I Hate Everything

I keep seeing this commercial where some curly-haired jackass bites into a giant freaking hamburger on a pretzel bun and then he is magically transported to a "pub" because this giant freaking hamburger on a pretzel bun is just like being in a "pub." And I sit there thinking, is that what people eat in pubs? A giant freaking hamburger on a pretzel bun? That looks like it has a lot of gross stuff crammed onto it? And then I think, what is a pub? I've been in a couple of pubs but they were in Scotland, so does that count? And I just asked Dr. Theresa, hey, says I, remember that place that called itself a pub that was on our street in Atlanta? And both of us remembered it and could even picture it, but we couldn't remember the name. But so what? Is it a pub just because you call it a pub? Anyway, I hate everything.

Talking Hamburgers

You know, in OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH, every character has a nickname. There's the Black Whirlwind, the Red-Haired Demon, the Dry-Land Crocodile, the Elegant Tiger, the Blue-Faced Beast, and so on. There's even the Timely Rain! But then toward the end of the second volume, we get the Magic Calculator. Ha ha! He's a guy who is good at math. But is that really funny? I don't know. Right after the Magic Calculator comes the Elfin Flutist. And I was like, are these nicknames becoming progressively less bad-ass? I was reciting such observations to Dr. Theresa in the car yesterday and she was like "Uh-huh." I can't say she seemed that interested! Then I tried it out on Tom Franklin at lunch. "The Magic Calculator!" I said. "Ha ha ha," I continued. Tom laughed politely. It all got me to thinking about an occasion quite a while ago when I was going over the history of humanoid hamburger characters in various media and Hanna yawned. And I said with wry self-knowledge, "Is my catalog of talking hamburgers boring you?" And Hanna said, "No, it's riveting." My wry self-knowledge was suddenly replaced with some other kind of self-knowledge! Maybe I need a personal focus group to try out topics on. You know what? I'm going to email Jimmy about the Magic Calculator.

Crying Horses

Last night in THE ILIAD, these horses started crying. These were some upset horses, I tell you! "Hot tears flowed from their weeping eyelids to the earth." And such. I thought "Surely Emily Wilson will give us a footnote - or an endnote, to be precise! - about these weeping horses." But why did I want to be precise in the middle of that sentence? That's the real question. Precision is always a mistake. Anyway, I did check and she provides a note about how the horses' heads are bending so low in grief that their glorious manes get dirty dragging the ground, but nothing about their red hot tears of woe. Now, bear in mind, these are magic, immortal horses, so they have different standards than the common horse you rode to work today. I'm kind of slow with THE ILIAD because I get in bed at night and everyone immediately starts stabbing each other. In the book, I mean. I'm like, "Wow, these guys never stop stabbing. They love it!" And pretty soon I'd rather be asleep. Poor me! I'm as sad as a horse sometimes.

The Hoary Story

You know, whenever I think about the word "hoary," which I do several times a day, as we all do, I think of it in pejorative terms... in the sense, though they do not use the word "hoary," you will find in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, when its characters quote what is, ironically (?), a hoary chestnut: "That gag's got whiskers on it." This, to me, these whiskers, these regrettable whiskers, this, they, they bespeak hoariness. If I were in a middle school essay contest about "What Hoariness Means to Me," I would quote, "That gag's got whiskers on it." BUT! All right, I'm reading ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC by Gideon Bohak, and Professor Bohak has used "hoary" twice so far, at least twice that I've noticed, and both times, he seems to mean it in a nice way! So maybe I have "hoary" all wrong, like everything else. Okay, so the other thing is, I'm reading in ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC about a certain root that will kill you if you pluck it out of the ground, due to its magical powers, so what you do is, well, you trick an innocent dog into doing your deadly dirty work for you. I don't like that. I don't like it one bit! But as I was reading it, I thought, "Hey! I already know about this magic root!" And the footnote informed me that the anecdote was extracted from a book by Josephus I have already read. It just goes to show you the benefit of reading mostly ancient things for a long time: pretty soon, you will be reading the same stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over because you have sucked out all the juices of antiquity, leaving nothing but the bone-dry husk. So that's something. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize for a second time that I am not in the manosphere (I read somewhere that the manosphere loves to contemplate ancient times with ugly little smiles on their stupid faces).

