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Astor: ‘Churchill, If I Were Your Wife…’

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Perhaps you’ve heard this story about Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Nancy Astor, who apparently had a famous rivalry. Astor was the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons (1919). Her Wikipedia page notes her quick wit and, though they are poorly documented, her trading of insults with Churchill. One rumored exchange says Churchill disliked her being in parliament, saying that having a woman there was like being intruded upon in the bathroom. Astor replied, “You’re not handsome enough to have such fears.”

A familiar anecdote has the viscountess in a disdainful state of her prime minister. She says, “If I were your wife, I’d poison your coffee.” Churchill replies, “If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”

Astor’s Wikipedia scholars attribute this quote, not to Churchill, but to his marvelously funny friend, Lord Birkenhead. I can’t suggest Birkenhead did not have this exchange, but I’m fascinated to learn that the insult is much older than he, Churchill, or Astor. The Quote Investigator, my new favorite website, reports the earliest recording of this joke comes from an 1899 Oswego, New York, newspaper. It was completely anonymous, being passed off as something the reporter overheard on the subway. The account was picked up by many newspapers, so by the time Birkenhead and Astor may have conversed, it would have been an old joke.

What’s more amusing is many people have claimed credit for it or given it to others. When Groucho Marx told the joke in 1962, he told it of George B. Shaw insulting a woman in his audience. In 1900, a comic named Pinckney claimed to have invented the dialogue a short time before the interview and that it had already worn itself out by flying around the world.

So if Lady Astor actually told Churchill or Birkenhead that she would poison them if they were married, she had plenty of opportunity to know she was setting herself up for a great joke.

Religion

Who is my neighbor? A terrorist, apparently.

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Little did I know, when I moved to Robbinsdale, Minnesota, that I was relocating to a seedbed of treason. But so it appears. Not one but two jihadist casualties overseas have been identified as former students at Robbinsdale Cooper High School. And it gets closer than that, as I’ll explain.

First, a little orientation. Robbinsdale Cooper High School is not in fact located in Robbinsdale. The historical reasons are convoluted (I don’t actually know them), but enough to say that the school district includes several inner ring suburbs. In any case, it’s close to me.

More than that, early reports (the information seems to have been redacted now; perhaps it was in error) stated that the latest casualty, Douglas McAuthor (sic) McCain, dead in Syria, lived on Oregon Avenue in New Hope.

Before I bought my house, I lived in an apartment building on Oregon Avenue in New Hope. New Hope isn’t that big. Oregon Avenue isn’t that long. We were neighbors. I very likely rubbed shoulders with him at some point.

Even so, I find it hard to generate a lot of sympathy for the young man. He was born in America, and New Hope isn’t a ghetto. He had ample opportunities to respond to the gospel. Instead he joined a death cult to murder infidels and rape women.

Still, after some consideration, I can think of a couple reasons to pity him. Continue reading Who is my neighbor? A terrorist, apparently. →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Russian Roulette’ and ‘Mr. Swirlee,’ by Mike Faricy

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I’m inclined to support my local mystery writers, as you know, so when I got a Kindle deal on one of Mike Faricy’s Dev Haskell mysteries, I thought I’d try it out. Glad I did. These are not highbrow mysteries, nor are they world-weary meditations on existential dilemmas. They’re just fun private eye stories that poke gentle fun at the form. I liked them.

Dev Haskell is a private eye in St. Paul. He has no office, but does a marginal business out of a string of scruffy bars. At the beginning of Russian Roulette he’s approached in one of those bars by a drop dead gorgeous woman with an accent (she says it’s French and he goes along with it) who asks him to look for her missing sister. Thinking more with a lower organ than with his higher functions, he follows her into a plot involving prostitution and sex trafficking.

The big joke in Russian Roulette is the way Dev overworks the traditional private eye pastime of getting injured and not letting it stop him. Not only does he suffer the liturgical beatings and a bullet wound that any literary private eye expects, but he also gets poisoned and car bombed. It stretches credibility that he’s able to function at all, let alone defend himself, by the end of the story, but that’s all part of the joke. Continue reading ‘Russian Roulette’ and ‘Mr. Swirlee,’ by Mike Faricy →

Poetry

Haikus Superus

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This site delivers haiku found in the decisions written by Supreme Court justices. I love it.

Here, for example,

standard supplied gasoline

and oil to Signal.

(taken from Perkins v. Standard Oil Company of California (1969))

He, however, did

not obtain a warrant to

arrest respondent.

(from United States v. Johnson (1982))

The applicant must

pass the examination

prescribed by the Board.

(from Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc (1976))

For how long a time

have you known it to be used

for these purposes?

(from Peters v. Hanson (1889)) (via Books, Inq.)

