A Date with a Puppet

Beebo and I are watching the current season of our 'bad' reality TV show, The Bachelor, which is in one of its Bachelorette seasons.  The current' B'ette, Ashley the dental student, has to choose between the usual gallery of aspirant doofuses.  One of them is a guy named Ames, who looks like a Gerry Anderson TV marionette from the sixties:

To our surprise, he seems to be an intelligent guy, and more normal and even eloquent than most of the dudes in the house this season.  Wonder how long he'll last?

This Thing Has Flown

R.I.P. James Arness, the Thing from Another World, better known as Marshal Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke (and brother of Peter Graves)

Mondays, huh?

Someone please make a movie of this STAT!

Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando 'fled 9/11 in hire car'

Trio reportedly embarked on cross-country dash following terrorist attacks on New York in 2001, claims Taylor's former PA

Liz Taylor and Michael Jackson ... Marlon Brando not pictured as he was buying a KFC family bucket at the time. Possibly. Photograph: Peter Jordan/PA
It may well be the most outlandish road trip since the wheel was invented: a cross-country dash featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The trio reportedly took turns driving, with Brando allegedly fueling himself on a diet of junk food. Details of the trip emerged in a Vanity Fair interview with Tim Mendelson, Taylor's former personal assistant. It came about after Jackson invited the two Hollywood actors to be his guests at a pair of concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden in early September 2001. Following the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the subsequent grounding of all internal flights, the trio were forced to find alternative transport back to the west coast. Mendelson claims they wound up driving a modest rental car all the way to Ohio – a distance of more than 500 miles. The trip was not all plain sailing. "Brando allegedly annoyed his colleagues by stopping at every KFC and Burger King they passed along the highway," writes Vanity Fair reporter Sam Kashner. "One can only imagine the shock their appearance caused at gas stations and rest stops across America." But Mendelson's freewheeling picaresque has already hit a bump in the road, with another of Taylor's aides insisting the actor was never in the car. "Elizabeth stayed behind," the anonymous aide told the magazine. "She went to a church to pray, and she went to an armory where people were who couldn't get home or who'd stayed behind to look for the missing. She also went down to Ground Zero, where she met with first responders. Eventually, the airports opened and she flew home." Unhappily, the trio at the centre of Mendelson's story are now unavailable for comment. Brando died in 2004, Jackson in 2009 and Taylor in March of this year. The method of their escape from New York looks set to remain a mystery.

Help me out here, people

I usually eat lunch at a hospital cafeteria right near my office, partly because it's a low-key place to read and eat and get away from work, and partly because I have a few choices for a lunch with a protein and two sides for six bucks.  This way I don't have to bring lunch in from home and eat at my desk or in the break room, and I don't have to go to one of the same few boring lunch places over and over again.  Also, this is when I try to eat my vegetables.



One thing that puzzles me, and I'm not getting any help from Google.  One cafeteria staple is the 'chicken quarter' -- a leg and thigh that have not been separated, and are served to you in one giant piece.  How exactly am I supposed to go about eating one of these big mothers?  I don't want to be all Henry VIII and pick it up and knaw on it, especially of it's some sort of messy tandoori-style preparation.  On the other hand, when I attempt to cut it up with a fork and knife, I can barely get enough off to feed a small child. 

Any ideas?  Is there a secret and civilized solution to this problem?  Or is it (as I suspect) just an easy and lazy way for the head chef to crank out a lot of substantial-looking entrees with extremely minimal effort?

Stella!

I just learned something interesting: Stella Artois, the beer with the pretentious commercials I have to sit through when I see a foreign movie at one of my local Landmark Cinemas, is nicknamed 'wife beater' in England! That's a different cultural interpretation!

From what I've read, its high-ish alcohol content allegedly makes British men get all 'aggro', though in truth, it's obviously the innate qualities of the louts who drink it that make them act out. However, some of the theories here are rather amusing--some people even think it has 'special chemicals' that turn a normal peace-loving chav fellow into a raging animal:

"I reckon it is true. My Mum used to work in a pub and the effect that stuff had on some of the guys in there was just awful. One in particular found himself with his hands round his girlfriend's neck after a night in it. He hasn't touched it since because he thinks it was because he had been drinking Stella that night. I think maybe it just brings out the very worst in someone, it doesn;t necessarily make them go home and beat seven shades out of the missus. My boyfriend had been drinking it one night when his usual lager was off and we had such a huge row on the way home, I've never seen him so argumentative.

"I think they should be allowed to conduct some kind of study into it, despite what it may do to the sales, because if there really is something in it which makes people behave aggressively, they should either change some of the ingredients or make people fully aware of the risks."

"In my last bar I was forced to change Stella to another lager because everybody who got drunk on it just ended up fighting. When the new lager was introduced there were no longer any problems. So in my experience it is true."

"It really do make some people very aggressive, my local pub will refuse to sell it to some customers."

"A policman told me it is true. It is well known to make men aggresive and abusive."

And my very favorite:

"Good question man, I always get in trouble when drinking that stuff, it couls be from the water they use to make it. Another side effect of Stella, it makes me poop really bad the next day. Anyone else have that problem?"

More information here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-494149/Where-did-wrong-beer-wife-beater.html

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Whoo-ee!  Beebo and Foulard have been very busy now, what with moving and Beebo's new job.  But here's a song for you to enjoy! 

Trivia note:  This song includes several quotes from William Wyler's The Big Country, as originally spoken by Burl Ives (and the whole song is done in Burl's voice).  I first saw the movie years after hearing the song, which gave me a weird reverse-recognition effect.

The Diana Dors Code

An interesting mystery about this blog's current cover girl, British bombshell Diana Dors.

