And it's not even like Keith Olbermann can meet Al Gore on the street and say "Your girl is lovely, Hubble."

Okay, so maybe it's not The Way We
Were.  It's The Way We Coulda Been.
If only.

Breaking up is so hard to do, as the Captain & Tenille have so wisely informed us.  It's even hard for those of us who are only bystanders.  Even when we knew from the start that the perfect couple was destined for Splitsville.  So, naturally we are very disappointed to hear that Current TV has fired Keith Olbermann and placed in his still warm chair the rear end of relentlessly self-promoting Eliot Spitzer, a man with a face for radio and a history for a rap sheet.  http://tinyurl.com/6pvvnux  Because it's not even like when Barbra Streisand, domestically ensconced in her earnestly noble and fulfilling lefty causes, sees Robert Redford moving onward and upward in his shallow but glamorous success.  Hence, Your girl is lovely, Hubble.

Isn't pretty to think so?

No, it's more like Hemingway's terminally unhappy couple, Jake and Lady Brett.   Jake, with his non-working man thing and Brett with her emasculating-wanting-to-have-sex-when-what-right-do-women-have-wanting-to-have-sex thing.  Yes, we are left with an ending right out of The Sun Also Rises, which Current TV's ratings will certainly not do:

"Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Nowadays, Eugene McCarthy is mostly remembered as the anti-Vietnam candidate in '68, the Pied Piper of the Pepsi Generation.  What is less remembered is his libertarian bent.  This past January, Richard Cohan in the Washington Post recalled that McCarthy's candidacy, bankrolled by a handful of wealthy Democrats, wasn't so different from Newt and Sheldon the Sugar Daddy.       http://tinyurl.com/d3lfxd9  In fact, McCarthy later fought hard alongside such bedfellows as the Mississippi Republican Party to overturn post-Watergate campaign finance laws, and became in other ways distinctly more libertarian or maybe just contrarian as he continued in presidential quest in succeeding decades.  The poet Robert Lowell traveled with McCarthy in '68, and McCarthy was a published poet himself.  In honor of his birthday today (he was born on this day in 1916 and died in 2005), here is one of his poems:

THE MAPLE TREE

The maple tree that night

Without a wind or rain

Let go its leaves

Because its time had come.

Brown veined, spotted,

Like old hands, fluttering in blessing,

They fell upon my head

And shoulders, and then

Down to the quiet at my feet.

I stood, and stood

Until the tree was bare

And have told no one

But you that I was there.

What up, Slumdog London?

Designer:  Hoping the Olympics
run like clockwork.

Wenlock and Mandeville, the despised graphic mascots of the 2012 London Olympics, went on a crime spree this weekend, robbing a Barclay's Bank at gunpoint and committing depravities against the bank's eagle logo.  "Of course, to a degree one could say criminality is built into their DNA," said Owen St. Stephens Stephens, Morelock and Wenlock's designer.  "I mean, given the lad who inspired them.  We wanted something high spirited.  But naturally, it's a shame about the eagle."

The Barclay's logo is expected to recover with counseling, but Britons aren't sure their still-contracting economy will be able to take the hit--$15 billion "and counting"--that the Olympics are expected to inflict.  And Prime Minister David Cameron just asked to double the budget for the opening ceremony (to be directed by Slumdog Millionaire's Danny Boyle) to the equivalent of $125 million. 

No wonder, then, that according to the NY Times, complaining about the Olympics has become "its own Olympic sport."   Also, consider: "The 1992 Barcelona Games left Spain with a $6.1 billion debt. Athens estimated that the 2004 Games would cost $1.6 billon, but in the end it was $16 billion...Meanwhile, it took Montreal nearly 30 years — until 2005 — to pay off the $2.7 billion it owed after the 1976 Summer Games."

Maybe bank robbing is not such a bad idea for Mandeville and Wenlock, who have been said to resemble "insane aliens."  Here's the link.  http://tinyurl.com/6thhdrt

The New Adventures of Old Christine.

It was only ten months ago that IMF leader Dominique Strauss Kahn was considered the leading contender to snag the French presidency from Nicolas Sarkozy.  Then came the incident in New York City, and yesterday DSK was arrested in Paris for engaging prostitutes at the Hotel Carlton.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/world/europe/dominique-strauss-kahn-released-on-bail.html?hp

In the meantime, Frenchwoman Christine Lagarde, 56, has stepped into DSK's former role as the head of the International Monetary Fund; tusseled diplomatically with Angela Merkel to increase Germany's participation in the on-going grind known as the European bailout; encouraged the Chinese to buy more stuff; and recently suggested to nit-twit Niall Ferguson--in response to Ferguson's assertion that men's risk-taking makes the world go round--that had Lehman Brothers been Lehman Sisters, the firm might still be in business.

