Craig Virden: RIP

One of the most recognizable faces of the New York children’s book publishing community passed away yesterday of a pulmonary embolism at the far too early age of 56. Craig Virden was Bunyanesque, boisterous, wonderfully erudite, a marvelous raconteur, a natural humorist. I knew him first from his days at Scholastic Books, then as the producer of DIC's Get A Long Gang. In the mid-nineties he became head of the children’s book division of Random House.

For twenty years I would see Craig at children’s literary functions. I would wait my turn for this force of nature always had members of the publishing world and the literati surrounding him. I would go up to him and tap him on his knees for he did tower over me. "Any good stories to relate about publishing life in the Big City (New York is a big city, Los Angeles is just a city)?" I would echo up to him. Damn if he wouldn’t begin to spin forth tales that made me burst out loud laughing. He would then be dragged away to countless meetings, and I would see him again at the next big publishing get-together. I was never sure whether any of his stories were true, but they certainly were funny.

To get a small measure of the man, here is his Publisher’s Weekly blog from this year’s Bologna Children's Book Fair. I made it a must every morning to read Craig's observations of a publishing world in flux.

I extend my heartfelt condolences to his lovely wife, literary agent Nancy Gallt who I have also known for years, and to their children. Craig will be sorely missed.

The Blog's the Thing

Today is not the birthday of Laurence Olivier ,but it is possibly the birthday of the guy who created the skull he's holding. Scholars argue whether April 23, 1564 is William Shakespeare's real birth date (there is a record of his baptismal on April 26th), but the world is quite sure that Earth's greatest author left this brave new world on this date in 1616. So if it's not his birthday, it's his death day. Votive candles should still be lit.

My first recollection of Shakespeare was in sixth grade, when Miss Waugh became so exasperated with my classroom whispering she reared back and threw a paperback copy of The Bard's shortest play, "Comedy of Errors," straight at my head. Corporal punishment was still the law of the landscape back then in Wisconsin, which no doubt was the reason why Ed Gein left school early. That got me thinking, how amazing old age is that a sixty-five year-old woman could still throw a three fingered splitter. I was to learn that had she hit me with Shakespeare's longest play, "Hamlet," I would today be Yorick himself, rather than an emaciated wannabe lookalike.

A friend asked me once whether there was a way of using animation to teach children at an early age the beauty of Shakespeare. He thought because I was in kids programming, everything I touched was educational in content. I must have looked like Big Bird that day or had sesame seeds caught in my teeth. The closest I came to anything educational was spelling X-Men with a capital X.

But the question haunted me, because at that moment I didn't have any girlfriends that did. Google Shakespeare with animation and you get dozens of sites where three hour plus plays are squeezed into 24-minute loopy truncations. While much of the animation is steps above the 70's Saturday morning cliche, the largest obstacle remained: Some of the world's greatest tales were so watered down that Classic Illustrated Comics read like St Augustine.

The Master's works were filleted to such a blistering degree that the Hamlet soliloquy, for instance, "To be or not to be, that is the question..." became "To be" and we're out of here. Things were so crudely edited that Romeo was left talking to himself under the balcony, the "Taming of the Shrew" morphed into a pigmy mouse, Falstaff resembled a spokesperson for Jenny Craig, and the trio of MacBeth witches became one Weird Sister with a multiple personality disorder. The Bard deserved better. A new method to introduce kids to the man who invented being human was required.

Nine years and hundreds of thousands of words later, scores of broken ideas, busted concepts, burnt out laptops, and too much taste testing of Absolut, Popov, Ketel One, Smirnoff, and Vox, I'd come up with one clean possibility of using animation without hopefully the crack of doom or the dogs of war crashing down upon me.

Over time, I will lay out the ideas that didn't make it, concepts too limiting, not clever enough, too stupid, or really really too stupid. Eventually I will post the one I think works the best. Some have already read my proposal, their facial expressions forcing me to wonder whether I've given them the Piers Plowman Middle English version. I'll take that as a positive sign.

I would post one short idea now, except I am already late to see Oliver Sacks at UCLA.

Disney Has Found Its Eighth Dwarf

Once upon a time there were some miners named Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, and Doc, and, of course, Dopey. They were the Seven Dwarfs that helped to create the Disney Empire. They were short. They were industrious. They were male.

Today, Disney uses a new group of dwarfs to help fashion their empire. They don't have funny iconic names, but they do have eyes that see the obvious and ears that hear the sound of checks being written out to them.

Disney was one of the few animation studios that missed my talented demeanor and droopy-eyed approach to programming, especially boy-centric programming. Now it appears that that boat hasn't so much left me at the dock as sunk in the harbor. Us old diggers who rooted out transcendent ideas as if they were subterranean fungi are now as current as, let me see, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride or the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Submarine Voyage. A new breed of creative development executives now gallops across the company's TV landscape: the raging anthropologist and the wily psychologist. Their job: to find out where Disney's lost boys have gone.

