Ever since Ben Carson ran for President, I've been less impressed with pediatric neurosurgeons.
Ugh I'm having an urge to make a gross joke and my internal war is warring.
I think the joke is that she had no career using that degree that the obituarist felt compelled to note, beyond giving away her husband's or her family's money in prestigious settings?
My feelings were...complicated, along the lines of 4 and the OP. She had a long and apparently happy and fruitful life. And yet, starting with that "pretty," her role as a woman was clearly primary. So it's a good life, but strongly indicative of forces that lead to not-good lives for many. And that's setting aside the fact that she must have been crazy wealthy, not even counting her husband's income.
5: I wondered if the inclusion of "pretty" was normal practice for a wedding announcement of this sort at the time, or if it was considered necessary to make a biochemist sound like a plausible wife.
Granted just about any red-blooded American male would be happy to marry the daughter of the Chase National Bank Chairman.
If only wedding announcements would knock off with the flattery of the bride, they might come to be respected as literature.
"Married. Harriet Aldrich, 22, Not bad, considering all the time she has spent reading, daughter of Chase National Bank Chairman Winthrop Aldrich; and Lieut. Edgar A. Bering Jr., 27, Navy research doctor at the Harvard Medical School; in Manhattan."
"...and Lieut. Edgar A. Bering Jr., 27, grumpy, pallid Navy research doctor at the Harvard Medical School; in Manhattan."
I like the second wedding announcement at that link: Dale Carnegie and his secretary.
The second announcement:
Married. Dale Carnegie, 55, famed meeter and influencer; and Dorothy Price Vanderpool, 32, Carnegie Institute secretary; both for the second time; on the eighth publication anniversary of his classic How To Win Friends & Influence People; in Tulsa. Said he: "Even after I wrote that book, it took me eight years to influence a woman to marry me."
From her photo, she might have had one european parent, but not both. Her obit
My guess: since the wedding announcement mentions the bride's rich banker dad, the writer thought people should know the groom wasn't necessarily marrying her for her money.
Sigourney Thayer, whose death is reported immediately below, also had a lively (though brief) time here on earth.
Yes indeed. Sigourney Weaver named herself after a minor character in The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Sigourney Howard, who was presumably the wife of a Mr. Sigourney Howard.
Very minor. She never appears and is mentioned only once.
I came here to drink cocktails and kick ass, and I'm all out of cocktails.
Actually mentioned more than once, but not by name. She's Jordan Baker's aunt, described by Nick as "senile" and "about a thousand years old".
I've never even pretended I'm going to try to read The Great Gatsby.
You're only as old as your personal frame of reference makes you.
"You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage and then retreating back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that keeps them together and lets other people clean up the mess they make."
Gatsby is a legit great book. Let me be the first to say it's worth reading.
20, 23: The movie version with Robert Redford and Sam Waterston from the 70s is currently on netfix.
Seconding 24. Although now this thread has me imagining a Gatsby/Alien crossover.
The shocking moment when Tom hits Gatsby with a fire extinguisher, knocking his head off his shoulders and revealing him to be secretly Jewish?
Gatsby is worth reading but is not a great book. It's the last three chapters or so of a great book that Fitzgerald didn't actually write.
OT, but this is something Trump wrote recently in a visitors' book. See if you can guess where he was visiting.
It is a great honor to be here with all my friends -- so amazing and will never forget!
Has to be the carousel ride at the Western Wall.
I already know the answer to 30, so I'll ask a related question- when people said the paper he put in the western wall was a copy of the electoral map, were they joking or not?
35 He sure knows branding, I'll give him that.
12 ""An imaginative personage with inclinations to vagabonding and pencraft." And quite striking.
33: They were joking; no one knows what was on it. Those papers are meant to be private; when Obama put one in someone found it and leaked it, so the rabbi in charge is more careful about making sure the notes of VIPs are quickly removed.
Somebody didn't "find it". Some asshole dug it out and brought it to a newspaper.
Yes. At least, as I recall, Obama had the sense and decorum to write something appropriate. Best case scenario, Trump wrote something related to that weird and awful prosperity Gospel con he's occasionally been associated with.
Since he was at a wall, he probably prayed for his own wall.
Her paternal aunt was John D. Rockefeller's wife, her paternal grandfather was a Republican senator from Rhode Island for 30 years, all descended from John Winthrop the founder of Massachussets; her mother grew up in this house. I should hope she did some charity work over the course of 50 years.
Winchester is a well off town, but it's not crazy rich like Greenwich or New Canaan. So it doesn't sound like she led a lavish lifestyle for a rich woman.
Somebody didn't "find it". Some asshole dug it out and brought it to a newspaper.
Finding does not preclude prior seeking.
But watching where somebody places something and then picking it up isn't really finding.
Hicks: The rich Aliens are different from you and me.
Ripley: Yeah. They have more mouths.
In my younger and more vulnerable years Ellen Ripley gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit," she said, "it's the only way to be sure."
That's Trump's policy on endangered species sightings.
"This is it! We're fucked! Game over, man! Game over! And there you sit calmly eating cucumber sandwiches!"
"Well, I can't eat cucumber sandwiches in an agitated manner."
Cucumber sandwiches are nice, but they are even better if you leave out the cucumber.
55: no it isn't, alas, because I misquoted; in the original it's muffins that you can't eat in an agitated manner. (Because the butter would probably get on your cuffs.)
That's ok ajay. A Great American Novel isn't written in one draft.
"It was the best of times. Mostly. I guess sometimes bad things happened and it felt like the worst of times."
Game over, old sport. Game over.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the part of the stream that is farther down river, except that this stream is a metaphor for time and the boats represent time machines."
There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, neatly dressed and ready with a cheerful greeting for everyone he met, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.
"In a hole in the ground there lived a CHUD - child-sized, hairy, underground dweller.
"It smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, and which revealed a second extendable set of jaws inside the first, surrounded by razor sharp teeth."
"Call me Ishmael Ray Jay. Or call me Ray. Or call me Jay."
In space, no one can hear the screaming that comes across the sky.
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull, and a second set of jaws in his throat for grasping the prey in his mouth.
History, Steven said, is a nightmare where you are standing in front of the class and you forgot to wear any clothes. I hate that when that happens.
"You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the slightly darker blue pill, the one that's more capsule shaped and has "600 mg" written on it in very small letters, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
OT: Have you all seen the paint colors invented by the neural network?
"Rhett, Rhett. Where shall I go? What shall I do?"
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut. I don't give a flying fuck at the moon."
72: It always starts out small like that. Today, they're inventing dull paint colors with stupid names, but in the future they'll be trying to kill Sigourney Weaver and bring xenomorphs back to Earth.
Nah. AI is going to grow up to marry a celebrity, and at the wedding we'll play videos of how it used to make up paint colors.
"Ask not for whom the bell tolls. What am I, the bell's press hack?"