AdamSmith

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/10415228/US-spied-on-future-Pope-Francis-during-Vatican-conclave.html

The Forgotten Reign of England’s Lesbian Queen by Michael Korda Oct 31, 2013 5:40 PM EDT Daily Beast The last of the Stuart monarchs ruled England with brilliance and intrigue, likely had an affair with a Churchill ancestor, and made sure her country stayed Protestant. Finally she gets the biography her remarkable life deserves. Nothing is more difficult than to recreate in all its complexity than a distant age and not only to get it right, but make it seem fresh and relevant. Fortunately, Anne Somerset has already done this brilliantly in her outstanding biography of Elizabeth I. In the case of Elizabeth, of course, Ms. Somerset had the advantage of writing about one of the most famous (and most compellingly interesting) of all English monarchs, the subject of so many different plays, films, and television dramas that we almost feel we know and understand her. Her new subject Queen Anne, on the contrary, does not loom large as a figure around which to build a television miniseries, and most readers, in the United States at any rate, would be hard pressed to place her exactly in time, or say anything about her reign. Great Britain's Queen Anne. (Universal History Archive/Getty) In fact, Anne’s relatively short reign (twelve years) was pivotal, and marked the emergence of England as a major power in the endless wars of European succession, sealed once and for all the future of England as a Protestant nation, and brought to the throne a woman of great intelligence, political skill, and determination to rule—as well as one whose strongest emotional (and perhaps sexual) attachment was to other women. It is sometimes the fate of England to do what seems daring and difficult in politics long before the United States (which, did not of course yet exist in Queen Anne’s day) gets around to doing it. We have yet to elect a Jewish president on this side of the Atlantic, while Benjamin Disraeli was a hugely successful prime minister in the latter part of the 19th Century, and we only just tested whether a lesbian can be elected mayor of New York City, while England may very likely have had one on the throne in the 17th Century. While there was no equivalent of Rupert Murdoch at the time, there were also no secrets in the densely packed court of the 17th Century, in which there was no such thing as privacy, and when everything the monarch did was closely attended by courtiers and gossipy servants—it was not considered unusual that James II’s wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth before an audience of forty courtiers. Speculation about their monarch’s private life was widespread, but it was not as important to her subjects as the fact that she represented the Protestant succession, at a time when people still lived on the dangerous edge between the return of a Catholic monarchy and a the shaky hold on the throne of a Protestant one, a period described well in that famous old English satirical song The Vicar of Bray: “When Royal Anne became our Queen, Then Church of England’s glory, Another face of things was seen, And I became a Tory… And this is the law, I will maintain Unto my Dying Day, Sir, That whatsoever King may reign. I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir.” The whole country shared the same ambition; after the Civil War, the Puritan Commonwealth, the beheading of Charles I by Parliament, the restoration of the monarchy in the person of King Charles II, and the short, stormy reign followed by exile of James II, the national impulse was merely to emerge on the winning side. The English had not yet completely lost their taste for extreme religious disputes, but after nearly a century of political turmoil and bloodshed, they were tired of staking their prosperity and peace of mind on the religious belief of their sovereign, nor did they want to repeat the experience of living under the clanking, authoritarian military dictatorship of Cromwell and his major generals. Charles II was admired because—although he was suspected of being a Catholic, in sympathy if not in fact—he lived a spectacularly secular life, and seemed to have little or no interest in religion himself. The English were like a man recovering from a wild binge, which had begun a century earlier with Henry VIII’s decision to break with Rome over his divorce, and carried them on a wild rollercoaster ride from one religious extreme to another. ‘Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion’ by Anne Somerset. 649 p. Knopf. $14.39 Nothing the current royal family has had to put up with comes close to the vitriolic, stinging libels that greeted Stuart monarchs, in an age when the personal life of the royals was not just good gossip, but bound up with bitter political and religious strife. Anne came to the throne in consequence of these tangled dynastic, political, and religious quarrels. Born in the reign of Charles II, her father the Duke of York was the King’s younger brother, and was deposed only three years after he came to the throne as James II because of his open adherence to Catholicism. Anne and her older sister Mary had been brought up as a Protestants on the instructions of her Uncle Charles II—although he is usually referred to as “merry,” the King was also wise, and had returned from exile with an unrivalled gift at reading the mind of his fractious subjects. The birth of a son to James II shortly after his succession to the throne more or less guaranteed a Catholic heir, and that threat precipitated the tumultuous events that brought about James’s flight to France, “The Glorious Revolution” that placed Anne’s older sister Mary (and her husband the Dutch Prince of Orange) on the throne. Since they were childless, Anne became next in line for the crown. She was by no means an innocent bystander to these