Magic Mauling

My current "daytime book" is... listen! I'm just going to cut-and-paste an email I sent to McNeil: "I was reading a book called ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC [by Gideon Bohak] and it mentions a Bible story which seemed vaguely familiar to me... I'm shocked that it didn't make a bigger impression in Sunday school, or maybe I have been repressing it all these years. Anyway, some little kids make fun of the prophet Elisha for being bald, so he causes a couple of 'she bears' (King James Version) to come out of the woods and maul them!"

Grits

Hey! Remember how I fretted that McNeil was never going to present us with any more of his special Bogie bits? I should have known that he had his reasons! The 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart, from which the bits were extracted, got really sad toward the end, he tells me. Then he gives us what I assume are his last few bits, and they are grim ones indeed. Grim bits, or "grits" as I call them for short. You have been warned! Writes McNeil: "I pick it up every once in a while, but it's sad when he's old before his time, and his wife is probably running around with Frank behind his back - and there's nothing he can do, really...except die." I told you it was grim! And as I have discovered for myself, after reading probably hundreds of celebrity biographies under the auspices of the Million Dollar Book Club, they all get sad toward the end. But I never learn my lesson. Hardly any celebrities get taken up bodily into Heaven like Enoch in the Bible. We should move on to happier things! Like, Adam sent Dr. Theresa and me a package of treats when we were sick. And, a week or two later, when Dr. Theresa was breaking down some cardboard boxes for recycling, she found a package of cookies in one them. A package of cookies we had overlooked somehow when we unpacked Adam's thoughtful gift. A package of cookies! Like a miracle! Is that a happy story? Because I can imagine a peevish reader, you know, Elon Musk or his teen BFF Big Balls, saying, "So what? Where's MY cookie?" Well, let's see. Speaking of the Million Dollar Book Club, we're on Kafka's diaries. So yesterday I was reading about a dream Kafka had about "a greyhound-like donkey, which was very restrained in its movements... its narrow human feet were unappealing to me because of their length and uniformity." This here donkey Kafka dreamed about had a "silvery shining breast." You know what I thought of! The supernatural creature the Padfoot, of course, a description of which provided the epigraph to my story collection MOVIE STARS. I'll save you the trouble of "clicking" on the "hyperlink": "In the neighborhood of Leeds there is the Padfoot, a weird apparition about the size of a small donkey, 'with shaggy hair and large eyes like saucers'... to see it is a prognostication of death." So we're back to death again, you're welcome. Grits!

The Old Garbage Hole

Remember how I told you I was on a podcast and forgot to promote the pilot that Pen and I made? Well, that's okay! The podcast is out but we just heard the pilot has been pushed down the old garbage hole into reject town. The axe has fallen. We got the old heave-ho. They're not making a show out of it is what I'm trying to say. For more information about how pilots work, see Uma Thurman's monologue on the subject in PULP FICTION. Anyhow! The host of the podcast, Andy Beckerman, is a fine young man. Fine young man! So don't disapppoint him. Don't you dare disappoint him! I won't see you harm a hair on his precious head with your cruel indifference! Don't listen to the podcast for me. No, just push me down the old garbage hole with all my hopes and dreams. It's where I belong! Listen to the podcast for him! Do it for Andy Beckerman! You know, this was my first real podcast appearance to my way of thinking, and I made some rookie mistakes, some of which have already been covered in previous "posts" for your convenience. Well, I should be clear. I've been on two other podcasts, but they don't count. One was about ADVENTURE TIME, and it was recorded back in the days when I would work on a story and then move on to the next story, and the next story, and lots of other stories, and I wouldn't see the episode or know how it had evolved until roughly nine months later, when it appeared on my actual television set, which is a thing people used to have in their homes. So these guys from the ADVENTURE TIME podcast had seen a screener of an upcoming episode ("Football," season 7 episode 5) and had a lot of great questions about it, but I had no idea what they were talking about. My brain was somewhere else by then! So they were a bit put out with me. I don't recall what I ended up muttering about instead. But you could barely call it a podcast. My fault, not theirs! Another podcast was the one I did with Ace Atkins when my book SWEET BANANAS came out. Now, that one, it was exactly the same sort of conversation Ace and I have when we walk around the neighborhood, so I don't count it. It was too easy! Anyway, with Mr. Beckerman, I got the idea that my main job was to talk, so I rushed to fill any microsecond of perceived silence with whatever wild notion pushed its way to the front. I was under the sway of what Edgar Alan Poe referred to as "The Imp of the Perverse."

