[TAG] Fwd: Your marriage essay

[Jimmy O'Regan]

2008/9/2 Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>:
> [Jimmy was kind enough to mail me, out of the blue, commentary on an
> essay I wrote recently, http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html .]
>
> Quoting Jimmy O'Regan (joregan at gmail.com):
>
>> 2008/9/1 Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>:
>> > Quoting Jimmy O'Regan (joregan at gmail.com):
>> >
>> >> I just read your fascinating essay 'Kudzu and the California Marriage
>> >> Amendment'; one niggle, however: 'Stanlislawa Walasiewiczowna' should
>> >> be spelled 'Stanislawa Walasiewiczowna' (or, with full Polish
>> >> diacritics, 'Stanis?awa Walasiewicz?wna')
>> >
>> > Thank you, sir.  I was copying a third-party source, and it didn't look
>> > quite right, but I forgot I had a Polish-speaker I could check with.  ;->
>> >
>>
>> I actually found your essay while trying to take a break from Polish -
>> I'm currently wading my way through 'Pan Tadeusz', first in English,
>> then in Polish, proofreading the scans as I go to possibly send to
>> Project Gutenberg. It thus came as something of a minor shock to find
>> yet more Polish in your essay - and I was already in 'error checking
>> mode', so... :)
>
> It's good to hear that the tragic historical trainwreck caused first by
> the "liberum veto", and then by Poland being in harm's way and attempting
> to be a liberal parliamentary democracy midway between three of the most
> powerful of Europe's autocratic dynasties (Catherine the Great,
> Frederick II and Frederick William II of the Hohenzollerns, and several
> Austrian emperors) produced _something_ good.
>

The Lithuanians like to claim Mickiewicz as their own, citing the
opening line of that book - 'Lithuania, my fatherland' - conveniently
ignoring that the /rest/ of the book is a paean to the ways of life of
the Polish nobility. Interesting topic in itself, but I mention in to
introduce this:

The Polish Prime Minister was summoned to Moscow, to meet Brezhnev:
'And what of this Mickiewicz, this Polish writer, who writes that
Lithuania is his fatherland?'
'But he's dead now!'
'Ah. I like how you work'

Anyway, I've put a small excerpt from book one online here:
http://joregan.blogspot.com/2008/08/pan-tadeusz-book-1-1.html

> Anyway, one of the reasons I hastened to finish that essay is that my
> family is going on holiday, starting tomorrow, on a cruise ship.  We're
> going to be visiting London, Copenhagen, Berlin, Talinn, St. Petersburg,
> Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, and London again, and arriving back on Sept.
> 19th.

Stockholm... Oslo... you're not going to stock up on lutefisk, are you?