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- You know, I keep trying to come up with the conclusion to my sentence that starts, "It's hard to be bitter about not being at Comic Con when...." but the lack of discretion that necessarily completes the sentence sort of prohibits me from going there. So that's all you get.

- They lost Patty's luggage.

- Stick class tonight.

- I know I have good genes and don't particularly worry about aging, so my perspective might be off, but seriously?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/fashion/24skin.html
SERIOUSLY?
If someone asked me to get breast implants to make their wedding look perfect, I'd stop talking to them, because CRAZY.

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From:

stardragonca.livejournal.com

-You speak of the non-shallow rich, old or new.
Heh. Elizabeth II still does as much of her own auto work as she can manage, because it's worth doing, and she enjoys it.(She doesn't have to be our Queen for a living, you know.) ;)
-One 1815 shilling = about $120, so that sounds about right.
-I think one might make a distinction between conspicuous consumption, and being conspicuous. Maybe.

From:

gement.livejournal.com

Ooh, where'd you get your number?

Mine, which came up with a shilling as $50 (a yuppie food stamp) was done entirely by eyeballing a list of prices in Dr. Johnson's London by Liza Picard. That appendix was astoundingly useful. No judgments, just a list of prices she found in various primary sources, ranging from 1p (enough gin to get drunk) and 2p (enough gin to get dead drunk) to the captain's cut of a privateering bounty.

If a shilling is $120, a pound is $2400, by the way. And people were just... loaning each other ten pound notes. I continue to fail to wrap my mind around it.

Edited Date: 2008-07-25 09:25 pm (UTC)

From:

stardragonca.livejournal.com

Believe it or not, sometimes people actually get paid to study this crap!;)
Figuring 35 years of real world inflation, and throw in the War of 1812 and that darn Napoleon, a grand for a 1780 pound sound reasonably approximate in terms of actual buying power.
It's hard to calculate buying power in a lot of ways: No Emperor could buy a book of matches or an aspirin tablet, to use one famous example, whereas slavery used to produce commodities drives all the numbers wonky*(Did the slave die? Did he or she have children?) Basically, you look at as many physical constants as you can.(There are a lot of these. Figure 26 days between Rome and London by land, for any age until steam locomotives. Land is land, wheat is wheat, a day's labour is a ays labour. Blah, blah blah.)
The relative gap between rich and poor is quite astonishing, until you contemplate modern billionaire companies and people. If you manged to sock away $1,000 a day every day for two thousand years, you are still only 2/3rds of the way to being a billionaire.

*I apologise for the technical jargon. These things can't be helped. Wonky is the state of having a high degree of wonkines, expressed in wonkitude.

From:

gement.livejournal.com

We should talk. You know things. You probably like telling them to people. I think I should like to hear some more of the things you know.

I'd email you but you don't have a public address listed. If you would be willing to open correspondence channels with me, this handle at hotmail would really appreciate hearing from you.

From:

stardragonca.livejournal.com

That would be entirely agreeable. :)

From:

stardragonca.livejournal.com

You know, I could get completely hammered on $20 worth of gin.

From:

gement.livejournal.com

And we're talking blue ruin here, not the good stuff. Any liquor store will sell you enough to get dead drunk for $8, if you're not picky. (1p is about $4 by my conversion.)