Various Birds

I picked up a book called THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT by José Donoso, and I was like, hmm, can this obscene bird of night be an owl, perchance? But then I read the epigraph, which is by Henry James's dad, and he is giving his sons some life advice, including "The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters." Thanks, Dad! (I recall while typing this that some kind of weird monster bird of the psyche attacked Henry James's father in a novel by Colm Tóibín and also, presumably, in real life.) So last night I was in bed reading THE OBSCENE BIRD OF NIGHT and I came across "the ugly chonchón of ill omen." So I was like, "Hey, sweetie, look on your phone and tell me what a chonchón is." Dr. Theresa, who was also lying there reading, picked up her phone and looked up the chonchón. She said - and here I paraphrase freely - "It's a head that flies around by flapping its big ears like wings," which was pretty dang close to how it had been described in the book. I mean, exactly, really. "A horrible head would fly through the air, trailing a long mane of wheat-colored hair... flapping huge sinewy ears that were like bat wings." I flipped to the TRANSLATOR'S NOTE at the end of the book, in which Megan McDowell refers to the chonchón as an "owllike creature," and, as you know, that's good enough for me. Though maybe I should put an asterisk on it for now. Which reminds me! I finished that Julian Barnes novel and I didn't see any owls in it, but there were some luminous geese... I should say, "Luminous Geese," as he afforded them the dignity of proper nouns. As a person who plopped luminous owls into his second book, I took special note of the Luminous Geese. (See also.)

Sunny and Red

The book (see yesterday’s “post”) did inform me that Nelson Eddy had a bodyguard named Red Boyles, which I found hilarious for reasons requiring, I believe, no explanation. Furthermore, Jeanette MacDonald, later in life, enjoyed the company of a regular “escort” named Sunny Griffin, which is not a significantly funny name. But Sunny Griffin’s day job? Makeup man at a mortuary! I guess it is, if not funny, something... for a mortuary makeup man to go by a cheerful moniker like Sunny. But maybe I don’t know enough about mortuaries. One time Dr. Theresa and I were in a bar in Decatur, Georgia, I think, and a guy there was like... wait, his girlfriend was writing a big old grimoire by hand at another table. And this guy was like, “Did you know you can just walk in and get a job in a mortuary with no qualifications? That’s what I did!” And he was really happy about it. Now, we don’t have to take his word for everything. Then, as I recall, he said some weird stuff about remembering a photo he had seen on someone’s refrigerator of Dr. Theresa in the gloves she wore at our wedding, and something else weird about what she had done with her hair that day, which I think may have been his job? Fixing up hair at a mortuary? Or maybe I got that from an X-FILES episode. Then he said something funny about his hometown, or he said it in a funny way, which, though I can’t or won’t explain it right now, became the basis of a long-running inside joke between Dr. Theresa and myself. I hasten to add that the joke was not at the fellow’s expense, as you may be forgiven for thinking after he had made startling personal remarks about a photo of Dr. Theresa he had seen once and never forgotten, like he was Dana Andrews in LAURA, while his girlfriend scrawled evil runes in a big, black book (the latter being a detail I drew on, if loosely, for my 2016 story collection MOVIE STARS) but no, it had to do with the musical intonation he struck while saying the name of his hometown, that’s all, a very innocent bit of japery indeed. This little walk down memory lane has reminded me of a song by Bill Taft’s current band. I’ve gone to the trouble of making it the number one selection on the following very manageable 10-song playlist (for you to experience as you read this “post” over and over again) of bands featuring Bill and the cellist Brian Halloran, though another of their bands, Hubcap City, seems to have been scrubbed from the music streaming service entirely, just like Jerry Clower before it. (Hey, just to bring it full circle, which I don’t think I’m actually doing, Bill and Brian were both in our wedding! Brian played his cello as Dr. Theresa, before she was a Dr., came wafting down the aisle on the wings of love, one assumes.)

