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Random Political Thoughts

Started by MV/Liberace!, February 08, 2012, 10:50:42 AM

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 04, 2019, 04:32:36 PM

I know. I have resisted your more obvious pandering in the past but that was too easy. Happy Treason Day.

No one calls it that any more, you old fossil.  Had I known you would take such an uncharitable view of my gallantry I would have been more persistent.

SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 08:26:05 AM
Thanks!  I am so pleased to discover someone else who shares my tastes in pipes.  Yours sounds like a beauty.


SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 08:58:48 AM
No one calls it that any more, you old fossil.  Had I known you would take such an uncharitable view of my gallantry I would have been more persistent.

I was using it in the sense of indulging someone. You appear to have taken it in its seamier, criminal sense - something which you are doubtless all too familiar, you Giant Pander.

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 09:28:41 AM
I was using it in the sense of indulging someone. You appear to have taken it in its seamier, criminal sense - something which you are doubtless all too familiar, you Giant Pander.

Can I at least be a Slim, Elegant Pander?

Dr. MD MD

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 01:50:59 AM

It's not as if we brought our A game. You were a bunch of yappy upstarts and we only made a half-hearted effort anyway.

^^^^^^^^

Mating call of the loser.

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 09:15:57 AM


Note that the civil discussion of a refined pursuit reduces Shreddie to the equivalent of gurning through a horse-collar.  Back to the stable yard with you, you pretentious bumpkin, and leave the gentlemen to their brandy.

SredniVashtar

 
Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 12:22:45 PM
Note that the civil discussion of a refined pursuit reduces Shreddie to the equivalent of gurning through a horse-collar.  Back to the stable yard with you, you pretentious bumpkin, and leave the gentlemen to their brandy.

You sound like the sort of character who would join a vintage cycling club just so you could flap around in a striped blazer and straw boater. We all know this pipe talk is sinister code for some very unsavoury practices. 'Honestly, officer, I just saw this delicious poor immigrant choking in an alleyway and was giving him the Heimlich. It just so happened that my trousers fell down at the same time.'

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 01:14:15 PM

You sound like the sort of character who would join a vintage cycling club just so you could flap around in a striped blazer and straw boater. We all know this pipe talk is sinister code for some very unsavoury practices. 'Honestly, officer, I just saw this delicious poor immigrant choking in an alleyway and was giving him the Heimlich. It just so happened that my trousers fell down at the same time.'

It is not advantageous to mention one sense in which the word is used in French and the jokes possible in that language but I do so anyway out of a generosity of spirit.  There are those who fetishize it (most of them British -- look up "pipe smoking chap" for a truly horrifying video that regularly makes the rounds as an object of mockery -- stay for the cough) but I am not one of them.


SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 01:27:18 PM
It is not advantageous to mention one sense in which the word is used in French and the jokes possible in that language but I do so anyway out of a generosity of spirit.  There are those who fetishize it (most of them British -- look up "pipe smoking chap" for a truly horrifying video that regularly makes the rounds as an object of mockery -- stay for the cough) but I am not one of them.



Does not the prospect of an untimely throat cancerous demise dissuade you occasionally from sucking on your Meerschaum for all it's worth?

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 01:37:47 PM
Does not the prospect of an untimely throat cancerous demise dissuade you occasionally from sucking on your Meerschaum for all it's worth?

Jeez, you're all sorts of paternal today.  It is a calculated risk of course, like everything else in life, but I am not the type to worry or temporize.

SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 01:54:25 PM
Jeez, you're all sorts of paternal today.  It is a calculated risk of course, like everything else in life, but I am not the type to worry or temporize.

I remember Freud saying something similar. He had trouble saying anything after his jaw fell out.

You remind me of Prendergast in Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, always wanting to show people his pipe collection. It remains to be seen whether you will share the same fate but I certainly hope so!

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 02:00:54 PM
I remember Freud saying something similar. He had trouble saying anything after his jaw fell out.

You remind me of Prendergast in Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, always wanting to show people his pipe collection. It remains to be seen whether you will share the same fate but I certainly hope so!

Damn you, now I have to read it!  I hope he is at least a step up from that dreadful creature in the alley you imagined earlier.

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 01:27:18 PM
There are those who fetishize it (most of them British -- look up "pipe smoking chap" for a truly horrifying video that regularly makes the rounds as an object of mockery -- stay for the cough) but I am not one of them.

