Hi, friends!
Happy Monday!
How do you spend holidays like New Year’s Day? Relaxing? Cleaning? Seeing folks?
I was hoping for a chill day watching college football but instead I’m watching Michigan’s defensive line beat the shit out of my QB.
I did however get my Christmas tree taken down and the decorations put away. So my living room (which is already small) no longer feels as cramped as it has for the past few weeks.
Fucked around for the most part. But we also did a little (very little) cleaning. I also took a nap which was glorious.
Man just when I thought my team was getting their shit together, 2 fucked up snaps and back to punting.
I still hate Jim Harbaugh from his days as a Bears QB. I was really hoping for a Michigan loss. Don’t get me wrong, I hate Alabama too, so I probably cancelled out my own hoodoo.
Yeah, I hate both those teams so much.
I’ve been rooting for Washington all week because I didn’t want to fucking play Texas again.
Not a chance of that happening with Bama’s loss!! LOL
Still rooting for Washington because they’re so good and fuck Texas.
That was beyond a stressful game. Penix proved he should have won the Heisman.
You could do what I do and tune out sprots entirely and listen to pop tunes on Youtube and read the online version of the London Review of Books. That’s probably a niche diversion. Just trying to be helpful.
Snacked on leftovers, watched some bad football, watched the wife & eldest do a polar plunge & went for a walk. Now we are going to get our pasta making lesson from the Italians.
Cleaned up the sink which was full of dirty dishes.
Prepping for food tomorrow.
Spent 1/2 of the day working on models which I didn’t do much till all my guests left.
Finished up leftover pizza from yesterday.
We watched a very special rerun of, what else,”Hawaii 5-0″! (While I ate mini-quiches for dinner. I meant to serve them last night, as appetizers, but we already had so much food, so it seemed…)
What is special about this one is we are back at the Honolulu Airport, where a smuggling/thievery ring is operating among the baggage/freight handlers. This is the usual, but lo and behold Marion Ross (Richie Cunningham’s Mom on “Happy Days”) shows up yet again, this time as an accomplice wearing this Chagall-like jewel-toned muu-muu. She is responsible for taking in and passing along airbill numbers, which alerts the ring to what’s worth stealing. You see, what happens is she’s a divorced mother of an 18-year-old who “sniffs cocaine” so to pay for her rehab bills she gets mixed up in all of this.
As if this wasn’t entertaining enough, and believe me, it was more than enough, we learn that in 1970 they had a version of answering machines. So Steve calls a number and the message is, “This call will be recorded electronically. You will have 60 seconds to [something. It was like, “leave your message.]” So he summons a tech expert who shows him how to intercept messages from a phone number and record them on this huge tape-to-tape recorder. The tech, who is Asian, says to Steve, “you’re very smart and you’re not even Chinese.” And then at another point Chin Ho unleashes a Chinese aphorism, à propos of nothing, really, and someone, I think Steve, says, playfully and with the best of intentions, “Inscrutable Orientals.” And Chin Ho is amused by this.
So they go off to interrogate the guy who they think is the ringleader. He has had a recent run-in with one of his dupes, which did not go well (for the dupe, who was also Chinese), so he’s enjoying a calming cigarette and a glass of scotch, and it was probably 10 or 11 in the morning.
Oh, and at another point we’re back at the hospital where Marion Ross worked as a nurse when Steve was temporarily blinded. But she’s not a nurse now, she’s been transferred over to the shipping department at Honolulu Airport.
I know I overuse this term a lot, and I should really increase my vocabulary, but this is all so fabulous. It sets my little vestigial tail a-wagging.
Marion Ross playing different roles reminds me of Columbo, where guest stars would repeat. I think Patrick McGoohan played three or four different murderers.
Of course he must have! It was the Golden Age of the Guest Star. Those whodunits, and the game shows, and the actors had their own gigs. It’s a wonder that anyone got any sleep. Meanwhile, over in Britain, there are like two dozen people who show up on all the panel shows and stand-up comedy routines and just hog all the available acting jobs. I will say that one of my unrequited crushes is a guy named Jack Whitehall. He hasn’t aged well, and he’s only 35, but he’s very posh and people make fun of him for it. I would take it. Better to live in a 3-bedroom flat in South Ken than this shithole–stop, Mattie. This is the life you chose, and Better Half is literally your better half. He’s a much better man than you. For richer or poorer, for better worse, in sickness and in health…well, you know the rest.
One of the things I puzzle over about the 70s is the distinction between TV and movie stars, and if you were a movie star who did TV, you probably were never going back to movies.
Peter Falk was a rare exception, but for the most part an actor like James Garner who was successful in movies but then took a big TV role in Rockford Files was never going back to the silver screen.
These days things are much more fluid, and that’s good, but I think in part it’s because movies aren’t what they used to be.
Bruce Willis was another guy in the 80s who moved out of the TV slums. I have on our tree right now an ornament of him in an air duct, because of course Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
I think the 80s finally saw a breakdown of the old system that held until then. I’m not sure why studios worried so much, though.
Well, thanks a lot, because I almost had a stroke because I was laughing so hard. I wonder if anyone’s done a similar “Fantasy Island” compilation. But they somehow left out the most fabulous cast ever assembled. These women play mothers of cast members.
This proto-gay almost fell off the couch when I saw this upon its first broadcast. My father was not impressed. My mother asked me, “Do you know who these actresses are?” “Of course I do! Ethel Merman–” And they had kind of a “We Need to Talk About Kevin” moment, but I had already exposed myself by ogling Bruce Jenner in his singlet and short shorts on the Wheaties box. My parents were saints. But my brothers liked to build models and listen to 8-track tapes and fix up old clunkers, so why shouldn’t I have an interest in actresses who just happened to be gay icons in the 1970s?
We have all boarded the Love Boat and set sail for Fantasy Island, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
I think it was a holdover prejudice from when TVs became common. The actors didn’t want to go from big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas to these cheap little black-and-white 39-episodes-a-year TV comedies or Westerns or whatever. To this day, the Oscars are considered much more prestigious than the Emmys, and the Golden Globes might as well just be disbanded, for all the ridicule and contempt that they’re held in.
You know what’s fun, though, is very, very famous American celebrities will shill for products abroad via really tacky TV commercials. They are remunerated handsomely. They seem to think that these foreign commercials will not see the light of day in the US but of course they all do. I can’t think of any specific examples but they’re all over the Web.
We rented a cabin for the last 4 nights, so we packed up this morning, cleaned what we had to clean, and made our way back home. Then spent the afternoon doing some laundry, storing some ski gear (which we didn’t use because of poor snow quality), and napping (as previously noted, glorious).
Didn’t get around to getting the holiday lights and decorations down, so we will do that piecemeal over this week. Really looking forward to getting rid of some clutter.
Happy New Year to all.
This is such a beautiful country. I really need to see the USA in my (1953) Chevrolet: