Todd Mason

Unfortunate timing to be quoting Roger Ebert's whining (which it is) about John Simon, who died this week. I vastly preferred Simon's writing on film to Ebert's...even if Simon could be more rude than he needed to be at times...as could Ebert, in that passage. Simon could praise the films (and plays, books, music) he loved in his reviews to the skies, and elegantly and intelligently.

Martin O'Malley was the non-starter in the 2016 Dem Pres race you were reaching for. Did only slightly better or longer than Rhode Island's favorite son...who actually had the best resume for the job, but ran an anti-serious campaign.

Arguably, it seems to me, Bond is shaken, if not by the death of any single person, but by the aggregate of all the death he's been the cause of, in a rather good moment in GOLDENEYE. That, and Famke Janssen, help make that easily the best Brosnan film. And, of course, the other female television spy who took even less guff than Emma Peel was Mrs. Gale, with Honor Blackman a pretty formidable character in GOLDFINGER (they're gold, those two films...or maybe not), even if not up to Mrs. Gale. But on this side of the Atlantic, we didn't see Mrs. Gale for quite some time, it's true. Also, as I remember it (less a fan and also no expert), Bond seems to fail at everything except finally killing Oddjob and managing to sabotage the final Nefarious Plan (albeit even that with considerable assistence) in GOLDFINGER... Definitely looking forward to your take, with LaMarche, on CASINO ROYALE '67, that fascinating and very fitfully impressive mess of a film.

Joel Schlosberg is not only correct about THE HANDS OF ORLAC, but about the all kinds of variations in film since, such as MAD LOVE (a remake), Oliver Stone's THE HAND (a ripoff--HA!), and THE EYES OF LAURA MARS...

"Brass tacks": FWIW Dept.: No one is too sure of what the origin is for this idiom (or at least nobody probably should be). In such things as furniture making, they are the finishing touch...so Let's wrap up this discussion might come from that. In terms of laying it on the line/being blunt or at least straightforward, bulletin boards in businesses and government agencies used to be much bigger deals than they are now (actual, non-virtual bulletin boards). Your bosses (but not mine, myaaan) and public servants would put up a bulletin with brass tacks. And there's even some notion that it's a corrupted reference to tin tacks or even tin backs (as in buttons?). Might as well drag in the Ting Tings. But perhaps it's rhyming slang for "bare facts" or the like... http://blog.oup.com/...s-idiom-origin/

I'll probably be the twentieth or so to mention something ike this, but despite being then fifty pounds heavier than I am now, and a desk drone in my job of some years, once about five years ago I was helping my parents pack away various items in plastic storage bins, which were stacked in the family/tv room, before being filled and taken down to the basement. A few of the lids were scattered about. Somehow, not paying enough attention, I put one foot on one lid and had my other foot on another, and they slid out from under me, one forward, one backward, and I as a result did a perfect, utterly unintentional split. That stretched muscles and tendons that I hadn't often felt in action over the years, and for a moment (but happily only momentarily) hurt like hell, but the tender fries suffered no damage...I think the body instinctively manages to twist just enough to keep them out of harm's way in that circumstance, or maybe I was even luckier than I thought I was. I'll probably never do another split again, but was surprised how easy it was when one had no choice in the matter, and no lasting damage done. I don't recommend anyone else try it...though masochists might enjoy themselves...

Ms. St. Clair is going to have to work a Lot harder than that to convince many of us that she isn't as striking as she is charming and funny. But, then, I live in New Jersey.

JP's schoolmate Barry Nelson was presumably named with some (maybe only eventual) knowledge of the existence of the actor, and the eventual dressing up like Bond--"Jimmy" Bond, no less, in the Nelson "Casino Royale" tv episode--seems like pretty natural consequence at least once in younger Barry's life...so, since JP was scouring his memory...Jimmy Bond also Woody Allen's character in the psychedelic '60s CASINO ROYALE film, as the Niven Bond's nephew...there are bits of that film which are quite good...then there's the rest of it...

For what it's worth, the way Jimmy pronounces "Bonobos" is similar to the most common pronunciation in the UK. But the British love to murder foreign words.

"I'm not from Havana" (Cleavon Little to M. Kahn in Blazing Saddles)...I vaguely recall that that probably refers to the kind of live sex shows that they demonstrate in The Godfather, and what was notable about the male performers...

As you found out, "54.40 or Fight" was a matter of border dispute between the US and Canada over at what latitude the Oregon Country ended and the Columbia District in western Canada began...more or less the last time, during the 1840s, that the Yanks and Canucks (as still British colonists) were likely to go to war. Somehow I thought of "20 Flight Rock" (not even Chris Rock). I wonder if Jimmy's memory of "Detroit Rock City" might be driven in part by radio-play, where the cleanup noises/news bulletin might well've been cut off... And, even more trivially, the person with the not-quite-Besser number might've just gotten it...some third person or company might've been ignoring Pardo texts for years...

FWIW: Definition of MALEFICENT. : working or productive of harm or evil : baleful. (Merriam-Webster Online).

Bob Saget was ripping off old Robert Bloch jokes some time back? The television, film and fiction writer (among other things) was also a common toastmaster at writer's events, and when not writing PSYCHO and the like, was prone (in the 1940s and '50s) to making jokes such as "Actually, I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar, on my desk." This was quoted in at least one ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS anthology...but, then, it could well be parallel construction...gallows humorists thinking alike...and even also something Saget, much as I did, read as a kid and it fell back into the forebrain eventually.

And also noted a few up.. Not restricted to Texas...

Meanwhile, the most common version of the word Matt was reaching for is "wump" as in Mugwump, someone literally or figuratively sitting on a fence--big political label particularly in the US Civil War. Hence also the band, the Mugwumps, that had eventual members of the Mamas and Papas and the Lovin' Spoonful before they moved west (from around the DC area, rather north of Galax, VA) and could afford a lot more drugs.

Might just be my equipment, but the streaming version seemed to hang up at about 1:24. Download seems to be unaffected.

Some Beach Boys songs are pretty weak, others are impressive...they did personally flame out and only mostly recovered, those that did, and all sympathies. But to pretend that they are awful when one is willing to sit, or stand enthusiastically, through Journey and KISS is pretty bizarre. I was amused by how many BB songs each of the panel kept finding that they lived or even loved... Now, Aaron Sorkin, at least after SPORTS NIGHT, really has sucked. Sorkin knows television. He thinks he knows politics...wow he didn't and still doesn't, even if the politicians who worked with him enjoyed the weak fictions about politics he was perpetrating. (And, of course, Gilbert and Sullivan are not the best model for SNL...nor STUDIO 60 the show within the show...for a relatively uptight college comedy troupe, maybe...)

NPR's Morning Edition this morning was full of summer (or summah)...not least this for the Jazz Is Better file: http://www.npr.org/2...-makes-no-sense (Somehow I missed the direct links to the MOTHER JONES article above when I posted this.)

This podcast, with this episode, plunges to even deeper levels of ignorance than previously. Congratulations.

Online etymology seems to prefer the notion that the one-G version of the "f-word" (meaning essentially an unpleasant crone, and related to the notion of a bundle of sticks as a similar burden) was the primary source of the slur against gay men...though some do note the use of the three-letter form in the kind of tony "public" school as Eton in the UK. I also suspect, since it didn't come into recorded use in the modern slur sense until the turn of the 1900s, that it has some roots in the Italian slur, "fighetta", which was used for quite some time to mean essentially "wuss" and was presumably heard by a lot of non-Italians in places like New York, Boston and Philadelphia in those turn of the century years. http://www.etymonline.com/ and others...

Fritz Leiber: "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" (1949 short story) http://books.google....epage&q&f=false --ah, that one's truncated...this one might not be even as legit as a Google Books image: ftp://24.10.225.252/AiDisk_a1/eBooks/L/Leiber,%20Fritz/Fritz%20Leiber%20-%20The%20Girl%20with%20the%20Hungry%20Eyes.pdf

M*A*S*H was really good for the first three seasons, while McLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers were still on and the writers were not required to show us how sensitive and human everyone was at all times...there were scattered good episodes and bits in later episodes, but it got pretty dire, indeed (the only downside to the first four seasons was that the sexism and unintentional racism infrequently could get up the nose). The Mary Tyler Moore Show was great as long as you could take how everyone had to think Mary Richards walked on water, even while they were yelling at her (similar to the Alda ego trip in the latter half of M*A*S*H). Welcome Back, Kotter got real tired, real fast...like most of ABC's comedies. Dan Savage makes some fine points about the heterosexism of Barney Miller, the best of ABC's comedies in the '70s pretty much (maybe with The Odd Couple, amusingly enough), but I forgave BM a lot whenever Steve Landesberg was onscreen.

http://www.kcsn.org/ 88.5 CalState Northridge. Around Philadelphia, our 88.5 is also a public-radio rock station, the one that puts out Conversations from the World Cafe...but I still tend to think of the DC 88.5, which was a bluegrass/newsradio station when I lived there, and has now spun off the bluegrass/folk programming off to a second station on 105.5 FM. And in unrelated Philly/DC news, Cosby's uni was Temple University in Philly (the closest thing Philly has to a public university) and Howard University is the HBU in DC...

"The feelgood family film of this or any summer; also the most intelligent and sensitive vagina dentata script eva'!: Teeth" --Crotch Choppersman, CBB, cited by Rotten Tomatoes

"Symbiotes" (fwiw) are the opposite of parasites and their hosts/victims...they are symbiotic, or mutually beneficial. A Pecksniffian comment on this fine episode, and an instructive example to all as to what happens when people...read...a lot...for funsies. (And a shout-out to pacifist/anarchist biologist hero Peter Kropotkin, who might've been the first to draw sustained attention to this phenom...symbiosis, that is, not pedantry.)