An Evil Guest: is

Gwern Branwen · 17 Mar 2010, 16:25 · from 2010-March.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:25:49 -0400
Subject: (urth) An Evil Guest: is
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On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 2:02 AM, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
> Gwern wrote:
>> 'pretty young woman'? Hold on, isn't Cassie's age late thirties-early
>> forties?
>
> No. She was "thirtyish" (207).

Well, even if we take Cassie at her word - I knew a woman who was in
her 40s for an awful long time - we can do better than that; the cop
who picks up Cassie guesses (pg 29) 'Forty?' 'Not quite.' (And I'd
argue that Cassie felt obliged to smile because the cop was actually
low, making it a compliment by someone she didn't want compliments
from.) 'Not quite' fits best with 39, 38 at the lowest.

Not to mention, early 30s doesn't really seem to me to give Cassie
time for all her husbands.

> Cassie's usual self was thirtyish. Margaret, iirc, was said to be in her
> fifties. The woman Klauser was looking at had obviously aged so much that he
> could think of her as old enough to be Cassie's mother. In my experience, I
> have never seen a thirtyish woman in modern times who looked old enough to
> be her own mother. <g>

Cassie is more like 40ish. As I said, the expectation of sex starlets
is 20s, and mojo Cassie is consistently treated as such (cf. the 3
square inch bikini); add 5 or 10 years to get Damaged Normal Cassie,
and that's a difference of 30 years - giving us the entire gap
necessary and even some left over time.

> I don't think that even Gideon could have transformed
> a talented woman who looked anything like Margaret into the most beautiful
> and desirable woman in the world.

Well, he manages to disguise himself very well, and one of the classic
uses for 'glamour' is beautifying ugly people, no? He can learn
invisibility in a year; I'd wager given a year or two he can learn how
to put a good glamour on someone if he doesn't already know how.

>> Margaret seems only to have known Cassie pre-mojo in passing - as
>> someone she saw occasionally from a distant and heard a reasonable bit
>> about. She then spends *months* with Cassie post-mojo, and like
>> everyone else, seems to forget about ordinary pre-mojo Cassie.
>
> Margaret had worked backstage for another actress in "The Red Spot"; she
> knew perfectly well what pre-mojo Cassie looked like.
>
> -Roy

And why do we think Margaret is exempt from the mojo's rewriting of
peoples' memories & expectations? Remember that Cassie was thought to
be famous even before she gave the last performance.

-- 
gwern

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