The Desert Rata.

Go placidly among the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in riches.
Speak your truth softly, and carry a big stick.
Listen to others, even the dull and ignorant, no matter how boringly and stupidly they may waste your time.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and recall that a pot that is watched will never boil.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, for they may punch you in the mouth.
If you compare yourself with others you will find you are a loser among losers.
Keep interested in your own career, however insignificant, and possibly illegal it may be.
Always buy low and sell high.
Exercise caution buying used cars, for the world is full of lemons, but don’t let this blind you to the killing you can make, for everywhere, Life is full of suckers.
Be yourself, however dull. Especially, do not feign marital intentions in a motel room.
Neither be cynical about Love; promise her anything, but give her Arpege.
You are a child of the Universe, no less than the Edsel and the dinosaur, you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the Universe will ignore you. Why shouldn’t it? Who are you?
Therefore, be at peace with the government, whatever it conceives you to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations in the noisy confusion of Life, keep peace with your wife, or she’ll soak you for every cent you’ve got.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a crummy world.
Tippiecanoe and Tyler too.
Be prepared.
Strive to have power over others.
And remember, only you can prevent forest fires.


Cheers darlings.

4th Anniversary.

Good gracious. Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the creation of this flog, and I almost completely forgot. I've been very neglectful of it this year; only 10 columns all year, and none since August. I'm sorry, darlings. My column on The Huffington Post, combined with Little Dougie's other writing projects has left little time or energy for flogging here. Anyway, Let's have a few random bits here. Shall we?

Up at the top of the column is Little Dougie and I with Casey Turner, whom you may remember as Big Brother 11's Banana Man back in 2009, which I flogged, episode by episode, over on Ye Olde Huffington Post as it aired. This was taken by Casey's wife the night before the finale and reunion show, when we dined together. No joke here. Casey was one of the few - ever - players on that show I found likeable enough to ever want to be in the same room with, and we've kept in touch since the show ended. Casey's one of my very few victi - ah - subjects I've written about who took it with good humor. This flog has made me some nice friends, and Casey is one of them

How does one politely tell a lady that she has crabs?



December starts next week, and Santa has a great gift suggestion for those hard-to-shop-for people you can't stand.

So the Roy Rogers museum closed (I'd been meaning to be getting around to going to see it just as soon as it was the last tourist attraction on earth, for half a century now), and they auctioned the stuff off.

Trigger - stuffed - sold for $266,500.

Bullet the doggie - stuffed - sold for $35,000.

Buttermilk, Dale's horse - stuffed - sold for $25,000.

Pat Buttram - stuffed - sold for $15,350.

Norman Bates's Mother - stuffed - sold for $544,000.

Hmm. I wonder what I could get for Sarah Palin stuffed?

Oh, and the article I read said: "The Bible they used at the dinner table every night sold for $8,750." What was it used for? A serving platter? An appetite depressant? Table mats? I'd pay more than that to eat dinner every night where the was no Bible at all.

I love the new British PBS series Sherlock. It's VASTLY superior to that piece of shit movie that Robert Downey Jr. made last year. Even moved into the 21st Century, it's more authentically Sherlockian than that big budget, action movie dreck. How do you not love the star's name: Benedict Cumberbatch? It will be just terrible to learn his name is really Bill Jones or Sarah Palin. Anyway, Benedict is a welcome addition to such other stalwart Sherlocks looking on here as Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Peter Cushing and Little Dougie. LITTLE DOUGIE! What is he doing there? Sherlock Holmes never had a beard, other than Irene Adler, that is. I've got to supervise Dougie's handling of my illustrations more closely.


Who didn't love Tony Curtis? I would have, but somehow I ended up being the only woman in Hollywood besides Greer Garson that Tony never shagged. Tony, I like it hot, and you, baby, were hot.



And Barbara Billingsey died recently also, America's Mom. Poor Beaver and Wally, although one of those pearls from that pearl necklace she wore at all times, even when baking, will never fall into their food again.



Don't worry, my latest Studly Hunk isn't being arrested, but I had to resort to stern measures to get Gerard into my boudoir.


Little Dougie's delusions just get worse and worse. Jake's had to take out a restraining order.



