Friday, February 18, 2022

What comes after "son of no coincidences"?

Chrome's history page tells me that at 4:50 this afternoon, I was reading Christopher Buckley's guest essay, "P.J. O’Rourke and the Death of Conservative Humor".   

Two minutes later, I read, "Humorlessness has crept in its petty pace to the right, where it is conducted with North Korean-level solemnity by the bellowing myrmidons of MAGAdom."  (I guess Chris Buckley didn't fall far from dear old dad's tree.) 

Immediately I Google the mysterious "myrmidon" and satisfy my thirst for knowledge.

Learning a new word, and at my age, too. 

Zoom ahead to 8:15 or so, "later that same day"; the film "Twentieth Century," and this bit of dialogue:


I ran it back several times, and I don't know what he's saying at the "inaudible" point, either.  Sounds sort of like Pearl Atomics, which I doubt.

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Minutes later:  Why guess when you can Google?  "..bath tubs, slews of Myrmidons" brought up this article from AV Club:  

“That’s not a contract,” he tells Lily. “It’s a coronation. Barrels of rubies. Enormous carpets for your pretty feet. Pearl and onyx bathtubs. Slews of Myrmidons at your beck and call.”
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who wrote the screenplay (based on their own stage play), didn’t fret about whether audiences knew that Myrmidons were Achilles’ soldiers in The Iliad. Like many scribes of Hollywood’s Golden Age (or, say, the Coen brothers today), they valued historical and cultural literacy for its own sake, weaving it into even the goofiest of material.

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