The Toon Disney into Disney XD transformation is too complicated and messy to explain in a family friendly blog. I try to remain upbeat and entertaining throughout my writings here. Some news items simply set me down into my own inner space adventures. I'll let this article and this article act as an E ticket ride to bring the reader up to snuff.

I produced more methane reading this particular New York Times article than half the dairy herds in Wisconsin emit in a week. Maybe that's the reason I don't bring newspapers to social events. Apparently Disney TV can't attract boys to its live action and animation programming because… well that's what these new hunters and gathers have been called in to find out. Disney XD has lost its XY.

Disney owned the boys TV market at one time, with Davy Crockett and Zorro and Spin and Marty and The Hardy Boys; but that was so long ago most of America's Interstate Highways were still being numbered odd or even. Those programs were all action-packed, and adventure-oriented, with great characters, plenty of bonehead humor and storylines that made you wish you were part of the proceedings. I wonder if Walt Disney ever asked any of his subordinates to gather themselves up some focus groups to see how long a raccoon tail Davy Crockett's hat should have?

I was part of the Fox Kids team in the '90s that reinvented Saturday morning, developing programming that attracted both genders quite easily. We blew away the competition with Batman, X-Men, Spiderman, Goosebumps, and a re-versioned Beatlejuice. We created the fabled 6-17 demographic, the first time ever that a salesman could sell advertising to such a vast kid market skew. None of us were professional academics, brand consultants, marketing mavens, or long term strategic thinkers. We were rank and file executives who knew story, understood our audience, and most importantly, worked around equally talented writers, storyboard artists, directors, and voice talent. The only time I ever heard the word "focus" was at my ophthalmologist.

Yet now the Rosetta Stone for attracting boys is a ratty Black Sabbath tee shirt. Black Sabbath has been around longer than Stonehenge. I'm not following how Ozzy Osbourne biting off the head of a bat helps configure a show for Disney, but then I don't have a degree in marketing.

If Aaron Stone succeeds, it is not because he is a mediocre hoop player, but rather because he's a normal kid thrust into the role of a superhero – an example of wish fulfillment attractive to both genders. I'm still dreaming of being bitten by a radioactive spider, though lately the only things biting me are villainous creditors.

Forgive me, Lord, for I am about to sin, but I don't know any man who would ever utter something as blatantly moronic as this line: “Winning isn’t nearly as important to boys as Hollywood thinks.”

Really!!!!!Get back to me with various examples because my testosterone-fueled mind can't conjure up one.

Oh, and one other item from this insipid article merits some commentary:

You, the executive VP of Research at MTV: Don't rewrite history! What were you, two years-old when Fox Kids was handing the competition its lunch on barbed wire doilies? We wrote the history on revamping a day-part that was by that time deader than heaven on a Saturday night. You guys just added additional chapters to the logic already established.

Go Figure: Moses is Departing Egypt and Taking His Facebook Friends with Him

You've heard of finger popping time? Well within a couple of days comes Chametz tossing time. Like everything else, it's all about tradition.

This Wednesday evening begins the Jewish holiday of Passover. Some believe that passover is what happens when you're not called for jury duty; but in actuality it is a major religious holiday commemorating not only the passage of the ancient Hebrews out of Egypt, but also the forty years spent constipated eating matzo while roaming around the desert waiting for Moses to ask directions to the Holy Land. Guys asking for directions is like a country road without dirt. If his sister Miriam had been in charge, the sojourn would have ended after a fortnight at best.

The main staple of food during Passover is matzo. Plain matzo can stop a tank in its tracks. Had they used matzo instead of simple Pennsylvania earth to shore up the dam, not only would Johnstown have remained flood free, but the dam itself would now be harder than uncut diamonds. This biblical food is so indigestible that gravel has an easier time flowing through the human digestive tract. Advanced Imodium is like gobbling down a carton of prunes and washing it down with EX-Lax compared to a box of matzo. I think Kevlar jackets have a matzo lining. But matzo is the traditional food. The days following the end of Passover are the busiest times of the year for proctologists. Go figure.

Like all Jewish holidays, Passover revolves around prayer, self-contemplation and food. Most non-religious Jews passover the first two principles rather guiltily, but make up for their sectarian lapses by pigging out (perhaps a bad choice of words) under the third category. Hundreds of years ago, some wise sage summed up all of Jewish history with this pithy remark: "Somebody wants to kill the Jews; the Jews survive; let's eat."

Passover is a holiday so old it takes up Chapters 1-15 in Exodus and is then recapped again in Leviticus 23. On the first and second nights of this eight day holiday a 150 course meal, featuring lamb, soups, briskets, Kugel, cakes, candies (no leavening please) and other cardiologists' nightmares, is served. This is to commemorate the fact that the slaves had scant time to sit around eating sand and dung beetle sandwiches when Moses gave the word to roll on out of Egypt. Grab what you can and leave the rest for Goodwill. This heart-stopping meal is called the Seder.

