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Posts Tagged ‘Gone With The Wind

What we have here is a failure to communicate…

Summer’s ending, and with it, the Summer Reading Season…  So, as readers shift back into gear, and think back over the books that occupied their breaks, Dan Wilbur offers Better Book Titles, where one will find such clarifying emendations as:

AKA, Guns, Germs, and Steel: Jared Diamond

AKA, The Symposium: Plato

AKA, The DaVinci Code: Dan Brown

AKA, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo: Stieg Larsson

One can find many, many more– and submit one’s own– here.

As we vacuum the sand from our volumes, we might wish a happy birthday to author Jacqueline Susann; she was born on this date in 1921.  Having been disappointed by her luck as an actress and a model, Ms. Susann turned to the typewriter.  Her first novel, Every Night, Josephine (or as Better Book Titles might have it, My Poodle and Me), was a best-seller.  Her second, Valley of the Dolls (or, a la BBT, Booze, Babes, and Pills) was the best-seller:  it topped the chart for 22 weeks, and by the time of Susann’s death in 1974, had sold over 17 million copies, making it the best-selling novel of all time.  According to The Internet Public Library, it’s still Number One, with current cumulative sales of 30 million (two million copies ahead of runner-up Gone With the Wind).

Jacqueline Susann (source)

Spice is the variety of life…

Source: The Presurfer (to whom, ToTH)

From Allspice to Vanilla, all one could want to know– “The Spice Encyclopedia.”

A veritable treasure trove.  For instance, while your correspondent has consumed enough coriander to consider himself an expert, he did not know that:

Coriander is probably one of the first spices used by mankind, having been known as early as 5000 BC. Sanskrit writings dating from about 1500 BC also spoke of it. In the Old Testament “manna” is described as “white like Coriander Seed.” (Exodus 16:31) The Romans spread it throughout Europe and it was one of the first spices to arrive in America…

Coriander is not interchangable with cilantro, although they are from the same plant…

They’re all there.

As we’re remembering the difference between and teaspoon and a tablespoon, we might remember that Butterfly McQueen was born Thelma McQueen in Tampa, Florida on this date in 1911.  While she enjoyed a long career as an actress, she is surely best-known for her first role, as Prissy in Gone With the Wind, and for her immortal line, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!”

Butterfly McQueen

Lifestyles of the Rich and Fictional…

Home of Gerald & Ellen O’Hara, Katie Scarlett O’Hara, Suellen & Carreen (Gone With The Wind)  2007, India ink and graphite on vellum, 30 x 42 inches.

For artist Mark Bennett, it’s all about the context…  pushing his pens into corners that the cameras can’t reach, he provides floorplans for the homes of famous movie and television characters, from the O’Hara’s to Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson; from the Jetsons to Jeannie.

Explore them here and here.

As we wrestle with Zillow, we might recall that this was a bad date for Roman republicanism:  on this date in 42 BCE, Brutus’s army was decisively defeated by Mark Antony, Octavian, and their troops at the Second Battle of Philippi in the Roman Republican Civil War.  Brutus, who’d joined Cassius in the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar two years earlier, committed suicide.

Brutus, resting before the battle (source: Heritage History)

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