Pelicans Are Not Owls

Undoubtedly you recall with a complex admixture of emotions the uncanny raccoon coincidence I personally shared with the narrator of a book I was reading in the waiting room of a doctor. Well, hold onto your hat(s)! We happened to be driving across the bridge to Dauphin Island the other day, a bridge I had not crossed in at least 45 years - though, when we reached a certain part of it, I recalled a recurring nightmare the bridge had given me in my youth... and that night, after we had crossed the bridge in the "present day," I had the terrible dream again! For the first time in many decades. But that is not what I meant to tell you. Don't trouble yourself about my tortured mind! What I meant to say is that as we crossed the bridge I took note of several pelicans, marveling at how weird they were, and remarking upon said weirdness to my beloved helpmeet, and then! Then, when we got where we were going, I opened up the book I had last cracked in the doctor's office and immediately came to this sentence: "Li looked at pelicans on the pier and remembered how weird they were, with their handbag-like beaks." Now I should name the book, because I have quoted a sentence. It's LEAVE SOCIETY by Tao Lin. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking two things. One of them is "Does Jack Pendarvis, chiefly known for his interest in the owls of literature, realize that pelicans are not owls?" Well, now I do! Thanks! The other question you have is whether or not I considered that taking my book clearly designated for medical emergencies, and deciding willy-nilly that it could serve double duty as the book I take along when I am visiting my parents, might bring down an avalanche of bad luck to crush my body and soul. Once again, now I have. Too late! In a possibly related matter, Dad told us that Dauphin Island was originally called Massacre Island by the French explorers who landed there, because they found a big pile of mysterious bones. My brother confirmed as much on his phone. He didn't trust our father, I guess! Dr. Theresa and I described a weird animal we had seen doing an eerie, serpentine lope across the road in Coden, Alabama, and Dad told us we had seen a mink. Following my brother's bad example, I looked up a mink on my phone and confirmed its minkiness. Later, at a separate gathering, after we had told our mink story afresh, my brother-in-law and I had a discussion about the plural of mink, and HE looked up the answer on HIS phone! What a weekend. I said I had never seen a mink before and Dr. Theresa boasted that she had seen plenty of mink (an acceptable plural) being cruelly mistreated in the film GORKY PARK. (Note that Dr. Theresa, with her tender heart, ceased her viewing at that juncture.) I said it didn't count, that I meant seeing mink in person. Everybody ran out of the room as we got in a big screaming match about it, ha ha, not really! I just wanted to make sure you were still riveted by the tale, because a very important part is coming up. A few days after the mink, Dr. Theresa and I saw a pig run across the road just about 2 miles away from my parents' house! Now, this was an adorable little brown farm pig, not a hairy, scary wild pig with giant-ass teeth for goring and chomping. Reading back over the "post," I changed "giant" to "giant-ass" for extra emphasis. To anyone I have offended with my cavalier use of dirty language, I apologize. A bittersweet coda indeed: I looked it up on the "internet" in the course of "researching" this "post," and am now debating whether or not to tell Dr. Theresa that the animal in GORKY PARK is a sable.

