Not-quite-as-exciting-as-it-sounds book of the week

Still looks like a good book, though.

Junie, I hardly knew ya

June Havoc died yesterday. She was a noteworthy actress in her own right (I even wrote about her briefly a couple of years ago), but she is probably best-known for being the sister of ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee. My favorite tidbit of information about her is that she and a partner once competed in a dance marathon and danced for approximately 3000 hours over the course of four months . . . . and came in second place.

Oops

Aw, man. I forgot to post yesterday! Boo.

Today, please enjoy this photo of a Golden Monkey that looks startlingly like Michael Jackson:

The joys -- joys, I tell you! -- of international travel

Have I mentioned that Sean and I, along with pals Curtis and Veronika, are traveling to Budapest later this spring? All we've done so far is update our passports, buy airline tickets, and book our hotel, and already the whole thing is turning into a major irritation.

For instance, my passport. This is a small thing, but it seems to sum up America's inflated sense of itself in the world. I had to renew my passport, and the new one arrived in the mail yesterday along with a pamphlet from the U.S. Department of State that claims, "With your U.S. passport, the world is yours!" Not, as Sean pointed out, "You can travel the world!" or "You can visit every country on the planet!" No, the world is now mine: I have a U.S. passport, so now Earth is mine. Mwahahahaha! There's also some sort of electronic chip embedded in my passport, which I find creepy. Fortunately for me, if the Department of State is going to be tracking my whereabouts based on the location of my passport, they will think I'm usually at home in a drawer.

Curtis told Sean yesterday that he had received a charge from Large Banking Institution, where we all have accounts, for his airline tickets. This bullshit charge is because Curtis made an international purchase (we're all flying British Air to Europe). Sean looked up our account online, and sure enough, we got the same charge. Sean called Large Banking Institution to complain and was told too bad, so sad. Not only that, any time we use our credit or debit cards out of the country, we'll be charged 3% of the purchase total for the privilege. Sean told the customer service rep that we'll probably move our accounts to a different bank because this is, after all, bullshit (he used more polite language than that), and received in reply what was basically a shrug. Thanks for valuing our business, Large Banking Institution! Time to check out Move Your Money.

Then Sean started poking around online to see how easy it would be to move our mortgage (or perhaps take out a second mortgage, the cash for which we would use to pay off our mortgage with Large Banking Institution). It turns out that we may have trouble refinancing because we've been so responsible about paying our mortgage on time every month, even making a few extra payments when we had the money, that we now owe little enough on it that we may not qualify for a second. Does that make sense? If we owed more money, we could get more money. But since we've been trying to pay it off in a timely manner, we may be out of luck.

[Weirdly, just yesterday I came across this quote by Thomas Jefferson: "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."]

Then Sean stumbled across a super-irritating news story about how airplane passengers are bringing too much carry on luggage onto planes, and now the flight attendants' union is working with some government agency or other to try to come up with new regulations to limit even further what passengers may take into airplanes. More surcharges for checked luggage! Goddamn, you gotta love the airline and banking industries for their chutzpah: they kick us, and we pay them for the privilege.

A little something for my collection . . .

Dexter bobble head.

Actually, given Dexter's propensity for wrapping his
crime scenes in plastic, I find this shot of the
bobble head much more disturbing:

What I learned today

For a couple of months now, I have been sloooowly working my way through a book entitled The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. It's not so much a book of obituaries as it is a book about obituaries -- about the joys of reading and writing about people, often very ordinary sorts, who have finished with this life. Today I came across a delightful section on euphemisms and a list that one may use to decode the obituary section:

We figure that the alleged killer probably is the killer. When the obit says someone was vivacious or sociable, we can guess what's behind these chirpy, mom-approved words: the departed liked to party; she felt comfortable on the barstool. Jude Law, playing an obit writer in Closer, got points with Natalie Portman and his audience by translating the code used at his newspaper: "'He was a convivial fellow,' meaning -- he was an alcoholic. 'He valued his privacy' -- gay. 'He enjoyed his privacy' -- raging queen!"

