Sunday, September 30, 2007

Bright Spots with Badges

I may have been too hasty in lamenting that this new fall TV season was bleak for lovers of crime fiction. Sure, there’s little to like, and lots of publicity about gimmicky programming around vampire private eyes and bionic babes and Neanderthal nebbishes. But there are still a couple of promising series, even if the odds against their surviving in a realm where game shows and sitcoms rule are slim.

The first of these is K-Ville, which stars Anthony Anderson and Cole Hauser as street-cop partners in New Orleans. But this isn’t the same Big Easy that provided that backdrop for Bourbon Street Beat (1959-1960) and Longstreet (1971-1972). The action here takes place in a New Orleans battered by Hurricane Katrina, ignored by the Bush administration, and then lied to by an incompetent president. Hoodlums have stolen street signs so that the police have a harder time finding their way around. Residents are still waiting for insurance companies to come through with settlements that they’ll never see. And local white grandees are willing to sabotage rebuilding efforts, if only to prevent all those poor black folks who moved to Houston after the storm from coming home again. “Dysfunctional” doesn’t even begin to describe the Crescent City in which Anderson’s Marlin Boulet and Hauser’s Trevor Cobb try to keep the peace--and bring a little optimism to the citizenry every now and then. Visitors from out of town may not see it, but Louisiana’s most beautiful burg has troubles that will take a generation, and better leadership in Washington, D.C., to overcome.

There are some disappointing elements of K-Ville. As has been pointed out before, Hauser’s character is supposedly an ex-con who, at the time of the Big Blow, escaped his cell, joined the military, served in Afghanistan, and then returned to the States for a job in the New Orleans Police Department with no one the wiser. Hah! Total fiction. And Anderson’s Marlin, a local boy who embodies the hope a nation feels for his historic city’s revitalization, leans way too far into earnestness and sanctimony; if leavened with a dollop of humor now and then, his demeanor would be easier to take.

Nonetheless, this Monday night series (which, believe it or not, now has me watching two FOX programs a week, the other one being Hugh Laurie’s House) is a serious, non-forensics-dependent cop drama, the likes of which we haven’t seen--at least on American network television--since NYPD Blue turned in its shield two years ago. There looks to be tremendous potential here both for stories rooted in economic, racial, and governmental frictions, as well as the halting relationship-building between leads Boulet and Cobb. K-Ville, which films on location in New Orleans, is already helping to boost that city’s economic recovery. If FOX will only give it the time it needs to achieve a more comfortable balance between the maudlin and the blackly humorous, this show might also give a boost to cop-drama lovers bored with CSI and Law & Order clones.

The other bright spot I see in the fall TV season is Life, a Wednesday NBC series featuring Damian Lewis, a Welsh-descended English actor (though you’d never know it, by listening to him on the show), who plays Los Angeles police detective Charlie Crews. Like K-Ville’s Cobb (and, three decades earlier, Jim Rockford), Crews is a former jailbird. He’s been exonerated by new DNA evidence, after having spent 12 long years in the slammer for a murder he didn’t commit. His legal settlement with the state of California not only gives him back his job, but it also leaves him with a rather significant chunk of change, which he’s used to buy a new car and a house he hasn’t yet gotten around to furnishing. His former compatriots on the force can’t understand why, with all his money, he’d bother to return to duty, and they don’t trust him, as a result--especially not his boss, Lieutenant Karen Davis (Robin Weigert, looking far more respectable than she did as Calamity Jane on Deadwood), who just wants him gone for good.