Could someone explain to me how Walt Disney and his entire staff of Disneyland planners and construction people all failed to notice they were erecting a giant penis beside a huge pair of testicles? I mean, I'm not complaining; the erotic aspect of this structure always aroused me. Who doesn't love riding a big rocket? Little Dougie liked it more when TWA left and Douglas Aircraft became the sponsor, and they painted his name on the rocket, so it became a giant monument to his junk. (He's a dreamer!) But really, how could they miss it?



You see, the Rocket to the Moon was supposed to be just the first step. Walt planned to build a Disney Resort on the Moon. Lots of room for parking, but that 1/6th gravity makes for slow-moving rollercoasters. Space Mountain would take 2 hours to ride. Oh, and there's that little problem of no air.



There they are, the newly-elected Freshman class of congressmen elected by the insane, idiot teabaggers. Here they eye progressive social progress, and draw their evil plans against it, and prepare to deprive America of that socialist healthcare that they themselves are enjoying, since hypocrisy is the only thing beyond greed and stupidity that the teabaggers all possess. They are busy extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich but refusing to extend unemployment benefits. You know, if you voted for any of those moronic teabagger candidates, fuck you. But first, they need to go speed-dial batch-vote for Bristol Palin, so that fat little Teen Fascist who can not dance, or think, can win Dancing With the Republicans. Don't watch that show, or Sarah Palin's Alaska. Commercials for American Fascism is all they are.

My ex-husband Boris and his friend Bela were fired by Ozzie & Harriet, when they decided to recast the roles of David and Ricky for no good reason, and with kids yet! They claimed that people found the show scary with Boris and Bela on it. So what? Did it ever occur to anyone that it was Ozzie, the man with no job or visible means of support, and Harriet who were frightening people? And then it turned out that the kids they cast were their own children! What blatant nepotism!


Last, and definitely least, this lovely book is coming out quite soon (It's being printed right now), and Little Dougie wrote the forward, a long essay for the chapter on Seymour, and it even includes some of his TV and stage scripts for Seymour. Fortunately, Jim Fetters wrote the book, so it will be worth reading, especially if you grew up in Los Angeles in the 1950s, 60s, or '70s. When I have a release date and info on how you can acquire it, I'll post it here, but it will be soon.As hopefully my next posting will be. Meanwhile, read me over on The Huff Po, and Cheers darlings.

The Martian Chronicler.

Today is the 90th birthday of Ray Douglas Bradbury!!!

I can not think of an event more worthy of dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlors. Pick up a Bradbury book and spend some glorious hours drinking in the Dandelion Wine of his words in his honor.

Or catch one of his movies. I have the film of Something Wicked This Way Comes running on my TV at this moment. It makes a great double-feature with George Pal's 7 Faces Of Dr. Lao. Both tell of magic carnivals coming to small towns to change the lives of their residents, one for the good, the other for the very, very bad. and Royal Dano, the voice of Disney's robot Lincoln, is in both.

Without Ray, no one would ever have heard of Mars!

These are two of Little Dougie's most-prized possessions. Ray's middle name is "Douglas." He named the protagonist of Dandelion Wine "Douglas" after himself, and told Dougie that book was special, just for Douglases. However, Little Dougie has stated that The Royal Order of Guys Named Douglas will graciously allow all to share our joy, and read Dandelion Wine..

Ray Bradbury, 90 years great as of today, is often called a "science fiction writer." I'm going to go out on a limb here and say - hold on - Ray Bradbury is not a science fiction writer. Look at these books. Are any of them even remotely science fiction? Nope. Ray is a fantasy writer, who often employs science fiction tropes for some of his his flights of fantasy. (Damn! There goes my vow never to use the word "tropes".)

Wait! One of these books isn't even fiction. It's essays. And two of those are mysteries.

You know what Ray is? A writer. Period. One of the best. And a National Treasure. No. Strike that. He's a World Treasure!

"Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now. Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air. So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago, in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicholas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumplestiltskin and Mother Goose - oh, what a wailing! - and shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and the old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon a Time became No More! And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of the Land of Oz; they filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and shattered Polychrome in a spectroscope and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologist's Ball! The Beanstalk died in a bramble of red tape! Sleeping Beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe. And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry 'curiouser and curioser,' and they gave the Looking-Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away."

- from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

Little Dougie told me: "I think it was reading that specific paragraph, when I was 8 years old, that first showed me how a writer could get drunk on the music of his own words. Notice how the deliberate omission of commas makes the raging tide of images flood forth like a Tsunami, as though they poured out too fast to bother with punctuation."