This coded understatement is an art, and part of the pleasure of reading and writing obits. [Hugh] Massingberd spent his career at the Daily Telegraph refining that art. "We all know 'he didn't suffer fools gladly' translates as 'a complete bastard,'" he told a gathering of obituarists in Bath, England. Massingberd is a great elegant bear of a man, and in a self-penned mock obit claimed to possess "an appetite of such magnitude that friends counted him three men at their table." He smacked his lips over his list as if it were a tower of profiteroles, then read it with lusty pleasure:

Gave colorful accounts of his exploits = Liar!
No discernible enthusiasm for civil rights = Nazi!
Powerful negotiator = Bully!
Tireless raconteur = Crashing bore!
Relished the cadences of the English language = Old windbag!
Affable and hospitable at every hour = Chronic alcoholic!
He was attached to his theories and sometimes urged them too strongly = Religious fanatic!
Fun-loving and flirtatious = Nymphomaniac!
An uncompromisingly direct ladies' man = Flasher and rapist!

Crushing on . . .

. . . Raylan Givens

My, what big teeth you have

This past weekend my best pal Norman and I took three separate trips out to the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood to catch the Red Riding trilogy. I can't even remember now how we found out about the films. Maybe we just spotted them in the Egyptian's newsletter, or maybe Norman read or heard something about them somewhere -- he has a knack for running across interesting and unusual things.

The three movies are based on four novels by David Peace. They take place in 1974, 1980, and 1983. They were originally made for the BBC last year, but they work marvelously as theatrical features. One guy wrote all of the screenplays, and each film was directed by a different fellow. The second film was my favorite, and much like the second film in noteworthy trilogies (The Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future II), it makes little sense if you haven't seen the first film and don't plan to see the third. Fortunately, Norman and I were game for all three.

It's hard to describe these movies without giving too much away. The story is inspired by the Yorkshire Ripper murders that occurred in England during the mid 1970s to 1980, but the murders are really just a jumping-off point. In fact, the first movie takes place before the first Ripper murders occurred and deals with the disappearances of three young girls who turn out not to have anything to do with the Yorkshire Ripper. The Ripper killings are prominent in the second film, and the third film ties the first two together. What all three are about is political and police corruption, as well as secrets that cannot remain buried forever.

Each of the movies presents the story in a different way, reflecting, I suppose, each director's take on things. The first movie seems more impressionistic than the others, but that may be because so much information has to be introduced that won't actually be dealt with until the later films. Here, the hero is a young crime reporter who sees a link between the little girls who have gone missing; his investigation leads him to something far different than he had expected, and he becomes a pawn in a complex web of corruption. In the second film, an outsider, a detective from Manchester, is brought into the investigation and he, too, finds himself in danger when he grows to suspect that one of the Yorkshire Ripper murders is actually a copycat killing. There are several central characters in the final movie, all approaching the case of the still-missing girls from different angles. (The Yorkshire Ripper has been jailed by this point.) The third film does a masterful job of tying the earlier movies together and filling in a number of gaps in viewers' knowledge about exactly what has taken place.

Is that enticing yet vague enough for you? Chances are you won't get a chance to see these movies in a theatre, but they're available from Netflix. If you're a fan of neo-noir or well-crafted police procedurals, I urge you to seek them out.

Literary love story, part 2

When I was in ninth grade, my family spent spring break in La Jolla. We rented a condo near the beach and spent every day lazing about, walking to the ocean, sightseeing, and shopping. One of the few places I remember visiting was a great bookstore. I like to think it was Warwick's, which is a fantastic shop that has been around even longer than I have, but I'm not sure. All I do know is that it was never difficult to talk my parents into stopping into a bookstore, no matter where we were, and I recall spending quite a long time browsing around this pleasantly-lit, well-stocked bookstore on a spring afternoon back in -- gulp -- 1981.