By all accounts, Crews is different than he was before he went “up the river.” He’s now less of a by-the-book cop, has adopted a Zen-like calmness, and demonstrates quirks that might make Bobby Goren, of L&O: Criminal Intent fame, jealous. (Actually, Crews strikes me as a combination of Goren and Detective Michael Raines, from last year’s too-short-lived series Raines.) And he has a new partner, the quite lovely Dani Reese, played by 27-year-old Sarah Shahi, a former model and cover girl for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ 2000 Swimsuit Calendar, who went on to portray a lesbian disc jockey on Showtime’s The L Word. Behind her comely appearance, Reese has her own demons to keep at bay. She’s a recovering drug addict, with what appears to be a promiscuity problem and some deep-seated disappointment in what the world has offered her so far. Reese’s superiors can’t be said to have any greater confidence in her future with the force than they do in Crews’. It’s inevitable that these two misfits will come to recognize that they are more alike and dependent on each other than they would ever have expected. Or preferred. Already, in the pilot episode (which aired last week), we witnessed Reese’s realization that there is absolutely no profit to be found in ratting her partner out for his unconventional investigative tactics.

The writers of Life spend a bit too much time focusing on Crews’ excusable disorientation with how society has evolved during the dozen years since he first sat down for a prison meal (a theme that’s been well worked before in Buddy Faro and the old Dan Dailey mystery series, Faraday and Company). And since everybody presumably understands by now that Crews was falsely incarcerated, it seems his fellow cops might cut him a bit more slack on that score. Nonetheless, the protagonist handles the pressure well, answering criticism from his colleagues with a flurry of Zenlike philosophizing that cuts them down a few pegs, even if they don’t quite understand how, or why. Crews is an engaging blend of outer intensity and inner tranquility, with just enough physical tics to signal his creaking switches between the two. That he’s also determined to figure out who set him up for a murder conviction all those years ago, gives the episodes an intriguing through-line. Was his ex-partner responsible? Or maybe Lieutenant Davis? If the writers of Life can follow the arc of this ongoing investigation with somewhat more polish than was applied to the running subplot about the murder of Dr. Jordan Cavanaugh’s mother on NBC’s Crossing Jordan, they should have a winner on their hands.

Sadly, the remainder of this fall’s crime-related TV debuts haven’t convinced me to continue watching. Gerald So contends at Crimespace that the comic spy thriller Chuck, which stars Zachary Levi “as an electronics store techie whose brain is bombarded with thousands of state secrets when a rogue spy sends him an e-mail,” is worth tuning in. But I prefer my mysteries and crime series to be more forthright and realistic. For now, I’ll stick with Life and K-Ville, and hope that the nets can come up with something more creative than a Knight Rider remake for their midseason substitutes.

I still like the idea, voiced last year in Salon by James Frey of A Million Little Pieces infamy, that the U.S. television networks should revive that old series standby, the straightforward private-eye show. “I think the time has come,” wrote Frey. I wholeheartedly agree.

Oh No, What Will James Do?

From BBC News:
Actress Lois Maxwell, who starred as Miss Moneypenny in a string of James Bond movies, has died aged 80.

Maxwell starred alongside Sir Sean Connery in Bond’s first movie outing, Dr. No, in 1962.

She played the role until 1985’s A View to A Kill with Sir Roger Moore, who told the BBC she had been a “great asset” to the early Bond movies.

A spokesperson for Fremantle Hospital, Western Australia, said she died there on Saturday evening.
Read the whole report here.

Another note of interest, this one from Wikipedia: “Since first appearing on screen in 1962 [Miss Moneypenny] has appeared in every Bond film with the exception of the latest, Casino Royale, in 2006.” Let’s hope she’s resurrected in the 22nd Bond feature film, due out in November 2008.

(Hat tip to Dark Forces Book Group via Bill Crider.)

Saturday, September 22, 2007

“A Populist in Ways Deeper Than Politics”

I may not be the most appropriate person to bear this news, because I could not have been considered a close friend of his; yet I feel compelled to say something, at least, about the untimely, if not wholly unexpected demise of Seattle writer, historian, and political commentator Walt Crowley.

