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Archive for the ‘The USA from the outside in’ Category

Bernstein’s New Book and Key Lime Pie

Posted in Celebs, Family, The USA from the outside in on May 30, 2007| Leave a Comment »

My brilliant and talented niece has a piece in today’s Huff Post that jives with a note I’ve had on my desktop for a couple of days, proving something about family … or not … and prompting me to write about Carl Bernstein.

Her post in the Post covers Berntein’s new ‘must read’, “A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton”, and quotes him as making much of how important he … ooops … it is.

I have no doubt it’s a page turner that’s flying off the shelves; after all, who’s hotter than Hillary at the moment, and Carl sports journalistic gravitas like like a bull dangles mountain oysters.

Not only does promise of an up-close-and-personal look, no matter how over-the-shoulder a peek down the blouse, at the cast iron bra that Mrs. Clinton must wear to deal with her fidelity-challenged Mr. guarantee buzz and sales, any hint of sex and scandal gets an extra boost when the Bernstein name goes with.

Which brings me to the note on my desk.

Carl Bernstein on marital devotion and loyalty. That’s rich!

Leave it to someone who’s been living on a little island in the middle of nowhere for years to remind those who may have forgotten that the uproariously funny book “Heartburn” … a truly inspired takedown of an unfaithful husband with appalling timing and equally poor taste in dalliance partners … was based on Berntein’s real-life philandering by his amazingly talented, now fabulously famous … then profoundly pregnant … ex-wife, Nora Ephron.

Hands down the best retribution ever dealt a wandering ego-with-a-penis, Ms. Ephron managed not only to keep readers, and eventually film-goers, highly entertained while inspiring women to brook no crap and proving that being the cheatee in a marraige can be turned into a position of great power, she put spending time with Carl Bernstein high in the top ten of what no self-respecting woman in her right mind would ever consider.

Yes, it was hard for the guy to get a date. May still be.

So, intimately familiar with all that is Washington politics as he is, as well, who better to probe the ins and outs of Hillary’s dealing with Bill’s ins and outs than the man single-handedly responsible for a British Baroness being forever thought of as the woman with a nose like a thumb and a mid-90s spike in the popularity of Key Lime Pie?

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Bill Maher is hot, is he not?

Posted in Celebs, I wanna, Island life, The USA from the outside in on May 26, 2007| 29 Comments »

Am I the only liberal, snotty, angst-ridden, happily married, over-fifty woman in the world who gets the screaming steaming thigh sweats over Bill Maher, or just one of a legion of middle-aged malcontents getting all hot and bothered to the strains of common sense wrapped in a manly, no bullshit package that seems as much a gift as a heart-shaped box of chocolates?

Since I don’t live on a part of the planet that get Maher-ified often … the occasional appearance on Larry King Live when that’s timed to air in our tiny CNN window in Seychelles is all I ever have available … it’s impossible for me to guess how his cute little pinched look, receding hairline and flat East Coast accent goes over in the US. I know he’s been around a while and is a hit, but do millions of American women there lie back, close their eyes and think of Comedy Central when their fire needs a stoking? I’m curious.

I don’t usually have ‘things’ for comics … musicians historically having the greatest likelihood of weakening my knees … since brash and edgy most often come across as cold and distant, and that just doesn’t wind my bathtub toy. I thought Dave Letterman was cute for a while, but then I met him.

(An aside … My mom was on Letterman’s show once when one of the other guests was Marilyn Manson. She thought he was ‘a very nice young man’. When I asked if he appeared to her as at all odd, she said, “No odder than some of the friends you used to bring home.”

Like I said, there are musicians in my past … sigh … )

But the Bill Maher tingles … what are those about?

Could it be I find him Electra-fying? He does have a nose very much like my darling father’s … stately, pominent and occupying a lot of face space … and in fact Bill (Do I dare call him Bill?) grows to more resemble my dad with every sporatic viewing I’m allowed.

Whoa! If this is some version of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” I’d better start hunting for a towel to throw in, because I’ll be done with having sexual fantasies FOREVER.

Stepping back from the brink of Freudian slippery slopes, I’ll get to why Bill Maher has me thinking today that jumping his bones would be a pursuit worth getting lathered up for … this from the Huff Post — a blog from Bill on South Carolina’s plan to allow concealed weapons on school campuses, and a sexy piece of writing it is.

Linking sex to violence is so hot.

In South Carolina you need to be 21 to get a concealed weapon permit. So the undergrads wouldn’t be armed. Just the teachers and grad students. So it wouldn’t actually stop anyone like the Virginia Tech shooter, until he worked his way up from the sophomores and stopped to re-load, but here I am applying practical logic to an argument made by guys who come in their pants when they hear the words “muzzle velocity.”