How I Read Now

I take my membership in the 2-person book club very seriously, as will be confirmed when I tell you that I moved JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS into a secondary position so that I could more faithfully engage with the biography of Polly Adler. Look her up! I don't have time for your lazy ways. Having finished that Marilynne Robinson book, I now read JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS for 10 minutes a day, 5 minutes at a time, while I wait to take my blood pressure. I make it through an average of four pages a day, a pace to which the book makes itself strangely amenable. I first noticed while reading THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN that Thomas Mann is very interested in time - its reality and its narrative uses and representation. That's a great oversimplication. To keep going in the same simplistic direction, the only direction I know, Mann is interested in how an hour can pass like molasses, while a decade can disappear in a blink. It is for that reason, I assume, that my readings of his mammoth text, though brief and greatly separated, feel as if they are taking place in a single unending and languorous haze. It may further interest you to know that I believe I was pronouncing "Thomas Mann" correctly for most of my life, and then, recently, I started thinking I was doing it wrong, so I started pronouncing it a new way, but now, whenever I say it out loud, someone says, "Who?" and I say "Thomas Mann" and they say "Oh..." Then they look at me like that one emoji with a straight line for a mouth. (See also, the time a smart-alecky undergrad corrected my pronunciation of "whilst" in front of the whole class, even though I was saying it right and he turned out to be nothing but an ill-informed little and, as I recall it, wealthy jerk with enviable golden locks. On the other hand, what is this bitterness? I am sure he turned out to be a very nice young man and he did demonstrate considerable ability in the classroom. His single flaw, now that I really contemplate it, was his unwarranted confidence about how to pronounce "whilst." There are worse crimes! God bless you, the handsome and polished pebble in my shoe! See also, then, the time I mispronounced the name of Ashton Kutcher, and was justifiably laughed out of the classroom and made to hang my head in dirty shame.) Oh! But what I came here to say is that though (as I have reiterated countlessly) I am under no obligation to tell you about more than one owl in a book, and I have already told you about two owls in JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, old Potiphar was just sitting in his special room where he sits as the sun goes down, and behind his head as he sits in a silent, noble fashion, there is artwork representing owls, falcons, and ducks, I believe in that order, but the book is all the way downstairs, under my blood pressure machine, so I guess we'll never know.

Important

By now you are intimately familiar with my new habit of reading old comic books at the close of each busy day. Among the most recent delivery from Tom Franklin was nestled one about Zatanna, the superhero who is also a magician. As you can see in the illustration above, there was an allusion to Phyllis Diller in the old Zatanna comic book. This is important information that I need to relay to McNeil right away. As he is, for all practical purposes, the only person still reading the "blog," I believe that my mission has already been accomplished. But I am going to check in with him privately as well, because I also need to tell him about a double entendre accidentally (?) made by the Flash in the same comic. It is too saucy to be printed here on the "blog." Now, I am sure you will never forget the time I found an owl in an Alan Moore Swamp Thing comic book. And I know you feel as strongly as I do about the time I found out Jan Potocki thought he was a werewolf. (You know, you can "click" on all these "links" to refresh your memory of these matters.) The latter incident caused me, somewhat indirectly, to purchase a copy of Potocki's novel THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA from Square Books. I could almost swear I already had a copy of it at some remote time in the past, but that mystery is forever shrouded in the mists of my mellow golden yesterdays. Anyhow! This paperback of THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA features as its cover the very same Goya etching lovingly reproduced in Swamp Thing, bestowing the presence of its own scary owl upon the later work. Whether there is an owl in the text of Potocki's novel, I have not yet had an opportunity to ascertain. However, my happiness remains unmuted, as the coincidence allows me to inform you that one of the old comic books I read last night in bed happened to be a pre-Moore Swamp Thing, in which some punk-rock vampires used hollowed-out pinball machines as coffins. One punk-rock vampire explained the uncanny similarities between being in a mosh pit and his existence as one of the bloodthirsty undead, a monologue that put me in mind of the fear of beatniks exhibited in pop art of an even earlier era.

Three Times the Owl

As I often do between book-club books, I picked up Ovid and randomly opened to yet another owl: "three times the owl/ Wailed out his cry to warn her." I don't want to say what the owl was upset about, but it was pretty sick stuff. Let's just say the owl had some good reasons! You're once, twice, three times an owl, and I love you, to paraphrase Lionel Richie. Which reminds me: back when I went to Sunday school, some folksy Christian troubadours came by as a special treat one time, and I was mesmerized by a short-haired young woman in a French-style striped shirt (you know, like Jean Seberg in BREATHLESS, basically, though I had not seen it at the time), who strummed her guitar and sang words about Jesus to that Commodores song, as I still remember: "You're once, twice, three times a Savior." That's what we thought was cool!

