It's my blog...
...and I'll rave if I want to. Or need to. You can vent, or you can explode, so I choose to blow off steam. Of course, as Groucho once told the audience when one of Chico's musical numbers was imminent, "There's no reason you shouldn't go into the lobby until this blows over."
No? Well, you were warned.
I tried to stave off the explosion of my cortex by pulling out the funniest book ever crowd-sourced, They Call Me Naughty Lola, Personal Ads From the London Review of Books. And it worked, for a while. Typical entry: "This column reads like a list of X-File character rejects. Woman, 34, able to bi-locate and start fires with the power of her pre-menstrual tension. Seeks human/Jovian hybrid with whom to start genetic processing plant (Bicester). Must have own car. Box no. 5258." I subscribed to the LRB on the basis of this book, but they don't even carry personal ads anymore, and the magazine shows up sealed in an annoying plastic bag, so I got angry all over again. But the British are staggeringly articulate, aren't they?
Oh, TCM, what happened? Do you want to show the classics, or do you want to sell wine and coffee mugs and bus tours of Los Angeles and New York? (San Francisco, there's your movie city.) Somebody is working hard to come up with themes -- cheesy monster day, divorce day, chain-gang day. Today it's priests, can you believe it, like Fighting Father Dunne, a shameless Boys Town ripoff with Pat O'Brien ladling on the sanctimony instead of Spencer Tracy. You absolutely could not make a movie about a Catholic priest and a bunch of little boys today. Which is good for the movies but bad for a lot of men who still have nightmares. Also, I know it was a conscious decision to turn Saturday mornings over to the kind of stuff theaters showed in the 1940s (Tarzan, Bowery Boys, shorts, forgotten serials), but think of the rest of us. We'll talk again. Thanks for finally getting around to Albert Finney, by the way. At this rate, you'll be memorializing Rip Torn around Thanksgiving. (The Cincinnati Kid, Cross Creek, Defending Your Life. Programmed it for you.)
I dreamed I was in a department store buying sheets and the salesman was Richard Nixon. Interpretation invited, if not necessarily welcomed.
In the latest dispatch from Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, it seems that after Barack Obama planted those "wire tapps" in Trump Tower, he buggered up the White House air conditioning so it never works right. Always too hot or too cold, whines President Hormonal. This bunch took weeks to master turning on the lights in the West Wing, so two-and-a-half years without figuring out the thermostat sounds about right. Also, why doesn't somebody investigate the book contract said to be worth more than $60 million to the Obamas? Must be something illegal about two black people being paid a lot to write books.
Well, publishers pay advances to authors in the expectation of earning the money back, and then some. Michelle Obama's Becoming has been at or near the top of the Amazon list since November, which means Crown Publishing has done very well. Barack Obama's first book, Dreams From My Father, written while he was barely known outside Illinois, sold well enough for him to buy a nice house in Chicago; Crown must have figured on his presidential memoir selling even better. That's how publishing works. (Calvin Trillin once proposed that the advance on a novel he was writing at least equal the cost of the lunch at which they discussed it. "Unrealistic," said his publisher.)
Crown is in "business" to make "money" without having to take refuge in America's super-generous "bankruptcy laws." Understand? Never mind, tell Ivanka to get out the sock-puppets and explain it without all the big words. If she needs a prop, there's a copy of The Pet Goat in the White House library.
Jeez, the Gilroy Garlic Festival? A six-year-old? And almost all the victims Latino? Mark me amazed and leave me in the lost-and-found. If they ever stop babbling about tonight's Democratic Jeopardy Tournament we'll probably hear that the killer's manifesto has surfaced and he hated brown people/women/LGBTQ/the onion genus. Then we'll hear that Gilroy is a rat- and rodent-infested shithole where nobody wants to live and it's Obama's fault.
Danielle Stella has come forward to save the Minnesota 5th from the satanic Ilhan Omar. Danielle's hobbies include shoplifting and forwarding QAnon* conspiracy theories. Danielle can be identified by the large cross she wears around her neck so as not to be confused with a Muslim. Muslims are grateful.
Boris Johnson, the new prime minister of "the United Kingston," has a friend called Darius Guppy. They once conspired/chatted amiably about having a News of the World reporter beaten up. Well, who hasn't wanted to do that? Now if only I could stop visualizing the two of them dining with Mr. Toad at Toad Hall.
*This is wrong. QAnon should be the support group for people who are addicted to idiot conspiracies and want to get better. Let's call the nutters QNation. QPlanet?
No? Well, you were warned.
