I got a note from Jeff Mejia's sister Jodi. He is getting some super-duper kidney treatment they hope will get his kidney to function properly. They are in wait and see mode. He doesn't have internet access, but the hospital has a mail interface where he can get messages. [link]

My mother and step-father are expected shortly so showering is the plan now.

The Inklings, and their co-horts, were the last vestiges of Victorian/Edwardian writers. They reveled in their non-modernity and rejected the new stuff (JRRT was notorious in his dislike of television, and even though he had a car while his kids were still living at home, he got rid of it during WWII or right after, and never bought another).

Relevance?

Oh, I just mean that Betsy's beer-drinking, pipe-smoking women are around in 1950, so if the Inklings are not hanging out with female authors as peers, they're doing it on purpose.

Edit: There, see? Like Kathy said.

I don't actually have any position to take in this discussion.

You know, if my mother had named me "Clive Staples," I might not have had the most enlightened attitudes towards women either.

Clive Owen doesn't seem to have a problem. I mean, we don't know that his middle name is Staples, but it could be, like, Hitler or Hassenpfeffer or Oogedy-Boogedy. Nonetheless, he neither smokes a pipenor rails against modernity.

His middle name is, obviously, "Robin's Lover".

If you get my share of C.S. Lewis, does this mean I get your share of Noel Coward?

I think Clive Owen should smoke a pipe. Mrowr.

(And for "smoke a pipe," insert...well, just about anything.)

I think he would look very silly smoking a pipe. Really, the age of the pipe has gone by, unless you're smoking dope in the pipe, in which case, you win irony points (double if you'er also wearing a grandfather sweater).

His middle name is, obviously, "Robin's Lover".

As opposed to Tolkien who, due to a tragic scooby-dooish speech impediment, was "Robin's Rover"?