On the accompanying book cover, I have no idea why the face of renowned character actor Henry Daniell is peering out at us from Mars.

Ray Bradbury was the first professional writer Little Dougie ever met, and he found him more glamorous than any mere movie star. Actors interpret, but writers create.

‎"First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren't rare. But there must be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn't begun yet. July, well, July's really fine: there's no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June's best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September's a billion years away.

But you take October now. School's been on a month and you're riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you'll dump on old man Prickett's porch, or the hairy ape costume you'll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it's around October twentieth and everything smokey-smelling and the sky orange and ash-gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early."

From Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.



How ridiculously cool is this photo? Ray Bradbury and Malcolm McDowell. Alex the Droog meets The Illustrated Man. A Clockwork Orange meets Fahrenheit 451.


Here's a wonderful caricature of Ray Bradbury and his best friend, Ray Harryhausen, impersonating my boys, Laurel & Hardy. Harryhausen turned 90 two months ago. Let's hope these wonderful men live another 90 years.

Cheers darlings.

Oh, and I'm still plugging along, churning out Big Brother reaps for The Huffington Post. Here's my most recent: "The Boobiac Strikes Back!"

Black Rocks

This is WTC Ground Zero yesterday, and those aren't spare ribs, extra-charred. They are the ribs of a 19th Century Slave Ship, which were apparently ribbed like a French condom (or a Frenchman, for that matter) which were discovered there yesterday. If it weren't for 9-11, they would never have been found. But are archeologists and scientists thanking Osama? No.


Wait! A 19th Century slave ship? Oh my Dog, it's The Black Rock from Lost!



So is Manhattan actually The Island from Lost? Eloise Hawking did say it moves about. Did it move to New York Harbor? It would explain so much. Why are New Yorkers so hostile? They are The Others! Why does nothing there make sense? It's The Island. Why are the rents so out of control? The place is being run by Hurley! Why is it that when I phone someone in NYC at noon, they don't get the call until 3 PM? The time-distortion field that surrounds The Island! Manhattan is lost in time and lost in space, and meaning, like Australia, or Catalina. And that's not pollution; it's the Smoke Monster!


It even explains the penchant for giant statues. Giant statues are only found in three places: the giant statue of Towaret on The Island that was sheered off when The Black Rock hit it in a storm (though you'd think that when a wooden ship hits a stone statue, the ship would suffer the worst damage.), Miss Liberty in New York Harbor, and the giant statue of me (aka "Miss Take-Liberties") here in my hedge labyrinth, The Befuddlement, which was built for my 1935 movie HER! at RKO, and has been here ever since, except for its brief loan-out to Universal when I made Abbott & Costello Meet She Who Must Be Obeyed in 1955. I bet if you lifted Miss Liberty's skirt, you'd find she has only 4 toes. And if you lifted my skirt, you'd get something amazing also, and I speak as a skirt-lifter from way back.



Speaking of Black Rocks, I have a message for Old Spice:



I don't give a rat's ass how this Adonis smells. Hell, he'd have to have been dead a week to smell worse than me anyway. What I care about is how he tastes!


So I'm just going to let him ride me off into the sunset. Besides, I have to go flog Big Brother now over on The Huffington Post, where you can read my newest piece: "Big Brother 12: (Mala)Props to the Houseguests." We make quite the pair, Old Spice and Old Slut.

Cheers darlings.

The Horror! The Whore-or!

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


It's Bastille Day, normally a day to remember Liberty, Equality, Sorority! It's a day to read, or watch, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.


And yet today, my darling Javier Bardem ...


...chose to throw away his liberty, and to get mm --- to get marr --- to get married!


WHY? He knows it's me he loves. Well, by "he knows" I mean I know and he'll learn it, the hard way, if necessary. Why else has he spent so much time on international phone lines engaged in XXX-rated obscene phone calls with me? Because he craves me!



Okay, I was the one always phoning him, and his little running joke each time he recognized my voice was always: "How did you get this number?", as though he knew nothing of the enormous amount of time and effort I put in to getting his new number each time he changes it. (To keep the joke alive, he always changes his number again after each time I call him. What a jokester!)



