Abalone Biscuit Stick

1. McNeil dreamed - shortly before I left for Burbank on a bureaucratic mission that would stun and bore you - that I was transformed into a toddler and Donald Trump hand-fed me a biscuit. I did not report the dream at the time because I was about to leave on my trip and it struck me as a dream of ill-omen, best blocked out of my mind until my safe return. 2. I know you want to know what book I read on the airplane. Well, you're going to be so glad you asked. See, I had this one Virginia Woolf novel all picked out. It was the right size for the airplane. The content, delightful though I am sure it would have turned out to be, was of secondary interest. You see, I like to print out my boarding passes and slip them between the back cover and last page of whatever book I am reading on the airplane, and I don't like it if the edges of the boarding passes stick out too much. My boarding passes are printed on letter-sized sheets of paper, which I fold over once, maintaining the creaseless integrity of the printed matter. I told you you'd be glad you asked! Let's move to a new numbered section as I explain why I print out my boarding passes rather than checking in via an app on my phone. 3. My phone is too old! It rejects the app! 4. Anyway, I'm going to quote an email from Jimmy Cajoleas now. I don't think Jimmy will mind. "[Have you] read Water Margin? I'm halfway through the Sidney Shapiro translation (he calls it Outlaws of the Marsh) and I think it's one of the greatest things I've ever read in my life." 5. That made me remember I have a copy of that very translation! When I go to bed at night, I often lie on my side facing a bookcase where, as I recline in that position, Outlaws of the Marsh finds itself in my eyeline. I bought it in 2007, I think, and never opened it. And just about every night I look at it from bed and think, "Will I ever read that? I certainly doubt it! It's in a cardboard box containing four volumes!" I bought it at Square Books because when we first moved to Oxford, we had some people over for dinner, and one of them was teaching it in a class, and I got so excited hearing about Outlaws of the Marsh that I ran out and bought it and didn't open it for almost 20 years. So, the night before my flight, I separated Volume 1 from its cardboard-bound brethren. Though it is part of a larger set, the first book is the size of an old-timey mass-market paperback, hardly sufficient for securing my boarding pass in the required fashion. This was a new experience for me. Just when I thought I had done it all in this old world. Walking around with most of my boarding pass sticking out! Like some kind of hippie! 6. My seatmate on the airplane saw my iPod. Unlike the last person who saw my iPod on an airplane, she was not impressed. She said, "My husband has one of those and it drives me crazy." She didn't say why. 7. On a more positive note, she announced that she was from the same town as the woman who wrote the book THE EGG AND I, and she knew the descendants of the book's characters. She couldn't remember the name of the female lead in the movie version and I blew her freaking mind by saying "Claudette Colbert." Anyway, she was saying that Ma and Pa Kettle (supporting characters in the movie) were real people and I speculated that later movies about Ma and Pa Kettle (are you still reading this?), such as MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO HAWAII, were probably not based on true stories, as they were about fanciful things like winning a trip to Hawaii in an advertising slogan contest. Anyway, I don't have time to explain Ma and Pa Kettle to you. I "posted" a publicity still of them above, and I'll let that do the work. The important thing is that despite my know-it-all attitude about Claudette Colbert there is no movie called MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO HAWAII, as I learned when I looked it up minutes ago. It's called MA AND PA KETTLE AT WAIKIKI. And they're just working on a pineapple farm in that one! They didn't win a contest, as I needlessly misinformed my seatmate. Further research (WHY?) led me to discover that Pa Kettle does compose a prize-winning jingle in MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO TOWN. And that is the story of how all the Ma and Pa Kettle movies I watched as a kid eventually got mixed up in my head. Most of all, I was shocked to learn that Ma and Pa Kettle were from this woman's hometown in the state of Washington! I don't know where I assumed they were from, but it wasn't there. Sadly, we must now move on from Ma and Pa Kettle. I know you're disappointed. 8. My Uber driver's wife makes a living singing the national anthem at sporting events! You'd think he would have an interesting story about how someone gets into that line of work, but he didn't. 9. I broke my glasses. 10. I saw Kate, who brought with her a treat from Hong Kong: abalone-and-oyster-sauce flavored "biscuit sticks" (the latter two words in English on the box). They were thin, crispy little sticks and I could eat them all day. Savory, with, as Kate remarked, a little of the sweetness of the abalone coming through. 11. She also brought something from a side-trip to Japan: a sake-flavored Kit Kat bar. We tried that, too, and it made us want to throw up. 12. I ran into Cole Sanchez, who remarked, of my shirt, "Do we have the same shirt?" (He was not wearing the shirt - let me be clear: he was wearing a shirt, just not that one - but yes, it did turn out he had the same shirt at home.) Now, you must know, in order to truly appreciate this story, that we consulted Cole while writing the sartorially concerned Adventure Time episode "Bespoken For," because he is a stylish man who knows everything about clothes. So hearing that Cole and I have the same shirt made it a big night for me. I was telling everyone who would listen, "Cole and I have the same shirt!" Cole went home and rethought his life. 13. At the departure gate for my trip home, I sat next to a Pepsi vending machine. A man came and stood in front of it and coughed down into my face a couple of times. He stood in front of the Pepsi machine for five minutes, examining the various Pepsi products on display. Then he walked away, never to be seen again. 14. Dolph Lundgren is on my flight! Yeah! He's speaking Swedish! In the middle of a Swedish phrase, I hear him say "tough guys" in English. I thought, "If anything bad happens on this flight, he'll save us!" Dolph Lundgren's drink of choice? Cranberry juice. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he was doing some kind of seated shadow boxing. His feet were subtly and elegantly "dancing," as I believe it's called in the boxing ring, as he cast some punches toward the seat back in front of him. He put on his shades before shadow boxing. "I'm living in paradise!" I jotted in my jotting book. The very sweet flight attendant, Diana by name, turned out to be a Dolph Lundgren fanatic, and addressed him with such giddy enthusiasm as the plane began its descent, to which he responded in such a cheerful and gracious manner, that I felt emboldened to turn around and tell him that he had given me confidence and peace in case of emergency.

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).

The Bouillon Incident

So Dr. Theresa and I were driving back from Memphis in one of those cars with that there satellite radio in it. And we tuned into an old-time radio drama starring Orson Welles, in which he kept talking about "meat juice," and, in fact, the title of the episode was "Meat Juice." I can tell you don't believe me! So "click" here and check out the title of episode 26! Well, after a bit, we began to get tired of hearing Orson Welles say "meat juice," as hard as that may be to believe. So we tried out different radio stations, and we were singing along, often inserting the phrase "meat juice" into a well-timed pause. Then we landed on an episode of American Top 40 from 1975 (presumably a different episode than the one we listened to in 2012 under remarkably similar circumstances), and old Casey Kasem spun "Third Rate Romance," a rather sleazy tune from my childhood. What filth my parents allowed me to listen to! Not recalling all the words, I bellowed over one verse the nonsensical imagery, "He was sittin' on a meat juice throne" and Dr. Theresa jumped in to provide the next line, "He was completely covered in foam." And now you can see why our 30th wedding anniversary is coming up pretty soon. You know what? I was going to save this photo (above) for that occasion, but now suddenly seems like the right time to show you Dr. Theresa (pre-doctorate) pointing at a hot dog in 1998. You may be wondering how I can date the photo with such startling accuracy! Well, I'll tell you. Kent Osborne took that photo at a professional baseball game at what was then called Turner Field. I don't know, maybe it's still called Turner Field! [It's not. - ed.] The president of TBS let us have his seats, so they were probably pretty good. I can't remember why he did that. To get us off his back? Once I ran into him in the grocery store and I was holding some bouillon cubes and all I could think to say to him was, "Bouillon cubes," as I waved my bouillon cubes in the air at him. He always had a mild and cheerful demeanor, but he made me nervous! I know it was 1998 (the hot dog photo, not the bouillon incident) because that's the year, so the "internet" tells me, that (in a different baseball game) Mark McGwire broke a big home run record, and it was on the very same visit from Kent that he watched Mark McGwire break that record on the TV at Manuel's Tavern, begging me (Kent was) to turn around and face the TV and enjoy the spectacle with him, but I kept my back turned to Mark McGwire for jerk-like reasons that now elude me. Anyhow, the "internet" says that (the Mark McGwire thing, not the bouillon incident) happened on September 8, 1998, and today is September 7, 2025! What a world. I don't like it.

My Five Skeletons

I'm sure you obsess about it all the time: how, at least once a decade and a half, I open some book of symbols or another and a mysterious card falls into my lap. Well, the last time that happened ("click" previous "hyperlink"), I went to the "website" of the mysterious organization who had placed their mysterious card in my mysterious book of mysterious symbols and interacted mysteriously with it. Are you still with me? Okay! Hang on! Remember yesterday? Remember how I "blogged" about a singing skeleton who is also a plastic toy filled up with air like a balloon? So, I "posted" that, and then I checked my electronic or "e" mail, and I had received, at exactly the same time, a promotional communication from the mysterious organization! And its subject line was "Archetype in Focus: Skeleton." WHAT! Then I calmed down and thought about it. Of course, the mysterious organization associated skeletons with October, just as I had. It was no warning from beyond! However! Let me draw your attention to the fact that my previous four "posts" - five, including this one - bear the label "skeleton." (And here I have to parenthetically state that if you exist, which you do not, and you access the "blog" by means of your phone rather than your home computing system, you don't get all the enticing extras, like skeleton labels.) I know what you're going to say now, but cool your jets, David Hume! Sure, maybe I've got skeletons on the brain! Or do I? For as a little investigation will prove, I use the label "skeleton" pretty dang loosely. Why, it could refer to the spine of a book, or to Chili's famed baby back ribs, dripping in their succulent juices. CASE CLOSED. Oh, wait! I wanted to quote this from that Colm Tóibín novel about Henry James: "a huge, obscure shape in the night, an angry, broken, pecking bird of prey, squatting in the corner, ready to take him, all black spirit, yet palpable, visibly there, hissing, come for him alone." But I don't think I can fairly pretend that this hissing bird of prey was an owl. The person suffering the unfortunate vision, which is certainly in tune with our Halloween season, is Henry James's father, whom "blog" readers may fondly recall as the man who wouldn't let tiny Henry James read a sexy book about hot corn. Wow! That made me think of something else: the book HOT CORN, with its depiction of hapless "hot corn girls" - with whose travails tiny Henry James was never allowed to familiarize himself - inspired me whilst happily I toiled on Julia Pott's show SUMMER CAMP ISLAND. I include above, at the risk of exploding the "blog," a title card from the show, manifesting that inspiration. I'm not sure who drew it. I'll ask Julia, and credit the artist in the near future! PS Julia already responded! She had plenty of time, because I finished watching von Stroheim's GREED, ha ha, before finishing this "post." I say "ha ha" yet my statement is true. The artist is Yoriyuki Ikegami.

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits

Welcome to the newest recurring "blog" feature since... I don't know when. Since before the TV blew up and I quit "blogging" because I was so dispirited by the blowing up of the TV set? That's right, you're just in time for "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits"! Was McNeilileaks our last recurring feature? It was very topical whenever that was... you know, the leaks era of history. When we'd cram "leaks" together with some word to make some other word. Most recurring "blog" features justly wither on the vine, like "Bookmarkin'! with Jack Pendarvis" and the unlamented "Today's Weather." But we here at the "blog" believe that "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits" has a dandy future indeed. In part, that's because McNeil, "inspired," I guess we'll call it, by the Million Dollar Book Club, is reading a 700-page celebrity bio of his own choosing. Because I am all tied up with all the various books to which I have committed myself, some of which I haven't even told you about, and find myself unable to join him in the endeavor (in fact, the bio is one I never read, and finally sold to Off Square Books during a long period of unemployment) McNeil has promised to pass along juicy morsels about the life of Humphrey Bogart as he absorbs them into his mighty brain. And he has given me permission to pass them on to you! Before we get started, I should say that I'm nervous about starting a recurring feature right now. It could be a lot of typing for nothing! Let me explain. The other day, a big old water pipe exploded - much like the TV of yore - under our house (the TV was not under our house) and some guys from the water company came by and dug up our yard. One of them took his shovel and severed a cable "linking" us to the "internet," much like the plow cuts the worm in William Blake's famous aphorism. Anyway, this same guy with the wayward shovel "fixed" the problem, but now the "internet" quits working at random times and AT&T, the worst company in the world, makes it nearly impossible to ask a human to come out to the house and look at what's going on. They just don't care! So all these carefully chosen words may vanish as I type them into the abyss. All right! That being said, we're already three bogie bits behind. Let's get started! BOGIE BIT 1: McNeil summarizes Bogart in his prep school days: "perennially bored, few friends, never cracked a book, oddly naive and vulnerable." BOGIE BIT 2: "During the depression, Bogart and his then wife had to move to some shabby apartment along the East River. One of their neighbors was a comedy writer who used to place his meal in a bag, shake it up, and then dump it out on a plate before eating it. No reason given why." As you may well imagine, the latter detail provided some grist for the usual hilarious email antics of McNeil and myself, as I fancifully pictured the comedy writer placing bread, ham, and cheese in the bag and shaking it up and presto, out comes a ham sandwich! Oh, what fun. McNeil replied that he was imagining mashed potatoes and gravy in a bag. Then he remarked, memorably, "Everything was a salad to this guy." I think that's a direct McNeil quotation, though I admit I am not double-checking. BOGIE BIT 3: Young Bogart used to sit in an arcade and play chess against all comers for a dollar a game! I might be forgetting something, but I believe those are all your bogie bits for the moment. Goodbye for now from all of us at "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits."

