| Notes from the overground. |
| Following up to yesterday's comments on Andy Kaufman,
I pulled some Andy's of my own way back in high school. I
thought of them yesterday, and thought it might be fun to
recount one after all these years. Andy and I are the
products of similar environments. He was 17 days older,
amd we are both New Yorkers. His family was Jewish, mine
was a Jewish-Christian-Athiest mixture, a convoluted
combination which resulted in my attending Catholic
schools, through a compromised process of family politics
too boring and complicated to describe here. In my senior year of high school we had an advanced math class in probability and statistics. There were about 20 guys and no girls in the class, only those of us who took every possible math elective. Lord knows why or how, but the school assigned this class to a rookie teacher with no control over the class and no grasp of the material. It devolved upon me to give this guy as much grief as possible in my own way, which was to concoct elaborate hoaxes without ever actually acting nasty or disrespectful to him. The first great triumph came about 20 days into the semester, when it was my turn to lead prayers. We had this class before lunch period, and we had to say some noontime prayer ritual for reasons never clear to me even then, and now lost totally. The teacher assigned each of us in turn to lead the prayers, based on our seating order. When it came my turn, I informed the class aloud, with great solemnity, that it was the feast of St. Polycarp (I always liked that name), and that I would be adding the obligatory Litany to St Polycarp to the normal prayers. The basis of the alleged litany was simply the back pages of the Missal. I just read off the names of all the saints in alphabetical order, and the rest of the guys would say "pray for us". I never dreamed that Mr. Sparacino would let us go so long. After a while, I got bored with the real names, and started making up phony ones in free association from words that sounded silly to me. "St Molybdenum" "Pray for Us" "St Calabash" "Pray for Us" "St Passepartout" "Pray for Us". And still he made no effort to intervene. There were snickers from the other guys here and there, and my own voice cracked up a couple of times when I said a particularly silly word (several guys cracked up when I said "St Tippy"), but we all kept up the charade pretty well. After a while however, the joke was thin, because all the guys in the class and I were waiting for his reaction, and there was none. It just went on and on. Finally, the friggin' bell rang, and the other guys started to file out. Mr. Sparacino said "wait a minute" and asked me why the prayers went the entire period. I made up a bullshit answer about St Polycarp, and he said "OK, but see that it doesn't happen again". End of story. To this day, I still don't know if he was the dumbest fuck that ever lived, or if he was the one who had the last laugh on me. But I think Andy would have been thrilled to see it either way. |
| One Fish, Two Fish |
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| PAL's goal is always to add new
material to our collections, and damned if he isn't great
at it. Miou-Miou in "Of Jonah, who will be 25 in the year 2000" Anne Looby in "Strangers" Amanda Ooms in "Unknown Time"
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Yesterday: Maria (#1 , #2 , #3 , #4) The Page Three Gold girls today are Gayner Goodman from 29 December 1987, and Carole Needham. She was 1982's page three girl of the year. (#1, #2) The WhyScans Bonus today is the last unedited caps of All Saints. WhyScans invites you to use them for collages if you care to, because he's pressed for time. No nudity. (#45, #46, #47, #48, #49, #50, #51, #52, #53, #54, #55, #56, #57, #58, #59, #60, #61, #62, #63) |
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Ever wonder what the Playboy,
Page Three, and other softcore models do when not
modeling for Playboy or the British tabs? Fred does.
Fred, or as he is known in the ancient Elventongue,
"Frodo", specializes in "outing" the
harder action from these ostensibly wholesome girls.
