Laura was a pioneer who drove a carriage in the snow—it was so cold she had to stop to snap the frozen breath off the horse’s nose so it could breathe! But Alison’s no slouch herself: we’ve heard from her latest book that she’s in excellent shape and is obsessed with workouts. So either of these two ladies could show us a thing or two about fitness. The question is, who’d be the better seminar speaker? Uncork your clever arguments, please!
Past matchup
Raghu brings on the stats:
Unlike Beverly Cleary, Leona Helmsley wrote nothing I would want to read. Quickly looking at snippets of books *about* her, none of them seem like anything I want to read, either.
“Palace Coup: The Inside Story of Harry and Leona Helmsley” gets 3.6 on Goodreads, which is basically 0 given the scale of scores there, and not even the 2 reviews are interesting. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1553418
“The Helmsleys: The Rise and Fall of Harry and Leona Helmsley” gets 3.0.
There’s a book by the guy who administered her philanthropic trust, and from the preview on Google Books, it looks excruciatingly dull and poorly written.
Extra credit for adjusting the raw numbers. One of the three central tasks of statistics is generalizing from observed data to underlying constructs of interest.
Anon writes:
According to Wikipedia “Alan Dershowitz, while having breakfast with her [Helmsley] at one of the Helmsley hotels, received a cup of tea with a tiny bit of water spilled on the saucer. Helmsley grabbed the cup from the waiter and smashed it on the floor, then told him to beg for his job.”
I think we can all appreciate someone who would tell Dershowitz to beg for his job. But Raghu counters with:
You’re saying that with Helmsley, the pre-seminar coffee will be ruined by a temper tantrum? I don’t know about Columbia, but our campus catering wouldn’t stand for such abuse, and then I wouldn’t get any coffee, and then I would leave without attending the talk.
We wouldn’t want the seminar to happen without Raghu in the audience, so Bev it is. We’ll see how she fares against Shakira in the semis.
Bechdel’s rule would have meant nothing to Laura. But just about any conceivable movie about Laura passes the Bechdel test.
“Little Battlestar on Dimidium” perhaps not. They could raise Pigs in Space I suppose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmI77ZBeJrQ if you dare.
It’s hard not to look ahead to anticipate potential future matchups and ignore the match in front of you. But it’s one match at a time. Fun Home on the Prairie!
I’m going to go with male protagonist proxies here (violating the Bechdel Rule)
Michael Landon (Poppa Wilder) vs. Michael Cerveris (Poppa Bechdel): Landon played a teenage werewolf while Cerveris played Sweeney Todd. Both scary, but I think the werewolf is scarier. So, Wilder.