I spotted a book on the new release display with an eye-catching title: Maybe He's Dead and Other Hilarious Results of New York Magazine Competitions. Being a naive teenager, I conflated New York with The New Yorker and thought, "That sounds smart." I started reading and soon was laughing out loud -- this thing was both funny and smart. Dad was kind of a pushover when it came to buying books: as long as it was a paperback, it was almost guaranteed he'd buy it. So it's no surprise I walked out of that shop with Maybe He's Dead and spent the rest of the afternoon (and many pleasant hours in the following years) reading and rereading it.

I haven't looked at the print version of New York in years so I don't know if they still run their weekly reader competition. I can't find it on the magazine's website, so maybe they have discontinued it. At any rate, in every issue, it used to be that readers were invited to submit entries that followed a particular set of guidelines. For instance, one week it might be to submit an essay about "My First Day at School" written in the style of a well-known writer or celebrity. Another week, for the first two lines of a book -- the first "flavorful," the second completely deflating. Or indispensable lines from any genre of movie. You get the idea. The title of the book comes from the "What I Should Have Said/What I Said" contest:

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: "Look, there's a lot of traffic, and he's probably been stuck in a meeting all day and didn't get your message, or he'd have called. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about."
WHAT I SAID: "Maybe he's dead."

I read Maybe He's Dead over and over. It's a delightful book to dip into, reading a few pages here, skipping to another contest near the back of the book. My brother also became a big fan. We loved to read bits of it out loud to each other and crack the other one up. When I was a freshman in college, I had very little money to buy Christmas gifts, but I found I could afford to give my brother something when I discovered an enormous trove of New York back issues in my college library: I sat in a study carrel for hours, copying out in longhand onto notebook paper contest results from issues published after Maybe He's Dead came out, then took my crappy notes back to my dorm room and typed them up. I put them in a red paper binder and gave John the world's only copy of Maybe He's Alive and Well and Living in Argentina and Sending in Entries Under an Assumed Name (itself a response to a contest calling for sequels to well-known works) for Christmas that year. He still has it. Actually, I have it -- I asked to borrow it a few years ago and still haven't returned it. The entries in my cobbled-together booklet are every bit as funny as those in the original book, or at least they seemed so at the time I was transcribing them; I tried to mask my chronic giggles as coughs, and I'm sure I irritated plenty of my fellow library patrons.

Sean has read both the original and the "sequel" and has become a fan, too. Occasionally we'll toss quotes at one another. Here's a favorite:

Listed simply as a farm,
The place possessed a certain charm.
A bucket hung down in the well;
How far it hung I cannot tell.
A rustic path there was that led
To barns, a silo, and a shed.
One barn, perhaps, contained some hay,
Another cows. I drove away.

(That's from the "flat verse" competition, in which readers were asked to submit poems which "may rhyme as well as scan, but should be uncontroversial and devoid of any trace of emotion.")

In 1985, when I started working at a certain independent bookstore, one of the services we offered our customers was out of print searches. Maybe He's Dead was already out of print by then, and over the years I wrote up a number of OP searches for it; once a woman told me she wanted to find 7 copies to give to friends. That's the thing with this book -- its fans are passionate. If you click the above link on the title it will take you to the Amazon page for the book, which lists a number of used copies that are available. They are all spendy. People seem willing to part with this book only for a price.

Here's my favorite anecdote involving Maybe He's Dead:

Five or six years ago I was reading one of Nicholas Basbanes' books about book collecting (I can't remember which one -- probably Patience & Fortitude) on my lunch break. I was reading a chapter on Serendipity Books in San Francisco, a delightful-sounding shop with an arcane method of arranging books on the shelves -- the idea is that readers will discover books they didn't even know they wanted via serendipity. It was so pleasant reading about this used book shop that I closed my book and decided to pay a visit to the used book shop across the street. As I was idly scanning the shelves in the trade paperback and hardback fiction section, what should I come across but a copy of Maybe He's Dead! It should have been in the humor section, but serendipity (and five bucks, I think it was) brought us together. I gave that copy to my friend Curtis.

How to kiss a woman by Captain Kirk

Checking in

I got nothin' tonight. NaBloPoMo requires that I put in an appearance here every day this month, but I haven't got anything to say right now. Tomorrow, perhaps another book review, but tonight all I can think about is getting a good night's sleep.

