BS: Conventional expectations thwarted

Subject: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 23 May 16 - 12:42 AM

Always hearing & reading about the 24/7 all·year·round sunshine one can rely on in Los Angeles: example in the Celeb section of last Saturday's Times2, with a ref to "lovely old, sunny old, bikini-tastic Los Angeles". But I wish to place on record that I have visited LA a couple of times, 6 months apart, Oct 2003 & Apr 2004, for several days each time: & it absolutely pissed down the whole time both times. Have the LA-Pantheon just got it in for poor old MGM, or what!

Anyhow:— anyone else got such any significant examples of conventional reasonable expectations so spectacularly thwarted by the actuality?

≈M≈

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Joe Offer
Date: 23 May 16 - 01:33 AM

Well, MGM, for LA to be "bikini-tastic," you have to go to the beach....and please don't wear a bikini yourself...
The tourists never look right wearing bikinis. Leave that task to us who live here ;-)

-Joe in California-

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Rapparee
Date: 23 May 16 - 11:47 AM

Joe, I don't think I'd want to see you in a bikini. Nothing personal, just pure aesthetics.

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Megan L
Date: 23 May 16 - 12:05 PM

aw rap even I might be persuaded to get a passport if he was on the beach in an itsy bitsy teeny weenie yellow polkadot bikini

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: keberoxu
Date: 23 May 16 - 02:35 PM

On the other hand, there is San Francisco, whose warm-season weather is so notorious that Mark Twain's quote thereon has been in circulation all these years. And yes, when I paid the area a visit, the Napa Valley interior was MUCH sunnier and warmer than the city by the bay.

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: meself
Date: 23 May 16 - 03:32 PM

Thanks for the Mark Twain quote! Oh, wait -

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: keberoxu
Date: 23 May 16 - 05:22 PM

My bad. R Kent Rasmussen, author of Mark Twain A to Z, says it is an alleged quote and cannot be found anywhere in the Twain canon. Somebody else must have said it?

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Joe_F
Date: 23 May 16 - 06:18 PM

In order to experience "24/7 sunshine" you would have to get well away from the Earth.

There is indeed a fair amount of rain in southern California. It is true, however, that it is extremely rare in the summer. I once saw a shower in July in Pasadena & thought "What the hell was that?"

I suspect that Joe Offer in a bikini would be eye candy for me. But I am a pervert.

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Stim
Date: 23 May 16 - 06:55 PM

This Twain misquoting takes us deep into Michaelish realms of literary antiquities where it seems we find that the winter/summer quote was actual a comment that Twain made about the weather in Paris, and which he attributed to English actor, James Quin.

It can be found in "The Life of Mr. James Quin Comedian, with the History of the Stage from his Commencing Actor to his Retreat to Bath. Illustrated with Many Curious and Interesting Anecdotes of Several Persons of Distinction, Literature, and Gallantry to Which is Added a Supplement of Original Facts and Anecdotes, Arranged from Authentic Sources, together with his Trial for the Murder of M. Bowen" published in London in 1887, where it is thus rendered:

"BON MOT OF QUIN.—One summer, when the month of July happened to be extremely cold, some person asked Quin if he ever remembered such a summer. 'Oh yes,' replied the wag, 'last winter.'"


For More, see here...

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: keberoxu
Date: 23 May 16 - 07:43 PM

what's Michaelish?

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Amos
Date: 23 May 16 - 07:44 PM

My own bastion cosmic of San Diego often betrays the expectations of the naive visitor; through most of May and June the skies are layered over with miles and miles of cool gray cirrus clouds, and our fabled sunshine often does not appear from dawn til dusk, This is because of the large amount of moisture which rises from the Pacific, right next door, which, as you may have heard, contains legendary amounts of the stuff.

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 23 May 16 - 08:51 PM

If the cirrus blotted out the sun all day, it did indeed thwart conventional expectations, as cirrus, consisting as it does of thinly-scattered ice crystals, is effortlessly penetrated by the sun's rays.

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: gnu
Date: 23 May 16 - 09:21 PM

You can't be cirrus about that? Thwart, thwart.

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Rapparee
Date: 23 May 16 - 10:20 PM

You mean Sam Clemens' quote I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more -- I could have gone earlier -- it was suggested?

But remember, he also said When you want genuine music--music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,--when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Stim
Date: 24 May 16 - 12:33 AM

"Michaelish" meaning "Grosvenor Myerish"-as in "after the manner of", referencing both his fondness for quaint and antique literature, predilection toward peculiarities of language, and his taste for rectifying popular misconceptions.

I suspect that, should he chance to check the link, our most esteemed MGM will find a certain sort of amusement in the fact that certain celebrated quotes attributed to heroes of the American Revolution were in fact lifted from Joseph Addison's 1713 play "Cato. A Tragedy".

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 24 May 16 - 01:41 AM

Except that I wasn't the one who ref'd Mark Twain. So...?

≈M≈

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Senoufou
Date: 24 May 16 - 03:12 AM

My Ivorian husband has been in the UK for many years now, but until recently had never visited Scotland. We flew up to Edinburgh to stay with my sister in Perthshire last year, and beforehand I wickedly convinced him that all Scotsmen wore kilts all the time and played the pipes at least once a day; that one ate only haggis and potatoes; that the mountains were enormous and resembled the Himalayas; that everyone spoke only Gaelic. I also (there's no limit to my wickedness) convinced him that he would need his own tartan, and should think about the design and colours and add a 'Mac' to his very African surname. He grew quite worried, and actually designed a rather nice tartan using felt-tip pens. My naughty sister was complicit in all this, and told him she'd ordered him a kilt ready for his arrival.
Arriving in Edinburgh after the flight, he looked about him and saw not one kilt, bagpipe, haggis or mountain. Luckily he twigged and started to laugh. I deserve to be divorced really...

Subject: RE: BS: Conventional expectations thwarted
From: Stim
Date: 24 May 16 - 12:16 PM

That's why I mentioned it--it was serendipitous.