When Anne avoided Henry's company, was sullen and evasive to him, he sent her from court; he hoped that a few months in the country would persuade her of his charms. It did not work. Anne was already playing a far more serious game than the king. Later, after she had been arrested, Henry would claim he had been 'bewitched' and the term wasn't used lightly in the 16th century. But perhaps it was simply the contrast between her vivacity and Katharine's solemnity; or perhaps the king mistook the inexplicable ardor of true love for something more ominous, long after that love had faded.
It is impossible to fully explain the mystery of attraction between two people. How Anne was able to capture and maintain the king's attention for such a long while, despite great obstacles and the constant presence of malicious gossip, cannot be explained. Henry was headstrong and querulous. But for several years, he remained faithful to his feelings for Anne - and his attendant desire for a legitimate male heir.
You may feel somewhat hemmed in by the role models society currently has to offer. As you struggle to arrive at your own definition of the truly modern achiever, the people around you sometimes criticize your own rather liberated attitudes. Just because their ideas are not in sync with yours in no way invalidates them. If your ideas are a tad too radical, theirs are certainly too conventional. There's room on this earth for both points of view...Here's a link to our discussion over at Misbehaving.Net about leveling the playing field. Thanks to danah for blogging it.
JILTED BRIDE GETS NEW MANBTW, this was stolen lock, stock & barrel from Dave Barry's blog where the recent addition of comments is really something not to miss.
A bride-to-be ditched just four days before her wedding found another groom in time for the big day. Alison Innes, 20, was eight months pregnant when fiancé Peter Knight, 28, sent her a text calling off their wedding.
But her wedding still went ahead on the day planned when former love Daniel Innes, 18, stepped in as her knight in kilted armour. Mrs Innes's off-on marriage is the latest saga in a line of marital troubles.
In 2001, she stumbled across her husband of only 10 days, George Greenhowe, in bed with her mother Pat. But despite her heartache, she forgave them even agreed to be bridesmaid at their wedding.
Mrs Innes, from Arbroath, said news her wedding was off had come "out of the blue".
"I didn't see Peter, but I received a text saying he was sorry. I was very upset and didn't know why he backed out," she told Closer magazine.
The Scot said she and Mr Innes had dated for four months last year and was "shocked" at his proposal, but it took her just 48 hours to agree.
She is not sure who the father of her child is - Mr Knight, Mr Innes or his brother John - but said her new husband had still promised to support her.
"Contrary to expectation, drastically reducing my consumption of alcohol triggered a corresponding decline in my weblog output: my previous post was a couple of months ago, at exactly the time I decided to drink less. I stopped doing other things too—watching television in mid-December and drinking coffee in early February—but the connection between blogging and alcohol seems too strong to ignore.One of the things he mentions is how he and Stavros The WonderChicken live far away from some of us bloggers who hang out in Boston, SF, NY. I was very interested in that, just thinking about it the other day, not in terms of living near bloggers, but rather, thinking about how few people you see in any given day and our lives are lived -- even in this jet-set world -- in very local ways. If your local neighborhood includes Harvard University or Times Square or The Golden Gate Bridge, you do have a different "local" experience over a lifetime which some may call elite, but this is where we live. I don't know if I want to apologize for it, but as I mentioned in my post "The Star You Are" it's disingenuous to pretend it's not part of the game here.
I wasn’t even a particularly heavy drinker. A beer and a couple of glasses of wine or a couple of beers and a glass of wine is as much as I ever feel like drinking. Over dinner recently, when I told my friend Willem that I’d started on a plan to drink less, he said: “But you never drank much anyway.” It wasn’t the quantity that bothered me as much as the regularity. Drinking was a habit, like watching television had been, and I was curious about whether I could break another habit as easily."
The Suffragettes refused to bow to violence. They burned down churches as the Church of England was against what they wanted; they vandalised Oxford Street, apparently breaking all the windows in this famous street; they chained themselves to Buckingham Palace as the Royal Family were seen to be against women having the right to vote; they hired out boats, sailed up the Thames and shouted abuse through loud hailers at Parliament as it sat; others refused to pay their tax. Politicians were attacked as they went to work. They homes were fire bombed. Golf courses were vandalised. The first decade of Britain in the C20th was proving to be violent in the extreme.
Suffragettes were quite happy to go to prison. Here they refused to eat and went on a hunger strike. The government was very concerned that they might die in prison thus giving the movement martyrs. Prison governors were ordered to force feed Suffragettes but this caused a public outcry as forced feeding was traditionally used to feed lunatics as opposed to what were mostly educated women.
The government of Asquith responded with the Cat and Mouse Act. When a Suffragette was sent to prison, it was assumed that she would go on hunger strike as this caused the authorities maximum discomfort. The Cat and Mouse Act allowed the Suffragettes to go on a hunger strike and let them get weaker and weaker. Force feeding was not used. When the Suffragettes were very weak..........they were released from prison. If they died out of prison, this was of no embarrassment to the government. However, they did not die but those who were released were so weak that they could take no part in violent Suffragette struggles. When those arrested had regained their strength, they were re-arrested for the most trivial of reason and the whole process started again. This, from the government's point of view, was a very simple but effective weapon against the Suffragettes.
Toy maker Mattel let it leak that Ken's failure to commit was at the core of the couple's troubles. He simply would not ask Barbie to marry him, despite subtle hints like Dream Bride Barbie. Why Boot Camp Barbie didn't propose first we'll never know.Well, hey, give Ken a break. It wasn't like Barbie had all the right equipment -- she doesn't even have nipples!
Clearly, there were issues around intimacy. Armed with stiff, plastic fingers, Ken couldn't even hold hands. And, it's true, Ken was not anatomically complete, which may have given him pause on the issue of a wedding and a wedding night.
But Gibson is hardly the first to fetishize the violence done to the Son of Man -- been to a good European museum lately?
