Do you ever hear someone say something about your field of interest that is wrong and you have to stop yourself from physically cringing but you gotta stay strong and cool cause you don’t wanna be ‘That NerdTM’?
there is no deep meaning to this, this is when I see people refering to Excalibur as “The Sword in The Stone”
Wait I though the sword in the stone is Excalibur. What is it then?
The Sword in the Stone is Caliburn, and was the way be became king. Excalibur was the sword given to him by the Lady of the Lake after he broke Caliburn fighting King Pellinore.
I have been educated today and I appreciate it
I did not expect everyone else to also like swords this much.
1) Thank you, Kap, for clearing up this misconception.
This is a Mills & Boon from 1967 and honestly I don’t know what I’d do if I met someone and they said ‘with those hands she simply must play the piano’ but it would probably end in tears
For those asking, this is from ‘When Love is Blind’ by Mary Burchell, aka Ida Cook. My New Year’s Resolution is to try and read books by really interesting authors, and Ida Cook comes under that umbrella category because:
she was singularly and bizarrely obsessed with opera, along with her sister, Louise Cook
she wrote about 112 romance novels in her life
during WW2, these two facts became incredibly useful because she and her sister were badass ladies who used the money that Ida earnt from selling romance books to smuggle Jewish people’s possessions across the border from Germany, helping Jewish refugees to satisfy Britain’s financial criteria for immigration
they literally used to go to Germany dozens of times a year to ‘see operas’, dressed in plain clothes, and would come back to Britain dressed in about eight layers of gold and finery
they did also actually see operas
when officials got suspicious about how many goddamn clothes and items of jewellery they were wearing at one time, they pretended that they were spinsters who didn’t trust their families at home not to sell their belongings, and so they wore all their best clothes and jewellery whenever they went abroad
they had to super carefully plan all their crossings so that the same people who saw them travelling to Germany with no luggage at all didn’t see them travelling back to Britain in completely different outfits, laden with baggage and suitcases
they did this so often that officials did begin to get suspicious about how many times in a year two women could actually go to Germany just to see operas, so the director of the Munich Opera House started to arrange specific performances on dates of their choosing so that they could prove their reason for travelling. He also let them choose which performance they wanted him to put on. They must have been bloody delighted
many of her romance novels are about operas
like this one
she had a bit of an opera problem, really
she wrote an autobiography and only about a third of it is about her heroic work helping Jewish refugees. The rest of it is about her childhood
Ester Reiter lived through discrimination as a Jew in Cold War America, marched to protest the Vietnam War with two babies in tow, and visited a mass grave in a southern Poland forest where her grandparents, aunts and uncles were likely murdered in the Holocaust.
When she woke up on Wednesday morning, the 77-year-old didn’t hesitate to stand up for what she says is another great injustice — the Ontario government passing legislation that a judge ruled violates the Constitution.
She cancelled her recorder quartet practice and made her way to Queen’s Park.
“You can’t let them get away with these dirty deeds without witnessing the thing,” said Reiter of the Progressive Conservative government invoking the “notwithstanding” clause to ram through cuts to Toronto city council in the middle of a municipal election campaign. “This is outrageous. It’s like shredding everything I care about.”
Mooncustafer 