So who's the silver fox now?

Hot roofs, cool cats.

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams:
March 26, 1911-Feb. 25, 1983

On this day in 1955, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiered on Broadway, starring Barbara Bel Geddes and Ben Gazarra as Maggie and Brick.  The play went on to win the Pulitzer.  In the film adaptation three years later, the play's homosexual elements, already muted through stage director Elia Kazan's influence, were almost completely deleted, with the heterosexual quotient pushed through that tin roof with the casting of Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. (Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood reprised their roles and Big Daddy and Big Momma.)  Tomorrow marks the 101st birthday of playwright Tennessee Williams, and yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of Elizabeth Taylor's death.  Let's all have a big bourbon today in their honor.

Dick Cheney now has a heart.

The former Vice President said he has "no intention of using it," but that he "finally got sick and tired of all the bullying.  People are always bitching and moaning about racial profiling or gay bashing or some such nonsense.  But the people who are really treated badly in this country are those born without a heart.  And it's the heartless greedy bastards who get everything done in America that needs to get done.  I'm telling you, it's criminal the way people treat us."

Escape Artists

On this day in 1944, 76 Allied prisoners of the Stalag Luft III escaped through the tunnels they had surreptitiously built over the course of the preceding year.  On that same day, a young man named Steve McQueen celebrated his 14th birthday on his grandparents' Missouri farm, though by most accounts celebration may have been too happy a word.

Reportedly, he ran off to join the circus later that year.  McQueen bounced back and forth between his grandparents' farm and the home of his mother, who was unhappily married several times; eventually he ended up in a juvenile facility.  He joined the Marines in 1947 and in the early fifties with money from the GI Bill, he studied acting with Sandford Meisner.  He became a big star with the 1960 Magnificent Seven, and in 1963 director John Sturgis gave him the lead in The Great Escape, a "loosely-inspired" (as the saying goes) recreation of the Stalag Luft escape.

The real Stalag escape did not end happily--73 of the 76 escapees were caught; 50 were executed.  Seventeen years after his starring turn, McQueen could not effect his own great escape from cancer.  Though he fled to Mexico to try experimental treatment, he died in 1980 at the age of 50.

Rag Sags, Seeks to Snag Swag.

"Well, Ma has come to rely on the
 internet to check the weekly
grosses.  Them fellers needed a
a stronger and more synergistic
media platform, I reckon."

I suppose you could say that the internet has put a fork into the publication that once printed the famous headline Sticks Nix Hick Pix about the failure of rural America to embrace movies about rural America.  Once considered the Hollywood Bible, Variety is up for sale; employees are apparently hoping for a new owner to infuse some capital.   Here's the link:  http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/variety-is-being-put-up-for-sale/?hp

Sap, and saps, rising.

So, Tuesday marked the official beginning of Spring, which has gotten me to thinking about one annual rite of spring: the sap rising in trees.  Could it be that a similar springtime phenomenon occurs in a country's national bloodstream, when a kind of unstoppable current rises to the surface?  Consider that on this day in 1919 Benito Mussolini founded the Fascist movement, and on this day in 1933 the Reichstag signed the Enabling Act making Adolph Hitler Germany's dictator.  The saps--the deluded idiots who thought those two thugs were real leaders--rose up quickly in support in both cases.  Also, on this day in 1991, the United Revolutionary Front, backed by support from Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia, invaded Sierra Leone, setting off a bloody and protracted civil war. 

In that war, it wasn't only the saps who rose up to fight, it was children conscripted as soldiers.  The problem of child soldiers in Africa is perennial, something we Americans tsk over and then basically look away from.  It is too painful to consider the horrors these children have undergone.

But this weekend, adults and YA alike will rise contentedly from their movie seats, having seen an exciting movie about lovely and well fed white children soldiers slaughtering each other, a film which despite its subject matter has earned a PG-13 rating that will send it on its way to upwards of a half a billion dollars in grosses.

Let's compare real Appalachian poverty with the Hollywood kind.  No flawless bronze complexion and no plush lips--probably a lack of teeth.  That's what real hunger and lack of dentistry do to you.  Here's another thing about child soldiering:  it doesn't seem to lend itself to love of any kind, much less love triangles. 

