So I thought today would be too dull to document, and along comes a new translation of the Kama Sutra.  Dwight Garner is (predictably) over the moon (pardon the pun), and remarks as every reviewer inevitably does, that the book is as much societal rule-mongering as play-by-play sex coaching.
Here's the link http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/books/the-kama-sutra-newly-translated.html?ref=books

I had thought to include a link to something suitably tangy like mango chutney, but then I came across this recipe for Korean shortribs by Padma Lakshmi from Oprah's website, and honestly, I don't know if the ribs are worth a damn, but Ms. Lakshmi's description of where and how she discovered and enjoys them (in Manhattan's Koreatown after her trip to a "bathhouse") is pretty choice.  Here's an excerpt; stir in one generous heap of sea salt and enjoy:

"I still go to the bathhouse, and I always revive myself after being pummeled, steamed, oiled and baked in the sauna for two hours (looking good is exhausting) by sampling one of the many Korean barbeque joints in the area.  My friends roll their eyes, telling me the point of going through that kind of medieval torture is to be more svelte and here I am with a plate of ribs piled high.  But I can't resist."                                                                 

Ah, yes, well, something's piled high here.  Here's the link to Padma's ribs http://www.oprah.com/food/Padma-Lakshmis-BBQ-Korean-Short-Ribs  To buy her line of baloney, simply gaze at the photo above and repeat softly but intensely, I know it's true, I know it's true, I know it's true.....

 And back to our reading:  Book reports due bright and early Sunday morning.  Curfew 4 a.m. sharp.

Convicted Mississippi killer found.

The convicted killer, pardoned by outgoing governor Haley Barbour, was found in Wyoming after authorities called in Marge Gunderson.  http://tinyurl.com/7hml9yv

"Seems to me this is just a darn crazy way to run a criminal justice system," Gunderson remarked as she slapped the cuffs on Joseph Ozment, who killed a man during a 1994 holdup.  "No need to get snippy, sir," she said to Ozment when he tried to resist.

Meanwhile former governor Barbour expressed outrage when police broke up his political betting operation.  "Don't you po-lice have more important things to do--like catching killers?"

"No, Fairy Godmother, I said 'lemme' get

Clockwise from right:  Khloe, Rob,
Kourtney and Kim, in their
new show, "Kardashians Are
Awesome Tail" appearing on the
Animal Planet, as well as on
the E! Entertainment Network.
 "Actually," producer
Ryan Seacrest notes, "they're way
less annoying in this format."

more network exposure, not lemur!"  --Kim K. 



Confused bride, reluctant wife, the sexiest schoolmarm in history--to say that Katherine Ross created iconic characters is a little like saying the voice of her real-life husband, actor Sam Elliot, is gravelly.  Best wishes, Ms. Ross, on your 71st birthday today.

King Leer: How sharper than a serpent's tooth....





...the ingratitude of those dang females who get all snitty about their role as sherpas for the mighty "sexual adventurer."  In the New York Times Sunday review, Jeannette Winterson takes down Frederick Turner's bio of Henry Miller, Renegade, and in the process pretty much kills off the enthusiasm a girl could have about the old priapic prophet himself.

Henry Miller

           A deadbeat dad who depended on his second wife June, and then lover Anais Nin to bankroll his life, Miller was, as Winterson notes, "obsessed with masculinity but felt no need to support himself or the women in his life.  Turner sympathizes with Miller who must sell his well-cut suits on the streets of Paris for half their value, but is apparently indifferent to the fact that June was selling her body on his behalf."

And then there's this observation:

 For Miller, America was "more mercenary than the meanest whore."  This is an ugly image, and while it is certainly true of Miller's mind, it seems indicative of Turner's own unconscious thinking....

And this:

 It seems to me if part of your mythmaking is to place a writer ahead of his time, we had better know something about his actual world--the world of the 1930s in New York and Paris.  In Paris, for instance, brothels were legal, but women couldn't vote--the exact reverse of the America Miller left behind.

Here's a link to Winterson's website http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/

And here's a link to a Miller website  http://www.henrymiller.org/

Jong:  "Sisterhood,
smisterhood, I'm taking
you down, byatch!"

This just in:  Fear of Flying author and Miller devotee Erica Jong has challenged Winterson to a nude mud wrestling match at Big Sur.  Writer Katie Roiphe promises to tag team.  Stay tuned for further developments.

"J. Edgar" wuz robbed!

Oscar robbers to Eastwood:  "Hey, pal,
the country demands bipartisanship. 
'J.Edgar' is goin' down."

So says the New Yorker's Richard Brody, a big fan of Eastwood's film.  Brody sees in the movie's Oscar washout an example of accidental bi-partisanship.