Crowley was 60 years old and had been undergoing treatment for cancer of the larynx for the past 18 months. He’d reportedly been in good spirits, despite having already lost his ability to speak naturally. In fact, the latest e-mail newsletter from HistoryLink, the successful Washington/Seattle historical database he’d helped birth on the Web in 1998, reported: “Good news regarding Walt. His throat surgery yesterday [September 19] went just fine, with no surprises. Everything went according to plan, and his surgeon is pleased at how it all turned out.” Crowley himself, on a blog he and his wife, Marie McCaffrey, had set up to keep their friends apprised of his condition, enthused that not long ago that “Mel Brooks has already optioned the musical of all my operations; it will be called ‘Old Frankenstein.’ I should be dancing (if not singing) again by the end of September.” Unfortunately, he died on Friday “after complications following a stroke.”

Already, some excellent tributes to Walt Crowley have been popping up around the Web. They give a bit about his background (born in the Detroit area, the son of a Boeing worker, former university rabble-rouser hired by Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman as a liaison with students, speech writer for former Governor Mike Lowry, etc.). But few so far rival one by Michael Hood, a longtime Seattle journalist who, among other things, covers the Seattle talk-radio scene. In his blog, BlatherWatch, Hood recalls that
Walt was a liberal, a democrat, and a populist in ways deeper than politics. Blessed with a sense of humor, and a wide-ranging curiosity; he had sense of the absurd, and a penchant for B-grade science fiction, robots, and rocket ships. ...

He couldn’t be facile or suffer fools or bores; but he loved people. If it was you he liked--he was loyal, and generous to a fault, and that was that. Walt cut his commentarian teeth as a political cartoonist; and took great joy in sometimes being an overlarge garlic fragment in baba ganoush of Seattle nice. ...

Civically, he was tireless.

Crowley led the successful public campaign to save Seattle’s historic Blue Moon Tavern from demolition in 1990, and chaired Mayor Norm Rice’s task force on historic downtown theaters, which drafted new laws and tax incentives for preservation and restoration of the Paramount, Moore, and Eagles theaters.
Hood knew his subject better than I did. I first met Crowley when, in the mid-1980s, he signed on with the staff of what was then The Weekly (now the Seattle Weekly), an “alternative newspaper” with a bent toward investigative stories, political coverage, arts reporting, and any other subject that could give it a from-the-sidelines voice in the operations of Washington’s largest city. I was pretty green at the time, though I’d been a reporter with a similar alternative rag in Portland, Oregon, Willamette Week. Crowley struck me back then as being a bit of an “in-crowder,” the sort who restricts his associations to movers and shakers who will steady the ladder of success while he climbs up it. He wasn’t an offensive name-dropper, but he did often pepper his remarks in editorial meetings with mentions of what So-and-So (insert name of prominent Seattleite) had to say regarding the topic of discussion. And in those days, he had the unexpected advantage of being a smoker, and therefore hung out for intimate chats not only with cigarette-accessorized celebs (or what pass for celebs in the Emerald City), but also other nicotine-addicted writers. There was undoubtedly a part of me that was jealous of Crowley, for the easy access he had to prominent and literary folk. I was certainly envious of the fact that he had been given the media business beat, which I wanted to cover myself (and would a few years later, after Crowley moved on from The Weekly).

It wasn’t until earlier in this decade that I came to see Walt Crowley as a valuable colleague. By then, he’d written a very useful guide to Seattle’s history and had founded (along with his wife and a local history writer, Paul Dorpat) the HistoryLink site. He was directing more and more of his attentions to the subject of Seattle’s unexpectedly intriguing heritage, about which I was also writing much. Since I had recently vacated a magazine-editing job, and Crowley was looking for copy to fill his Web site, he started to throw some assignments my way. It was a great opportunity for me to recycle my research, whether I was writing about the Panic of 1893, the so-called Wild Man of the Wynoochee, Washington’s Capitol Building, or one of my favorite subjects, Tusko, the “great unwanted” Thai elephant that had brought havoc to a small town, but joy later on to the children at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.