great events, however—a devoted card player, she played her own hand shrewdly and carefully, indeed her refusal to recognize her infant half-brother as the Prince of Wales, or to support her father, who complained not without reason that even his own children had deserted him, was calculated to bring herself to the throne. Married to the dull, but worthy Prince George of Denmark, Anne had seventeen pregnancies, but only four of them produced live infants, none of whom survived long. Those who are compulsive watchers of The Game of Thrones or The Tudors would in fact be better off reading Anne Somerset’s masterful and fast-paced biography. Anne’s grasp of politics, the almost unbelievably dramatic events that surrounded her life, the plots and counterplots around her, above all the dominating “love interest” of the Queen’s life, Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, the tempestuous wife of the most gifted and successful general in English history, whose descendants would include Winston Churchill, and for whom Blenheim Palace, that grandest of private homes, would be built. The relationship between the Queen and her beautiful, fascinating, conniving, demanding, passionate, infuriating, jealous, and ambitious confidente Sarah, is dealt with by Ms. Somerset with a deft blend of consummate tact and unflinching detail, and remains one of the more astonishing episodes in the long history of the English royal family. Sarah was witty, acerbic, shrewdly manipulative in furthering her husband’s interests while he was away on the Continent winning his great victories, and yet capable of great, indeed stifling loyalty to Anne. Clearly, Anne adored her with a combination of passion and extraordinary patience that is, alas, only too frequent in great love affairs, and equally clearly, Sarah, despite her rages, her tantrums and her determination to squeeze every political and material advantage she could out of the besotted Queen, adored her back, a relationship which caused a scandal in their time, and would still no doubt cause one in ours. Anne, for her part, though long-suffering, never forgot that she was the Queen, not Sarah, and eventually put an end to Sarah’s domination, and with steely determination replaced her in the ultimate humiliation with Sarah’s own cousin, the quieter, but equally determined Abigail Masham. Sarah fired back with a volley of scandalous innuendo about the Queen and Abigail Masham, but in those broad-minded days Anne’s determination to adhere to the Protestant succession, and the tricky settlement that would bring the crown on her death, through his mother, to the Prince-Elector of Hanover, a fat and unsympathetic German who spoke not a word of English, rather than to her dashing Catholic half-brother, mattered more to the English than her somewhat muddled passions. This is all Game of Thrones material, sex, jealousy, and politics, but fascinating as it is, Ms. Somerset is a serious biographer and a very readable historian. She is fortunate, as are her readers: these people wrote an enormous number of letters, and lived surrounded by a court which dealt in gossip, in an age when a malevolent pen was a more dangerous weapon than a sword, and when the broadsheet, the cartoon and popular ballads were as deadly and pitiless as pieces in the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror or the Daily Express are today, and perhaps more so. Nothing the current royal family has had to put up with comes close to the vitriolic, stinging libels that greeted Stuart monarchs, in an age when the personal life of the royals was not just good gossip, but bound up with bitter political and religious strife between Whig and Tory, and between those who clung to the Protestant succession and those who yearned for “the king across the sea,” and it was Anne’s fate to attempt to square this circle. To this day, water is not served at table in the officer’s mess of some of the older British Army regiments, for in the 17th Century many officers, when the King or Queen’s health was toasted, passed their wine glass across their water glass to signify that the exiled Stuart Pretender was their rightful monarch, while water is served in wardrooms of Her Majesty’s ships (where it is even less likely to be drunk) because the Navy’s loyalty was never in doubt. Anne Somerset tells brilliantly the story of this tangled reign, in which England and Scotland were finally combined to create “Great Britain,” and in which English conquests and victories on land an on sea made it a worldwide empire, and a serious contender for European power. Above all she brings Anne to life as a shrewd and an instinctive politician, in her middle age increasingly gouty and overweight, but with a compelling personality and a deft touch in an age when the monarch still reigned. Ms. Somerset’s book is history at its best, authoritative without being overbearing or over-detailed, constantly illuminated by a canny eye for the revealing detail or anecdote, and above all readable as we follow Queen Anne’s life and her increasingly firm grip on power, despite a life full of tragedies, intense family pressures and divisions, and the constant difficulty of dealing with her endlessly demanding and outspoken friend Sarah Churchill. Those who write history are constantly being criticized for being either too “popular” or too “academic,” but Anne Somerset manages to strike the perfect balance between the two, her book being at once entertaining and yet solidly based on meticulous scholarship. It is a grand achievement and sheds welcome light on one of the more underappreciated English sovereigns, and on what might be called the Age of Jonathan Swift. If ever a work of history managed to be “definitive” and yet great fun to read, this is it. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/31/the-forgotten-reign-of-england-s-lesbian-queen.html

That was the main pun.

