The Morehead The Merrier

Limp Woody

2012-01-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

When you gotta Van Gogh, you gotta Van Gogh.

What is wrong with this seemingly-clever movie poster? Well, a couple things:

1. Owen Wilson is in it.

2. Although using Van Gogh's Starry Night for a Paris night sky seems clever in a movie about a man time-travelling to meet great Parisian writers and artists of the past, there's the small problem that Van Gogh is not in the movie. Wilson keeps time-travelling to Paris in the 1920s, when Vincent Van Gogh had been dead for 30+ years. Even on his one, brief visit to La Belle Epoque, he doesn't meet Van Gogh. It's like doing a poster advertising a movie in which a man meets and befriends Charles Dickens, by showing him strolling through Hamlet.

Ah, the Woody Allen problem. Woody, Woody, Woody. Woody, you broke my heart.

Once upon a time, in a far-off time called the 1960s, Lenny Bruce died, and Woody Allen became the best stand-up comic on earth. For decades, he was the finest jokesmith in America. Listen to his classic comedy albums; one magnificent joke after another.

Then he became Woody Allen movie-writer/director, and began making wonderful, hilarious movies, like Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death, culminating in the Oscar-winning masterpiece Annie Hall. We loved Woody. He was funny; he was an artist. He was too above-it-all to bother coming to California to pick up Oscars.

Never tell a comic that they are an artist, especially if they are an artist. Oh a few may have sense enough, like Buster Keaton or Stan Laurel did, to say: "What rot. I'm a baggy-pants comic getting laughs." The art just happens.

But you always run the risk of encountering a Charlie Chaplin, who agrees that he is an artist, while also pursuing inappropriately--young girls for sex. Result: The Great Dictator ends in a turgid lecture to the audience. The otherwise-wonderful Monsieur Verdoux ends in a turgid lecture to the audience. Limelight is a two-hour-plus heartfelt tribute to himself that is almost impossible to sit through, which is unfortunate, because Buster Keaton doesn't appear until nearly the end. (Pauline Kael called Limelight: "The richest hunk of self-gratification since Tom and Huck attended their own funeral - and Chaplin serves it up straight.") No one saw A King in New York, in which Chaplin found modern New York and television crass. And no one should ever see A Countess From Hong Kong.

But at least Chaplin only made about one movie a decade after he learned he was an artist. Woody churns out one movie a year, like apple blossoms, whether the apples are any good or not.

Woody became Chaplin. He made self-regarding movies, like Stardust Memories, which was basically Woody spending 90 minutes slapping his fans across the face. He made the turgid Interiors, which I'm told some people even saw. He made the delightful Hannah and Her Sisters, and everyone liked it so much that he's been remaking it in different world cities ever since.

And of course, there was Manhattan. It had the best-possible "This-is-Art" pedigree: it was in black & white, and none of the characters were likable except the high school girl. The movie posited, with a straight face, that the best and most-healthy romantic relationship for a middle-aged man was a romance with a high school girl. That a more-appropriate and healthier romance for the high school girl might be with someone HER OWN AGE did not appear to be a realistic idea to Woody. Of course not, because she existed only to be the man's (Woody Allen, by coincidence I'm sure) salvation, an unjaded girl, who also happens to be jailbait.

It's a full-out "artistic" defense of statutory rape, and it got great reviews, was a big hit, and somehow didn't creep out America. My friends did not understand why I was creeped out by it. Pauline Kael and I seemed to be the only people in America that noticed it was a tale of a child molester told from the molester's POV, and presenting it as as GOOD and HEALTHY!

So why was anyone surprised when we learned he was screwing his own high-school-age step-daughter? He'd already made a movie declaring his pedophilic intentions, one with lovely photography, great Gershwin music, and excellent jokes.

Sometime after the treasure Bullets Over Broadway, people stopped being excited over new Woody Allen movies. In fact, people stopped going to them, but Woody kept making them. There were good reasons why Woody lost his audience:

1. Many were old, and died. I'm lucky to be still hanging on.

2. Another Woman, New York Stories, Alice, Shadows and Fog, The Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, Melinda and Melinda... This list goes on, and on.

But every so often out would come what would be called "Woody's best-reviewed movie in years." They come about every three years. Generally they are remakes of earlier Woody movies, only moved to Europe. Match Point was pretty good. If you hadn't seen Crimes and Misdemeanors, it was even better.

God forbid that Woody might try different titles styles, maybe, in some Saul Bass-ish way, to adapt the titles style to the movie it announces. Nope. Exact same titles every movie.

Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen's latest "Best Movie in Years," except it isn't. I watched it last week, and I could not have been more disappointed. It's not so much a remake of Woody's wonderful The Purple Rose of Cairo of 26 years ago, as a merely extremely-similar type of wish-fulfillment, living-a-daydream fantasy, only without the artistic balls to provide the believable downbeat ending that Purple Rose had. Purple Rose was a fantasy about reality and daydreams, and how reality is still there after you've returned from the escapism. Midnight in Paris is just silly dreck. It's subject is the lure and danger of nostalgia, like remembering when Woody Allen made great movies.

The premise is simple enough. A TV writer (Woody Allen-speak for "sell-out." Woody started out as a TV writer) who has written a novel about "nostalgia," visits Paris with his fiancee and her parents (And, apparently, with his manuscript), where he finds himself transported each midnight to Paris in the 1920s, where he hangs out with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and The Fitzgeralds, and has a romance with a woman who makes a career out of being the mistress of artists. (What she saw in Owen Wilson we never figure out, much as it was always impossible to figure out why all those hot women slept with Woody in his other movies. Interesting and entertaining to talk with? Sure. Sexy? Not on the Planet Earth.)

The "Woody Allen Character" in this movie is Owen Wilson. Woody has to have other actors play his roles these days, because he is too old to play the romantic leads anymore, and it never occurs to Woody to write a movie about a man his own age. (If he did, the man Woody's age would undoubtedly have a romance with a teenager anyway, so it's just as well.)

You can hear Owen "doing" Woody as he squawks the sort of remarks Woody made in hectic situations in other movies, except that they're about half, or a third, as clever and funny as he stuff Woody used to write for himself to say. Whether Woody didn't write any good jokes for Wilson to say deliberately, or whether he's just not the best jokesmith in America anymore I do not know.

Owen's fiance is a shrill shrew who is shallower than a Mormon sermon. It is impossible to believe Owen ever went on a second date with this lovely hag, let alone proposed marriage to her. She is not a character; she's a walking rom-com cliche: the fiancee who exists solely to be dumped when the protagonist wises up. If this were a Cary Grant movie, Owen's fiancee would be played by Ralph Bellamy.

Her parents are also cartoonish buffoons so dead to what's around them you wonder why they would bother to go to Europe at all. Apparently they just go to Paris so they can criticize it. (It's all so OLD!) They are mildly redeemed by the fact that about three-quarters of the very-few laughs I laughed during this picture were in response to Mimi Kennedy's hilarious mother-in-law from Hell.

Woody doesn't explain why this daydream happens to Owen, or what its rules are beyond starting with a car going by a particular spot at Midnight. Okay. He didn't explain why The Purple Rose of Cairo happened either. Stephen King's huge new novel 11/22/63, waits until nearly the end to offer a small stab at an explanation of why there's this time-travel portal. But King is quite clear about why it happens to his protagonist. Apparently Wilson has this miracle happen because he'd really like it if it did. So would lots of other people. Why don't they rate?

I love Gertrude Stein on HARRY'S LAW, and Hemingway was good on the short-lived LAW & ORDER: LA.

So Owen goes off midnights and hangs with Hemingway and his pals. He tells them he's a writer, and they all accept him at face value, and welcome him into their literary salons and drinking bouts, never noticing that he never says anything interesting or perceptive. All he does is fawn on their work (sometimes praising stuff they haven't written yet), and he's welcomed in and asked along. Basically, he's their fan. I don't know how to break this to you, but it's rare for fans to become intimate friends with those that they are fans of. Creative people crave other creative people, not the people who love their work but have nothing to offer themselves.

Ah, but Wilson has a novel on "nostalgia," a word none of them know. Gertrude Stein volunteers to read it on knowing Wilson for 2 minutes, when he has displayed exactly zero interesting thoughts or comments. I found that harder to believe than the time-travel. (And the time travel is apparently not limited to Wilson. A private detective follows him, and somehow gets trapped in pre-revolutionary Paris of the 18th Century. Why? How? It's a plot thread that goes nowhere, and seems lifted from a Blake Edwards movie. Further, the movie expects us to find the detective fleeing aristos of 1780 funny. Why? The detective is an innocent who was hired to follow a man, and for this non-crime he gets trapped in the past. I was appalled, not amused.)

And then we come to the people Wilson encounters in the past. Every season, Doctor Who has an episode where The Doctor and his current companion travel to a point in earth's past and meets some historical figure with whom they fight some alien monster. Since the DW revival began, The Doctor has had adventures with Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare (a ridiculously over-sexy Shakespeare), Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Vincent Van Gogh, and he apparently deflowered Elizabeth I of England. "She's not 'The Virgin Queen' anymore."

The counterfeit historical characters The Doctor meets are all (except maybe Shakespeare) a lot more believable than the versions of famous folks from the past Owen Wilson meets. I could buy that Tony Curran was Van Gogh, but Corey Stoll's Hemingway is not Ernest Hemingway. It's a fan's daydream of Hemingway. I can not believe that, in all casual conversation, Hemingway always spoke in an affected parody of his own prose style.

What does Hemingway need with Owen Wilson? And why is someone as notoriously heterosexual as Hemingway hanging all over that gorgeous man?

Nothing against Corey Stoll's performance. Since his Hemingway isn't written realistically (despite the fact that he's supposed to be the real Hemingway), Stoll plays him with a droll stylized wit. He was funny, I just don't think Real Hemingway was funny. I might add that Stoll was far sexier than the real Hemingway ever was. I'd do Stoll (Corey, call me), but I'd never have done Hemingway, which is, incidentally, why he killed himself. I should have let him down more easily.

If the real Ernest Hemingway was as hot as Corey Stoll, I'd at least have read him.

Adrien Brody's one, brief scene (For which he gets billing equal with Wilson and Stoll and Kathy Bates and Rachel McAdams, all of whom worked more than just one day on the film) as Salvador Dali is funny, and Brody got, from me, the biggest laugh of the movie with the line "I see a rhinoceros," but I'm sorry, none of these characters ring true to me. Kathy Bates comes closest, although her readiness to read this guy's manuscript just because he shook her hand and said he was a writer, and her liking it with suggestions (despite being surprised by it's "science-fiction" nature, being set in the future, i.e.the present), I found impossible to believe. Judging from his conversation, I find it impossible to believe this guy can write well, or even type competently.

It's a daydream, but it is presented as real. It's better than Woody's worst, but not as good as his good films. It will get a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination it does not deserve, but it won't win. It's third-rate Allen at best, and his most-overpraised movie in years, but there are some lovely shots of Paris, a city that is almost as hard to make look good in a picture as Yosemite National Park. I love Paris in the springtime, Woody loves Paris in the wrong time.

Cheers darlings.

Little Dougie, Toulouse, and I take in Paris. Wow! Time Travel! Here we are in 1994! "La Ennui Epoque".

The Tallulah Trilogy!

2011-12-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

NOT the actual cover. Just a mock-up.

Sorry to be days late. I thought Flogger, or at least Little Dougie, would have had this post up on time, but nooooo. I had a celebratory eggnog on Christmas Eve, and woke up ten minutes ago. No book flogging up. Typical!

So my big news is out. Coming late this spring is the publication of the next volume of my memoirs, Tallyho Talulah. This is the biggest publication news of 2012, that and for Halloween, the final volume of The Tallulah Trilogy: My Gruesome Life, will also become available for your eBook readers and Print-on-Demand hard copies.

Of course, credit-hog Little Dougie is listed as the "author." I must start looking at my contracts sober, if I could only figure out when? Readers of my earlier memoir, My Lush Life, will recall that one chapter titled "The Seventies" was but a single blank page. This is because I can't remember anything from 1969 to 1980. I'm told this is common. Well Little Dougie was poking around in my attic one day, and he found a typed manuscript of a memoir I dictated into a tape recorder for a personal assistant to type up each day, of my adventures in the California beachside town of Alta Caca, CA, in the summer of 1974. Reading it, the story was as new to me as it will be to you.

I had gone to Alta Caca to star in a summer-musical theater production of a new musical based on a classic Bette Davis-Joan Crawford movie. I was also teaching a master class in acting for virile teenage boys. While I was there, stuff happened, and there were shenanigans. I made friends and enemies, I had sex, and also got married to yet another husband (at the same time!), I had adventures, and I drank rather a lot. I met some sweet surfers who "hung ten" at sea and on land, I met a very unhappy music man whose wife disappeared mid-summer, and I had some magnificent martinis. It was so lovely there, even the Headless Indian Brave, fell in love.

And, as it turned out, Little Dougie found out that my visit had implications beyond anything I knew. He interviewed the other survivors of that summer - those that can hear my name mentioned without SCREAMING! - and has enlarged the narrative beyond what I remembered, which is easy, because I remember none of this. Tallyho Tallulah will be the best beach read you'll ever get greasy with suntan oil. [Note. The above cover is just to give you the idea. This will not be the cover design. However, the cover of My Gruesome Life below is final.]

This IS the final cover for this book for Halloween.

Little Dougie has a second book coming for Halloween, which completes what he cheekily calls The Tallulah Trilogy, his epic comic novel/movie star memoir, My Gruesome Life.

Let me be clear, My Gruesome Life is not about me. But you may want to read it anyway. Oh, I am in it. They want people to buy it after all; but I merely make cameo appearances in the mid-sections, where I steal the narrative from everyone, upstage the main characters shamelessly, and of course, have yet another new husband unmentioned in My Lush Life or Tallyho Tallulah. I never can keep track of how many husbands I've had, not even when I limit it to just my own husbands.

My Gruesome Life is the autobiography of Guy Thanatos, the famous horror movie icon known as "The Man Who Gave Evil a Bad Name" when he ruled the horror screen along with Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and Sir Christopher Lee back in the 1960s. Dougie spent months in 2004, sitting in Maison D'Thanatos, Guy's mountaintop lair/movie star mansion, listening as Guy told Dougie his amazing, terrifying, hilarious life. Think "I, Claudius" set in Hollywood in the 1960s, told as a Vincent Price black comedy of murders. Or think Kind Hearts and Guillotines. It's either the scariest comic novel ever written, or else the funniest horror novel you'll ever read.

I know Guy Thanatos terribly well. I was in his very first movie when he arrived in Hollywood in 1939, East vs West. Later we appeared together in one of his 60s mad scientist/monster movies (He played The Scientist, I had the other main role), Doctor Scary, while I was romancing Al Steele. Guy is mentioned a couple times in My Lush Life, but here he takes center stage. It's a lot of fun, in a sick twisted way of course. So 2012 is the year of Little Dougie in bookstores and online. Exact release dates will be announced here when I have them. The Tallulah Trilogy shall sooon be complete. What awaits? Tallulah Morehead and the Deathly Complexion?

Now for some bits and stray random thoughts from lately.

Nothing says "Christmas Cheer" like Christmas at The Addams House.

Hilarious. Comedy Central re-ran the Charlie Sheen Roast on Christmas Eve. You can not get into a more cheery holiday mood than watching z-list comics and the comedy genius that is Mike Tyson making obscene insults to the king of hookers and blow. I'm all teary just thinking about it.

Mel Gibson's days of worrying that gay guys are mentally undressing him are all over. These days, gay men mentally dress him.

Hey, all you masochistic, anti-Semitic ladies out there, Mel Gibson is back on the market. Hubba! Hubba!

This picture of Paul Newman is just to cleanse your mental palette of the photo of Mel above.

This just in: Kim Jong Il has officially changed his name to Kim Jong Dead. He's not Il anymore.

In a Huffington Post article by the screenwriter of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the author wrote: "[The director] told me that world should have the color of an old man's foreskin. I haven't actually seen an old man's foreskin, but I took the point."

Since old men's foreskins is not on my menu very often, I asked Little Dougie about this quote. He replied: "WHAT point? I see an old man's foreskin every time I go to the bathroom or change my clothes, and trust me, it's the exact same color it was 60 years ago."

I didn't dare ask him what color that was.

Now shooting his third James Bond movie, Daniel Craig has a firm grasp on his most-important part.

Well, after being a best-seller you were told you were out-of-touch for not reading, and a Swedish movie everyone but me seemed to have seen, now THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is an English-language movie, with James Bond added to sweeten the appeal (They call him something else), opened in wide release for the holiday, and it has finally bombed at last. Who knew that millions of Americans don't find graphic anal rape to be their idea of Christmas Day moviegoing fare? What wet blankets! (I guess Dickens was right to cut the scene from his first-draft wherein Scrooge anally-raped Tiny Tim, as "perhaps a tad too much." It would have exhausted him on the reading tours.)

Actual headline in US Weekly: "'At Last' Singer Etta James is Terminally Ill." Gee, I'm - ah - "glad"? - they're so happy about it. Sorry if she kept you waiting. Some of us were sad about it.

Ew, or, as he's known at Disneyland, "Captain Ew."

Speaking of creepy Santas...John Waters!

“If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them!”

— John Waters

That said, though I have lots of books, a few of them by John Waters, I definitely do not want to have sex with John Waters. (Even I have some standards- well, a few - well, one.) So I guess if John ever comes over, I'll have to hide all my books. That'll take some doing. (I love you, John, just not that way. There had to be somebody, and it turned out to be you.)

THE HORROR OF LAUREL & HARDY! #1. Stan & Ollie at The Bates Motel.

I was watching an old Laurel & Hardy short (The only kind there are. Stan & Ollie simply refuse to do a reunion tour!) the other night, titled The Laurel & Hardy Murder Case. At the climax, Stan & Ollie were trapped late at night in this old dark house, and this crazy old lady attacks them with that nasty knife. As Stan tries to fight her off, he accidentally knocks "her" wig off, and it's a crazy old man in drag who is attacking them! Who knew Sir Alfred Hitchcock ripped off Psycho from Laurel & Hardy?

THE HORROR OF LAUREL & HARDY! #2 Laurel & Hardy Meet Frankenstein.

No, Laurel & Hardy never "met" Frankenstein, much as I would have enjoyed that. Boris Karloff is here menacing them in their prison picture, Pardon Us, where he played "The Tiger." (I assume "The Tiger" is a renegade Time Lord.) The thing is, Karloff is only in the French language version. Walter Long plays The Tiger in the English language version. I guess The Tiger regenerated. See? I told you. Time Lord.

Charles Gemora, out of make-up.

Governor Gleep of Mars has decided to throw his space helmet into the Republican presidential ring. His problem is he's been known for years to have trouble keeping his suction cups off of his female employees. And then there's the human woman he's been taking to Mars for long weekends. He says there was no sex, and since Martians have no penises, he may be right, but then, what were they doing? Plotting the conquest of earth?

But Governor Gleep did turn the Martian economy to dust. Look at the lifeless desert that is Mars today: Reaganomics taken all the way. Gov. Gleep's tax plan? "3 - 3 - 3"

And he's better than Blagojevich.

The Martians break up the Occupy Earth protests.

"It's Class Warfare," scream our alien overlords! They have a new designation for Earthlings: "Illegal Non-Aliens." They're clearing out Arizona first, so no one cares.

Vanessa Redgrave knows how to give Jesus a REALLY happy birthday!

Ken Russell, aka "Mr. Restrained," passed away a short time ago. He's now trying to talk his way out of having directed The Devils to St. Peter.

"Are we there yet?"

Worst Episode of The Love Boat Ever!

Click on this image. Trust me.

How I detest Hollywood sham! I just learned that the baby who plays Baby Harry Potter in the flashbacks in HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS is A DIFFERENT BABY than the one who played Baby Harry Potter in the opening scenes of HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCEROR'S STONE 10 years ago! Why? Wasn't he good enough? Are we just supposed to ignore this blatant change of tiny children? This is worse than when they changed Darrins! They didn't even bother to pretend Baby Harry Potter had had baby plastic surgery! How do you think this makes Daniel Radcliffe feel, knowing he could be replaced by a new baby at any moment, as is happening to him right now on Broadway!

When they changed Dumbledores, they had an excuse; Richard Harris was dead. Good lord! Is that it? Did the original Baby Harry Potter DIE??? I can think of no other reason. What's next? Using fake alcohol in drinking scenes? SIMULATED sex in love scenes? I am an ARTIST! Give me real booze and a real penis, and I'll give you Art - eventually! And Art will be smiling.

Is this the impostor? Or is it the other one?

This is when Christmas was Christmas!

Nothing says "Christmas" to me as much as cigarette ads with Santa smoking. These ads were products of what Tom Brokaw relentlessly calls "The Greatest Generation." (The date on this ad is "December 15, 1951," Little Dougie's second Christmas.) Yes, the best people ever, and they used Santa Claus to sell smoking to kids. (Thanks to Samurai Frog for finding this gem.)

"Let a carton of Pall Malls say 'Merry Christmas' for you." (And what will say: "Have a cancer-free New Year" for you?) And they are MILD! (As in, you die of "mild" cases of cancer and emphysema.)

A Hungarian Jew disguised as a Japanese Shinto man dressed up as the Nordic Christian Santa, all played by one of the scariest men in the movies. That says "Christmas in Hollywood" to ME!

A merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, joyful Kwanzaa, bleery Boxing Day, delirious Generic Winter Holiday, and a happy Arbitrarily-Chosen Point in Our Solar Orbit. In other words:

Cheers darlings. Read some good books this year!

Bye Bye, Bob.

2011-12-22T17:42:00.000-08:00

Bob and his books.

Little Dougie has something to say today, so I'll turn things over to him while I have a drink. Cheers darlings.

I am VERY saddened to learn that my friend and teacher Robert Easton has died.

In the Los Angeles Times obit that ruined my morning today, it mentions that he taught at USC, and that is where I met him, when I took a course in stand-up comedy from him there in 1978. George Wallace (The black stand-up comic, not the white racist governor) and Glen Super were also in the class. Everything he taught us was of value. His formula for a great stand-up act: "Have a strong opening, a great middle, and a terrific closing, and you'll do well." He was right.

"This is the Seaview submarine. We have Peter Lorre on board, and a very stupid script. Please send help, or at least a better script."

But more than class, I enjoyed our going out for a bite after, and listening to his tales of his amazing career. I'd relate his hilarious Peter Lorre story (They worked together in the movie of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, as seen above) except you have to hear it for it to work.

We had a four week break in the class schedule while Bob went to Spain to coach Lord Laurence Olivier on his accent for The Boys From Brazil. I was OK with that, as I realized how much more coaching Olivier needed than I did.

Here's Bob's usual stereotyped image. He told me his character catchphrase was "I been kicked in the head by a mule."

"Howdy folks. This here is Petunia, my girl friend. I been kicked in the head by a mule."

I last saw him about three years ago, and we had a great chat. He was a kind and very intelligent man, genial and warm, with a keen sense of humor, and of course, the sharpest ear imaginable. I still have video of my old stand-up act, on which you can hear Bob introduce me from off-screen.

Bob was addicted to books, an addiction I share. His home, where he lived with his wife, June, to whom he was married for 44 years, was STUFFED with books. There were books everywhere, in every spare cubic inch. When he bought new cars, he wouldn't trade in the old ones. He kept them on his property, stuffed full of more books he had no more room for inside. This may sound eccentric to you, but it makes perfect sense to me. Everything Bob touched became a library.

It's funny how Bob is remembered as "The Henry Higgins of Hollywood," the ultimate dialect coach, because his acting career was enormous. He was on everything on TV, usually playing hillbilly hicks and hayseeds, and in hundreds of movies. He had a recurring role on The Burns & Allen Show as a young man who had been a student at USC for 9 years without ever coming close to graduating. This hit me ironically for two reasons: 1. I first met him as my teacher at USC, and secondly, because Bob was brilliant. As a kid, he first found fame as one of the Quiz Kids, a group of high-IQ child geniuses. At 19, he was initiated into Phi Eta Sigma, a national honorary scholastic fraternity for men. He often played idiots (who had been kicked in the head by mules), but out-of-character, he was super-intelligent. (Not that you'd know it by the screenplay he co-wrote for the ultra-kitchey sci-fi movie The Giant Spider Invasion.)

Perhaps the best way to remember Bob is to watch him work, so I'm embedding some of his work. This first clip is from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, so you can see him acting with Christopher Plummer and Bill Shatner. Bob is the raspy Klingon judge who sentences Kirk. Given his dialectical brilliance it's no surprise that he does a PERFECT Klingon accent. I'm sure he coached Plummer and Michael Worf on how to do proper Klingin accents. ("No Michael, you're doing a southeastern Klingon dialect. Worf is from North Kling. that's more like this...")

Here's a short funny clip from an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, in which he plays a cosmetologist, and wants to make sure you get that that is what he is.

