Seriously. Save that crap for Modern Love.
"the parent of one of our kid's friends" or "one of our kid's friend's parents", I should think.
I especially like:
"I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could," said Mr. Partilla, who moved out of his home, reluctantly leaving his three children. But he returned only days later. Then he boomeranged back and forth for six months.
"As honorably as I could" is doing some work there.
2: I think I meant "one of our kids' friend's parent."
I should amend 3 to say that I'm not judging what was probably a very difficult situation. I just think it's funny that it got written up in the Vows Column that way.
4: then maybe "one of our kid's friends' parent"?
(one of ((our kid)'s friends))'s parent
Maybe "kid's"? All I'm saying is it looks wrong, and I get to decide that.
Goddamit that was supposed to be "kids's" in 9.
Yeah, I agree with 5. Shit happens, I have no idea what was up in their marriages, but, you know, then you don't participate in a Vows column, especially one in which you do some defensive pleading and recount your still-married-to-the-other-person declarations of love.
Mares eat oats and goats eat oats and little kid's eat ivy.
Yeah, I dunno, mixed feelings on this one. I mean, they're horrid, crass nouveau riche people -- what else are they going to do? You don't see stories like this in the paper about Joe Schmoe and Jolene Schmoline throwing over their first spouses when things get a little mundane out in Scarsdale. But that's not because it doesn't happen, on the contrary, it happens so often that it wouldn't meet anyone's definition of news. Are those people monsters too? The whole thing with the Vows section just lends itself to some kind of creepy grossness, whether it's this particular kind of thing or a different one.
The median income for a household in Scarsdale is $180k; are you sure that's the best example?
14: Sure, think how few people's taxes exceed that bar.
I bet these two make a lot more than the median income in Scarsdale.
13, 14: I was gonna say -- there's not exactly a vast demographic distance between the UWS and Scarsdale.
Natilo is only pretending to be down with the gente, apparently. The downtrodden do plenty of heinous fuckery, and you think he'd know that.
Methinks Turge needs to reread 13 a little more closely.
Yeah, Natilo is totes down with the gente, just confused about where they live. Not like I would be any good at guessing income distributions of Minneapolis suburbs.
The whole thing with the Vows section just lends itself to some kind of creepy grossness
Which is totes why we must read it.
sidebar! sidebar! Why am I saying "totes" like this!?
sidebar! sidebar! Why am I saying "totes" like this!?
It started out ironically mocking and then became ordinary. Oh god, does this make us hipsters?
I'm sympathetic to the idea that people's lives are complicated, and I'm even sympathetic to people with complicated lives who try to tell their stories publicly.
But a newspaper has an obligation to actually deal with the complexity. If you're going to tell this story, you have to actually tell it, and that includes trying to get a sense of what the ex-spouses (and even the kids) think about it all.
Or, of course, you could decide as a newspaper that you don't want to tell this story, which would be fine with me, too.
Oh god, does this make us hipsters?
Maybe. How much PBR have you consumed in the past 48 hours?
Heebie: sure, fine, he writes that it is common everywhere, but he lead with the "they're nouveau riche, what can we expect?"
No, I meant Scarsdale/New Rochelle/New Canaan -- that type of place. Ice Storm country. Sure, same kind of thing happens in Podunk, but nothing there is news. My point was that if the guy was an orthodontist and the woman was a real estate agent, it could be exactly the same story and no one would care, because they're not on TV.
Perhaps "nouveau riche" is what's tripping people up. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that these people inhabit some kind of demi-class in between the prosaic UMCs and the more cultured UHBs. They're both media people is the thing.
But a newspaper has an obligation to actually deal with the complexity.
How does the Vows column work? Do reporters actually seek out stories? I had somehow passively assumed that people submit their own stories, and perhaps even pay to have them printed, with the reporters' role being only to select the notable ones and attempt to write them in an entertaining way. In other words, I hadn't thought this part of the paper was about journalism, but rather a sort of gussied-up community announcement board. Perhaps this is totally wrong.
24: I have never knowingly consumed PBR in my life.
29: I guess you're free of the hipster taint, then.
Also, notice I wrote "Joe Schmoe" and not "Joe Sixpack" which would have a more particular class connotation.
The NYTimes recommends a Paris hotel with rates starting at 780 euros. There are times when I can read one of their travel articles and pretend it might be aimed at someone like me, but this is not one of those times.
HAS Paris lost its edge? Mais non! The city's bohemians are just harder to find.