Illustration by G. Foulard

From Wikipedia:

Before she died [in 1984], Dors apparently hid away what she claimed to be over £2million in banks across Europe. Eighteen months before her death, she gave her son Mark Dawson a sheet of paper, which she told him was a code that would reveal the whereabouts of the money.

Her widower, Alan Lake, supposedly had the key that would crack the code. But Lake committed suicide only five months after Dors died, leaving Dawson an apparently unsolvable code. Dawson, however, was determined to discover his late mother's fortune. He sought out computer forensic specialists Inforenz, who recognised the encryption as the Vigenère cipher. Inforenz then used their own cryptography software to suggest a ten-letter decryption key, DMARYFLUCK (short for Diana Mary Fluck, Dors's real name).

Although the company was then able to decode the entire message and link it to a bank statement found in some of Lake's papers, the location of the money is still unknown. Some speculate whether there may have been a second sheet, whose information might have led to the discovery of the money. Channel 4 made a television programme about the mystery and created a website (now removed) where users can read more and help solve the mystery.

'Bob' caught

How odd that the inspiration for this movie--one of my favorite movies of the 80s, and one of the things that made the Pacific Northwest appealing to me 20 years ago--was still doing his thing until yesterday!

From the Seattle P-I:
Redmond police catch notorious 'Drugstore Cowboy': Silent alarm, 911 call, quick police response lead to arrest

Thursday, May 27, 2010
Last updated 9:36 a.m. PT

By BILL CHRISTIANSON
REDMOND REPORTER

Thanks to a silent alarm, alert employees, a 911 call and quick police response, Redmond cops caught the notorious real-life "Drugstore Cowboy" trying to rob a downtown pharmacy last night.

Redmond police arrested 73-year-old James Fogle, whose book about a life spent stealing narcotics became the critically acclaimed movie "Drugstore Cowboy," and Shannon Benn, 45, for investigation of first-degree armed robbery. The two men were allegedly trying to steal prescription drugs from Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, which is adjacent to a 24-hour QFC and just a few blocks from the Redmond Public Safety Building.

Fogle, who has spent nearly half of his life behind bars for a myriad of crimes, and Benn will appear in a King County Superior Court tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. when a judge will set bail, according to Dan Donohoe, spokesperson for the King County Prosecutor's Office.

The charges Fogle and Benn face will not be determined until Friday or next Tuesday, Donohoe said.

Right around the 9 p.m. closing time last night, a Pharmaca employee was locking the front door when one of the suspects showed the employee he had a gun and forced his way into the store, located at 15840 Redmond Way, and demanded drugs. Fogle and Benn, both from Tacoma, began tying up the three staff members and asked one female employee to turn off the store lights. The employee quickly went to the front door and as she was turning off the lights, she saw a woman who was walking by. The employee cracked the front door open and whispered to the passerby to call 911.

The woman passerby, unaware of exactly what was going on, called 911, but realized what was happening as she looked through the front glass doors.

Around that same time, another pharmacy employee triggered a silent alarm, alerting police dispatch of an emergency.

Eleven Redmond police officers responded and surrounded the building, according to Redmond police spokesperson Jim Bove. Fogle and Benn, who were carrying "bins of drugs," saw several officers in front of the building and tried to escape through the back door, according to Bove. But officers were right there and took Fogle and Benn into custody at gunpoint, Bove said.

"He's known throughout other agencies," Bove said. "Detectives from other agencies called and congratulated us and told us how prolific of a pharmacy robber he is. It's good to know we have someone in custody who has done a lot of damage. ... Other agencies are glad to see him in jail."

The three Pharmaca staff members were not injured and the case is still being investigated.

Bove said "everything that had to happen right, happened right. We can't say enough about how well everybody handled the situation. Everything fell into place."

Pharmaca declined to identify the three employees in order to protect their privacy, according to front store manager Gary De Lay, who was not working during the robbery, but was called into the store after it happened.

"I wouldn't have expected something like this to happen in Redmond," said De Lay, who has managed the holistic, multi-service store since last November. "The best possible outcame happened. I am so proud of my team. They kept their cool. We train for that all the time and they did exactly what they were supposed to do."

The woman who called 911 — "the pivotal factor" in catching the crooks, according to Bove — declined to talk to the media, Bove said, "but she said she was fearful for the employee who asked her to call 911 and is happy that nobody was injured."

During one of his prison stays in California in the 1970s, Fogle wrote the manuscript for "Drugstore Cowboy," which became the 1989 movie starring Matt Dillon. He became a prison celebrity in 1989 when Portland filmmaker Gus Van Sant made a movie on Fogle's then-unpublished novel. "Drugstore Cowboy," starring Matt Dillon, got rave reviews. The movie was nominated for 11 awards and won four of them, including awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

The story of the movie follows Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon) and his "family" of drug addicts as they travel across the Pacific Northwest in the early 1970s, supporting their habit by robbing pharmacies and hospitals.

Fogle was believed to be back in action as Centralia police linked Fogle to a brazen heist last year, according to a report by Washington's Most Wanted.

Fogle and another man sawed their way through the pharmacy wall from an adjacent business and stole money and drugs in the January 2009 robbery. Police caught and arrested Fogle's partner in crime, Marvin Flowers-Roscoe March 30, 2010, after linking nasal discharge DNA to him.

"I figured with all the drywall dust, they were probably blowing their nose so I called the state lab and asked if they could get DNA off of snot and the scientists laughed and said 'yeah' and said 'send me the stuff,' so I did," Centralia detective Carl Buster told Washington's Most Wanted.

But Fogle remained on the loose — until yesterday.