Friday, January 31, 2014

Worst Betty Scene Ever



An anonymous Betty recently commented on Betty Keira's magnificently entertaining review of Ring in a Teacup, saying, amongst other sapient things, that it's one of her favorites.  (There I go, just assuming the commenter is female.)  I love Ring in a Teacup myself, but it will never be a favorite – because of that ludicrous, horrible, ridiculous final scene, when Lucy runs away from Fraam's home, checks into a hotel without any money, and gets locked into her room by an hotel employee, who phones Fraam to let him know they've got a penniless impostor claiming to be his fiancée penned up on the premises.  This, for me, qualifies for inclusion on the short list of competitors for Worst Betty Scene Ever.

Other contenders?  Please share your views.

Just guessin’:
Betty JoDee:  pages 1 through 224 of The Hasty Marriage, but especially the wedding;
Betty Anonymous:  the Worst Betty Scene Ever is still better than anyone else’s best;
Betty Keira:  cold, damp Scotland and Eliza charging a hill and being outflanked by a major meteorological event;
Betty Debbie:  each description of Sarre’s parenting ‘skills’.

Oooh, ooh – I’m also nominating:

  1. scenes in which Maggy speaks in Scots dialect, even though the action may be magnificent, amusing or thrilling, as the random insertion of 'och' and 'wee' is sheerly irritating;
  2. every ruddy time Ivo and Julia discuss how unappealing intelligence is in a woman;
  3. Loveday plotting with Sieska or whatever her name is to get her married to a gold-digger via cruise ship skullduggery that makes absolutely no sense at all.  Why couldn’t she just have written as Loveday saying, ‘well, let’s go on a cruise so you can get to know him better and we don’t have to tell your cousin that golddigger will be on the ship, too’;
  4. Alcoholic Louisa of Heaven Around the Corner being prescribed 1-2 alcoholic beverages per day; and
  5. Jake, that pompous twit, abusing Browning to his own ends, in All Else Confusion.


What say you, Betties?

29 comments:

  1. The worst Betty Scene Ever. I should probably give this some thought. I know I read a very bad one a couple of months ago but I don't remember which story it was. Anyway, I nominate Donimic van Wijkelen in a cold jealous fit terminating Abigail's employment at the hospital in the Netherlands where she helped out because there was a shortage of nurses and forgetting to pay her so she had no job, no money and could not return to England. (Saturday's Child)

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  2. A Star Looks Down: the bit wherein 10 year old Dirk steals a small sailboat and nearly kills himself and his sisters just to get revenge for something that Beth supposedly did (but in actuality did NOT do)...ugh.

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    1. If you think about it, on a scale of 1 to 10 that is easily a 20.

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  3. It came to me this morning, this lonely Sunday morning...

    Actually, I am at my parent's home, I can hear my dad coughing in the dining room where he has set up his notebook. My mom is pottering around the flat. But I remembered that bad, bad...

    So, I would like to nominate a second novel although it probably does not qualify:
    It does not make you feel that bad when you read it. Outraged more like.
    It is not a scene. It goes on for weeks in the story.
    It is one of the most evil things to happen in a Neels.

    The Fortunes of Francesca
    Evil Uncle William incarcerating Francesca and Auntie who had had a recent heart operation in his rural Dorset home and keeping Auntie from seeing a doctor/going for check-ups.

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    1. Quite by chance, The Fortunes of Francesca is a hidden link to a comment I left elsewhere today. See if you can find it.

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    2. And I woke up to that tune playing in my head this morning...

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  4. I have to say that I agree with number three in that list. I think it is so out of character for Loveday to plot with Sieska... she seems otherwise such a sensible girl and she knows that Terry is an adventurer, and it's just so petty to agree to completely ruin her best friend's whole life (and financial situation) simply because she's annoyed with an RDD. Having said that, when I recently reread CtaW I skipped over that chapter and really enjoyed the rest of the story!
    Betty van den Lurkdom

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  5. I was watching a cooking show. One of the contestants is an Austrian diploma'd nurse working in casualty and another one is a male student nurse in theatre. They both made it into the second round.

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  6. We have a new member, # 120. Welcome Betty Eldel44! I am fairly certain that that is not your real name but it sounds great.

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  7. I was looking for recipes today and found a lovely little video on jamieoliver.com.

    No, it’s not Sadie with Anna and Julie in the kitchen getting ready for Christmas.

    Jamie Oliver's Super Easy Pancakes featuring Poppy and Daisy
    Taken from Jamie Oliver's Family Christmas special from a couple of years ago on C4, Jamie knocks up some brilliant pancakes with Poppy and Daisy.

    The girls are sooo cute. Their daddy too.

    Christmas special, Bettys, so what do I spy with my little eye among the decorations? Look at the pumpkins with the girls‘ names carved! But that’s not what I mean. What I really mean are the paper chains!!!

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  8. Today, again quite by chance, I found another (I almost called it Christmas-sy) video from November last year.
    Intocht Sinterklaas Uithuizen 2013
    The Arrival of Sinterklaas from Spain, an event which takes place in November each year.

    An important event in the Netherlands. As you can see in the video, they put up quite a show for the little ones.
    The songs in the background are all Sinterklaas/Zwarte Piet songs.
    Betty Anonymous

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    Replies
    1. This was really interesting to watch and fun, too! Thanks for sharing.
      Betty van den Pikken Wol

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  9. Last year, I tried to find a fellow student from university via google. No luck. Former addresses in Rhode Island and California. Today, I found her!!! I cannot understand why I did not find her last year. Anyway, she used to live in places where some of our Californian Bettys live. Now, apparently, unless she has moved again, she is a resident of Austin, Texas, Williamson County. We have Bettys there...
    Betty A.