Crowley, though, always seemed to have a great deal more ambition for HistoryLink than he did money, so our association in that area was inconstant. I would still see him occasionally on downtown Seattle streets, and we lived close enough to each other in the city’s Greenwood-Phinney Ridge area that I bumped into him while grocery shopping or book buying. However, I couldn’t make the single Christmas party he invited me to attend (legend has it that those occasions were delightful), and our social circles didn’t intersect enough for us to stay in close contact. Any jealousy I felt toward Crowley dissipated as I saw that he really was a genuinely warm man, and he never failed to stop and talk, when he did see me. There was always something in the works that he thought might interest me (most prominently, a franchising of the HistoryLink site to San Francisco, California--one of the cities I most adore in this world).

It was several weeks ago that I heard his time on this earth might be short. That he wasn’t doing so well with his cancer treatments. I wasn’t sure at first whether I should be acknowledging his health problems by dropping him an e-mail note, so I hesitated. And now my chance to do so, to wish him the best in his last days, is gone. I feel no guilt, for I am confident he would not want me to; but I do feel sadness at having lost somebody with such energy, curiosity, and intelligence. Certainly, Walt Crowley was a lucky man to now be missed by so many.

READ MORE:Walt Crowley, 1947-2007,” by Knute Berger (Crosscut); “Walt Crowley, Historian, Part of City History, Dies at 60,” by Sharon Pian Chan (The Seattle Times); “Degrees of Separation,” by Marlow Harris (360Digest); “Say Goodbye to Our Friend, Walt Crowley,” by Jean Godden (Crosscut); “Goodbye, Old Friend,” by Charles Smyth (Spiraglio); “Walt Crowley, 60,” by Rick Anderson (Seattle Weekly); “Walt Crowley Remembered,” by Joel Connelly (Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

Borat Gets a Gun

My God, just when I thought that the standards of American network television couldn’t possibly sink any lower, TV Squad brings word today that FOX is planning a “brand-new cop show about a police officer from Albania who is transplanted to the U.S. The one-hour project, currently titled Raffik, will be a fish-out-of-water story focusing on the officer’s reactions to the wonders of America.” So, the big question is, will this guy simply be Marshal Sam McCloud with borscht in his teeth, rather than toothpicks? Or maybe a less moronic Borat (aka Sacha Baron Cohen)? The only ray of hope for this endeavor lies in the fact that author-screenwriter Anthony Horowitz, the man behind Foyle’s War, is Raffik’s creator.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Tube Boobs

This is one of those controversies that clearly demonstrates the disconnect between Red America and Blue America, the Bible Belt and the U.S. coasts, Midwesterners and everybody else. According to today’s Los Angeles Times, a 30-second commercial spot for the animal-rights organization PETA has been banned in Houston, Texas. What’s the beef? The commercial finds 30-year-old actress Alicia Silverstone, “a well-known animal rights activists and environmentalist, ... swimming in a pool naked and talking about the beauty of a vegetarian lifestyle.”

Now, aside from a brief butt shot (which, as everybody knows, is hardly a novelty on cable TV these days), there’s nothing particularly revealing about the footage. I’ve seen more skin on many a public beach than the former Batgirl displays here. “As she emerges from the pool,” explains the Times, “her carefully placed limbs and some fancy camera work leave it all to the imagination.” Nonetheless, this ad has been “reportedly banned in that bastion of beef by Comcast Cable. ... Whether it was too saucy or too controversial is unclear,” reports the newspaper. “A spokesperson for Comcast did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment. Neither did PETA.”

Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, even residents of the Lone Prude State can see the spot for themselves, right here.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Why Didn’t Dick Cheney Listen to His Own Advice?

This video comes from 1994. His warnings then have since proved prescient. How many more American lives are you willing to sacrifice to the Iraq “quagmire” now, Dick?

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Happy Birthday, Peter Falk

British novelist Mark Billingham, in his fine Rap Sheet tribute to the TV series Columbo, mentioned this last week, but I think it’s necessary to mark the occasion on the exact date: Today is the 80th birthday of actor Peter Falk, who of course played the single-monikered Los Angeles homicide investigator in that renowned NBC show.

