While I enjoyed this and other interesting responses to the question about the Missouri Compromise, I listened to the Ensemble Baroque de Nice play some of Alessandro Scarlatti’s concerti grossi. I’ve had the recording for ages – I bought it in college, when my obsession with baroque chamber music really began. I had played one of the concertos in high school orchestra and liked it; I remember having a really hard time finding a recording of them. (The internet in 2001 was not what it is now.)
The Earworm 
The suppervision of chowder-eating tyrants? Never take an exam on an empty stomach.
Not to worry, one of my young coworkers today confidently declared that Watergate happened in 1967. He knew this because he had just seen All the President’s Men. I did not turn around and suggest he vet his info before speaking in a room full of people who were actually alive at the time. I think that merits at least some brownie points for restraint, especially since his speech devolved into some fairly ham-fisted rhetorical flourishes on Viet Nam-era draft-dodging, and all I could think of was having seen William Christie on Sunday and, well, yay Viet Nam-era draft-dodging.
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I think that merits some points for restraint – especially given the business about draft-dodging. (Also: for some reason I had assumed that Christie was British. But after a brief google, I now know better.)
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He’s certainly like no other Buffalonian I’ve ever known, but that may be my fault.
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Most of my in-laws are from Buffalo, and having known them all for quite a few years now, I’ve concluded that 1. IT IS SO COLD THERE WHY WOULD ANYONE LIVE IN SUCH A PLACE and 2. Buffalo contains a lot of people who have never left Buffalo, either in a geographical or a philosophical sense, but it also contains enough high-quality weirdos and other interesting persons that I am generally in favor, as long as I don’t have to visit during the winter.
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ETF (who is also from Darkest Wegman’s Land and I think would pass muster as a high-quality weirdo) maintains that it doesn’t actually get that cold there, it just snows a lot.
As for visiting, me neither, I just assume the Thruway closes from November to May, and you’d never get past Hrofescaster without sled dogs and Yukon Cornelius for a guide.
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Donnes-moi une freine. It’s south of here and close enough that people will drive up for an evening at the theatre.
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Of course, because they basically already live there.
There is a cultural subtext at work, however, which is that the western part of the state kvetches about the eastern part being a liberal Sodom and eating up all the tax revenue, so the eastern part of the state considers anything west of Schenectady to be where Northwest Passage expeditions traditionally get lost and die.
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Odd really since, for us, the Niagara peninsula is the bucolic south; land of vines and fruit trees, summer theatre and expensive B&Bs. Buffalo is, admittedly, seen as a slightly inconvenient way to access cheap US air fares but not-so-long-ago it was a haven to which one might retreat from the Presbyterian rigours of a Toronto weekend.
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Where on earth did the student get the idea that Missouri was supervised by Maine? It’s just so implausibly wrong.
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Part of the Missouri Compromise was that Maine was admitted to the union as a free state to balance out Missouri as a slave state – I think the student somehow went from this to the idea that the two states were Twinsies Forevah or something.
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I didn’t know that. What was Maine’s status prior to the compromise?
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It was part of Massachusetts.
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