Nestled Together

I'm rusty at the old jotting game. As you know, it used to be that when I went on a trip, I jotted everything for you in one of my dear old jotting books. Everybody was simply crazy about that! But then I stopped "blogging," and the last time I went to Los Angeles, why, I hardly even mentioned it. But since then, I quit social media, and as a result, I no longer have anything to do aside from the ocassional jot. Bearing that in mind, I shall now attempt to make you one of those lists that I used to make that everyone adored so much. 1. I asked a question at the front desk of the hotel and the desk clerk said he knew my voice! He said, "Are you Root Beer Guy?" I screamed back in his face, "YES!" That has never happened to me before (being recognized as Root Beer Guy, I mean; I have screamed enthusiastically into many faces), and, I dare say, never will again. (Full disclosure: on a later date, I overheard him telling a coworker "Did you know that guy is the King of Root Beer?" So maybe he didn't have the solid grasp on my character that I thought.) 2. I don't usually use conditioner on my hair. In fact, I would almost go so far as to say I never do. BUT! I figured, what the hell, this hotel conditioner is free. I'm going to put it on my hair! What's the worst than can happen? I also cleaned out my wallet. 3. Rode around with Richard, the chillest Uber driver in the world. If you're ever in California and need a ride, ask for Richard! 4. Remember the drugstore where I famously bought my expensive brush? And, let me double check, did I buy an expensive comb there? Once again, I scream, "YES!" Anyway, that drugstore is gone now! It's just not there. How could they have gone out of business? They must have been raking in a fortune on brushes and combs alone! All kidding aside, I miss you, fancy drugstore. Go with God! 5. I had steak Sinatra two nights in a row, once at Dan Tana's and once at The Smoke House. (I think I have erroneously called it "The Smokehouse" a few times in the past, but their official signage separates the smoke from the house.) I may have formerly insisted that Dan Tana's steak Sinatra is superior to the steak Sinatra at The Smoke House. On this ocassion, however, I must advance the opposite claim! The old Smoke House waiter stood and mixed the spaghetti in with the steak and peppers right at the table, but not with showy theatricality, no, just in the background, in a workmanlike fashion, getting the job done without undue fuss, which, of course, did not add to or subtract from the toothsome nature of the dish in question... OR DID IT? The result, in any case, was delectable. 5. I had stars in my eyes whilst consuming my steak Sinatra that night, for across the table from me sat Jesse Moynihan and his brother! Now, I have never met Jesse's brother before, and, as I have often boasted (most recently a few seconds ago), I quit social media. The only thing I miss about social media is "Pickle Minute," a thing that Jesse and his brother and some of their friends do on Instagram. I'm a big "Pickle Minute" fan! And there, at The Smoke House, I felt I was in a live episode of "Pickle Minute," as Jesse's brother took a photo of me pointing at a fried pickle. For, yes, having spotted fried pickles on the menu, how could two of the hosts of "Pickle Minute" resist placing that order? They could not. 6. Also at dinner, a guy named Joe I met at a party in 2012 and haven't seen or talked to since, but I remembered him, because you meet so few people you can talk about Anthony Braxton with! 7. Had a meeting scheduled at the Bob's Big Boy restaurant where David Lynch used to go every day. It turned out that Bob's Big Boy was too crowded to host the meeting, to my deep chagrin, as I thought it a wonderful coincidence that Lynchian muse Laura Dern was at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, whence I had come, at the very same time! 8. After the meeting, I walked around the neighborhood with a person who had been in the meeting with me. We wandered about, talking about the meeting, and what it meant, and sharing our regrets about the salad place across the street from Bob's Big Boy, where we had ended up. Finally, in our circular perambulations, we saw Bob's Big Boy looming before us. "Should we?" said the person. To which I again screamed, "YES!" By now, its lunchtime rush concluded, Bob's Big Boy was quite accommodating. The person ordered a slice of strawberry pie, because the Bob's Big Boy menu stated that the strawberries were "nestled together." When the pie came out, this person observed joyfully, "They ARE nestled together!" The person went on to declare the strawberry pie at Bob's Big Boy "maybe my favorite piece of pie." 9. I brought some Henry James to read on the airplane. I always found him tough going in the past. Anyway, this time, his characters were making lots of wisecracks and I was getting into it. 10. Well, I have left out many of the nice people I saw on the trip, and interesting events, but my jotting is not what it used to be. Special mention must be made of Hanna K Nystrom, who was flying in from Sweden just as I was about to fly back to Mississippi. She thoughtfully made time for breakfast in the brief Sweden-Mississippi overlap we enjoyed. We talked about how cold and gray it was. (Los Angeles was chilly and gray for the whole of my stay, once again lending some weight to the Lorenz Hart lyric.) Hanna said it was colder than Sweden!