Today's atypically laconic comments: "Rebekah Tamar, the Sun's Page Three Girl of the Millennium" (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, #15, #16) |
| Devilscan | Hey Scoop. Welcome back from your sojourn. Hope it was refreshing. This is a pic that was run in the tech section of the Toronto Star this week. It's actually about the third or fourth that I remember them running of Marlen Cowpland (Wife of the Corel CEO), but the first one that I've scanned. She seems to exhibit all of the essential qualities of a 21st century trophy wife. The guy in the pic, btw, is Michael, her hubby. There was a story going around up here that he had bought her a $50 000 gold bustier, and from the looks of things, it seems like the sort of thing she'd wear both inside and outside the bedroom. |
Members Bonuses- The Red Violin |
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| a | These comments contain
some spoilers. If you don't want me to ruin anything for
you, skip to the pictures The Red Violin is a very literary movie, interweaving time periods like a modernist novel. The essence is simple. A famous violin is being auctioned off in contemporary Montreal. It was made in Cremona during the golden age of violin craftsmanship. What happened in between? There is a mysterious connection between the first time period and the last. The craftsman is making the instrument for his unborn son. The violinmaker's pregnant wife has her fortune told. It becomes apparent to us almost immediately that the fortune teller is "mistakenly" reading the future of the violin, not the woman. She predicts a long life, and the woman dies in childbirth two weeks later. Since the old crone knows the violin's future, it makes a beautiful context in which to relate the history of the instrument. As the gypsy turns over each Tarot card, she tells of its significance, and each card equals a vignette. Each story also explains the presence of one of the bidders in the modern day auction. All very cleverly woven together, and all of it perfectly logical and plausible. The fifth card tells of the present day story, featuring Samuel L. Jackson as an appraiser preparing authenticity checks for the auction. That final story solves the mystery violin's color - the varnish was mixed with blood. Then we flash back again to see the violinmaker using his dead wife's blood in the mixture, and we know why the woman's fortune was intermingled with the violin's. It is because she did actually achieve a long life as an integral part of the violin. The film also achieves a very literary resolution. Jackson substitutes a copy and steals the violin to give to his daughter. The instrument was made for the creator's child, and will be given to the child of the only man alive who truly appreciates the creator's genius. A very tidy script which could get a nomination for best screenplay if I had any say in the matter. In addition to enjoying the intricate interweaving of multiple time-periods, I also got into the individual stories, all of which were quite different from one another, and each of which had something to say about its epoch's perception of perfection, beauty, and expectation. Taken individually, they reminded us how we have changed. Taken together they reminded us of the immortality of beauty, despite the fragility of our human generations. On a more literal basis, the movie reminds us just how many real stories are behind those ancient instruments, some handed ceremoniously from genius to genius, others shrouded with mysterious disappearances. I really enjoyed this movie, and the sound track made it even better. Miscellaneous thoughts: After watching the film, I was surprised to find that Greta Scacchi is only 39. Her face looks 10 years older, and her body - well, let's just say her bottom could match Kate Winslet's, as you'll see in the collages. What the hell happened to her? I was so-o-o disappointed that Samuel L Jackson didn't say any cool stuff like "you need this violin, when you just got to have the motherfuckin' best". I never saw him so subdued. I was surprised to see the accordion players in modern China (where the violin spent a "lost generation" as a symbol of decadent Western music). So China threw out decadent Western Mozart and replaced him with that traditional and pure oriental accordion music? It turns out that this all stems from a little-known historical incident in the Sino-Polish war, which occured about the same time as the Scottish-American war. It seems that the Chinese and the Polish were scheduled to fight a great battle in yesteryear, but it came out so badly that both sides agreed to cover it up forever. The Chinese, pacificist Confucians and Buddhists at heart, showed up for the battle with no weapons. They couldn't kill anyone, but they were willing to die to save face rather than shame themselves with the dishonor of either cowardice or failure to honor an appointment. Possessing the only weapons, the Poles should have achieved an easy victory that day, but their cavalry had only practiced riding in horse shows, and their attempts to fire weapons from a moving horse resulted in casualties only to themselves, their horses, and their officers. Finally, they agreed to call the battle and the war a draw, and had a big party instead. It was at this feast that the Poles gave the Chinese their first accordions, Polka lessons, and some complimentary Polish sausage to take home. I am reminded of the greatest revolutionary Chinese Polka, translated here for the first time (sorry, my Mandarin is a little rough around the edges, so the translation is approximate): "She likes Kielbasa that's her doom. She likes Kielbasa more than Din Sum She likes Kielbasa - capitalist cow! She likes Kielbasa more than Chairman Mao"        |
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| Members Bonus | ||
| El Kabong | Senor
Kabong, now working without Babbalouis and trying his
hand at scanning, has some more material from issue 54 of
Celebrity Skin. Not very high quality material, but
interesting, and it may be new to some of you. Lola Ferrari, who once claimed to have the world's largest breasts (#1, #2, #3, #4) Keely Shaye-Smith paparazzi |