He may have won an Oscar for No Country for Old Men, but he was fine with having some Cunt Free From Old Ladies. (He's seen here demonstrating exactly how you get ahead and win awards in Hollywood.) And I'm not the only old lady Javier has had the hots for. We all saw him making out with his mom at The Oscars. I liked him a lot better when he was with old us than with this --- this --- person he's shackled himself to despite his almost being madly love with me, once he stops pretending to be afraid of me.




I blame Woody Allen! He made them both star in some movie together that I didn't see. (Who goes to Woody Allen movies any more? That is so 1978.) Without that stupid Barcelona movie, that creature might never have sunk her claws into my man. Just because he didn't yet know he was in love with me, and pretended to think of me as some crazed, elderly stalker he couldn't distance himself far enough away from was no excuse! Only a stupid bitch like her would take those restraining orders he repeatedly filed against me seriously. They were just part of our running gag where he pretends to be repulsed by and terrified of me. It's really very funny, and it's not like I kept him tied up in my basement that entire weekend anyway. After all, he wouldn't have been able to chew his way out of those straps if I hadn't used edible restraints in the first place, now would he?.


And yet here he's gone and broken my heart by marrying that cow. Why couldn't Tom Cruise have jumped about Oprah's furniture over her during their romance? I'd be happier, Katie Holmes would be better off, it's not like I'd ever be desperate enough to want Tom Cruise (Ew.), and Oprah's furniture was already threadbare.



How the bovine Latin creature ever got a reputation as a beauty, I will never comprehend. Think how horrified he'll be when he finally sobers up (something I always wisely avoid doing for this very reason - among others) and gets a good look at her!



Oh well. I'll just have to drown my troubles flogging Big Brother 12 over at The Huffington Post. Am I in lust with any of the houseguests yet? Well, let's just say I'll be drowning my sorrows in my imaginary romance with Lane Elenberg, which is not the hometown of Ellen DeGeneris. This guy has biceps bigger than my living room, coupled with a brain the size of Mel Gibson's decency. The perfect man.



I mean, look at the size of his shoulders! I'm not normally a fan of tattoos the size of the Sistine frescoes, but with a canvas the size of his shoulders, one understands why the tattooist would work in Cinerama. Anyway, check out my weekly columns on Big Brother 12, and I'll be back here when, well, when I feel like it.



Cheers darlings!

The 12th Coming.

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Studio City to be born?"

- What Yeats would have written if he'd waited 90 more years to write "The Second Coming."

I return to recapping CBS's Big Brother in The Huffington Post on Friday. Hopefully The Chenbot will keep it in her pants this summer, and not get knocked up again like last year; and if not, maybe she could realize that "stretch" is not really a good look in maternity clothes. It's their 12th Season. Who knew there were that many unemployed social pariahs in America? Oh right, the keeper of the Teabag party members knew.


Check us out, come Friday.


Cheers darlings.

Rye Musings

I was drinking some rye, and I thought I'd share some random rye musings. For instance, that stupid song:

"Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocket full of rye."

The rye would soak your pocket, and ruin your outfit.

I watched an episode of Family Feud the other night. When asked "Name a place where people store their junk," the woman answered: "Garage." Isn't the only correct answer "in their pants"? That's where Little Dougie stores his junk, although he has been known to allow some select (and not so select) others to store their junk in his trunk for a while.

"But this was a real, truely live place. and you were there, and you, and you, and even you, Smokey. And I remember some of it wasn't very nice, but most of it was beautiful, but all the same, all I ever told them was 'I want some Mr. Cluck's Chicken', and they gave me chicken! But oh, Auntie Claire, there's no place like home."

What was scarier on the LOST finale; The Smoke Monster or the Meg Whitman commercials?

Hurley to Ben: "You know, you were a real good number 2" Was Hurley calling Ben "Good Shit"? That's what they called excellent pot when Little Dougie was in college, a million years ago.Or was Ben on THE PRISONER, and I just never noticed, in which case, how good could he have been?

So Sayid carries a torch for years for smart, strong, stands-up-to-torture Nadia, but his purgatory girlfriend is Shannon, the excruciatingly annoying, spoiled, shrieks-when-she-gets-a-hangnail airhead? Obviously his work as a torturerer is sending him to hell, because any place you're stuck with Shannon would be HELL! Remember her in the pilot episode, shrieking at her brother: "I've had a really bad day!" unlike the 40 people around her who had also JUST SURVIVED A PLANE CRASH?