Dear Diary

Did you know I keep a handwritten diary, just like Brian Cox and Lord Wariston? Diaries are the original "blog." Diaries are the original TikTok! Diaries were a TikTok you could damn well keep to yourself. Pardon my salty language! And my inaccurate understanding of what TikTok is. Anyway, my diary is how I know that it was New Year's Eve when Dr. Theresa and I went to Square Books and I, uncharacteristically, could not find anything I wanted to drop my money on. Dr. Theresa, however, came away with three juicy mystery novels, one of which I idly picked up and really got into. Now we are entering territory that was not explored in the diary. Exclusive content! So I was like, "This book is called MAGPIE MURDERS. It is really heavy on the magpies! There are magpies everywhere you look in this thing. There is NO WAY this author is going to give me magpies AND owls!" ("Click" here to begin a years-long journey that will slowly and poorly deepen your knowledge of my interest in the matter.) Anyway, last night we were reading in bed as outside the snow was falling on the ground and I was suddenly presented with this fact by the narrator of MAGPIE MURDERS: "A nineteenth-century naturalist named Thomas Blakiston had an owl named after him."

Karl Malden Wouldn't Sit Anywhere Else

When I go on a trip I still take my famous jotting book but I hardly jot in it anymore because I don't "blog" anymore, rendering the very act of jotting questionable. And besides, as Adam Muto rightly admonished me last time I won an Emmy (this is my subtle way of telling you that I just came back from Los Angeles with another one!) I should look up and experience the world directly rather than jotting about it while it's right there in my face. In fact, if you "click" on that previous "link" you will see a photo of me with my jotting book open and ready for jotting backstage in the immediate aftermath of the awards presentation two years ago. I'm the problem with America! But you know, I'm glad I brought the jotting book because I AM required to "blog" whenever I read a book with an owl in it, and on this trip there appeared in my path THREE books with owls in them. I couldn't believe it. It was a bonanza! Let's get right to them! Well, first I stopped by Square Books for something to read on the airplane, as I like to do. And I was drawn again to the Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald, though I never enjoy them the way I'm supposed to. But now I guess they say "airplane" to me because of some sick compulsion. I picked up this one called DARKER THAN AMBER and I was like, "This seems familiar." Because they all seem familiar. And the titles are interchangeable. So I put it back on the shelf and went home empty-handed. And I sat there and thought, why do I know that title? And I poked around on the "blog" and saw that my friend McNeil had mentioned DARKER THAN AMBER as being particularly sexist. But as far as I could tell from my own "blog" I hadn't read it, and perversely I decided to get it and see if McNeil was right. And McNeil was right! In fact, I would argue that Travis McGee goes beyond (?) mere misogyny into a psychotic fear of sex. Now, of course, we can't confuse the author with his creation, but I would argue that McGee is presented as an aspirational character. "Jake leaned back on his heels and stared up at me, like a man admiring a tall building," is a typically modest self-description by our narrator. And now please forgive me but I'm going to quote just a smidgen of the misogyny so you won't think I'm exaggerating. You have been warned. Here we find catalogued McGee's disapproval of women who have had too many boyfriends: "she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death." What! What kind of writing do you call that? Moisturous! Moisturous? It has a certain purple tone that KNOWS it has a tone (A CERTAIN PURPLE TONE sounds like the title of a Travis McGee novel)... hmm... a tone approaching parody, but wanting it both ways... what is called in the business "kidding on the square," as I was once informed by Rob Schneider. Ha ha! But "tiny stink of death"? That's one of the grossest phrases I've come across. And later McGee refers to a woman's mouth as a "round horror-hole," okay? A ROUND HORROR-HOLE. Wow, I'm forgetting the owl. Weren't we talking about owls? McGee says that the eye of a corpse is "like a cheap glass eye in a stuffed owl." And you know what color that eye is? "Darker than amber," that's what color. So I was lying in bed reading this in the hotel room and Dr. Theresa was lying there too reading her own book - what a picture of contentment I am sure we made! - and she said, "Hey! This has an owl in it!" The owl in her book, she said, flew right into an inn and caused much consternation and dialogue. So! I finished Travis McGee and started a book of Sam Shepard short stories I had picked up at Skylight during one of our jaunts across the city. And in the very first story, some owls settle into a eucalyptus tree. So anyway that is a lot of owls in a lot of books for one trip. Speaking of Skylight Books! I ran into the actor Steve Little there, forced a copy of my most recent story collection on him (they had a couple of copies) and kind of harassed him until he fled the store. This is an accurate depiction of events. And speaking of Sam Shepard! So, T-Bone Burnett was one of the presenters at the Creative Arts Emmys, and I was determined to meet him at the ball following the show. And I did! Megan Abbott and I had been reading Sam Shepard's ROLLING THUNDER LOGBOOK, in which T-Bone Burnett appears, leading me to make the following brilliant remark to the distinguished musical icon of whom I have been a lifelong fan: "I saw a picture of you dressed up like a wizard!" (See above.) I'm getting everything out of order.