Misleading book spine of the week

Can you read that? Impatient with Desire. Bright red flowers and lush greenery. I saw that spine among the advance reading copies in our store's break room and thought it might be some torrid tropical romance. I pulled it from the stack and was surprised to see this cover:

"That looks like Donner Lake," I thought, and I was right. This is not a tropical romance; it's a novel about the Donner Party. Score!

Quote of the day

"...Alcohol has so many empty calories. You get a nice little buzz from it, but I’d rather have a pork chop. It’s not the same euphoria, but it's comparable."

~ Bryan Batt

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Guinness cupcakes with Bailey's Irish Cream & cream cheese frosting
(recipe can be found here)

Where has the time gone?

Good lord. This just about sums up all I have gained by getting to level 548 in Mafia Wars.

Quote of the day

(image via Derek Cooper)

From 52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust:

"You're in an unusually good mood today," Anne noted as, whistling, I prepared to load a pain au levain into the oven.

"Parchment paper," I explained. "I can't understand why no one ever told me about this. It's like finding religion."

What I learned today

She (Cherie Currie of The Runaways) used to be married to him (Robert Hays of Airplane! fame).

Spring forward, my ass

I don't like Daylight Savings Time. (Or is it Daylight Saving Time? There seems to be some disagreement on teh internets. I favor the former.) Specifically, I don't like the night we have to spring forward. Spring forward! It sounds so upbeat and cheery! Relentlessly cheery . . . Really, all it means is that I lose an hour of precious, hard-won sleep. When I woke up this morning, my clock read 6:03, but I knew it was really only 5:03. I'll be doing that for the next week or so: "My watch may say it's 9 p.m., but I know it's actually 10 p.m., so good night." Wait. That's not right. Well, any excuse to hit the hay.

With the days getting longer, I've noticed it getting lighter earlier and earlier in the morning. I do like that it will now (for a while, anyway) be dark when I get up at 5:30 every morning. I consider myself a morning person, but I have to kind of ease into my day: I like to take it slowly, making coffee and showering in the dark, reading a book while eating breakfast, turning on my headlights on for the drive to work. But all the while I will be seething inside, thinking constantly of that hour of sleep I lost the night of March 13 - 14.

Beautiful book cover of the week

(publication date: May 1, 2010)

I love the simple color scheme, the bold typography, and the three essential story elements: one of the protagonists, his dog, and the enormous couch (a.k.a. "the Barge"). Oh, and the book itself is pretty awesome, too.

You say potato. I say, "Mmmm, potatoes!"

I'm beginning to plant my spring vegetable garden. There's not much going on yet, just some peas, lettuce, blackberries, and a few herbs. I have packets of all kinds of seeds and some onion starts just waiting to go in the ground, and I hope to get a lot of them going this weekend. The other day I decided to try my hand at something new: potatoes. I don't know how well they'll take to the Los Angeles climate, but I thought I'd give 'em a shot.

Here's their new home. Growing potatoes in the ground can take up a ton of space, so I thought a container of some sort would be the best way to go. One of my favorite gardening books, McGee & Stuckey's The Bountiful Container, explains how to grow potatoes in a garbage can. You drill holes in the bottom of the can for drainage, put some potting soil in, lay the potatoes in the soil, and put more soil on top. As the potatoes send their vines up, you continue to cover the exposed stem and leaves with more soil, until finally you have a container of dirt shot through with new potatoes growing out from the vines sent out by the potatoes 'way down at the bottom. A co-worker who has worked as a nurseryman advised me to drill some holes in the sides of the garbage can, too, to aid with aeration. (He also suggested I mix some common garden soil in with the potting soil, which I did not do. Sorry, John.) I raised the can up on some bricks to further aid with drainage, as well as covering the bottom of the inside with pebbles to keep the potting soil from flowing out of the quarter-inch holes. I am going to try growing them in the space between our garage and guest house, which is sheltered but gets some sun around midday. I honestly don't know how well they'll perform.

