Last fall in Merrimack, N.H., a former town councilor infuriated by one bird spent months pressing for an ordinance with fines that climbed to $500, prompting one 40-year resident to ask: “We’re an agricultural town. If people moved here and now, all of a sudden, don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”...
Because of the covid lockdown and because of the rising price of eggs, a lot of people were buying chicks, and some of those chicks grew up to be roosters.
"'You’ve put all these things aside because you’re a mom and you’re taking care of a family,' she said.... 'Then you think: Is that all I am good for? When did I stop being a person?' Menopause lent a kind of fury to Ruchi’s midlife turmoil. 'I actually thought I was crazy, because I was irritated at everything,' she said.... 'There was a time when I was like, "Oh my gosh. How are we going to do this? How is this going to work? What is my family going to say?"... I am a strong person. I am a capable person. My family is very, very, very important to me, but I am more than my kids and my husband. I think I kind of forgot that.'"
1. When her husband forgot her birthday, the wife remembered that she had forgotten that she was a person.
2. Do you get much anonymity by limiting the NYT to using only your first name when your first name is as unusual as Ruchi? (I did look it up, and I can see that in India, it is a very common name.)
3. From the anecdotes in the article, I get the impression that when these long-term marriages dissolve, the man finds another woman (to take care of him?) and the woman embraces independence.
4. From the comments over there: "This article contains the second reference I’ve seen recently to menopause as the cause of women becoming intolerant. I feel like that’s a slippery slope. I offer for consideration the fact that many, many women in our society are expected to carry loads that are unreasonable. I think that might contribute to 'intolerance' more than any hormonal shifts. And I believe such intolerance is valid."
The former lieutenant governor, who was 47, served in the role from 2018 to 2022 under Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam. In 2019, two women accused Fairfax of sexual assault years earlier, prompting Virginia Democrats to call for his resignation....
When he ran in the Democratic primary for governor in 2021, Fairfax, who was Black, said during the gubernatorial debate he was treated like George Floyd and Emmett Till when Democrats immediately called for his resignation after the women made the allegations.
Baron Cohen says his workout regime with the celebrity trainer Alfonso Moretti stops his mind spinning. “Instead of lying in bed overthinking and staring at my phone, I get up, jump on FaceTime and train with Alfonso. It sets a positive tone for the whole day.”...
We all confront mortality, invisibility, loss of sexual appeal and having to use reading glasses in dark restaurants: the task is to work out the most constructive way to deal with all that....
He's "positive" and "constructive" and looking at us angrily. I'm sad to see he got divorced!
Headline at Whiskey Riff, which I found after I heard Joe Rogan do the revealing and I listened to the song. You can find video of both the Joe Rogan segment and the song at that link.
... Joe shares some rather intimate details about Anthony’s seemingly pending divorce, and how it sparked this song. The “Scornful Woman” is Oliver’s wife, Tiffany, and from the side of the story we’re given, it sounds like she’s trying to take as much money as she can off him.
“He starts making millions of dollars, playing arenas. The wife divorces him. She wants everything. She wants EVERYTHING. She wants more than half. She wants all the money he’s going to be making in the future because she was with him when he was broke. It’s f***** crazy...."
It's not crazy for her to want more than half. If you are married and sharing equally, and you've gone through the poor times together — maybe you scrimped together while one of you went to medical school — then you're owed a share of the earnings that only arrive later.
When Anthony's song “Rich Men North of Richmond" made him an overnight sensation in 2023, he and Tiffany and their 2 children were presented as the definition of happiness.
The new song says "She'll turn a warm afternoon/Into a cold, cold one."
"One imagines [JD] Vance gasping in horror at Mlotek’s account of the 'airiness' with which she makes her wedding vows, recalling 'how easy it was to swear I would want what I had'—as if marriage might be a commitment to one’s desires rather than a commitment to another person, or a role in a community. Reactionary and revolutionary views of marriage alike offer narrative satisfactions that the liberal view seems to lack. Eulogizing a marriage undertaken in this spirit presents a storytelling challenge: it requires inventing the stakes yourself. Mlotek—like many brides and grooms writing custom vows—doesn’t quite pull it off. But she does make privacy and its place in love feel idealistic and almost subversive. Her book is subtitled 'A Memoir of Romance and Divorce,' and her reticence is perhaps the most romantic thing about it, testifying to an abiding intimacy that transcends any legal relationship. After she and her husband decide to separate, she manages to avoid telling most of her family and friends for nearly a year...."
Idealistic and subversive privacy in love... but you can still write a memoir about it... when the love dissipates beyond mere airiness and into utter nonexistence.
The aforementioned JD Vance is also a memoirist, as the New Yorker article pauses to say: "In 'Hillbilly Elegy,' his parents’ separation is the wellspring of childhood suffering; his grandparents’ home is the one source of stability, and he idealizes their volatile union." For the record, Mlotek and her erstwhile husband had no children, or even pets.
"I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth."
"... to be perhaps the most famous, the most glamorous movie star in the world. I was, however, just the right age to experience her as a pop culture mainstay and occasional punchline. This was Ms. Taylor’s frosted-tips-and-caftans era, when she appeared in front of a camera only to make soft-focus perfume ads, parodied by 'Saturday Night Live.' It was the time of her union with Mr. Fortensky, a construction worker she’d met in rehab, and whom she married at her friend Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch."
I'm not interested enough in Jennifer Lopez to care about her multiple marriages and divorces, and Elizabeth Taylor began a bit before my time, but I remember the Elizabeth Taylor of the 1960s, and that sets me apart from Weiner, who arrived after Taylor's prime. I'm still quite interested in Taylor, even more so after watching this new HBO documentary:
Taylor critiques fame. I thought this review from Chris Cassingham was apt: "At a time when the public’s access to celebrities’ personal lives is simultaneously at its greatest and most calculated, the raw vulnerability of Taylor’s recollections is necessarily tempered when transposed onto something so pedestrian as Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes often is. If the material at [director Nanette] Burstein’s disposal holds within it deep insights about the toxic nature of hypervisible celebrity, about an industry’s exploitations, her film deploys them hesitantly...."