Let me check my jotting book and see which of my sparse jottings I've left out. Oh, went back to Dan Tana's and got the same booth. I was like, "Hey, I liked that booth when I was here before, can we have it?" And the maître d' was like, sure! "Karl Malden wouldn't sit anywhere else," he informed us. So here we are sitting where Karl Malden would be sitting were he still among the living. But he can't do a thing about it now! Photo by my brother. Well, I'm flipping through these pages and I hardly jotted anything, it turns out. I'm not sorry. On the plane ride to Los Angeles I was sufficiently convinced that my Biscoff cookie bore the face of a holy saint to request that Dr. Theresa take a photo of it, which she gamely did.

A Dirty Glass

Dr. Theresa and I watched THE PARALLAX VIEW last night and I was happy to see Paula Prentiss. But then she was just in a couple of scenes! And I thought... she is always just in a couple of scenes! It's not right. Nor is it accurate, but I can think of many examples off the top of my head of the shameful underutilization of Paula Prentiss. THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT. I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE. CATCH-22. And that was without even trying hard. It's like the executives are afraid her presence is too vibrant. "We can't have the audience shielding their eyes from her vibrant presence the whole time! They won't be able to eat their popcorn!" Always the bottom line with those guys. I mean look at this lobby card. All you get is the back of her awesome haircut. I learned about I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE straight from the director's brother, Elvis Perkins, which I only mention because I just realized I have met three different people named Elvis. Is that odd? How many Elvises have you met? Maybe not three! Or maybe everyone has met a minimum of three Elvises. I'm sorry I brought it up. And we are getting off the subject. So when Paula Prentiss and Warren Beatty were having their big scene, of course the thing I was thinking was: "She has been a foil to both Warren Beatty and Bob Hope! That is an unusual range she has there!" [Though Bob Hope was the Warren Beatty of his day in at least one way. - ed.] Now, as you know, I don't "blog" anymore, but it seemed important to mention that shortly thereafter Warren Beatty goes to a rough, tough bar in the northern climes and arouses the ire of louts by ordering a glass of milk. Who could help but recall Bob Hope going into a rough, tough bar in the northern climes and ordering a lemonade? No one, that's who! And when Bob similarly arouses the ire of louts, he famously snarls, "... in a dirty glass!" Warren Beatty didn't think of that. And then he dies at the end of the movie. Score one for Bob Hope. (Though see also.) I will note that a tiny bit of inadvertent research reveals that Burt Reynolds's eponymous tiny child sidekick in the forgotten action-comedy COP AND A HALF goes into a rough, tough bar and orders a "milk... in a dirty glass," bringing everything together, especially if you recall that Burt's character in HUSTLE enjoyed drinking milk, too, though presumably in a clean glass. How could I NOT "blog" under such circumstances, with such a myriad of kaleidoscopic thoughts whirling around in my precious, delicate head? Like, I just thought of Leonardo Dicaprio's cranberry juice. I'm like a James Joyce character over here, thinking so much! And wait, don't they mention James Joyce in THE DEPARTED? Hmm, is it possible to think TOO much? "I can't believe he died!" I yelled during THE PARALLAX VIEW. "It was the seventies, who didn't?" replied Dr. Theresa with a jaded shrug. Anyway, I'm sorry I didn't say "spoiler alert" but it ruined the flow. These are the choices we make in life and some of them hurt people. Well, I might as well say Paula Prentiss dies too. I was in denial. I kept yelling, "Is she DEAD? Is she DEAD?" even though she was obviously lying there on a slab in the morgue. I really wanted her to hop up!

We'll Meet Again

Well I just went to Los Angeles on my final ADVENTURE TIME trip. And though my jottings in my precious book of jottings in which I jot whenever I go on a trip have decreased as my "blog" dwindles into the oblivion it so richly deserves, I feel one last round of thorough jotting transcription is in order on such a melancholy occasion. So let's see what I jotted. The plane landed! I made it to Cartoon Network in Burbank just in time for a meeting. I leapt out of the cab, tripped over my own suitcase and landed brutally upon my knees. "This trip is starting out well!" I probably mused sardonically with my famed sardonicism. I had to use the Cartoon Network first aid kit, which was top notch. Now! I always like to buy a big bottle of seltzer at the grocery store across the street to have in my hotel room, as future biographers will be interested to note. So, once safely in my room, or so I thought, I opened my seltzer bottle to have my ceremonial first sip and seltzer went everywhere! It went on important stuff that shouldn't get seltzer on it. I was beginning to think the trip was cursed, and I was already bummed out because of its elegiac nature. Also, Adam Muto had STIRRED HIS COFFEE WITH A KNIFE during lunch that day! I had a roommate from Wisconsin a long time ago, and once when I stirred with a knife he said, "Stir with a knife, stir up strife!" I had never heard such a thing. But I immediately added it to my catalog of superstitions. So I was inclined to blame Adam for the ill-augured nature of the trip, though Kent reminded me that I fell down and scraped my knees BEFORE Adam stirred his coffee with a knife. I'm not sure that matters! The next morning I woke up with a piece of grit or something in my eye. My eye was swollen and red and the lid was drooping down and the corner of that eye emitted a constant stream of ugly tears. "Well, I can't go anywhere. I guess I will sit in the hotel room and clean out my wallet." Such was the content of my thoughts. "I guess this is how I am spending my last ADVENTURE TIME trip." I threw away a big pile of scrap paper from my wallet, keeping just three things: 1. My ticket stub from when Kent and I went to see 50 SHADES OF GREY. 2. Something funny I wrote down that Bill Boyle said when he was drunk. 3. My visitor's pass from when Julia and I secretly skulked around the GILMORE GIRLS set while they were shooting. Then came a knock at the door. It was Steve Wolfhard bringing me eyedrops! What a pal. Steve's thoughtful gesture allowed me to leave for a meeting I had in Beverly Hills with some degree of confidence. My eye was still bothering me a little when I sat down to a fancy lunch in fancy Beverly Hills. (This was not a lunch meeting; the meeting came later. I was alone.) I ordered a bitters and soda and when I squeezed a lime wedge into it, the lime juice squirted into my "good" eye, for I was wearing my glasses atop my head as I am prone to do. The curse had not yet lifted, I felt, despite Steve's kind gesture. (Oh yes, that reminds me, Steve and I were staying at the same hotel, the one where the guy who plays Squidward always hangs out in the lobby. One evening I came down to the lobby to find Steve sitting right next to Squidward on a banquette, entirely unawares! So I wrote Steve this important note in my ever-present jotting book.)

