Tired of listening to the same old interview programs where the interviewer and interviewee fall over each other spouting platitudes?
Roger Ebert lists a sampling of responses from old movie stars that showed a wee bit more frankness and a wee bit less Frank Ness.
For example:
Q. Lee Marvin, how are things between you and Michelle Triola, your girl friend?
A. She's been eating nothing but anchovies for the past day and a half. You know why she likes anchovies so much all of a sudden? She's knocked up. She's gonna have a little Lee Marvin. Put it down: Michelle's knocked up. If you make it good enough, they'll never print it. It used to be, we'd check into a hotel, it was Mr. Marvin and Miss Triola. So she changed her name to Marvin, to save all that embarrassment. Now it's Mr. Marvin and Miss Marvin.
An NRA "pollster" just explained to me over the phone that the dastardly United Nations, in collaboration with Third World dictators and Hillary Clintonand of courseThe Media, is AT THIS VERY MOMENT conspiring in back rooms to take away our gun rights.
Have so many enemies of freedom ever gathered in one place for so fiendish a purpose???
You may have heard a while back that Bob Dylan had recorded a Christmas album. I was certainly surprised to learn this, but I was willing to give Bob the benefit of the doubt. After all, I have come to think his last four albums are pretty great, not to mention his acknowledged classics from the '60s and '70s. Well... listen to this:
I know it's for a good cause (hunger relief), but come on, Bob. This is Lawrence Welk country. Your voice works well for very few genres anymore, mainly croaky blues numbers, croaky ballads, and everyone's favorite, croak rock. Stan Freberg couldn't have written a better parody than the real thing. Well, maybe he could.
I guess the good news is now parents will have something else to threaten naughty kids with besides coal in their stockings.
Settle down, class. You remember that crazy Mr. Azoulay from down the hall? Well, you might say he's never been shy about his love of poetry, so in honor of him I've decided to teach you 2day's science lesson in the form of limericks.
The Periodic Table
There once was an odd kind of table,
where no eating occurred. You were able
to see at a glance
which elements dance,
and which of them were and weren't stable.
An 'H' was the first one to see,
and next came the element "He,"
a "Li" and a "Be,"
a 'B' and a 'C,'
then an 'N,' 'O,' and 'F,' and a "Ne."
And some of the gases are noble,
while the pnictogens tend to be mobile.
Watch out for the chalcogens, alkalis, halogens--
make a mistake: boom! Chernobyl.
There once was a metal called lead,
but no 'L' will you see there; instead,
there's a 'P' and a 'b.'
That sounds weird, but you see,
it was "Plumbum" in languages dead.
There are 92 natural elements,
but that hasn't stopped the experiments.
They keep adding more,
so it's hard to keep score.
To list them would be anti-merriment.
I'll stop there for now, my dear students.
To blather on wouldn't be prudent.
Just copy the chart
Till you've learned it by heart.
And that's all I'll say in concludin'.
I just returned from a great family vacation in rural Wisconsin, where I observed several curiosities worthy of note.
A SEPTA bus. For those not from SouthEast Pennsylvania, this The Acronym of our transportation authority. Commuters were heard complaining that the Waukegan local stops running to downtown Philadelphia between midnight and 5 am every night. We later observed several more SEPTA buses in western PA, so I suppose it's the annual migration season. Artist's recreation
A small riding lawnmower. What made this noteworthy was that it was parked outside a local bar. This may not be that unusual, as local law prescribes a blood alcohol content of .08 for drivers, but 8.0 for mowers. Real life, son
A digital converter box. I'd wager that most of us fancy-shmancy 2logger types were unaffected by the big digital TV transition a couple months back, but our rustic family cottage had a tiny analog TV with rabbit ears, meaning it now needs said converter. In previous years we could get about three channels, all full of static and occasionally in black-and-white. Now there are more like ten channels, all in clear color. BUT--the signal breaks up every few minutes, so that you miss a word or two. Plus the extra channels are weird things I've never heard of otherwise (e.g. "This" Network). So, as Harry Shearer has been documenting on NPR's "Le Show," it's not exactly a digital wonderland, Alice. Harry Shearer: Before (L) and After (R) the digital transition
The fearsome grass bass of Fish Lake. Many's the fisherman's tale of "the one that got away." At Fish Lake, the angler is considered lucky who catches a fish bigger than his lure. This year, however, I was fortunate enough to catch not one, not two, but several grass basses (genus seaweedis pestilentius). The author reels in the big one
Quick poll: Which sock do you pull on first? According to Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, my most-trusted source for information apart from Wikipedia, 95% of people pull on their left sock before their right.