You don't say. They also recommend several restaurants with prix fixe meals starting at only 50 euros.
It's not clear to me why anyone reads anything in the NYT besides the opinion and the political pages. Travel, Lifestyle, Vows? What's that you say?
The Science Times section is often interesting.
Oh, okay. I hear the business section can be interesting from time to time. That's where they tend to put economic news, I believe.
I thought Scarsdale was a weight loss camp.
Excellent, there's a link to an older NY Mag article on the same topic:
We at Daily Intel are not naïve. We understand that sometimes people in relationships fall in love with other people, and that they sometimes want to marry those people, which necessitates ending their current relationship. The heart wants what the heart wants, and all of that. We get it. [...] But what we do not understand, what we cannot abide, is when said people, in the throes of connubial bliss, lobby to have themselves included in the New York Times "Vows" column, and then proceed to tell the reporter about how they cheated ontheir previous partner in a way that suggests they think of it not as something crap they have done to another person but instead like it is a part of their personal love story.
[...]
Their "road to love was bumpy." Except one of those bumps was, oops, a fucking person.
[...]
Do the people who tell these stories really realize this stuff is going to end up in the Times, really? Do they worry that it's going to ruin their wedding announcement by making them sound awful? And what do the exes think? What's their version of events? Frankly, we think they should be called for comment. It's not really fair to them to not. Why shouldn't the reporting in "Vows" be as rigorous as it is elsewhere in the paper?
And now I get to take the kids to and from school every day.
Seriously, who can fall in love surrounded by 15 kids in pre-K? Some mornings at drop-off, it's all I can do not to key the cars of the other parents. Even the cute ones.
As soon as I saw the story, I knew it would be written up here.
Something about this one makes me hate the reaction of people, surely anticipated and manipulated by the Vows column editors (there was commentary written up on a facebook page) more than the actual couple, even if they submitted the story themselves. I'm sick of being a dancing monkey with the predictable reaction to the predictable NYT story, and I'm sick of the hate-feeding on these types. Who fucking cares; let them have whatever happiness they can grab out of a shitty situation.
Commentary written on a friends facebook page, I mean; my reaction isn't just driven by what I've read here.
I'm sick of being a dancing monkey with the predictable reaction to the predictable NYT story
If you read the Post for a few months, the NYT seems subtle.
Elsewhere in Times coverage of the real victims...
And speaking of the NYTimes, this is funny.
44: Why doesn't anyone ever throw me an extra $20k so I don't get discouraged?
How long will that keep you encouraged for?
Does it not occur to these people that their kids are going to learn to read and, like, maybe even look things up on the Internet? Is it really necessary that this story be known?
I miss Veiled Conceit.
8 proves yet again that Lisp can solve all of the world's problems.
44: This paragraph is the kind of thing I love.
One executive, whose firm prohibited discussing the topic with the news media, said the bump in base salaries had confused people, even though their overall compensation was the same. "People expect a big bonus," this person said. "It is as if they don't even see their base doubled last year."These reputedly "confused" people apparently have big enough jobs at *financial* institutions to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
I'm not judging what was probably a very difficult situation.
I'm a bit tired of everybody professing not to judge anybody/thing short of George W. Bush and the Black Death. I say judge away. Judge fiercely! Judge like a champ! If we can't judge these blindly selfish twits, what hope is there for the Vows column civilization?
Skimming through the article, at first I missed the sentence, "In fact, as they became friends so did their spouses. There were dinners, Christmas parties and even family vacations together".
51: I don't think if they were actual people that you knew that there would be anything wrong with judging them. But when the media holds people up for scorn, if you participate you are judging for your own entertainment. It's not clear that's what the Vows column is doing, but it's also not clear that it's not.
Thinking about this in the shower, it seems like there's an implicit consensus about the proper way to end and begin relationships, which is ultimately very rigid and unforgiving of deviation. (Disclaimer: This applies only to the people I am most familiar with, i.e. white, college-educated, middle-to-upper-middle class people between the ages of 23 and 50.)
So, assuming that these people are serial monogamists, which seems to be the largest plurality, if you find yourself in a sub-optimal relationship, you are supposed to:
1. Suffer through some period when you would like to be broken up, but you're waiting to see if things get better.
2. Let the other person down easy.
3. Wait some time, from 3 weeks to 6 months, before seeing anyone.
4. Have some very casual affairs for some time from 3 weeks to 6 months.
5. Pick one of the people you are dating to start a serious monogamous relationship.
6. Repeat.
I suppose, if you can swing it, there's nothing particularly wrong about this cycle, but imbuing its strictures with a lot of moral force seems like a recipe for frustration and bad feelings.