Still, I understand why we're supposed to cheer The Hunger Games, because it's supposed to remind us of the horrors of a decadent society.  So I will drop the crabbycakes--it isn't like I'm going to solve the problem of children soldiers this weekend--and offer this recipe from Tyler Florence for Decadent Chocolate Cake from the Food Network website:  http://tinyurl.com/7zobpb  Somehow it seems appropriate.

Child soldier photo from http://slaveryinthe21stcentury.blogspot.com/2010/11/worldwide-child-soldiers.html

Walker Evans Appalachian photo from http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/walker-evans-let-us-now-praise-famous-men

Triumph of the Will photo from http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/11/12/918928/-The-Most-Controversial-Films-Of-All-Time-

Mike Daisy and his traveling pants: An eyewitness steps forward.

Mike Daisey:  "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs"
and a tortured relationship with facts.

Since Mike Daisy has been forced to admit that many of the facts of his theatrical expose of Apple were in fact not facts, that he had not traveled to the provinces he'd claimed, former audience members have suggested they had suspicions earlier.

Today, however, one person stepped forward with more dramatic story:
"I knew he wasn't telling the truth when I saw him at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, because right in the middle of the monologue he stood up and the back of his pants caught on fire.  Stage hands rushed forward to put out the fire, and Daisy wasn't seriously hurt, but his ass was probably about as red as his face is today."

"It's all true," the audience member added emphatically.  "At least it's an essential truth.  I'm planning a stage show about it next month.  The Fiery Truth of Mike Daisy."

Photo is from New York Times Theatre Talkback, in which Charles Isherwood worries that Daisy's dilemma will harm the theatre memoir genre.  Here's the link:  http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/theater-talkback-mike-daisey-continued/?hp

There is no escape.

At least not from the onslaught of The Hunger Games.  It opens tomorrow after a carefully tended multi-media-heavy-on-the-social-media marketing campaign that helped drive sales of the trilogy to 24 million. 
The UK Telegraph says Katniss is "ox-hearted," whatever that means, but loves the movie.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/9146761/The-Hunger-Games-review.html

Manola Dargis in the New York Times says the movie should be better, that Gary Ross is a bad fit as a director, Jennifer Lawrence no longer has the lean and hungry look necessary for a character like Katniss, but "what finally saves the character and film both is the image of her on the run, moving relentlessly forward." http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/movies/the-hunger-games-movie-adapts-the-suzanne-collins-novel.html?hpw=&pagewanted=2

In the New Yorker, where the female writers have been as taut as Katniss' bow, humming with anticipation for a week, David Denby pans Panem, or rather Gary Ross' version of it.  He praises the actors but says the "rest of it is pretty much a disaster--disjointed, muffled, and even, at times, boring."  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2012/04/02/120402crci_cinema_denby

Still, even if there's a surprisingly small amount on screen given the subject, There Will Be Blood at the cineplex this weekend and probably for the forseeable future, as The Hunger Games slaughters its competition.

NBC unveils new sitcom, "Mr. Mope."

Small town mortician steals toys from children in his off hours; mocks them with "mope face" when they cry.  "It's a laugh riot," says one network source.

Okay, just kidding.  It was Rep. Paul Ryan who unveiled yet another budget plan calling for lower income tax rates for the rich while gutting social programs for the less fortunate.  Ryan hit the airwaves yesterday selling his plan, which provoked a mini-march on Washington by a bi-partisan group of cats, who fear they will suffer shortages once seniors start dipping into feline food supplies.  "Sure, we appreciate the sop for fat cats," the group's spokesman said.  "But Ryan needs to think about the rest of us." 

AP photo of Paul Ryan is from the Huffington Post, which dissects Ryan's plan.  Here's the link:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/paul-ryan-budget-plan_n_1366933.html?ref=paul-ryan

You must remember this.

Casablanca to play on the big screen nationwide, Wednesday, March 21st, for one day only!

Don't forget--tomorrow's the day:  TCM is sponsoring the event in honor of the film's 70th anniversary; the movie will be shown at Cinemark Theatres, among others.  On the New Yorker website, critic David Denby gives us his breakdown of the movie, with a few historic tidbits thrown in. (The studio's first choice for Rick and Ilsa was Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan.)  Here's the link:  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/03/casablanca-rerelease.html

In honor of the Iraq invasion anniversary (9 years today!), presenting Private SNAFU and a new definition.

