, and there’s one more reason the Devil lost:
Care.
See, apparently Charlie Daniels actually kept extra fiddles on the stage for this song, because playing the Devil’s part WILL snap the fiddle strings. Yes, both Johnny and the Devil have longer solos in the live version because this song is really just Charlie Daniels showing off (earned, though, lbr), but my mom said his fiddle strings were literally SMOKING long before he got into the extended part. And so by necessity, when one set of strings snapped he’d drop the fiddle and pick up another.
The Devil is using his fiddle the same way he uses people: he’s abusing it, treating it as something worth nothing but disdain. I want to pause here briefly and note that when this song was originally written, the best violins in the world were considered to be the Stradivarius violins; there are now modern violins that match or beat their sound, but that’s an EXTREMELY new innovation. This means the Devil is likely playing on a violin worth tens of thousands of dollars; even if he’s conjured an infernal violin for himself, the contempt he shows for Johnny’s (implied) poverty and simplicity says it doesn’t look like just any old violin. And yet, he treats it like garbage—and that’s exactly what comes out of it.
(If you’re wondering where the violin comes into this, a fiddle is a violin played differently, and this is one great way to show the difference between “high” and “low” art is spelled B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.)
Meanwhile, Johnny is some backwoods hick who’s probably never even heard the word Stradivarius, wouldn’t know what to do with one if he had one, and likely plays an absolute shitkicker that looks like hell and cost him fifteen bucks at the pawnshop.
But Johnny VALUES his fiddle. He doesn’t so much play it as make love to it. What we hear is beautiful because he understands he’s not the only one with a soul; instruments have souls, too. He’ll take that solid gold fiddle because he can use the money, but he’ll go right on playing his cheap beat-up old thing until the day he dies. He loves it like he loves his home and his music, and that love makes magic.
The Devil loses because he doesn’t understand the concept that love will beat out greed every time. Johnny wins because he values and respects what he has.
The creator of Phineas and Ferb sorting his M&Ms on tiktok bc that's just what he does. as a middle aged man.
its tagged Stimming and ADHD. "i dont know why [i sorted the M&Ms]" sure you didnt. Autistic ADHD man made a show of autistic ADHD characters.
Peer reviewed ADHD
More peer reviewed autism. Joseph Fink said similar about people talking about Carlos from WTNV, yesterday on his BlueSky, that the character has a lot of his traits and people kept calling Carlos autistic coded so that started telling him something.
and this is why baseball is the best sport (see also: these baseball sidequests)
as he deserves!!!
@unpretty I LOVE THIS
The tumblr code originated on July 2, 2012.
You can check when you signed up for tumblr by looking at this post.
Reblog so everyone can hear what they need.
Death of the author: Treating the author’s stated interpretation of their own work as merely one opinion among many, rather than the authoritative Word of God.
Disappearance of the author: Treating the context and circumstances of the work’s authorship as entirely irrelevant with respect to its interpretation, as though the work had popped into existence fully formed just moments ago.
Taxidermy of the author: Working backwards from a particular interpretation of the work to draw conclusions about what the context and circumstances of its authorship must have been.
Undeath of the author: Holding the author personally responsible for every possible reading of their work, even ones they could not reasonably have anticipated at the time of its authorship.
Frankenstein’s Monster of the author: Drawing conclusions about authorial intent based on elements that are present only in subsequent adaptations by other authors.
Weekend at Bernie’s of the author: Insisting that the author would personally endorse your interpretation of the work if they happened to be present.