Bob had worked with just about everyone I admire except Laurel & Hardy: as mentioned above, he even coached Olivier. He worked, as said above, with the divine Gracie Allen, a true comedy goddess, my fave Peter Lorre, and my idol Jack Benny. He even worked with Ray Harryhausen, as he is in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Here's a wonderful clip with lousy picture quality, of him on The Jack Benny Show. He is "Lem," the tall hillbilly who suffers a violent fate about 4 minutes into the clip.

And finally, here's an entire episode from the very first season of The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves. Bob was just 21 when he shot this. His role, as the Texan ham radio guy with one scene, is entirely in the second clip, but I thought I'd download all three parts, so you can watch the entire episode if you like. The main baddie is Russell Johnson, about 13 years before he was marooned on Gilligan's Island.

The nutty professor is Lucian Littlefield. Lucian worked with all the great comics. He was WC Fields's officious supervisor in the Fields masterpiece The Man on the Flying Trapeze. He was a veterinarian masquerading as a doctor to help Stan & Ollie snooker their wives in Laurel & Hardy's greatest movie, Sons of the Desert, and he often appeared on The Abbott & Costello Show.

Here is how Bob looked the last time I saw and spoke with him, still as gentle, kind, and fascinating as ever, though as you can see, in his later years, he cultivated this not-at-all attractive look with the beard untrimmed since about 1980. Good way to get cast in character parts, but then Bob never had any problems getting cast. He kept right on working, even shooting two movies this year. He was a working actor in Hollywood for 62 years! And bear in mind that, at 6 feet 4 and a half inches, he was an enormous man. He leaves behind a daughter and a grand-daughter. Bob was pretty grand himself, but he was as unassuming and modest a man as you will ever meet in Hollywood.

Bob's elderly Buffalo Bill look.

RIP Bob. You were a class act.

Too Much Christmas.

2011-12-21T20:47:00.000-08:00

Hot air balloon travel being, of course, synonymous with Christmas.

It's beginning to look TOO MUCH like Christmas,
Everywhere you go.
Thanksgiving was yesterday,
And now the streets look so gay,
You eyes will blur and you'll get vertigo.

A tasteful mansion of, I'm guessing, white people, given their propensity for all white lights. Love the Star of David. Neighborhood Jews are saying "Leave us out of this, okay?"

It's beginning to look too much like Christmas.
Gets worse after dark.
I really do hate to grouse,
But, my God, my neighbor's house,
Looks like Disney's park.

Have a Mickey Mouse Christmas.

Horrible tinsel,
And way too much chintz'll,
Make everyone wish they were dead.
By far the worst folly,
Are trees looking jolly
When all of their leaves have been shed.
And I will grant,
Another Santa,
Fills me up with dread.

Is this house being swallowed by the Time Vortex?

It's beginning to look too much like Christmas,
Please gouge out my eyes.
You'll soon see a Yule Log,
Blazing at the synagogue.
An Elf robot?
My brain lobotomize.

How do I get in without being electrocuted?

It's beginning to look too much like Christmas,
Soon my brain will split.
I hate to sound so gruff,
But I've already had enough,
Of this Yule bullshit.

"No, Scotty, I said the deflector shields!"
Because nothing says Christmas like Star Trek.

If you must decorate your exterior for the holidays, take a cue from Calvin.

Merry Annual Christian Cultural Incursion.
I will have BIG NEWS to post here on Christmas Day!
Cheers darlings.

Turkey Day.

2011-11-24T15:58:00.001-08:00

Hello darlings, and thanks for taking a few moments away from your annual Family Thanksgiving Celebation Traditions, like drunken recriminations over pumpkin pie, or old wounds aired out over stuffing, or obnoxious fatties occupying your living room, cheering at football (I give thanks I was never raped in the shower by a football coach when I was 10.) as though football was important or entertaining (I recommend pepper spray to clear out all the football fans. Enough with the Occupy My Living Room movement!), to read my humble and always abject thoughts on this, the fifth anniversary of this flog. And they said it wouldn't last. Or were "they" talking about True Love?

Why is Thanksgiving on Thursdays? Aren’t we supposed to "Thank God It’s Friday"? Are we supposed to thank God twice in the same week? I think that’s a little overboard, don’t you?

It’s a little tricky for me to give thanks on Thanksgiving anyway. Oh I’m flooded with gratitude, especially when I’ve just been flooded, but the problem is, I practice Christian Science except for all the doctrines, beliefs, and that attending church crap. Mary Baker Eddy’s idea of God wasn’t a being you could talk to, like a Gay Best Friend. Rather, she defined God as Principle, Mind, Truth, Intelligence, Spirit, and a lot of other crap like that, and it’s practically impossible to tell just what the hell she meant. Reading Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures isn’t much help, as it’s completely incoherent, and suggests that it’s authoress was thoroughly mad. Let’s face it, the woman told people not to drink alcohol, so her judgment was terrible. Besides the fact that I am a Goddess of the Cinema, I don’t really know just what the hell I believe in. But if I believed in God, here’s what I would give thanks for this year. And please, in my comments section, tell me what you’re grateful for, provided of course, that you’re interesting, witty, and funny. Or a hot man.

Things I am grateful for this Thanksgiving:

1. Vodka.

2. Penises.

3. Male prostitution. (At my age, one has to pay for quality.)

4. Gin.

5. My vagina, and every year, there’s more of it to love.

6. My fans, especially the straight male ones, who aspire to star-screwing.

7. Gay men.

8. J. R. R. Tolkien. (I actually have no idea who the hell he is, but Little Douglas assures me this will get me lots of geeky nerd fans. I asked why I would want geeky nerd fans, when I’d prefer horny male underwear models, but Douglas says geeky nerds love Internet Flogs. Anyway Viggo, call me.)

9. Vermouth

10. My clitoris. Getting her pierced was the smartest thing I’ve done.

11. Huge Jackman

12. Colin Ferrell’s colon.

13. Scotch

14. That I’m still breathing.

15. Porn.

16. Gay porn.

17. That guy who played The Green Arrow on Smallville. He can store his shaft in my quiver anytime.

18. That President Bush is no longer president. It was a bad idea to let a Bush run the country. My bush has been running me for a century, and that was certainly a bad idea. However, that ignorant twit we saw on TV, fumbling his way through sentences, and sending healthy young penises overseas to die in deserts can go to Hell.

19. TCM. Turner Classic Movies keeps me alive to a new generation of obsessive fans. I just wish that bastard Robert Osborn wouldn’t introduce each of my films with, "Unfortunately, we’re contractually bound to run this Tallulah Morehead turkey. Brace yourselves." At least he is more complimentary on Sundays, when he says, "Good news movie fans, this Tallulah Morehead movie is silent, so you won’t have to listen to her hideous voice." Thank you darling.

20. Bourbon.

21. Edgar Rice Burroughs. He created Tarzan. I’ve been holding auditions for the role of Tarzan here in my home, whether the part was being cast or not, for almost 50 years, and nothing in my entire career has ever given me greater, or more frequent, satisfaction. If you are an even remotely plausible choice for the role, please feel free to come by my home, majestic Morehead Heights, mounted ever-less-firmly astride ever-crumbling Tumescent Tor, north of Malibu, any Saturday afternoon, undressed to impress, and give me a shot. Oh, and a note to that one-legged Englishman who keeps hopping up to try out for the part: while I have nothing against unidexters, indeed some of my closest friends haven’t got a leg to stand on, nevertheless the absolute minimum supporting limb requirement for the role of Tarzan is three legs. Human tripods , move to the front of my spine.

22. Tequila.

23. Scrotums and their magical contents.

24. That Delores Delgado is still dead. Delores’s demise is the gift that keeps on giving.

25. Senior Extra-Maxi Depends.

26. The memory of that one, unforgettable night, naked in the light of a full moon, atop magnificent Half Dome, taking a trip to Heaven on the tongue of Peter Lorre. Dear Peter, you aren’t in Heaven. You were Heaven!

27. The memory of that one, unforgettable night, naked in the light of a full moon, in the raging surf of Lunada Bay, taking a cruise to Heaven in the tentacles of the Giant Squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. That libidinous mollusk could suck all of my erogenous zones at once! Squiddy dear, you aren’t in Heaven. You were Heaven!

28. Peter Lorre again, for introducing me to Squiddy in the first place, when I asked him for a second date, and he said, "No, I think once was more than enough. You’d be better matched with our squid." How typically unselfish of him.

29. Margaritas.

30. DVDs. They keep my legacy alive, and they pay me for doing those commentary tracks. Also, they have improved the porn experience tremendously.

31. Male Frontal Nudity in movies, the greatest advancement in art in 200 years.

32. Personal massagers. The date who won’t flee when he sees you in a good light.

33. HD-TV. My God, it makes porn look incredible!

34. Rotgut.

35. Male nipples. Oh they do have a function. Do they ever!

36. LOST. The show may be over, but my DVDs take me back to The Island whenever I want. (And Jacob's Ghost, you've got a hot shag just waiting for you if you ever materialize in Morehead Heights)

37. That Harry Potter defeated Voldemort. I thought sure Voldy would triumph.
.

38. My doctor, who keeps me alive using cutting-edge techniques.

39. THE Doctor.

40. Playing "Doctor".

41. Disneyland. It's The Second-Happiest Place on Earth. The First-Happiest is up my skirt.

42. That Kris Humphries is soon to be single again. Kris, call me.

43. That The Hobbit is coming. I just hope I last long enough to see it.

44. The New Laurel & Hardy 10-Disc DVD Set. Absolute Comedy Heaven!

45. Albert on Survivor.

46. That Ashton Kutcher is single again, and prefers old ladies.

47. Stuff.

48. Edward Gorey's Great Veiled Bear.

48. That Beavis and Butthead are back.

49. Dark Chocolate!

50. Dame Edna Everage, and her brilliant manager, Barry Humphries.

And finally you, my devoted readers. I live for you and you alone, and a good shag. Anybody up for sex? Oh, and here's something for all of you to be thankful for, the forthcomng publication next year of my new book: Tallyho Tallulah. 100% new material!

So spend your Thanksgiving The Tallulah Way, and enjoy some great stuffing! Now I'm off for a traditional Ayn Rand Thanksgiving: Roast Atlas Shrugged: Part One with all the trimmings, and then, as Ayn loved to do, head off to the shelter downtown, to take food away from the homeless. Always makes me misty-eyed.

Cheers darlings.

Mister Halloween

2011-10-31T19:03:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween all. Tallulah is out Trick-or-Treating, by which I mean she turned a trick she felt was quite a treat, and now she's out --- cold. So while she's napping, I, "Little Dougie," would like to tell you about the man who was Halloween Personified to me: Larry "Seymour" Vincent, who is 36 years dead, but forever alive in my heart.

4 years ago I wrote and published a new book titled The Q Guide to Classic Monster Movies. It's a Halloween-type book. I'd like to share with you the words found on the dedication page. They are:

Jerry Vance was born in Boston in 1924. Early in his career he adopted the name Larry Vincent, but when he died all too young at 50 in 1975, he was best known as Seymour, The Master of the Macabre, The Epitome of Evil, The Most Sinister Man to Crawl Across the Face of the Earth. And the Best TV Horror Host that ever was. He was also the first person to pay me to write jokes about horror movies, and he was my friend. I miss him still, and I dedicate this book to his memory.

A photograph of Larry and myself was supposed to appear on that page, but was cut without my permission, or indeed even any notification to me. I found out it was not in the book when the I received the first copy. This is one of several matters concerning the treatment my book received from it's publishers which have left me - let's say dissatisfied. Anyway, here's the picture that was supposed to be in the book.

I wish I still looked like that, and I wish he were still alive even more. Note the autograph over Larry's right shoulder. It reads "Good show Doug!! Seymour. (I'm on the left.")"

A strange thing happened a couple days before the book came out. I was channel surfing one afternoon less than a week before publication day, and I came across an episode of Mission: Impossible from the third season, shot probably in 1968 or '69. This seemed like just the mindless white noise I wanted running. A few minutes into it, a door on the TV screen opened, and Larry Vincent stepped into the show and began playing a scene with Martin Landau.

I got to meet Martin Landau a couple months ago, and told him this story of unexpectedly seeing him with my dead friend, and how it surprised me into tears He patted my back and gave me a hug, as I was getting teary again just tellng him.

I knew that Larry had appeared in an episode of Mission: Impossible, but not that I was watching that episode, so his appearance surprised me into happy tears. There was my long-dead friend, alive and acting with a future Oscar winner. And Landau's Oscar was for playing Bela Lugosi, an actor, and I use the term loosely, who is profiled in my new book, dedicated to Larry. It was a wild series of accidental occurrences, but it felt to me like a ghostly visit from my friend, a Hello to acknowledge my posthumous gift. When the DVDs of Season 3 came out, I bought the whole season just to get three and a half minutes of Larry in it.

I'd like to share with you this Halloween an account of my friendship with this wonderful and funny man, which I wrote some years ago for the late, lamented Local Legends webpage, about Los Angeles TV personalities of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. Believe me, if there'd been no Seymour, there'd never have been Elvira. This essay also appears in full in James Fetters terrific new book Creatures of the Night that We Loved So Well: The Horror Hosts of Southern California, which you can order by clicking on the title. (I also wrote the forward.)

What's under the cloth? See next photo.

Having been a big fan of Jeepers Creepers (A hosted horror movie TV show in Los Angeles from 1962 to 1965.), when I was ages 12 to 14, when a new horror host show, Fright Night With Seymour came on KHJ in 1970, I was excited to tune in, and quickly fell in love with Seymour's prickly sense of iconoclastic humor. I was in college at the time, and never guessed that before Seymour ran his course, I would become a part of it.

Seymour was so popular with us college kids, that we actually turned on the show and watched him, even at parties. I remember the night I turned 21, in May 1971, I performed as Puck in the closing night performance of our University production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, then went to the closing night party at the home of the girl playing Hermia in Hermosa beach, and very stoned, we all watched Seymour. We talked through most of whichever movie was running, and we ignored the commercials, but we all watched Seymour and laughed our heads off.

I first actually met Seymour that October, the night the opening day at Disney World TV special was broadcast. Seymour was hosting a special Halloween show at the Wiltern Theatre: a double feature of The Return Of Count Yorga & Night Of The Living Dead. Seymour did a monologue, including his infamous version of The Raven, then sat onstage with a microphone and made jokes all through the silly Count Yorga sequel. (Whatever possessed AIP to think that queeny Robert Quarry could be the next Vincent Price?) During intermission Seymour signed autographs in the lobby. Then he introduced the second feature, mentioning that jokes wouldn't be appropriate during George Romero's disturbing masterpiece, and left.

I stood in the fan line and got Seymour's autograph on my Seymour certificate and went home thoroughly entertained. Over the next couple years I attended several more Seymour appearances in movie theatres, and seeing some real dogs in the process. But the day came, in late 1973, when Seymour was announced to ride in the Westminster Founder's Day Parade, a parade which formed on the grounds of Westminster High School, from which I had graduated in 1968, just a half mile from my home.

I was working then writing radio comedy for "Sweet Dick" Whittington at KGIL (To this day, still a close friend), and decided to take a shot at getting a writing spot with Seymour. I was convinced I could write the character. I'd seldom missed the show, and felt I knew the character intimately by this time.

I found Seymour waiting around, just outside a classroom in which, a few years earlier, I had studied Moby Dick & Lord Of The Flies. I introduced myself to Larry Vincent, told him I was writing for Sweet Dick, and asked if he was looking for writers for his TV show. Luck was in. He was. He told me to call his office on Monday and set-up an appointment to come in and show him some sample material. He also introduced me to Lynda Vincent, his much-younger wife, who wrote most of the shows with him, and Gary Blair, the show's executive producer, who was also the voice of Herkamer Eugenski, the nasal voiced, whiny announcer for Seymour Presents on KTLA.

Seymour's Dorian Gray portrait was Banjo Billy, Seymour's nemesis, seldom seen at the same time and place as Seymour.

I made that call, come Monday, and Larry, who was as nice on the phone, as Seymour was prickly on the air, invited me to come down to the studio a few days later, on the day they would be shooting that week's show. I could show him my samples and watch a Seymour show shot. I was in Heaven.

The evening before my appointment, I sat down and made a stack of what I felt were my strongest radio sketches. Then I put paper in the typewriter, and wrote a sample Seymour sketch.

At that time, one of the most popular shows on the air on KTLA was Help Thy Neighbor. Neighbor was a morbid feel-good tearfest, on which down-on-their-luck sad sacks would come on, unload their sob story to the host, Larry Van Nuys, and then Larry would take phone calls. Viewers (The show was on live, 5 nights a week) would call in with one form of assistance or another to help the poor schmuck humiliating himself. It was creepy and smarmy, only slightly less horrifying then Queen For A Day. (At least everybody who came on got helped. They didn't kick 3 needy cases out empty-handed each day like Queen did.)

I felt that Help Thy Neighbor was ripe for the Seymour treatment. I wrote a sketch called Shaft Thy Neighbor, in which Seymour read a letter from a pathetic wretch who had been buried under the biggest pile of hard luck since Job, and then took calls from people who "Helped" him, by making matters worse. ("You will no longer have to work day and night at two jobs to support your wife and 14 shoeless children, because your bosses both phoned and fired you, your wife has left you for another man, and your children have all run away.")

When I got to the KTLA lot at Sunset & Van Ness (Just across the street from an apartment building, now demolished, in which I was to live in 1986-8. It's the apartment building in Pulp Fiction.) Larry brought me in to to see The Slimy Wall in the sound stage. To my delight, the Help Thy Neighbor set sat right next to the Slimy Wall, at right angles to it. My sketch could be shot on the actual set, just by rotating the cameras 90 degrees!

As we entered the studio, we ran into Larry Van Nuys coming out. As it happened, I knew Larry Van Nuys. Prior to his achieving 15 minutes of stardom with Help Thy Neighbor, he had been the next disc jockey on after Whittington each morning at KGIL. (Since leaving, he'd been replaced by Wink Martindale) Larry Van Nuys, seeing me, hollered, "Douglas! How the hell are you?", and grabbed me in a big bear hug and gave me a loud, sloppy kiss on the cheek, all right in front of Larry Vincent. I explained that I was there to try and land a job writing for Seymour, and Larry Van Nuys, on the spot, began to regale Larry Vincent with extravagant praise of my comic genius. This, I felt, didn't hurt at all

Seymour reads the teleprompter roll through the fog, while a crew member laughs.

Larry Vincent explained that he had been actively trying out writers for sometime, to find someone to take the burden of turning out the scripts every week off his and Lynda's shoulders. In fact, the show I was going to see shot was written by a female guest writer, to whom I was introduced. I instantly envied and hated her.

Back in his office, I gave Larry my sample pile, with the Seymour sketch carefully buried at the bottom. I sat there as Larry read the pages. He started looking stern and detached, but quickly was laughing out loud, and mentioning how funny he found some of the words used. (I remember him saying he thought "Dreck" a particularly funny word, when it popped up in one of my sketches.)

Then he came to Shaft Thy Neighbor. "What's this?" he asked. I explained that it was a sample Seymour sketch I'd written the night before, to show how well I could write for him. He put his serious, detached face back on, but it didn't stay long. By the time he finished reading the sketch, not only had I been commissioned to write an entire script, but Larry bought the Shaft sketch on the spot.

Larry prepares for a take, by looking over the teleprompter copy for the next sketch.

The movie I was assigned to write a show around was The Leech Woman. Unfortunately, it was not possible for some reason, for me to see the movie before writing the script. (The evening my show was broadcast remains, to this day, my only viewing of The Leech Woman, a film of seminal importance to my career.) I looked the movie up in several guides, and read as much about it as I could, and went from there.

Since I couldn't write about the film's specifics, I wrote instead a series of parodies of other famous films & TV shows. My opening sketch was a take-off on You Bet Your Life. When Seymour said "Fringies", that turned out to be the secret word, and a rubber chicken came flying down from the eaves. Another sketch employed a huge photo of Banjo Billy I had seen on Larry's office wall, which, in my script, became Dorian Gray's portrait of Seymour. ("Many of you have commented on how I appear to be eternally youthful, how my classically chiseled features never show the wear of time.") Of course, when Seymour revealed the picture, he was livid. ("That can't be me! I want my money back! Eternal youth isn't worth that! Get me Dorian Gray on the telephone immediately!")

I had Seymour try to crash That Party Down The Block disguised as a mousekateer, wearing my own, personal mouse ears, and a furry shirt that had been part of a theatrical costume of mine. (Lynda Vincent provided the offscreen voice of Annette). Shaft Thy Neighbor was used, and, in my favorite sketch, a parody of Curt Siodmak's beloved Sci-fi nonsense Donovan's Brain, I had Seymour remove Eugenski's brain and put it in a fish tank. The disembodied brain instantly took control of Seymour, forcing him to tap dance and sing Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey. In the final scene, Eugenski's brain had been put in Seymour's body, so Seymour now spoke with his squeaky voice, while Seymour's brain squawked impotently from the tank. In short, since this might be my only Seymour script, I fired all my comedy guns.

I delivered the finished script to Larry at the Equicon science fiction film convention, that November. My relationship with Larry had already altered. It was no longer fan and celebrity. Larry let me hang with him throughout the convention, and we discovered that I had the ability to break Larry up as easily as he broke me up. We were to go on breaking each other up, for the rest of his life.

Unfortunately, when the time came to shoot the script, Larry had bad news. KTLA had cancelled him. My script was to be his next-to-last show. Larry told me he was very happy with what I had written. He said they had auditioned dozens of other writers and every single one of them had had to be completely rewritten by Lynda and him to fit the character's speech patterns and stay in character, which meant they saved them no work at all. Mine was the only script anyone else had ever written for them that could be shot exactly as written, with no rewriting. The job would have been mine, except, there was now no job.

One change had been made. KTLA Standards & Practices decided that the phrase Shaft Thy Neighbor was dirty. (It was 1973. Dinosaurs still walked the earth) The sketch was changed to Shelf Thy Neighbor, which sounds similar, but which, you'll notice, makes no sense.

On KTLA we had a set time slot. The show had to end on time. As we shot the show, it soon became clear that my script was too long. Midway through shooting, the film editor went back to his lab and hacked a few more minutes out of The Leech Woman, to give us some more air time. (So disrespectful. Fortunately, the movie is crap) Even with the movie butchered to bits, there wasn't time for my brain switch ending. Seymour's brain would remain in his skull. Too bad.

My friend, the late David Tarling, came to the taping with me and took these pictures, now so precious to me. The one picture from that day that I no longer have, was a shot of Larry, Lynda, Garry and myself, lined up in front of the Slimy Wall. Months later, when I began working with Larry at his home on a projected record album, I was proud to see that picture of us framed on Larry's living room wall, where it remained until his death.

So, that was it, I thought. The day of the broadcast, in January 1974, I had friends over and we and my family all watched my first, and for all we knew last, show air. At one point, after an unseen, imaginary audience boos a particularly lame joke, Seymour said, "I didn't write that joke. I got it from Eugenski, and he got it from his writer, whom I've already fired." My mother broke up and, always willing to ally herself with anyone criticizing me, said, "He really let you have it for that one." I believe she was disappointed when I showed her that every word of that bit, including the booing sound effects, were in the script and were written by me. Mother was so hoping it was Larry departing from the script to humiliate me on TV.

Shortly thereafter, I was promoted to producer of The Sweet Dick Whittington Show at KGIL, which was now full-time employment, writing bits, booking the interview guests and setting up all the details of Dick's notorious live stunts. I became happily busy.

Larry performing Shaft, excuse me, Shelf Thy Neighbor.

At the beginning of March Larry Vincent called me. KHJ had picked the show up. Back under it's original title Fright Night With Seymour, it was going back on the air in April, and Larry was putting me on staff to write half the shows. Best of all, our time slot was open-ended. It didn't matter how long we ran, so I could write as long a show as I wanted and we would do it all, without butchering the movies. You've heard of a dream come true? Well, this was one.

We shot every other Thursday afternoon, doing two shows in a session. Every other taping session I would be the author of the shows. The two shows in between would be by Larry & Lynda.

I would come in to the studio and sit in a screening room so tiny it made the Marx Brothers stateroom look like a stateroom, and a projectionist would run 16mm prints of my two movies. In this pre-home video Stone Age this was the only chance I had to see the films, though a couple, like The Incredible Shrinking Man, which was the best film we ran, I already knew fairly well. I took extensive notes of everything that happened in the movie. I wrote the scripts at my leisure, usually in my office at KGIL, turned them in, came in the day before taping and met with the projectionist/editor, with whom I would extract the film clips we would be using in the show. Since we literally snipped the clips out of the movie, and spliced them back in when we had shot the show, we were damaging the prints every time we used a clip. Naughty.

I came to all the tapings, whether it was my shows or not, for two reasons. 1. I often came up with tweakings for lines or bits on the set, and 2. Being with Larry was such a joy I wanted to be around all I could.

Larry was a great guy, and we became close friends quickly. Lynda & Garry were also terrific people, and we were a happy unit indeed. Larry had a temper. If somebody screwed something up, he would let them have it with both barrels, but he never simply got angry, and he never got angry without cause. In all the time I knew him, he never once raised his voice to me.