The Missing "Link"

As is his God-given right, nay, his responsibility, McNeil was "clicking" around on his birthday tribute the other day, when he came upon a "post" in which I reported some of his research into the subject of the Pitcairn Islands, including a "link" that McNeil had provided as a source for more information. McNeil took time from his natal celebrations to alert me that the "link" no longer works. Or, to be more precise, it works, but it leads to no information about the Pitcairn Islands. Instead, curious readers will be led to an article about "Pixie Haircuts for Older Women." As I sat there thinking about it, the realization occurred to me, with a growing sense of dread and regret, that the "blog" has been going for more than 15 years. And yes, I had noticed from time to time that some of the old "links" have become quite, quite deceased, and some of those that are not deceased have long been taken over by other entities. Zombie "links," perhaps we may call them. Then I thought to myself, "Jack," I thought, "you need to go back and check every 'link,' and if it has been compromised, you need to redirect it to the very explanation of which you are contemplating the composition," in other words, dear "blog" reader, the paragraph you are enjoying right now. "That should occupy your mind and distract you from encroaching despair," I told myself.

Ghost Nap

Well, I decided to take a nap. And I was like, "I sure wish I had something to read while I drift off to sleep." You see, I'm reading a biography of Tom Stoppard right now, but it is too bulky for napping purposes. There is no way to get comfortable with it. Also, the last thing I read in it was the phrase "Her poems are moist and pulsating," which I suppose was meant to be a compliment, but filled me with a Cronenbergian sense of horror no doubt unintended by the author. So I checked out the bookcase next to my side of the bed and found an academic treatise on ghost sightings, which provided just what I was looking for, filled as it was with deadpan sentences of the type I enjoy, such as, "The obvious explanation for headless ghosts is that they represent those who had their heads chopped off." A few pages later, there is a quotation from an 18th-century man who thought he saw a ghost: "I perceived my hair to heave my hat from my head, and my teeth to chatter in my mouth." That gave me a chuckle! A hat popping off a head in fright was something I might have associated with the capering of Stan Laurel, but I never before read a claim that it had happened to an actual person in real life. Soothed by such imagery, I fell into a dreamless slumber.