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  10. It’s a small world after all...

    Ever since I discovered the blog of Dutch quilter Ingrid aka Supergoof who, for a time, lived in Blokzijl, a place that two of our heroines visited in the Netherlands, I just love to look at pictures of quilts. I would love to be able to create something that big but the very thought of all those hundreds of little pieces... But I do enjoy looking at the very many different designs.
    Incidentally, as I have mentioned before, she stopped blogging "forever" on 29 December 2013. But she missed it, she likes to write stories and enjoys taking the pictures and so she started blogging again, on 23 January 2014. Hooray!

    Anyway, today I was on pinterest and trying hard not to get lost I thought I’d next check out Betty Debbie’s pins of quilts when all of a sudden I thought, „I’ve seen that quilt before.“ I went back to the previous pinner who also had quilts, the girl I know from university, and she has pinned the same quilt, although from a different source. Now isn’t that funny.

    It's a small world...

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    Replies
    1. It is a small world...and now I have an excuse to spend some time on Pinterest...

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  11. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  12. And may I say I miss the Top Comments / Recents Comments section?!! Sigh.

    More Recent Comments

    February 4, 2014
    News of Betty AnoninNM, Betty AnoninTX's mom.

    February 6, 2014
    Life After Betty: Summer of Summers
    Anonymous: What about Lucy Walker?

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    1. I've fed-back to Google and the Blogger team that we really want our top comments gadget back, to no effect. I can't imagine ours is the only blog affected. If you can find a way to petition Google/Blogger to fix the problem and restore the gadget, please do.

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  13. We have another new member. Welcome, Betty JO! Perhaps you would like to share with us how you became a Betty fan. Do you remember which was your first Betty Neels novel?

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  14. Ok, this isn't the worst scene ever or anything, but one of those WHAT??? moments, for me at least. In Midnight Sun's Magic, the RDD kisses Annis, and she "felt a strong urge to ask him if he were married, if he had children and a family. She wanted to know more about him, but although he had kissed her with some warmth, his manner was as casual as it had always been and she was sensible enough to know that kissing a girl when there wasn't another female to be seen for miles was a perfectly normal thing for a man to do." Really? A married man? Harrumph. Better not be normal for Mijnheer van den Pikken Wol!

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    Replies
    1. That Annis. She seriously needs to learn 1) minimal assertiveness; and 2) ducking technique.

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  15. Apologies that my comment is horribly out of date, but it *is* immaculately pressed.

    This feels like happy fate! Only this past weekend I set myself to undertake a reread of all my Betty Neels, then catalog them with my own synopsis and star ratings. There's a spreadsheet and everything. Wikipedia led me here and it's as if life is fun again!

    I just reread "Year's Happy Ending," and what stuck out for me as a worst was a small, but niggling gripe: Deborah is gifted with "a large wrapped package" for being such a top-rate nanny, and she even promises young Eleanor they will open it later to see what's inside. And--the horror!--this package is never mentioned again! The lack of closure on this disturbs me even now. The rest of the book is one of Betty's middling efforts, in my opinion; a mishmash of her tropes that never quite comes together.

    Oh, fellow Bettys, it's so nice to meet you!

    Side note: I tried to become a follower but was given an error message. I'll try again later; Blogspot will not best me in this!

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  16. Cute dogs!
    I very love they!

    Hiện nay các chương trình tổ chức tết trung thu cho các cháu thiếu nhi ngày càng được tổ chức một cách hiện đại hơn nhiều so với các năm về trước. Thiết bị sự kiện cũng ngày một thay đổi theo yêu cầu khách hàng, vậy để có một buổi sự kiện hoàn hảo thì mình cần làm gì?
    Song Huyền là đơn vị chuyên nghiệp hàng đầu Việt Nam về cách tổ chức, dàn dựng chương trình, đặc biệt là dịch vụ như: thảm trải sàn, nhà giàn không gian, cho thuê sân khấu, âm thanh ánh sáng…
    Ngoài ra chúng tôi còn cung cấp các dịch vụ khác như dịch vụ tổ chức sinh nhật tại đây, cho thuê đội múa lân sư rồng, cho thuê ca sĩ, cho thuê mc dẫn chương trình, cho thuê pg…

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  17. Probably not the worst, but in Sun and Candlelight Althea basically tells the demon children (and possibly the psychotic nanny) that they can do anything they want to her and she won’t “sneak” to Sarre. Famous last words?

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  18. Julius gettting angry at Patience for saying out loud what he had told his sister he was going to do. And forbidding her to speak of it again. And accepting her apology. The more I think about that scene, the more I flashback to some really bad blind dates, and the more I want to tell her to get up and leave the restaurant without looking back.

    B. Baersma

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  19. In my opinion the worst Betty Scene is in Stormy Springtime, when Ralph sneers, is caustic and incredibly rude to Meg when she borrows one of his medical texts to learn more about his work. Way over the top nasty. The week Meg spends in Holland housekeeping for his family is one really bad, bad Betty scene as well. Meg is pretty well a drudge working from sunup to the early hours of the next morning (granny liked to stay up to the early hours reading and then calls for a hot drink -- is Meg staying up waiting for granny to go to sleep or is Meg woken up by a ringing bell; either way very inconsiderate and entitled future in-laws.)

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