In May, Larry rode in the Strawberry Festival Parade in Garden Grove, not far from my folk's home in Westminster. I rode in the parade with Larry & Lynda, then we went to my parent's home for a huge home cooked meal. My 16 year old brother Duncan had, of course, told every kid for miles around that Seymour was coming to our house, so there was a small crowd of kids to greet us when we arrived. (Enroute, we had stopped at a K-Mart to pick something up, and Larry had been recognized, and started a small mob scene.) Larry & I got going at that meal, sharing increasingly ribald humor, while Lynda & my mother sort of smiled indulgently. (I remember one thing that broke us up being the idea of Larry playing Banjo Billy wearing, instead of Groucho glasses and fake nose, a dildo-nose & glasses. Well, it is a funny image, though Mother wasn't amused.)

We attended a Sci-fi/comics convention in San Diego together, during which, they ran Larry's ghastly movie The Witchmaker. Larry and I sat and made jokes aloud throughout the film to the delight of the audience.

(In an excessively weird co-incidence, at that time, I was working for Larry Vincent, who had appeared in The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, and Sweet Dick Whittington, who appeared in The Thing With Two Heads. Stranger still, now those two two-headed movies are available on the same DVD. It's like my 1974 life on one disc, with my one boss on side 1, and my other boss on side 2. Spooky.)

These movies are terrible, but they're fun. You kow the old sayng: Four heads are better than one."

Killing two jobs with one stone, I booked Larry on The Whittington Show on KGIL one morning as an interview guest and sat back and listened to the comedy gold as my two bosses sparked and riffed together, the only time they ever met. (Needless to say, they both tried to top each other with tales of what an utterly worthless excuse for an employee I was.)

One time on the set, a sketch required Larry to wear a Sherlock Holmes-type deerstalker cap. He was wearing my own personal one. (I kept writing my wardrobe into the show) Larry was in place on the set, waiting for the scene to be slated when I strolled up to him and whispered to him that he had the hat on backwards. Now, of course, the front and back of a deerstalker cap are identical. It isn't possible to put it on backwards, though you can wear it sideways, as Harpo does in Duck Soup. Larry knew this, of course. But he strode mock-angrily off the set, and staged a pretend tantrum ("Why doesn't anybody check these details?") about almost being allowed to do the sketch with the hat on wrong, while he took the hat off, turned it around, and re-groomed.

May 1st, 1974 Doodles Weaver was on the set. He had recently released a record album called Feetlebaum Returns, and was now going to produce a Seymour comedy album. Larry and I were to write it. That evening I dined with Doodles and Walker Edmiston, and Doodles regaled us with tales of drinking with Bogart. Doodles was a great guy to hang with, but murder to work with. We argued about material constantly. Basically, I would write a Seymour piece and Doodles would rewrite it into a Doodles piece, and then, since Larry would be doing it rather than Doodles, it got changed back to my original version.

I remember one afternoon, sitting with Larry in his living room in Santa Monica, working on the album script, when Larry and I noticed something odd. Visible through his sliding glass door, a wrench was floating up into the air. Larry had an open toolbox on the porch, and we found a kid leaning out of the window of an upstairs apartment, with a fishing rod with a magnet on the line, tool fishing.

M - I - C - K - E - Y M - O - U - S - E.

Larry was appearing six nights a week at The Mayfair Music Hall in Santa Monica most of that year. As it was easier than bringing people to the studio, I often took friends to the Music Hall to meet Larry and see him perform live, seeing and meeting guest performers as varied as Ian Whitcomb and the late, great Anna Russell. Bernard Fox, who more recently appeared in both Titanic and the Brendon Fraser version of The Mummy, was the Master of ceremonies for these shows.

Once Larry tipped me off that Mel Brooks was shooting a sequence for his new film at the Music Hall in the afternoons that week. I put on my "I Belong Here" expression and showed up, which is how I came to be present in the room when Mel shot the Puttin' On the Ritz scene in Young Frankenstein, a scene this blog's friend Ken Levine has listed as among the top 5 funniest scenes in movie history. (And I am inclined to agree.)

Another day, Larry told me about going into a bar the evening before. Rod Serling sat down next to him and ordered a drink. Slowly the two men noticed each other. "Rod Serling?" Larry asked. "Seymour?" Rod asked back. Turned out Serling was a Seymour fan too. Larry was just tickled by it.

On August 8th, 1974, we had just finished taping my scripts for Vincent Price's Diary Of A Madman & Son Of Godzilla, when a news bulletin came over the studio monitors. I stood next to Larry Vincent in the studio at KHJ and watched Richard Nixon resign. Larry was very depressed by the event, fearing it boded ill for America. I was ecstatic to see the old bastard fleeing in disgrace.

During my time writing for Larry I came up with two new characters for him to play on the show, a biker hipster called "Mr. Cool" and "Ranger Bob", a forest ranger who dispensed insane forestry advice. I also created Seymour's Fairy Tales in which Seymour told horribly warped new versions of old children's favorites.

And then Larry was hospitalized. The show was cancelled. Larry gave me the task of writing the last two shows. The next to last show, for the film Octaman was never shot. Larry was simply too ill to do it, so a show was cobbled together out of old pieces on video at the last minute.

The World's Coolest Bumper Sticker!

That Thursday, I picked Larry up at the hospital in Burbank and drove him to Knott's Berry Farm, installing him in a suite at a hotel adjoining the park, before scurrying over to the theatre to oversee the tech rehearsal while Larry relaxed. My job at the park that weekend was really just to see to it that Larry had as easy a time of it as possible. I didn't know Larry was dying, but he knew.

Before I could leave the hotel room to go to the rehearsal (Lynda was already at the rehearsal.), Larry stopped me. "Douglas, I have to tell you something. You've been a good friend to me, and I appreciate it. I love you, my friend." And he hugged me. I was embarrassed and kept mumbling that I knew it and he didn't need to say it, but Larry said, "No, I do need to say it." I didn't know it then, that he was taking care of business, making sure he'd said the things he wanted to say to his loved ones while he still could. Though I was about as uncomfortable as I could possibly have been at the time, afterwards, in the years that have followed, I have always been very deeply glad that Larry made a point of opening his heart to me, and letting me know I had earned a place in it.

Doing the show turned out to be the best medicine for Larry. He rallied that weekend, and rose to the occasion so well. He enjoyed himself tremendously. Between performances we would go out on an electric cart, toodling around the park, going on rides. As Seymour he would elaborately take cuts in line. "Look over there!" he'd yell, pointing away, and then we'd sprint up to the front and push on to the ride. "So long, suckers." He would call as we rolled into the ride, and everybody had a great time.

Larry's "Baseball" card.

Closing night Larry had pizza delivered backstage for everybody working on the show, out of his own pocket. He entertained the friends of mine that came to the shows in his dressing room. He seemed to have time and energy for everybody. I remember sitting in that dressing room, listening to him talk about his experiences understudying Kirk Douglas on Broadway, and about the time, as a college student, that Boris Karloff had come and addressed them.

A genuine Seymour fan club membership card, sent to me by Douglas Mason, who is not Little Dougie.

After the weekend was over, Larry felt well enough to return home, instead of going back to the hospital. He seemed full of optimism, and spoke of plans to use Seymour in other ways, after we finished the album, which was only partially recorded. When my paycheck came, it was considerably larger than what we had agreed on. Gary Blair told me that Larry had insisted that I be paid an increased fee, because I'd done such a good job for him, and everything had gone so well.

Onstage at Knott's Berry Farm.

But Larry's rally lasted only about a month and he was back in the hospital. I came to see him as often as I could, until he was moved into intensive care and only family could come. It was Gary Blair who finally told me Larry was dying. It seemed hard to believe. He was only 50. These days I am 61, and I'm way too young to die. For Heaven's sake, Tallulah is 114, and seems set on outliving all of us.

Sending Moona Lisa's halves to opposite sides of the planet. Moona Lisa, aka Lisa Clark and her identical twin sister were the "Siamese Twins" in Sir Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Saboteur.

Finally the terrible day came. I was living in Redondo Beach, next door to my aforementioned friend David Tarling (Who also took the Knott's Berry Farm pictures above, of Larry's last-ever show.) and his wife Mary. (David would better Larry, or perhaps worse him, by dying at age 38.) When I got up one day, there was a note tacked to my front door that Mary had left before going to work. It just said three little words: "Larry is dead." The pain of that loss is still sharp today.

The gauntness of Larry's hands in this photo still makes me sad.

It just isn't right. Larry should still be here, crotchety and funny at 82. We should have had a lot more laughs together. I can't imagine what other paths my life and my career would have taken had Larry Vincent not died so young, but I know I miss my friend still. He leers down at me from pictures on my wall, and, thanks to his loyal, devoted fans who loved him too, I have audio tapes to hear him again, though I know of no existing video tape of "Seymour", beyond this 58-second blooper clip, but I never give up hope video will turn up. Meanwhile, I have my DVD of The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, and have the Mission: Impossible DVD, and he's also in Disney's The Apple Dumpling Gang as Iris Adrian's husband, but don't blink. Search about You Tube, and you may find some of comedy songs.

(In Seymour's last TV show, shot shortly after The Apple Dumpling Gang, I had Seymour relate how a terrible tragedy occurred at Disney Studios while they were shooting the movie. Then we ran a clip from our movie that week, The Hideous Sun Demon, showing the monster catching a rat and squeezing it to death, while Seymour said, "A new security guard didn't recognize Mickey Mouse without his little pants and gloves.")

A page of TV Guide. Seymour "caught" scrounging through the trash. In one show, I had him throw the film reels of a terrible movie we'd run into a trash can like this, only to have them pop back out. The trash rejected it.

In 1976, in a conversation that will forever be one the supreme highlights of my life, Groucho Marx, or, as I think of him, God, told me he had seen some of my Seymour shows and that he thought I was a funny writer. Groucho was a Seymour fan!

In 1978 my first full-length stage play, an adaptation of Dracula, opened. The dedication in the program read: "This play is dedicated by it's author to the memory of Larry Vincent, better known to his fans as 'Seymour'. A great friend to horror, terror and things that go bump in the night, and a great friend to me."

"And now, the time has come for me to make that dread sojourn into the world that lies out there, beyond the slimiest of walls. Until next time, this is Seymour, wishing you and yours a Bad Evening!" I'll be waiting, my friend. Meanwhile,

BOO!

This photo hangs, framed, beside the computer on which I type up Tallulah's columns for her. She'll be back soon.

BIG News Coming! (Plus Survivor)

2011-10-24T01:54:00.000-07:00

Have you been dying for a good book to read since finishing reading my autobiography, My Lush Life? Well there is good news on the horizon, for Skeletor here, and for all of you. Details remain to be hammered out, no dates have been set yet, and the release date is apt to be a year away, but I can confidently state now that the sequel to My Lush Life, modestly titled Tallyho Tallulah, is coming, as an eBook for Kindle and other eBook formats, and as a Print-on-Demand hard copy for you Luddites like myself that like real books on your shelves. Like I say, publishing moves slower than a glacier, but wait long enough, and you get the majesty that is Yosemite Valley. In any event, a literary treat for my fans is on the way. Be patient and your patience will be rewarded with the funniest book of the 21st Century. The hard parts, the writing and the finding of a publisher, are finished. Soon, darlings, soon.

One of my ex-husbands, looking to see what I said about him.

You need a better mask, Little Russel. With this one, we still know who you are.

There are other things in life than Survivor this week, as Mohamar Gaddafi could tell you if he hadn't been shot like a dog with a depraved owner. They say his last words were pleading for mercy. He received the same mercy he'd shown thousands. Should he have been taken to The Hague, legally tried, and then hanged? Sure. Sadly for him, his captors hadn't the patience. Boo hoo.

Saddam Hussein found in a "rathole." Qadaffey (Never spell it the same way twice.) found hiding in a drainage pipe. Good lord, don't any of these super-villains have any huge luxury hideaways under volcanoes, or stylish private cheateaus atop the Swiss Alps, or undersea cites, like normal super-villains? Blofeld would be laughing. Khaddaffei was last seen dead in a drainage ditch. Now the EPA is fining him for pollution.

It's a mid-life career change for Khaddafi. (Kay Daffy? Quadraffini?) He's doing Snuff Films now, except he made a rookie mistake in the area of casting.

Anyway, Qadaffi (Quadaffie? Kadaffi? Ghadaffay? Cadaddfei? Gdaffy Duck?) is dead. The "Occupy Tripoli" protesters can go home now.

Meanwhile, in the South Pacific, Survivor was continuing. Ozzy's tantrum was hilarious. How many people has he helped blindside in past Survivor seasons? And yet, when his little girl friend got blindsided and he learned that "his" tribe was not playing for him to win as Rob's had, he was indeed all pissy about it. What does it mean, Ozzy? It means you're not in control. So what does he do? He does his best to further alienate the tribe, and makes the idiot blunder of telling them he has the idol, just to brag that he was smarter than they all are. Never tell people you have the idol! That's begging to be blindsided.

"I'm now what's called a free agent," the moron said. Does he think the other tribe will bid for him?

"He's behaving like a stupid bitch," said Cochran, anxious to show why he's still a virgin. Way to charm the ladies.

The Blue Tribe is still eating that saliva-and-blood-soaked pork. Ew.

Little Russell was out idol-hunting, and Benjamin, who has the idol, and Albert, who is an idol and knows Benjamin has it, were happy to watch the little idiot waste time on his futile search, as was I. Benjamin, who talks endlessly about playing an "honorable" game and never lying (recipe for losing Survivor), decided that not-telling little Hantz he had the idol didn't constitute an actual lie. Let's see how well he succeeds at not lying to Little Hantz.

Little Hantz was gleeful that he found the clue where Albert had left it for him. Benjamin was right that Little Hantz does indeed have his uncle's walk. Stuff was said, but it's hard to hear when Albert is shirtless, though I did catch Benjamin's comment that they wanted to play "as Christian men," which I assume means burning Cochran at the stake as a heretic.

Little Hantz: "You wouldn't think someone has it already, would you?"

"I don't think so," said Benjamin as the idol nestled deeper into his pocket. Ok, Benji, that's not withholding information. That's an active lie. Your pledge to play the game without lying to him, which you swore to, is out the window. A liar and a hypocrite. Yup, he's playing as a Christian man all right. Lies and hypocrisy are Christianity's centuries-long stock-in-trade.

Benji's excuse for going back on his oath to tell Little Hantz no lies? He reminds Ben of Big Hantz. Was that in his oath? I will always tell you the truth, unless you remind me of your uncle, and then I'll be the same lying hypocrite he was.

Martini Shuffle Bored.

They should rename Redemption Area Arena as Bitterness Stadium. Christine, all class, flipped her former tribemates The Bird. What is she, 7? She looks 47. Jeff asked Elyse about playing in front of people who had voted her out. Actually, her tribemate spectators were Ozzy and Keith, neither of whom voted for her, but she didn't know that, or much of anything else. She thought her attach-herself-as-concubine/whore-to-a-strong-veteran-player strategy would carry her to the end. Oops. When just being the Alpha-Dolt's bitch won't get you to the end of Survivor, then the terrorists have won.

Dalton Ross over at Entertainment Weekly doesn't like the shuffle bored challenges, but I do. It's better than watching footage of puzzle-solving. You can follow this game and tell who's doing well and who isn't, and it takes some skill. Elyse managed the rare come-from-behind-loss.

Jeff Probst: "What do you take away from this?"

Elyse: "I think for me, I take a sense of accomplishment, because I gave my all." Hello? So lounging about all day in a bikini, tanning while flattering Ozzy, and being asked to sit out challenges because she's useless, is her "all"? Her "all" isn't very much. She got eliminated in the first half of the game. I think she should take away from this a sense of Failure, because, by pretty much any measure, she failed, utterly and totally.

Jeff should have sent her off with: "Elyse, your adventure - is pathetic. Get out of my sight." But he didn't.

That's my ride in the background. Captain Nemo is so hot. He calls me his little Giant Squid.

Over on the Blue Tribe, Not-Dame Edna has also adopted the attach-yourself-to-the-returning-veteran strategy. This is working better for her because the Blue Tribe has forgotten their initial repugnance at acquiring Benjamin, and are following this moron like sheep. At least Not-Dame Edna's way of doing it is not to lie about tanning, but to seek out food, work around camp, kiss Benji's ass endlessly, and walk on Benjamin's spine. If only she'd crack it. If he suddenly became a paraplegic, Survivor would stop bringing the delusional creep back.

So Mikayla the Delilah is now Benji's target for elimination. Come on, you bozos; get rid of Little Hantz. He's a loose derringer. (That little twerp is no cannon.) He's a mixture of stupid, ignorant, religious, and Texan, and that is a recipe for a camp full of corpses.

In the Red Tribe, Ozzy suddenly noticed he was playing on his own, and that that would guarantee his losing, so he came dragging back, tail between his legs (Well, emotionally. His little bit of tail was just sent home.), apologizing for being a dick, and fully realizing that revealing he had the idol was basically, really, really stupid. But Cochran and Hairy Pothead both know they need to keep the target on Oz The Great and Peevish. Keith, nice-looking, well-built, is still worshiping at the Oz shrine. Keith is cute, but a balless dope.

I've got a lovely bunch of cocoanuts.

Great challenge, and whomever designed the transformer wheelbarrow/giant slingshot is a genius. In addition to Immunity, the winners got to go slide down rocks into a lovely pool, and a third clue to the idol. If it's the Blue tribe, the clue would be:

"If your idol-seeking energy is starting to lag,
Look in the pocket of the moronic windbag."

Whereas, if the Red Team wins, the clue would be:

"You won't find the idol,
And that is because,
It's already been found,
By the douchebag named Oz."

We had a come from behind win this time. The red tribe was hopeless at the wheelbarrow-through-the-zig-zag course part, giving the blue tribe a huge lead which the blues managed to blow by having Benji, Albert and Mikayla do the slingshotting. Albert was great at it. He is a professional athlete. Mikayla was mindlessly doing it one-handed because, you know, aim isn't important when shooting at targets. At The Playboy Mansion, Hef preferred the girls to shoot one-handed, as it displayed their tits better, and Hef didn't give a rat's ass if the girls scored or not as long as he did. Benji suggested twice that she sit it out, but she wouldn't, despite the fact that she never hit a target, even by accident.

But Benji was not shooting any better than she was. He also never hit a target. They both should have sat down and let Albert win the challenge for them, but noooooo. So instead, the red tribe came from behind and won. "It's Mikayla's fault we lost, " said Benji, who played every bit as badly as she did. It was both of their faults they lost. Ah, I can never get enough of that old-school Christian hypocrisy.

Jeff hands their fake idol to Ozzy, ignoring me, a True Idol of Millions.

The Red Tribe had a lot of fun at the sliding rocks. They got a picnic along with the natural water park stuff. That's nice.

Falling for Ozzy.

Benji decided instantly that the elimination candidates were just Delilah and Not-Dame Edna, and since Not-Dame Edna was his personal slave, he decided to make Li'l Hantz's sick dreams come true, and vote out the temptress. His stated reason was that she blew the challenge, but he blew it equally, and he wasn't nominating himself. More fine, aged-in-wood Christian hypocrisy.

Albert however, was of the opposite opinion, and campaigned to keep Mikayla and lose Not-Dame Edna. Hey! What about Li'l Hantz? Vote out the borderline psycho. (Okay, he's not "borderline.") Trust me. Vote him out, before he gets rid of you - with a machete while you sleep. You'll wake up just long enough to watch yourself bleed out, while listening to Li'l Hantz apologize and explain that The Lord told him to gut you.

"Trust me. I can get Coach to listen to me," said Albert, as he scrubbed a skillet shirtless. (Albert. I have a dirty skillet too. Could you come over and scrub mine shirtless too? I'll make you very glad you did. Just let me know long enough in advance to dirty up a skillet.) The problem is, the only voices Benji ever listens to are the ones in his head.

Mikayla referred to Not-Dame Edna as "Almost double my age." Not-Dame Edna is 35. Mikayla claims to be 22, which means she's probably 40, but let's pretend she is 22. Double 22 is 44. 35 is not "almost" 44. Mikayla apparently flunked math, unless she shagged the instructor. Wait. Maybe she meant to say that Not-Dame Edna was almost double Mikayla's IQ. That I believe, and Not-Dame Edna is no genius. (However, Real-Dame Edna is a genius.)

Albert's position was that Not-Dame Edna was useless at challenges, which is why they sat her out. This ignores that Mikayla was also useless at the challenge. He also said Not-Dame Edna is smart. I have so far seen no evidence of her being smart. I guess he's just assuming she's smart because she's Asian.

Benji's position was that Not-Dame Edna is his slave. Mikayala is not.

Albert to Li'l Hantz: "Honestly, the way we came together on day two was real and legitimate. And the way, I feel, Edna was brought into that group, it wasn't as authentic." This is blissfully meaning-free. Really. That is all meaningless verbiage, but he was talking to Li'l Hantz, who is an idiot, unacquainted with Reason, so there would be no point to trying to make sense. Making sense scares him. In any event, Li'l Hantz has wanted Mikayla burned at the stake ever since he first noticed that her tits make his dick hard. No one would ever sway him from voting out Delilah.

But Li'l Hantz said he would not vote out Not-Dame Edna, so he won't. Albert realized that Li'l Hantz is a dope among dopes, and gave up trying to talk to him. A man who tells you he wants to be "a Radical for God" is way too stupid to talk to about - well - anything.

Benji had a classy way of expressing why he wants to keep Not-Dame Edna: "If you were to tell Edna at the merge, Edna, I want you to follow Ozzy, even when he goes and takes a shit, and wipe his ass for him, she would." Talk about high praise! Watching the broadcast, Not-Dame Edna must have felt filled with pride. (CBS bleeped out "Shit" and "ass". Last week, on NBC's Harry's Law, the word "twat" was spoken, unbleeped, twice! Make up your minds, guardians of TV morality. Of course, everyone who watched Harry's Law, when they heard the word "twat" on network, prime time TV, well, their heads exploded and they all died. All of them. All of the millions of people watching that high-rated show died of hearing "twat" spoken aloud. It was tragic. That was how they killed Kuaddaffie, they told him that "twat" had been heard on NBC prime time twice, Mohamar thought of Condeleeza Rice, and his head exploded.)

So Rick Nelson, the Utah rancher who has spoken about three sentences all season so far, found himself the swing vote. He turns out to have no guts, no balls.

"He hee. We won the challenge, and Ozzy is making an ass of himself. Wanna Joint?"

At Tribal Council, Li'l Hantz spoke the best sentence in the whole episode, maybe all season. He was trying to use big words to sound educated and intelligent, when he plainly is neither, so he threw some multi-syllabic terms into his pronouncement. Apparently it never occurred to him that words are more than just sounds; they have meanings, so, in trying to explain that the next challenge was crucial (All Immunity Challenges are crucial) he said: "This next challenge is absolutely detrimental to the way the game turns out." Clearly he has no idea what the words he is using mean. He just chooses words at random. No wonder the Bible thumpers were able to hook this pathetically stupid young man so deeply. He goes with the words that sound best, and, say what you will about content, a lot of the King James Bible translation sounds like lovely poetry, even though it's just senseless, superstitious twaddle. (No, NBC, I said "TwaDle".) After he said it, everyone else politely refrained from saying: "Huh?"

They debated whether loyalty or numbers were important at the merge. Remember Russell going into the merge in his first season, way, way down in numbers, and his tribe still wiping out the other tribe because the idiots were falling all over each other to flip and betray each other? I'd say the loyalty vs strength debate was settled quite decisively that season. Snore.

Li'l Hantz, true to form, announced all the secret oaths they had made. That boy has less discretion than Wikkileaks. And then, Li'l Hantz launched into a morality lecture, like any intelligent adult needs a lecture from an idiot: "Nowadays, people get the misconception that we can tell a half-lie, or tell a little bit of a lie. Oh, it's just a game. Oh, it's just a cigarette. Oh, it's just a little bit of marijuana [Where was Hairy Pothead to defend pot? Back at his camp, not having lost.] Oh it's just a little - You know, that's lasciviousness. Because there is no gray. It's black or white. Period."

Where to start? First off, he's clearly quoting from what ever dumb-ass con-man preacher he has been seduced by. There's no way a boy who has no idea what "detrimental" means, knows what "misconception" and "lasciviousness" means, particularly as none of that was lasciviousness. If there is anything I know about, it's lasciviousness. I've embraced my inner lasciviousness, and my outer lasciviousness too for that matter, all my life. I admit freely that "a little bit of marijuana" is a bad thing. One should have a LOT of marijuana.

But beyond his hapless parroting of some southern Bible-thumper, there is the appalling, obvious fact that this is a boy who lives in a world of all blacks & whites. Any intelligent, educated human being knows that everything in Life is shades of gray. Everything! The mental world he inhabits is the limited world of the moron: all black & white. Scratch a moral absolutist; find a fool.