Unrequited Owl

Tom Stoppard, as we learn from this biography of him, wrote many letters to the object of his unrequited love, in some of which he playfully referred to her and himself as "the Owl and the Cat." The author of the biography does not specify which was the owl and which the cat, nor is any mention made of the possible influence of Edward Lear on Stoppard's whimsical entreaties. The one thing we know for sure is that this biography of Tom Stoppard is a book with an owl in it. As long as you are here, I think I should tell you about some developments. Do you remember when I rewatched the film EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE and took note that Mel Tillis sang "sexy smile and Robert Redford hair" in the chorus of "Coca Cola Cowboy," rather than the song's actual lyrics, "Eastwood smile and Robert Redford hair," possibly out of deference to the film's star Clint Eastwood? Why, of course you do. Well! According to wikipedia, the lyric in the movie is "sexist smile and Robert Redford hair." I have done nothing to either refute or confirm wikipedia's claim, but it doesn't make any sense at all. Why would Robert Redford's luxurious, shining locks, which are famously attached to a head encasing a left-leaning brain, be associated lyrically with sexism? Furthermore, the eponymous "Coca Cola Cowboy," one would imagine, drinks Coca Cola, in contrast with the rotgut favored by "authentic" cowboys in disreputable saloons, whom one pictures harrassing barmaids and whooping it up in a sexist fashion. Therefore, the "Coca Cola Cowboy," I would argue, whatever he harbors in his heart, presents a smooth and shallow front, all empty calories and fizz, his immaculate, gleaming teeth as well-tended as his much-brushed coiffure, and is less likely to reveal a "sexist smile" than the fictionalized version of a cowboy to whom he is presented as a contrast. Having done no investigation whatsoever into the matter, I would like to state that I am right and wikipedia is wrong. But in the interest of justice, I couldn't keep the existence of wikipedia's questionable interpretation to myself.

Chicken in the Air

I was watching TO CATCH A THIEF, and there were Cary Grant and Grace Kelly eating chicken and drinking beer. Naturally, I was like, I must email Kent right away! Kent loves eating chicken and drinking beer! I entitled the resulting email "Chicken and Beer," which reminded me that Kent had eaten in the Atlanta airport once, having stumbled upon his ideal restaurant there, a restaurant delightfully named "Chicken and Beer." I did not report on the matter at the time because I had given up "blogging" forever. Kent emailed back that he had recently fried chicken for himself for the first time, with pleasant results. Now, for the record, I must say that Grace Kelly appears to be eating a sandwich, not chicken. Maybe it is a chicken sandwich! We can only hope. I can't recall if the type of sandwich was specified. Cary Grant really appears to go to town on his chicken, but when he is done, and tosses the remains into the picnic basket, I can't say that it looks as if he has really had much chicken at all. In fact, I was appalled at the amount of chicken he appeared to be wasting! Then he starts smooching it up with Grace Kelly, and kind of leans her backwards over the open picnic basket, and I could only imagine that her hair was getting on the chicken. Perhaps I was focusing on the wrong thing. In conclusion, I happened to be emailing my friend Megan about TO CATCH A THIEF and, in response, she brought up, independently, of all scenes, not knowing of my recent correspondence on the matter, the chicken scene! Chicken is in the air. And in the hair!

Humor

They all said McNeil was crazy! Well, me. I said it. I said McNeil was crazy when he claimed that every 1960s movie features a desk with an obelisk on it. But today I watched ONE MORE TIME, which is a 1960s movie for all practical purposes, and, as you can see from this photo I took of the television screen, it had a desk with an obelisk on it. Now, there is no Jerry Lewis scholar I trust and admire more than Chris Fujiwara, but upon the conclusion of this repeat viewing, I must say that I have come to take exception to his description of ONE MORE TIME as "lacking in humor." For example, there is an old butler who is very slow, and as the old butler slowly totters across the room with a silver platter, Sammy Davis Jr.'s moustache and sideburns turn gray, and he (Sammy Davis Jr., transformed by his interminable wait) mutters to himself in a feeble, distracted manner indicating great age. Later, in an unrelated incident, he sneezes all the icing off a cake! A second sneeze issues forth with such force that an entire roomful of people is toppled to the floor.

Where Were You

No doubt you remember exactly where you were that day in 2014 when McNeil and I watched the Jerry Lewis movie THE BIG MOUTH and noticed that Jerry and his leading lady wore nearly identical outfits in every scene. Well! Mark your calendars, because last night I was watching THREE ON A COUCH, and in Jerry and Janet Leigh's first scene together, their jackets appear to be made from closely related bolts of cloth. I leapt up and took a photo of my TV screen! Pardon the greenish reflections in Janet and Jerry's hair - the fault of a reflection on this end, not the frankly sumptuous color design of THREE ON A COUCH. Postscript! My friend Juan Martinez, author of the top-notch short story collection BEST WORST AMERICAN, tells me the pattern on the jackets is a Prince of Wales check, AKA Glen Plaid. Write it down!