Everybody knows what a SNAFU is, even if your great aunt Minnie calls it "Situation Normal all Fouled Up."  The WWII GIs who came up with the term had no such delicate sensibilities, which is why director Frank Capra, who headed up the Army's documentary effort, seized on the term for a series of educational cartoon shorts.  Private SNAFU would provide the troops with a perfect example of what NOT to do.  The project was put out to bid, and Disney was so certain of snagging the job their team had already put together storyboards when Leon Schlesinger and Warner Bros. came in with a lower bid.  The Warner Bros animation crew--Chuck Jones, Frank Tashlin, Mel Blanc, etc--went to work, aided by writers like Theodor Geisel (sorry, I know I promised not to mention Dr. Seuss for a while).    The shorts, racy for their time, were popular with servicemen; watch them today and they feel very much of a piece with Bugs Bunny & Co. 

Those wascally tewwowists! 

But what might those cartoons have looked like Disney-fied?  And what might the world look like if we hadn't had such a Disneyfied view of foreign intervention 9 years ago?  With a little more Bugs Bunny, we might have understood that the guy who comes in blasting is the idiot.  Call it Situation Normal All Fudded Up.  (And don't even get me started on the Porky Pigs--I'm talking to you Halliburton--who got rich off this folly.)

The SNAFU cartoons are on YouTube, but Wikipedia has some of them, and there's more background at the Golden Age Cartoon site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Snafu

http://www.goldenagecartoons.com/reviews/2011/snafu/

Cue the muted jazz.

Veena Sud lit a cigarette and stared out the dingy window at the low-slung clouds of the Pacific Northwest.  She was a woman with murder on her mind.  It was those damned expectations.  They'd almost buried her once, and now she had to kill them.  Kill them quick and without mercy. 

Veena Sud, creator (or should I say adaptor) of AMC's murder mystery The Killing, and her publicist sit down with the NY Times Sunday Magazine to blame the "expectations" of the "super viewer" for the series leaving a bad taste in everybody's mouth...You know, like last night's booze hanging on your tongue when you remember how that dame taunted and teased you all season.  Who killed Rosie Larsen? she kept saying.  Keep watching.  Find out who killed Rosie Larsen. Just one more red herring.  And then she took a powder and left you holding the remote with no clue as to who killed Rosie Larsen.  And now Veena's back.  Like a bad penny.  Promising to tell you who killed Rosie Larsen.  At the end of season two.  That dame's no good, I tell you. 
Here's the link:  http://tinyurl.com/78buso6
Also you may want to check out an earlier post in which I unraveled the clues of the buzz-killing adaptation through the sweaters:  http://tinyurl.com/7tjnd2l

Farewell print Britannica.

Girl Trouble.

The New York Times--in the Fashion & Style section--asks wherefore art the next Gloria Steinem, then wanders into the question why Steinem in the first place, and lets Rebecca Traister (among others) answer with "she was figurehead chosen by the media for complicated reasons.  She was young and white and pretty, and she looked great on magazine covers."  Here's the link:  http://tinyurl.com/7fmnguy



Wanna eat crackers in his bed,
better bring the juice box.

In not unrelated news, the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg feels the need to announce that neither Sarah Palin nowadays nor Julianne Moore playing Palin back in 2008 pass his saltine test. But Palin back in the day, oh, baby:  "The tempestuous Alaskan's tousled pile of hair, her liquid eyes and stylish glasses, her childlike window-washing hand wave, her (to my ears) musical voice, her lips...I'm sure I wasn't the only man, even the only male Democrat, who was mesmerized by her corporeal and sonic affect....In 'Game Change,' Julianne Moore... doesn't quite get the flirtatiousness, the seductiveness, the juiciness--the magic."  (Hertzberg's emphasis, not mine.) 



Hertzberg isn't specific in his complaint about Palin's lack of sexiness nowadays, only that "the past couple of years have not been kind to her."  Here's the link:  http://tinyurl.com/37heys

Since there have been no changes in Palin's physical appearance, one can only surmise four years have drained her of her juiciness.  Good to know.  And I totally understand.  Like for example, see post below:  George Clooney has a gray beard, and so does Mr. Hertzberg; Mr. Hertzberg's glasses are quite stylish.  I'll bet he's got a real come hither wave.  And yet, and yet. 

It's about time we saw George Clooney in handcuffs.

I had some pink fuzzy ones that would have worked nicely.  And why is he so bundled up in this warm spring weather?  Lose the sweater, George.  And the shirt.
Still, it's a start. 

