Lewis Carroll (3) vs. Margaret Wise Brown; McQueen advances

Most of yesterday’s discussion concerned not Steve McQueen’s movies or Vidkun Quisling’s war activities, but Martha Stewart’s taxes.

Unfortunately it seems that neither McQueen nor Quisling has had any tax problems. All we got in the comments is this from Jonathan:

The definitive Quisling biography was written by Dahl — no, not that one, or we could get a two-fer from Roald. But there’s this from the biography in Wikipedia: “During formal dinners he often said nothing at all except for the occasional cascade of dramatic rhetoric. Indeed, he did not react well to pressure and would often let slip over-dramatic sentiments when put on the spot. Normally open to criticism, he was prone to assuming larger groups were conspiratorial.” Ummmm…. not ideal for our purposes?

Not great, but that’s better than what we have for McQueen, from Jeff:

I had a PowerPoint Bullitt joke all lined up but it turns out it’s the namesake McQueen not the cool-person McQueen. On the other hand, it’s hard to want to vote for the Nazi.

So I was all set to go for Vidkun. But then I saw that next round he’d be up against Maurice Sendak. According to wikipedia, “Sendak described his childhood as a ‘terrible situation’ due to the death of members of his extended family during the Holocaust which introduced him at a young age to the concept of mortality.” No way am I gonna feed him more trauma by placing him up against an actual Nazi. So McQueen it is.

Today’s matchup

It’s the third-ranked children’s book author against an unranked, but also legendary, author of children’s books. Seems like an odd pairing, but the unseeded contestants were put in randomly and this just happened. Carroll, as a bona fide mathematician, could do an academic talk very well, while Brown could very well put everyone to sleep, given that this is what her most famous book does for a living.

As usual, I learned lots of things from wikipedia:

Brown, who died in 1952, bequeathed the royalties to the book (among many others) to Albert Clarke, who was the nine-year-old son of a neighbor when Brown died. Clarke, who squandered the millions of dollars the book earned him, said that Brown was his mother, a claim others dismiss.

and

From the time of its publication in 1947 and until 1972, the book was “banned” by the New York Public Library due to the then head children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore’s hatred of the book.

A Carroll connection! What do youall think??

Again, here are the announcement and the rules.

3 thoughts on “Lewis Carroll (3) vs. Margaret Wise Brown; McQueen advances

  1. Perhaps @Manuel is invoking this from Carroll

    See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!

    to vote for both. I tried that once with no success.

    Much as the mathematician in me would like to hear Carroll, who might coin a few new portmanteaus, I want to spare Columbia the picketing by some who worry (with reason?) about his relationship with Alice.

    Let’s see how the matchup between Brown and her sometime illustrator Sendak pans out.

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