#l. a. ring

[laclefdescoeurs]

Landscape near Kallerup with a field to the right. Telegraph poles at the left, 1906, L. A. Ring

[psikonauti]

Laurits Andersen Ring (Danish,1854-1933)

Smallholders in the Village of Ring, 1887

Oil on cardboard

[tratadista]

Laurits Andersen Ring, Já Parou de Chover? (1922)

[anti-rop]

absolutely despicable behavior from WB to plunder a fan film from 15 years ago just because their corporate greed led them to want to make their own (likely soulless even with PJ’s involvement) version with the exact same title.

UPDATE: the copyright has been released and the fan film The Hunt for Gollum is back on YouTube and can be watched. Though, it's still really telling of the capitalist corruption of WB and Hollywood that their first move and publicity for this (unnecessary) movie was to directly attack the fans for something produced over a decade ago.

[spiraling-trap]

there is no death

[lawlight week day 6: ghosts] @lawlightweek2024

[an-american-in-norway]

In the Month of June L.A Ring 1899

[mithrandirl]

Have you heard nothing Lord Elrond has said? The Ring must be destroyed!

[awnrii]

been rewatching a lot of rvb so I had to redraw motorcyclist tex and her 9-5 epic fail church

comparisons below!

damn. do you guys like the halo helmets I think it’s fun

[shima-draws]

Just got back from seeing Sonic 3 and HOOOOOOLY SHIT y’all. Oh my fucking god. OH my god. Ohhhh my g o d

[sweet-little-honeybee]

👀🩷💜

[harrietvane]

So, in Busman’s Homeymoon, Lord Peter buys Harriet Vane a mink cloak worth 950 pounds (according to the Dowager Duchess’ journal entry), but he buys Tallboys for “only” 650 pounds.

Even bearing in mind that real estate really did used to be cheaper, do you understand how that is possible? Or how to find out more about relative purchasing power? I used an online calculator website which gave me some figures, but it still seems insane that one could buy an entire Elizabethan farmhouse for 2/3 the price of a garment! Very curious to learn from others who understand this better than I do.

Ah, I see my esteemed colleague @oldshrewsburyian has also had some interesting thoughts on this, so I'll link that here as well before I begin.

So, it's a legitmate question, and there's no catch-all simple answer (in the gotcha sense of 'why didn't i know that bit of cultural Truth'), but there are mitigating factors that take it from a ridiculous price comparison, to merely outlandish. Even taking into account that the coat is quoted in guineas, not pounds, and that PW says the bank valued Talboys at £800 via a mortgage (the paid price was a discount, for paying in cash quickly, which is Plot Relevant), it gets us to roughly the same place, value-wise. Or shall we say PRICE-wise, rather than value, as I'll get into below. There's several factors at play here - they mainly relate to class, and spending power:

-The house is Not That Great, in terms of the kind of property that PW would usually be buying. I mean it is still a large-ish house, big enough to have 2 adults and small children in, but it's not what would be on his radar normally. The only reason they know about it, it that it's near a place where HARRIET grew up as a child. It's not getting any high marks in particular Beauty, Convenience, or Quality - the main reason HV's drawn to it is sentiment, rather than anything else. They both know that they will have to significantly add to it, and alter it, in order for it to be a comfortable home. That would usually be out-of-budget for someone in Harriet's position, who would expect to buy something that meets her needs 'as-is'. Most people looking at buying that house would be Harriets not Peters, so it might be a tough sell.

-The house has no power, and limited plumbing: There's dark references to DRAINS by the dowager duchess, it's entirely possible that this house has no modern plumbing at all - they make the comparison that the huge palace the Wimseys grew up in wasn't plumbed until recently, but then again they do have about 800 servants, whereas Talboys is just a regular house: they will have Bunter alone (at first), with an assist from Mrs Ruddle. There's mention of "a cistern" with some basic valves, but the scullery is mentioned as having a copper, from which hot water is "scooped into a large bath-can" - a copper being, simply, a large metal basin over a fire, in effect. No running hot water, maybe no flushable loos - it's a factor. They also talk specifially about having to electrify Talboys themselves - it's candles and lamps until then. It's fancy camping. By the mid-1930s, a lot of middle-class buyers would expect a little more convenience in both water and wiring, unless they had significant support staff, which Talboys would not be expected to house.