Born in New York City, but reared in Ossining, in the Empire State’s Westchester County (north of Manhattan), Falk made his initial stage appearance at age 12 in a youth camp production of The Pirates of Penzance. The acting bug was thereby planted, but it took some while to mature. According to his official Web site’s biography,
After graduating from Ossining High School, where he was a star athlete and president of his class, Falk served as a cook in the Merchant Marine, then studied at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he completed his work for a B.A. degree in political science at the New School for Social Research in 1951. He earned a Masters degree in public administration at Syracuse University in 1953. After applying unsuccessfully for a job with the Central Intelligence Agency, he became a management analyst with the Connecticut State Budget Bureau, in Hartford. In his spare time he acted with the Mark Twain Maskers in Hartford and studied at the White Barn Theatre in Westport, and for the first time began to consider the possibility of becoming a professional actor. In 1956 at the age of 29 he left his job with the Budget Bureau, moved to Greenwich Village in New York, and declared himself an actor.
He debuted Off Broadway in Molière’s Don Juan, and soon after found himself on Broadway in a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. Although “a theatrical agent advised him not to expect much work in motion pictures because of his glass eye” (he’d lost his right peeper to cancer at age 3), Falk left for Hollywood in 1960 and scored a supporting role in the acclaimed film Murder, Inc., for which he picked up an Oscar nomination. “On a roll,” continues his Web site backgrounder, “he was nominated that same year for an Emmy playing a drug addict in The Law and Mr. Jones. Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles, with Bette Davis and Glenn Ford, was Falk’s second feature in 1961 and with it, his second Oscar nomination. Also that year he got a second Emmy nomination in The Dick Powell Playhouse’s presentation of The Price of Tomatoes--and this time took home the prize.”

Falk’s initial TV series was The Trials of O’Brien (1965-1966), a “weekly one-hour comedy whodunit” in which he played a well-meaning lawyer who was willing to bend the rules of law a bit in order to make sure that his clients got a “fair go.” (The American Bar Association, accustomed to the more earnest legal proceedings on Perry Mason, apparently complained about O’Brien.) But it was Columbo, which debuted in 1971 as one of three series rotating under the umbrella title, the NBC Mystery Movie (later the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie), that made Falk a familiar face in U.S homes.

As most people likely know by now, Falk wasn’t originally envisioned by series creators Richard Levinson and William Link as the right guy to play their persistent L.A. homicide detective. Since Thomas Mitchell, a thespian then in his 70s (and probably best remembered now for playing Scarlett O’Hara’s father in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind), had previously filled the part of Lieutenant Columbo in their theatrical production, Prescription: Murder, Levinson and Link were looking for an older actor when they tried to transfer the character to television. Their preference: Bing Crosby. But after the singer-performer turned them down (reportedly, because their schedule conflicted with his golfing), Levinson and Link instead rethought their protagonist in the form of Falk, whose “rumpled looks and good nature” had impressed them, according to Richard Meyers’ book TV Detectives. After he had played Columbo in two teleflicks, Prescription: Murder (a 1968 adaptation of Levinson and Link’s play) and Ransom for a Dead Man (1971), NBC signed Falk to play the part in a regular, 90-minute series.

Columbo ran on NBC from 1971 to 1978 (climbing into the top five of the Nielsen ratings), and then was brought back by competitor ABC in a succession of TV movies broadcast from 1989 to 2003. (A full listing of episodes and teleflicks can be found here.) Falk picked up five Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of the permanently rumpled sleuth.