Fiction

Non-Reviews of Two Books

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Loren Eaton refuses to review Megan Abbott’s Bury Me Deep. “Can’t talk about how Abbott walks a tightrope over the chasm between the literary and genre worlds, every sentence showing her knowledge of the writer’s craft while the subject matter stays committed to delighting the reader,” he says, leaving us to wonder what could possibly be in this book.

Jonathan Rogers talks about the origins of one of his books. “When I sat down to write The Charlatan’s Boy, the first sentence I wrote turned out to be the first sentence of the finished product: ‘I don’t remember one thing about the day I was born.'”

Bookselling, Fiction

‘Death’s Doors’: a snippet and an apologia

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CHAPTER I

The Lifestyle Services case worker seemed friendly and genuinely interested in him. Tom Galloway wasn’t entirely pleased about that. The case workers he’d dealt with in the Twin Cities had all seemed overworked and time-pinched. The desks in their cubicles had been piled with file folders and official bulletins, and they themselves had exhaled an institutional miasma that seemed to say, “Don’t show me any red flags and we won’t ask too many questions.”

But Megan Siegenthaler seemed to have all the time in the world, and was cordially curious about everything having to do with Tom and his family. Her small office had been painted a cheery mint green, and a tasteful landscape print hung on one wall. No family pictures though. He supposed those might be stressful for some of the case subjects. Or just as likely she had no family.

She herself was a honey-haired woman who must have been very attractive once and was still comfortably good-looking. Her green eyes were especially remarkable. She smoked a long thin cigarette, as was her right in all places except for hospital ICUs ever since the passage of the Smokers’ Re-enfranchisement Act. She’d offered Tom a breathing device, in accordance with the provisions of the Act, but he’d turned it down. Tobacco smoke had never bothered him much.

“I suppose it’s pretty dull here in Epsom compared to life in the Cities,” she said.

“I like it dull,” said Tom.

“Does Christine like it dull too?”

Tom adjusted his mouth in something like a smile. “No. She’d like to move back.”

“What do you think about that?”

“I don’t care what she’d like. I’m trying to keep her alive.”

Megan picked up the Galloway file and flipped through it. She had very long fingernails, enameled in red. Tom had always wondered why anyone who had to work with paper or keyboards would bother with such a self-inflicted handicap. “I think we ought to talk about this,” she said. “Your last case worker made a note about your attitude. You realize that, in the long run, you can’t keep your daughter alive, don’t you?”

Tom kicked himself in a mental shin. He should have learned to keep his mouth shut by now. He didn’t want to have this discussion again.

“I know what the law says,” he grunted.

“Then you know that if Christine decides to end her life, you have no legal power to stop her. The Constitution’s on her side. If she complains to us that you’re interfering, she can be taken from you and escorted to the Happy Endings Clinic by a Lifestyle Services worker. The law is very explicit.”

That’s just a snippet from Death’s Doors, my newly released e-book (by the way, Orie says it’s non-DRM, which means you can convert it to your e-reader’s format using the Calibre utility, even if you don’t have a Kindle). I thought I’d just take a few moments to talk about this book, and what I think it means (I could, of course, be wrong). Continue reading ‘Death’s Doors’: a snippet and an apologia →

Authors, Poetry

The Joys of W. H. Auden

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“One of the joys of reading late Auden is the pleasure he takes in rare words used correctly,” Patrick Kurp reminds us. “Like his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks, he loved trolling the Oxford English Dictionary for good catches.” Catches like dapatical, for which you’ll have to read his post for context.

Alexander McCall Smith wrote a piece last year about the importance of Auden with a few personal anecdotes. “When I started to write novels set in Edinburgh, the characters in these books – unsurprisingly, perhaps – began to show an interest in Auden. In particular, Isabel Dalhousie, the central character in my Sunday Philosophy Club series, thought about Auden rather a lot – and quoted him, too. A couple of years after the first of these novels was published, I received a letter from his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who is a professor of English at Columbia University in New York. . . . I then wrote Professor Mendelson into an Isabel Dalhousie novel, creating a scene in which he comes to Edinburgh to deliver a public lecture on the sense of neurotic guilt in Auden’s verse.”

Fiction, Publishing

Death’s Doors

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Dateline: Minneapolis

My new novel, Death’s Doors, is now available for download for Amazon Kindle.

In the near future, suicide is a constitutional right. Tom Galloway is an ordinary single father, just trying to keep his rebellious and depressed daughter from going to the Happy Endings Clinic.

The last thing he needs is a ninth-century Viking time traveler dropping into his life.

But Tom is about to embark on the adventure of his life. One that will change the world.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Myrna Loy Serving Coffee

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Due to the immediate, overwhelming response to the photo in our last post, our executives have decided to post another one. Here we see the gorgeous Myrna Loy serving Navy sailors in an canteen during WWII. This wasn’t a one time stint for her. She stopped acting to support the war effort and worked closely with The Red Cross. Learn more about her in this review of her biography, Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl In Hollywood.

Myrna Loy serving coffee to service men