it has a "ring to it"...

 

On The Golden Girls episodes, I started to notice that, on Betty White's left hand, on her ring finger, is a ring with a big sapphire in the middle, and surrounded by diamonds.

        It's just like Lady Diana Spencer's engagement ring from Charles, the Prince of Wales, in February of 1981.

Once I noticed it, I started watching for it, and kept seeing it.

Googled - didn't have time to read the whole thing, but yes, it's a ring like Princess Diana's.

        A headline on the Internet said that Diana's engagement ring "started a trend."

Betty White and Allen Ludden

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fashion of the early 1980s

 

        A video about then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1983.  That's the year when they took their first trip to Australia.  They had been married for two years, and had their first child, Prince William - they brought him with them on the trip.

Diana's dresses:  pie-crust collars abounded!

I wanted to wear dresses like that!

        At the age I was, then, I kind of wanted to wear - everything.  Dreaming, and yearning, and wanting.  Wanting everything (well, not really, but you think  you do)....

        ---------------- Making an exception, perhaps, for the hats.  It's a British Royal Family tradition - ladies wearing hats.

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in a subterranean chamber

 One of the people on that Kennedy Library panel discussing Jackie Kennedy's "literary life" is Greg Lawrence, author of Jackie As Editor, copyright 2011, Thomas Dunne Books - St. Martin's Press.

------------------------ [excerpt] ------------ {the narrator here is Eugene Kennedy (no relation to the Massachusetts Kennedys); he's a Catholic priest from Chicago who worked with Jackie on a book about Mayor Daley} -------------------- "I was her escort at the Democratic Convention in 1976. ... She had talked to me in advance about going with her and whatnot, and it was quite an experience.  

I was traveling with Mike Royko and a group from the Chicago papers.  What occurred that night, first, of course, we came into the hall, and it was mayhem as soon as she entered.  

        She was extremely calm, and I walked with her, and I didn't have my collar on or anything like that, and I went to these seats that had been reserved for her.  And her sister was there.  And then all these people came streaming over to say hello to her - the actor Lorne Greene and the Carter family came down.  Everybody wanted to be seen with her.  It was highly amusing, in a way, because you could see why she did want to walk fast....

"Here we were at the heart of the Democratic Convention, and she had asked to meet Daley, who was a delegate.  We talked to the guy that was the chairman of the party then, Robert Strauss, from Texas.  So he set up this meeting, in a lower level of Madison Square Garden, in some subterranean chamber.  

And here's Dick Daley in his blue suit, and I knew the way Daley would react.  She went over to talk to him, and he just listened, very happy to see her.  But even to her...as far as a book, he was very self-protective and protective of his family.  

She wanted him to know she was having a book written about him.  She was very straightforward.  She told him that she had commissioned a book, and he said something like, 'We'll look into it.'

        "He died the next December.  Now while he was alive, nobody would talk.  They feared for their lives and their jobs and so forth.  It was very interesting, the control he exerted.  After he died, I ended up talking to dozens and dozens of people, who knew him in various ways, some of them in a very intimate way, and they were very helpful.  

Jackie was fascinated by all this, and her support never wavered.  

Before Daley died, it didn't matter to her that he wasn't going to give any direct support.  She understood, if you were on to something, if she felt you were on the right track, she would encourage you to keep going along that track.  If she thought you were diverging from it, that's when she would intervene and say, 'Well, I'm not sure about that.'  She did it so nicely."

-----------------------------------------------------

On You Tube:

World Turning

> Fleetwood Mac

...and play

Lorne Greene

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"I'm a senior editor at Doubleday"

 Oh! - you can find this on You Tube, video titled:

The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

channel / uploader:  John F. Kennedy Library Foundation

------------------------------------- I've never seen this, before.  It's an hour and 38 minutes, so if you put it on when you have some work to get done, it will last for a bit - you don't have to keep stopping what you're doing to find something else to play.

        One panelist tells the story of getting invited to dinner at the home of New York City Mayor Ed Koch.  The guy arrived at the mayor's apartment and the 20 people who were there didn't seem to know each other.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was one of the guests.

        When they all sat down at the dinner table, Mayor Koch asked everyone to go around the table, each person introducing themselves.

        ("I'm Jacqueline Onassis; I'm a senior editor at Doubleday.")

