An email from Longtime Reader Preussenotto reads:
Still loving your blog, but I have to take issue with something I have noticed. There has been an appalling lack of Barbara Eden pictures for some time. Please correct this at your earliest convenience. Regards,
I thought something has been missing…
Hope that redresses the shortage somewhat.
Question: On which Paul McCartney album did Silly Love Songs feature?
Answer: ALL OF THEM.
One day, if you’re all good, I’ll tell you the story of our band’s version of the song. (Warning: features nudity.)
I’m not triskadekaphobic, because I’m not in any way superstitious. In fact, I got my job at the Great Big Research Company (Seffrican division) on Friday 13th, August 1979 and I never looked back.
I knew one otherwise ordinary guy who was so afraid of the number thirteen, and Friday 13th in particular, that he would take the day off work and stay in bed, drinking only water all day. Other than laziness, the only reason I would stay in bed in Friday 13th was if Nigella Lawson was in it.
And so would anyone else not a homosexualist.
I never understood superstitions, by the way. I know that some of them are rooted in past customs — e.g. not spilling salt (because salt was really expensive back in the day) — but getting all worked up about a black cat crossing your path? Give me a break.
People in Roman times would pay a soothsayer to tell them whether it was safe to travel by having the soothsayer “read” an animal’s entrails (which had to be fresh — no PETA back then, obviously). What people don’t know is that our Dr. Fauci can trace his lineage all the way back to Roman soothsayer Gaius Faucissimus in 87 B.C., so he’s still in the family business of making money off ignorant people.
Don’t get me started, because where superstition is front and center, can religion be far behind?
I’ll just leave the topic alone, but here’s another pic of Nigella recumbent.
Your suggestions in Comments.
Glenn Reynolds:
“Why do the lefty media always have to puff people up into bogus heroes?”
Answer: because otherwise, their only heroes are murdering bastards like Stalin, Mao, Guevara, Lenin, Trotsky, Castro, Chile’s Allende and Venezuela’s Chavez (just off the top of my head; there are LOTS more).
A couple Christmases back, New Wife admitted to #2 Son that she had no idea what animé was, whereupon he gasped in shock. I was a little scornful, because my only exposure to the genre had been the kiddie junk seen on TV during the kids’ childhood. And New Wife can hardly bear to watch cartoons, of any kind.
But the thought obviously rankled him, and being a thoughtful and considerate boy (okay, man: he’s now 31), when he came on Monday to visit us for his birthday week (family tradition, don’t ask), he brought New Wife an animé movie to watch. And so we watched it together last night.
What a revelation.
Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress is an absolute tour de force. The story is compelling, the time/space continuum jumps are seamless — the latter are better than any other movie I’ve ever seen, in any format — and the plot is faultlessly written. It is, quite honestly, a perfect movie.
#2 Son also revealed to us that his favorite Christmas (?) movie is Tokyo Godfathers (also directed by Satoshi Kon), which means it’s high on my list.
If you’re a fan of the animé genre, you’re probably laughing at me right now (and that’s okay); but if like me you’re an ignoramus of the genre, then you owe it to yourself to watch it — just as much as if you’d never seen a black-and-white movie before, you’d have to watch one of the classics made by Ernst Lubitsch, Elia Kazan or John Ford.
He’s left us a few others, carefully selected because he knows my taste in movies. I can’t wait to watch them.
Afterthought: I have to admit that this is not the first time #2 Son has done this to me: he also turned me on to Archer and Arrested Development, to name but two Needless to say, I trust his judgment a great deal. Oh, and one of his Christmas presents to me, many years back, was the boxed set of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s dance movies.