This is what I came up with.   It really shook me up.   :-\
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6LktkSMZb8

K_Dubb

Quote from: Walks_At_Night on July 05, 2019, 02:34:04 PM
This is what I came up with.   It really shook me up.   :-\

Oh yeah that dude is famous -- I think he's in Argentina.  I will refrain from making any Butz-Choquin jokes because Shreddie is a delicate flower.  But this is the one I was thinking of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XigCvFf8AN4

He does pretty good but somewhere in there is a godawful dry hack of a cough that blows it all to pieces.

SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 02:23:23 PM
Damn you, now I have to read it!  I hope he is at least a step up from that dreadful creature in the alley you imagined earlier.

Actually, combine Prendergast and Captain Grimes and you'll think you were looking in the mirror. I'm surprised you haven't read one of the great comic novels of the past century. What on earth are they teaching you over there? I'd expect that ignorance from an unlettered oaf like Walks but I thought you were a slightly better-read sort of oaf.

SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 02:40:36 PM
Oh yeah that dude is famous -- I think he's in Argentina.  I will refrain from making any Butz-Choquin jokes because Shreddie is a delicate flower.  But this is the one I was thinking of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XigCvFf8AN4

He does pretty good but somewhere in there is a godawful dry hack of a cough that blows it all to pieces.

Dry hack at 3.10. He looks to me that he really wants you to think he's enjoying it but can't quite pull it off and just looks uncomfortable.

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 02:46:56 PM
Actually, combine Prendergast and Captain Grimes and you'll think you were looking in the mirror. I'm surprised you haven't read one of the great comic novels of the past century. What on earth are they teaching you over there? I'd expect that ignorance from an unlettered oaf like Walks but I thought you were a slightly better-read sort of oaf.

Whew, at least it's not Peter Grimes!  No, half of our reading has to be American literature, appropriately, which takes a big bite out of your canon.

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 02:52:41 PM
Dry hack at 3.10. He looks to me that he really wants you to think he's enjoying it but can't quite pull it off and just looks uncomfortable.

I doubt he even smokes a pipe for real; you keep it just on the edge of going out.  Unless you are otherwise, um, distracted.

Do you think it is Pud at his sheep hut in the Dales?

SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 02:53:43 PM
Whew, at least it's not Peter Grimes!  No, half of our reading has to be American literature, appropriately, which takes a big bite out of your canon.

They really whitewashed him in the opera. He's a cranky misfit in that but an outright murderer in the poem. I'm guessing even Britten is too modernist for your retrograde tastes.

Just because they don't teach it doesn't mean you are allowed to be ignorant, young man. I've read enough American literature to know it's mostly rubbish anyway.


SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 02:59:28 PM
I doubt he even smokes a pipe for real; you keep it just on the edge of going out.  Unless you are otherwise, um, distracted.

Do you think it is Pud at his sheep hut in the Dales?

Pud comes from mining stock, I think, that's where his chippiness comes from. He lacks the serene, pastoral temper. He was complaining about having to dig down to a leaky water pipe the other night but I know he must have loved it. Digging in the dark, up to his knees in filth. He probably even got Laura to pretend she was a pit pony.

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 03:01:24 PM
They really whitewashed him in the opera. He's a cranky misfit in that but an outright murderer in the poem. I'm guessing even Britten is too modernist for your retrograde tastes.

Just because they don't teach it doesn't mean you are allowed to be ignorant, young man. I've read enough American literature to know it's mostly rubbish anyway.

You guys had different concerns back then.  Frankly a lot of what you might call "novels of manners" from the early 20th c. that Englishmen so often cite just don't work without a good feel for your class system which, to an American, is irrelevant.

SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 05, 2019, 03:14:15 PM
You guys had different concerns back then.  Frankly a lot of what you might call "novels of manners" from the early 20th c. that Englishmen so often cite just don't work without a good feel for your class system which, to an American, is irrelevant.

Oh, what rot. You're worse than us when it comes to the class system. This idea that it's a level playing field is balls from first to last. The only difference is that your sense of class is defined by money rather than birth. I've yet to see a more pitiful specimen of humanity than the American snob, as if they have anything to look down on people about. The bloody country only started last week!

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 03:20:36 PM
Oh, what rot. You're worse than us when it comes to the class system. This idea that it's a level playing field is balls from first to last. The only difference is that your sense of class is defined by money rather than birth. I've yet to see a more pitiful specimen of humanity than the American snob, as if they have anything to look down on people about. The bloody country only started last week!