He is an idiot. I'd call him a buffoon, but I'd be insulting buffoons.

Cowboy Rick Nelson did not cowboy-up. He chickened out, and Mikayla was off to Redemption Area. After Li'l Hantz's idiot sermon, I do not understand why there was not a unanimous vote for Hantz.

Exiting, Mikayla said that Li'l Hantz always blows-up at "a stronger woman." Is she saying he's a weaker woman?

The previews for next week showed Benji leading the Blue Tribe in a group prayer. I may well vomit. Of course, he also mentioned putting a bullet into Li'l Hantz's head, which I rather like the sound of (You'll get off with self-defense anywhere but Texas.), but I know they don't have guns.

Anyway, no need to thump, nor read, any stupid Bibles. Just toke up on your shades of gray medical marijuana and await Tallyho Tallulah. It's coming, my darlings, it's coming.

Cheers darlings.

Sawyer/James Ford/LeFleur is enthralled by great literature.

The Horror of Being "Benjamin"!

2011-10-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

Coach Benjamin Wade: "If anybody calls me 'Benjamin' to my face, I'm gonna go nuts!"

Funniest line I've heard all week. Honestly. What could be more disgraceful, insulting, and humiliating than to be called "Benjamin"? This is why Master B. Franklin of the Founding Fathers always insisted friends call him "The Stove," and, in his later years, his homies all called him: "C-Note."

Oscar-winner Benjamin Affleck. You may debate his acting chops, but not his beauty.

Though I haven't been writing about Survivor, I have been looking at the grotesque spectacle. Russell Jr has a future (a short future) as a horror movie subject. That boy is one troubled mess of conflicted feelings: his desire to be a Good, God-Fearing Boy clashing with his need to rape the Delilahs who are intentionally tempting him by breathing and walking around and stuff, and to then bury them in shallow graves down near Redemption Area, coupled to his inability to keep his mouth closed, all coated with his genuine stupidity, make him a scary study in psychosis. I was actually shocked he wasn't voted out last week, when everyone learned that he was lying to everyone, betraying all confidences, Russell's nephew, and seriously unbalanced, but no. They chose to evict Scary Stacy, The Diva Mortician, who is good with people, once they are dead. Her live social game is disturbing.

Ok, beware Benjamin Linus, although word is, he's reformed.

Imagine you are all alone except for a camera crew out in Redemption Area, late, late at night, trying to sleep, and without warning, Stacy touches your shoulder, with her hands that handle The Dead. I would SCREAM!!!

Stacy, who may have escaped from the Blaxploitation version of Six Feet Under, explained to us that Tribal Council was all "fake." We know this. It's a TV show. It's fake, like Stacy's sanity. This woman has serious anger issues. I understand not wanting to be hugged by Benjamin. No one in their right mind (which, ironically, excludes Stacy right there) ever wants to touch, let alone be hugged by, Voldepussy. But she has full-on rage happening. Her stiffs - I mean clients, don't give her trouble like this.

Christine to Stacy: "I was hoping it wouldn't be you." In her situation, I'd hope it wasn't Stacy also. I'd be hoping for Albert to come tap, tap, tapping at my backdoor, to be perfectly frank.

Stacy: "All you-all goin' straight to Hell with gasoline drawers on." Yes, just the person I want telling me bedtime stories as she tucks me in, all alone with a camera crew out on Redemption Area at Midnight.

Benjamin Bratt is so dreamy!

"I don't care what people think of me out here," sobbed Russell Junior, lying once more, as it is painfully obvious that he does care what people think of him, or else, why bother to tell us "I'm a good guy"? And why cut out the eyes of his victims who have seen his lust and his sin, which they, the Temptresses, the Delilahs, the Jezebels, deliberately provoked from him, if not because he couldn't stand the accusations that flashed in their dead eyes as they looked at him. Or was that someone else? The case is still unsolved.

Benjamin was hoping that Albert, beautiful Albert, and that Playboy Bunny-Delilah person (How ironic that as she's out here being a Playboy Cover Model, The Playboy Club became one of the first cancellations of the new season.) would report back from the Duel For Redemption that Christine and Scary Stacy keep their mouths closed like good little soldiers, and not spill any beans to the other side. Has he met Scary Stacy? Did he see, when Russell Junior first came out of the Hantz closet and confessed his Bad Seediness, the triple-take Stacy did at the "revelation," one that Daffy Duck would consider overdone? And then there's the small problem of what possible motive would Scary Stacy have not to use her last remaining weapons, "Tribe Intel"?

Stacy on Coach: "Adults call him Benjamin." I've heard adults call him Voldepussy. Now Stacy might have gotten by if it had stopped there, but helpful Christine had to chime in: "Whether he likes it or not," thus exposing the essential pettiness of the matter. Jeff was on it in an instant, and went right after the underlying pettiness of refusing to call him "Coach," utterly eroding the "adult" portion of the Rage-With-Dignity pose Stacy had chosen for her appearance. But full-on craziness awaited, once Jeff got her mouth going, and he knew then to sit back, like the "clients" she talks to all day long, every day, as she pumps them full of Formaldehyde. The Dead never call her "crazy," or at least, not twice.

Albert, accurately, called Stacy's rant "Sour grapes." It was, big sour grapes, in a big sour whine, but what most of it also was, was incomprehensible, barely intelligible, and dependant on mental leaps she was making alone. Anyway, she got across that Benjamin was running his tribe, much like Ozzie thinks he's running his tribe.

I love the catch-the-balls-in-the-swirly-ramps challenge. It works best as an elimination challenge, with five or more people. All those balls whizzing, and the faltering concentration that, one-by-one, eliminates folks makes for great viewing. As a one-on-one duel, it depended on only a single error, which is a waste of its potential. There was never any doubt that Stacy would lose it. She was enraged, and few things monkey with your concentration more than being enraged. Believe me, I know, God fucking damn it!

Of course, having Jeff Probst hollering stuff at you interferes with concentration also. And he missed a great opportunity to announce, on CBS: "Ladies, its time to drop your balls."

Stacy: "I'm a diva." Ah yes, one of the many, beloved Diva Morticians popular culture is so enamored of. She's like Tina Turner, as she would be if she were up to her elbows in a human cadaver.

Albert was mad at Stacy letting the other tribe know that he is Benjamin's Bitch. "These were the things I thought we'd be able to keep under the radar pretty well. Just pisses me off." Yes, isn't it awful how, when you make an enemy, that enemy then does stuff you wish she wouldn't?

Albert predicted: "Coach is gonna be pissed." Close. If they'd had a reasonable supply of vodka, say 9 or 10 gallons, he'd have gotten good and pissed, but as it was, he merely got pointlessly peeved. He so wanted revenge against Stacy who is totally gone now, beyond his reach. She is with The Dead now, literally. (And you know how work piles up when you're out of the office for two weeks.)

"If anyone calls me 'Sir Benjamin' to my face, I'm gonna go nuts. I will go all Medieval on his diaper."

And so we learned that "Benjamin" is the worst thing you can call someone. "Who's 'Benjamin'?" asked Russell - Shh, My Last Name, Which is Tattooed All Over Me, is a Secret - Junior. That boy is swifter than snails.

Benjamin Graduates

Benjamin: "My parents call me 'Coach'." Oh who do you think you're kidding? Your parents never call you.

Over in Red Tribe Land Elyse is in full Manson Girl Mode for Ozzy. She saw how being a total Susan Atkins to Boston Rob and Russell in past seasons had worked out well for those floaters, and decided to be a floater here. In the words of Pennywise the Dancing Clown: "We all float down here, and when you're down here, you'll float too!"

Not a Benjamin. It's Pennywise, the Dancing Clown.

Ozzy also saw the last season of Survivor, and thinks he's The-Boston Rob-Who's-Done-Porn. Unfortunately, as he will quickly find out today, this isn't a repeat of last season. Everyone else saw last season also, and the others are not happy little Manson Girls.

Elyse thinks it's just cute as Hell the way Cochran works at camp, instead of spending all day sunbathing in her Playboy Mansion Lifestyle. Imagine. If he'd only take the time to tan like she does, he wouldn't be so pasty. (You know, Elyce actually looks like Susan Atkins in 1968, with just a touch of Patricia Krenwinkle.)

Elyse took Cochran's "Little Engine That Could" appellation and instantly, without even meaning it as meanly as it was, emasculated him further into "The Little Cochran That Could." Actually, most of the Little Cochrans I've encountered over the centuries could, it's just, who wanted them too? Cochran refused to confirm the proper spelling of "Cochran" to Ozzy, to keep him from being able to write it on a ballot. If certain past contestants have proved anything, it's that in Tribal Votes, spelling does not count. (Remember "Ressell"?) And in any event, I'm sure Ozzy could spell "Jew Boy" without a problem.

Ozzy saw Benjamin's dominance of his tribe as Natural and Good; the Way the World Works. So did Susan Atkins. However, Hairy Pothead, Dawn, Cochran, and even Keith the attractive-but-mildly-vacant one, felt a new game plan was needed, one where Ozzy didn't ride on their backs to a shot at the big money. (And if they'd enjoyed Ozzy's porn career as I have, they'd know that Ozzy is experienced at riding a co-star's back to a big money shot.)

Jim, aka Hairy Pothead, picked up instantly that Ozzy's unasked-for advice to Benjamin to eliminate Albert (Heresy!) translated into his own plans to eliminate Keith and Hairy. Of course, Ozzy's real plan is to eliminate Cochran, but Cochran, for all his social ineptitude, is smarter than the rest of his tribe combined, and saw that in encouraging the "Ozzy-is-the-threat" campaign, his - ah - bacon would be safe from the fryer again.

Why do I love Survivor? Well part of it is that it occasionally throws stuff at me like Albert's Idol Hunt. Sure his early display of smartness in finding the clue was quickly negated by his sharing it with Benjamin and the dumpy broad, thus allowing Benjamin to go out and actually find the idol (So the idols are both found, and in the possession of the two vets, natch.), but so what? He was shirtless and gorgeous every moment of it. Look at him: physically flawless, and in those wet-shorts walking-shots, clearly hung like a sperm whale, handsome, level-headed, smart-but-not-too-smart. He is The Perfect Man! Tallulah is in love....

We heard Albert say: "I'm gonna have a target on my back once we come to the merge," over a beautiful shot of his walking full back to camera, head-to-toe shot, with him wearing a buff on his head, shoes, and some VERY tight, damp shorts, as indeed my own shorts were becoming quite damp just watching this shot. All I could think was, "That target will be just below your back, gorgeous."

We watched Benjamin pray to whatever weird god he believes in (Yottle? Yog-Sothoth? Baron Munchhausen? Mary Baker Eddy?) to find the idol. He must have prayed to something powerful and big, because he shortly thereafter found the idol. (By looking for it, not by waiting for a "sign".) The only thing big enough to do that which I know Benjamin believes in is his own Awesomeness, so he undoubtedly was praying: "To My own Awesomeness..."

The best parts of Benjamin and Gerold.

We saw Benjamin make downward-stroking gestures into his seated-lap as he said: "Now I gotta get a hold of myself, and just say: 'Dragon, get back in there'." Benjamin smug in victory is always a sickening sight, but this had him literally aroused, and I don't want to contemplate Benji stroking his dragon, and talking to it, as he forces it back into his pants.

Cochran's Excellent Fishing Expedition really went no where, and was mostly an excuse for gorgeous underwater-photography of Ozzie spearing helpless little animals. Cochran's contribution to the expedition consisted of - ah - his presence, you know, in case a smart Jewish lad of no physical skills should suddenly be needed to - ah - to know something. Yeah, that's it. He was crucial!

Ozzy told us: "Fishing's not easy. It might look easy to somebody watching it at home." Actually, to this viewer watching it at home, it looks impossible. Hollywood Squares looks easy. Underwater hand-spear fishing looks impossible.

"I feel like they're finally becoming My Tribe." said Ozzy, as we watched him walk ashore carrying his catch, home is the warrior, home with his kills. Ozzy is one Tribal Council away from learning they are not His Tribe.

Ok, he's a loony Creationist, and nearly 40 years on, he's still kissing Richard Nixon's ass, but still, he has money to win.

Cochran's description of Ozzy as "Mowgli-esque" broke me up. That wasn't Disney's Jungle Book. This one was The Bare Necessities.

Not a Benjamin, but he'd have been great at the Immunity Challenge!

I loved the roasted pig challenge. It was disgusting, and it forced Cochran to eat pork, but it was great TV. The only real problem was that, after a 2-ounce loss, it was impossible to assign blame. Not even Elise sat back with a "No thanks. none for me. I'm dieting," or a "Meat? Are you serious? No way. I'm a vegan." I don't know how Hairy Pothead felt after hearing Jeff yell out "Jim with a huge piece of meat at the end," but I'm guessing he was flattered. I'm sure this was far from the first time Benjamin has heard someone yell: "Coach gnawing off something big." I suspect the man is part beaver anyway. He's all pussy. When Jeff yelled out "Dawn with a big hunk of meat," I expected Dawn to mutter: "Oh great, Prom Night all over again!"

Did you get the feeling that this is how Russell Junior always eats?

Jeff Probst: "Now Brandon can't get his out. Rick pulls it out. Both tribes getting to know each other in a whole new way." I'm reminded of the night I learned what "Circle Jerk" means. I was amused by Russell Junior's quiet, automatic "Thank you" to Rick. He was raised right. Not to have brains or be intelligent, but to be polite. I see him in my mind's eye, sitting over the shallow grave he's just buried Mikayla in, sobbing out a very sincere "I'm terribly sorry, ma'am", as he apologizes, and explains that he had to kill the temptress for making him rape her, because he's a good boy. And it's nothing personal, ma'am.

Jeff Probst: "Whatever is in your mouth, put in your basket, then walk away." If only I had a martini for every date I ever went on that ended with those words, sometimes spoken by a cop, once by President Roosevelt. (You should have seen Eleanor's face, which wasn't easy, given the position she was in.)

So the winning team got to keep the spat-out meat? And they took it back to camp and ate it? That was the single grossest Survivor moment to me since they ate the rats a decade ago. Really, truly disgusting. Remember, lots of the players got cut mouths and gums playing this challenge, so they BLED on the food also. I just hope the next challenge wasn't inspired by the Human Centipede movies. (I wanted that role. I was perfect. Instead, I'm going to be in this cheap knock-off of it, The Human Caterpillar.)

The important thing about how the challenge turned out is that Albert is safe for another week.

Russell Junior made the "feast" of recycled pork. I guess he's used to recipes involving hand-me-down food. "Hey! This meat has only been in one, or at worst, two mouths. Growing up, my par on most dinners was four mouths. And only in their mouths this time too. This is luxury."

Elyse: "We're all gonna have pig guts break-outs tomorrow." Her grasp of science is every bit as weak as Cochran's grasp of society, when he suggested that eating pig will give them all "Oral Herpes." To what terrible extreme did Mama Cochran go to scare her son into keeping Kosher? Or was it just because every guy in his high school that got herpes, got them from, they said, the same pig?

"Doesn't everyone have herpes?" asked life-of-the-party Cochran. He really doesn't get out much, does he?

Ozzy was weirded out by Cochran working a lot, and felt quite secure in his tribe's willingness to vote out someone who contributes constantly over someone who lies around in a bikini all day, saying stuff to Ozzy like: "You're a good guy." (Which, to be fair, to Ozzy, does constitute "contributing.") Ozzy is soon to stop living on Planet Ozzy.

Hairy Pothead believed Keith and he were "on the same page." Maybe so, but in different paragraphs. Keith did not want to blindside Ozzy through Elyse. He and someone called Whitney, whom they swear was on the show prior to her materializing at this point in this episode (Like Nikki & Paolo materializing in season 3 of Lost, and we were supposed just to believe they'd been there all along. Sure. Pull the other one. No! I said the other one!) both liked undermining Ozzy, if they could do it without seeming to do it. The term for this sort of play is "Chickenshit."

They edited the Tribal Council to make it look like Cochran was in deep crap, and this was also part of blindsiding Ozzy by voting out Elyse.

Jeff gave Dawn a chance to go off on Cochran, but she's a Mormon lady from Utah who's probably never seen a Hebrew in person before in all her life, apart from local Indians (Never forget, Mormans believe really weird, stupid stuff.) and in Woody Allen movies. She thinks Cochran is cute as a button, and there's no way she's got the taste to detect the difference in wit between Woody Allenisms written by one of the great jokesmiths of the last 70 years, and Cochran's "hilarious" assertion that they'll all get Oral Herpes from eating that pigmeat.

When Dawn mentioned Cochran's "joke" about all getting a communicable disease, from sharing tainted, unsanitary meat, she said: "I don't know where you get that." Dawn, you get that in science class. Try spending less time in church and more time in a science class. Read a book by Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking instead of by Joseph Smith, excuse me, by the Angel Moroni.

Well Elyse suffered a classic blindside that hit Ozzy as hard as it hit her. Loved it.

Anyway, I'm on record: I like a lot of Benjamins.

But there are creepy bad Bens too. One is called "Coach," because all the other Bens, including the rat, voted him off of the name.

Cheers darlings.

Got Wood?

2011-09-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, which followed Snow White into theaters two years later in 1940, is one of the finest, most amazing, and beloved animated films ever made, still towering over even recent animated films on a visual level. But let’s look a little deeper at some of the plot’s flaws or weirdnesses. Remember, I love this movie; this is all from affection. I love Pinocchio because he can always get wood.

Okay, there’s a big visual problem right off in the first shot. Jiminy Cricket is singing When You Wish Upon a Star (A song which has resulted in people wishing on me for decades, and not cleaning up afterwards either.) while seated on a candle-holder above a book of Pinocchio. A spotlight picks him out. (Where is he singing, and who is putting a spotlight on this bug?) The shadow of the shelf is clearly seen, and equally clearly we see that Jiminy is not casting any shadow. Hello? This has bothered me every time I’ve ever watched this movie. (Beside Jiminy are books whose spines show the titles Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Disney making promises? Disney would release his Alice 11 years later, and his Peter came out 13 years later, as did his movie of Peter Pan.) At the instant he finishes the song, they cut to a much closer shot, and suddenly the shadow he was missing before appears, so it’s not like they forgot he needed a shadow. They just didn’t bother.

Budget concerns? In a movie with one shot that cost over $50,000? That $50,000 shot is the multiplane shot from Jiminy’s point-of-view of Gepetto’s shop as Jiminy hops closer, which comes only a moment later. It’s an amazing shot, especially on big screen.

In the book Pinocchio, the cricket is killed by Pinocchio in chapter one. Clearly Jiminy had a better agent when dealing with Disney.

Kindly loveable old Gepetto has no child to love. Aaaww. Why doesn’t he? Was there never a Mrs. Gepetto? Was he sterile? Gay? He couldn’t adopt?

Jiminy leans his hand on the hugely bustled butt of a china lady, and begs her pardon, This is the first butt joke in the film, but far, far from the last. Disney’s anal infatuation appears over and over. (We have already had by this point the shot of the cricket warming his butt on the hearth.)

It’s also the first, but far from the last instance of the cricket showing lust for human females. This is an odd idea, animals with sexual lust for human females, that reappears throughout Disney. Look at the way Donald Duck goes bananas for human ladies in The Three Caballeros. (“We’re three caballeros, three gay caballeros, they say we are birds of a feather.” Birds? Yes. Caballeros? Arguably. Gay? Clearly not.)

Cleo the goldfish shows a lot more interest in Gepetto’s doings than any fish I’ve ever seen. Neither Cleo nor Figaro the kitten can speak, but both understand English (Why Italian Gepetto speaks English, without even an accent, is never dealt with. Later, the villainous Stromboli at least has an Italian accent. The villainous coachman has an English Cockney accent.)

Later, Gideon the cat wears clothes (as does Jiminy), and functions as a person, though he can not speak. (He had a voice. Mel Blanc, in his only job for Walt Disney, recorded all his dialogue, but then the decision was made to make Gideon Harpo-esque, and all his dialogue was cut. All that remains of Mel Blanc in the finished film is a hiccup. In his charming autobiography, That’s Not All Folks, Mel says he worked 16 days on the movie at $50 a day, so he was paid $800 for a single huccup. At that rate, I would be a billionaire!) (I had lunch with Mel Blanc once, in 1976, a total charmer. We spent the entire lunch talking about Jack Benny.)

But Honest John (In all materials about the film his name is given as “J. Worthington Foulfellow,” but in the film he is only ever called “Honest John.”) is a fox who can speak, and even sing - as famously does Jiminy - and seems accepted by humans as a normal member of society, albeit a crooked one. What planet is this?

Next butt joke: In the song Little Wooden Head (What an explicit anatomical feature to sing about in a children’s movie, though it can make me sing my brains out!) is the lyric: “Little wooden feet and best of all, little wooden seat in case you fall,” followed by Gepetto giving the lifeless puppet a prat fall on his little wooden butt.

Cleo breathes out bubbles throughout the movie. Where is the air for those bubbles coming from?

Third butt joke: One of Gepetto’s cuckoo clocks marks the hour by showing a fat woman spanking a little boy’s explicitly-depicted naked butt. Yes, there is little boy ass crack 10 minutes into the movie.

Cleo the goldfish likes being petted and having her stomach tickled like a kitten. Ever known a fish to enjoy physical contact from a human?

Cleo and Figaro are reluctant friends. I’ve known a lot of pussycats in my long, long life, and they all loved goldfish too, preferably for lunch. As Cat sings in Red Dwarf: “I’m gonna eat you little fishey!”

When Gepetto declares it bedtime, Cleo goes to sleep. I’ve never heard of a fish that sleeps.

Gepetto smokes in bed. He even has a peg on his headboard to hang his pipe on, so he does it habitually. Wonderful comic actor Jack Cassidy and beautiful actress Francis Drake might have warned him against this, except that both of them burned to death after falling asleep while smoking.

The Blue Fairy grants Gepetto’s wish that Pinocchio be alive. I’ve known hundreds of fairies of all colors, and not one of them has ever granted my impossible wishes. My water taps here at Morehead Heights, mounted ever-less-firmly atop mighty Tumescent Tor, which thrusts insistently skyward, still do not dispense Vodka.

Gepetto sleeps with his glasses on. Bad idea, though not as bad as smoking in bed.

Pinocchio comes to life already able to speak, fully conversant with English, and with the intellectual level of a 7 or 8 year old boy. Where did that knowledge come from, particularly given his brain is pinewood, and he’s been sentient for only 2 seconds? I guess he came already programmed, like a PC.

The Fairy gives Pinocchio a goal: prove himself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and he gets to become a human being. No other human was ever given this entrance requirement, though it would be a vastly better world if they were. But why didn’t the Fairy just create him that way? I mean, where does his personality traits come from if not from she who made wood sentient?

The transparent coloring of the Blue Fairy is exquisite.

Once again, Jiminy’s lust for human women comes to the forefront. The Blue Fairy cons Jiminy into being Pinocchio’s conscience by hitting him close up with her beauty, and Jiminy blushes deep pink out of desire for her. Okay, I’ve seen fairies charm insects they should have squashed many a time. She makes him kneel before her to receive her blessing, like all fairies I know. At least he gets a new outfit out of the deal. She gives him a magic make-over. He needed it, He was wearing the raggediest outfit I’ve ever seen household vermin wear. It’s Queer Eye for the Straight Bug.

In the charming third musical number, Give a Little Whistle, Jiminy teaches Pinocchio to whistle. How does a creature with no lungs, made of solid pine, expel air? And what was Disney’s obsession with whistling? Snow White also sings Whistle While You Work, though at my age, one pants as one works.

Fourth butt joke: As Jiminy slides on the violin strings in the song, the string snaps, and strikes him in the ass (Who knew crickets even have asses?) hard enough to send him flying.

Jiminy flirts with a mechanical wooden human-esque milkmaid in one of the clocks. Now he’s lusting for mechanical wooden human effigies!

Fifth butt joke: Gepetto lights a match by scratching it up his own butt. I guess he has a hot ass.

Turns out Gepetto keeps a loaded pistol under his pillow. He’s going to blow his brains out in his sleep that way. What other dangers for the unwary sleeper are lurking in his bed besides pipes and guns? A bear trap? Rick Perry?

Sixth butt joke: Pinocchio startles Figaro when he’s walking under Gepetto’s nightshirt, and the cat flies straight up into Gepetto’s butt under his nightshirt, which so excites Gepetto that he fires one off, and his pistol shoots also.

Seventh butt joke: Jiminy asks to “cut-in” on two mechanical dancing figures by taping on the female’s hugely-bustled butt with his phallic umbrella handle. Then he asks the human effigy “How’s about sittin’ out the next one, eh?” He is obsessed with lust for human females!

Pinocchio still has one wooden aspect, he can not feel physical pain, as we see when he sets the index finger of his left hand on fire. (This still is flipped. In the film it's his other hand, Figaro is on the other side, and the basket is on the other side. A giveaway is that the feather in Pinocchio's hat is on the wrong side. I do not know why the image is flipped but I'm too lazy to flip it back now.) At least until Gepetto reaches Cleo’s bowl, when it is his right hand that is on fire and gets dunked. Pinocchio’s burnt glove self-repairs, or maybe it “heals.”