There they are! They are Yukon Golds, probably my favorite potato. (I say "probably," because I don't think I've ever met a potato I didn't like.) I'm already planning all the potato salads, hash browns and garlic mashed potatoes I'm going to make from them. Hmmmm, I wonder if I can freeze them? I'll have to look into that. I only used about half the seed potatoes I ordered from Seeds of Change, so I've asked my friend Sherri if she'd like the rest; if she says no, then I'm off to buy another garbage can and plant a second batch.

You can't have too many potatoes. At least, I can't.

Buttered side up

All day long I've been thinking about bread: about baking some warm, crusty, tender bread, about banishing the chill from my kitchen with a slowly preheating oven, about filling the house with the sweet, yeasty aroma of freshly-baked bread. And you know what would go really well with that bread? Some homemade butter.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world

The new Mad Men-inspired Barbies go on sale in July! At the very least, I would love to score one of the limited edition Joans.

Speaking of scoring, my sister's soon-to-be ex just landed a gig doing construction for Season 4 of Mad Men. I'm hoping to get an invitation to visit the set.

Literary love story, part 1

I am an avid reader and, as you might suspect, I own a lot of books. Most of my books have no special meaning to me: I read them (or, in the case of coffee table-type volumes, I paged through them), I liked them, and now they sit on my shelves as constant reminders of pleasant days past. Four books, however, I love beyond all others, and I love the actual physical copies of them that I own. I'm going to tell you about them this week.

First up: The Princess Bride by William Goldman. WARNING: Spoilers abound!

First, don't go whining, "The Princess Bride? Wasn't that some kids' movie 20 years ago?" Believe me, the movie, while an enjoyable trifle, doesn't come anywhere CLOSE to the wonderfulness of the book, despite author William Goldman's involvement in the film, and I'll get to that presently. Second, isn't that a bizarre cover? That's the original artwork that appeared on the first paperback edition in the U.S., and that was my first copy of The Princess Bride. My dad read and enjoyed it when the paperback was first published, and he passed his copy on to me. I was about eight years old at the time, and isn't that a weird-looking book for a little kid to be running around with? Also, if you're remotely familiar with the plot, you know that the artwork has absolutely nothing to do with the story. Ah, those 1970s-era graphic designers -- they were high, and thought all of us were, too.

The title page reads:

THE PRINCESS BRIDE
S. Morgenstern's
Classic Tale of True Love
and High Adventure
The 'good parts' version
Abridged by
WILLIAM GOLDMAN

In his introduction (which you absolutely must read -- it's part of the story), Goldman claims he didn't write The Princess Bride. He says his father read it to him as a kid and he loved it. How could he not? Little Billy was a sports fanatic, and when he asked if the book had any sports in it, his father replied, "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles." What is not to love, I ask you?

Well, years later Goldman gave his son a copy and was stunned that the kid couldn't get past the first chapter. Nothing wrong with the first chapter, Goldman thought, but all the really good stuff comes later. He'd never actually read the book himself -- his father had read it aloud to him -- so when he picked up his son's copy he was surprised to discover that there were a lot of ponderous historical and political passages he didn't remember. That's when he realized his own father had skipped all the boring bits and gone right for the passages that would entertain little Billy. Goldman made it his mission to abridge this fine book and make it entertaining and accessible for all.

[All of this is untrue, of course. The Princess Bride grew out of an ongoing bedtime story Goldman told his daughters when they were little. In one of his later books on screenwriting, he admits that The Princess Bride is his favorite of his own books and he has no idea how he came to write such a great story.]

If you buy a copy of The Princess Bride today, you'll notice sentences, paragraphs, and sometimes whole pages set in a fancy italic script. These are the places where Goldman "interrupts" the story to explain things or to point out that he excised a number of pages at this point and that the only thing you, dear reader, need to know is that "What with one thing and another, three years passed." That sort of thing. My first-printing paperback, and the first edition hardback I obtained many years later, don't have the fancy italic type passages. Those passages are instead printed in red, which is even fancier, especially in a $1.95 paperback. The brilliance of these fake edits is that the story keeps moving forward without any boring exposition.