I say judge away. Judge fiercely! Judge like a champ!
Flippanter sucks.
I think it's not so much relationships, as marriages with children, and what triggers judgment is less the procedure, than the motivation for ending the prior relationship. "This marriage is over because I can't stand living this way anymore. Now that my prior marriage is over, I can think about entering new relationships," is reasonably forgivable. "My current marriage is tolerable, but this new person looks like much more fun to be involved with," triggers judgment.
The procedural judginess is because the procedure you describe looks like the first motivation, while a quick transition from one marriage to another looks like the second.
58: "My current marriage is tolerable, but this new person looks like much more fun to be involved with," triggers judgment.
Yeah, but, I guess what I'm saying is, the reason it triggers judgment is because the "proper" way to do serial monogamy is so ingrained in how people thing about these things.
58 nails it, I think. Presumably anybody in a long term relationship will from time to time develop strong feelings towards somebody other than their partner. The question is, what they do about it. And the answer has to have something to do with the number of innocent bystanders who are going to be collateral damage if they swan off with the new model. There's plenty of room to be judgemental there I think.
I suppose, if you can swing it, there's nothing particularly wrong about this cycle, but imbuing its strictures with a lot of moral force seems like a recipe for frustration and bad feelings.
I actually read the underlying article, and I'm really more on board with Natilo now than I thought I'd be.
OTOH: the reason that morality is involved is because of the potential for suffering and misery. I agree that a more flexible set of cultural conventions would help, and that part of the pain is precisely because the extant ones don't always fit right, but a certain amount of jealousy and heartache and misery will exist even in the most open-minded sexual utopia. Love and sex have moral weight simply because they matter.
58, 59"My current marriage is tolerable, but this new person looks like much more fun to be involved with," triggers judgment.
natilo is right -- the way LB phrased it implies the judgment already.
There is no room for Love in our bourgeois value-system.
I'd be happy to judge if I knew more, but as it stands, I have no idea how unhappy these people were in their respective marriages, regardless of how noisome the people themselves seem. And I'm enough of a fool/romantic/evil bitch to believe it's possible for people to meet and need to be together. I have no standing to speak to this, I suppose, but I'm not sure how miserable parents in the same house are without doubt better for kids than divorced ones. It's true that like half my friends' parents got divorced in our first year of college, but it's not like the kids were in any way, shape, or form under the impression that their parents were happy before that.
I will say that I didn't actually think all that ill of the couple after reading the article: any judging I was doing was mostly about "Don't write it up in the Times" rather than because I think I know enough to judge the underlying conduct.
I think writing it up in the Times was probably motivated in large part by a desire to get the word out that they totally weren't screwing before they dropped the bomb on their respective spouses. They obviously care about what people think of them, and it's undeniable that there was something going on before the splits, so some sort of reputation damage control is in order, and having the seal of the NYT on their pseudo-fidelity is about as good as they're likely to get.
I did think quite ill of them because a) does anyone really believe that they weren't screwing, are we children here?, and b) actually I do rather think that if you're reasonably happily married (which they say they were, albeit that a) caveats that substantially), then if you start getting starbursts off one of the mums at the PTA, then I personally think it's a bit incumbent on you to subtly organise your life so that you're not seeing too much of her. Organising coupley camping holidays, FFS.
66 and 60 are right, I think. Most adults get tempted at some time or other. Most the time the morally right thing to do is to resist the temptation, or to make efforts to remove oneself from situations in which one might act upon it.
An awful lot of people fuck up, and no-one's a moral paragon, but that doesn't make fucking up morally unquestionable, or otherwise OK.
my friends' parents got divorced in our first year of college, but it's not like the kids were in any way, shape, or form under the impression that their parents were happy before that.
How important is parental happiness rather than just stability of circumstances to kids? Varies from family to family, obviously, I would say with no meaningful consensus value. That is, happiness between parents may be crucial for one family and completely beside the point for another, with no contradiction.
The people in the OP are asinine for consenting to be in the newspaper, and probably for other reasons as well.
I have no standing to speak to this, I suppose, but I'm not sure how miserable parents in the same house are without doubt better for kids than divorced ones.
Do those inclined to be judgmental feel sure that the miserable parents are better for the kids?
