Occasionally The Other Charlotte or I have fun with the silly stuff that Tina Brown, unemployed Brit editor, turns out in the weekly column that someone over at the Washington Post gave her as a charity work.


This Thursday’s column, however, in which Tina, scratching her head over something to write about, attended a historians’ convention and wrote it up, seemed beneath our usual contempt. Just the lead alone prompted me to give Tina a pass:


“History is hot. And not just Brad Pitt’s flying thighs.”


My God–someone at the Post writes her a check for this stuff? Well, maybe not a very big check.


But the inimitable Wonkette knew how to wring some laughs out of Tina’s historical musings:


Tina: “History is hot.”


Wonkette translation: “It has been at least 15 minutes since I said something was hot. (People used to pay me to do that.)”


Tina: “And not just Brad Pitt’s flying thighs.”


Wonkette translation: “The last time I saw Brad Pitt I had just taken some of my Special Pills.”


Tina: “There’s such an outpouring of books from historians at the moment, you can’t throw a canape in Manhattan after 6 p.m. without hitting a tweedy scholar.”


Wonkette translation: “So someone got a little soused at that Tony Judt party. The tweedy guy stepped in front of Harvey at the last second, I swear.”


Tina: “Boston University professor and historian David Fromkin’s new book provides a more oblique contemporary frisson.”


Wonkette translation: “Don’t those words sound pretty together?”


Tina: “[Princeton historian Simon] Schama has assigned some summer reading for Rummy once he’s through with Grant: Thucydides’ ‘History of the Peloponnesian War,’ Edward Gibbon’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ Steven Runciman’s ‘A History of the Crusades’ and, for a case of imperial nerves, The ‘Meditations’ of Marcus Aurelius. Also, E.M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’ and Lytton Strachey’s essay in ‘Eminent Victorians’ on the loony Maj. Gen. Charles Gordon of Khartoum.”
 
Wonkette translation: “Surely I have reached my word count by now.”


Thanks for the link, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review Online.