A Clockwork Red?

Posted by Anna Kournikova to Facebook today

Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.


I'm not sure how to say Clockwork Orange in Russian. But then the book is barely in English to begin with.

It was gonna be Patrick Swayze again....

People magazine announced that Jennifer Lopez will be on their cover of the most beautiful people today or whatever it is they call it.

In other news, People magazine announced that it takes 8 years for them to write each issue. After the piece on Jennifer Lopez being hot, there's a really interesting feature on Lindsay Lohan's promising film career, and eager anticipation of what M. Night Shamalayan will direct next.

when Britney got me choked up... in a comedy

So, I was flipping channels the other day (which is flipping about five of them since I still don't have cable)... I stopped on an episode of How I Met Your Mother, mostly because Britney Spears was a guest on it and when you don't have many options ya tend to at least check her out.

The thing is, it caught me off-guard.

The short version of the set-up was that Neil Patrick Harris (aka Doogie) was teasing one of his other friends by pretending that he was going to marry Britney's character. Only Britney wasn't in on the joke. Typical far-fetched sketch comedy misunderstanding thing... till Britney shows how into it she is by going off to call her mom on the cell phone, and says,

"Momma, it finally happened! I just wish Dad was still alive so he could walk me down the aisle."

Ummm, yeah. Cute joke and all. Hit me like a sockful of bricks. Ahh well.

Ya know, side note, I realized I've had posts on Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and now Britney in the last three weeks and I don't think I've had even one filthy reference. I must be slipping.

VPILF

alright, so there's been a few thousand posts out there about McCain tapping Sarah Palin to be his veep, and a few people have already asked me what I think about it... so here's a couple of things I came up with.

First let me start off by saying maybe everyone else was surprised, but I've been saying since back in May that I hoped he picked her (but figured he probably wouldn't). It's true, it's even in the archives of the message board I hang out on.

I first found her name when I was looking at the British bookmakers site, www.ladbrokes.com, to see the odds on the presidential race and on the veep selections. When I saw her name I went to look her up, and liked her story.

All indications are she's a straight-down-the-line traditional conservative. Pro-life and in favor of hands-off management of businesses and pro-gun rights.

Actually, if you think about it, she's pretty much everything Mitt Romney WASN'T, which is a pretty ringing endorsement in the end... consider:

example... I can understand conservatives being in the NRA. I can understand them having a problem with the NRA. Just don't join the night before you announce you're going to run for prez. That's basically what Romney did. Palin's been pretty consistent with her positions, you can tell they're not just of convenience or an attempt to ingratiate herself to "the base", she is a person of her own principles and convictions and pretty much either you agree with her or you don't. I can even have a lot of respect for a lib if they're at least consistent of their positions and reached them because of core beliefs about human nature, not just parroting what your party tells you to say.


Besides... I can't think of any other pick that would have jazzed the right like this or so scared the lefties. I've seen so much ranting and wild-eyed the foaming at the mouth sect on the other side of the aisle. You can tell whether something a Republican did was a good move by how rabid the left gets in response to it.

Also got to say you just can't beat that timing of the announcement. I can't ever remember a time when a convention wrapped and something came along and just totally commandeered the news cycle like this. I went on CNBC.com at 1:00 in the afternoon on Friday... so you figure less than 18 hours after Obama's "coronation". The word Obama literally did NOT APPEAR on the entire front page of CNBC.com. The surprise of the Palin announcement had pushed the entire Dem. convention off the front page.

Will it matter in the end? We'll see... I do think that if McCain can, with this move, get say 12-15% of people who were excited about Hillary's campaign to vote for McCain-Palin, he's got a pretty good chance in November.

But then, who would have guessed I'd get excited by a beautiful, thin brunette with nice cheekbones and a solid conservative record named Sarah ;-)

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

obligatory july post

Today (well, now yesterday I guess) may prove to be a day of some long-term significance, so I guess this is recording it for posterity.

Tickets booked today to go to Tallahassee and a football game with someone special (who may or may not have storms brewing in her eyes... flight and hotel package, going up for FSU - UAB game which is the start of the season.

Besides gameday it should just generally be good fun. Expected stops on the tour include PoBoys, Bullwinkle's, Poor Paul's, maybe Pockets, maybe BW3 or AJ's... hope to track down my old boss Jerry. Also have to mark 10 years with someone who will probably be one of the first to read this :)

People will meet for the first time... big step. Nothing to be nervous about though --- would rather be there now though and with apologies to Tom Petty, the Waiting is the Hardest Part...

Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder, or Star Trek TOS Episode #60

Marisa Miller

St. Cecilia, by Peter Paul Rubens

This is not going to be your usual diatribe on the superficiality of beauty. Well, okay it basically is, but hopefully it's my usual jaded twist.

