| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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It's the latest part in the PBS trend of taking a bunch of people and making them live in another time -- this time Edwardian England. One family pretended to be the masters of an enormous manor house, and 8 others pretended to be the servants. It looks like it's going to turn out to be a version of the Stanford Prison Experiment. The master family (especially the little boy) are taking to their roles remarkably easily. The previews for next week show the servants revolting against them, which is frankly surprising -- you'd think these people knew what they were getting into when the signed up for the project. Of course a scullery maid is going to have a hard time! The man who has become the butler, Mr. Edgar, is the grandson of a butler from that time period, and he is the most interesting of all the people. He told us a bit about his grandfather, who was an icy fellow that sounded a lot like the man Anthony Hopkins played in "Remains of the Day." At one point, Mr. Edgar finds two of the male servants passed out on the lawn after having drunk too much the night before, and he nearly broke down. Tears came out of his eyes! Then he said that he understood why his grandfather was the way he was -- you need "discipline, discipline, discipline" if you want to keep your footmen in check. I felt so badly for the poor man. I think the next episode is showing tonight -- 8 pm, my time -- if you're curious. |
and I am 43% snob |
Thank God this country never had such a rigid social class system. |
id love to see the answers to your snob quiz spider. wow, id be an uppity schoolmaster who gets wacked in ww1. funny kazoo. thats the same response i got before i noticed i forgot to check my gender. is your step-dad an engineer too? |
Umm... crudity offends me more than nudity. I have had conversations with the people who bag my groceries. I would have a relationship with someone unemployed. Walmart = cheap crap. Rabbit = gift for my niece. I don't remember the others... |
I die in the trenches along with my fellow schoolmaster, Patrick. 50% snob. |
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I had a snob rating of 67% and my answers were almost the same as Spiders, except I don't date unemployed people, ever. |
How could you answer the crudity vs. nudity question any differently than I have? You can be tolerant towards nudity and intolerant towards crudity easily. (Art, naked babies, nude beaches, your SO lying in bed....these aren't crude.) But how could you be against nudity and not crudity? Because if you're against it, you think...it's...crude, right? Why else would you be against it? I don't get it. And I will continue thinking about this instead of my spreadsheets until it's time to go home. |
The next episode of Manor House is on tonight, not next week. |
From the OED: Of products of the mind: Not matured, not completely thought out or worked up; ill-digested Of literary or artistic work: Lacking finish, or maturity of treatment; rough, unpolished. Of natural objects: Coarse, clumsy. Then there is this: In the natural or raw state; `not changed by any process or preparation' (J.); not manufactured, refined, tempered, etc.; of bricks, unbaked. I guess nudity would be exactly that, although it seems to be about rocks and stuff, not the human body. Just my two cents. |
1) You can be crude and nude. 2) You can be nude but not crude. 3) You can be crude but not nude. But the question is, how could someone be offended by #2 and not #3? Or maybe the question is structurally flawed and needs to be tossed. Or as Jeeves said about Nietzsche, it's fundamentally unsound. 3 minutes to go before I go. |
I felt an earthquake this morning. I thought there were rats in my heater making it shake. |
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Based on my dad's current job, since he retired from AT&T. It sounds amazingly like me, and very much like my life now, or what I want in life now, and it said I would be a secretary, which was what I did when I did work. Weird. |
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42% snob |
Did not see the male/female button there. When it said I sewed and aranged flowers for the church.... |
and i meet my end all matilda-esque |
When I was a young man I carried my pack And I lived the free life of a rover From the Murrays green basin to the dusty outback I waltzed my Matilda all over Then in nineteen fifteen my country said Son It's time to stop rambling 'cause there's work to be done So they gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun And they sent me away to the war And the band played Waltzing Matilda As we sailed away from the quay And amidst all the tears and the shouts and the cheers We sailed off to Gallipoli How well I remember that terrible day How the blood stained the sand and the water And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter Johnny Turk he was ready, he primed himself well He chased us with bullets, he rained us with shells And in five minutes flat he'd blown us all to hell Nearly blew us right back to Australia But the band played Waltzing Matilda As we stopped to bury our slain We