-There's probably no farm! It's a farm house - not a wider land purchase. People like PW's brother the Duke are wealthy primarily because they own land, not because of the big palace they have (which eats money, rather than generates it). The land is what gives them spending power, because other people are paying them rent to live on it, farm on it, or both. PW's own personal 'younger sibling' wealth is also mentioned somewhere to be primarily in real estate (assumed to be in London) - sad to say: he's a landlord, and that's why he's rich. Talboys, on the other hand, as a purchase, would not, in almost any way, be expected to generate revenue through either farming, agriculture, or charging rent. Until they invent house flipping in 80 years, or until the motorway goes through in 40 years, there's not much expectation that Talboys would increase all that much in value.

-Lastly, there's a massive disparity in what The Market Will Bear when we compare a basic residence vs a luxury item (like a mink coat) in the mid-1930s. This is not particular to that time, though. Like any first-year economics student will tell you, the price of something is not it's intrinsic value, it's what someone is WILLING to pay for it. If someone is willing to pay such a price, that's the price it will be. So, we're not comapring Objects, we're comparing Buyers: the the main purchasers of a slightly run-down farmhouse located nowhere special are Harriets, and main purchasers of mink coats are Peters. Talboys is priced for Harriets. The mink coat is priced for Peters.

Compare for example, a contemporary parallel: the Hermes Birkin bag. It's a leather handbag with a starting retail price of about USD 11,400. Just for the bag. Then, you have fancier versions of the fancy bag, eg wikipedia tells me one version sold at auction for USD 380,000 in Hong Kong in 2017. Now, the Harriets of today are not buying a Hermes Birkin handbag, but they are probably trying to buy slightly run-down houses outside urban centers for (one hopes) slightly less than 380k. The Wimseys of the worlds are clearly buying Birkin bags. In that way, it's actually pretty easy to get to a place where Person A might buy a single luxury item for X pounds, and Person B might buy a whole residence for X pounds, and neither feel like they'd done something insane. The key here is in a Wimsey/Vane marriage, they run up against this concept immediately, and repeatedly.

There's a good reason the first epistolary section of the novel is almost entirely taken up with money chat - the ring, the purchase of shirts from Burlington Arcade, the marriage settlement, the gift from the bride to the groom, the mink coat, the bitchy exchange between Helen and Harriet about HV being allowed "six free copies of her book" to distribute. These people come from 2 fundamentally different experiences of the world. They might have gotten engaged using the word 'Magistra', specifically to emphasise their fundamental equality (in the context of learning and the mind, to begin with), but it can't be denied: there's gaps that need to be bridged. They both know parts of their married life will be spent in attempting to do that, hopefully to their mutual satisfaction. Mention of a mink coat for 950 guineas is a nice, neat shorthand for illustrating what's still at play between them here.

[laclefdescoeurs]

View from a street in Fløng, 1911, L. A. Ring

[thegoldenelite]

I saw this PICTURE a while back, and it's haunted me ever since. So I went digging around, and I found this reddit post. It's the DDT roster depicted as anime girls!

DDT did a collaboration with a flash game called "Ring ☆ Dream". So these are official! The game was about managing a women's wrestling promotion

(this game is no longer available to play).

Kota Ibushi

Konosuke Takeshita

Tetsuya Endo with Mad Paulie

Daisuke Sasaki

Michael Nakazawa

The rest is under the read more!(Long post under the cut)

Kazuki Hirata

Antonio Honda

Shigehiro Irie

HARASHIMA

Toru Owashi

Masahiro Takanashi

Ken Ohka

Yukio Sakaguchi

Makoto Oishi

KUDO

Keisuke Ishii

Akito

Soma Takao

DJ Nira

Cherry

Yoshihiko

Sanshiro Takagi

Danshoku Dino(Dino is topless but you can't see anything lol)

[tratadista]

L. A. Ring, Visita ao Sapateiro (1895)

[aloneandforsakenbyfateandbyman]

Lana Turner on set of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

[the-one-that-weeps]

HAPPY GAY MARRIAGE TO LEONEED!!