I don’t know how much money they spent on the stunning multiplane shot of the town waking up the next morning, with the camera panning about, tracking in through archways to different locales, while dozens of animated schoolkids and their parents enter and scamper about, but one biography of Disney I consulted (out of 5) cited the shot as costing $1000 a second. That would nail it at $44,000! Anyway, the shot is worth it.

When Pinocchio asks what the other children are, and Gepetto answers “Boys and girls,” Pinocchio makes a momentary face on “girls,” but then enthusiastically asks: “Real boys?” Gay! (Cleo and the Blue Fairy are the only female characters of any importance in the movie. This is a very masculine fable.)

From here on in, we must pay attention to the timeline, because it’s central to the plot problems of this move. Okay, it’s the morning after the night when Pinocchio comes to life. We’re roughly ten hours into the timeline here.

Enter Honest John & Gideon, a fox and a cat who wear clothes and are accepted as full members of human society. We do not see any other animals in the film who are. They are struck by the novelty of a living wooden mannequin, but no one is struck by how weird it is to have a fox and a cat being a sly comedy team amongst humans. A talking fox in clothes, considerably larger even than a wolf? Well what’s so strange about that?

Eighth butt joke: After tripping Pinocchio, Gideon sweeps his butt with a whisk broom, then picks his rear pocket.

Ninth Butt Joke: As Honest John begins seducing Pinocchio into a life in the theater, he admires his many physical aspects. As he says: “That physique,” he taps Pinocchio’s butt with his phallic cane. We’re in very dangerous waters here, but he is about to launch into the great song An Actor’s Life For Me, my own personal theme song. It also contains the shockingly honest lyric: “Hi diddley day, an actor’s life is gay.” True, but this is a Disney film!

During the song, when they cut from a ground-level medium-shot, to the stunning overhead tracking shot of them singing as they dance down the street, the book and apple core Pinocchio is holding vanishes out of existence.

Jiminy oversleeps his first day (out of only two days total) on the job. I had no idea insects slept at all, let alone overslept.

We then jump ahead to that evening. We are 24 hours into the story. Pinocchio is opening in Stromboli’s puppet show, where he has learned a musical number but, as one would expect from an amateur with only one day’s rehearsal, he screws up the choreography.

No matter. He’s an instant star. Jiminy momentarily abandons him with the great line: “What does an actor need with a conscience anyway?” Good question.

Well Stromboli gets an Italian accent, though we’re told he is a gypsy.

Tenth butt joke: In the I’ve Got No Strings number, the Dutch girl puppets sandwich Pinocchio between their out-pushed butts.

When the French female puppets begin doing a can-can number, Jiminy does a double take, and then puts on his glasses, enthralled. More lusting for human female effigies. I may never take my clothes off in front of a cockroach again, unless he’s very cute, and I’ve never seen a cute roach.

Back at Gepetto’s house, it’s dinner time and Pinocchio is not home from school yet, so they are holding dinner. I understand Geppeto’s concern for what happened to the boy (Gepetto should have taken him to school himself, rather than shove a ten-hour-old wooden boy out the door unchaperoned.), but why wait dinner? Pinocchio is made of wood. He has no stomach nor digestive system. He can’t eat or drink.

Cleo has a piece of cake in her bowl. Even if fish ate cake, no one wants cake that’s been immersed in water. Ew. Let them drink cake!

Figaro’s dinner is a cooked fish, which Gepetto intends him to eat in full view of Cleo. Double ew! Cleo must live in constant terror.

There is no Stage Puppet’s Union, so Stromboli decides to keep Pinocchio as an unpaid slave, though he gives him a worthless slug as token payment before locking him in a birdcage, and threatening him by throwing an axe into a “dead" puppet, in a gruesome shot. Disney never backed off from terrorizing kids, and certain scenes in Pinocchio would be at home in a horror movie.

Eleventh Butt Joke: When Stromboli mentions Constantinople, he shakes his gigantic ass in our faces in a comical parody of a belly dancer.

When Jiminy catches up to Pinocchio in Stromboli’s coach, he refers to himself as “your old friend.” Pinocchio has been alive at this point about 24 hours.

Pinocchio and Jiminy both routinely wear their hats indoors. Manners, boys, manners!

Does our heroes own resourcefulness get them out of the tight spot they are in? Nope. The Blue Fairy arrives and frees them. A deus ex machina halfway through the movie. Sloppy plotting.

Pinocchio’s famous trait of having his nose grow when he lies has always brought to my filthy mind the image of a bed partner for him one day, whether male or female (He shows no interest in the female puppets that so entrance the cricket), screaming in the heat of passion: “Lie to me, Pinocchio, lie to me! Lie bigger! Lie harder! Tell me Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. I need a BIG lie!”

Twelfth butt joke: To hide in shame when the Blue Fairy appears in Stromboli’s caravan, Pinocchio faces away from her and bends over, presenting his butt to her in greeting. So Pinocchio is a bottom. By the way, this is the proper way to greet a fairy that materializes in your room. The fairy’s “magic wand” will set you free that way.

Twelfth-and-a-half butt joke: Jiminy is also presenting his butt to the fairy, with his head buried in bird seed. Kinky! He’s playing “Tweety” with her.

Pinocchio’s nose doesn’t merely grow. It sprouts twigs, leaves, a bird's nest, and hatches two baby birds, suddenly called into existence by Pinocchio’s lies. Well, they aren’t the first to be given life through someone lying to someone else.

(Also, we are told by the Blue Fairy that Pinocchio is made of pine. Why then does he sprout leaves instead of pine needles?)

The fairy says: “This is the last time that I can help you.” This is a lie. She will help him twice more.

Next we have a talking fox, a large dressed cat hiccuping with Mel Blanc’s voice, and a Cockney coachman drinking and plotting evil together in an Italian saloon. I’ve never seen Englishmen drink with talking animals in a bar in my life, anywhere in the world, not just Italy.

Okay, this is a big one. Let’s look at the whole Pleasure Island scam. To wit: it involves kidnapping large numbers of little boys, indeed, requires a steady supply of them to be profitable. Wouldn’t wholesale disappearances of children be noticed by - oh - hundreds of people? The perfect crime, this is not.

The scheme requires the creation, construction, operation, and apparently drastic nightly repairs to, an entire, rather large and elaborate, theme park (the theme being “Wholesale Hooliganism”), which would cost millions!

What do they get from this? A supply of work-donkeys to sell to farmers, salt miners, circuses, zoos, etc. Is the market for donkeys so enormous that there’s a chance in Hell of this scheme being even remotely profitable? Wouldn’t it be vastly more cost-effective to just breed donkeys in the normal manner, not to mention the legal risk? As horror movie, the Pleasure Island sequence is magnificent. It has terrified kids and grown-ups for 71 years, and caused nightmares beyond counting. It is incredibly disturbing and frightening. But as an economically feasible scheme, it’s beyond idiotic. This has bothered me for many decades, ever since I was old enough to stop being freaked out by it, and able to think about it rationally.

And one other point: given that it posits that turning kids loose in a huge theme park causes them to mutate into donkeys, isn’t it ironic that Walt Disney would go on to create the most-popular theme parks on earth? His studio successors have even put Pleasure Islands into the parks, in the Pinocchio rides in the Fantasylands, and in Orlando, actually making a genuine island called Pleasure Island. Is the Disney corporation running a secret sideline in black market donkeys? (The studio was even run for many years by a major jackass named Eisner.) Do they have signs saying “Unruly children will be turned into donkeys and sold”?

“I’d rather be smart than be an actor,” says Pinocchio. You can be both (Hello!), but it’s still a damn funny line.

In “diagnosing” Pinocchio, Honest John listens to Pinocchio’s “heart.” His chest is solid wood. He has no heart, nor any internal organs at all. This fact will figure in my greatest plot objection, later on.

When Honest John gives Pinocchio his “ticket” to Pleasure Island, he gives him an Ace of Spades. This is known as the Death Card. That implication is probably intentional on the studio’s part, but Pinocchio is not being threatened with death, rather with life. When he begins changing into a donkey, his ears and tail are meat, not wood; he’s becoming a real, live donkey.

Early in the film, roughly 50 clocks inform us that Gepetto went to bed at 9 PM. This means Pinocchio’s birth occurs about 9:05 PM. We are explicitly told that the coach for Pleasure Island leaves at midnight, so when Pinocchio goes off on it, he’s 27 hours old. I’m going somewhere with this timeline. Trust me.

It’s not really presented as a gag, so I won’t list it as a butt joke, but on the coach, Lampwick repeatedly uses his slingshot to shoot rocks at the asses of the asses pulling the coach. Though it’s never made explicit, plot logic demands that these donkeys are all ex-little boys.

The whole trip to Pleasure Island and the indulgence of the boys there features spectacular animation.

I should add that the large sidewheeler steamboat that transports the kids to the island is another large expense in this scheme. The price and demand for donkeys must be gigantic.

Among the unique attractions at Pleasure Island are a tent in which boys are encouraged to just beat the snot out of each other in a giant, ongoing brawl, and Tobacco Road, where they boys are given free cigars. The latter becomes ironic when we remember that it was smoking that killed Walt Disney.

Another attraction is the “Model Home,” a large, mostly glass palace the boys are allowed to vandalize, including smashing complex stained-glass windows. Just repairing that for the next batch of boys must cost more than they could get for the donkeys, not to mention requiring weeks to fix.

Lampwick strikes a match on the Mona Lisa, which has already had a chalk stick figure drawn over it. Well, I’m sure it’s merely a reproduction.

The Pleasure Island scam also seems to employ a lot of men, many pockets to pay, many mouths that know of this ongoing, ferociously cruel and horrific crime.

When we see the park later, it seems to have suffered damage to the tune of millions of dollars. Donkeys better be worth more than diamonds.

Fortunately for Pinocchio and the plot, he and Lampwick are the last to transform into jackasses. I can accept that the factors of Pinocchio’s pure spirit, his utter lack of malice, and the fact that he’s made of wood not flesh, delayed his transformation, but why is Lampwick the last flesh human to transform? He’s pretty much an irredeemable delinquent from the moment we meet him, the very essence of a Bad Influence. He was a jackass going in. Even on the coach ride in, he gave as one of the island’s best features: “no cops.”

The pool hall shaped like a giant 8 ball is a swell idea.

Pinocchio learns that smoking will make you sick. Too bad Walt Disney didn’t pay attention to that lesson. But how does Pinocchio smoke? Again, he has no lungs! The danger of smoking to him isn’t lung cancer, it’s setting himself on fire, something he’s already done once.

“Ah, you smoke like me grandmother,” says Lampwick, a really funny line, though bewildering to Little Dougie. One of his grandmothers was a Mormon, and the other was a Christian Science Practitioner, so neither one of them ever smoked. (Perhaps the funniest line I ever heard in a gay porn movie was a bottom shouting at the top who was giving him too gentle a pounding: “My grandmother fucks harder than you do!”)

As you can see from this picture, lungs or no lungs, Pinocchio smokes a cigar the way most people smoke a medicinal joint. Don't Bogart that cigar, Pinoc.

Lampwick’s nickname for Pinocchio is “Slats.” That’s pretty funny. He seems to take it in stride as no big surprise that his sidekick is made of wood.

When Lampwick picks up Jiminy, he asks: “Hey, who’s the Beatle?” How amazing that Lampwick already knows of The Beatles, given that the two oldest ones, John & Ringo, were only born the year Pinocchio was released. How prescient. (Ringo Starr is 71? Oy vey!) Lampwick is also very blase about meeting a talking cricket who is dressed better than he is.

Once we get to the donkeys, we are presented with one of the most nightmarish movie sequences in all of 1930s & '40s Hollywood cinema. And bear in mind, while Pinocchio escapes (Apparently the moment he’s off the island, its power to transform him is escaped also.), no one else does! All the other children go to their Hellish fate with no sign of rescue or restoration ever.

Nor are any of the Pinocchio villains ever apprehended or punished. They all get away with it, scot free. Pleasure Island remains an ongoing unspeakable horror. Hey, Blue Fairy, how about intervening here?

Pinocchio has been drinking beer. How? He has no throat nor stomach. Does he absorb it? Pinocchio’s time as a were-jackass reminds we theatrically-minded of Nick Bottom’s stretch as a were-jackass (right down to Shakespeare’s punning name for him: “Bottom” becomes a literal Ass.) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a role quite successfully played onstage in 1997 by Little Dougie. But with Bottom, it’s pure, hilarious farce. For Pinocchio, it’s total terror.

The shot of Lampwick’s hands clawing in terror at Pinocchio, only to mutate into hooves as he does so is more horrifying than anything Universal Pictures was making in that era, and their The Wolfman came out the following year. Few took their kids to The Wolfman, but everybody took their kids to Pinocchio.

Does the shot of Pinocchio’s ass’s tale suddenly shooting out of his butt constitute butt gag # 13? No. It’s not a gag, but a shot that sends the kids watching into a frenzy of terror as their now-beloved little hero is suffering the same horrible fate they’ve just seen befall Lampwick.

Pinocchio reaches home before dawn of that same one night. He’s been gone less than 24 hours. Since Gepetto didn’t leave to look for him (And after his initial departure he must have returned. Because when he left the first time, he left alone, but now Cleo and Figaro are gone with him) until after dark (Let’s say 8 PM-ish), he can’t have been gone more than 8 or 9 hours.

Yet the house interior is covered in dust and cobwebs. An army of wildly industrious spiders must have been spinning their tiny brains out. The place looks like it’s been abandoned for years!

A great deal of plot mechanics are now lept over by having the Blue Fairy, who just a few hours earlier said she could never help Pinocchio again, send him a message via Dove-Mail that informs him that Gepetto went looking for him and got swallowed by a whale.

In less than ten hours, Gepetto has exhausted all the land around his home where Pinocchio could be, gotten passage on, or chartered, or already owned, a boat, collected his pets, went to sea, and got swallowed by a whale. What a busy night he’s had.

Pinocchio now, for the first time, begins showing the qualities the Blue Fairy told him he must achieve, by instantly charging off, free of fear, to find and rescue his dad. Good thing for Gepetto that he didn’t run into Honest John a third time. (Honest John got paid a large bag of gold for seducing Pinocchio, and is never seen again, also getting off scot free to enjoy his ill-gotten goods. No retribution for anyone in this movie, despite some of the most despicable characters in the whole Disney canon.)

It is dawn of the second day of Pinocchio’s life when he ties a rock to his tail and jumps into the sea, not committing suicide, but on his rescue mission. He’s about 33 hours old now.

The whole sequence of Pinocchio’s underwater search is of surpassing visual beauty, of a type not seen in a Disney movie again until the exquisite Finding Nemo, over 60 years later.

But note, because it's important later, that Pinocchio has no problem being underwater for an extended time. Someone without lungs, who does not breathe, can not drown. Of course , the tendency of wood to float can be a problem, but he has that rock tied to his tail. He and Jiminy (whose failure to drown is more problematic) are even able, somehow, to speak to each other underwater.

Butt joke thirteen: To stay underwater without floating upwards, Jiminy puts a pebble in his pants, which makes him look like he has, let’s say a large load in his diapers. I’m sure that, after the donkey sequence, many a kid in the audiences over the years did too. It’s a movie where you could say there was not a dry seat in the house.

The fish in the sea also understand human language, at least enough to flee in terror when the word “Monstro” is somehow spoken.

A clam emits bubbles. How? One bubble is so large, Jiminy is contained within it, but he pokes a hole in it, and it fills with water. This has no relationship to actual air-in-water physics. What cosmos is this?

Finally, at 1 hour, 13 minutes and 12 seconds into this movie, we meet the most dynamic and fully-realized character, my personal favorite, Monstro the Whale, although the character is a monstrous libel against whales, beautiful and gentle giants of high intelligence.

Monstro is gorgeously designed and magnificently animated. Inside Monstro there is a lot of open air. A lot! Also a lot of room.

And here we find Gepetto, Cleo (In her bowl. She is, after all, a fresh-water fish), and Figaro, who, having eaten seafood, has now been eaten by seafood, and Gepetto’s boat. There is no evidence of anyone else. So either he was sailing it himself (though it looks large enough to require at least two if not three to man it), which would mean he either owned it already, or was able to buy it and sail it off in that one evening, or the crew all died when Monstro attacked the boat. The question is never addressed.

Gepetto and his pets are starving to death. They act like they’ve been inside that whale for weeks. Gepetto actually says of his fishing inside the whale: “Not a bite for days.” Is he counting the days before Pinocchio was brought to life? Because the timeline proves that, even if we say it’s noon by now, he can not have been inside that whale more than 12 hours at the most. Is it a dire situation? Yes. Can they be starving to death in less than 12 hours? Well, can you starve to death in that time? At most, they might feel a tad peckish. This is the aspect of the movie that bothers me the second-most, Gepetto’s behavior like he’s been without food for a month, when he tromped off from a full table of dinner at most 18 hours earlier, probably less. The idea of eating Cleo has apparently not occurred to either Gepetto or Figaro.

Also, Monstro seems to be part Tardis, because he’s considerably larger on the inside than he is on the outside.

All the fish we’ve met up to now have been anthropomorphized to some degree, but now we get a school of tuna that are rendered as realistically as possible. Whenever Monstro moves, it’s wildly wonderful animation, and the tuna eating sequence with Gepetto fishing inside the whale is tremendous.

That, when panicked, Pinocchio manages to swim faster than the tuna is, let’s say remarkable. It seems silly to call something "implausible" in a movie about a live wooden boy.

Again, the idea of a whale sleeping seems unlikely to me, and if it did sleep, it would not do so on the ocean floor. A whale breathes air. It can drown.

The shots of Jiminy with Monstro’s eye and teeth are hilarious scale-joke shots. Great comic fantasy art.

Pinocchio getting swallowed by the whale is somewhat scary, as getting swallowed by a whale always is. Just ask Little Dougie. He’s been swallowed by a few whales himself. And we’ve both been swallowed by Monstro ourselves together, at Disneyland.

Side note, I only fairly recently realized that the Monstro that swallows you into Storybookland in Disneyland these days is not the original Monstro, built back in 1956, shortly after the park opened. When Fantasyland was redone in 1982, the old Monstro was torn down and a new, smaller one replaced it. See the comparison in the photo below. I’m embarrassed that it took me 20 years to notice the change.

Dougie is always attracted to folks who are hung like a whale. Here we see Little Dougie back when he was young and less repulsive, French-kissing the Original Monstro, in hopes that he's a sperm whale.

Coming out and telling your parents you’re gay is hard enough, but how do you explain to Dad that your hooliganish behavior has turned you into a were-ass? Fortunately, Gepetto is into unconditional love. He may be a loveably befuddled character, but he’s also a saintly father figure.

For someone who is at most 40 hours old, Pinocchio is more resourceful than Papa, and quickly devises a brilliant, simple, and effective plan to escape from the whale, involving fire, a phenomena he understood so poorly only 40 hours earlier that he set his finger on fire with little more reaction than “Pretty, pretty.”

And how in hell did Gepetto build a raft like that so quickly? Remember, he can not have been in that whale even 12 hours, no matter that he says it’s been days. (Unless Monstro is some kind of Tardis whose inside runs at a different time rate than the outside universe.)

However, if I were made of wood, I’d be a lot more careful about setting a big wood fire, and also, some of what he’s burning may be relatives of his. (In a sequence written and possibly animated, but cut from the film, Gepetto was to tell Pinocchio about his grandfather, a pine tree.)

They need a big, showy climax, and the whale chase certainly provides that. The escape from and chase by Monstro is a great sequence. Never has any of the numerous attempts to film Moby Dick ever achieved anything like this great action scene. Frankly, the best qualities of Moby Dick, another libel on the sweet nature of whales, are essentially literary anyway. It’s not actually good film material, despite the varied and interesting cast of characters.

I can find no evidence that sneeze specialist Billy Gilbert was called in to provide Monstro’s giant sneezes, but Walt was well aware of his talent in that area, having used him for the voice of Sneezy shortly before.

And now, at last we come to my biggest problem with this movie’s story: The Death of Pinocchio.

He drowns.

How can Pinocchio drown? How? He has no lungs. He does not breathe. He can not drown. In fact, I would think that to kill him, given his life is created and sustained solely by fairy magic (much like Little Dougie’s) I don’t see how he could be killed at all, short of burning him up. If you chopped him to bits, by logic, the bits would still be alive until such time as the Blue Fairy took back the life that she created. He wasn’t smashed against the rocks, as he might have been in that climactic moment. We can see he is undamaged.

Drowning is the only possible cause of death for him here, except he can not drown. Remember, earlier we saw him spend a lengthy and protracted period of time strolling about the ocean floor, even chatting with fish and with Jiminy, all without drowning. (Nor did Jiminy drown, which is more problematic, since he does breathe to live.)

So what killed Pinocchio? The most deadly movie hazard of all, Plot Necessity.

In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Snow White sort of dies, everybody has a good cry, and then she is resurrected by Love’s First Kiss, and rises again, explicitly Christlike, and all feel joy as she rides off to Happily-Ever-After-Land. It worked really, really well, and Walt Disney blatently decided to go with that end-formula a second time.

Pinocchio dies so that the Blue Fairy, once again helping him even though she said she couldn’t do that anymore, can resurrect the now-noble, self-sacrificing boy, even more Christlike. (He died for his father.)

You’d think that merely getting back to shore safely (Even Figaro and Cleo in her bowl wash up on shore OK, by a wild coincidence, right beside Gepetto.), with his bravery and resourcefulness, would be enough for the ending, with Pinocchio getting his promised reward of becoming a genuine human being, but no. Walt felt the need to go all Easter Sunday on us: Death and Resurrection, along with transformation into a little boy who is, let’s be frank, not as cute as the wooden version.

But joy after tears repeats the audience-pleasing catharsis, and audiences for 71 years have been elated by the joyous end of Pinocchio. And so, after less than 48 hours of life, Pinocchio is real. Music, dancing, and Jiminy gets a medal he tells us is “Solid Gold,” though it says right on it “18 KT, which is not solid gold.

And it tells us at last that when we wish upon a star, our dreams come true. It’s bullshit, but it’s sweet. The real moral is that it’s good to be brave, truthful and unselfish, however, if you get killed in the process, don’t expect any fairies to save your ass, though I know a few (more than a few) who will savor your ass.

Cheers darlings.

Emmies Schmemmies!

2011-09-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

Ah the Emmy Awards, three hours of the TV industry telling itself how important and talented and wise it is, before we switch back to Jersey Shore. Here’s some Rye musings I had as I sipped some rye.

When was the last time you saw a TV show that opened with an alien making gay jokes to an out Lesbian? I know: same old, same old.

Leonard Nimoy was a last minute replacement for Alec Baldwin who had already shot his bit when he learned that Fox had cut a Rupert Murdoch joke of his. Alec walked out, and I say good for him.

This show was, after all, produced by Mark Burnett, aka, Palin’s Pimp, that is, the man who produced Sarah Palin’s unreality show about raping Alaska’s wilderness and killing its wildlife, pretending it was a “Nature Show.” The only nature it revealed was that of the abominable Mrs. Palin, and the revolting Mark Burnett. Next up from Palin’s Pimp: A Dr. Phil type show with people getting help and compassion for emotional problems from Mr. Empathy and Sanity himself: Dick Cheney. It will be called Have a Heart. Anyway, good for Alec. I applaud him. Someone with principles at last.

If I had Superman’s eyes, or a TV the size of a Cinerama screen, I might have been able to see who I was supposed to be laughing at in those tiny apartment windows in the opening filmed bit. Palin’s Pimp, my TV doesn’t come equipped with a microscope. Please remember to make the images larger than an amoeba.

Sure enough, a gentle ribbing of Bristol Palin appeared in the opening filmed musical number, a joke so soft it drew no blood. Comically eviscerate her or don’t mention her at all. (However, some of the number was indeed funny. Don’t tell them I said that.)

In the number, Jane Lynch bragged that her haircut “cost more than your house.” One does not brag about being such a dope you’d pay a huge amount of money for a haircut, particularly in this economy. You can get that exact same cut for $12 from most any competent barber. Here, let me give you my barber’s card, a Mr. S. Todd of Fleet Street. And afterwards, stop by downstairs for a yummy meat pie. Their speciality? Long Pig. Tastes like chicken.

You know, much as I like Jane Lynch, her character on Glee is simply too obnoxious and mean-spirited to be enjoyable, or even bearable. Are they still doing that unfunny throwing colored liquid on people thing? They did it on last year’s Emmys, and it didn’t amuse me then. I am really beginning to wonder how anyone can even stand watching Glee.

When they switched from on-film to live, with live singing instead of lip-synching, you could really hear the difference; suddenly Jane was singing flat, very flat. The audience gave her a standing ovation for going deeply off-pitch. What a forgiving house. Still, for the most part, the lyrics were clever, with some cut to the satire.