No, this is new and different from their own collusion with the NSA. This news is that telecom providers such as Level 3 have let the NSA tap its lines which link the servers of Google, Yahoo etc. to one another and the world. Although, to your larger point, what a surprise.

The puns are too many to know where to begin.

"Surprise me!"

http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/01/smallbusiness/sex-workers-obamacare/index.html

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/apr/17/why-cant-we-give-up-fossil-fuels

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/31/glenn-greenwald-leaving-guardian

Parking this here, as there is no forum for general-interest cinema. Happy All Hallow's! 'Here's Johnny!': The Shining scene is scariest in movie history, claims studySeminal Jack Nicholson scene voted most frightening, but The Exorcist and A Nightmare on Elm Street have the edge overall Ben Child theguardian.com, Thursday 31 October 2013 09.37 EDT Jump to comments (149) Death's door … Jack Nicholson in The Shining. A study suggests the 'Here's Johnny' scene is the scariest in cinematic history. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive The "Here's Johnny" scene from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is officially the scariest movie moment of all time, according to a new study. The Shining Production year: 1980 Country: USA Cert (UK): 18 Runtime: 119 mins Directors: Stanley Kubrick Cast: Danny Lloyd, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall More on this film Website Play.com polled 10,000 users to find the 10 films that most frightened customers, then used heart rate monitors to find out which scenes delivered the greatest chills. The Shining scored the scariest scene, with scenes from Wes Craven's original 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Exorcist in second and third place respectively. The most frightening scenes were calculated by identifying the percentage increases in film-goers' heart rates from spikes occurring at the same moments. The "Here's Johnny" scene, in which Jack Nicholson's deranged writer peers through a hole in a door he has just created with an axe, made pulses jump by 28.2%. A Nightmare on Elm Street's most frightening moment, in which Nancy Thompson brings killer Freddy Krueger from her dream into the real world, caused a 26.7% increase in the average heart rate. The Exorcist's scariest bit, when Christine MacNeil investigates a strange noise in her attic, raised pulses by 24.8%. The three movies changed positions, however, when viewer reaction to the films in their entirety was taken into account. The Exorcist came top over the long haul, sending pulses racing by an average of 25.9%. A Nightmare on Elm Street was second with 25.9%, with The Shining bringing up the rear on 23.3%. When these figures were combined with the scariest moment scores, however, The Shining reclaimed first place, with The Exorcist second and A Nightmare on Elm Street third. "It's interesting to see just how close the top three films' scare ratings were," said Shingo Murakami, managing director of Play.com's Japanese owner, Rakuten. "It seems The Shining's extended periods of tension and soundtrack kept viewers' hearts racing throughout, but simply couldn't match the massive terror induced by Freddy Krueger's multiple gruesome murders or The Exorcist's explicit exorcism." The study also found that watching the three scariest films affected viewers' heart rates in a similar manner to light exercise. Top 10 scariest films voted by Play.com users (scariest moment and scariest film scores combined)The Shining (1980) The Exorcist (1973) A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) Ring (aka Ringu) (1998) Alien (1979) The Silence of the Lambs (1990) Poltergeist (1982) Insidious (2010) Halloween (1978) Saw (2004) Three scariest moments from the top three The Shining • "Here's Johnny" scene (28.2% increase in average heart rate) • Twin girls scene ("Come and play"; 23.1%) • "Red rum" scene (21.0%) A Nightmare on Elm Street• "Fight fire with fire" (where Nancy Thompson brings Freddy Krueger into the real world from her dream; 26.7%) • "No way out" (where Johnny Depp's character, Glen Lantz, is murdered by Freddy and his bedroom fills with blood; 26.2%) • "A bloody mess" (where Tina Gray is murdered by Freddy in front of her boyfriend Rod Lane; 26.2%) The Exorcist• "Attic noises" (where Christine MacNeil investigates a strange noise in her attic; 24.80%) • "Take me!" (Father Karras is possessed and sacrifices himself; 23.66%) • "I cast you out" (the initial exorcism attempt by Father Karras and Father Merrin; 18.33%) http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/31/the-shining-heres-johnny-scariest-movie-scene-jack-nicholson

Google is my mind!

Regret I never stayed there -- almost, but not quite. In April 2010, when I was going to NYC on an apartment-hunting visit (with Andre meeting me there ), Orbitz was advertising a room at the Chelsea. I snatched it up but, on the day of check-in, got a last-minute email to the effect of, 'Sorry, the room you booked is no longer available. Please call us for alternate arrangements.' Orbitz did rebook me in a nice suite in the Trump hotel at Columbus Circle, for the same price, but we were bummed about not getting to stay in the old grand dame, no matter far past her glory days.