Milan Fashion Week got off to a head-turning start when Cavalli introduced his Winter 2008 “Polar Bear Vagina” line.
Friday’s Quizzlet: Grunters and Collectors
Appetizer: If you could be any current celebrity for one week, who would you be?
Rachel Weisz‘s husband isn’t really a celebrity, but if he were – that would be my answer. Because I’d cherish a week’s worth of long conversations about my feelings with her. From behind.
Soup: On a scale of 1-10, how much do you enjoy talking on the phone?
We’re looking at about a 2. I am a very social person, and I could sell ice to Eskimos, but if I don’t absolutely have to be on the phone – I’m not. I hate long voice mail messages – “Hi, this is Steve and I’ve just called you as you could have probably just seen by looking at your caller ID. Anyway, so I’m calling you and you can call me back if you want. Or don’t – maybe you’re busy or sleeping or something. Anyway…” Kill yourself. Nor do I like calling someone, getting their voice mail and then having to listen to the same sort of blather – “Hi, you’ve reached Steve at 555-4455, which you might already know because you just dialed it, and I’m not here to take your call right now. Look, I’m sorry I missed your call because talking incessantly on the phone like a 14 year-old girl is what I live for. Please leave your name, number and a short message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m done recording my voice mail message that you listen to before you leave yours and which I change hourly.” YOU leave a short message, frigtard. And kill yourself. I changed it a year ago for business reasons, but I still pat myself on the back for coming up with the greatest voice mail message in human history. It went: “Thank you for calling Dave. If you don’t know what to do when you hear the beep you probably shouldn’t be using a telephone.” Feel free to use that. Please.
Salad: Name a charitable organization to which you have donated.
I used to donate to the Boston Humane Society every year. The address stickers they’d send me adorned with puppies and kittens were just a bonus. I’ll find a similar animal charity to get involved with up here, although I might just start my own at the rate my own squirmy wormies are ravaging my wallet. Janet made a comment this morning about how cute their little grunts are, and we always talk about how they are incapable of not picking up any loose item they come across, be it a stone, piece of paper, human toe, etc. I then announced with an unnaturally straight face that if the puppies ever started a band, it would be called Grunters and Collectors. Come on, that’s funny.
Main Course: What’s a food you like so much you could eat it every day for a month?
A month? Come on, let’s make this interesting. I could eat feta cheese every day for… a life. And incidentally I do. Was there a Greek shepherd 600 years ago who sat milking a goat on a hillside in Crete, chuckling to himself about the addiction he was about to unleash? I liken it to the early settlers bringing whiskey to the Native Americans. Maybe I’ll start a goat cheese support group. “Hi, my name is Dave and I’m a fetaholic.” “Hi Dave.” “It all started when my father first took me to Molivos in Montreal circa 1984…”
Dessert: Have you or anyone in your family had the flu this year?
We’ve been a little busy with the cancer and the Alzheimer’s, thank you very much. Was I whining there? It’s better than self-mutilation with a snowblower – which was the alternative. Remember, what you’re reading is an “outlet”. On the issue of health – I bought a ridiculously powerful and expensive juicer last week and have been atomizing carrots, apples and oranges at a dizzying pace ever since. The intake is wide enough to take in a whole apple at a time and the motor sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet. I am getting my mother and father onto the regime as well in the hopes it will aid in their various maladies. I predict I’ll be crazier than Jay Kordich on bathtub amphetamines within a month.
Let’s get our little community back, kids. Answer these questions yourselves in the comments.
The Road House Curse
Dalton: So, you play pretty good for a blind white boy.
Cody: Yeah, and I thought you’d be bigger.
The 1989 movie Road House has always held a special place in my heart. Even moreso after I started working at bars in various capacities and found I could put a lot of Dalton’s Zen-like bouncing and shithead-management principles into practical use. “Expect the unexpected. Take it outside. Be nice.” Whoever wrote that movie obviously spent a fair amount of time in that dirty business themselves. Hopefully with shorter hair and looser blue jeans.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z0CngDuHcc[/youtube]
The cast of Road House is having a rough week. First the ever-so-awesome Jeff Healey dies Monday of pancreatic cancer at the tender age of 41, and now Patrick Swayze is reportedly close to death suffering from the exact same thing. It’s beyond uncanny and Kelly Lynch better watch her breathtaking Roadhouse heiney. Because we’ve seen this sort of thing before, kids.
Is everyone familiar with Poltergeist? It’s the exceptionally scary movie that Spielberg made in 1981 and an eerie series of events befell many of the people associated with the both original and subsequent sequels. And I’m not talking about nasty clowns, a pool full of corpses or a TV on the fritz. Here is a quick run down and upon some new research today it’s even worse than I remembered.