Jane’s monologue, however, was a definite step up from the song. It was pretty damn funny. The Betty White line made me laugh, as did “finger pistols.” Why would Jane be “afraid” of Tom Cruise? She’s twice his size. She could pick him up and put him in her pocket or just step on him.

The intro singers (Which included Joel McHale) , promised that none of the Comedy sucked, and then included a clip from Mike & Molly. Liars!

Nice to be reminded why I never watch Jimmy Kimmel.

The first award was finally handed out at 16 minutes into the show. Great. No wonder it runs 3 hours. At least it went to lovely Julie Bowen, Jack’s ex-wife on Lost. She must have dressed hurriedly, because 90% of her top was missing. I’ve seen women in hardcore porn who was more decently attired.

Interesting. Apparently all the men on Modern Family are “Supporting Actors.” as the women on it are all “Supporting Actresses.” Modern Family is a great show, and unique, the only TV show in history with no leads at all! Or maybe Baby Lily is the only lead.

Ty Burrell had a very funny acceptance speech. Imagine writing such a good piece when your win is far from assured. Four nominees from the same show could easily split the vote, and give the award to the effeminate boy from Glee.

Once again, Ricky Gervais was the funniest person in the room, and he was in London. Hilarious bit. “What bunch of cowardly/Countrymen...” I can’t imagine that gag getting on the air even five years ago. I roared with laughter.

On the other hand, Jane’s comment about Ricky was not funny, and sounded rather like someone was miffed that he was funnier than she was.

Who wrote these idiot, unfunny voice-over jokes as the winners walked up? Less funny and less funny as it went along.

Having done his Arrogance Crazy Tour only to crash and burn, Charlie Sheen was presenting as part of his Apology & Humbleness Tour, which has had him on most every talk show on earth over the last two weeks, letting us know that he’s not the insane obnoxious dickwad he was six months ago. Good luck, Chuck.

Charlie’s message of good wishes to the show that had to fire him was classy on paper. If only he sounded like he meant it, rather than sounding desperate to look like he had suddenly grown up. He’s a professional actor of talent; he ought to be able to fake sincerity better than that. Anyway, it was tasteful of him to resist doing a tasteless gag or two (That’s my job). I’m sure he’ll make up for it tomorrow on his Comedy Central Roast. When does Mel Gibson come out to give good wishes to gays & Jews?

And consider this irony: Sheen so destroyed his own reputation that now, when he comes out and is totally professional, and even sane, the house is a little bit disappointed. The audience wants to see the flame-out, not a man who woke up to reality, and is trying to show he’s not still a flaming jerk.

It was lucky that Modern Family has no leads at all, as that prevented it from sweeping every comedy award. Sofia Vegara was dressed far more decently than her co-costar Julie Bowen had been.

Why did all the Lead Actresses in a Comedy come up on stage? Why? When Amy Poehler came up, I laughed, thinking it was a genus bit, running up to accept the award when she’s only been announced as a nominee, but no, that was not it. As soon as the big-boned woman from that horrible sit-com came up, it was destroyed. When they all came up, it just became meaningless.

The plus-sized woman from Mike & Molly won. Hello? I watched one episode. It sucked so badly, I’ve never turned it on again. I can not believe she is funnier than Amy Poehler or Tina Fey. (Who admittedly, is not exactly starved for Emmys. She’s running out of shelf space.) Was the academy just afraid that if she lost, she’d eat them? And then, in her acceptance speech, she tells a blatant lie: “I work with the best cast.” Darling, was your entire cast nominated, the way Modern Family’s was? Did your show get any other nominations?

The filmed bit parodying The Office was very funny, even if I had not a clue as to who the guy delivering crystal meth and the girl who didn’t understand the word “work” were.

Amazing Race wins Best Reality competition again? Honestly, it’s past time for it to go to So You Think You Can Dance.

I had to run the writers for my beloved The Daily Show a second time, this time in slo-mo, to read all the hilarious faux-Newsweek captions they’d each been given. Well worth it. Hilarious. That’s why they’re the winners yet again; they are the best.

Sorry, I had to fast-forward through Michael Bolton. Like most sane people, I can’t stand him. And is his face rotting? He looks like he’s decomposing without dying first. He’s starting to look the way he sounds. And then someone named Lea Michelle said that Michael Bolton “still looks good.” How does she read the teleprompter if she’s stone blind? And the use of the word “still” implied that at some time in the dim, remote past he was good looking. When was that? Pre-birth?

Don Roy King, director of Saturday Night Live, has a 14 year old daughter? He looks like he should have a 14 year-old grand-daughter.

When The Daily Show stops being the best show in its category, it may stop winning. Still, what a great line-up of nominees there. Six great shows. No mystery as to why Jay Leno’s disgraceful mess that once was The Tonight Show was not nominated. These are shows that do not dumb down the way Leno relentlessly does. They all play at the top of their intelligence, and invite the audience to rise to their level. Jay wants to make sure every overly-stupid, low-IQ Teabagger in America tunes in. He’s number one in ratings but, with George Lopez now gone, he’s in last place in quality. Well Pride can’t buy you more cars than any one man can drive in a lifetime, so whore it out, Jay, whore it out.

(30 years ago I knew and highly respected Jay Leno, as the comic’s comic. Boy, those days are now deader than Osama Bin Laden. It makes me sad.)

The first acceptance speech that was so conventional, read off a card, that it bored me all to heck came halfway through the show, from the guy who won for writing Friday Night Lights, which I found ironic. If that’s how well that show is written, I’m glad I never watched it.

Was Margo Martindale too drunk to get up those steps?

Frankly, with Lost over, it’s hard to get interested in the Drama acting categories.

Please. Martin Scorsese nominated a with a bunch of TV directors? Who do you think would win? Zero suspense there. For a riveting director, he sure gave a dull speech. Nothing more boring than reading off a list of names. It’s like reading aloud The Begats.

Nice to know that Peter Dinklage’s lovely wife is not a size queen.

Whoa. Julianna Margulies husband is hot! What show is he on? And how unusual of Julianna to wear a top made of giant Swiss cheese.

Kyle Chandler, if you can’t think of what to say, stop talking and get off.

I quickly hit Fast-Forward when LL Cool J ran out and began yelling at me. I have these old fashioned ideas that shouting at someone is not “singing.”

How in Hell did that hatchet job on the Kennedys get nominated for anything? Is Best Hatchet Job a category, or Best Libel?

Jane Lynch introduced the cast of Entourage as the reason she’s a Lesbian. Okay, but there were at least three of them I would shag in a heartbeat.

By this point in the evening, there had been so many references to Jane’s Lesbianism that any Teabaggers who had tuned in, rooting for the Kennedy hatchet job to win, had already turned it off and begun writing angry letters in crayon, complaining about the “deviants” on TV. “Now I gots to ‘splain to my yung ‘uns ‘bout preverts. Hows I s’posed a do that? That bootifool dyke makes me sick.”

Seeing Doctor Who’s Stephen Moffett sitting there applauding disappointedly when Downton Abbey won in his category made me sad, not that the winner didn’t deserve it. But that was a really tough category.

Maggie Smith won. Of course she did. She is a goddess, and she was hysterical in Downton Abbey. (Of course I saw it. Didn’t you?)

Barry Pepper won an Emmy for assassinating the character of our assassinated hero Bobby Kennedy in that tabloid, sleazoid garbage The Kennedys??? Now I am OUTRAGED! Everyone involved in that libelous garbage should be run out of the industry, not rewarded. Pepper, shame on you, shame! I will never forget how Bobby made my heart soar when I saw him speak live, from 15 feet away, three days before he was murdered, and how devastated I was those three days later. So now he’s been murdered again, and they rewarded the accomplice. Shame! Shame! Shame! Everyone who voted for Pepper, go fuck yourselves with a hot poker, you evil bastards. You made the Teabaggers happy. And Pepper, you better not ever cross my path. Goes for you too, Kinnear. Bastards!

Oh and by the way, Bobby was a billion times better looking than Pepper also. Pepper, I have a suggestion as to exactly where you should lodge your ill-gotten Emmy. The coward didn’t even show up. Good.

What a let-down that everyone involved in The Kennedys were missing from the Dead People Montage.

A film editor for The Beverly Hillbillies was included in the Dead People Montage. Okay, Fine. But you know, two years ago, my dear old friend Ed Cotter died. He won an Emmy many years ago for editing Happy Days, yet he didn’t make the Dead People Montage that year. How come this editor made it and Ed did not? What is the criteria? Again, Ed was an Emmy winner.

Since it would be crass to go right on and hand out another award on the heels of the Dead people montage, instead they broke, and spent three minutes trying to sell us stuff, because that isn’t crass at all.

Okay, Guy Pearce was funny. He could insert himself into my inner circle (More of an oval, actually) any time he likes!

Kate Winslet won Joan Crawford’s Emmy! And unlike Joan, Kate showed up, though she was so flustered, she forgot to wear a bra. Mildred Pierce is a fine James M. Cain novel, but I still prefer Double Indemnity.

Jane, “Hakuna Matada” does not mean “Circle of Life.” As everyone who made The Lion King #1 at the box office this weekend for the first time in 17 years knows, it means “No worries.”

Oh look, there’s my darling Bobby Morse, standing up there with the rest of the cast of Mad Men, not getting to speak. Love you, Bobby! From How to Succeed to Mad Men, Bobby just can not get out of advertising in the 1960s.

Gee, I wonder which show will win Best Comedy series. The suspense is unbearable.

I am so over Gwyneth Paltrow. She has become such a bore.

Hey, who won Best Reality Show Host? I was rooting for Kat Deeley. No one ever announced the winners of last week’s Not-Good-Enough-for-Airtime Emmies.

I drifted off, Which show won Best Comedy? I have no idea. It’s a wide open field.

And I’m ready to drift off again too, so cheers darlings.

Surviving the Horror of BB13.

2011-09-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

Oh, the horror, the horror.

Last Wednesday, CBS decided we needed a 90 minute finale of Big Brother 13. They were wrong. 90 seconds would have been too long for that horror. We had the worst season ever, even worse than the infamous winter season back during the writer's strike, bottomed off by the worst winner ever. Voldebitch won. I may vomit. Strike that. I DID vomit!

And the worst thing is, even I have to admit that Boobiac deserved the win. She remained in the house despite effort after effort to get the bitch out (I blame Queen Kalia, who learned just what a commoner she is, in fact, about as common as you can get), and she won a hell of a lot of competitions. She even used her own hypocrisy to win, by endlessly saying how she hated "Floaters" while getting rid of players and keeping floaters around so that she would win any final vote. Edsel has the brain of a Model T, and Knobby, the Ultimate Floater, is just a useless waste of flesh.

Knobby had a particularly terrible last show, since he finally decided now to start PLAYIN' this game, not realizing in his incredibly dim excuse for a brain, that the Final Episode was leaving it way too late. "If not now, when? If not me, who?" he asked us. Answers: When? Never. Who? Anyone but you. His wild ego trip when he was finally evicted, his grandstanding hollering as though he was greeting his fan clubs on a triumph was especially revolting. I picture Tori Spelling somewhere, voting for Edsel over him. Meanwhile, his performances in the final challenges were his most pathetic yet. He actually bragged about what he will do when he returns as an "All-Star". Hey dipshit; you are no All-Star; you are an All-Pathetic. All-Stars are not people so stupid that, in an underwater competition, they throw away their goggles, only to find that they can't see underwater without them, and have to get out and go get them again. Too stupid even to be funny.

Queen Kalia's exit show was also an embarrassment, as the stupid woman, who had failed due to her own indecisiveness, especially in her idiot wimp-out the week she allowed Lawon to evict himself (Lawon, you win the title of The Stupidest BB Player of All-Time) instead of sticking to her guns. Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Watching her freak out and not just weep, but wail and cry and shriek in the toilet was sickening and disturbing, almost as disturbing as the fact that there is a camera recording the toilet at all. I wonder who has the unenviable job of monitoring that footage every day.

Edsel, about riding the giant mixing blades: "I'm feeling nauseous, and I definitely do not want to give up on this competition, although I don't want to be swimming in my own throw-up either, so it's like a Catch-22." No it isn't. Edsel, don't pretend you've read - a book. I have read Catch-22. In fact, it's one of my favorite books ever. (Right now I'm reading Erica Heller's Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad, The Apthorp was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22 - a book title that also doesn't seem to understand what a Catch-22 is, but then, as Erica admits in her book, She's never read Catch-22 any more than Edsel has. Her book is really Yossarian Dearest, an adult child of a celebrity raking in cash taking literary revenge trashing her parent in print. Refusing ever to read her father's best-known book is just more spite from a spiteful middle-aged woman. I met Joe Heller, and he was extremely nice to me, but then, I never tried to get a pony or an allowance raise out of him.) A Catch-22 is a situation that has been rigged with circular logic so that you can never win, not a dilemma with two unpleasant alternatives. In a Catch-22 there are no alternatives.

Edsel also sealed her own fate when she opened Pandora's Box out of greed, and so saved Voldebitch. Moron! Notice how when Edsel opened Pandora's Box, it saved the last vets, whereas when Voldebitch opened it, it benefited all the remaining houseguests, therefore also benefiting Voldebitch, though it was punishment for Jesse. (Alison Grodner, STOP bringing back Jesse! No one on earth except Jesse is ever glad to see that stupid asshole.)

Dani's statement that "[Voldebitch] is the biggest floater in the house," just isn't true. Biggest bitch in the house, and outside it too, yes, but a floater she was not. Come on. She won more competitions than anyone else. It was Voldebitch's social game that sucked. She had an Anti-Social Game.

Jordumb on Edsel: "Portia has done nothing in this game. She just walked around in a bikini, cooked." Actually Jordumb, except for cooking, you just described yourself. Edsel won several challenges and made several big movies, and several big, big goofs. Jordumb looked at the pretty colors. Jordumb, advocating Knobby the House Elf over Edsel for the win: "Adam walked in the house from Day One was playing the game." No he wasn't. He tried playing it the last week, but was no good at it once he finally tried.

In the end, Leatherface emerged as the season's true villain: a lying hypocrite who, in the end, cast the vote that gave the money to Voldebitch.

What was with The Chenbot only letting two non-jury evictees speak and then turning it back over to the jury to yap? Not a word did Dominc or Cassi get to say, and frankly, I was more interested in their POV than Evel Dick's. They didn't let Lawon speak either, but that was probably wise, though it robbed him of his last chance to announce that he was ready to start PLAYIN' this game. Keeping Keith silent was very wise.

But I'm too revolted by the whole season, and the disgusting outcome to discuss it any more. I watched it before Survivor (Thank you , DVR) So at least I had Survivor to wash the bitter taste of BB13 out of my mouth.

At least on Survivor I had a new cast, where, for now, I only hate one of them going in, Coach Wade, whom I called Voldepussy the last time I had to flog her. I have issues here too though. They've once again brought back two veterans, Voldepussy and the Wizard of Ozzy. (Ozzy has done porn. I've seen stills that revealed his hidden assets. I like that.) Plus they've kept that stupid Redemption Island crap that fouled up last season.

Having no newbies to hate lasted only until the intro of Russell's nephew. Oh please! Contestant nepotism? This little moron is highly religious, a sure sign of an absent intellect, and actually thinks he can hide his last name despite it being tattooed on him TWICE. He thinks he'll be able to keep his shirt hiding them all season, on a show where the men all go shirtless. Even that repulsive little geek Cochran had to take his shirt off, something that should be illegal for him to do. And could he get a tarp to cover his gigantic nose? 50% of that geek's body weight is nose, and the rest are pimples.

Hantz Junior said: "I came out here to change the course of the Hantz Family's name." The "course"? He's mixed his metaphors to where the sentence has no meaning, but then, this kid is married and a father at 19, and a devout churchgoer. He clearly has no brain.And to make matters worse, his name is Brendon. We have to vote Brendon out AGAIN???

It was certainly hilarious to see how horrified the Blue Tribe was to get stuck with Voldepussy on their tribe. Can't blame them. Suspicious as I am of Blue Tribe rancher Rick (He's from Utah, which means there's a large chance he's a Mormon. Also, his full name is Rick Nelson! Everyone knows Rick Nelson is dead. Shouldn't he be on the other tribe? Because if he's Rick Nelson, that makes Ozzy his dad!), I had to respect his statement re: Voldepussy: "There ain't no dragons, and, ah Hell, he's in his 40s." So true, although on her CBS online bio, it says that Voldepussy is 39, but given that most everything else this fabulist says is a lie, I see no reason to take her being "39" at face value. As Oscar Wilde wrote: "London society is full of women of the very highest position who, of their own free will, have remained 35 for years." As Voldepussy pretends she's a man, she's upped it 4 years, to Jack Benny's perpetual 39.

I loved Ozzy giving a quick grope to one of Jeff's tits before he ran off. Can't blame him. And that's not all he groped, as the above illustration shows. (Remember that you can click on the pictures to see them larger and in more detail.)

Given that Hantz Jr and Voldepussy are on the Blue tribe, I am already rooting for the red tribe, though the presence of Hot Albert mitigates the tribe somewhat.

Let's look at some players.

One of my favorite people on earth is playing on the Blue Tribe, my friend Dame Edna Everage. She is very much a survivor. Go Edna, g... What Dougie? The Edna on the show is some other Edna. The real Dame Edna is in Rome at the moment? Drat! Oh. Never mind. What is this Edna wanna-be? She's an anesthesiologist. Great. Her job is putting people to sleep. She'll be riveting on the show.

I have a favorite contestant already: Albert. Remember Fat Albert? Well this is Hot Albert! Good Groucho, he is GORGEOUS!!! He is an Adonis. He gives his profession on his CBS online profile as "Baseball/Dating Coach". What the Hell is that? Here's a coaching tip; don't date baseballs; date humans, especially ones that look like Hot Albert. He gives his hero as Crash Davis, the character Kevin Costner played in Bull Durham. His hero is a fictional character. Like anyone who actually exits, Al? Mind you, many of my best friends are complete fictions, but still, a hero should be a real person. But so what? I loves me some Hot Albert. He didn't get much airtime this week, but soon.

This Keith seems a vast improvement over BB13's idiot horndog Keith. Keith is Little Dougie's middle name, but Dougie on the best-looking day of his life was no Keith. Too soon to see if he's more than just beautiful, but he's seemed level-headed and sane so far.

Repulsive little Cochran is a Superfan. He has "a Buff collection." Oh great, another Knobby, albeit, Knobby is no law student. Cochran has book smarts, but he's also an obsessive Survivor fan. Obsessive fans are always creepy and pathetic, unless they're superfans of me, or WC Fields or the Marx Brothers. He said of being on the show: "This is an out-of-body experience for me." Good idea. Getting out of that eyesore body is an excellent idea! I predict he will never make my Studly Hunk of the Month, nor ever lose his virginity. (To do so would mean cheating on his own hand.)

I immediately liked Papa Bear. Hello, a career as an out-gay NYPD detective? Wow. That took major balls. This is a man with courage. He instantly won my respect, and I'm rooting for him. Of course, once the tribes merge, he'll probably be rooting for Albert. I'd offer to shag him, but he didn't seem interested. I'd suggest Little Dougie for him, but he'd probably find Little Dougie too old and decrepit.

When he brought up being a bear, some of his tribemates thought he was referring to Wall Street bears. Jeeze guys, where have you been hiding out that you don't know that plump hairy gay men are called bears? Admittedly, he's a Polar Bear, but after a few weeks on this show, when his fat is gone, he'll be a silver fox.

Right off, in the first challenge, we had Voldepussy doing his yoga crap to center himself to lose the challenge, which was a worked-out version of a classic old logic puzzle. Since logic is beyond this moron, this challenge was over before it began. Ozzy had no chance to lose it. I thought opening with a one-on-one challenge was a DREADFUL idea, but the tribes, to the production team's surprise, turned it into a group challenge by loudly coaching their champions. As it turns out, logic puzzles are too much for the whole Blue Tribe.

Neither Voldepussy nor Ozzy the Great and Hunky got the puzzle rules in their heads right. We saw both of them get corrected by Probst. Actually, when it was shot, they fouled it up so badly, they actually had to stop it completely and drum the damn rules into their heads, and then restart the puzzle portion of the challenge. King Cheops built pyramids faster.

Okay, Semhar wins the "Most-Pretentious" Award for Episode One for being a "Spoken Word Artiste." Oh puh-leaze. You know why they call them "Poetry Slams"? They're named after the way people slam the door behind them as they flee from them. Nice gobbledygook she spouted, but it's not making me throw out my Edgar Allen Poe books. And what the Hell kind of name is "Semhar" anyway? I'm so glad we won't be seeing much more of her, unless they somehow manage to send someone even lamer to Redemption Area next week, and she somehow survives their duel. I miss the old days of Survivor, when some really idiotic old lady would get evicted first episode, and when you saw her again on the reunion show, you couldn't even remember her name.

Cochran was wise to not want to get undressed. Please remain dressed, Cock. He also runs VERY effeminately.

Voldepussy told his tribe he was not a threat. They already knew this. What he is is the tribe joke.

What's with the Russian commie on the Blue Tribe? Shouldn't she be on the Red Tribe?

Edna likes Voldepussy. Edna, you are not worthy of your divine namesake.

Christine the Evil Car thought she was being sly looking for the idol in the first 10 seconds. Way to paint a target on yourself, lady.

Jim is a Medical Marijuana Dispenser owner? Hello Jim! You're my new second-favorite, after Albert. I don't care that you're awfully doughy (You won't be long anyway), I'll shag you. Just bring along my medicine. I need it right now to fight off the nausea of seeing Vodlebitch win BB13. I needs me some over-medicating! Little Dougie chimed in "Me too!"

So he told them he's a science teacher. Why? Nobody votes out the marijuana dispenser! Tell them the truth and you'll be the most-popular guy in camp!

Dawn wanted the shelter built. Ozzy The Great & Terrible wanted to loaf in the sun. Dawn, you're right, but crush your control-freak tendencies or you'll be going bye-bye next. She called him "a little Bob Marley" to her. Dawn, Jim is the Bob Marley with the ganja! Sober people are such a drag to be around. She said she didn't think Bob Marley was "a planner." You ever worked a music tour, or written a song or organized enough rehearsals to make professional music? It takes a planner. Marley is just happy while he does so. Me not liking Dawn yet. In fact, I've never liked Dawn, which is why that's usually when I go to bed.

Brendon's ashamed of his "Loco" tattoo. He should be, but he is loco. He's also got some very bad church-based sexual repressions (though not enough to have kept him from becoming a dad by 19), and called one girl on the tribe a "Delilah." Oh puh-leaze! Later he complained of Mikayla "flaunting herself" by dressing exactly the way all girls on Survivor have always dressed, even as the cameras caught him literally lurking hidden in the bushes, peeping at Mikayla's titties. (Which found it's way onto The Soup this week.) I foresee a "her slutty clothes forced me to rape her; she was begging for it" defense coming at his trial someday. He may well turn out to be worse than his uncle, while not anywhere near as smart. Repressed pervs are dangerous. Stupidly over-religious (which is to be religious at all) repressed pervs are the worst of all. This boy is a stalker-in-training. He'll be serial-murdering "sluts & whores" one day, mark my words. I just hope he waits until he's off TV. He's making my skin crawl, and I look terrible when my skin has crawled off.

"I wish we had an astrologer here," said Russian-spouting Sophie, hoping to be voted Most Stupid. She's a medical student. Yes, just what I like in a doctor, someone who believes in the idiocy that is Astrology. "Your finger is broken."

"What should I do about it?"

"Let me consult your chart?"

"My medical chart?"

"No, silly. What good would that be? I meant your astrological chart. You're a Gemini. Hmm. Nope. No point in treating you. Your chart says 'bad things are unavoidable at this time.' I'll have to amputate."

On her CBS online bio she lists one of her Pet Peeves as "People who walk slowly in cold weather." Hello? Why do give a crap how fast strangers walk in any kind of weather? You know my Pet Peeve? Idiots who like Astrology.

The morons on the Blue Tribe seemed to be thawing to Voldepussy. No, no. Stay focused on voting that gasbag out. I am not having to put up with The Dim Lord for another season.

Dawn has missed her calling. She should be a slapstick comic. The woman falls over more than Snooki. "This has nothing to do with the game. This is two people talking," said Ozzy to Dawn, who believed him, thus cementing her position as tribe buffoon. Dawn, you idiot, it's ALWAYS the game. You're letting Ozzy know that you're a lame-o they should get rid of. Anyway, if she's falling apart on Day Two, her tribe won't want her on Day 10, when she's a gibbering wreck. Butch up, bitch!

Cochran and a machete is a recipe for lost fingers.

The onscreen caption gives Brandon's occupation as "Russell Hantz's Nephew." Do you have to go to school for that? Or did CBS just not want to put up "Professional Floozy Stalker"? Once we saw him with his shirt pulled up, exposing his - ah - physique, I became very glad that his tattoos force him to remain shirted, and not flaunting himself like a Delilah. But I'll give him this, he seems to be able to fish, though it's because fish smell like floozies, and so he had to stab them and stab them and stab them and stab them and stab them and...