Of course, the actor has had other roles. Many of them, on both the large and small screens. It’s easy to forget that Falk appeared in Have Gun--Will Travel, The Untouchables, and Naked City; that he played a treasure-seeking cab driver in the 1963 comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and parodied Bogartesque gumshoes in Neil Simon’s The Cheap Detective (1978); and that he portrayed a dubious ex-CIA agent in Arthur Hiller’s 1979 comedy, The In-Laws, and did a turn in his director friend John Cassavetes’ 1974 film, A Woman Under the Influence. (Cassavetes had earlier guest-starred in a fondly remembered 1972 episode of Columbo, “Étude in Black.”) What we remember, instead, is that Peter Falk made a household name of Lieutenant Columbo, a shabby-raincoated, cigar-chewing, Peugeot-driving, Italian-descended cop behind whose obsequious manner and often poorly shaven mug hid an investigative mastermind to rival Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot put together. Philandering psychologist Ray Flemming (Gene Barry) had it right when he said, in the TV film version of Prescription: Murder, “You’re an intelligent man, Columbo, but you hide it.”

Actors could be known for far less memorable roles.

Happy 80th, Mr. Falk.

FROM ’ZINE TO SCREEN: I came across this bit of trivia at the Web’s Ultimate Columbo Site:
Columbo’s genesis dated from March 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine published a short story, written by two old friends, W. Link and R. Levinson. First entitled “May I Come In?” by the writers, it was then [retitled] “Dear Corpus Delecti.” The policeman, called Lieutenant Fisher, was a little man, who looked insignificant. Columbo was taking shape. “We recalled the policeman [Porfiry] Petrovitch in Dotstoïevski’s Crime and Punishment. This character, even if he looked quite humble, was in fact really intimidating. He knew how to catch the killers off guard,” explained William Link.
Also interesting, from the same site, is an article titled “How We Created Columbo--and How He Nearly Killed Us,” by Levinson and Link, which is an excerpt from their 1981 book, Stay Tuned: An Inside Look at the Making of Prime Time Television.

READ MORE:Lt. Columbo: The Genesis of a Character,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File).

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Turning Over a New Leaf

Unless you’re George W. Bush, it’s pretty much impossible these days to ignore warnings about the progress of global warming, the imminent demise of the polar bears, and the impact of population increases on the earth’s finite resources. But have you ever thought about how much environmental damage you’re doing, simply by reading books?

Eco-Libris has. And as penance, Eco-Libris -- a service of California-based Redwood Visions Consulting LLC (which apparently strives “to bring high-level Internet business expertise to the world of green and sustainable businesses”) -- wants you to help subsidize the restoration of far-off forest lands. As its Web site explains:
Hey, we know you love books. Who doesn’t? But what about all the trees that are used to produce the paper for these books? About 20 million trees are being cut down EVERY YEAR to produce the books sold in the U.S. alone. What can you do about it? Well, here’s a suggestion: stop reading .. NO, NO. just kiddin’.

A better solution would be to start planting trees for all the books you read. To let you do just that, we thought up Eco-Libris, a means to balance out the paper in your books by planting trees. To maximize your impact, the trees will be planted in developing countries, benefiting both the environment and local communities.

For every book you balance out, we will send you an Eco-Libris sticker to put on your book cover, displaying your commitment to sustainability and perhaps even inspiring others to become more responsible about their use of natural resources (in case you were wondering -- the sticker is made of recycled paper with non-toxic ink ... oh, and the thank you note too, and yeah, even the envelope).
That sounds downright admirable, even if it does cause you to sweat a bit as you walk through the aisles of bookstores, imagining all the forests that have been toppled and pulped for your reading entertainment. Such guilt might actually make you pay the $1 per book per tree that Eco-Libris charges for every sapling it sticks in the ground on your behalf.

But isn’t it a bit off, and seemingly counterproductive that, at the same time as Eco-Libris (which, by the way, is said to translate from the Latin as “from the books”) is encouraging you to fund the planting of trees, it is willing to send you a paper thank-you note in an envelope? Couldn’t that recycled stock have been better used in, say, the printing of more books for you to enjoy?

More information about Eco-Libris’ project is available here.

Monday, September 10, 2007

There Once Was a Title So Mangled ...

It’s Monday again. Let’s start the week off right with a couple of delightful discoveries.