For my Beverly Hills lunch I had a salad of poached shrimp. There were some hearts of palm in there and some special, hairy radishes. The couple at the end of the bar ordered the same. What a piece of work these two were! First the salad didn't have the kind of hearts of palm they like. Then there weren't enough. They decided they wanted a whole bowl of hearts of palm so they could distribute them throughout the salad in their own inimitable way. But not that kind. They wanted them chopped into a different shape. Then the dressing was too sweet and there wasn't enough of it. And so on. They sent their plates back like six times. Beverly Hills! Well, I liked my salad so much I decided I was going to come back to this place for dinner after my meeting. There would be a whole different dinner menu upstairs! And so I did. That night, the guy seated at the table next to me, very close, asked if he were disturbing me by using a little light to look at the menu. I said not at all! I told him that I had used my candle for the same purpose and had burned my hand, in keeping with my cursed journey. Then I said, "Pardon me, are you an actor?" And he said yes. And I said - and I said it in exactly this peculiar and formal way - "Are you, in fact, Timothy Dalton?" And he said yes. So in a minute I got up and went to the spacious and lavishly appointed Beverly Hills men's room and called Ace Atkins (rudely forgetting the time difference) and told him I was sitting next to a James Bond, because I knew he'd want to know at once. Ace is a James Bond expert! Oh! I forgot to tell you. Flashback to an hour earlier! While I was waiting downstairs for the restaurant upstairs to open for dinner, I sat at the bar where I had enjoyed my luncheon of poached shrimp and watched a 70-year-old French woman (she herself mentioned her age) being - I am almost certain - flattered and cozened by a down-at-the-heels gigolo! Beverly Hills USA! Well, I felt heartened after my encounter with Timothy Dalton. I felt that he had lifted the curse! And so he had.

Why, the very next night I met Lyle Partridge and Steve and Pen and Sam Alden and Ryan Pequin (of THE REGULAR SHOW) at the Club Tee Gee, a dive with glitter on the ceiling, where I played a bunch of Kelly Hogan songs on the jukebox and Ryan took this picture of Lyle and me!

Lyle drew a lot of great pictures on Post-It notes so now I have those in my wallet with that other stuff I mentioned earlier. At one point I told the story of the time I got lost in the North Georgia woods and

Lyle drew this depiction, the accuracy of which you will appreciate if you go back and read the story. Sam was describing what he called the "hubristic death" of one of his eccentric ancestors and I ask idly if he also happened to be related to John Alden. And he is! He is the direct descendent of John and Priscilla Alden, one of the greatest love stories in American history! Boy was my mom excited when I called her from the airport the next day and told her. "Speak for yourself, John," Mom said, quoting Priscilla, and then demanded a picture of Sam so she could look at him. Okay! "It's no big deal, they had thirteen children," Sam said, implying that half the people in the room were probably the descendants of John and Priscilla Alden, I guess. We all loaded up and went to a party that Kent was throwing for all your favorite ADVENTURE TIME writers and artists, past and present. I sat on the floor next to Ako Castuera and we sang a bunch of songs associated with David Lynch movies.

We sang "Blue Velvet" and "I Told Every Little Star" and "In Dreams." We sang these songs at the top of our lungs half-recumbent on the floor on some sort of shaggy pillow in the middle of the room while people were trying to do other stuff and get on with their lives. On Kent's balcony, we sang "We'll Meet Again" not once but twice at widely separated key moments. Not a David Lynch song but a sentimental choice for the occasion. You know what? I'm leaving a lot of stuff out. A LOT! I feel rushed and weird in my gut because I have my last ADVENTURE TIME meeting in a couple of hours. And I'm not "blogging" anymore, anyway, as you can see. No, but really, I have twice as many pages of jottings that I didn't even get to. But everything has to end, even ADVENTURE TIME, even jottings, even parties. The day after the party Pen brought Kent a bag of fried chicken to cure his headache and I rode along. You know how Kent loves his chicken, ha ha ha! What a life. It had been raining and the sign on Kent's gate was smeared and wistful.

Pen and I had been eating at a shawarma place and noticed a tray of unexpected fried chicken glowing in a golden, almost holy light in the kitchen. It seemed like a sign! A sign for Kent. You don't believe me about this glowing chicken but I'll show you if Pen will send the photo he was compelled to take by the majesty of this glowing chicken of which I speak. [And he just did! - ed.]

George Plimpton's T-Shirt

You know two things about me. 1. I love John Aubrey. 2. Every book I read has an owl in it. So it will not alarm you to discover that I am reading JOHN AUBREY: MY OWN LIFE, the wonderful biographical reconstruction - mostly in his own words - by Ruth Scurr, and it has an owl in it. We have had owls from Aubrey before. But in this case he makes friends with Francis Potter, who is "haunted" by Ovid's "barbarous Medea, mixing her witch's brew: roots, juices, flowers, seeds, stones, the screech owl's flesh and its ill-boding wings. He sees her, hair all unbound and blown about as she dances round..." (See also.) All of which gives Potter the idea of inventing the blood transfusion with chickens. Naturally! Aubrey helps out. Hey, as long as I've got you here, I was at Off Square Books a few nights ago, listening to a guy talk about his memoir. Once he and George Plimpton were out looking for what I believe this fellow called "the elusive burrowing owls of New Mexico." George Plimpton whipped off his t-shirt and tossed it into the air, where it attracted a large gathering of curious bats. Plimpton conjectured that the bats believed his t-shirt to be a delicious giant moth. I assume all this is in the book, or why did he bring it up? So I am putting his book on my list of books with owls in them.

