24 Comments

  1. Um… the title is Bill’s addition? Not the caption? Without a caption was this a cartoon? Or is Bill making his own joke.

    “Playing Hide ‘n’ Go Seek, altho I think going up to 20 is a bit extreme. Maybe that’s the joke?”

    When we were kids we usually went to 50 or 100. You can count to 10 in about 2 seconds if you are fast enough and you will *ALWAYS* have a smart ass kid who will try to count too fast. Counting to 50 was a necessity to give us time to hide.

  2. “When we were kids we usually went to 50 or 100. You can count to 10 in about 2 seconds if you are fast enough and you will *ALWAYS* have a smart ass kid who will try to count too fast”

    So you make them count backwards, or by threes, or from ten thousand and one to ten thousand one hundred.

  3. Alternative caption (good this week only, possibly)

    Why did I take the Rams and give the points?

  4. (1) Despite seeing it a dozen times, he still wasn’t desensitized to this scene in “Alien”.
    (2) I guess words _can_ hurt me.
    (3) YESTERDAY was the deadline for Amazon shipping for Christmas?
    (4) It was a business call. Why did I end why “Love You!”?
    (5) “Buy Bitcoin at $20,000, before it goes up again”, they said.

  5. Oh, Bill, I enjoyed all the comments! Please don’t stop! (I was surprised to see van Gogh wearing sweat pants. They were “invented” that long ago?)

  6. I really enjoyed the recent VvG movie “At Eternity’s Gate”, and a review-article that was occasioned by that one but discussed a slew of them, going back to “Lust For Life” and beyond!

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/why-do-filmmakers-love-van-gogh

    It also discusses pronouncing the name. Too long to quote, but follow the link (I hope not paywalled) and if you don’t enjoy reading the whole thing at least read the paragraph you can get to by searching “Another advantage of Vincent”.

  7. “We should leave van Gogh to the Dutch, from whose lips “Gogh” emerges as a two-part catarrhal feast.”

    What a great line . . . I haven’t spoken Dutch since my parents passed away, and miss speaking it . . .

  8. The British pronounce him as “van Gock” but don’t they also pronounce Don Quixote as “Don Kwick-set” and Don Juan as “Don Jew-un”?

  9. MiB, the claim in the Anthony Lane article I linked was that ‘Nor are the English [correct], who plump for a cozy “van Goff.” ‘ In the clip that Andréa posted, the British was pretty much like that. Maybe what you are thinking of is the one involved in “She pronounces the name to rhyme with a Scottish loch,” .

  10. Oh, I’ll just paste that paragraph:

    Another advantage of Vincent is that it gets millions of his admirers off the hook. They are spared the herculean horror of trying to say his last name, and the pitfalls of cultural snobbery that surround it. In “Manhattan” (1979), two couples amble down a street, discussing the overrated. Who deserves to be brought low—Mahler, Mailer, Lenny Bruce? “How about Vincent van Gogh?” Mary (Diane Keaton) asks, in playful provocation. She pronounces the name to rhyme with a Scottish loch, and Isaac (Woody Allen), who’s only just met her, flinches in disgust, mouthing and remouthing her words as if he were chewing stale cake. To him, it proves she’s a phony who tries too hard. The correct version, for him as for most other Americans, is “van Go,” and the joke is that none of them are right. Nor are the English, who plump for a cozy “van Goff.” Let’s be honest: we will never be sufficiently glottal. We should leave van Gogh to the Dutch, from whose lips “Gogh” emerges as a two-part catarrhal feast. Thank heaven for Vincent.

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