BellGab.com Archive

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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: 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Dear WOTR, if I have once drunk the Queen's health in a foreign country with a group of Commonwealth citizens, is my loyalty suspect?  I was unaware it is now called the "loyal toast", and couldn't think why God should not bless the old bat.

Regrettably my proposal of "the Continental Congress" was met with jeers and derision -- so much for civility.

Quote from: WOTR on July 05, 2019, 12:47:50 AM
I have a really nice slender "pre-republic" Peterson with the frustrating, simple, "made in Ireland" stamp (for the heathens who are unaware, this dates it prior to 1949.) Pencil thin shank, elegant, canted bowl... But with a P-lip. Albeit, it is not the somewhat exaggerated shape of a modern pipe due to the very thin stem (by far the thinnest that I own.)

The Irish free state should land that pipe somewhere directly between the great wars. Nice choice. 

Thanks!  I am so pleased to discover someone else who shares my tastes in pipes.  Yours sounds like a beauty.

Quote from: WOTR on July 05, 2019, 12:12:36 AM
We have a bunch of US employees... I'm just trying to think if any of them has the good humour to find this funny. When I talk with them tomorrow I almost want to ask if they had a good "treason day."

Oh we can take it; it's part of the national epic.

"Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III may profit by their example.  If this be treason, make the most of it!" -- Patrick Henry



There were so many great lines, full of passion and delivered at the point in history where the English language was in the full bloom of muscular potency before yielding to the Continental sentiment from which it has never recovered.

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 04, 2019, 04:22:47 PM
Tell us something we didn't know!

That was a freebie cuz I know you'll swing at pretty much anything.  Happy Independence Day!

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 04, 2019, 04:10:48 PM
You'd better find a slim, elegant man and hand it over then, it's obviously wasted on skinny, raddled types like you.

I bet you have a shelf with all your pipes. Dusting them carefully every morning and boring the arse off anyone who mistakenly shows a polite interest.

Yes, and dedicated ones for each tobacco, too!  I can also handle a hot dog, with bun (or "bap" as you so quaintly call them) without the slightest fear of choking.

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 04, 2019, 03:58:36 PM
What are those bits of string hanging off your shoulders?

Oh, that's right. Your arms.

Take particular note of the pipe:  it is an early Peterson before they got all fat (with a p-lip, unfortunately, and I am loath to have a standard one fitted) marked "Irish Free State".  Slim, elegant pipes for slim, elegant men.

Quote from: SredniVashtar on July 04, 2019, 03:37:44 PM
Puuuuuuke!

What a bloody mess that country is, we really need to step in and clear up this failed state before it bites people like a rabid dog.

<----Did you notice the new picture, too?!?! 

Quote from: pate on July 04, 2019, 01:38:05 PM
Outstandigit, kayDubya!  You win the intartubes for the day in my book.

Well played, sir, well played.

+1

Thank you, dear pate; I have been stewing on that one for a while.

Quote from: AZRAA on July 04, 2019, 11:38:37 AM
Hey, K. Dubb, what are your political leanings?

Maybe some other day I can delineate them for you and sow discord among the brethren.  Today, I am only an American.

Quote from: pate on July 04, 2019, 01:25:06 PM
America!

Fuck yeah!

Quote from: Yorkshire pud on July 04, 2019, 11:26:47 AM
Putin and Kim will blush at Trump's homage to them. Trump's cult will henceforth rename it 'Trump day'.

I watched a little of it.  It looked disorganized, random, small-town, and, with the inclusion of tractors, downright bucolic.  I must have missed the tanks, but thankfully they weren't chasing the Falun Gong float down the street.

Dear WOTR, if I secretly prefer -- but do not use -- the term "holiday" in lieu of "vacation" (which has always had a whiff of digestion about it to me), is my loyalty suspect?

Quote from: Yorkshire pud on July 04, 2019, 08:32:15 AM
We can always depend on you for a bit of 'whatboutism'...  Yet you've excelled yourself this time.. I'm a bit disappointed you didn't manage to shoehorn the potato famine in Ireland and the Duke of Northumberland and his merry men V the Jacobites at Culloden.

Drawing unexpected parallels to highlight hypocrisy has always been an effective rhetorical technique.  Lately it has been given a cute name in a cynical effort to class it with the fallacies but this has not dulled the edge one bit.

Quote from: AZRAA on July 04, 2019, 03:13:44 AM
I wonder what colours those would be.

Quote from: WOTR on July 04, 2019, 12:08:08 AM
I suppose this is the thanks that I get for continuing to serve in my futile, unprofitable role as Bellgabs official self-appointed life coachâ,,¢. 

While I believe you are correct and you will not win many friends in your position, I can at least congratulate you on making the right enemies.

Quote from: albrecht on July 03, 2019, 10:20:40 PM
Ha! Classic. Aside from the more modern "Asian" sex gangs taking your children, ignored for years from your own police, and presumably the people, due to deference to "cultural issues" -well documented in the news, sadly. Didn't your lot fight each other, and marry, via various cousins and what-not? For centuries? Sure, I know, now, the various German-Danish-Dutch etc royal houses took over (again, since they did it before also, though different ones, at times) but it was a grand deal back in the day to marry a cousin- providing the title or land- or in latter days just for the wealth or land? Even today, the recent mulatto aside controversy, there seems to be an odd idea of maintaining the bloodlines (aka property and wealth.) I'm guessing, simply guessing, that your establishment would've been MUCH more comfortable with yet another cousin, or at least relation, that this upstart Hollywood American, with her mixed-blood, like the Dutch were with their South American Strongman daughter's marriage incident a few years past. I wonder how the peerage books will deal with this new one! Ha, will be funny as they go through her line. Some split Pimm's or tea I imagine.

Plus a definite mystical element -- they were lining up to be healed by the king up through Charles II, I think.



I had a boss who was quite a coin collector and I've actually held one of these so I guess I won't get scrofula, whatever that is.

Quote from: albrecht on July 03, 2019, 05:42:53 PM
Ha. Should be good.

"The weather today will be sunny with a chance of being zapped in the head by aliens."

Quote from: albrecht on July 03, 2019, 05:01:33 PM
Has he been confirmed for BellGab Sardinefest 2020?

Larger herring and other fish are also allowed and encouraged.

I am in touch with his agent.  The big guy is excited to appear but the dudes in silver are being little bitches about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyM8OgGHiMA