"The liberal critique takes the film for a whitewash, due to its omission of some of Hoover's most egregious deeds--such as his involvement in McCarthy era persecutions--and its noncommital stance toward the relationship with his second-in-command Clyde Tolson.  The conservative side is hostile to any suggestion that Hoover might have been a homosexual."  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/01/the-j-edgar-snub.html

Meanwhile another firestorm has broken out over the last-minute decision of the Academy to present the film the first annual "Edith Head/Edna Mode Award for Best Cover-up of a National Hero" for the film's "discrete (non)use of Hoover's many fashionable frocks." 

Not surprisingly, this has riled conservatives who don't believe rumors, published and otherwise, suggesting the FBI leader was an enthusiastic cross-dresser.  The LGBT community is equally outraged, and according to Carson Kressley, "deeply saddened."   In his prepared statement, the style maven said, "This could have been an occasion for healing, and more importantly, for learning.  Even a chunky right winger can rock a good dress just as hard as any liberal.  Such a missed opportunity."

Wolves and a Late-in-Life Fox.

Looks like Liam Neeson has scored once again as hunky action hero guy.  The Grey concerns the travails of the survivors of an Artic plane crash battling ravenous wolves (Are there any other kind?  Well, actually, yes, as I expect quite a few environmentalists are screaming right about now.)  In any case, while it left USA Today's Claudia Puig, ahem, cold http://tinyurl.com/6m4jka3 , the movie and Neeson have A. O. Scott in the NY Times and Dana Stevens in Slate shivering with deelite. NYT: http://tinyurl.com/7z3v9e2 ; Slate http://tinyurl.com/7rekl5m.  Neeson never had quite the level of handsomeness and cock-sureness for traditional leading man success,  but now all his heavy humanity is working in his favor, even though he'll be 60 this year.  Even within the confines of slickly packaged Hollywood violence--maybe especially within those confines--movie goers like to see someone who resembles an actual human being, wrinkles and all.  This standard applies to men only, of course. Wanna see a woman battling wolves?  Well, let's get perky, you betcha!

Palin:  "Honey, bring your big gun,
and I'll give you a spin in my chopper!"

Charla Krupp dies.

Krupp in 2008.

Writer/stylist who told women how not to look old will not have a chance to actually be old.  She was 58.
Here's the NY Times obit:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/style/charla-krupp-self-help-author-on-womens-looks-dies-at-58.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

He saw it coming.

January 26, 1998:  Bill Clinton says, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," thus setting off slog toward impeachment, an effort led by Newt Gingrich, who subsequently resigns when his own multiple affairs are revealed.  

January 26, 2012:  Newt Gingrich surges in the polls in Republican primary race, after shouting down a debate moderator who questioned him about his request to his second wife for an "open marriage" during his six-year affair with now third wife.

Thank you, Dr. Obvious.

Twin Towers:  Who knew they shortened your calf muscles?

So it takes 3 male researchers in a lab studying young heel-wearing and non-heel-wearing females to prove that wearing high heels shortens your calf muscles and changes your stride.   Thank goodness someone told us.  I guess now we'll all stop wearing those pesky things.  http://tinyurl.com/7n6e8qx
What they might have measured is how far their own tongues hung out as they watched the young heel-wearers stride around the lab.  

(Particularly when it's
 elongated by the arched foot)
the leg bone's connected
to the boner.

The Old Man and the She.

Nicole Kidman as Martha Gellhorn and Clive Owen as E. Hemingway

I don't give two hoots who wins the Oscar, but since today seems like a good day for toasts (Manhattans at lunch!) I think I'll have another toast at midnight--Bellinis in honor of the nods for screenwriting, direction and picture for Midnight in Paris, in which a very butched up and bewigged Corey Stoll (the bald detective from the last incarnation of Law and Order) plays Hemingway.  Next up:  In May HBO's Hemingway and Gellhorn, about Hemingway's relationship with tough woman writer Martha Gellhorn, who, as Nicole Kidman puts it, "out Hemingway'ed Hemingway."

A true Bellini, by the way, should be made with fresh peach pulp and Prosecco. (For the Bellini inventor, Guiseppe Cipriani, the head bartender at Harry's in Venice, the cocktail's peachy color evoked the robes worn by St. Francis in a painting by Giovanni Bellini.)  But in a pinch, a Bellini with peach schnapps and champagne will do. 

Just be sure to mutter something like the world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.  Also try to look tough.