The book apparently was optioned for film a number of times, and Goldman was either unhappy with how slowly its development progressed or with how drafts of the screenplay were turning out. Finally he bought the rights himself so he could have more control over his baby.

Those who enjoy the movie might be surprised at how lame some of the casting is, or rather, how very different the on-screen characters are from their literary counterparts. For instance, Robin Wright is very pretty, but she is not the most beautiful woman in the world; the entire first chapter of the novel explains how Buttercup becomes the world's most beautiful woman. Also, Wright's hair is blonde, and Buttercup's is the color of autumn, which I have always imagined to be more of an auburn shade, with perhaps some golden highlights. And finally, Robin Wright seems like a pretty smart cookie, while in the book, Buttercup is kind of dumb. She is lovable in her way, but she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I've always found Cary Elwes to be very bland, so the less said about his portrayal of Westley, the better. Perhaps the most egregious miscasting is Chris Sarandon as Prince Humperdinck. Sarandon is also a bit bland, and worse, he's just a lightweight kind of guy. Humperdinck is tough and mean and scary. He is shaped like a barrel and is described as walking "like a crab, side to side." Oliver Reed in his heyday would have made a fantastic Humperdinck.

One of the things I find interesting about Goldman's fiction, which is completely at odds with movies based on his books, is that a crucial plot element hinges on you not being able to see what is happening. That is, you're picturing something while you're reading, but it later turns out that you had it all wrong. In The Princess Bride, that plot element is the Man in Black. The moment you see the Man in Black, you know it's Westley -- he's wearing a mask, sure, but you'd have to be a moron not to realize it's Cary Elwes. In the book, you can't tell. The Man in Black is some scary, nameless, relentless pursuer who will stop at nothing to get his hands on Princess Buttercup, and it's a fantastic moment to discover that he is, in fact, Westley in disguise. Goldman does something similar in several of his novels, notably Marathon Man and Control, in which you picture the action occurring a certain way, and it turns out you're mistaken. It's kind of cool, actually, and it's a pity that the movie versions have to go and ruin a great thing.

Speaking of great things, my two favorite scenes from the book aren't in the movie. The first is the flashback sequence to Inigo's childhood, when his father practically kills himself trying to make the perfect sword for the six-fingered Count. Inigo briefly explains this sequence of events to Westley while they're dueling, but it's far more entertaining, not to mention detailed, in the novel. The other scene I love occurs when Inigo and Fezzik rescue Westley from the Zoo of Death. See, in the movie he's being held prisoner in the Pit of Despair, but in the book he is captive on the fifth level of the Zoo of Death. Apparently there wasn't enough money to film that sequence, which is really a pity because it's a thrilling and very funny little adventure within the larger story. I heard Rob Reiner loves that sequence, too, and was very sorry not to have the budget to shoot it.

I love The Princess Bride because it has everything (see above), yet nothing feels crammed or shoehorned into the story. It's funny and exciting and romantic, and it's as much about books and the love of writing as it is about the plot. I've read it probably 20 times, and I'm looking forward to reading it again this year. As far as I'm concerned, not to love it is . . . inconceivable.

What I learned today

When a body is cremated, it's burned at about 1500 degrees F. in an oven called a "retort." The head and the heart take a long time to burn. Gold and mercury fillings vaporize. After the cremation, there are a lot of bone fragments left, most of which get tossed out. The rest of the cremains (a great word!) get tossed into a big blender and are pulverized into a fine powder.

The adjective of the day

Definition #3 from dictionary.com: peevish; irritable; cranky.

Definition #4: How my tummy feels after being force-fed finger foods all afternoon and evening at an Oscar party.

Julie and Julia, reappraised

"These damn things are as hot as a stiff cock!"

~ Julia Child

I know Meryl's probably not going to win the Oscar tomorrow, but I'm suddenly wishing she would kick Sandra Bullock's ass.

Mission accomplished

Remember this? Done.