Experiments in Intercourse

First of all, relax! There is nothing at all wrong with the "blog." The culprit that drove me mad was just a curious virus that only I could see, infecting a particular browser in the hotel's business center... the very business center immortalized (in a tastefully fictionalized version, of course) in my almost-new book MOVIE STARS, suddenly the toast of New York town! I, however, was out in Los Angeles, and I brought my jotting book of precious jottings, but in my new anti-"blogging" spirit, I jotted nearly nothing on my trip. And yes, I made that decision out of pure spite! Okay, I will tell you one thing. Julia and I walked up to Ako and I said, "Ako, tell Julia what you told me about the miraculous powers of coconuts!" And Ako shouted with hilarious urgency, "IT'S NOT TRUE!" It turns out that I have been going around telling lies that Ako accidentally told me about the miraculous powers of coconuts. One day, as she related to us ruefully, she was telling the same story when it dawned on her with the force of epiphany how suspicious it sounded. So she looked it up and was mortified at the extent to which she had been misleading an innocent coconut-buying public for so many years. Then she explained to Julia and me what the powers of coconuts REALLY are, and to be honest, the coconuts still sounded pretty miraculous. Okay, I feel bad for you, so I am going to tell you two funny things from the airplane ride home. There was a peperoncino garnishing the plate of food they gave me. So I bit into it. It was just a small, ordinary peperoncino but it seemed to contain an abundance of juice. The amazing quantity of juice expelled even by my rather timid bite squirted all over my personal airplane video screen. It even squirted onto the ceiling over the passengers in front of me! So it dripped down on them and they urgently pressed the button to summon the harried flight attendant. "The airplane is leaking bright green fluid!" they told her. "We're doomed!" Or words to that effect. So I had to confess that I had squirted the peperoncino juice that had rained down on them like the stinging hot portent of a deadly malfunction. Then I was enjoying THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON by H.G. Wells, my chosen airplane reading, and I suddenly came to a chapter called - in embarrassingly big letters - "Experiments in Intercourse"! Ha ha! So I put my thumb over the word "intercourse" so the guy in the next seat wouldn't think I was reading something too sexy for an airplane. Wells just meant that his heroes were trying to find a way to communicate with the moon men. He didn't mean anything dirty! He meant "intercourse" in the sense of "communication." That's how people talked back in crazy times! But I hid it with my thumb anyway. Okay, I'll tell you two more things. Look at this picture. Adam says it's okay to show it now. I was going to wait until season seven of our show had concluded. There are still two more wildly surprising episodes to come but Adam says the titles are out there in the public now and everybody knows them so it doesn't matter. Well, some quite literal spy took this spy picture with her sneaky spy camera very early in the season and spread it around the "internet" without compunction, our most personal and private business, including some very revealing episode titles, though I don't believe I've given a large enough representation for you to see them. But the funny part is the map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County that's on the wall. Look and you will see it! You may furthermore recall when it was presented to Kent and Pen. Scores of young detectives taken in by this remorseless charlatan and thief thought it was some kind of map of a previously unknown territory of Ooo, the land where ADVENTURE TIME occurs - as did, no doubt, the budding Mata Hari herself. Well, there are probably tons of 13-year-olds all inspired and debating ABSALOM, ABSALOM! now, propelled forward by their initially misguided researches - so everything turned out all right; aren't you as sure of it as I am? In my preferred version of these events, the emotionless miscreant helped everybody learn and grow even though she was trying to hurt and spoil! I'll finish up with something I've been sitting on for a month or so because I don't care about you anymore. I started reading a book called THE YEAR OF LEAR, about KING LEAR, sort of, and it has owls in it, but not even the same owls that KING LEAR has in it! Some other owls. Thomas Dekker is describing a miserable denizen of a plague house: "And to keep such a poor wretch waking, he should hear no noise but of toads croaking, screech-owls howling, mandrakes shrieking."

Bakery Heiress

Remember in Feb. 2007 when Dr. Theresa took a hammer and a nail and made me a new notch in my belt? Well I am about to lay on you a story just as captivating! First, let us go back (forward?) to 2008. Our fascinating prologue commences when I was staying in a motel in Los Angeles. I walked up several blocks to see THE APARTMENT on the big screen. And I saw Shirley MacLaine's face in this very scene (above) race through dozens of emotional transmutations in mere seconds. Every emotion, she had! But subtly. It was different on film, and at its intended size and scope, though I had seen THE APARTMENT many, many times before, on a tiny television screen with a tiny televised picture. The difference was like... when I used to see Rothko paintings in a library book and think, bleh! But then in the 1980s my ex (?) girlfriend (?) and I flew to Washington, D.C. together and I don't know where she went... but I met, by some obscure prearrangement, a bakery heiress on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Her roommate, possessing the magical name Cornelia, was a Roosevelt. Like... A ROOSEVELT. We drank concoctions of rum and orange juice on the balcony of a hotel across from the White House. An upstairs light was on over there! As dusk descended! The bedroom, we reckoned. George and Barbara, en déshabillé! After we parted, though, the kind-hearted bakery heiress and I (it was on plain white sliced bread that her cunning people founded their considerable fortune!), I was forced to stay with a different, less hospitable bunch, some [redacted] who - however noble their purposes, and I think them quite noble in intent! - were unpracticed as hosts. They lectured me vitriolically on the subject of cheese for hours at a time, for example, and hung gory, unavoidable posters of vivisection in every cranny, and fed me on naught but that which made my stomach hurt, and always made me pay for the cab. EXCEPT for that one glorious evening when [redacted] a raging fire in a big fireplace though it was June and boiling hot outside, and then [redacted]! [redacted]. The Indigo Girls were climbing the charts for an eager young nation with their hit [redacted], which, coming through the radio, burrowed into my mind as the theme song for that [redacted]. But I mean, I saw some Rothko paintings in person at the National Gallery back then, in the aforementioned 1980s, in Washington, D.C., and their majesty was all-consuming, like Shirley MacLaine's. Even though, prior to the screening (keep up! we've moved forward to 2008 again), I had considered her movie "my favorite," it was like I had never seen it before. So that seems like a shame. It seems, in fact, like I have wasted my life! But the point is that in 2008 I forgot to turn in my motel key when I checked out. Nothing else I just mentioned had anything to do with anything. I just wanted to explain why I still have this motel key.