My parents were terribly unhappy together, and I assume they stayed together 'for the kids', although they didn't actually split up until I was a couple of years out of college. But I'm really not sure if we were better off that way, or if we would have been better off if they'd split back when they figured out how much they disliked living together. It's like trying to pick yourself an alternative set of neuroses.
The people in the OP are asinine for consenting to be in the newspaper, and probably for other reasons as well.
I agree with this, but the second part isn't adding much. Most people are assholes in a variety of ways.
Varies from family to family, obviously, I would say with no meaningful consensus value.
Yep.
69: And does anyone know if the alternative to divorce in this case would have been misery? I'm pretty sympathetic to divorce as an alternative to grinding misery; it's where it seems likely that the options were reasonably happy marriage or much better exciting new marriage that I get judgy.
And then I withhold judgment again in any actual situation where I don't know the people because I realize that I honestly don't know what was going on in any informed way.
We should get their kids on here and ask them.
Riddell has a very brief Wikipedia entry which includes: Riddell chiefly covered children and education--in 2004, she launched "Family Matters," a weekly segment that focused on family and parenting issues.
Um? I'm judging because they decided to publish a one-sided account of a giant shitstorm of their own making and presumably their former spouses and their children did not get a vote in whether they did so. Even if they asked the poor children, there are...issues of consent, to put it mildly. I will judge the hell out of that. These people are self-serving, self-involved, probable narcissists. Also they're assholes.
And my understanding of the whole marriage thing (coming from a very unmarried person) is that it's kinda like, I don't know what the future will bring, but I'm picking you to face it with, and I'm going to make a lot of really important life choices that can't be unmade on the understanding that you're picking me, too, and that we're gonna stick it out together. Call me old fashioned, but absent serious fundamental flaws in that arrangement -- say, one person is working out patterns of abuse, serious issues of economic or other kinds of deprivation raise issues of coercion / lack of consent, one party turns out to be a lying dbag and it was all based upon a fraud -- you've made a goddamn promise. You are free to break it, but not without being a serious dick. That is not to say that we're not all, in our own ways, dicks. But still: definitely a dick move.
a) does anyone really believe that they weren't screwing, are we children here?
I can actually believe this. If they got from admitting that they had feelings for each other to deciding to leave their spouses fast enough, holding out until after they'd made the break doesn't seem implausible to me. I don't see that it makes any substantial ethical difference (like, it seems like technical compliance with Natilio's steps for acceptable serial monogamy rather than anything meaningful), but it's not unbelievable.
get judgy
OK, is this just an abbreviation for judgemental? Different extension for the two terms maybe? Is there a case where an attitude is judgy rather than judgemental and vice versa?
Although I have to wonder how the author pitched it to them. A relative's real estate agent recently asked her whether she'd like to participate in a Times story. They made it sound like it would be about the house; at her request I asked a few questions, and they were way more interested in the separation that prompted the real estate listing than the house itself. The whole thing seemed way, way off. She didn't do it.
78 gets it right. Not everyone is a crazed rabbitoid fornicator.
...if you start getting starbursts off one of the mums at the PTA, then I personally think it's a bit incumbent on you to subtly organise your life so that you're not seeing too much of her.
This seems to me the right way to handle things of this nature. IIRC catholics call it "avoiding the occasion for sin." Walking up to the precipice and peering over is asking for trouble.
There is no room for Love in our bourgeois value-system.
No, Love is only for the higher income group: John Snagge, Audrey Cameron... Paul Fenoulhet.
IIRC catholics call it "avoiding the occasion for sin."
There's a lot of empirical support for the idea that one is better off arranging things so that the situation/context/opportunity for Doing The Wrong Thing doesn't come up than you are in relying on your intrinsic virtue and willpower.
Look, these people got themselves written up in the Vows column, thus almost certainly giving their neighbors and friends something to make fun of them about and reducing their own social standing, just for the sake of your titillation and reinforcement of smug prejudices. You should all be thanking them for their sacrifice.
Also, I like it how the assumption is that the former spouses bear no responsibility whatsoever for what happened. Oh, those innocent victims. I'm not saying that they're necessarily morally blameworthy (morality is complicated, here), but when a marriage ends like that there's usually a reason on both sides, which may be why the starbursts weren't avoided.
These people are self-serving, self-involved, probable narcissists.