World traveler

Tonight Sean and I took new passport photos of each other. In fact, he's sitting next to me right now, cropping them to size on his laptop. We both need to renew our passports because we're going to Budapest in May -- Sean's latest feature film, Something Blue, is going to be screened at an international conference of public television programmers. While I'm incredibly proud of Sean, I never figured my next destination in Europe would be Hungary; I figured Germany or France, one of the major leaguers, would be my next stop. I feel both excited and confused about the prospect of this trip. I need to get crackin' with my copy of Top 10 Budapest and figure out what we're going to see and do while we're there.

I dug out my old passport earlier this evening. I'd forgotten that I'd put it in a bright purple leather passport folder. Really, what was I thinking? The photo, which was taken in 1988, is not a bad one of me. I look rather eager, as if I were thinking about my upcoming trip to England, which I probably was. The one thing I'd forgotten about, and which pretty much destroys any attractiveness I may have displayed in that picture, was my glasses, which cover half my face. I mean, I know it was the 80s, but really: what was I thinking? I'm certainly not going to reprint my passport photo here for y'all to see, but this picture should give you some idea of what I looked like then:

Lose the eyeglass leash, grow the hair out about three inches, add 30 pounds, and presto -- there I am. Or was.

The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir

A long but very seductive montage of scenes from classic film noir. Watching these clips, many of them familiar but some not (whatever is that movie featuring that long, spiraling drop down a water slide?), makes me want to dive back into the shadowy, erotic, and violent world of film noir and not emerge for a good long while.

It's official: I am a dog person

Strange

Every now and then I attempt NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month, which occurs in November and is a challenge to post something to your blog every day for a month. I have been successful exactly once; I usually give up a few days in or forget to post just once and ruin everything. NaBloPoMo has become more ambitious the last year or two and now challenges bloggers to post every day, any old month of the year. They do try to help bloggers out by suggesting a theme, which is always optional and is intended to spark some creativity. This month's theme, which spoke to me as others have not, is strange. I'll bet I could write about something strange or direct your attention to something strange every day for a month. After all, there's an entire internet out there, and there's some freaky stuff hiding in its dark corners.

For instance, here's a kinda strange picture:

That is a still (or maybe a collage -- it's hard to tell) from the movie that scared the living crap out of me as a kid. My sisters and I saw part of it on TV one afternoon when I was about 6, and our screams of terror at the monk who hid behind pillars and broke the necks of passersby with his whip brought our mom running; she turned off the TV and told us to go outside and play. Since I didn't have the forethought to check the TV Guide listings to learn what we'd been watching, the movie's title was lost to us; for the next three decades Mary, Susan and I referred to it simply as The Monk. Whenever one of us would describe the movie to someone, we were met with blank stares; no one, it seemed, had ever heard of a movie about a murderous, bullwhip-wielding monk, and I'm sure it crossed all of our minds at one time or another what maybe the three of us had experienced some kind of mass hallucination. (Interestingly, none of us remember the monk's cowl being bright red, so I'm guessing we were watching it on a black and white TV. Hey, it was the early '70s -- such things were not uncommon then.)

A few years ago, my friend Norman showed up with a DVD in hand: a thriller entitled The College Girl Murders, with the red-draped monk, his whip, and a couple of scared-looking women on the cover. I think he stumbled across it at his local Best Buy. Could this be it? It was! We watched it and it was a laughably bad movie, with weird, out-of-place broad comedy interspersed with some harmless T&A and the much-anticipated monk-on-coed violence. Stranger still, the whole thing was in German! What the hell was some local Los Angeles TV station doing showing a 1960s German horror flick on a Saturday afternoon? My new DVD was subtitled, but the version my sisters and I saw must have been dubbed; none of us recall subtitles. So bizarre. Even stranger was the fact that I had had no luck figuring out what this movie was, after years and years of inquiry -- it turns out that the German title is Der Monch mit der Peitsche, or The Monk with the Whip, which you'd think I would have stumbled across somewhere.

I still have my DVD copy, if you want to borrow it.