Nothing like wretched excess

The rich and powerful do like to get together for their Big Events, don't they? And demonstrate their command of wretched excess in the process. The rest of us do our part by gawking -- hence the interest of the world in Jeff Bezos' wedding to Lauren Sanchez in Venice.

Business Insider, always on the lookout for the fresh angle, reports that there is a prenup.

Whew. Glad to hear it. Bezos married his first wife, MacKenzie Scott, without a prenup and ended up having to give her $38 billion in Amazon shares in the divorce settlement.

Don't know what the terms of the Bezos-Sanchez prenup are.

Sanchez is a successful television reporter who has something of a side gig of playing television reporters in fictional contexts. She did this, for example, in Gotham Tonight, a three-episode web series that served as a prequel to a Batman movie. She was also an unnamed entertainment anchor in an episode of Dirt in 2008.

I also refuse even to do a google search on the matter of the divorce settlement between Sanchez and her ex., Patrick Whitesell, a founding partner of a Hollywood talent agency.

But the funniest take on the wretched excess of the Venice wedding has come from The Onion. Which gives us a "by the numbers" column. I'll give some samples from it.

120:
Gladiatorial combatants fighting to death in reception pit.

2,500 ml:

Amount of lip filler present

AFU826:

Serial number of warehouse container holding Sanchez’s ex-husband.

-----------------------------------

I have now done my modest part.

Comments

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog