Balance

It occurs to me that of late I may have been giving women a hard time on this here website, and I’ve also been discussing various examples of female pulchritude in my usual drooling Male Bastard fashion, so my Lady Readers may be getting a little ticked off.

Here then, in the interests of balance, is something for said Lady Readers:

I have no idea who he is (British, to judge from the label — “What label?” I hear you ask), so go ahead and just look at him like a sex object.

I owe you all one.

Comments, on this post, are restricted to the Ladies.

The Midi

No time to post anything cultural today; I’m off to the south of France, e.g.:

…and tonight I should be dining somewhere like this:

Yeah, I’ve had enough cold weather for a while, although apparently a cold front has swept through the place, making the weather more like Hardy Country than the Midi. (I know, I know: First World Problems.)

Tomorrow: Monaco, or maybe Provence. (I’m in the hands of Longtime Friend & Drummer Knob, so I have no idea where we’re going or what we’re doing. Pics to follow, if I can get decent wi-fi access on the road.)

Livin’ The Dream

So this guy inherited a bank, had no interest in running it, and sold it for three quarters of a billion dollars. Then he set out to do what any super-wealthy Formula 1 enthusiast would do: he built his own racetrack in his backyard where he can race his $5-million collection of sports cars whenever he feels like it.

And just to add to y’all’s jealousy, the 52-year old guy’s racing companion is his 23-year-old girlfriend, the wonderfully-named Clemence Lepeyre:

I know: he’s ugly, she’s young and gorgeous; he has lots of money, she has… well, you know.

Sounds like everyone’s happy except the Usual Suspects (in this case, the envious socialists because he dares to be rich and enjoys spending his money, and the envious harpies who whine about the couple’s age difference, like he’s going to settle for some old frump about his own age lol).

To all us guys, though, this man is a god. (What else would you do with $726 million and no charitable instincts?) All he needs to make this thing perfect is an air-conditioned 500-yard indoor range somewhere. (By the way, I love the track layout: it has something for everyone and every kind of sports car.)

As I’ve often said before: money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it sure as hell buys you a better class of unhappiness. Now all I need is to buy that winning PowerBall ticket so I can test that hypothesis for myself…

NEW OLD STUFF!

In an earlier post on music, I griped:

 I’ve become sick of all the old music, “old” being defined as 60s-70s music of my rock star (uh huh) youth. I mean, if I hear “Sweet Home Alabama” and anything by Led Zeppelin one more time, I’m going to slip the safety off the 1911.

So maybe that’s what Classic Rock needs: for new guys to reinterpret their music (as opposed to just reproducing it), much as Dred Zeppelin did to Led Zeppelin (I love the Dred, by the way).

And it’s happened, in (of all places) Finland (!). Have a listen to the Leningrad Cowboys (!!) performing the aforementioned Sweet Home Alabama live with the Red Army Choir (!!!) and be entertained by all the rest of the Cowboys’ interpretations of the old hits as they appear on the page (e.g. the turgid Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door and even the syrupy Those Were The Days).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am a happy man today, and I have The Englishman to thank for bringing these guys to my attention. (I know they came on the scene in the 1990s, but somehow I missed them. More fool me.)

And now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m going to buy the album.

Doubles

In one of his very few funny sketches, comedian Lewis Black muses on the loss of memory common among us old farts. It’s particularly emphasized when we’re discussing stuff of little consequence, i.e. show business.

“Hey, did anyone see that TV show last night? It had that actor from that other show with the blonde chick from that movie with the guy from the… oh yeah, the James Bond movie about the pipeline.”
“Oh, yeah. I saw her at the Academy Awards show last year… or maybe it was a couple years ago. What’s her name?”
“Dunno, but she’s got a great body.”
“Oh yeah.”

Among men of my vintage, we’ve all had conversations like that.

I have a theory about this memory loss business. It’s not memory loss, per se — the memories are all still there, but our brains have just relegated some to the “Stupid Shit We Don’t Really Need To Remember” file.