It's an old fashioned key. A key key. Like, a metal key. A key. The kind of key Norman Bates would give you, or possibly Dennis Weaver from TOUCH OF EVIL. A motel key dangling from a flat blue slab of plastic, Room 109. So! Now we are coming closer to the point. Dr. Theresa and I have this spare house key we like. It just stays by itself. It's not entangled or associated with a bunch of car keys and office keys and random keys that open we don't know what. It's just on a ring all alone. Or used to be. Very light and convenient! Like, to have in our pocket if we want to take a casual stroll. But its key ring just fell apart! Suddenly there was nothing to anchor that favored key, to give it heft, to shield it from loss. So I thought maybe we could put it on this old motel key ring I have. Ha ha! These kinds of stories are my favorites. The motel key was designed diabolically. Bulky and twisted and nigh impossible to pull apart. Probably for some motel owner's good reason. So Dr. Theresa got some pliers out of the kitchen drawer and went to town on that implacable key ring like a champ. Finally she was able to separate the parts of the ring just enough so that we could slide the vital house key into place. Then I took a hammer and banged the whole thing back together like Thor himself descended from the heavens. That key ain't slipping off now! I'd like to see it try. It was real teamwork, though Dr. Theresa had already restored everything more than adequately with her pliers by the time I managed to dig out the hammer, and my hammering, while it made me feel like a great big man, was likely just for show.

Santa's Face

I'm cooking a goose for Christmas. Believe it or not we don't really have any goose-cooking supplies around here. So I went out today. First I stopped by The End of All Music to see Bill Boyle, whom you can usually find behind the counter on a Sunday. I saw that the new arrivals bin was stocked with interesting things and Bill said that many of them were the abandoned records of a mutual friend (should I reveal his name? It's probably nobody's beeswax!) who's moving out of town. Speaking of none of your beeswax, I had an email from my old pal Abby Greenbaum, full of juicy music biz gossip about big-name country stars. But I can't tell you any of it! I can only give you some of the last part of the email: "The next day I hung out at Santa's Pub and, in honor of Christmas, did tarot readings for my roadie friends. Have you ever been to Santa's Pub? It is a triple wide trailer in South Nashville that is also a bar. Beers cost $2, and Santa's face is painted on the outside." But back to the goose! I was grousing to Bill that I really shouldn't buy any LPs because I had to spend my money on goose supplies, and Bill insisted on buying my stack of records for me. (Pictured above, one of them.) How often do you walk into a place and the guy working there buys your stuff for you? Talk about Christmas cheer! Speaking of which, I couldn't find any cooking twine at the grocery store so this guy who works there walked back behind the mysterious doors of the meat department and came back with a length of cooking twine for me. "Just stick that in your pocket," he said. Dang! I forgot to tell you that after I saw Bill I stopped for a bite to eat at Big Bad Breakfast, where, to my alarm, the Food Network had set up and was shooting something. I sat at the counter, not too far from an intensely glowing young couple they were interviewing. ("Random customers, I don't think they're from here," my server told me.) The Food Network had forced these clean-cut sweethearts to order a Pylon apiece. Now, these trim and fresh-faced matinee idols looked as if they'd barely be able to finish half a Pylon between them. Have I told you about the Pylon? It's named for the Faulkner novel, natch. It's a waffle with lots of stuff on top. Slaw and chopped-up hot dogs and chili and oyster crackers and hot peppers and I can't remember what all. Mustard, for instance. The Pylon cures your hangover. Now, this rosy-cheeked ingenue and her all-American beau have never had a hangover in their tender lives, I avow. But they cautiously approached their Pylons in the spirit of good sportsmanship. The funny part was that the interviewer would ask them things like, "Why do you think this place is named 'Big Bad Breakfast'?" "I don't know," was their reasonable answer. (It is named for Larry Brown's book BIG BAD LOVE, but how are they supposed to know that?) "What do you think is the origin of the Pylon?" asked the interviewer. "I don't know," the young woman said.

This Counts

Move over, vampires and werewolves, there's a new hot ticket this Halloween season: ghosts! Oh, how I hate myself. But I know you'd want to be the first to hear that Dr. Theresa and I have started our annual Halloween film festival. So far, it's 100% ghosts. First, LAKE MUNGO, recommended by Megan Abbott. And then BEETLEJUICE came on TV and we were like, "This probably counts!" Both BEETLEJUICE and LAKE MUNGO have kids capturing ghostly images with their cameras, and in both cases - forgive me for this morbidity - the ghosts are produced by drowning. Hey, ghosts gotta be produced somehow. Speaking of gruesome subjects I guess I should tell you about these gruesome stories I have been reading in THE DECAMERON lately. WARNING! They are gruesome. Like, in one, the king has the heart of his daughter's low-born lover cut out and then he gives it to her in a golden goblet! What a jerk. He weeps a lot, too. He's probably one of the weepiest kings you'd ever want to meet. It's complicated. And then there's one where this woman finds her lover's body and takes his head as a keepsake! And she puts his head in a big vase and covers it with dirt and plants basil over it and waters it "only with rose or orange water or with her own tears" - and she grows the sweetest basil in the land! Anyway, THE DECAMERON is gross.

Melancholy Abounding

The usual trouble sleeping. As if you care! Picked up THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. Read "dead men's bones, hobgoblins, ghosts, are ever in their minds, and meet them still in every turn: all the bugbears of the night and terrors, fairybabes of tombs and graves are before their eyes and in their thoughts, as to women and children, if they be in the dark alone." Burton is writing about people who have "Symptoms of Melancholy Abounding in the Whole Body," to describe whom he uses the funny phrase, "the melancholy juice is redundant all over." ... "If they hear, or read, or see, any tragical object, it sticks by them; they are afraid of death, and yet weary of their lives; in their discontented humours they quarrel with all the world, bitterly inveigh, tax satirically, and because they cannot otherwise vent their passions, or redress what is amiss, as they mean, they will by violent death at last be revenged upon themselves." Wow, what, sorry, not too cheerful, but striking and incantatory. "Fairybabes of tombs and graves" really caught my attention.