I suspect this is true of pretty much anybody who contracts to have their romantic history detailed by a professional writer in the NYT Vows column.
you've made a goddamn promise. You are free to break it, but not without being a serious dick
However, I'd counter that "til death do us part" is a ridiculous promise that nobody has any way to realistically guarantee. I know this makes the baby Jesus puke, but marriages start and end constantly and (as I'm sure ever old-timer here is sick to death of reading me type) nobody has the first clue what's going on inside anybody else's marriage except their own and you can't even be sure you know it about your own. Other people's marital decisions: there but for the grace of Wotan...
If nothing else, the spouses did not submit the story to the NYT.
Also, notice I wrote "Joe Schmoe" and not "Joe Sixpack" which would have a more particular class connotation.
Don't forget Joe the Plumber!
Anyhow, I think the way the vows column works is that the editors select one of the announcements (which are submitted) to write up in detail. So all we know is that they submitted a wedding announcement and then didn't resist having themselves written up as a story, which isn't what I would do but hardly justifies tying them to a cross.
88: They may yet! Are they marrying each other?
I'm rooting for that! And all four collaborate on a Modern Love column!
hardly justifies tying them to a cross
This seems more a nailing sort of offense.
The Kids Had It Coming sounds like a good title for the movie.
I am aware of all internet traditions!
I'm in ur base, killing ur doodz!
Come on, guys. I know I'm funny. My mom says so. It's okay to laugh.
I'M TRYING SO HARD.
||
Holy shit, mcmanus is leaking stories to Politico: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/12/cutting-social-security-to-prevent-cuts-in-social-security.html
|>
Walt, if I were Obama, I'd be actively promoting half a dozen rumours like that, just so I could deny five of them in the State of the Union.
Ok, obviously this people suck purely because they allowed this story to be written up in the NYT (I notice that this bride's occupation is now listed as "freelancer," which might explain a lot of this), but the rest of it isn't so utterly cut and dried. By the time you're peering over the edge of temptation, doesn't it mean that your relationship isn't all that? Also, I totally believe the bit about their not sleeping together, as they seem very much the type to want all possible moral justifications on their side.
absent serious fundamental flaws in that arrangement -- say, one person is working out patterns of abuse, serious issues of economic or other kinds of deprivation raise issues of coercion / lack of consent, one party turns out to be a lying dbag and it was all based upon a fraud -- you've made a goddamn promise. You are free to break it, but not without being a serious dick. That is not to say that we're not all, in our own ways, dicks. But still: definitely a dick move.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Anyone who's ever gotten divorced when they weren't facing regular beatings or debtor's prison has made a dick move? If that's your definition of marriage, you're welcome to it, but leave the rest of us out of it.
Shorter: Ditto to apo in 87.2.
Sort of off topic, but that NYMag Daily Intel posted pointed to this old vows column:
ON Ted Skala's 35th birthday, he dug a six-foot hole at the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas to find an engagement stone as extraordinary as his feelings for Erika Fredell.
WTF? This is something people do? It's legal? Holy smokes, it is! And it only costs $7 to try! Craziness.
From the website:
Tools are not necessary for diamond searching. A good way to search for diamonds is to walk up and down the rows looking for diamonds lying on top of the ground. However, most visitors like to dig in the soil. Therefore, you have the options of bringing your own tools from home, or you may purchase or rent tools here.Of course, I too would want to dig. What's the point of just keeping a weather eye open for diamonds?
There are also places in California where you can pan for gold.
Many a happy hour I have spent picking over bits of slag in old mineshaft tailings.
IYKWIM, AITYD
Gold is rare. Diamonds are just DeBeers rare.
Huh. The bride in question has given a bit of a response.
109: The hand displayed for that article is hideous.
There is no room for Love in our bourgeois value-system.
We poor sinners shun the perfect love of Christ more than we fear the Father's blasting wrath because -- contra 1 Samuel 15:22 -- while the one merely exacts compliance, and nothing is more bourgeois than compliance, reward and punishment, the other motivates sacrifice, and very few things are less bourgeois than sacrifice.
110: You're right. It's been boiled or something.
110: Oh, God, sausage fingers!
102: Yup, dick move. I don't inherently judge dick moves bc I think they're impossible to avoid completely (within reason; Stalin, for example, does not count), but I also think it's sort of understood that you should at least try to avoid making them. With this particular incident, it's as if they were competing in the dick move olympics, and then after their heat they put an unscheduled stop to all further competition while they performed a 10 minute choreographed end zone dance to a 90s-era megamix.
and then after their heat they put an unscheduled stop to all further competition while they performed a 10 minute choreographed end zone dance to a 90s-era megamix.