buried ours and the Turks buried theirs Then we started all over again Now those that were left, well we tried to survive In a mad world of blood, death and fire And for ten weary weeks I kept myself alive But around me the corpses piled higher Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over tit And when I woke up in my hospital bed And saw what it had done, I wished I was dead Never knew there were worse things than dying For no more I'll go waltzing Matilda All around the green bush far and near For to hump tent and pegs, a man needs two legs No more waltzing Matilda for me So they collected the cripples, the wounded, the maimed And they shipped us back home to Australia The armless, the legless, the blind, the insane Those proud wounded heroes of Suvla And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay I looked at the place where my legs used to be And thank Christ there was nobody waiting for me To grieve and to mourn and to pity And the band played Waltzing Matilda As they carried us down the gangway But nobody cheered, they just stood and stared Then turned all their faces away And now every April I sit on my porch And I watch the parade pass before me And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march Reliving old dreams of past glory And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war And the young people ask, "What are they marching for?" And I ask myself the same question And the band plays Waltzing Matilda And the old men answer to the call But year after year their numbers get fewer Some day no one will march there at all Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me And their ghosts may be heard as you pass the Billabong Who'll come-a-waltzing Matilda with me? i got the lyrics from: http://www.pogues.com/Releases/Lyrics/LPs/RumSodomy/Waltzing.html Read the bit at the bottom of the page. |
I wasn't kidding about the Stanford Prison Experiment. The "master" of the manor (IRL some piddling businessman) is zestfully embracing his role of lord of all he surveys as if he were born to it. Holding pheasant hunting parties, sipping port and laughing manfully with the aristocrat neighbors, dressing down the staff...it's a quite remarkable transformation. His wife (an ER doctor IRL) is warming to her part, as well, admitting she doesn't mind being passive and allowing her husband to make all the decisions. (She did express regret that she's not spending more time with her children and sister, though.) Though she also "forgot" for a (rather long) moment that none of this was real, and thought her son would inherit the property. That's...crazy.... And her sister! Poor Miss Anson, she's had a mental breakdown from being so suffocated in her role and has had to take time off for the sake of her nerves. It's so tragic! I don't know whether to laugh at the art becoming life in action, or feel terribly for her and all the women like her back in the day. The poor butler, whose grandfather was a real butler, is taking his role to heart. He becomes so distressed when the master is displeased with him...it's awful seeing an old man cry like that. Actually, the whole thing is becoming horrifying. At one point the narrator pointed out that the gentry didn't like the term "weekend" because it implied that they were employed during the week and were having two days of rest. Isn't that appalling? Stuff American Idol -- this is the reality television I care about. |
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I watched the first half hour last night. The "revolt" so to speak. I actually found myself getting pissed off at some of these people working on the bottom. They disrespected the butler WAYYYYYY too much. They weren't putting the situation into the times and expected it to be easy labor with plenty of time off. The ones I felt sorry for were the ones doing their jobs and trying hard to keep things appropriate to the era, and getting stuck with the extra work since they were short staffed. In the end they got 1/2 day off a week for all of them. The butler is really taking this part to heart and doing an amazing job. But he has not gotten the respect he deserved from the other workers. Though he might have taken the issue to his employer sooner, that is the only fault I saw in him. It was my first time watching it but it was totally interesting. |
I read on the PBS site that a lot of the people are still in contact with him -- the master family sees him a lot, and I think Rob the footman and someone else are planning to take a vacation with him in the future. I think that, for what this project is, it's a shame that some of the below-stairs people (like Kenny) don't do their fair share of the work. There used to be a scullery maid, Kelly, who thought she was scrubbing pots too much and tried to get everyone else to help her. I mean, true, no one wants to scrub pots for 16 hours a day, but didn't she know that's what her job would be when she signed up? If you want realism, you just sack up and do the job. And then, Kelly chose to leave the project in the middle of the house's first big dinner party -- I thought that was very bad. |
Oh, and I just adore the butler! |
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Whee! |