Dr. Theresa's Grocery Store Adventures

Yes, I have another episode of "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits" all loaded up in the cannon and ready to fire. But first I have to tell you that there was this guy in line behind Dr. Theresa in the grocery store yesterday, and she turned and looked at him, and to her amazement, he was an exact double of Rufus Sewell. She generously pointed him to an open lane for self checkout, for which he kindly thanked her. "AND HE WAS BRITISH!" Dr. Theresa concluded her tale, triumphantly drawing the conclusion that Rufus Sewell spends his free time shopping for groceries in Mississippi. This caused me to remember a story I have believed for many years, that Dr. Theresa encountered Tea Leoni in a Blockbuster Video parking lot in Atlanta, and gave her directions to the Margaret Mitchell House. And I'm sure it is true! Let us never forget the time I gushed fervently to either Francis Ford Coppola or a random man with a beard. Hey, look, man, when I was a kid, I heard that Ernest Borgnine (and George Kennedy? Or is that a figment of my medical condition?) had been spotted at Schambeau's grocery store in Bayou La Batre. Supposedly, he was in town making a movie called THE RAVAGERS, which I'm not sure even exists. POSTSCRIPT! I looked it up, begrudgingly, and it is called RAVAGERS, with no "THE" - much like GILMORE GIRLS, which I used to erroneously call "THE GILMORE GIRLS." Also, in the first version of this "post," I called the movie "THE SCAVENGERS." And George Kennedy is not in it. As predicted by many, my brain no longer works.

This Is a Great Story

I had to run out of the house and sit in a medical-type waiting room today, only this time it wasn't for me! Anyway, I left in such a hurry that I didn't grab the book that I reserve especially for doctors' waiting rooms. I snatched up the book most conveniently located instead, on my famous side table, which (the book, not the table) happened to be THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTONY by Flaubert. Now, I'm sure you remember when I was reading THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA and I was all wild-eyed and brimming with hysteria when I discovered it had a cithara in it. I was like, "Wow! A book with a cithara in it! Now I've seen everything! That's never going to happen again in MY lifetime!" So I was sitting there in the waiting room this afternoon and next thing you know I'm reading about a cithara. It just goes to show you, believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything.

McNeil Bits

To be clear, these are not "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits." These are little bits of McNeil himself, though one of them is connected to his bogie bits, if you will. He mentioned Bogart giving a bellhop a nickel tip, and I wondered what year that was, so that maybe I could calculate how much the nickel tip would be worth today. I have a lot of time on my hands. McNeil was at work, so he did not have his 700-page Bogart biography with him, but, to satisfy my curiosity, he paraphrased, from memory, an interview with the bellhop, who, according to McNeil, "laughed and made an excuse for Bogie, saying something like, 'I'm sure he mistook it for a quarter, haha.'" Thus we may conclude that the nickel wasn't worth a whole hell of a lot. Next McNeil bit! McNeil is always keeping me informed about all the greatest scientific wonders of the age! Sometimes, these developments disturb and frighten him - for example, the massive catapult that shoots satellites into space or the discovery of a giant secret planet. (And here I should remind you that you really need to access the "blog" on your desktop or laptop computer, so that you can enjoy the use of handy labels such as "McNeil's Greatest Fears." If you "click" on that one, it will take you to the numerous examples of all of McNeil's very greatest fears. We're just scratching the surface here! If you are looking at your "blog" on your phone, the labels do not appear, and therefore, much to your sorrow, you will never know the full and staggering extent of McNeil's greatest fears.) Other times, man's quest for knowledge fills McNeil with glee, such as when he was inspired by the idea of making diamonds out of skeletons, and suggested we take up graverobbing. Or when he read, and here I quote myself quoting McNeil, "an article suggesting that all the gold on Earth came from the collision of dead stars and [said], 'Let's go get us some of this!' seemingly suggesting a trip to outer space." This time, McNeil seems pretty hyped up about a company that, as he puts it, "sells sunlight from space. You open their app, and wherever you are (at night and on a clear evening, I presume) they project sunlight down from a satellite. Fine. Of course you could see how you might drive a neighbor insane. Or what a nifty burglar alarm it would be. Or now you would never have to drive at night, I guess." I take McNeil's word for these things. It's good enough for me! Finally, after watching HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK due to a 45-year-old recommendation of mine he found while cleaning out his attic, McNeil chose, seemingly at random, a movie from the "blog's" Big List of Movies. Now, I couldn't vouch for it, as I haven't seen it, except for the opening scene. It was one that came to us through a memorable description ("click" here) by noted musician Kelly Hogan, and the name of that movie was SOMEONE I TOUCHED. Summarized McNeil: "Everyone got syphilis but found out about how love works I think."