- She didn’t have a lot of screen time in the movie (“What’s happening? WHAT’S HAPPENING?!“), but Dominique Dunne who played the older sister, was strangled to death by her boyfriend just 5 months after production wrapped, kicking off the creepiness that would become known as the Poltergeist Curse. She was 22. During the fight she had with her boyfriend that ended in her death, a friend inside Dunne’s house turned up the Poltergeist soundtrack to drown out the noise of the two yelling outside.
- Heather O’Rourke, the actress who played Carol Anne (“They’re heeeeeere!”) died during the making of part 3 in 1988 from acute bowel obstruction. She was only 12 years old.
- Most famous for his role as “Chief” in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest, Will Sampson had a large role in part 2 and died from kidney failure shortly after in 1987 at 53 years of age.
- Perhaps the most detestable character of the series, the old preacher who turns out to be a walking spook, was played by Julian Beck. He died of stomach cancer in 1985. In all fairness he was 60 years old and is a bit of a stretch for curse victim consideration, but he did croak only weeks after filming had ended.
These four occurrences are just the tip of the iceberg, and there is no better account of the curse than Wikipedia’s if you’d like to learn more. Wild, wild stuff, Ed. Maybe at this point we should be calling it the Poltergeist Reuinion.
In keeping with my Roadhouse Curse theory, here are some facts to back up my hypothesis.
- Jeff Healey died very young earlier this week.
- Patrick Swayze is apparently at death’s door as I type.
- In 1994 Chris Collins, who played a troublesome patron who offered to let folks fondle his wife for $20, died of a cerebral haemmorage.
- Kelly Lynch is best friends with Sheryl Crow. Jesus.
- Red West appeared in 16 Elvis Presley movies.
- Sunshine Parker died of pnemonia in 1999.
- Kevin Tighe appeared in 1995’s Jade. Shudder.
- UPDATE: We lost Patrick.
The horror. The horror. Roger Hewlett, Terry Funk and Sam Elliot had better renew their life insurance policies because we’re obviously in for a really long and terrible… curse… here. No need to thank me, it’s what I’m here for. And I’m pulling for you, Patrick.
Dalton: If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice. Ask him to walk. Be nice. If he won’t walk, walk him. But be nice. If you can’t walk him, one of the others will help you, and you’ll both be nice. I want you to remember that it’s a job. It’s nothing personal.
Steve: Being called a cocksucker isn’t personal?
Dalton: No. It’s two nouns combined to elicit a prescribed response.
Steve: What if somebody calls my mama a whore?
Dalton: Is she?
Wednesday Wadio: Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl
It’s hard to believe this song only reached #55 on Billboard’s 100 when it debuted in 1970. Especially since it was up against such classics as “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family and “Everything is Beautiful” by Ray Stevens. Oh well, we can appreciate it fully in retrospect. My favorite element is the one note guitar solo which you can see in this video at 2:07 and again at 3:00.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBS3B2cZcFM[/youtube]
We wouldn’t see the one-note solo reach such great heights again until Joey Santiago brought it back in the late 80’s – but that was because he didn’t know how to play the guitar. So what exactly was Neil’s excuse? My first guess would be – drugs – but there are many theories as to the inspiration and genesis of the song. Here are a few I gathered together:
- Young has never said who the Cinnamon Girl is. He prefers to leave lyric interpretations to the listener.
- This song got Young in trouble with his wife. He had to explain that the Cinnamon Girl was just a person he came across while touring.
- The liner notes in “Decade” say he wrote this song about a girl he saw walking down the street playing finger cymbals.
- There was a music club in the 60’s called Cinnamon Cinder. It was featured in an Time magazine article about teenage nightclubs in the early 60’s. It has always seemed obvious to me that it was about the girls that would hang out at that club.
- I think that the real “Cinnamon Girl” was a young, attractive Native American, Latina or Pacific Islander woman with dark tan (read: more or less cinnamon-colored) skin and long black hair.
- This song was known to be a song for Pamela Courson… also known as Pam Morrison. I know this because I read it in a book about the Doors.
- Neil was rated as one of the ten best lead guitarists in a recent magazine and it listed this song as THE essential Neil solo. That had to be a joke, because this solo is the same note played over and over.
- Neil Young had a very high fever when he wrote this song and just picked up his guitar and wrote a song. He talks about it on an episode of Conan O’ Brien its not a very big secret.
What? No space aliens were involved? Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Cinnamon Girl, anyone? Didn’t think so. This song rocks, grooves, bashes and batters its way through to the end, and even if you don’t consider yourself a classic rock fan, watching the video is worth it just to see where the Coen Brothers got their inspiration for Anton Chigurh’s haircut.
Let’s Fire Up the Quattro!
New Amsterdam is a direct, and poorly disguised, descendant of my beloved Life on Mars – which the BBC offered to several American networks without takers. I just want to get that down for the record in the midst of an insanely busy day which, coupled with a penchant for buggery, prevents me from writing more.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Enn6zc9ug-o[/youtube]