Author Topic: Nero fiddled while rome burned  (Read 2891 times)

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Offline SyN

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Nero fiddled while rome burned
« on: September 08, 2005, 10:03:00 PM »
Bush was to busy playing guitar to care, and his mom thinks all the refugees are now better off. goes to show where they are at.  But hey it took the attention away from Karl, ect ect.
[ This Message was edited by: SyN on 2005-09-08 19:04 ]
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
A word to the wise is infuriating.\"

Offline Antigen

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Nero fiddled while rome burned
« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2005, 11:30:00 AM »
There are many differnt explanations to Marie Antoinette's alleged PR foible about cake. One of them goes that when she heard that the people had no bread, she thought that cake was a perfectly reasonable and accesible alternative for them. Cake, of course, being something more like biscuits or quick bread w/ bread being a more delicate, time consuming product.

It wasn't that she was so cold and heartless so much as that she was cloistered, out of touch and totally niave of life on the ground in her country.

And W's looking forward to messing around w/ a prop guitar on Trent Lott's newly rebuilt front porch.

Same shit, different century. Whether they're crazy, mean spirited or just incredibly stupid and out of touch makes no difference to the people STILL waiting on their roof for a chopper or boat to happen along.  

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.
--Thomas Edison, American inventor

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Offline Anonymous

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Nero fiddled while rome burned
« Reply #2 on: September 09, 2005, 10:30:00 PM »
The cake quote is a myth, she never said it.

Quote
Let them eat cake; er, I mean brioche. Oh, nevermind...
Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake." We have that on the authority of biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, who spoke on the subject at the 2002 Edinburgh Book Fair.

Historians have known better all along, actually, but it has long been popularly believed that Marie, wife of Louis XVI and queen of France on the eve of the French Revolution, uttered the insensitive remark upon hearing peasants' complaints that there wasn't enough bread to go around. Not true. "It was said 100 years before her by Marie-Therese, the wife of Louis XIV," Fraser explains. "It was a callous and ignorant statement and she [Antoinette] was neither."

The attribution is doubly erroneous in English, truth be known, because the word "cake" is a mistranslation. In the original French the quote reads, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," which means, literally, "Let them eat rich, expensive, funny-shaped, yellow, eggy buns."


http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/b ... inette.htm
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline SyN

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Nero fiddled while rome burned
« Reply #3 on: September 09, 2005, 11:10:00 PM »
Cake in that time/ language, was as we know it  another word for plaster.  So in that period of time if she did state it, which as any politics goes depends on the spinner you read from meant, let them die, since even then plaster was inedable only good to seal walls.[ This Message was edited by: SyN on 2005-09-09 20:11 ][ This Message was edited by: SyN on 2005-09-09 20:16 ]
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
A word to the wise is infuriating.\"