McNeil's Shimmering Li'l Bogie Bits

The new month I promised you is already upon us, and that means it's time for an exciting new installment of "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," this one cut-and-pasted directly from an email that McNeil sent me! "Bogie moves out of the house he shares with Mayo and checks into room 207 of the Beverly Hills Hotel - a small room just off the lobby. He orders ice, a glass, a bottle of beer, and hands the bellhop (Ken Leffers) a nickel tip." End of bogie bit. But! I do have a couple of questions, and when McNeil answers them, I'll let you know. 1. What year was this? And how much, then, would a nickel be in today's money? I guess that counts as a two-part question. And here is my second question. 2. How long was Humphrey Bogart married to Mayo Methot? Because we can't be very far into the bogie bits, can we? To put it another way, how far along is McNeil in the 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart from which he gleans his precious, shimmering bits?

Big August Wrap-Up

Well, folks, it has been a busy August sure as you're born. For reasons related to employment and general health, we have experienced the highest volume of monthly "blogging" since April 2016, when the TV blew up and I decided to "quit" "blogging" forever. Just a couple of notes as we head into September, with all its "mellow fruitfulness" as Keats put it, I think, or at least that's what they told me at the University of South Alabama. I got out my Aquinas this morning - shut up! - and noticed for the first time a handwritten, carbon-copy receipt tucked inside, belonging to the original owner. Now, you know how much I love it when I have clues about who owned a book before I did. You remember when I read June Havoc's memoir in the Million Dollar Book Club, for example, and the previous owner turned out to live in the same house where Eleanor Roosevelt used to live! "Click" here for details. Oh, what a time that was to be alive. When I read June Havoc's memoir, I mean. Those were the days. My Aquinas, however, formerly belonged to someone named "Father Michael," a priest, I assume. The clerk must have known him on sight! Or did he ask the priest's name, and did the priest answer "Father Michael"? Like, "That's all you're getting out of me, chump." Or maybe that becomes your official name when you're a priest. No, I've known a couple of priests in my life, and they had last names. (One of them, Father Dorrill, was the person who taught me the Keats poem alluded to above, which is a coincidence I only thought about later. Then I came back and added this intrusive parenthetical information just for you!) Or maybe "Michael" is a last name. But I don't think so. I mean, I know Michael is a last name sometimes, but somehow I think this priest just went around calling himself "Father Michael." That's fairly routine, I think. Show your parishoners you're just one of the fellas! It's fine. You can read about similarly named priests in the works of Bill Boyle, whose birthday is today. Happy birthday, Bill! Anyway, Father Michael got a ten-percent discount! For being a priest, I assume. I was shocked at the price he paid, though. It was $76.21 with tax, even after the discount! And that was on July 16, 1990. We're talking 76 big ones in July 16, 1990 money! I got it for less than half that, used, at A Cappella Books in Atlanta, where I once saw Bruce Springsteen making his wallet-toting lackeys pay for some art books. What else? Well, I watched a bit of WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? this morning, and do you remember how McNeil was always looking for obelisks in movies? That was his big thing for a while, and I guess I caught the obelisk bug! Speaking of health issues. Anyway, in WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?, there's an obelisk in THE VERY FIRST SHOT! Not merely the first scene, THE FIRST SHOT. And let me state for the record, it is the largest obelisk I've ever seen in a movie. It's bigger than Jerry!

