7/13/2023 0 Comments Better luck nextime acouticHer split is complicated by desperation to appease her scornful teenaged daughter, whom Archer sends out for a visit as a last-ditch effort to hold onto his rich wife. Johnson sets the tone for the novel’s spiky take on marriage with epigraphs from Zsa Zsa Gabor and Groucho Marx, which are complemented by the zingers Ward reports having heard at the ranch, including, “He was taller when he was sitting on his wallet.”Įmily is torn about her divorce – and she’s not the only one. Asked why she became an aviatrix, she quips, “I took up flying airplanes because I enjoy looking down on people.” (Her first was from her flight instructor, whom she married at 17.) This is a character who “believes that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” She channels Carole Lombard with a touch of Katharine Hepburn, and gets all the novel’s best lines. Louis in her double-cockpit biplane for her third divorce. Tall, blond, adventurous, bitingly witty Nina O’Malley, a repeat customer, flies herself in from St. With less relish, he recalls how he landed at the ranch after his parents lost their stately home and comfortable livelihood during the Depression, forcing him to withdraw from Yale. Despite the decades that have passed, he recalls the hijinks and heartaches from that year in sharp detail. Hobbled by a wartime back injury, and with no wife or children (“not that I know of, anyway, ha ha”), he’s glad to have a rapt listener. Prompted by a group photograph of the guests and staff of the Flying Leap from that pivotal summer, Ward happily dives back into the past. The visitor tells the retired doctor that he is writing a book about divorce ranches and asks to record their interviews. Ward’s recollections are spurred 50 years later by an unnamed visitor at his nursing home in Whistler, Tennessee. His main job was to squire – or wrangle – the wealthy women that the ranch catered to. This was his last season working at the amusingly named Flying Leap ranch as a pseudo-cowboy and gofer. Johnson frames her story through memory, in the spirit of the coming-of-age film “Summer of '42.” Her male narrator, Howard Stovall Bennett III, a retired southern doctor better known as Ward, wistfully recalls the summer of ’38. The book channels Frank Capra’s screwball comedies, and more specifically, George Cukor’s hilarious 1939 movie version of Clare Boothe Luce’s play “The Women” – in which much of the all-female, all-star cast (Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, and Paulette Goddard) also land on a Reno divorce ranch. Julia Claiborne Johnson’s fun second novel, “Better Luck Next Time,” takes readers to one so-called divorce ranch in 1938. Her course of action was not unique in fact, an entire business had developed around the needs of women in her situation. Her first husband, she told me, had grown older but had never grown up. Will consumers be mindful about the relative impact of different EV vehicle options?Īs a young bride, one of my stranger initiations into my husband’s family involved hearing stories about his step-grandmother’s disappointing first marriage and six-week stay on a Western dude ranch in the 1930s – which enabled her to establish Nevada residency and subsequently procure a quick Reno divorce. If you size up CO2 emissions over a vehicle’s lifetime, electricity soundly beats internal combustion – especially as more power is renewably sourced and battery technology gets “cleaner.”High gasoline prices turn heads toward EVs, which can lead to a hunt for affordable EV models. (The EV “high end” keeps getting higher.)The EV story, analysts point out, remains one of net carbon impact. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times decries a wave of bigger – and bigger-battery – EVs. Those are pricier than EVs like the little Bolt hatchback, which General Motors discontinued in favor of pickups. They’re more resource-intensive, too. The demand side – that is, consumer preferences – plays an important role, too.There are full-size EV pickups that can power homes, and some drivers do need big vehicles. For 2022, the firms involved in the mining and manufacturing for those accounted for 27% of Tesla’s total emissions, reports Quartz.But the supply side isn’t the only thing to consider as we think about EVs and making the future work. And such “Scope 3” emissions – including those of suppliers – represented the deepest part of the product line’s carbon footprint.Batteries are a big factor. But this time, in Tesla’s report, it was part of the tally. What should we make of a recent report from carmaker Tesla reminding us that, even though its cars have no tailpipes, there are significant carbon emissions associated with getting them built and on the road?It’s worth thinking about, though there’s a lot more at play when it comes to electric vehicles and CO2 emissions.The vast network needed to supply raw materials and component parts for EVs makes for difficult accounting.
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