LAW & ORDER promised that, in their series finale, they would answer all our questions. Well I, for one, am still puzzled. Is New York City purgatory? Is Manhattan really an Island, or something else? Why wasn't Lennie Briscoe in the church? Who will Sam Waterston choose to replace him? Why doesn't Lupo have a girlfriend? How come Hurley is black on this show? What does Ernie Hudson see in S. Eptha? (Really! What?) Why was S. Eptha the only person on the whole island with a life away from the job? Where was the doggie? How will Broadway actors get TV credits now? Was it all a dream? Cops out in a cop-out!

Why is it that on Law & Order, when the the detectives investigated murders, they never had hot-looking, best-selling crime novelists tagging along, and solving their cases for them? No wonder they got cancelled! Think of the sexual tension Rick Castle and Detective Lupo would have!

"Three little monstrous ghouls are we,

Pert as a monster well can be,

Filled to the brim with fiendish glee,

Three little monstrous ghouls.

You won't be safe so you better run,

Nobody's safe, for we care for none,

Life is a joke that will soon be done,

Three little monstrous ghouls.

Three little ghouls who, all unwary

Hang in your local cemetary,

Folks all agree we are really scary,

Three little monstrous ghouls."

We'll always be bosom baddies,

Fiends, monsters, not pals.

We'll always be bosom baddies,

If Life should reject you,

There's me to dissect you.

Don't you wish you could buy a ticket and see this bill?


I read this enormous book (700 pages) on DOCTOR WHO. In it, I read that when they announced the actress who is now playing the new Doctor's new companion, the offical BBC press release said: "Karen Gillian beat off dozens of hopefuls to land one of television's most-coveted roles."So that's how they do it in Wales; you have to beat-off lots of people. In America, a good role can be landed with a single blow-job.(It's also a really good book for anyone interested in the actual process of writing.)

When butcher men are made, Franklin Pangborn will make them.

I've just had Morehead Heights redecorated. Do you like it?

This is my belfrey.


I saw a TV commercial for a casino that ended with the admonition: "Please gamble responsibly." How the hell do you do that???

Looks like it's time for Jughead to lube up!


Here's Robin Hood and Maid Marion (Richard Todd and Joan Rice) in Walt Disney's 1952 The Story of Robin Hood, directed by the great Ken Annikin, back when Robin Hoods were sexy, as opposed to now. Here's a line from Owen Gleiberman's review of the new Robin Hood in Entertainment Weekly: "The scene builds to a carefully angled image of Robin with his shirt off, and about all we can think, looking at Crowe's muscular but still doughy torso, is that he must have worked out for months for this token beefcake shot."Who'd have thought anyone would make a worse Robin Hood than Kevin Costner's Robin of Encino? At least Ironman 2 is kicked his butt at the box office.

On the left, that's Richard Todd, who was Robin Hood 58 years ago for Walt Disney. The other guy is, of course, President Reagan.

How Ironic: Todd's Robin Hood robbed from the rich to give to the poor, and Ronald Reagan did exactly the opposite!


The Pope has forgiven The Beatles for saying they were more popular than this mythical Jesus person (which, at the time, they were). Nice of him. But have The Beatles forgiven the Pope for covering up for child-molesting priests, and for being an actual Nazi in Hitler's army? No? Too bad.


It's good to be the king, especially when the king is Buster Keaton.



And sometimes, it's good to be a Queen!

The English know the proper place for Little Dougie, in a dumpster!


I tuned in a minute or so early for LOST one night, just as they were kissing off Buzz Aldrin on that Dancing With the Has-Beens show. It seemed to me that I heard Tom Bergeron say: "Buzz, I have to say, when I was 14 years-old, watching on a black-&-white set, you walk on the moon, I never thought I'd have this honor, to kick a living historical human legend off of a cheesy TV dance show. Blast-off, Buster."

All right, who let the dogs near the spaghetti? Now I'll have to throw all of it out.


They're for MUSIC? I thought an ipod was the autobiography of one of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "I, Pod".

No, this is not me! It's Betty Buckley, imitating me!



No, this is not me! It's Betty White imitatiing me!



Well, let's leave Little Dougie gazing out at a green elephant, the sort that only flies when you're not looking. I'm turing 113 on Saturday, and he's turning 60. I need a drink


Cheers darlings.