All credit to Alexandra Petri, by the way, for bringing this fact into my life completely unsolicited and of whom I will always endeavor to be worthy. But, yes, W. Somerset Maugham, who described himself in his own autobiography as being "in the first rank of second-raters," one time had a sex dream about Percy Shelley.
Madeline Kahn is taking the week off, and I want to re-up Elon Green's wonderful piece about the greatest, most horrifying episode of the Dick Cavett show in history, when John Cassavettes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazarra turned up on-set too drunk to discuss the movie they were there to promote.
My great-grandparents once had a homestead near Burns, in the shadow of an extinct volcano named Glass Butte for the obsidian flows on its slopes. The land is part of a ranch now and there’s nothing there anymore, if there ever was much of anything. But I wanted to see that scrap of nothing which is, when it comes down to it, one of the reasons I exist.
These little shreds of naptha, toluene, xylene, titanium dioxide, other pigments, and a number of possible extenders including diatomaceous silica, are a drop in the slop bucket of tars and oils and plastics that wash down daily as dust, as grease, as snack wrappers, as scum, in cigarette butts and chewed gum.
JAYNE: When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels.
If Josh Hutcherson were your boyfriend, he would entertain your friends for hours, mixing cocktails like a wise bartender during Prohibition and listening intently to their tales of workplace microaggressions and bad scones.