Pulling a Trigger on a horsey judge: The case of Sigmund and Roys.

This is Judge Roy Moore.  This week Roy Moore rode his horse--high horse, hobby horse and real live horse-- to the polling place http://tinyurl.com/7b86972 in Etowa County, Alabama.  He was ejected from his post as state judge by his own colleagues back in 2004 when he wouldn't stop dragging his stone monument of the Ten Commandments into the courthouse, but now he's won again in the Republican primary and is expected to be reelected to the bench.  Presumably on election day Moore was also packing, as guns and horses seem to be de rigeur in Alabama politics these days, even if there may be a few of those infernal horseless carriages out and about.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU7fhIO7DG0&noredirect=1

This is Judge Roy Bean.  Known as the "hangin' judge" (unfairly notes his Wikipedia entry--he only sentenced 2 to death and one escaped), Roy Bean was a law unto himself, dispensing his own particular brand of justice in Pecos County, Texas in a place called Langtry, where the judge owned a saloon called the Jersey Lilly in honor of actress Lilly Langtry, who visited the town 10 months after Bean died on this day in 1903.  A quirky fictionalized biopic, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, starring a bearded but still beautiful Paul Newman and directed by John Huston, featured a cameo of Ava Gardner as Lilly Langtry.  (Roy Bean was also portrayed by Walter Brennan in the Gary Cooper western, The Westerner.)

This is Roy Rogers.  Born in 1911 as Leonard Slye, he grew up in a tenement in Cincinnati but moved with his family to California in the late twenties where he found success singing and playing the guitar.  When the singing cowboy/movie star Gene Autry walked out of a picture in a contract dispute, Leonard Slye was renamed Roy Rogers and began an immensely successful career in serialized westerns.  His trusty horse, by the way, was named Trigger.  Upon Trigger's death, he was stuffed and mounted, and in 2010, he was sold to a cable company.  http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2010-07-14-roy-rogers-horse_N.htm

Do you think Judge Roy Moore's psyche would be assauged with a stuffed Trigger outside his courtroom instead of his stone commandments?  He couldn't pretend to be Charlton Heston, but a pretend cowboy pretending he's Judge Roy Bean? I'd call that a judicious compromise.  Even Freud might approve.

They sat down over a bottle of Metamucil and worked things out.

Photo of animatronic Stones
by AP.



The official word is that old goat rockers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have patched up their latest rift in time to tour again http://music.msn.com/music/article.aspx?news=711467 However, sources close to the pair suggest the Rolling Stones haven't toured in person in well over two decades, noting that when Dolly Parton, known to be a shrewd businessperson, opened her Dollywood themepark in eastern Tennessee she also purchased the rights to the Stones.  "Pretty much everything was for sale back in the eighties," the sources said.  Using animatronics pioneered by Disneyworld, and relying on local Appalachian craftsmen skilled in making "apple dolls" from dried apples, she created the touring version of the Stones that audiences have seen ever since.



Photo of Apple Doll from DollKind
http://www.dollkind.com/dolls/apple-doll/
which gives instructions on apple doll making.





With apologies to Brando and Steiger, the Coulda Been King's Speech.

So, after posting Sunday about the new bio of Wallis Simpson, I couldn't stop wondering what might have happened had Edward VIII ever realized that the "fix was in" when it came to his marriage and abdication, and a certain scene with two brothers came to mind. 

Here's the link back to my Sunday post which contains the link to Liesl Shillinger's review of Anne Sebba's bio That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor:  

    http://zooeygrant.blogspot.com/2012/03/coulda-been-kings-speech.html?spref=tw

David Cameron listens with rapt interest as Barack Obama explains
how an orange ball and basket thingy can effectively distract young
people from the fact that they have no long-term economic future.
"Bloody brilliant," Cameron is overheard to remark.  "Our prole sport
just makes them want to riot."

AP photo by Carolyn Kaster.

Beach Reading: An American in Paris.

Although on this day in 1887, book seller and publisher Sylvia Beach was born in Baltimore, Maryland, she grew up in Paris and attended the Sorbonne.  As an adult, enraptured by Left Bank culture and by pioneering Paris book store owner Adrienne Monnier, Beach opened the now legendary Shakespeare and Company, which became a hub for Left Bank intelligentsia and lost generation writers.  When obscenity charges made James Joyce's Ulysses problematic in America, she stepped in to publish it.  She was forced to close during Nazi Occupation--she was interned for 6 months--and never again managed to collect the resources to reopen.  The Paris store carrying that name today is strictly what the French would call homage.