Sure you have the new-money/old-money thing which is practically all of Fitzgerald, for example, but the classes are fluid and moving between them creates the energy of a story.  Very different from your insular worlds written for the people who inhabit them and a bunch of middle-class lookers-on.

Yorkshire pud

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 03:06:12 PM
Pud comes from mining stock, I think, that's where his chippiness comes from. He lacks the serene, pastoral temper. He was complaining about having to dig down to a leaky water pipe the other night but I know he must have loved it. Digging in the dark, up to his knees in filth. He probably even got Laura to pretend she was a pit pony.


All of the above is frighteningly close to the truth. Or as the late Alan Clarke MP of Leeds castle, and daliences with various concubines as his fragrant missus stayed home (he even took one mistress on their honeymoon) would say; The
actualités.

My paternal grandfather was indeed a miner. From aged 14 until his lungs gave out at 63, and passing away four years later. The waterpipe was a mere inconvenience in clay soil. Closest I've been to a mine is delivering the stuff, filthiest hardest job I've ever done, although only temporary. More filthy than that dodgy video involving the entire fruit and veg aisle in Tescos, the admittedly willing filipino house boy and the vinyl underwear.


albrecht

Quote from: Yorkshire pud on July 05, 2019, 04:31:01 PM

All of the above is frighteningly close to the truth. Or as the late Alan Clarke MP of Leeds castle, and daliences with various concubines as his fragrant missus stayed home (he even took one mistress on their honeymoon) would say; The
actualités.

My paternal grandfather was indeed a miner. From aged 14 until his lungs gave out at 63, and passing away four years later. The waterpipe was a mere inconvenience in clay soil. Closest I've been to a mine is delivering the stuff, filthiest hardest job I've ever done, although only temporary. More filthy than that dodgy video involving the entire fruit and veg aisle in Tescos, the admittedly willing filipino house boy and the vinyl underwear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k 

WOTR

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 05, 2019, 01:37:47 PM
Does not the prospect of an untimely throat cancerous demise dissuade you occasionally from sucking on your Meerschaum for all it's worth?
It's very difficult to find any research on pipe smoking. Most just lump smokers in together. The few studies that I ever managed to dig up that separate out pipe and cigar smokers put pipes at the bottom followed by cigars and then cigarettes. It suggests an increased risk of cancer and heart disease- but very minor when compared to cigarette smokers. Even then, the pipe smokers usually had 3-5 bowls a day. I probably average that in a two week period.

As K_Dub says: it is a calculated risk. I work out, eat quite healthy, and occasionally light up in an attempt to offset my healthy lifestyle. I would consider being an obese, pizza inhaling, beer swilling, television addicted vegetable to be far more of a risk- but people generally don't comment on those*...




K_Dubb

OK I read it overnight and, with all the good will in the world, I just can't see it.  Aside from Prendy's pipes and Grimes's mustache, maybe.  I'd happily be either -- they are genuine characters -- but they are clearly written as melancholy/sanguine opposites.  Maybe it is Grimes's perpetual resilience?  There aren't too many people who'd read a novel just to appreciate the exact nature of the horse-apple you have tossed in their laps.

SredniVashtar

Quote from: K_Dubb on July 06, 2019, 10:33:17 AM
OK I read it overnight and, with all the good will in the world, I just can't see it.  Aside from Prendy's pipes and Grimes's mustache, maybe.  I'd happily be either -- they are genuine characters -- but they are clearly written as melancholy/sanguine opposites.  Maybe it is Grimes's perpetual resilience?  There aren't too many people who'd read a novel just to appreciate the exact nature of the horse-apple you have tossed in their laps.

For fuck's sake, you eejit! Didn't you spot something about Grimes? I'll take my answer off the air.

BTW, you're not the first American to miss the glaringly obvious.

K_Dubb

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 06, 2019, 10:44:28 AM
For fuck's sake, you eejit! Didn't you spot something about Grimes? I'll take my answer off the air.

BTW, you're not the first American to miss the glaringly obvious.

What, that he has sworn off women because they are mysterious?  How contemptibly shallow!

Fun book, though.

SredniVashtar

 
Quote from: K_Dubb on July 06, 2019, 10:55:26 AM
What, that he has sworn off women because they are mysterious?  How contemptibly shallow!

Fun book, though.

However you people managed to get a rocket into space is the real mystery. You mean you didn't know what Grimes's persistent habit of getting 'in the soup' meant? Or his relationship with the 'splendid little athlete' Clutterbuck?

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