In the wake of all the

posts about sexiest men, talented but

annoying men, and so on, I want to set forth

a category hitherto untouched (because it

seems so far out as to be impossible): 

Good-smelling men.

This all started many… Read full post »

Glamour boy

Get your costume on, you got 'em

lined up, waitin' for you
 

Glamour boy

You got 'em standin' in the aisles so

don't hang 'em up

For twenty-five thousand dollars you

can look like a woman tonight

For… Read full post »

 It starts off with a harmless little show about addiction, in which the subjects have no idea they'll be facing an intervention (though just about everyone in the country knows about this show, and lines up for a chance to expose their family chaos to the nation). The/… Read full post »

So I tuned it in. Felt guilty about it, yes, and please be advised I never watch this show, but I just had to see what the gal with the Lisa Simpson hair had to say about her wandering (worthless!) husband and just why their otherwise-magnificent marriage had finally/… Read full post »

This is Me in Grade Nine.

God help me, yes.And on a good day, a smiling day, hair washed, yes.

Having blathered on for too long about how miserable the writer's life is, may I take a moment to complain about my life story and how rotten it's… Read full post »

Martin Scorsese, Martin Scorsese!

A little Italian let’s praise today:

The Topo Gigio of pictures, they say. 

When Taxi Driver comes on TV,

I always drop what I’m d… Read full post »

Yesterday as I sat in my grandchildren's favorite restaurant (a place which barely qualifies as one, except that it copiously spews an almost edible product), my sweet 5-year-old granddaughter Carrie looked up at me with her earnest brown eyes and asked,

"Grandma, who'… Read full post »

Let us now praise the magical transformation that is plastic surgery.

OK then, let's not.

Yes, I do realize that for some people this is an illness. I would have included the poor woman who injected her face with cooking oil, but it was just too horrible… Read full post »

Is it real?

Is it fake?

Is this game of life a mistake?

The child is father to the man.

Transformation

                    &… Read full post »

Hey,  Michael Jackson, what happened to your

nose?

For in your wretched childhood, it resembled

And with those boys in bed, it grew just like

Hey… Read full post »

And now it’s time to play. . .

 FUN WITH WORDS! 

Ye-e-es, it’s that goofy game in which we discover words that no one uses any more. Words that are retired. Words that have expired. And a few once-popular phrases that seem to have dropped right off t/… Read full post »

Wordsmiths are odd creatures, sometimes falling down the dark rabbit hole of word associations.

In so doing, we can sometimes plumb the depths of the murky ties between words and their hidden meanings.

Inspired by something I had seen on TV, I pulled out my fat, nea… Read full post »

Is it true? Can such an unspeakable desire reside in the human heart? It can, and it does.

Let me explain. Way back in the ‘70s, I married into a family which was in many ways a mirror image of my own: middle-class, conventional, a  Dad with no more tha… Read full post »

Don’t wanna listen to my telephone ring ring

ring

Or sing ding-a-ling or talk about a thing

Not this morning, not never ever,

Don’t wanna think about the night before

Or maybe it’s a bore behin… Read full post »

 I Love

(Tom T. Hall from the album The Last Hard Town)

I Love little baby ducks
Old pickup trucks
Slow movin' trains and rain
I Love little country streams
Sleep without dreams
Sunday school in May and hay
And I love you too.

I Love - leaves in the wind
Pictures of my friends
Birds/… Read full post »

Quick! What's the next line after this one in the Beatles hit She Loves You:

"You know it's up to you, I think it's only fair. . . "

As a kid, I tried to fill in this unintelligible line with all sorts of things. The closest I got was… Read full post »

August 26, 2009

A SLEEPLESS Michael Jackson spent his last hours begging his doctor for a powerful anaesthetic. For six hours, Dr Conrad Murray resisted, fearful that the singer had developed a dangerous addiction to propofol, according to court records.

Instead, Dr Murray… Read full post »

My life can be divided into two parts: pre-2005, and post-2005. Or rather: three parts. Before the earthquake of 2005  swallowed my life like a sinkhole, the watershed was 1990, the year I hit bottom with alcohol and got sober.

When that happened, I knew I had reached rock… Read full post »

Some outtakes from my earlier post. . . 

 I was up all night, sobbing and sobbing. . .

Kate's Dad, Jake "Raging Bull" Kreider

The Dionne Quintuplets at Twelve Oaks

Is Little Aragorn still breathing?

&… Read full post »

The King of Pop has gone to live with the angels.

His suffering is over, but ours has just begun.

                      … Read full post »

This is not a confessional, though I 

need to tell my story as an example

of a bizarre medical phenomenon: psychiatric diagnosis that vacillates with the tide of popularity and social approval. 

After long and wretched experien… Read full post »

It all started with Milky, that goddamn Milky.

I was looking on the 'net for Milky the Clown and other stars of 1960s Detroit children's TV a few years ago, and came up empty. This time, I hit pay dirt.

You can't dig into Milky & co. … Read full post »

The other day I found myself wandering through the vast wilderness of Google images, trying to call up this or that picture on whatever topic I was currently  blathering on about. And somehow or other, I remembered a picture (or series of pictures) that was very popular/… Read full post »

 I'm not stardust. I'm not golden.

I wasn't then, and  I'm still not now.

It was the summer of 1969, and the world was obsessed with one thing: the "moonshot", in which the astronauts would finally fulfill John F. Kennedy's prophecy and wal… Read full post »

Twitch, twatch, skytter and

I guess it must have been ten

years ago that a former editor

of mine started

enthusiastically telling me

I smiled and nodded my head

 … Read full post »