"How big?" Mikayla shouted at him when he caught a fish. Oh my Dog, she is a Delilah, and a size queen to boot! Where's my butcher knife? Floozies and temptresses must die! (Brandon's answering gesture back told her he has a tiny little peepee. I am so unsurprised.)

Madame Sophie the Astrology-Lover said she suspects Brandon is hiding something. Duh. You are a real Einstein. The guy who won't take his shirt off is hiding something. You betcha. He's hiding the bodies of 14 Delilahs he's buried in his basement.

The Immunity Challenge was Classic Survivor: an obstacle course topped off with Cocoanut Basketball. Plus it inspired Albert to play shirtless, and Semhar to self-destruct, a winner all around. Semhar stupidly insisted on being one of the hoop shooters, which it turned out she sucked at. If you volunteer for a particular task in a challenge, you damn well better be able to do it, or you'll be having one-woman poetry slams for the crabs over on Redemption Area.

Much as I wanted Voldepussy voted out first, the Blue Tribe owned this challenge. Did you see Albert haul Brandon up the wall by himself? That man is awesome!

Jeff Probst: "Rick's got a hand on it!" Jeff! How uncalled-for. So he plays a little pocket pool to motivate himself, does that mean you should announce it to the world?

You could see Brandon studying the way Rick chopped through the ropes like a row of Delilahs. That machete may make Mikayla 8 inches shorter before this series is through.

Jeff: "Mikayla is a scoring machine!" So he thinks she's a Delilah too?

Mikayla's CBS online profile gives her occupation as "Lingerie Football Player." What the Hell is a Lingerie Football Player? Sounds like it involves flaunting herself. It gives her Personal Claim to Fame as "I was on the cover of Playboy February 2011 and met the hard working Hugh Hefner." Good gracious, she IS a Delilah, or at least a full-fledged floozy! Doing the Playboy cover is the very definition of flaunting yourself. And she "met" the "hard working" Hugh Hefner. Is "met" what they're calling it now? And did she meet the Hugh Hefner we see on TV, the doddering dirty old man in the Popeye-The-Sailor hat also, or just this "hard-working" one. I have trouble believing that Hugh, at age 194, gets all that "hard" anymore. As George Burns once said about sex after age 80: "It's like shooting pool with a rope." Creepy as Brandon is, he may be right about Mikayla the Delilah. She is so going to end up in a shallow grave down by Redemption Area.

Jeff: "Keith drills one for Savaii." Ooh great. Which one? Who are the Delilahs on the Red Tribe? Keith, drill me next! (Dougie, don't look so scared. When do I ever call you by your middle name?)

Semhar "didn't realize the cocoanuts would be so heavy." How lame is that? The average weight of a cocoanut is 1.5 pounds. Oh my aching arms! A pound and a half? Who do they think she is, Hercules? Albert's testicles weigh more than that. Cochran's nose weighs twice that! (Which may account for his posture. Stand up straight, boy!)

At the Blue Camp, the hunt for the clue was on. No one found it though. Stacey, the scary mortician (Brendon may have some work for her when he goes Delilah-Hunting.) actually looked right at the clue, and removed a stick from the same tree bore it's in without noticing it. Very observant. With razor-sharp skills like hers she will go far. In fact, all the way back to America. Talk about being literally clueless!

Semhar tried to make Jim sound bad for admitting he hated losing, in order to draw fire away from herself. More lameness. "No one can feel worse than I did right now," she said, apparently having never seen anyone in end-stage cancer. Way to charm votes away.

Ozzy did not want to vote out Semhar. In fact, he wants to keep all the hot girls. Of course he does. He's voting with his dick, which can be a dangerous thing to do if it gets caught in the voting machine. What he really wants to do of course, is cement a loyal harem of hot, dim girls to be his cadre of supporters. He quickly found that the tribe would prefer losing the full-of-herself Spoken Word Artiste who was speaking too many words: words like: Let me shoot cocoanuts, I'm good at it, or Jim, you're a poopyhead. A true Spoken word Artiste knows when to shut up. Semhar does not. Anyway, Jim was not so stoned that he didn't sniff out what Ozzy was really up to. Jim is smart, and if a fourth of Purple Haze were to arrive at Morehead Heights soon, I might even say more nice things about him later on. Yes that's right. I'm bribe-able.

Jim went right to Cochran to tip him off that Ozzy was trying to divert votes from Semhar-the-big-boobed to him. (Ozzy loves Delilahs, frequently! He's done straight porn, remember.)

Cochran: "Survivor is not meant to be a comedy routine." I beg to differ. That's my gig, Pasty Boy. Fortunately for him, the others want a strong tribe without full-of-themselves "Spoken Word Artistes" whose mouths write checks their bodies can't cash, and they don't want Ozzy assembling a harem to carry him to victory. They all saw last season and Boston Rob. They learned. They want her cocoanuts out of there before she drives them all cocoanuts. (To me, The Cocoanuts is primarily The Marx Brothers' first movie.)

Even Ozzy quickly noticed at Council that tribe feeling was against Semhar. He was smart enough to cut her loose.

Semhar to Cochran: "Your name has come up. I will just say that." Yes, his name came up, when Semhar brought it up. Freely translated, she was saying: Vote me out with my bodacious boobs and huge ego? No. Vote out Pasty Boy. His tits don't compare to mine. The argument did not sway Papa Bear.

Cochran turned attention to Semhar's laziness. She bought up her giving them "toothbrushes." Crest has been show to be an effective voting-out-preventing dentifrice, when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular, professional care. Cochran pointed out that it had consisted of giving folks sticks. The back-and-forth was hilarious, and since Cochran is approximately 1000 times smarter than Semhar, it wasn't going well for the boobed one. He said she stands by the pot all day. I half-expected Jim to say: "No, that's my job!"

Cochran assured everyone they would not have to rub him. That's a relief.

But Semhar's was the only vote for Cochran. Even Ozzy, seeing how the tribe was swaying, voted to oust her. She went away whining about how her tribe all lied to her. "It shows me how fake they all are." I don't know about them being fake, but she sure is lame.

Wanna see the real reason Semhar was voted out first?

Cheers darlings.

The 7 Dwarfs of Dr. Lao.

2011-09-12T15:37:00.000-07:00

I happened to rewatch Snow White & the 7 Dwarfs last night, since the only other choices were 9-11 remembrances, and frankly, I remember it vividly enough as it is without further reminder. It's not like it's a pleasant memory one enjoys lingering over.

But of course, Snow White is a pleasant memory one enjoys lingering over, and as I lingered over it, some random thoughts occurred to me.

Oh please. Grumpy is sooooo gay.

When Snow White first identifies Grumpy, his bed is visible in the background, as it is in Doc's close-ups in that scene also, a sheet has been left hanging over the "G" in Grumpy's name on the foot of the bed, so his name is seen as "Rumpy". Like I said, Gay.

The first time Little Dougie saw it, when he was 5 in 1955, he knew Grumpy was his dwarf, and he's grown up to be the tall, not bald, small-nosed version of him, only grumpier.

I want some of what Dopey is smoking.

Why don't woodland creatures ever clean my home! Frankly, neither Snatches, my kitty, nor Baskerville, my mastiff, ever clean up anything except for Baskerville lapping up my vodka spills. My staff spend most of her time cleaning up after the beasties.

Why aren't the dwarfs wealthy, given they own "a mine where a million diamonds shine"? How do they market their product?

Ew. Didn't these creep out kids at Disneyland in the 1950s?

If Snow White really were dead, as the dwarfs believed when putting her in her glass coffin, how good an idea would that see-through bower be a couple years later? Ew! Instead of "Snow White," she'd soon have turned into "Demon-Vomit Green".

Who wants to marry a man given to making out with random female cadavers he encounters? Necrophiliacs are not good husband material. (And what's with how charmed everyone was with a Disney movie that has seven gay men living together, sleeping in pushed-together beds, and ends with animals and circus freaks killing an old lady, followed by necrophilia? Mind you, the older I get, the more I depend upon the kindness of necrophiliacs.)

The Queen is dead, and Snow White has gone off to help rule the Prince's realm. Who is the new head of the government where Snow White came from?

Why does the Queen have no staff whatever besides a huntsman and a mirror? Really. There is NO ONE ELSE in that castle! No wonder Snowy has to do the housework.

I want that peacock-themed throne! This is what all the toilets at NBC looked like back in the 1960s. (This still is from Disney's sequel: 7 Brides for 7 Dwarfs, in which I starred as the Queen. For a full description of this memorable forgotten Disney animated classic, see my previous flog posting: Feeling Grumpy.)

Why is Dopey's head three times the size of Snow White's? Hydrocephalic? (It would explain so much.) As a small kid, I thought she sang "Some Day My Prints Will Come" and that she was singing about waiting to get photos back from the drugstore.

If the dwarfs can't even remember the last time they washed, why do they have several bars of soap waiting at the trough?

Why are queens always scarier than witches? Sometimes Little Dougie scares the crap out of me. Cheers darlings.

Shedding Shelly.

2011-09-03T19:17:00.000-07:00

"You're good. You're first class, Geoff. You'd sell John out to me, or me to John, or.. . you can tell me... have you found some way of selling everyone to everybody?"

"Not yet, Mummy, but I'm working on it."
- Eleanor of Aquitaine & her son, Prince Geoffrey in The Lion in Winter, by John Goldman.

We were never going to be rid of Voldebitch this week, as her win of the POV seems all but fated, so let us instead, look at what did happen, the longed-for, almost Shakespearean fall of Leatherface the Deceitful, into the soured Guacamole of the Outside world. Avocado get on with it.

It began before The Beginning, in the fight I mentioned last week as hoping to be included this week. Well it was, and what an explosion it was, particularly since I don't really get what it's actually about. As near as I could tell, Homophobic Asshole was enraged to learn that Leatherface treated him exactly the same way she treats everybody else. Turned out she was not an extension of his own body, the way Jordumb is, but a separate human being playing to win the game for herself. As far as I could make out, this was news to H.A.

Was Leatherface Shelleying Homophobic Asshole? Of course, exactly the same way she had Shellyed each and every single person in the house. She was a snake from Day One. It never occurred to H.A. that she was a two-way street. It is because Jordumb is a cul-de-sac?

But it began with Voldebitch, The Source of All Evil on Earth. She went off to confront Homophobic Asshole over throwing the "Cornhole" competition which ultimately led to Bukie's ouster, since that would be somebody coming between her and her sac-free man, and nobody does that except online, or when working special parties in Vegas for visiting German businessmen or French diplomats. Of course, what she was really doing was tattling on Leatherface, directing House Hatred away from herself and onto Naugahydepuss.

Voldebitch: "Shelly told me that you threw the cornhole competition."

Homophobic Asshole (while brushing his teeth): "Where'd you hear that from?"

Say Good night, Gracie.

Voldebitch: "It's Brendan. He's my fiance." Thanks for the reminder. It had slipped my mind.

Homophobic Asshole: "Okay, so what are you talking to me for?"

Voldebitch: "I'm not."

I played that exchange back over and over, each time more amazed by Voldebitch, in a one-on-one conversation with H.A., when there was no one else present, actually denying to him that she was talking to him. She had to talk to him to say she was not talking to him. It's flat-out denial of Reality. She's certifiably insane. And she's whining.

Kalia noticed that Leatherface was Shellying them weeks ago, but overlooked it, as someone who at least acts like her ally is better than no ally at all. I've been waiting and waiting for someone to notice that they'd been Shellyed by Leatherface and turn on "Mom" and finally, Homophobic Asshole did. Feeling secure as HOH, he lit into her, little knowing that the house power was two hours away from shifting 180 degrees, and he was three hours away from Exit Interviews.

Leatherface wanted to know who had Shellyed her about her Shellying other people, and fastened on Knobby. Knobby is a House Elf, a slave race. Knobby exists only to serve the Houseguests. Knobby would never try to kill Leatherface. Knobby only meant to maim or seriously injure. In any event, it wasn't Knobby. That would be making a move, and Knobby doesn't make moves. Knobby eats bacon. A few months ago, Knobby weighed over 300 pounds. Knobby needs to protect what's left of Knobby's heart. This means no exertion or game play. Only bacon.

And anyway, it was Voldebitch who showed Leatherface what being Shellyed felt like.

Homophobic Asshole went to Knobby next. Knobby loves H.A. Knobby thinks about H.A.'s biceps and abs when Knobby is alone at night, touching Knobby's knob inappropriately. (Not that I can think of an appropriate way to touch any part of Knobby at all.) Knobby makes dolls of Jordumb and sticks pins in them. Knobby immediately Shellys on Leatherface to Homophobic Asshole. Leatherface, seeing them go into a room together, and suspecting Knobby of Shelleying her out, barged right in and got in their faces.

Leatherface: "I have done nothing but be a horse." Of course, of course. And this one will talk till her voice is horse. That is, of course, unless this horse, is the amazing Leatherface! Go right to the source, and ask this horse. She'll give you the answer that you endorse. But, all told, that was a mean thing to say about horses.

Incidentally, Bukie's done nothing but be hung like a horse. (I saw his online photo. Impressive.)

Leatherface tried to calm things down by pouring a lot of verbal kerosene around, at one point trying to throw people under buses as they were standing beside her and she was telling the tossee that she was throwing the other one under the bus, who was also standing beside her. She was trying to Shelly everyone at once when they were all together. She was flailing. It was hilarious.

She barged into a room where H.A., Knobby, and Jordumb had just asked Queen Kalia to take a hike so they could plot, and turned that conference into an inferno also.

Her big reveal in that room was "Everyone's talking about you guys getting to the end and no one having a chance." This is, or should be, self-evident.

Jordumb: "I am shocked."

Homophobic Asshole is also dumbfounded to learn that there are people in the house playing to win it for themselves, and not on Team Jorff. He is not merely angry; he is morally outraged that someone would dare to play selfishly to win it themselves, instead of doing The Right Thing, and play for him to win.

As the fight loudly raged on, Edsel and Voldebitch listened at a safe distance, Voldebitch delighted with all the drama she'd stirred up without getting any splashback from it herself.

Homophobic Asshole: "You ride the fence too close, you're gonna get burned." This is another line I played back repeatedly, to be sure my ears hadn't revolted on me. The three or four metaphors mixed into that sentence like the contents of a verbal Smoothie have robbed it of any meaning.

Leatherface: "I'm as scared as a cat on a hot tin roof at this point." Actually, that metaphor as used by the divine Mr. Williams, was not about fear. It was about a dilemma: a cat on a hot tin roof has to jump off, but can't because the roof is too high. Leatherface should relate well to the play: it's all about Mendacity, her stock-in-trade. (Many years ago I was in Mr. Williams's only musical: Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof. We were a smash. I was smashed the whole time, and the Fiddler smashed through the roof.)

Things looked good for Leatherface at first. Queen Kalia's HOH win meant her safety. Knobby beat his head against Harry Potter's headpost for not doing better at the HOH contest. He went out first, owing to his stupidity.

Homophobic Asshole's loss of the POV he needed to stay in the house was sweet. That, as we learned later, he lost it because he threw one of the clown shoes out of the pit himself without noticing it, makes it hilarious! What an idiot!

However, I could have done without this taste-free Family Ickiness Revelation from Edsel because of her clown shoes win: "Thank you, Dad, for taking me to the ball pit when I was a kid, because it definitely paid off today." Ah, child services...

Everyone blamed Leatherface for Homophobic Asshole's eviction, but the tie-breaker was delivered by Queen Kalia. How does she skate?

Jordumb went completely to pieces over H.A.'s exit. "Did this really happen to me?" No. It happened to Homophobic Asshole. She slid through the show to a win last time, without doing or knowing anything, and now, when she's suffered a setback no different than what she has caused to happen to other players, the Universe no longer makes sense to her. Oh boo-hoo. Suck it up, crybaby.

Voldebitch was also crying. So she was upset that she wasn't voted out? She was counting on seeing Bukie? What?

We got to see The Pity Party at greater length, as well as a really bizarre one where Queen Kalia and Edsel had to comfort Leatherface over having to vote out Homophobic Asshole instead of Voldebitch. Hey, if anyone should cry over that, it should be me. Kalia said to Leatherface: "There's no crying in Big Brother." Excuse me? Have you ever watched this show before? Niagara Falls channels through the house some weeks. Remember Amber, a few years back? That girl couldn't say "Good Morning" without a crying jag.

And when Jordumb turned, she proved she could be just as petty as anyone else. We finally glimpsed the REAL Jordumb when she began screaming about Danielle: "Her season was four years ago, and who gives a fuck if her dad is Dick?" So having won the show wears off? Look out, Jordumb, because your win already is halfway to "four years ago".

We finally had the snake challenge we'd earlier seen Knobby hogging the practise version of. His practising didn't help much. He still went out first, as per usual.

Voldebitch pointed out that she and Jordumb were "surrounded by snakes." Actually, Voldebitch is always surrounded by snakes, because she has them for hair. It turned out that Jordumb and Edsel were both pretty good at this quite difficult challenge. Edsel even managed to score a snake eye twice.

When Voldebitch went out second, she pretended to be happy by pouting and crying, and whining out: "I want to go home." You know where the door is, woman. Go ahead and leave. Bye-bye.

I shouldn't be surprised that Edsel won this. Rolling a ball down a slinky snake is peanuts next to negotiating a runway in 9-inch heels while high on God-knows-what.

When the power shifted to Edsel for the week, Knobby ran back to the Newbies.

In the myth, opening Pandora's Box unleashed Voldebitch on the world. Edsel might have known that if only she'd ever read -- a book. But she hasn't, and there was $5000 calling to her, so she opened the box, and Jordumb was saved and Leatherface doomed.

Queen Kalia was annoyed with Edsel, though less so when she learned privately that she also gets $5000. That softened the "sting" of losing Leatherface.

Jordumb was still so pissed about Homophobic Asshole being out of reach that she wasn't even cheered by the news that saved her bacon. Instead she fixated on wondering about Edsel's reward. "Why couldn't Ah win HOH, and get Pandora's Box?" Jordumb, if you had, it would screw up your nominations instead of screwing up hers. Voice of Reason? Voldebitch! "Who cares? ... Because we didn't!"

Knobby, of all people, pointed out first that the nominations did not matter at all. All that mattered was who won POV.

Edsel did Kalia a really big favor. She confessed to all that she got $5000 for opening Pandora's Box, but she told Kalia about her getting a matching $5000 privately. So Kalia gets a big prize with no house resentment.

Edsel made a big drama about picking her nominations, despite the fact that it did not matter. Yawn. The words: "Adam and Shelly, you are safe," were, as we saw, completely false.

Jordumb complained back when Bukie was kicked out about having to take care of Voldebitch during her meltdown, but now, here was Boobiac getting Jordumb through her zombie stage. Then off to negotiate with Edsel, with Jordumb wanting Voldebitch to be silent! Then she was hilariously tactless about Voldebitch, as she sat next to her. Boobiac was so stunned by it that she had no idea how to react, and eventually decided on her grating, fake laugh, always a bad choice. "I know you guys have your doubts about Rachel. Everybody thinks that, you know, Rachel's a liar and, ah, all that stuff, but..." And that she's an insufferable bitch, and that she's a whore, and that she's vicious and vacuous and unbearable and unstable and irritating and fake and....

Jordumb gave Leatherface The Silent Treatment. How nostalgic for Leatherface, like being back in high school again. Said Leatherface of Her Big Move: "I can't change what has happened, you know, it's been typed in ink." Leatherface is old enough to remember typewriters. Did she ever see a typewriter that typed in pencil?

Leatherface spouted off at length, full of self-justifications, to Knobby as they sat out in the smoking pit and puffed away. Knobby looked at her, and nodded to keep her mollified, and resisted pointing out to her that, since if it isn't her, it'll be him, he's not likely to be sympathetic. I got the feeling that if she'd stayed like this for a full two weeks, it would have forced Knobby to quit smoking.

About the POV Competition dummies: they were creepy. Stuffed jump suits had been hung up, and the faces of the previous-partners of the remaining players had been sliced off their freshly-slaughtered corpses by Leatherface, tanned and preserved, and were now stretched grotesquely across the heads of these dangling scarecrows.

It was straight-forward endurance, jump on and hang onto your partner's cadaver the longest, and you win. This was fair for such a crucial contest, as it really tests willpower. This is why Knobby once more fell first. This is why Voldebitch won it, would always have won it.

Knobby still thinks it's funny to mine his homosexual panic when he has to ride the back of Dominic's corpse.

Jordumb's rationalization for jumping down second (She did not fall off. She gave up and let go.), given that she was on the block, was pathetic: "I'm not one to tolerate pain. I know a lot of people, they say it's mind over matter, but this isn't like Survivor or whatever." Actually, this is a lot like Survivor 0r Whatever, and when it's an endurance competition to keep from being voted out, it's exactly like Survivor or Whatever. It's always been Survivor or Whatever for pussies. However, I'll grant her that it's impossible for mind to triumph over matter without a mind.

Okay, Queen Kalia's farting was pretty funny. Queens do not fart. Queen Elizabeth II has that sour face all the time because she's still holding in every fart she's needed to pass since 1953.

Leatherface showed how she fights for her life by falling off less than 13 minutes in.

Voldebitch won it. She always would have. Leatherface is doomed.

Leatherface, speaking of Voldebitch in the challenge: "She was on Brendon't back. That's where she likes to be." Well, she does like hanging on his back like a monkey, but she prefers to hang on his front, or recline while he looms over her, facing her.

Voldebitch made a long speech enumerating all the reasons she wanted Leatherface out of the house. Every single one of them applied equally well to Voldebitch, starting right off with: "She is not a nice person."

Leatherface went crawling to Jordumb, "not about the game", getting all weepy about her kid. I was waiting for her to say her daughter needed new legs, or her grandmother would die without an operation, some weepy reason why she needed the money. She could use a soul transplant. They are pricey.

Leatherface offered a deal to Voldebitch and Jordumb. Boobiac's eyes were rolling all over the room. She took her offer too far to be even remotely credible. She, who has lied and Shellyed everybody in the house, said that, in an HOH competition between the three of them, she'd drop out and let them win. And I believe that Mickey Mouse is a real, living rodent, five feet tall, who lives in a house and has a pet dog.

Well the POV ceremony was suspense-free.

Knobby: "This is not the end of Adam. I'm going to do whatever I can to stay in this house." This consisted of doing nothing at all, while Leatherface ran around imploding. It was exactly the right move.

Said Edsel of her function at the POV ceremony: "A trained monkey could have done my job." Has she ever had a job that a trained monkey couldn't do? (And correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never heard of anyone training a monkey to speak, let alone host game shows, though Howie Mandell hosted a game show, so maybe they can.)

All right, the scene between Leaetherface and the mechanical fortune teller was genuinely creepy. This is religion reduced to its most naked: Lawon's Faith in his receipt of a magic, bad-stuff-undoing superpower upon eviction (His Heavenly Reward upon death), and now Leatherface spending three hours praying to a mechanical effigy of a fortune-teller, begging for a nomination-reversing superpower to be dispensed to her because, well, because she really, really wants one. Three hours.

Then she switched over to praying to a more-tangible deity, by praying to Voldebitch, offering to be her slave. Her real problem is that Leatherfaced has now Shellyed every person there once or twice and been totally found out. No one there believes any promise from her. Knobby has more credibility, and his word is worthless.

The offer of her fake diamond ring was the most outre of all. I know of no precedent for someone offering jewelry for a vote before. That it was fake jewelry, and therefore a lie and a con is par for the Leatherface course. That it was made to a girl who probably has a better eye for jewelry's value than Harry Winston was hilarious. And all of it begged the question of why she even possesses a cheap duplicate of her family heirloom ring in the first place, and why she has it with her.

Leatherface made a hunter's offer, to cut off one of her own ears or a finger. Naugy, you cut off one of your ears, and I'll support you staying in.

As she begged for her life to Voldebitch and Jordumb, Leatherface told them how she had never thrown a competition, as the producer's played her throwing the Bride of Zingbot competition, and we heard her voice telling us why she threw it. I love it when the producers call a player on their duplicity.

Jordumb told The Chenbot that she never got bored with Voldebitch. Probably true, but then, I doubt Jordumb would ever get bored by a dangly bit of yarn. When Homophobic Asshole wants her off his back, he distracts her with a laser pointer.

Leatherface: "I adore Jordan. I adore her heart." I'd adore seeing it basted in savory juices, slow-roasted, seasoned with garlic and maybe something weird, like an avocado, and served up to my family on Thanksgiving.

Between hanging out with the girls, both in studio and out, sipping appletinis with women who consider him harmless and sexless, complaining about fatty foods, 90210, and Torie Spelling, all the while worshipping the ground Homophobic Asshole works out-on, Knobby has morphed into a Metalhead Gay Best Friend. Gracious me! He's turned into Lawon! Any moment now he'll be ready to start playin' this game!

Homophobic Asshole and the errant clown shoe is just funny.