I tried to stave off the explosion of my cortex by pulling out the funniest book ever crowd-sourced, They Call Me Naughty Lola, Personal Ads From the London Review of Books. And it worked, for a while. Typical entry: "This column reads like a list of X-File character rejects. Woman, 34, able to bi-locate and start fires with the power of her pre-menstrual tension. Seeks human/Jovian hybrid with whom to start genetic processing plant (Bicester). Must have own car. Box no. 5258." I subscribed to the LRB on the basis of this book, but they don't even carry personal ads anymore, and the magazine shows up sealed in an annoying plastic bag, so I got angry all over again. But the British are staggeringly articulate, aren't they?
Oh, TCM, what happened? Do you want to show the classics, or do you want to sell wine and coffee mugs and bus tours of Los Angeles and New York? (San Francisco, there's your movie city.) Somebody is working hard to come up with themes -- cheesy monster day, divorce day, chain-gang day. Today it's priests, can you believe it, like Fighting Father Dunne, a shameless Boys Town ripoff with Pat O'Brien ladling on the sanctimony instead of Spencer Tracy. You absolutely could not make a movie about a Catholic priest and a bunch of little boys today. Which is good for the movies but bad for a lot of men who still have nightmares. Also, I know it was a conscious decision to turn Saturday mornings over to the kind of stuff theaters showed in the 1940s (Tarzan, Bowery Boys, shorts, forgotten serials), but think of the rest of us. We'll talk again. Thanks for finally getting around to Albert Finney, by the way. At this rate, you'll be memorializing Rip Torn around Thanksgiving. (The Cincinnati Kid, Cross Creek, Defending Your Life. Programmed it for you.)
I dreamed I was in a department store buying sheets and the salesman was Richard Nixon. Interpretation invited, if not necessarily welcomed.
In the latest dispatch from Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, it seems that after Barack Obama planted those "wire tapps" in Trump Tower, he buggered up the White House air conditioning so it never works right. Always too hot or too cold, whines President Hormonal. This bunch took weeks to master turning on the lights in the West Wing, so two-and-a-half years without figuring out the thermostat sounds about right. Also, why doesn't somebody investigate the book contract said to be worth more than $60 million to the Obamas? Must be something illegal about two black people being paid a lot to write books.
Well, publishers pay advances to authors in the expectation of earning the money back, and then some. Michelle Obama's Becoming has been at or near the top of the Amazon list since November, which means Crown Publishing has done very well. Barack Obama's first book, Dreams From My Father, written while he was barely known outside Illinois, sold well enough for him to buy a nice house in Chicago; Crown must have figured on his presidential memoir selling even better. That's how publishing works. (Calvin Trillin once proposed that the advance on a novel he was writing at least equal the cost of the lunch at which they discussed it. "Unrealistic," said his publisher.)
Crown is in "business" to make "money" without having to take refuge in America's super-generous "bankruptcy laws." Understand? Never mind, tell Ivanka to get out the sock-puppets and explain it without all the big words. If she needs a prop, there's a copy of The Pet Goat in the White House library.
Jeez, the Gilroy Garlic Festival? A six-year-old? And almost all the victims Latino? Mark me amazed and leave me in the lost-and-found. If they ever stop babbling about tonight's Democratic Jeopardy Tournament we'll probably hear that the killer's manifesto has surfaced and he hated brown people/women/LGBTQ/the onion genus. Then we'll hear that Gilroy is a rat- and rodent-infested shithole where nobody wants to live and it's Obama's fault.
Danielle Stella has come forward to save the Minnesota 5th from the satanic Ilhan Omar. Danielle's hobbies include shoplifting and forwarding QAnon* conspiracy theories. Danielle can be identified by the large cross she wears around her neck so as not to be confused with a Muslim. Muslims are grateful.
Boris Johnson, the new prime minister of "the United Kingston," has a friend called Darius Guppy. They once conspired/chatted amiably about having a News of the World reporter beaten up. Well, who hasn't wanted to do that? Now if only I could stop visualizing the two of them dining with Mr. Toad at Toad Hall.
*This is wrong. QAnon should be the support group for people who are addicted to idiot conspiracies and want to get better. Let's call the nutters QNation. QPlanet?
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 3:00 PM
1 Comments:
While less literate than the London Review of Books, don't forget the Bloom County personals column:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vxyGvLEbbLQ/XA3RDbxhFzI/AAAAAAAASDg/BVrO-QDjPXc6Zfzy2zwYxNxXcpI14N7ZwCHMYCw/s1600/RCO037.png
I miss Opus.
Post a Comment
<< Home