Jennie Jerome Churchill

Edith Wharton:  Born Jan. 24, 1862

On this day, 150 years ago, Edith Wharton was born.  The chronicler of New York City's cosseted set wrote more than 100 novels and short stories and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer.  Her last novel, The Buccaneers, told of wealthy American heiresses snagging titled but cash-strapped European husbands.  There were hundreds of such heiresses in the years prior to World War I.  Downton Abbey's Lady Cora is a fictional example; Jennie Jerome Churchill, mother of Winston, was the real thing.

Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill became engaged two days after they met; Winston was born 8 months after they married.  Lord Randolph died at age 45 from an illness thought at the time to be syphilis.  After his death, Jennie married a man Winston's age, chartered a boat to turn it into a hospital to treat soldiers injured in the Boer War and wrote her memoirs.  The second marriage didn't take, but she married again, this time to a husband three years younger than Winston.  She died at age 67 of complications from a broken ankle.

As for Winston, he lived on to a ripe old age of 91 and died on this day 47 years ago.

Born Nov. 30, 1874.  Died Jan. 24, 1965

Though the myth of Jennie as the inventor of the Manhattan cocktail has been debunked, I think I'll have one today in their honor.

Horse. Stick. Stop.

The CW will make a series out of The Carrie Diaries.

Like all bloggers: in my jammies, collecting the scoop.

Terror in the Air.

 

The atmosphere was electric, apparently, when Ahnaud received something called the Energy Globe Award, with convenient potential as a lethal weapon.  The Guvernator's hair static is also powering a small farm in Bavaria where herds of children sport freakishly prominent facial features and the sheep bleat "I'll be bah-ah-k, bah-ah-k, bah-ah-k."

Giddyup.

Today is the birthday of Graham Kerr, of Galloping Gourmet fame.  Back in the late 60s and early 70s when Kerr whipped up his butter and cream and wine-laden dishes on television, the idea of a celebrity chef was a novelty.  Unlike Julia Child, the kindly but stern teacher, the free-wheeling Kerr was the crazy friend, the life of the party.  A car accident and his wife's misdiagnosis with cancer sobered him, converted him, both to Christianity and then to healthier ways of cooking and living.  Nowadays, he's promoting himself as a Galloping Gardener.

For those who don't know or remember, Kerr is British (or was, he's a naturalized U.S. citizen now), and his comical Spotted Dick episode is one of his most famous.

Spotted Dick, a favorite British dessert, is a pudding made with suet, a food product (pure animal fat, usually taken from around the joints) which we Americans generally think is for the birds, literally, as in bird-feeder material.

So, for a birthday celebration to honor the old Spotted Dick jokester as well as the current more earth-conscious chef, here's a link to an easy recipe for a suet bird feeder cake from P. Allen Smith's website:   http://www.pallensmith.com/articles/suet-cakes-for-birds

And here's the link to Graham Kerr's website, if you want to catch up:  http://www.grahamkerr.com/index.php/category/blog/recipes/

In any case, salutations, Mr. Kerr, on your 78th birthday!

I think he speaks for all of us.

Service dog waiting for his owner to cast a ballot in the South Carolina primary. 

Reading your Miranda rights.

Alex Witchel has an interview with Cynthia Nixon in this week's New York Times magazine; Nixon discusses her career that began in childhood, her bout with breast cancer, her recent "coloring outside the lines" (Witchel's phrase) as a newly minted lesbian "by choice."  Here's a link to the slideshow of some of her parts, including a 1982 tv movie in which she and fellow child thespian SJP appear:  http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/01/22/magazine/cynthia-nixons-past-roles.html?ref=magazine

 

 Nixon, head shaved, is appearing on Broadway this month in the cancer drama "Wit."

Which witch. Cue Sinatra.

Those fingers in my hair
That sly come hither stare
That strips my conscience bare
It's witchcraft

And I've got no defense for it
The heat is too intense for it
What good would common sense do for it

Cause it's witchcraft, wicked witchcraft
And although I know it's strictly taboo

When you arouse the need in me
My heart says yes indeed in me
Proceed with what you're leading me to

It's such an ancient pitch, but one I wouldn't switch. 
Cause there's no nicer witch than you.

The ayatollahs are trying to drive Barbie out of Iran.  http://tinyurl.com/832xbxs
They're also trying again to kill Salmon Rushdie.  The fatwa is back in full force.  http://tinyurl.com/7cctps3
And in Israel, writes the rabbi Dov Linzer, ultra-Orthodox males are persecuting girls as young as 8 for being "immodest."  Here's the link:  http://tinyurl.com/7wfutw3

("Witchcraft" composed by Cy Coleman with lyrics by Carolyn Leigh.)

"What on earth would make you suspect it's that time of the month?"

Seuss-ical headgear gets the boot.