"She typed back: 'Well, I have Kleenex and margaritas. By Google Maps, you live 34 minutes from here.' 'When she opened the door, I said, "How about a hug for an old friend"... And she hugged me. And I gotta tell you, that hug alone was kind of like putting an electric blanket on high around me.'... They remarried... Why?
'To right an old wrong,' [she said], 'I say this to him over and over again, how incredibly rare it is to have a chance to right a wrong. To have a chance to have a redo is just nothing short of a miracle.'"
From the comments over there: "I have never forgiven our parents for divorcing while we children were teenagers — because years later they got back together again and eventually remarried. They put us kids through a lot, and apparently it was completely unnecessary. It's unfashionable for couples to 'stay together for the sake of the children,' but absent abuse, I wish more would consider it."
"He packed a bag, got in his Jeep and boarded a ferry. We had been married for nearly 21 years.
When he reached New York City, he laid out his narrative: He thought he had wanted our life but didn’t. He thought he was happy but wasn’t. A switch had flipped. He didn’t want our house or our apartment. He didn’t want any custody of our children."
All over the world, women are joining forces under one roof, sharing the load of child care and household bills through the age-old power of sisterhood....
"... carved by a robot.
At a workshop in Carrara, Italy, a robot sculptor has been putting the finishing touches on a copy of the Horse of Selene, scheduled to go on display in London during the first week of September. The horse is one of the best known of the 2,500-year-old sculptures — also known as the Parthenon Marbles — taken from the Acropolis in Athens in the early 1800s by Thomas Bruce, the seventh earl of Elgin, when he was ambassador to the occupying Ottoman Empire.... The British government says Elgin had permission to remove them. Others say the permission was limited to pieces found in the rubble.... In any case, Elgin had the 5th-century B.C. marbles torn down from the Parthenon and shipped to Britain, where he intended to display them privately in his home. He instead sold them to the British government for $42,000 to help pay for a costly divorce."
"In 1973, when Roe issued, abortion law was in a state of change across the nation. As the Supreme Court itself noted, there was a marked trend in state legislatures 'toward liberalization of abortion statutes.' That movement for legislative change ran parallel to another law revision effort then underway — the change from fault to no-fault divorce regimes, a reform that swept through the state legislatures and captured all of them by the mid-1980s. No measured motion, the Roe decision left virtually no state with laws fully conforming to the Court’s delineation of abortion regulation still permissible. Around that extraordinary decision, a well-organized and vocal right-to-life movement rallied and succeeded, for a considerable time, in turning the legislative tide in the opposite direction."
"Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship.
Both sides often fail to recognize how profoundly the rules of family life have changed over the past half century....
Deciding which people to keep in or out of one’s life has become an important strategy to achieve that happiness....
"'The latest attitude on divorce by the law is to prevent frivolous dissolutions,' read the article, which was later removed after public backlash.
China is fighting a rising divorce rate through state counselling and forcing couples who want to split into a one-month 'cooling off' period.... The topic drew 980 million views in 48 hours on Weibo, China’s leading social media platform...."
"Her lovers are said to have included the INXS singer Michael Hutchence, the actors Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, Polish counts and English noblemen. She was admired by Elvis Presley — 'he always sent me champagne' — and had advances from Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. The break-up of her marriage to Captain Arthur Cameron Corbett in 1970 became a landmark case after a judge declared it could be annulled due to Ashley’s birth certificate registering her as male.... She was publicly outed as trans in the Sunday People in 1961, leading to all her bookings being cancelled overnight and people assaulting her in the street."
Who was Captain Arthur Cameron Corbett? His claim to fame is merely that he got that marriage annulled. Other than that, he was some British aristocrat — 3rd Baron Rowallan. He met Ashley in 1960, the year of her transitioning, and just before the public outing, and married her in 1963. He had to know what he was doing, and when the marriage broke down, there was alimony to avoid paying.
British mumbo-jumbo from Corbett's Wikipedia page: "Dexter a salmon Proper holding in its mouth a jewelled ring Or sinister a seal Proper."
"And to this day, I am astonished that my parents undertook a similar path with the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church.... My father was a worldly 32 and my mother a winsome 19 when they met.... He was agnostic, though his parents were Presbyterian. She was Catholic.... [A] brush with death prompted him to convert to Catholicism.... Not long thereafter, my three siblings and I noticed that our parents’ double bed was replaced by twin beds.... What we didn’t know was that my father had been married before meeting my mother. His first marriage lasted about two years, and because the church refused to recognize the divorce and end of that union, my parents could not receive the sacrament of matrimony. During my father’s immersion into Catholicism, it was pointed out that without the sacrament of matrimony performed by a priest, my parents were technically living in sin. Mortal sin.... Mom and Dad, with the bishop’s permission, and after taking a solemn vow, could leave the marital bed and replace it with chaste cohabitation.... 'No one is to know of the brother-sister relationship except the Advocate Father O’Brien, the Pastor, the Tribunal, and the confessors of the parties,' the tribunal’s letter said.... [N]ine years after my father’s heart attack and their decision to have a celibate marriage, his first wife died. On an ordinary Tuesday evening in 1970, Mom and Dad were married in secrecy at our parish church...."
"'I’ve read where you said you weren’t miserable, but you also knew you weren’t happy,' Winfrey said. 'And so you wanted to bring a happy version of yourself to your son. Which I think is about the best gift anybody can give to their children.'"
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