First, we learn (via Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist) that librarian members of Fiction-L, “an electronic mailing list devoted to reader’s advisory topics,” have compiled a rather extensive rundown of book titles and authors’ names that readers frequent garble, distort, or otherwise “butcher.” Just a few of my favorites:

A Race Car Named Desire (aka A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams)
Bonfire of the Vampires (The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe)
Eat a Cat by Post (Etiquette, by Emily Post)
Fire Hydrant 415 (Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury)
Lame Is Rob (Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo)
Oranges and Peaches (The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin)
Satan in the White House (The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson)
The Canine Mutiny (The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk)
The Lovely Boner (The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold)

And, of course, the best of them all:

Satanic Nurses (The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie)

The whole list, plus some muddled recollections by patrons struggling to tell librarians what exactly it is that they’re looking to find (“That book about Hotey the donkey” [Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes])--can be found here.

* * *
Second, who in hell has ever heard of “The Great Limerick Craze of 1907”? Sad to say, we hadn’t, until yesterday, when Britain’s Independent on Sunday brought us this recollection:
In September 1907 a magazine called London Opinion offered a big cash prize for the reader who could come up with the best last line for the following limerick:

There was a young lady of Ryde
Whose locks were consider’bly dyed.
The hue of her hair
Made everyone stare ...
The winning submission was apparently, “‘She’s piebald, she’ll die bald!’ they cried.”

The Independent goes on to explain that the London Opinion “was only one of dozens of papers and periodicals to run such a competition.
This year marks the centenary of what became one of the greatest crazes ever to grip the British nation, as limerick fever took a hold on all social classes. The extent of the contagion was measured by a statement to the House of Commons by the postmaster-general who noted the following year that sales of sixpenny postal orders--the standard entry fee for the contests--had risen from 800,000 the year before to 11 million. Nearly six million were sold in the month of August alone.
In commemoration of that limericking ludicrousness, The Independent has decided to renew the London Opinion’s 1907 contest, asking its readers and others to compose their own “best last line” for the limerick in boldface above. (Just one caution: The paper asks that entrants “resist the temptation to submit unprintably bawdy entries.”) The Independent goes on to promise that “[a] bottle of champagne awaits the 10 best suggestions received by 16 September. E-mail your lines to competitions@ independent.co.uk. The editor’s decision is final.”

You can read The Independent’s full report here.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

The Girl from “Guy”

How is it possible that today could mark the 50th birthday of onetime poster babe Heather Thomas? You remember her, right? In her mid-20s, she spent almost as much time strutting about in bikinis on the 1981-1986 ABC-TV series The Fall Guy as she did helping Hollywood stuntman-bounty hunter Colt Seavers (Lee Majors) round up bail-jumpers and other lawbreakers.

Back then, the number of Heather Thomas photos taped inside boys’ high-school lockers might have exceeded even the quantity of Ray-Bans and Rubik’s Cubes being sold in the United States. I have no statistics to back this up, but my guess would be that only the famous pin-up of the Charlie’s Angels star then known as Farrah Fawcett-Majors provoked more male salivation than Thomas did at the time.

This Connecticut-born, California-reared actress, who in the era of The Fall Guy boasted all the appeal of a blond, tomboyish, small-town girl unselfconscious of her own beauty, looked to have fame within her grasp. After attending the University of Southern California’s Film School, Thomas scored roles in the eminently forgettable series David Cassidy: Man Undercover and B.J. and the Bear before being signed to play “Jody Banks” on The Fall Guy. In 1982, Us Weekly chose her as its “Favorite Female Newcomer.” Unfortunately, the Majors series, with its country-ish theme song, typecast Thomas for parts that emphasized her sex-symbol looks, rather than her acting chops. “There’s obligatory condescension that goes with that,” she told People magazine back in 2003. “You fill that archetype--the blonde bimbo. But at that point, I was just having fun.” She guested on The Love Boat, T.J. Hooker, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, and the somewhat less than award-winning 1990 series Swamp Thing.