And the reason we do this (I think) is that our brains — or at least the memory portion thereof — are like a computer’s hard drive, with a finite amount of storage; and as we get older, the amount of available space for new memories shrinks because honestly, we’ve seen so much stuff by now that we’re trying to fit a terabyte’s worth of data into a gigabyte’s area. Small wonder we get forgetful.

When you’re a youngin, what do you have to remember? Nothing. Your mother’s face, that you hate peas, where father keeps his wallet and suchlike. As an adolescent, you need remember only a few more things: your girlfriend’s phone number, your favorite beer, where you keep your wallet, and so on.

As an old fart? Good grief. Birthdays, anniversaries, grandkids’ names, old lovers’ phone numbers, the names of the songs on Sergeant Pepper’s, your first car (all your cars, come to think of it), your first / last / most memorable sexual experiences, your boss’s name (all your bosses’ names), where you put your wallet… the list goes on and on, seemingly ad infinitum.

At some point, therefore, your brain’s CPU says “Fuck that shit. Let’s start prioritizing those memories. Girl’s name you shagged in the parking lot? Gone. The color of your third car? Outta here. The color of your date’s prom dress back in 1971? Buh-bye.” (Annoyingly, the brain will sometimes trash something important, e.g. your wedding anniversary date, but good luck using that excuse with yer Missus.)

I told you all that so that I can tell you this.

I get confused by the various celebrities / actors / famous people, especially when they have similar names, similar faces or have similar careers. I’m not talking about Nigella Lawson or Sophia Loren, who stand alone, are individually memorable and are goddesses. Let me give you a good example of what I’m talking about.

Two actresses, both blonde, both sorta Aryan / foreign-looking with unusual names, both quite beautiful and both quite successful in their careers. Here they are:

The first one was in that movie with Nicholas Cage about the stolen Constitution, the second was in that TV show with the ginger from Band Of Brothers. (You know the TV show I’m talking about; it also features the funny-looking actor who played in that movie about wine.)

But mention Diane Kruger and Malin Akerman and you’ll get a blank look from me: I wouldn’t recognize either if I bumped into them in the street, and if you asked me to tell which was which… forgeddabahtit. “Blonde chick who was in some movie or maybe it was a TV show. I think.”

It’s even worse when their names are similar. Katie Price and Katy Perry? Seriously?

I know: one’s a pop singer or something like that, while the other’s a… model? reality TV starlet? celebrity prostitute? [some redundancy] A quick online search reveals that they don’t look anything alike, but when you see a headline that reads “Katie Price Is Pregnant!”, there is no way to tell which one is going to pop a sprog without a photo or scorecard.

Which is probably a Good Thing. Our lives are too important to have to store shit like this in our cluttered brains, no matter how much this might alarm Variety magazine or the Daily Mail.

And we sure as hell don’t have to know the answer when it comes to “Which Kardashian — Kim, Khloe, Kris, Kunty or whoever — is bonking a Black dude?” (it’s a trick question: they all do, apparently).

Nevertheless, I see an occasional feature arising from this, so in weeks to come, I’ll post some more confusing doubles.

Oh, and I almost forgot; here are the two Katies:

I know, they don’t look anything like each other. Doesn’t matter, I still get their names confused because quite frankly, I don’t care. I need to remember Shakespeare’s sonnets, not this bullshit.

Disconnected

It says something for my state of mind that when I saw the headline “May and Hammond at war over worst budget build-up in history”, my immediate thought was “Why are Captain Slow and the Hamster arguing over their show’s budget, and where’s Jeremy Clarkson in all this?”

Of course, the headline refers to some nonsense about UK politics and the “May and Hammond” referred to are not James and Richard, but BritPM Wossname May and the Lord High Chancellor of Whatever, Philip Hammond.

Cut me some slack: I’m out of touch here in Nether Boonies, Cornwall, and the UK’s budget battle is about of the same interest to me as the love life of that fat comedienne who’s related to Chuck Schumer. (Okay, maybe the budget thing is a little more interesting, but you get my drift.)

Now: what’s for breakfast?