The Vine: February 15, 2007
Dear Sars —
Your Dire Straits searcher should check out www.pandora.com — it sets up “radio stations” that play songs similar to either the artist or the individual song you give them initially. Sounds like it’s similar the liveplasma.com thing, but you can get more specific. It’s a great way to find artists and albums you never heard of before.
Signed,
Online Radio Junkie
Dear ORJ,
A ton of other readers suggested Pandora; thanks for the tip. Other suggestions appear below, and if I got it more than once, it’s asterisked.
(Dire Straits/Mark Knopfler songs)
“The Bug”
“Heavy Fuel” *
“Romeo and Juliet” *
“Sailing To Philadelphia”
“Skateaway”
(Dire Straits/Mark Knopfler albums)
Brothers In Arms *
Making Movies *
On Every Street
Private Investigations
the Princess Bride soundtrack
Shangri-La
(other artists)
Eric Johnson
Fleetwood Mac
Fountains of Wayne
Frank Zappa
John Martyn
Morphine
The Police
Richard Thompson
Styx *
Sugarloaf
U2
Van Halen
ZZ Top *
Sars: a short and sweet one for you.
After many years of being single, I’ve finally found someone who I’m desperately in love with. Talking marriage, kids, the whole nine. She’s my lobster, basically, and I couldn’t be happier.
I have, of course, been talking this up to many of my friends, as they’ve all been a member of the Find Him A Girlfriend Club for many years, and word has started to spread. Problem is, it hasn’t spread to everyone, namely people who are getting married.
I’ve been a bit of a professional wedding guest over the last few years, and as such, am now getting invited to weddings of people I met at other weddings. Sigh. Anyway, many of these invites are coming without the “and guest” attached to them. I know it’s uncouth to assume you can bring a date if it’s not specified, and I know it’s certainly possible that some of these people could want to save money and not open it up to guests, but part of me suspects that it’s because I have been to — I shit you not here — about 16 weddings in the last five years, 15 of which I have gone stag to. So I’m pretty much known as the single guy at all these affairs, and I think a lot of people assume I won’t have a date, which, of course, now I do, and thus don’t think to give me the option.
Is there any way for me to gently tell these people that I now have a SO to bring to these things, or am I relegated to being the single guy even though I’ve finally found someone?
Signed,
Where The Hell Is My Plus One?
Dear At The End Of The Aisle,
Your only real option, at least without falling afoul of good manners, is to let the information get out of its own accord…and not to take it personally if, once it’s out, you still don’t get plus-one status. It’s not uncommon for couples who are planning a wedding not to give an “and guest” to anyone who’s not married or in a long-term relationship, which seems kind of Scroogey on the one hand, but on the other hand, when you and your lobster plan your own wedding, you’ll sort of see the wisdom. It’s nothing personal; it’s probably not that they think of you as Stag Guy. It’s that they don’t know your status for sure, and if they give you a plus one, they have to give everyone else one, and they don’t want to feed three hundred people or have randos getting drunk and mounting the ice sculpture at the reception, blah blah. No, your girlfriend isn’t a rando, but…you see what I mean.
Drop The Lob into conversation where you can, but beyond that, until the relationship becomes either longer-term or more formalized, this is just how it’s going to go with some of these invitations.
Hi Sars,
I bought a copy of Television Without Pity: 752 Things We
Love to Hate (and Hate to Love) About TV (not that I need to tell you
the title, I’m sure). I enjoyed it immensely, and I was sad when I read
the last page. It was perfect reading for my commute, and put me in a
good mood in the morning.
I work in marketing communications for a small company. There are five
of us that write marketing materials, and one editor. We spend a lot of
time in the editing stage to make our larger pieces (e.g. catalogue,
website, et cetera) read as if written by one person. Debating which
sentence works best with five people is no fun!
In your book, you and Wing have maintained a consistent voice, and I
can’t tell that two people wrote the book (except for the occasional
personal detail that slips in, like “younger brother/sister”). Do you
have a system for how you achieved this?
Just curious…
M
Dear M,
Thanks for the rave review!
It’s not a system, so much; it’s that we’ve worked together as co-editors and writing partners for nearly a decade, and of course we started working together because we were already friends…so, we sort of started out with a unified-ish voice, but by now we’ve spent so much time together, working and otherwise, that it’s more like we share a brain.
This is probably not helpful for your particular situation, but my suggestion to your editor is to craft a strong style guide with lots of examples of the “house” tone, which will help to make the writing more uniform; s/he should also give plenty of feedback during the writing process, and then just tune it up in the editing phase so it’s more uniform.
But unless you all want to work on top of each other and co-dependently shop online together for close to ten years, our system may not be one that works for you. Heh.
Tags: Ask The Readers etiquette popcult
