I read all of George RR Martin’s ASOIAF last week, because I read like the wiiiiiiiinds of winter, and it is so so so long and clearly has not had the benefit of even the gentlest editor, and I begged for release before it ended. Even now, I’m not sure it’s really over. I took a nap on page 850 of 1125, and when I woke up, I had dreamed I’d made it to 925, but I hadn’t. Is THIS the dream? Are you dreamers, like me? ANYWAY, the show is better than the books by a factor of a billion, don’t believe anyone who says otherwise, they’re living out the make-another-VHS-copy-of-The-Ring-scenario, and here’s Sarah Mesle on the finale episode.
Actual LOL for Manfeels Park.
Our own Mary J. Breen wrote this piece about her time in CUSO (the Canadian equivalent of the Peace Corps), and I love how it gets at her enduring uncertainty about what she was doing in Malaysia in the first place, and the limits of interference in general:
During those years, the tragedy of the Vietnam War was unfolding just six hundred miles north across the South China Sea. Over 300,000 US troops were in country by that time, and disk jockeys were sent to entertain them via Armed Forces Radio Saigon. Remember Good Morning, Vietnam? The disk jockey I loved turned out to be the one who replaced Robin Williams’ real-life character in the movie. I’d never heard anything like him with his frenetic, funny patter interspersed with breaks for ultra-serious news reports listing the latest count of “enemy dead” (never US dead) and perky little jingles with messages like, “A dirty machine is a bad scene.” I couldn’t get enough of this music, even though listening was a guilty pleasure because it was impossible not to remember that some of the same GIs listening to the same songs that night would be dead by the next—those same young GIs we’d regularly meet in Singapore on R&R, where they were buying up anything Singapore had to offer. I remember one guy showing me his arms with a dozen silver watches on each. “Bullet proofing,” he called it. Now, even after all these years, whenever I hear Ain’t Too Proud to Beg or Nowhere to Run, I am back in the jungle listening to Motown while Americans of my age are killing and dying for a bogus cause in a similar jungle not so far away.
You have probably already watched David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s “Dancing in the Streets” without music, but if not! IF NOT, man.
It’s the most apt metaphor to say that I realized I was putting all my eggs, literally, in that particular basket, and I had imbued the idea of freezing my eggs with so much meaning that I expected to see all of my anxieties and fears about getting older and being single and dying alone to disappear instantly the second I went through with it.
FEELGOOD STORY OF THE YEAR:
On a recent afternoon, Mary Killoran, 86, was willing herself through a kettlebell dead lift. Mrs. Killoran, a retired medical transcriber, has lived alone since 1971 in an apartment overlooking the East River. A few years ago she suffered a bad fall and began using a walker.
Mr. Addo, 44, taught her exercises like balance lunges and stretching techniques. Gradually, she regained her balance and traded the walker for a cane.
Now, she drinks a protein shake each morning and strolls to the World Trade Center and back — twice a day. She works out about three times a week, but stops by the gym even on off days to visit Mr. Addo. He helps her “be more cheerful, so you don’t have to be depressed,” she said.
My bestie, who is Australian, ran into Tony Abbott (one of the world’s great all-time losers) at an Australian Function last week, and said: “Any plans to do anything about climate change?” (No, he has no such plans.) And it reminded me of one of the finest moments in attempted political meet-and-greeting:
What kind of female are you? You may be wrong.
Today, in “can’t get a fucking break” news. See also (or, no, please do not go see) the comments section for any articles about the money being given to the Central Park Five.
I’m not a big “books about watching people play card games” person, but the excerpt from Molly Bloom’s book about running Hollywood poker games in Vanity Fair made me want to set Tobey Maguire ON FIRE, summarized here:
That feeling of contentment, however, was issued a rude awakening when Tobey, in for $250K and down to his last $50K, pulled out a close win over a World Series of Poker champion named Jamie. “I had to worry about my job security if he lost,” Bloom writes. Tobey went on to humiliate Bloom in front of the remaining players, loudly offering her a thousand-dollar chip if she did “something to earn these thousand dollars. . . . Bark like a seal who wants a fish.” Bloom writes that she tried to laugh it off, but Tobey continued: “‘I’m not kidding. What’s wrong? You’re too rich now? You won’t bark for a thousand dollars? Wowwww. . . you must be really rich. . . . C’mon,’ he said, holding the chip above my head. ‘BARK.’ ‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘No?’ he asked. ‘Tobey,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to bark like a seal. Keep your chip.’”
Bloom was incensed: “My face was on fire. I knew he would be angry, especially because he had now engaged the whole audience, and I wasn’t playing his game. I was embarrassed, but I was also angry. After all I had done to accommodate this guy, I was also shocked. I had made sure I ran every detail of every game by him, changed the stakes for him, structured tournaments around him, memorized every ingredient in every vegan dish in town for him. He had won millions and millions of dollars at my table, and I had catered to his every need along the way—and now he seemed to want to humiliate me. . . . He gave me an icy look, dropped the chip on the table, and tried to laugh it off, but he was visibly angry. When he left, the room was buzzing.”
Because, right, he would NEVER have pulled that shit with a dude, because he would be (correctly) concerned that a dude would punch him in his weasel face.