And so was Leatherface voted out at long, long last. She had to make the walk of shame to go Shelly The Chenbot.

Leatherface's speech so excluded Queen Kalia, she almost blew her only vote. Knobby's speech was to ask the players to hit the "Snooze Button" on his dream. Knobby is a walking, bacon-devouring Snooze Button.

Queen Kalia's farewell message to Leatherface was the lyrics to the theme song from The Golden Girls. An original thought would tax her poor brain severely.

The HOH competition was gooey and disgusting, but not as disgusting as who won it after the broadcast ended. Knobby had no chance at it, unless he was allowed to eat the donuts and then shit them out at the other end of the course.

Well, the best that can be said for this season is, it's nearly over. Cheers darlings.

Double, Double, Toil and Troubles, Dani Burns and Jordumb Bubbles.

2011-08-26T20:04:00.002-07:00

Well, this Thursday's show was the most (first) really entertaining episode all summer. Power rocked back and forth, and unlikely were the outcomes. (And nothing more unlikely than who won the second HOH after the show ended, but for the sake of spoiler avoiders, we'll save that for a later column.)

But before Thursday came Wednesday.

Both Homophobic Asshole and Voldebitch endlessly say they respect "Players," and want to oust "Floaters." So what did H.A. and Boobiac do? Voted out Major Player Daniele, and left Major Floaters Edsel and Knobby the Big Brother House Elf.

Why would Daniele even consider throwing the POV competition? Trusting Homophobic Asshole would be a stupid thing to do. Getting rid of her is both his right move strategically, and also his right move vengeance-wise.

Ah Knobby, what a great deal-maker! His offer to Homophobic Asshole between clouds of cigarette smoke (I've seen more smoking on this show this summer than I've seen in real life this summer. I know like one person who still smokes, and he lives in Minnesota.) was that IF he won the POV, he would let Homophobic Asshole make him his bitch. And he'd also let H.A. have the first-born offspring of the monkeys that will fly out his ass if he wins the POV competition. But H.A. already has Jordumb.

Voldebitch's verbal torture of Daniele, with its peculiar obsession about turning 25, which appeared to be pure juvenile verbal harassment and overwhelmingly petty personal vengeance, was, I believe, also strategic, as a way of getting Daniele off her game before the POV challenge, and it was quite effective. My favorite moment was Voldebitch's: "One time when I turned 25, like last year..."

"One time"? How many times has she turned 25? And "like last year"? In other words: "One of the many times I turned 25, like when I turned 25 last year, for the 8th consecutive time, I..." To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: "Las Vegas Society is full of VIP-Waitress/Whores of the very lowest emotional maturity who, of their own free will, have remained 25 for years. Lady Voldebitch is a case in point. To my own knowledge, she has been 25 ever since arriving at the age of 40, and that was many years ago now."

Boobiac: "Do you hate me? I already know he answer to that." Yes and yes. That is truly a question she should never ask anyone. When Jordumb, who has the mind of a slow child, is more emotionally mature than you are, you are a mess.

Daniele on Voldebitch not getting selected to play in the POV competition: "The look on her face alone was enough of a win for me." Not really, as things turned out.

I see that several of my readers who leave comments have stated that they could not understand anything the Zingbot said. Now I find the Zingbot dreadfully tiresome. I'm sorry; I'm funnier. (It didn't dare steal from me, but it stole one from regular commenter "Pablo Diablo". Hey Zingy, get your own act!) However, I had no trouble understanding what he said: so I'll transcribe his zingers for the sake of those to whom it was just a whine. (And why would they take its voice up an octave for a "Build Zingbot a Bride" competition? They must have been building a lesbian fembot, to celebrate Gay Marriage in New York. How ironic that Homophobic Asshole won it. He made a lesbian fembot faster than anyone. I'll bet he's made Lesbians out of many fems who were not Lesbians when they first met him. Jordumb certainly seems to be getting closer to Boobiac these days for no good reason. Hmmmm.)

"You say 'Mischievous,"
And I say 'Mis-CHEEV-e-ous.'
You say 'vertiginous,'
And I say 'Huh?'
Mischievous, Mis-CHEEV-e-ous,
Vertiginous, Huh,
Let's call the whole thing off."

Yes. Let's. (And it's "mischievous." You can take the hick out of the back woods, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.)

Queen Kalia had a "good feeling" that the POV challenge would be "something that we're good at." So the competition would be about sucking at Big Brother? The amount of actual information about the upcoming challenge contained in Queen Kalia's "good feeling" was "Zero." As for it's accuracy rating: also "Zero." It was jigsaw puzzle-solving in three-dimentions, and you both sucked at it harder than Voldebitch after receiving a $300 tip from a Japanese businessman who just sat through a Seigfried & Roy performance and now wants relief!

When the Zingbot 3000 entered the Big Brother House, it committed a terrible crime; it upstaged Voldebitch. She Who Will Not Just Be Ignored could not stand that the Zingbot was the immediate Center-of-Attention, her rightfully-born throne, so she tried to claim attention back from the usurper, by chiming in: "Zing me!" This produced something you do not see every day: a robot having an awkward moment. Zingbot had a script to deliver, and Zingbot is not to be tricked into delivering his material out of order. Zingbot's act has "structure." Zingbot has never worked The Comedy Store Main Room at midnight on a winter Wednesday night, for 7 drunk hecklers. I have. Zingbot just stared, wishing it had Gort's death ray from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Zingy, we all feel that way when looking at, or worse, hearing Voldebitch, but what can you do? (Seriously, WHAT can you do?)

Zingbot: "Hey Jeff, 1995 called; they want their soul patch back." Hey Zingbot, 1985 called, and it wants its tired, outdated "so-and-so called" joke-set-up back. Will your next zinger feature "Knock-knock?" or "You may be a redneck if.."? Everyone laughed as though this was funny. Also, "1995" would be an "It," not a "They." Zing!

Zingbot: "Hey Portia, shouldn't you be named for a car with a roomier trunk?" This joke would work better if there were a car called "Portia," but there isn't. There is a car called "Porsche," but that's not what he said. And she should be named for a topless convertable, because she has nothing up top. Zing!

Zingbot: "Rachel, every other word out of your mouth is the F-word: fiance, fiance." That was the best it could do for Voldebitch? That's like zinging Hitler with a joke about waking up hungover and accidentally using his mustache for a toothbrush. There are, shall we say, richer lodes to mine in Boobiac.

Zingbot: "Daniele, do you own a car? Or do you still prefer to just ride your daddy's coattails?" The horribly mangled metaphor in this lame joke left me with an image of Evel Dick racing down the 405 Freeway on foot, running as fast as he can, with Daniele hanging on to his coattails (which means I see him dressed in a swallowtail frock coat from about 80 years ago) for dear life, as she is battered along the concrete, her dragging, bloody legs in constant danger of being run over and pulped by passing cars. Also, there are too many words in the joke, and a needlessly split infinitive. The joke should be: "Daniele, do your own a car, or do you prefer riding Daddy's coattails?" It's still not funny, and the metaphor is still mangled, but it's more concise and has better comic rhythm.

I'm not going to bother quoting his previously-mentioned, Knobby-is-Uncle Fester joke. Go read the original joke in the comments here a few entries back.

Zingbot: "Shelley, what do you call someone who likes to smoke, hunt, and fish? A dude." Okay, that was a bit funny. A dude who is a jerk, I should add. Her loves are all killing: hunting is killing animals, fishing is killing fish, and smoking is killing Leatherface. Puff, fella, puff! Smoke more! (And unsurprisingly, Leatherface's Diary Room rejoinder was her wish she had a gun from her personal arsenal to shoot Zingbot with, and kill some working-for-scale day player inside it, overhwelmingly hot. Killing, that's Leatherface's idea of a good time.)

Zingbot: "Kalia, you write a sex blog, but you seem to be an expert on the thing done after sex, like sleeping." What a long way to go for such a limp joke. Before it got to its sleeping joke (and you have to be a relentless feeds watcher to know that Queen Kalia, like most house pussies, spends 85% of her time asleep), I had finished four other jokes using all or part of this Dostoevskian set-up line:

"Kalia, you write a sex blog. If there's two things you know nothing about, it's writing and sex."

"Kalia, you write a sex blog. Is it called 'Sex For Dummies'?"

"Kalia, you seem to be a expert on what you do after sex: grabbing a sixpack, and watching TV."

"Kalia, this week you seem to be an expert on the things you do after sex, rolling over and going home."

Zingbot: "Hey Jordan; the only reason Jeff hasn't proposed yet is because he knows you're terrible at answering questions." Again, a long, long way to go for an extemely tiny excuse for a joke. Jordan couldn't possibly be expected to follow a sentence with that many words in it, and sure enough, she nodded off during her own zinger. Her response to her zinger, "Wait, what?", was the single funniest moment in the entire hour.

Bride of Zingbot will never make anyone forget James Whale's masterpiece, Bride of Frankenstein, but as a tribute to last weekend's Khardasian wedding, it was fully appropriate, as Kim is made up wholly of artificial parts also. And of course, The Chenbot is a Fembot herself. And it was a good and difficult challenge. You couldn't float through this one. I'd be curious to know what Homophobic Asshole's winning time was. My guess: 72 hours. (And he was still three days ahead of Jordumb.)

Knobby didn't bother to try to win, just futzed around. I'm deeply shocked. Of course, if Homophobic Asshole was serious about sending Floaters home, Knobby would be well-advised to win POV. Plus demonstrating that he can actually win something (Remember, his previous POV "win" was Daniele deciding to let him win.), might give his deal proposals some small element of credibility, since they always hinge on "If I win HOH..." or "If I win POV..." or "If dinosaurs return and eat Cleveland..."

Queen Kalia: "The problem for me is that all the pieces look alike." So this wasn't a problem for anyone else? This isn't a basic aspect of blank jigsaw puzzles generally? Queen Kalia's idea of a puzzle is: which shoes to wear with her purse.

If only Bukie were here to play this challenge; he would have assembled the Fembot that would have cured cancer! Thanks for nothing, CBS

Leatherface intentionally tanked it too. She doesn't "make." She destroys.

Unfortunately, after the challenge, we went on watching the contestants kissing Homophobic Asshole's asshole, instead of watching Zingbot "interface" with Fembot on their wedding night. As some of the more-smug-looking ladies working at Disneyland could tell you but won't because it would get them fired, sex with audio-animatronic robots is incredible. As long as they're plugged in, they keep right on going, plus they vibrrate on nine different speed settings, from "Mild Temblor" to "Puree." Those three Johnny Depp robots in the Pirates of the Carrabean ride get more action than the real Johnny Depp does, and the two robot Harrison Fords in the Indiana Jones ride were nearly dismantled for doing gay robot porn videos under fake names.

Edsel heats a thing that holds her head up? Is her neck too weak to do the job itself from undereating, or has she never learned how to operate her neck?

Queen Kalia tried throwing Edsel under a bus, which sounds like three freeway lanes clogged up for two hours. In trying to aim Homophobic Asshole in his stated direction of going affter Floaters, she said: "It really bothers me that I could leave before someone who has done literally nothing." Whereas Queen Kalia has only done nearly nothing. She did have a week as HOH where she screwed up royally and massively. Of course, H.A. doesn't know it yet, but he's screwing up pretty fiercely by not taking her deal. He'll be regretting it to The Chenbot fairly soon.

So Homophobic Asshole pulled down Edsel and put up Daniele, and her goose was thorougly cooked. The Floaters chances of making it to the end increased exponentially.

Apparently Leatherface and Homophobic Asshole had a huge fight Thursday morning, when it was too late to edit into the show. I hope we see it on Sunday.

The great things about the double eviction episodes is that they are fast-paced, with all the fat trimmed, and secondly, the game gets really unpredictable. This was a satisfying hour with genuine suspense.

Queen Kalia wept crocodile tears over having to turn on Daniele. Oh boo-hoo. Tell it to Leatherface, Misstress of Crocodile Tears.

Daniele managed to move Leatherface into actively working to keep her in. But, after another bout of her Diary Room crocodile tears, her highly-resistable force met a truly-immovable object: Knobby's intense stupidity, and his hero worship of Homophobic Asshole. Knobby's tastes are appalling: "Metal" (among my favorite minerals), Torie Spelling, bacon, hollering, early heart failure, Evel Dick, Homophobic Asshole, being lame. Leatherface spelled out the whole logical case for why he is a fool to support the surviving Vets any longer, and he smiled , nodded, and, like any blob at rest, would not move.

Leatherface tried turning Voldebitch against Homophobic Asshole. When did they become buds again? Last I heard, they hated each other.

Daniele, whose fate hung in a precarious balance already, made a keep-me speech that consisted of berating players, ala Dominic earlier on. It was really a vote-me-out speech. What was she thinking?

Queen Kalia's speech was much, much shorter, and even dumber: "Vote for me!" No, you idiot. You want them to vote for Daniele! It's an eviction vote, not an awarding-the-prize vote. You just asked everyone to vote you out.

Daniele informed The Chenbot that she is "not a coaster," so the Chenbot had to place her coffee cup on someone else. Oh Knobby!

In her classy farewell speech, Boobiac told Daniele that she, Daniele, is a bitch. I can't choose from the 400 remarks this triggers in my mind, so insert your own irony here.

The first HOH challenge was a mental challenge, yet Jordumb came within a hair's breadth of winning it. Had the last question gone the other way, the situation in the house would be a hell of a lot different now. But Queen Kalia took it, and enacted Daniele's Revenge, consequences be damned!

The poor players only had one commercial break to kiss Kalia's ass. Fortunately, her ass is so huge that they could double, and even triple, up.

Voldebitch didn't even bother trying to kiss Kalia's ass. If ever there were a lost cause. Homophobic Asshole and Voldebitch went up. On to the live HOH competition. Wow. Suspense!

But it was looking for giant clown shoes in a tub of colored balls? Is this a challenge for adults, or a game for a 7 year-old's birthday party? (Wouldn't Voldebitch have an advantage? After all, she uses clown shoes for bra cups.) This competition was so easy, Edsel won it, and she's still afraid of clowns.

Edsel wisely left the nominations as they were, despite Homophobic Asshole reminding Edsel that he used the POV to save her earlier in this column. The Queen of Evil vs the Last Athlete Standing. Although I would have preferred Voldebitch be evicted, or burned at the stake, there's little doubt that it's best for everyone except Jordumb that it was H.A. who hit the highway.

Think about it. Now left we have Queen Kalia bonded tightly with Edsel, and apparently with Leatherface, though how firm that is depends on whom the next HOH is (It's...), since Miss Naugahyde of 2011 goes where the power goes. Then you have Jordumb and Voldebitch clinging to each other, Jordumb the Stan Laurel of the two, she knows she's a fool, and Boobiac is the Oliver Hardy, who thinks she's a whole lot smarter than she ever actually is. And then there's Knobby, the last man standing. (God, what a bad season for men on this show), who, if he can be trusted to vote with them, makes it three-to-three, but Knobby's ideas of self-interest (which are unrelated to what is actually good for him, see his bacon-love) will also sway in the breeze. So the good thing is, the rest of this season could go either way. It's unpredictable again. The bad thing is, there's no one there I want to see win. I'm rooting against all of them!

Knobby looked ready to cry over choosing which of these two close, personal friends, who barely speak to him and view him with barely-concealed contempt, to vote out.

Homophobic Asshole's speech was all trying to talk Leatherface into voting for him over whatever their fight was about.

And then, to make it still more suspenseful, it was a tie: Jordumb and Knobby voted for Voldebitch, while Edsel and Leatherface voted for Homophobic Asshole. This left it up to Queen Kalia to complete Daniele's Revenge. I so hoped for Voldebitch, but I can't fault her for throwing out H.A.

Homophobic Asshole's classy statement that "no one in there has a sac," is literally true. There are five women and Knobby, who has shown again and again that he lacks any balls whatever. H.A.'s comment was meant as railing against Floaters, but he didn't evict floaters. He talks, talks, talks one game, and plays, plays, plays a different one.

As always, Voldebitch's tears are ambrosia. Let us savor them for a few days. Cheers darlings.

Cornholing.

2011-08-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

Am I to believe that no one on the Big Brother staff, no one in the Big Brother house, and no one at CBS Standards and Practices knows what "cornholing" actually means? Hello? It's had its obscene meaning for at least 200 years.

You want some laughs? Check out Lawon's exit interview with The Chenbot online, which never aired. It opens with The Chenbot trying to strangle the idiot. Nothing Lawon says makes any sense. He's a total, drooling moron. He's a Martian, a particularly stupid Martian. He is ready to start PLAYIN' the game now though. "I still I think I won, because I came in the house the same way I was outside of life." (Huh?) What, exactly, is good about that? In any event, Lawon, you did not "win," not ANYTHING!!!! And we learned that Dani, Lawon, Edsel, and Queen Kalia's alliance has a name: "The Pajama Jammers." No wonder they're all too embarrassed to say it on TV, except Lawon.It's perfectly clear that nothing can embarrass Lawon, short of dressing well.

Well, whatever went wrong this last week, at least Bukie is gone to the Jury House, though utterly gone would be better. This is another reason they should have evicted Voldebitch weeks ago. Now, even when she's out, she'll still be on the jury, and I'll still have to see, and worse, hear the hideous bitch.

The problem with the soap suds challenge is we watch this show to see the players play dirty, not clean. It is, of course, great fun to watch the players fall on their asses, though sadly, no serious injuries. But it was pretty obvious even before last Thursday's episode ended that Homophobic Asshole (A man who thinks cornholers shouldn't educate kids) was going to win HOH, and the instant it ended, I went online and found out that, yup, he did. But did Voldebitch or Leatherface choke to death on suds, or break a limb falling over? Sadly, so, so sadly, no. (The tricky part was the poor CBS show staff who had to dangle large, rabid dogs over the challenge, to drool foam on them.)

Voldebitch: "Rachel is back!" Boobiac, you never left! Go away. dig a hole, crawl in, and pull the dirt in over you.

"I'm probably the only person in the house who knows what a dishwasher is," said the woman who has no idea what an avocado is, and thinks Guacamole is some rare, "weird," exotic dish. Where do they find these people? Edsel has never tasted an onion, and Leatherface has no idea what an avocado is, nor what a "moral scruple" is either. I guess she's not interested in foods she can't go out and kill. On the plus side, since avocados and guacamole are delicious, the fact that Leatherface has missed out pleases me. What does she eat? Pig intestines? If so, watch out Voldebitch! (I used to grow yummy avocados on trees in my yard, and by me, I mean my staff.)

I'm sure Voldebitch knows what a dishwasher is: "The Hispanic guy who works in the kitchen, but isn't a cook." And I 'm certain Boobiac has washed dishes. It's how she pays for restaurant meals at restaurants that don't take blow-jobs in place of cash.

Voldebitch: "I like a foam party just as much as the next girl, but I don't know if I can handle this much foam." OK, Leatherface (who is the next girl) doesn't know what avocados are, and I have no idea what a "Foam Party" is. Cujo's birthday celebration? Maybe Voldebitch's tricks are so afraid of catching arcane diseases from the shrill trollop that they won't let her touch them naked unless they are both covered in antiseptic soap studs. She should be sterilized before every use, or better yet, cauterized.

When Jordumb predictably fell on her tiny butt (vanishing completely into the mountains of suds) Leatherface helped her up. You wana play boy scout, Rawhyde-puss, or do you want to win Big Brother? Because you need to win HOH. Did you see Homophobic Asshole, who thinks he loves Jordumb, and who constantly tells us how the pathetic child is "a little cutie," stop to help her? No. And who won HOH? Homophobic Asshole.

Dani expressed doubt that Queen Kalia has ever washed a dish in her life. Queens have kitchen maids for that sort of drudgery. I have my doubts that Queen Kalia has ever eaten off a dish before. Kalia may not be smart, but she is a lousy competitor. Kalia, of course, blamed Dani's cheer leading for her ultra-lame performance. Queenie, if you were a competitor, you would tune everything out, and play the challenge to win! Kalia is pathetic. Quit blaming others for your lousy game play. The I-hope-Edsel-will-win-HOH "strategy" didn't really pan out, Edsel having won so far - ah - oh yes, nothing!

Fierce competitor Voldebitch, decided her strategy would be to cheer on Homophobic Asshole rather than play to win.

Voldebitch: "Come on girls, at least when you win, I pretend like I'm happy." This was the biggest single lie anyone has told in the house all summer. Pouting, sobbing, having tantrums, getting all weepy in the bushes, so Bukie has to talk her down from near-suicide is her "pretending like I'm happy"? How does she express misery? Firebombing Tripoli?

The worst thing about Homophobic Asshole winning HOH is that getting rid of, or better yet, killing, Voldebitch is not a priority with him. Leatherface now loathes Boobiac, but it's too little too late. I will never come to like Leatherface. Likewise Voldebitch is sick of Leatherface, and "had enough of her fake attitude." Oh that's the deepest cave in the world calling the Sun "dark." I've had enough of Voldebitch's fake boobs, fake hair, fake laugh, and fake education. (But I've had enough of Leatherface too. It's double-eviction week. Wouldn't it be great if Leatherface and Voldebitch both went? Please, please, please. Next week is my kitty cat's 14th birthday. Do it for my pussy.)

Dani thinking her "deal" with Jordumb and Homophobic Asshole means anything is purest wishful stupidity. Has she ever met her own father?

I liked that even Homophobic Asshole now knows that the answer to "Who wants to see my HOH room?" is always "No one!" Can we retire that ritual now, please? Even the players are sick of it. Apparently Jordumb has been teaching Homophobic Asshole's neices how to spell.

Leatherface decided, apropos of nothing, to go gratuitously start another fight with Voldebitch. This is a woman who would stamp on Godzilla's tail, and yell: "You call that levelling a city? My granny eats cities better than you do, and she's only radioactive after she eats baked beans!" And the substance of her complaint? She wanted Boobiac to stop "making eyes" at her. Of all Voldebitch's many great Crimes Against Humanity, making eyes at Leatherface is low on the list. After all, looking at Leatherface won't give Voldebitch any pleasure - nor anyone else. She's a sight to make eyes sore. I loved Boobiac's lame defense: "Shelley, I haven't been talking about you to anyone --- --- --- like recently." (By "like recently," she means since Leatherface, like, entered the, like, room.

Okay, Leatherface likes peanut butter. Many otherwise-sane people do. She likes English muffins. So do I. But she claims to be 40, for Heaven's sake (which means she's 55), and she eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Yuck! Even at 8 years old, that made me bilious. But she likes it. Fine. Eat it, but you might at least TRY sampling other foods offered you. Even being from The South is no excuse for picking up a pear and having to ask "What is this?" I don't much like pears, though they are preferable to even the world's finest apricot or nectarine, but I friggin' know one when I see one. She called pears and avocados "weird foods." Leatherface, what's weird is a woman of 55-but-admitting-to-40 not recognizing a pear, and eating peanut butter and jelly. Maybe if she'd gotten some decent nutrition at some point in her life, she wouldn't have skin that would shame an alligator. (But she only eats peanut butter she herself has killed.)

I was eating an egg salad sandwich when I saw that "America" had voted to allow Have-Nots to eat hard-boiled eggs. Homophpobic Asshole picking The House Stooges, I mean the remaining Pajama Jammers, to be the Have-Nots was kind of funny in a sick way, or would be if it didn't forbode his nominations. (I was waiting for Leatherface to say: "What is an 'egg'?" We don't have 'eggs' in The South. It's Yankee food, suh!" She should love avocados. They used to be called "alligator pears," and she's now seen what pears look like, and she has skin like that of an alligator with bad skin.) Queen Kalia told us of Jalapenos: "I physically can not eat them!" Can she eat them spiritually? How about metaphysically? How about stuffing some up her over-abundant ass? It's not like she's being forced to eat something "weird" like a pear.

The table got smaller. Whoopie. I could spend this time watching old George Burns & Gracie Allen TV shows.

Dani: "I'm not stupid." Well, not compared to Jordumb or Lawon, but she's never going to get her doctorate any more than Bukie ever will.

Homophobic Asshole was pretty funny, when Edsel came up to talk game, being sarcastically impressed that she was ready to start playin' this game, 49 days in.

He nominated Queen Kalia and Edsel, planning on backdooring Daniele. Well, maybe the double eviction on Thursday will get one of these stones out of my gall bladder.

Oh, and all you New Yorkers squawking about the earthquake there yesterday? Shut up. Less than a Richter 6, with the epicenter several states away in Virginia? Puh-leaze. Here in California, that's not an earthquake, merely a vibrator that got left on. Wake me when you get a real earthquake.

Until then, Cheers darlings.

A Shining RAY of Joy.

2011-08-22T18:11:00.001-07:00

Today is the 91st birthday of Ray Douglas Bradbury. (Little Dougie likes including Ray's middle name, for obvious reasons.) Bless his huge heart, he's still with us. Stay with us Ray; we need you.

Here's a link to the posting I put up a year ago on his 90th birthday. It could use a revisit today, or a first visit, if you didn't read it last year. All Hail Ray Bradbury. Cheers, Ray darling!