I think people for whom English is a second language will enjoy this video, as well as people whose first language is English.

        In our economy, I cannot help but notice, there are many things that aren't good and are expensive, while at the same time there are things like this "literary Jackie" video that are really good, and - free of charge - !  LOL.  It's like some kind of absurd, unexpected miracle....

Ed Koch, mayor of New York City, 1978 - 1989

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...when the conditions are right...

 One time at work a few years ago, I was telling a guy about a book that I thought he might find interesting.

        He said, Yeah, that sounds good - it would have to be raining out, for me to read it.

I hadn't thought about activities as being able to be participated in only if the weather conditions are right.  Although, yes - it can be that way.  We cannot ski if there isn't any snow... what other examples are there?  ...

        I was reminded of that convo recently when re-reading a passage from Chronicles, by Bob Dylan:

------------------------ [excerpt] ---------- I cut the radio off, crisscrossed the room, pausing for a moment, to turn on the black-and-white TV.  Wagon Train was on.  It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country.  

I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door - a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library.  

I switched on the lamps.  

The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness.  Up until this time I'd been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot.  

Brando.  James Dean.  Milton Berle.  Marilyn Monroe.  Lucy.  Earl Warren and Khrushchev, Castro.  Little Rock and Peyton Place.  Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio.  J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse.  

        The Nelsons.  Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys.  Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy.  Levittown.

        Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke.  There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies....Books like Fox's Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus.  Pericles' Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides' The Athenian General - a narrative which would give you chills. ...

Endless rows of books - Sophocles' book on the nature and function of the gods.... Alexander the Great's March into Persia.... There was Simon Bolivar's biography, too.  I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that. ----------------------- [end / Chronicles excerpt] ----------------------

Bob would have to be in a rest home ... my former co-worker would need some rain....

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a thin, translucent coating

 That gossip columnist we wrote about here in the last post, Nigel Dempster (that's  his photo at the top), was quoted saying, "There is a holiday in my heart when I discover another marriage breakup."

        Nice guy.

----------------- ...the sentences and phrases that Tina Brown writes tend to fascinate me:

the two tabloids that have "a thin, translucent coating of middle-class respectability"

"sources routinely denounced and routinely embraced"

"screaming populist tabloids"

"daily blizzard of headlines"

"from the benign to the malign without a pause for magnanimity..."

"a swashbuckling editor"

"fiendishly well-connected, dazzlingly anecdotal"

..."scattered rains gave way to drenching gales and then to spectacular and finally lethal hurricanes" - and here, of course, she isn't even talking about actual weather, she has made a series of metaphors to describe escalating media intrusion on people whose images grab attention....

        Such prose could knock you flat.   It's a plush, dynamic writing style.

        Tina Brown sort of does with words and language what Julia Child did with food.

One thing to bear in mind - Ms. Brown's description of print media in Great Britain, which is quoted and excerpted here in this blog, was from a book that was published in the year 2007.

        We had the Internet back then, but social media had not yet "taken over" to the extent it has now, so all that information about Britain's "voracious" readers buying newspapers might need updating here, nearly 20 years later.

Fleet Street - the heart of the British newspaper and printing industry for nearly 500 years

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total recall

 

[excerpt from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown] --------------- Lady Diana Spencer took her bow at the nexus of a national malaise.... The plebeian tabloids - The Sun, the Mirror, and the Star - no longer had the field to themselves.  

Under a swashbuckling editor, David English, the Daily Mail converted itself to a tabloid format in 1971 and quickly eclipsed a wilting Daily Express as the enduring bible of middle England; English's successor, Paul Dacre, has only increased its power.  

(By 2006, the Daily Mail was selling more than two million copies a day.)  

        The magic formula of the Mail was a combination of curtain-twitching class envy and strident rightist politics, with the added spice of the most waspish gossip columnist in London, Nigel Dempster, whose scoops from the highest circles of the Establishment were read at every upper-class breakfast table like a ransom note.  

Dempster had a thirty-year reign of terror until he was felled by ill health.  He was a miniaturist in tabloid takedowns.  His demonic social energy seemed to take him everywhere at once; in a car he always drove at a hundred miles an hour with the horn blaring.... He was dapper, fiendishly well-connected, dazzlingly anecdotal, and blessed with total recall.

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