The “never remarried” is sad enough, but “was never loved” is downright depressing.
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the wiki article seems to imply that they were not married in the biblical sense. The had a depression going on and an old man realized he could pass on a government pension to someone just by saying “i do” even if they really didn’t. ie it was an act of charity in a desperate time.
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I think marital love is a somewhat modern development. People have married for all kinds of transactional reasons throughout history, and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong. I like to believe those marriages could evolve into something resembling love, and at least mutual respect, and perhaps if they had more years together, theirs could have, as well.
Obligatory:
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I am obviously not a judge of such things, especially from such a distance in time and space, but it sounds to me like this one did. Perhaps knowing his time was short, the husband weighed his words and actions more carefully than the rashness of youth leads some to do. Maybe the wife, despite her difficult circumstances, hadn’t had the tenderness of a young person’s heart burned out by the hardness of the world. Stranger things have happened.
TIL pluto-populist
2023 is the first year since 1987 that vinyl records will outsell CDs, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
I can’t wait for 8tracks to return.
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People these days seem to be “renting” music more than they are buying it. Streaming services, etc. Heck, I can even go on Youtube and watch me some Jeff Beck and pay an extremely modest fee (watch a few seconds of ads – suckers!). Now, how would Jeff Beck (RIP) get paid for my enjoyment of his music? I do not know.
I do know that whatever we have streaming through the Alexa (Spotify, I think) always plays the same songs when a category is chosen, based on prior listening habits (though I do not know if they keep “skip” demands as data). Wife has to be extremely specific in requesting, as she has eclectic and capricious tastes in music (and I love her for it!). “70’s rock” always starts with The Eagles’ “Take it Easy,” for example. “80’s alternative” always starts with Oingo Boingo’s “Dead Man’s Party.”
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I’m going to go ahead and crack open a beer and listen to my cassette version of Nirvana’s Nevermind and chill out. Side 1 twice and then Side 2.
If we want to go retro, here’s a short clip of Wendy Carlos showing off her massive early Moog synthesizer, plus her 8-track. The size of the synthesizer is very reminiscent of early computers! This is from a year or 2 after she released her grammy winning, and platinum selling, version of Bach played purely on synthesizer. She also later would compose the score for A Clockwork Orange, the Shining, and Tron.
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I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an 8 track IRL.
I had one friend with a reel to reel system and few friends with 8 track players, but my first was a cassette player.
I know someone with a massive 8 track collection. He has them on 2 walls in a hallway: the wall of fame and the wall of shame.
Like me, he’s old enough to remember 8 tracks from childhood but not old enough to have this collection at the time. He accumulated it later.
I remember in college (at which point CDs were the norm but people still had cassette players for homemade mix tapes and such and 8-tracks were so obsolete that some students hadn’t even heard of them) I went to a party at a house that had a big old sound system connected to an 8-track player and around 2,000 8-tracks. It was an insane collection of 8-tracks.
I installed an 8-track player in my dad’s truck when I started driving it to school. I had a portable 8-track player with over the ear headphones that were both a radio and plugged so I could listen to said portable 8-track player without bothering others. I used to sit in a corner of the gym while waiting for my wresting match to come up and rock out to Boston.
TIL that swimming world records are only kept for meters. Katie Ledecky broke her own American record for 1,650 yards today, and both her old and new times are the fastest any woman has ever gone over that distance, but because it is in a 25 yard pool it doesn’t count as a world record.
It’s kind of weird that we are still holding serious competitions in a 25 yard pool… you’d think they’d standardize.
But you obviously can’t compare times in a 25 yard pool to times in a 50 meter pool (Olympic length). You get more than double the turns.
From what I gather the 25 yard pools are considered “short course” and have their own records. Maybe not at the world level because I’m guessing that’s a weird pool length outside the US.
Short course internationally is 25 m, aka SCM. There are separate world records for short course (SCM) and long course (LCM), the professional circuits that have started up the last couple years are short course meters. SCM records are considerably lower than LCM b/c of the extra turns, but are also somewhat weird in that American and Australian swimmers often only compete in LCM. E.g., Ledecky has never competed in the short course world championships, and never bothered setting the 400m world record at her peak. Short course yards is primarily a US collegiate thing.
Yes, and HS, and rec leagues, because many pools are 25Y, and expensive to change.
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