Literary Matters

I guess it has been almost exactly three years since we have had any "Literary Matters" and do you know why? Because everybody hates them! Literary matters are the worst. But somehow I have two. 1) I am still getting a lot of enjoyment from this book THE LORE AND LANGUAGE OF SCHOOLCHILDREN: "At present rude gestures seem to be in a state of flux, the following being currently regarded as the most offensive: 1. The first and second fingers, extended and slightly parted, are jerked upwards, the back of the hand facing outwards. 2. The nose is pressed upward with the thumb, and the tongue put out. 3. Ears are twisted, or thumbs placed in ear-holes and fingers fluttered, a gesticulation known as 'elephant ears'. 4. The nose is held while an imaginary lavatory chain is pulled. 5. Air is forced through the pursed lips to make a juicy noise known as a 'raspberry'." (Pictured, friend of the "blog" Sally Timms making rude gesture #1, accompanied by smirking friend of the "blog" Jon Langford.) 2) Remember when Ace Atkins revealed a spoiler that ruined EVERY SINGLE TRAVIS MCGEE NOVEL FOR ME? I am going to tell it to you now, so BEWARE! (Oh, wait, I already told you this.) Ace told me, "The woman always dies." So anyhow I was going to go eat a cheeseburger down at Handy Andy's and I didn't have anything to read so I stopped by Square Books and got a Travis McGee paperback called A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING. That sounds like a weird place for dying! So this woman wants to hire Travis McGee and he's thinking about it and she gets killed a few pages into Chapter One, while he's still standing there thinking about whether or not he's going to take the job! That must be some kind of a record, even for Travis McGee.

Diablo

Well, Megan Abbott is getting ready to hightail it back to New York City, from whence she came. During her brief time here as writer-in-residence, there have been several "movie nights," not all of them chronicled by your humble chronicler - indeed, not all of them attended by him. The first featured Hal Needham's HOOPER, starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. For our very last "movie night" we decided to do something different: Hal Needham's SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. "I'm trying to see whose pants are tighter," Megan remarked of our two leads. When Jerry Reed's character said, "I got to get some go-go juice and put some groceries down my neck," it reminded me of something Dean Moriarty might say, leading me to a brief and instantly concluded reflection on the relationship between beatnik and CB radio culture. Ace brought over Coors beer (an important factor in the plot, as I am sure you recall) and "diablo sandwiches," one of which Jackie Gleason orders at a pivotal point in the movie. Now, according to Ace, no one knows what a diablo sandwich really is. Ace has scoured the "internet" and found it to be full of lies, grandiose claims, and errors on the subject. He even telephoned the original restaurant from the movie - the "Old Hickory House" (as Dr. Theresa recalled last night, she used to go there for biscuits and gravy with her dad) - and confirmed that they had never sold anything called a "diablo sandwich." Ace therefore reconstructed the diablo sandwich through a careful study of the frames in which Jackie Gleason terrifyingly devours his "diablo sandwich." There is a picture that Megan took of Dr. Theresa and Ace and Bill and me standing in her kitchen over the fixings for our diablo sandwiches but I can't use it here... it is too depressing, emphasizing as it does Megan's absence from the frame (there's another one of Ace and Megan toasting with cans of Coors, but that hasn't hit my inbox yet). So instead I will find a photo of Hank Worden, whom I noticed in a SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT cameo for the first time last night. Cameo! It was a blip. Less than two seconds, I'd guess. I want to say it was a tribute to a certain scene in RED RIVER, substituting horn-blasting semis for rearing horses, though I don't know whether I'm making up that scene in my head, and now that I think of it, I don't know that Hank Worden was in RED RIVER. I do know that he was in everything from THE SEARCHERS to TWIN PEAKS (which is why he is talking to David Lynch in that photo). Interestingly (?) - how I abuse that word! - his appearance in TWIN PEAKS combines his dialogue from THE SEARCHERS with the thumbs-up gesture he flashes in SMOKEY IN THE BANDIT (doesn't he?). I have given you so much to think about.

A Very Man Bait Christmas

We watched two Hammer movies Dr. Theresa gave me for Christmas: MAN BAIT on Christmas Eve, ha ha! And BAD BLONDE on Christmas Day. MAN BAIT is not as saucy as it sounds. It is virtually sauce-free. In fact, the first five minutes are just bookstore workers puttering around in a bookstore. Puttering around! Finally Diana Dors (pictured) showed up and I yelled "MAN BAIT!" And then I giggled. I couldn't say the title without giggling. Sometimes I giggled until I cried, Dr. Theresa standing by to dial 9-1-1. Dr. Theresa was amused by the low stakes in MAN BAIT. The big villain's plan is to get a hundred pounds from a bookstore manager. A hundred pounds! From a bookstore manager! (In the accompanying illustration here, he is TRYING UNSUCCESSFULLY TO STEAL A BOOK!) Things escalate. Sort of. There are some murders - I guess. Kind of accidental murders. The bookstore manager's "invalid" wife dies from reading a letter, for example. MAN BAIT! Well, BAD BLONDE had more of the old pepper to it. It was a brazen rip-off of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. It even had opera in it, Cain-style. Someone should (and I'm sure someone has) write an article about how, for Cain, opera is always tied up with betrayal and murder. I seem to recall that Cain wanted to be an opera singer but his mother - who WAS an opera singer - scoffed and jeered at him and told him he didn't have the voice for it. Freudian! I can't remember where I read that, but I used to proclaim it forcefully to my hardboiled class all the time, so it is probably true. The BAD BLONDE in BAD BLONDE was Barbara Payton. She had a lot of lines like, "It's too hot to sleep," in which she invested special meaning. And she literally licked her chops at the sight of her "prey," a young boxer. That's another thing! MAN BAIT started with a host of sad sacks glumly and quietly preparing a bookstore for daily operations and BAD BLONDE started with a boxing match at a seedy carnival. One of those is a better way to start a movie. Hey, remember when I went to an auction of Bob Hope's personal effects but I couldn't really tell you about it because I was going to write about it "professionally"? I've done a little bit of that, in an article on the Atlantic's "web" site, which you may read by "clicking" here. I mention it because Barbara Payton makes an appearance. Looks like, knock wood, I will be able to squeeze a good bit more juice out of that Bob Hope auction in the coming year. I'll let you know. Allow me to make a closing observation about MAN BAIT, ha ha! It will contain spoilers. So there is the inevitable "good girl" character in MAN BAIT. Her chief rivals for the affection of the bookstore manager (!) are the MAN BAIT (Diana Dors) and the bookstore manager's "invalid" wife. Thanks to the psychotic, if not very ambitious, criminal, her rivals are eliminated. I have half an idea here, something about how the "psychotic" characters in movies often reward the "good" characters by acting out the "good" characters' dark and unspoken impulses, and wow, as I'm typing it boy does it sound obvious and boring. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN deals with the idea explicitly, though maybe I am thinking about movies in which the filmmaker seems unconscious of the implications... hmm... My one consolation is that no one has read this far.