You mean the piece on NPR this morning? It couldn't have been more condescending and insulting if she used an electric insult machine on National Condescend to Fans Day.
To be fair, there are VAST numbers of tone-deaf singers in Fenway Park any given night, and she was sitting next to one of them.
Still and all, it would have been a better essay if she'd acknowledged up front that the Globe had already done her research for her, or if she'd scared up a couple other worthwhile details about Fenway lore. (For example, the "wrong" story somebody tells her, about a daughter named Caroline,
did
happen, but it happened this year, well after the song was entrenched in Fenway tradition. One of the players had a kid, they named her Caroline, and the birth announcement was put up on the board during that song.)
The funniest aspect of the "Sweet Caroline" singing is that the song is quite a bit longer than an in-between innings stretch, so it is never finished before play begins, and they just fade it out. So everybody is still screaming "So good! So good! So good!" in the middle of the first pitch.
This article is so interesting and HI-larious: [link]
Mr. Carroll is an object of national fascination in part because of his apparently pathological criminality, and in part because he represents a kind of Briton known as a chav. Chavs, whether rich or poor, tend to favor gaudy jewelry and expensive-but-tacky clothes with big logos and to behave in a way that others find coarse or obnoxious.
Male chavs wear tracksuits and baseball caps; female chavs pull their hair tightly back in buns or ponytails, a style known as a "council house facelift," from the term for public housing.
...
Chav behavior - outrageous spending sprees, drunken brawls, inappropriate public displays of affection, screaming matches with loved ones in bars, destruction of property, late-night stumbling and/or vomiting - provide celebrity magazines here with much of their material. Among British women, Coleen McLoughlin, the girlfriend of the soccer star Wayne Rooney, is seen as a celebrity chav.
...
Others in the greater chav universe are David and Victoria Beckham, who would hate to be considered chavs but who nonetheless wore matching purple outfits and sat on matching thrones at their wedding; and Jordan, a former topless model who recently traveled to her own wedding in a Cinderella-style carriage shaped like a pumpkin and pulled by six white horses.
Chavs = B&T crowd. also? all the Gottis.
You mean the piece on NPR this morning? It couldn't have been more condescending and insulting if she used an electric insult machine on National Condescend to Fans Day.
It was a British colonial sort of condescending. "Oh, look at these silly natives and let me imply the superiority of Britannia, er, New York-based totebag carrying liberals."
Yeah, Chav is a particularly unpleasant new term - it's precisely cognate with "white trash".
I want a monte cristo sandwich.
Sadly, it doesn't appear I'll get one.
Chavs = B&T crowd. also? all the Gottis.
I was just thinking Chav = redneck. Go team region-specific associations!
These pants are in excellent condition. They were never taken on pirate expeditions. They weren't worn onstage. They didn't straddle a Harley, or a guy named Harley. They just hung there, sad and ignored, for a few presidencies.
Too funny. Oh, to have the 30 inch waistline that would let me bid on them...
Chavs are known as neds in Scotland.
Also, at work, I listen to an American radio station and during the news, I half caught a story about some guy who said on a TV/radio interview that if you aborted all the black babies then the crime rate in America would drop.
I didn't hear that right, did I?