I Fall to Pieces

Hey! I thought you'd want to know I found THE COMPLETE GODS AND GODDESSES OF ANCIENT EGYPT. They were on a shelf, of all places! Wedged right in between the Oscar Wilde bio we read in the Million Dollar Book Club and MAMMALS OF THE WORLD: A CHECKLIST. You know what else I found? This month's electric bill. I looked everywhere for it for a couple of days and then I just paid it by phone. My friend Quinn had already made fun of me once for still using paper checks. Well, she wouldn't make fun of me. She expressed incredulity. Anyway, it was on top of a tall bookcase for no reason I can figure out. Despite all the efforts of medical science, I'm falling apart. Hey, Ward McCarthy and I once tried to adapt Tom Franklin's short story "Grit" into a feature-length screenplay called I FALL TO PIECES, but as we expanded it, the story became goofier and goofier (it is not at all a goofy story) and, indeed, distored beyond recognition. So no one enjoyed that. We called it I FALL TO PIECES because in the story, the bad guy - and here comes a spoiler for Tom Franklin's short story "Grit," from his first collection, POACHERS, and my description may be inaccurate and misleading, so there are two caveats here, and counting! - as I was saying, the bad guy is put into a machine and ground into tiny pieces of grit. Also, the good guy was falling to pieces in a less literal way, now that I think of it. Pretty good title! And the song that should play over the closing credits is obvious, making the job so easy for the hypothetical music supervisor. Oh, well. This "post" brought to you by the new "internet" that is no longer the godawful AT&T "internet." If I hadn't quit social media like the hero I am, I would be on there every minute of the day griping about AT&T and feeling like a big he-man who was really going to change the world.

A Weird Creature of the Night

Here's one of the many, many narrators of THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA: "Pliny says that elephants have been taught to dance, and that once they were found rehearsing in the moonlight." When I read that, I decided to find out more! I scurried downstairs like a disgusting little rat and nosed around in the bookcase where I knew I had seen my books by Pliny the Elder when I was looking for something else. I had just two volumes out of the huge, sloppy pile of books that make up his NATURAL HISTORY, and I was pretty sure I didn't have the one with elephants in it, and I was right. Noticing that one of my Pliny (the Elder!) books did not have a dust jacket, I recalled that I had bought it used in San Francisco, and as I strolled down the sidewalk with my purchase in hand, that's when (as recorded previously on the "blog" - "click" here, you uncaring monster!) I either spoke to Francis Ford Coppola or some guy with a beard. Then I remembered that after I walked away, I thought, "I should have gotten him to sign this Pliny the Elder book. They're both Italian!" Well, now, in what we call "the present," I'm glad I didn't, because then I would have known for sure whether or not this guy was Francis Ford Coppola, and I might have been disappointed. And humiliated! As it is, we all dwelled in what may have been a pleasant illusion, and what could be nicer? I can keep you in suspense no longer! I got hold of the Pliny volume with the elephants in it, and the reality of the anecdote was much sadder than the light tone of Potocki's narrator would have one believe. That's what I get for wanting to know things. As you can imagine, once I had book eight of the NATURAL HISTORY, in which Pliny promises to tell us all about animals - and delivers! - I skipped greedily ahead to the bird section, hoping to find some owls, which were, indeed, forthcoming. "The eagle-owl is a funereal bird, and is regarded as an extremely bad omen... it inhabits deserts and places that are not merely unfrequented, but terrifying and inaccessible; a weird creature of the night, its cry is not a musical note but a scream." Scarily put! But old Pliny gives the eagle-owl (not to be confused with an eagle) a fair shake: "I know several cases of its having perched on the houses of private persons without fatal consequences." That's a relief! Now let's get back to THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA, which, although it hasn't had a single owl in it yet (except on the cover), does have monkeys riding vicuñas, which I only mention because my list of monkeys riding dogs has so few entries, whereas I am adding to this list of books with owls in them, upon which you never "click" anymore, all the time. Look, put down your quill, I know that a vicuña is not a dog. Which reminds me. I was reading that Lord Byron poem, and there's a character called the Chamois Hunter. And I was like, hey! This guy can't find his chamois, a small, soft cloth for polishing things! That's not really what I thought. What I really thought, given my capability for contextualizing, was, huh, a chamois must be an animal. I'm 61 now and I went my whole life thinking a chamois was just a kind of rag or cloth! I never gave a thought for the poor chamois who gave up its life, I assume, so I could polish up the trophy we won for the battle of the bands in 1989, largely because my brother was one of the judges. Which reminds me. Jon Host and I once rhymed "chamois" and "clammy" in a song.