Thing One and Thing Two
at the spring Royal Wedding

"I do not like them here or there,
I do not like weird things in hair."

                   ---Queen Elizabeth, overheard.


Fascinators banned from Ascot.  Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/7esz4lo

Calista updated: Marianne, defined.

Marianne (mer-ee-an)
noun
1.  first or second wife of powerful man during pre-geezer, frequently pre-power, period  2.  wife for whom man feels no uxoriousness (see Calista, defined, Jan 16 post) 3. said geezer after roasting, skewering, or otherwise dishing by now ex-wife:  Marianne is a dish best served cold, or alternately, in the heat of fury.
verb
1.  to offer up ex-husband in all his glory for public inspection:  Wow, she really Marianned his ass.

"On the eve of the South Carolina primary, Marianne Gingrich reveals Newt requested an open marriage to accommodate affair with Callista--just after Marianne was diagnosed with multiple schlerosis."

Mark Wahlberg assaults terrorists, grammar in single blow.

And only the English language is slaughtered.  The model/rapper/actor, expounding upon his scheduled flight on one of the 9/ll planes: 

"If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have went down like it did," he tells the magazine.*  "There would have been a lot of blood in that first class cabin, and then me saying, 'Okay, we're going to land somewhere safely, don't worry."

Wahlberg:  Actor reportedly
ate pizza, visited strip joints
before his lethal attack
on participles.

* No actual terrorists were killed in the construction of this sentence.

Girls, just let him stick his face in your underwear drawer.

Trust me, your mother would prefer it to your doing this.

"Teens exchanging passwords as a sign of intimacy."
  http://tinyurl.com/6wyshwx

Kinda like Beethoven going deaf....

....from stuffing piano keys in his ears.

Paula Deen:  Killing herself softly
with her song of saturated fats.

Wait until Dark.

 

Wikipedia to go dark tomorrow in protest over anti-piracy legislation.

Adrien Brody, strutting his stuff for Prada

To:  Adrien Brody

From:  Marybeth Psanky

Re:  My grandmother's winter coat

Give it back.

Calistas, defined.

ux·o·ri·ous  [uhk-sawr-ee-uh s] n. --  to dote fondly upon one's wife. 

Calista & Newt Gingrich

Ca·li·sta  [kah-li-stah] n. --  1.  third and much younger wife of geezer     2.  object of geezer uxoriousness.

Harrison Ford & Calista Flockhart

File under apt metaphor.

"The private equity business is like sex," Howard Anderson, the MIT professor, told the Boston Globe in 2007.  "When it's good, it's really good.  And when it's bad, it's still pretty good." *

Was it good for you, baby?
Oh yeah, it was good for you.

* And of course, in both instances, someone is getting screwed.

MLK Day.

Battle Royal.

Downton Abbey vs. Golden Globes.  Which to watch and which to dvr?  British royalty vs. Hollywood royalty.  Escada gowns vs. Edwardian gowns.  Made-up drama vs. manufactured drama.  But which will be cold and stale in the morning?

That's easy.

Must love dogs.

According to Hollywood wags, the very first Oscar very nearly went to dog star Rin Tin Tin, and organizers, fearful that the award would never be taken seriously, decreed that no canines could be eligible.  C'est la vie, Uggie.

For the doggone cutest performers in 2011 films, click on the link below.

http://tinyurl.com/8786e8h

At left:  Uggie, the canine co-star of the French silent film homage, The Artist.

Meet your president in 2032.

The Miss America pageant will be held tonight in Las Vegas.  So set your dvr, or watch Sandra Bullock's Miss Congeniality, or just remember that what some contestants want is "longer sentences for repeat offenders...and world peace."  Or try to forget the whole thing.  But be warned, Miss America 2011 Teresa Scanlon plans to use her scholarship money to pay for "law school enroute to a career in politics."                                                                                            In  related news, the trial of former Presidential aspirant/pretty boy John Edwards is being postponed so he can have heart surgery.  Now if they can just find a soul for him, he'll be set.

The Sweater returns, to knitted brows.

American version:
Muted, almost mousy.
Easily lost against
the background.

The news is in:  We'll know who killed Rosie Larsen....by the end of Season Two.  For many, The Killing, the Americanized remake of the wildly successful Danish series, frustrated with its slow pace and infuriated with its ambiguous ending.  In retrospect, an examination of the now famous sweaters tells the tale.



Danish version:
Bold, decisive.
Doesn't just stand
out in the crowd;
it leads.

For more on the sweaters and for the story of a Danish-American love affair that ended happily, check out the July Killer Sweater post at Julie Matthews' Knitting at Large blog:  http://tinyurl.com/788s6ay