Mortgaging 17 Cherry Tree Lane

[gwendally]

I went to Mary Poppins Returns last night (yes, for New Year's Eve.) I quite liked it overall. Basically, that's about as violent as I like my films to ever be (i.e., with zero violence, and almost no threat of peril, either.) I could go on about the good song and dance numbers, or the sweetness of Lin-Manual Miranda, or how good *all* the actors

Comments

[gwendally]

Another comment on the subject of my bizarre Forrest Gump of a town. Again, please note that we have fewer than 18,000 people, 30,000 if you include the entire county. I was on Twitter the other day arguing with someone in Georgia. She looked me up and came back and exclaimed that she had family members in my town. Because of course she does.

I recently overheard a black woman sneering at a guy for claiming he marched with Martin Luther King. Ha ha, she laughed (on Twitter), so many people claim this, but they can't all be telling the truth. Yet, yes, he did. (And various other things related, this wasn't a one-off.) Just as one of the guys responsible for the Pentagon Papers lives near me (in the county, not the town, but his mother-in-law was an alumna of my college who mentored me, so I know him that way, too.) We are the most self-actualized small town I've ever heard of, and our fingerprints are all over this nation. And... not one god damn castle graces our riverbanks. Who WANTS that?!?

Momentarily Embarrassed Millionaires

[polydad]

Hi, Gwen --

People want there to be rich people because they want to see *themselves* as rich people -- or at least people with power and status -- and so if they can pretend rich (powerful, important, etc.) people *exist*, they can pretend that their own lack of wealth, power, and influence is a mere temporary aberration.

Castles started their existence as military forts. Powerful people used them as residences and business sites in part because building was expensive and in part because they *needed* that military security. We have since created sufficient wealth that buildings are much more affordable, and military technology has developed to a level such that forts aren't useful any more.

But in a Big Scary World, the idea that one can retreat behind stone walls and lock the heavy iron gates has a lot of appeal, even if as fiction.

Re: Momentarily Embarrassed Millionaires

[mme_n_b]

This. It's why Russian alt. history books and online imaginings are full of land-owning nobles and rich merchants with a leavening of doctors and engineers. No one imagines themselves as one of the peasants.
It's also why the best book on the history of my small American town is, literally, the history of its castle.

Princes and Princesses

[elenbarathi]

Yeah; what Joel said: in a fairy-tale, everybody gets to imagine themselves as the Prince or the Princess, even if they start off the story in beggar's rags. That's the charm of fairy-tales - they speak to the Inner Child, who's about six, and thus takes no heed of silly grown-up realities like balance sheets or the social order

[froggoddess]

#ReasonsIsoldmyhouse

Gah I never made it to that move over break!