Introducing...

I've had this blog for awhile now. I've tried off and on to figure out what I'm going to do here. I'm still not entirely sure, but I think mainly history, language, and movies. I like movies, I watch an awful lot of them, I have some opinions on them. And I figured since blogs are now like opinions and assholes (everyone has one), I could nicely get lost in the throng and say all sorts of random junk.

The Unsinkable Molly Brown, 1964 film
Like, right now, as I write this, I'm watching The Unsinkable Molly Brown (UMB). Of the musicals of this era, it probably has a better message than some. These can be much deeper than perhaps many people think. Well, first, UMB does not fall in to the general theme of a musical within the musical. Of course the overlying idea is that Molly must stay with Johnny Brown. I would never suggest someone take relationship advice from a musical. Generally they are filled with people who are so bad at making decisions it's almost ridiculous. 

Margaret 'Maggie' Brown
Oh, here I am rambling on about musicals, assuming everyone knows about Molly Brown. Better known in her lifetime as Margaret (Maggie) Brown, she was born Margaret Tobin. She's probably most famous for being one of the women who survived the sinking of the Titanic, and forcing the lifeboat she was in to turn around to pick people up. (A little different than what they showed in Titanic.) This is also where she picked up the nickname 'Unsinkable'. 

She was a suffragette and came in to wealth when her husband, James Joseph Brown (better known as J.J., not Johnny), helped his company with his engineering efforts to exploit an ore seam.

As with many films, the musical from 1964 has some vague things in common with the actual life of the Unsinkable Molly, but most of it has been changed/made more dramatic. We can safely assume that they did not run around bursting in to song (though that would be neat). I honestly think that the life of Molly Brown as it stands would be very interesting to see, as it is. She was clearly a person determined to do everything she could. She knew it from the start, wanting to marry a rich man. (Hey, this was 1866!) She did end up marrying J.J. out of love, because he was just as poor as she was, and clearly it did not hurt her one bit. In the end she was an American socialite, a philanthropist, and she took up activism for a number of causes, such as the rights of workers and women, education and literacy for children, and historic preservation. She separated from J.J. in 1909 but they remained in close contact. He died in 1922, and she finally died in 1932, of a brain tumor.

The movie plays various aspects up for comedic effect, of course, ignores others and makes some of it up. Once again, if you want your history, don't get it from Hollywood!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's Get Baking

So, like many home chefs, I have a number of cookbooks at home. I do use them occasionally, but there are some that I haven't tried a single recipe from. I'm hoping to whittle down my entire library soon, and that will include my cookbooks, but I don't want to get rid of a cookbook I haven't tried even once. Another thing I want to do is bake and cook more, I particularly want to bake more. (I mean, I do end up cooking pretty much every night, even if it's not always something new and exciting.) Thus, this project was born. I'll try and document it as I bake my way through some of my books. I'm starting with One Bowl Baking by Yvonne Ruperti, which is a neat book I received from my sister. I'm setting an easy goal for myself of one new recipe a week. I'm hoping to do more than that, otherwise this will take forever, but I'm trying to be honest about my ability to set aside the time and gather the will power. The book contains about 112 recipes...
Read more

The Wooing of the Irish

Introduction In the tradition of Irish literature, there are many genres. One example is the genre of dindshenchas , the stories of why places are given certain names, and there is also the genre of tochmarc . A tochmarc is a story of the wooing of a woman. While each story has it's own unique details, there are many shared themes and tropes within the genre of tochmarc . Finding these common threads can give us some ideas of their idealised romance. For this, three stories will be used: Tochmarc Étaínne , from the Tales of the Tuatha De Danann, Tochmarc Emer , from the Ulster Cycle, and Tochmarc Becfola , from the Tales of the Traditional Kings. In the first section they will be briefly summarized while in the second section we will tie them together and briefly discuss the themes of tochmarc and the common elements within these stories. The Stories Tochmarc Étaínne The story of Tochmarc Étaínne 1 has been divided down into three subsections by the editors of Ber...
Read more

Sunday Dinner: Calzones

Image
Forgive the truly awful pictures and the fact that there are almost no pictures. This is what I get for doing this so late. The original plan for today was to make chili con carne and the first recipe for my one bowl baking project, cornbread. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to get enough cornmeal for the muffins, so I turned to something else I had wanted to make for a long time: calzones! I only realized all this fairly late, so dinner was going to be late, though we've definitely eaten later. First step was pulling out a dough recipe. I went with Cook's Illustrated for their calzone recipe. I ignored the filling but I did follow their instructions for the dough. So the dough started rising around 7pm, and would need at least an hour and a half before I could start even thinking about eating. After that, it was time to divide up the dough into balls, let it rest a further 15 minutes and prepare the ingredients I was going to be shoving in them. Both would get some ri...
Read more