It's interesting to think that, during times of the Renaissance, "beautiful" women were women who were huge. I mean the fatter the better. It kinda made sense too --- in a time wrought with plagues and such, when horses were part beast of burden and part menu item --- it was a status symbol (and damned sexy) to clearly have ready access to enough food. Basically, being fat was being rich.

So my question isn't how we got where we are today, or why chickies today are held to the standards they are etc. etc. Though that in and of itself could be an interesting diatribe. My question...

Controlling for, oh, surgery and airbrushing and such, some women today are just born what we would consider pretty. There's only a certain combination of characteristics women can have, especially if you're talking specifically about white women of European heritage.

So, were there Cindy Crawfords and Rachel Hunters wandering around 15th century Europe, regarded far and wide as hideous and ugly, and wallowing in self-pity because they have good metabolisms?

with apologies to Jimmy Durante....

Good night Ms. Gavin, wherever you are.

...you know who you remind me of?

I was walking into a local watering hole, when I saw coming up the other way on the street what looked to be a young woman I used to work with and occasionally chat with but hadn't seen in about a year.

I smiled and waved, and she got the same look on her face everyone on Earth gets when someone's being very friendly and you have no clue who they are.

"Jackie, it's me, Bradley! How's it going"

"Oh! I'm not Jackie... I'm her identical twin sister, Cristy."

My next statement was one of those things that... even AS the words floated past the teeth and the lips and out into general consumption, I wanted to smack myself and go find a hole to crawl into...


"Oh, really? You look just like her!" Doh!


Yeah, umm, that's kinda the idea behind the whole "identical twin" thing, ya see... to her credit she did not say "Ya dumb prick", though she certainly would have been entitled to.

What I meant was that not only was this girl her twin, she had the same exact build, same haircut and length, same wardrobe, many of the same mannerisms, etc... I did not mean "derrr you look like your twin, yuh-hup."

go west, young woman

Most of you who know me may already have heard this story, but it warrants repeating. And if you don't know me, honestly what the hell are you doing here anyway?

This is possibly the only post I'll do in "Gator orange", because it's in honor of a girl that at one time (and, at last report) lived in Gainesville, FL. I dubbed her Sleeping Beauty, for reasons that made sense at the time but aren't really worth the time to explain.

Anyway, freshman year at Florida State, so October 1997. One of my friends (and someone I had a borderline obsessive crush on) decided she was going to drive down from Tallahassee to Orlando for Halloween Horror Nights. For some reason that has been lost to history, I couldn't go along, but I chatted with her pretty soon after her return.

Seems this gal had headed off in the wrong direction. Just a skosh. On her way from Tallahassee to Orlando, she ended up in ALABAMA.



Now, I should provide a visual aid for those of you not intimately familiar with the layout of the Viagra-wantin' dangler that is FL. Suffice it to say, for someone from Gainesville, heading from Tallahassee to Orlando (southeast) and ending up in Alabama (due west) is a neat trick.

courtesy of yahoo maps http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-577612-map_of_florida-i

What makes this story great though, I think, is that it wasn't even that she saw the giant sign that said "Welcome to Alabama" and said 'oh crap I'd better turn around!'... uhh no, this collegian got pulled over by an Alabama State Trooper... she was SPEEDING in the wrong direction!

Offhand I'm guessing that guy had a good story to tell when he got back to the station. Knowing her she probably turned on the waterworks and that got her out of any ticket.

Asbestos I can figure, she meant to get on I-10 East and instead got on I-10 West... and stayed on it for about 200 miles... passed signs for Destin, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Pensacola, over several rivers... into another time zone... passed the Welcome to Alabama sign... my first question to her was "Uhhh, hon... didn't you notice the SUN was on the wrong side?" No, apparently it had already gotten dark while she was driving.

There was something about this girl though... there were things I wanted to do with her, and most of them did NOT involve chatting over capuccino about contrasting the systemic perpetuations the electoral college system makes necessary to maintain a sense of political efficacy permeated on a nationwide scale for sufficient adoption and participation, while still including inherent safeguards to both placate smaller regions and protect against the same mass endorsements the system itself requires. No, when it came to this particular filly, my search was more of Van Halen's 9th album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

And yet, while the tale of going just a weeeeee bit off course will forever live on in infamy (and now for what I believe to tbe the first time is committed to "print")... at the same time, I still check MySpace and Google every few months to see if she's on the grid anywhere. And I haven't seen hide nor hair (both of which were quite nice) in, what, 7 years now.

So, as Obi Wan said to Han, "Who's the more foolish, the fool --- or the fool who follows her?"