Which would, of course, totally win them gold in the dick move olympics.
dick move olympics
Oh, the links one could post.
Riddell declines to say whether she or her husband asked for their exes' consent to tell their story in the Times, or at least notified them that it was in the works. "I really don't want to wade into this any further than we already have," she says. "It's not helpful to anybody."
That would be a "no" then?
111: Doesn't compliance sometimes require sacrifice? Is the distinction that between being told,"You cannot eat that cookie!" and deciding on your own to give the cookie to Jesus?
Or should I just go back to my previous policy of just assuming that Filippanter is just too deep for me when I don't understand him?
119.2 -- Too much "just" -- but no justice.
118: You're not being "helpful", dsquared!
119: But, you have to really want to give the cookie to Jesus.
114: Aw. A welcome warm fuzzy.
Also, I don't know what this business is about cookies, but we had way too many of the buttery kind in the house, and, determined not to gain more weight than the recent ex-girlfriend, I decided they simply could not remain. So I ate them all at once.
Well, in a 24 hour period. Turns out one's digestive system sort of objects to that kind of thing after adolescence? I think I once (twice? a few times?) used similar logic wrt to fun substances, and it turned out about the same.
Doesn't compliance sometimes require sacrifice? Is the distinction that between being told,"You cannot eat that cookie!" and deciding on your own to give the cookie to Jesus?
Fortune 500 companies advertise fairly often for "compliance counsel/consultants/etc.," but I've never seen a listing for a "sacrifice consultant," if that helps.*
Or should I just go back to my previous policy of just assuming that Filippanter is just too deep for me when I don't understand him?
"Willfully obscure" is more apt than I care to admit very damaging to my self-esteem. Dude. Dude. Whoa. Dude.
But, you have to really want to give the cookie to Jesus.
The cookie always already abides with Jesus.
* From whom, one assumes, a "quest consultant" could be expected to rescue a "maidenhead provider, royal."
111, 124: I looked up 1 Samuel 15:22
Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as much as in obeying the LORD?
To obey is better than sacrifice,
and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
That's about what God favors not people prefer.
I guess I was wrong to bring up cookies. Maybe that's the difference between Santa Claus and God -- Santa Claus likes cookies, but if you're feeding God you better go with meat.
124, 125: But I guess I'm avoiding the part that I really don't understand -- what you mean by Sacrifice. Clearly, you're not talking about the kind of prescribed rituals in the passage from Samuel.
126: from the link "Most cookies left out for Santa end up being fed to the reindeer."
That doesn't mean that Santa doesn't like cookies. It just means that even he can only eat so many.
127: Loving your neighbor as yourself, even if he is a huge asshole.
Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as much as in obeying the LORD?
To obey is better than sacrifice,
and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
"I like the smell of burning flesh. But I like being obeyed even better."
127: Christmas is, inter alia, an opportune season to ruminate on what changes from the Old Testament to the New. Cough Jesus cough Easter cough.
Back to the OP: One of the exes is cross about the story.
133: Yes! And he comes off as a jag, too. (Sorry -- the implication that his daughter is now going to be kidnapped because her picture was in the paper and he is rich is beyond ridiculous.)
134: That was my thought too. Except I'm not sure what "jag" means here -- similar to prick?
133, 134: It's surprising how often people pass up the easy "I won't comment, for the sake of the children/the good of the nation/your mom."
Maybe The New York Times has forgotten, but New York can still be a dangerous town for children of wealthy people.
Wow--I'm not sure he could have possibly phrased in a way that would have made him come across any worse. Beautiful.
136: Yes, but I can hardly judge.
I keep saying to myself I won't comment for the sake of keeping my job...
He didn't sound that bad to me -- bitching particularly about the picture of the daughter was stupid, but it's a conventional sort of stupid. I'd guess that he's probably a twerp, just because the situation seems like everyone involved is likely to be, but nothing he said struck me as putting him in a terribly bad light.
I'm not sure what "jag" means here
New York can still be a dangerous town for children of wealthy people.
He knows that drug dealers deliver now, right?
Knecht, will you do your namesake's job and beat these reprobates for me?
And he comes off as a jag "new media" PR guy at an investment bank, too. (On first glance I thought he'd actually gone into investment banking himself, but I suppose this is perhaps not quite as bad.)