Sharp witted, brilliant, caustic … and, yes, brash and edgy, but with such a hefty dose of musth in his take down that instead of cold and distant he seems hot and close enough to be breathing on the back of my neck.

Whew.

Anyone have a cigarette?

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That’s entertainment …?

Posted in Celebs, The USA from the outside in, WTF? on May 24, 2007| 1 Comment »

Since I’ve been out of touch with American pop culture for more than a decade, a headline in Forbes offering a look at the “best paid men in entertainment” drew me, as the thought of a concise look at who’s hot this year seemed a good way to catch up.

I was hoping for something that might explain who Demi Moore’s boyfriend is, or maybe drop a clue to leading men the world is salivating over that I should at least have heard of.

No such luck.

Spielberg, of course, I expected. When money and entertainment are mentioned together, that one-man blockbuster franchise has been at the top of the ticket for years.

George Lucas on the bill was a bit of a surprise, but apparently he’s still raking it in from past glories. Fair enough.

Tom Cruise. Well, yeah. And Denzel Washington? Okay. But these guys were all doing really well for themselves way back when while I was still in the real world.

Where were the new really rich, incredibly successful, amazingly popular show biz men?

And then they started popping up.

Simon Cowell. Dr. Phil. Howard Stern. Rush Limbaugh.

Ah wha … ah wha … ah hooey? Gasp. Choke.

Okay, Howard and Rush have been around a long time, but IN THE TOP 25 BEST PAID MEN IN ENTERTAINMENT? I don’t think so.

I remember Rush doing diet commercials on local TV in Sacramento … a fat fish in the small pond of KFBK listeners … and was stunned when his radio show went national. “Who the hell outside the Central Valley wants to listen to that blowhard?” I asked myself. And now he’s in the top 25?

And Howard Stern. Sure, edgy, hip and all, and I’m all for a guy being dedicated to his hair … but in the top 25 in ENTERTAINMENT?

And the other two? Paaaalease! I popped back to the home page just to make sure it was really Forbes I was reading and not a Mad Magazine parody.

Sorry, folks, but I have to ask …

What the hell are you thinking over there making mediocrity so lucrative?

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Out of the loop:Paris Hilton is a person? Go figya …

Posted in Celebs, Seychelles, The USA from the outside in on May 7, 2007| 3 Comments »

I am so out of the loop that the loop doesn’t even look like a loop any longer … it’s more like a spiral my eyes can’t follow very long before they start to water and cross.

I’ve not lived in the US since 1993, and a lot has happened in America in the intervening years.

Politics are almost unrecognizable to me, for example. I still haven’t been able to wrap my head around the fact that an election went wonky and that the “decider commander guy” has been running the show for quite a while now. And my home state, the land I remember as Jerry Brown country, now takes orders from Arnold. That’s just too strange.

I haven’t seen any one of the past three years’-worth of Oscar winners and can no longer do the NYT crossword puzzles. Who am I trying to kid? I can’t do the TV Guide crossword any more. I have never seen an “Idol” show, or Reality TV of any kind … well, not since Candid Camera. I have no idea who anchors network newscasts, and although I do know Rush Limbaugh … he used to be a loud-mouth fat jerk in Sacramento, so we bumped into each other (shuddering yuck) often … but have no clue what an Imus is or sounds like.

Since it’s a small island in the Indian Ocean I live on and not Uranus, there are whiffs of pop culture that occasionally drift in, and certain times of the year we even get Larry King Live here … and what better smorgasbord of celebrity is there on offer than Larry’s? … but just hearing a name yacking about themselves for the half-hour before CNN switches to the BBC mid-way through whatever I’m trying to absorb does not necessarily convey context, and it’s context I’m so definitely lacking.

For example: Who the hell is Paris Hilton, and why do even I know her name? I get that she’s blond and rich, but I don’t understand why anyone cares.

I suppose I could pass for the celebrity litmus test … If Sandra’s heard of you, you must be famous … just don’t ask me to have an idea about who you are or what you do.

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A dead okapi, or hope for the future?

Posted in The USA from the outside in on April 29, 2007| Leave a Comment »

okapi
In a quick perusal of today’s Huff Post, a quick glance at Arianna’s Sunday roundup had the term “bicameral backbone” leap from the page and poke me in the nose.

Although it sounds like it should be something closely examined during a necropsy on an okapi dead under suspicious circumstances, bicameral backbone is actually much stranger and higher up the list of endangered species.

It’s the Democrats’ bicameral backbone observed on the front page, a resurrection of which seems as much a miracle as the reappearance of the wooly mammoth … the GOP might like a new mascot … or a tasmanian wolf in George Tenet’s clothing.

Can a true Blue streak of stamina flesh itself out? We may have to wait and see just what this backbone is connected to.

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