The photos here, of Beach; Beach and James Joyce; Beach and friends, including a banged up Hemingway; are all from "Le Blog:  A Blog about All Things French," which contains a fuller account of Beach's life and love for Monnier.  Here's a link:  http://leblog1815.blogspot.com/2011/03/sylvia-beach.html

Paris Was a Woman, book and documentary, are also good sources when you're ready to moon about the romantic life of the Left Bank back in the day.  I recommend it highly.

Jon Corzine pretty sure he left that missing $6.9 billion in customer funds wherever he put his car keys...

...And apparently investigators are nodding their heads in sympathy, saying Yeah, we really hate when that happens.  It's so annoying to lose your car keys.  And $6.9 billion. 

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, who covered the business beat before he got his column, thinks that Corzine and the rest of the crew at MF Global may be about to walk, and I don't mean the plank, despite the fact that $6.9 billion in customer funds was improperly mingled with the firm's funds as it was collapsing, and now is gone.  Incredibly, since investigator haven't been able to find a "smoking gun," says Nocero:

"Apparently, the current theory is that it was all just a big accident, the chaos of those final days causing the firm's executives to tap into customer funds without realizing it."

Here's the link to Nocero's column http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/opinion/nocera-is-mf-global-getting-a-free-pass.html?hp

Investigators in the MF Global case are also looking
for their missing asses, but haven't found them, either.
"We're using both hands, but no luck so far," a
spokesman has said.  "I bet when we find Jon's car keys
our asses will be there with the missing $6.9 billion. 
Hey, case solved!  They don't call us crack investigators for nothing!"

Got MILF?

Delaney, left, is a sensational 56 today. Joanna Cassidy
looks pretty sensational, too, at 67.  She couldn't play the older sister?   

Lansbury:  Manchurian MILF
with an Oedipal twist.

Dana Delaney is 56 today and looking drop-dead gorgeous as a crime-solving coronor on ABC's Body of Proof, which features Joanna Cassidy, who is all of 67, playing her mother.  You might think, given only 11 years age difference, the producers might have allowed Cassidy to play Delaney's older sister.  A few years back in the lamentable Laws of Attraction, Frances Fisher, then 56, played the mother of Julianne Moore, who was 46.  But those numbers aren't so shocking when you consider that the infamous "older woman," Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) was only 36, Dustin Hoffman was 30, and Katherine Ross 27 when they made The Graduate, and Angela Lansbury was all of 37 when she played the mother of Laurence Harvey, then 34, in The Manchurian Candidate.  In any case, felicitations, Ms. Delaney!  Let's all watch her show tonight; supposedly, it's "on the bubble" and if it's canceled, she'll be cast next year as Julia Roberts' grandma.  So let's stave off the GILFs, at least for a while.

Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson, only 6 years
older than the 30-year-old "boy" you're seducing.

Monday Morning QB: Pipsqueak Leadership.

On this day in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt delivered his first fireside chat.  Also on this day in 1930, Mohondas Gandhi began his march to the sea, which would break the British monopoly on salt and lead eventually to India's self rule.  On this day in 1938, Hitler's Germany annexed Austria, and on this day in 1917, the Russian Army threw its support to the February Revolution, which would bring Lenin to power.  By the thirties, of course, Lenin had died, and the Soviet Union was ruled by Stalin, who, when it came to annihilating his own citizens, made Hitler look like a piker.  The world is smaller these days, and, world leaders--good, bad and ugly--are pipsqueaks by comparison.  (And yes, I'm even talking about you, Mr. Crying Tiger Pinup Putin.) 

Basis for nostalgia or not?  Hmmm.

Would you believe...that Agent 99 is 79 today?

Agent 86 and Agent 99 battling
the forces of KAOS.

Of course you wouldn't.  It's as outrageous as anything else Maxwell Smart ever dreamed up.  Although Barbara Feldon is best known as the glamorous and professional Agent 99 in the Mel Brooks/Buck Henry 60s sitcom, Get Smart, she also did a wickedly funny turn as a small town beauty pageant director in Michael Ritchie's sly cinematic satire, Smile.  So get out your shoe phone and add it to your Netflex queu.  And felicitations, Ms. Feldon!  It's your birthday--Kick up a little KAOS today!

Ms. Feldon at 2008 TV Land awards.