After The Fall Guy’s five-year run, recalls one Web bio, Thomas found several roles in TV movies. She “co-starred with Cliff Robertson and Hope Lange in Ford: The Man and the Machine (1987), a biopic about the renowned manager who revolutionized the industry. Her fine acting in the telepic brought Thomas a Gemini nomination for Best Performance by a Supporting Actress. She then was cast as Marilyn Monroe in a Kennedy-themed movie called Hoover vs. the Kennedys: The Second Civil War (1987), had a feature role as Lt. Carol Campbell in the World War II film The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission (1988) and acted alongside Rodney Dangerfield and Tim Allen in the comedy Rodney Dangerfield: Opening Night at Rodney’s Place (1989).”

However, she also battled drug problems. In 1984, says TV.com, Thomas “entered rehab for cocaine addiction. She blames a Hollywood lifestyle. After exiting rehab, she continued acting, but started writing scripts. She penned more than 40 scripts, before selling one in 1997.” That story carried the unpromising title School Slut, says People, and focused on “two high school girls, one an outsider, one a beauty queen, who feel ostracized and ‘decide to work outside the paradigm.’” Despite Thomas’ enthusiasm, no movie of her work was ever made.

Married since 1991 to an entertainment attorney, Thomas divides her time these days between Santa Monica, California, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She has a couple of stepdaughters and one child of her own, India Rose, who was born on June 19, 2000. According to the Internet Movie Database, her last acting part was as an unnamed showgirl in the 1998 Billy Crystal film My Giant.

The fact that Heather Thomas, a fantasy babe from my youth, will today blow out 50 candles on a birthday cake makes me feel awfully damn old. It’s almost enough to send me out to buy The Fall Guy: The Complete First Season, which was released a couple of months ago on DVD, if only so that I can once more appreciate the sight of Thomas sashaying through a pair of swinging bar doors, and cocking her bikini’ed left hip, as she did in the main title sequence of that series. Be still my aging heart.

READ MORE:TV’s Turd Blossoms,” by Gedeon Maheux (Gedblog).

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

“A River of Punishment and Execution”

Authors nowadays are told that they have not only to write good books, but then to promote their literary efforts with tendentious blogs and tours and bells-and-whistles YouTube videos. In that light, I am particularly charmed by a very understated promo video from Peter Ackroyd, who has a new book about England’s Thames River to flog. No technological fireworks here. Instead, the sum of what we get is the doughboyish, bespectacled, and ardently academic Ackroyd in a small boat, drifting along the Thames through London (about which he already wrote a wonderful book) and gabbing about that river’s history, while a snippet of classical music reels out in the background. It’s nothing in the way of cinematic come-ons, but nonetheless makes me want to send away for his book post haste. Other authors, take note.


(Hat tip to Book/Daddy.)

If It Quacks Like a Lame Duck ...

American “media personalities” (the Chris Matthewses of the world, as opposed to actual new reporters) are prone to portray George W. Bush as someone able to overcome pervasive political woes and widespread scandals, and still pull one over on his Democratic opponents on Capitol Hill. But as the Associated Press points out today, the prez’s power to influence has actually fallen to historic lows:
President Bush’s success rating in the Democratic-controlled House has fallen this year to a half-century low, and he prevailed on only 14 percent of the 76 roll call votes on which he took a clear position.

The previous low for any president was in 1995, when Bill Clinton won just 26 percent of the time during the first year after Republicans took control of the House. If Bush’s score holds through the end of the year, he will have the lowest success rating in either chamber for any president since Congressional Quarterly began analyzing votes in 1953.

A study of House and Senate floor votes, compiled by CQ over the August recess, also showed that House Democrats have backed Bush’s legislative positions this year only 6 percent of the time, making for the strongest opposition from either party against a president in the 54 years CQ has kept score.
You’ll find the whole story here.

READ MORE:How Bush Betrays Reagan,” by Gary Kamiya (Salon).