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True Confessions of a Ricochetti
On another thread, one of our members admitted something:
I always confuse Horace Greeley with William Jennings Bryan.
I’ve seen a few other comments like this over the years I have been here. When Ricochetti go wild and make their true confessions, it usually isn’t the sort of thing you would see on Facebook or Jeff Bezos’ diary. How many people on your Facebook feed even know who Horace Greeley and William Jennings Bryant are? This is a high-class joint with high-class true confessions.
My true confession: the older I get, the more trouble I have with homonyms. I tend to write out loud. I once found an error in one of my books where I had used the word “clamber” instead of “clamor,” for instance.
What’s your most Ricochet-style true confession?
Published in Humor
It took me three tries to get through Joyce’s Ulysses.
I speak, read and write fluent Swedish but have never been to Sweden. I have been to Norway twice and don’t speak Norwegian. This is a source of great embarrassment when I talk with either Swedes or Norwegians, which in my line of work, is kind of regular.
I can no longer stand the taste of Cola.
Yes, and it’s up to us to diagnose it. It is obviously some defect in character or mental ability. Or just they don’t like the book. Maybe.
Ok this will be controversial: Not everything that Derrida or Kristeva wrote was bad.
It’s a beautiful Bible verse, and… since we talked about books on this thread… I loved James Herriot’s use of it to title his series about a country vet in England.
Clearly you were watching The Hobbit. Or hadn’t slept in a week.
You’re a better person than I am. I loved Dubliners. I don’t get Ulysses.
I’ve read Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress at least four times each.
No, not better. Just more prideful and stubborn. I liked the section in Ulysses in which Stephen and his father have their discussion about the IRA but unfortunately it is about a hundred pages into the book in my edition and then it ends while the book continues. I loved Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist both. With Finnegan’s Wake I did not even make it past about thirty pages before giving up. That thing is not a novel. It is a puzzle.
Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve definitely exceeded that number with LOTR, though I guess I can confess I don’t know these books at all. If the first is the thing on which the movie was based, I guess I at least know what it’s about.
Old books are like good friends. One never tires of their company if one loves them.
Actually, it’s Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But a great quote nonetheless. I read Herriot’s first book of the series, but no further. My folks used to watch the TV series on PBS, I think, but I had no interest in the show.
Science Fiction novels by Robert Heinlein.
The movie version of Starship Troopers is an abomination.
This might be bragging. Usually it requires a sharply hit ball.
Ah! I’m not crazy though. There’s a similar passage in the Bible! I had a beer in the building where Rime of the Ancient Mariner was written. (Or was it BY the building?) Don’t’ remember. There’s one of those blue plaques you see everywhere in England on the outside, and you can visit. We just happened to be in that village and saw it. My husband and I were like… “Cool.” Though I’ve demonstrated we clearly aren’t Coleridge scholars. :D
The movies are good but movies are almost never better than the novels. It’s not here either. There are aspects of the novel that one could criticize but by and large it’s a true epic. Now epics can be tedious and I suspect that’s what people are reacting to.
Aren’t Swedish and Norwegian nearly identical?
Yeah. I quit Ulysses about a quarter of the way through. I consider it to be virtually unreadable.
That’s not a confession. You should have read them that often.
The movie Starship Troopers is horrible, and has nothing to do with the book,
You got through Ulysses?
Sharply hit or not, it did end the razzing I took from striking out on the previous at bat.
I’ll bet.
Not everything that Nietzche wrote was bad. But bad philosophers fly to it like flys to Beezlebub’s excrement.
Maybe you can settle a long argument, how do you pronounce “Schytt” as in the Swedish glaciologist, Valter Schytt? I might have fallen for a practical joke, from a Danish cook who claimed to speak Swedish.
Rule: A good way to be put on a death list is to make the cultural comparison: “X and Y are nearly identical.”
Confession: I think there are a select few movies that were better than the books they’re based on; I think there are some TV series that are better than the movies they’re based on.
Bladerunner is better than Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a terrible movie, totally awesome TV series.
The first Highlander movie was a masterpiece; every subsequent movie was dreck. The TV series was really great.
If it sounds like I’m drawn to stories about Good stomping the snot out of Evil, I’ll cop to that. Makes it even more intriguing that I can’t stand LOTR.
Oh, come on!
I’ve learned since joining Ricochet that I can’t trust my memory. I’ve written so many comments off the cuff, completely confident that I was remembering events or something I read correctly, only to find out, through some kind comment a fellow Ricochetti has written in response to my erroneous comment, that my memory was completely incorrect. Either I didn’t understand the event or article correctly the first time, or my memory of it was completely wrong.
The mistakes I’ve made were about things I didn’t bother to verify before I hit the comment button because my recollection was so vivid. My mistakes have been quite frustrating for me, but also enlightening. They’ve made me interested in how memory works. Or in my case, doesn’t work. :-)
I’ve been wrong so many times when I was absolutely sure I was right that I try not to exhibit too much certainty.
Uh, oh. Must confess the only Heinlein I’ve read is The Door Into Summer, which I hated.
That one had some time travel in it, didn’t it? I did like the part where the cat had to try all the doors.