Girding oneself for these two nights takes weeks of stomach expansion exercises and calorie destroying calisthenics. A new liver is advised, for drinking at this meal is as mandatory as knowing that the serving of food will only end when all arteries are clogged and the paramedics arrive with crash carts.

The Passover wine is so sweet that pure cane sugar could develop diabetes from it. So arduous is the preparation for the Seder that no sooner are the dishes washed and the crowds dispersed than planning begins for the following year. It takes that long just to make sure those who hate each other are seated right next to each other again.

Now Seder in Hebrew means order. People just doesn't get together and begin scarfing down food. That would then make it a wedding or a wake. Tradition demands an order to the serving of the meal. That's where the Haggadah comes in. This ancient text sets down the rabbinical codification of when to serve which dish, how to relax while eating it, what questions children should ask, and what answers no one pays any attention to.

The Haggadah also lays out when to drink the wine, sing songs about goats and, in more modern versions, when to leave your seat to disrupt the ongoing service by talking loudly to others about how poorly your children are turning out. Fun and guilt are had by all.

Various beautifully illustrated Haggadah editions from all over the world have survived through the centuries and now safely reside in various university special collections. One of the most magnificent examples of extraordinary artistry is that created by Arthur Syzk. His Haggadah is possibly the most widely distributed version of the Twentieth Century. The illustration on the left depicts Pharaoh's men drowning in the Red Sea. Remember, the Bible isn't a series of Comedy Central one-liners.

While the Haggadah is an important book, it is not writ sacred. Any participant can add personal and relevant passages to his or her own Haggadah ,as long as the basic line of the ceremony is kept intact. Feminist, gay and lesbian tracts, blessings for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and various and sundry political statements have crept into current texts. What never seems to change, regardless of the author, is the amount of food and drink that inherently must be consumed.

Thanks to friends, I stumbled upon this latest version of the Haggadah . I doubt it will end up in any hermetically sealed cabinets, but it certainly does have that feel to it: Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah.

Hundreds of Haggadah variations are now circulating on the Internet. No doubt there is even an Al Qaeda Haggadah someplace out there with some verse about "Death to the Jews" and "Next Year in Jerusalem or Else." If they drink as much wine during their Seder as is required by Haggadah bylaws, I doubt if any of them will remember their chants the next day, let alone their way back through the Khyber Pass.

The French Make the Best Commercials

This clip is not from the movie Madagascar: Escape to Africa. This is an actual French commercial produced several years ago that I stumbled upon last night while reading a post about Dan Ackroyd signing crystal skulls (filled with vodka) in Madison, Wisconsin. I can't make stuff like this up. If I could, I'd be working at this very moment as a paid writer and not as the itinerant cleaner of cat boxes I list myself as on Craig's List.

I have no idea what's being sold here other than it is a beverage of sorts, but I'll take a year's supply of it.



For those who really care about how a commercial like this is made, here are the behind the scenes tricks. The technique is called performance capture, used spectacularly in both Robert Zemeckis' film adaptations of Polar Express and Beowulf.


Addendum: Could Henri Rousseau be the inspiration for the animal design of the commercial? I'm not sure but at least I can end this post on an intellectual note far less provocative than images of God's creatures pole dancing for refreshment.

Oh Canada, Let Me Explain

Darkblack is a Canadian blog of infinite visual stimuli, as well as one of my favorite sites not affiliated with the XXX-Nation. If I could Photoshop this well, I would be employed at The Daily Show or be creating graphics for the New Adventures of the Trailer Park Boys. Darkblack's stuff is that good.

So imagine my consternation when I checked out a recent post and came across this:



Before you Canadians who make the darkblack blog so entertaining go ballistic and threaten to cut off cheap supplies of pharmaceuticals to health-starved Americans, halt the supplies of Edmonton shale oil you export to us, or deny us access to Whistler during ski season, let me "do some splainin" about Red Eye. Drum roll, please!

Fox News -- a comedic organization of shiny-teethed teleprompter readers, a network so rife with factual inaccuracies that it would make Joseph Goebbels cringe -- produces a late, late night comedy of errors called Red Eye. This show actually should be called "one eye," since most of the humor on it is based on the only male muscle with its own brain. Red Eye means to be the Fox News answer to The John Stewart Show. It has most of us muttering, "Who asked the question?"

How dumb is Red Eye? It's so dumb that the Indian Head Test Card pattern scored higher in its SATs. Rimshot!

This show is so boring death row prisoners would rather watch their own sentencing. Bada Bing!

This show is so bad Khalid Sheikh Mohammad preferred waterboarding to watching Red Eye when offered a choice of torture methods. Canned laughter, anyone?

Program executives filled the airwaves with this Romper Room of the Wretched because the ab-roller or ShamWow infotainment spots were too cerebral for the normal Fox late night viewer. "I'm here all week. Try the brisket!"

Red and Eye are monosyllabic, much like the typical Fox News report, thus making this seamless programming in the parlance of the business. "Wanna buy a duck?"

The show's premise has always been as simple as the mis-reading of the Second Amendment. Round up guys so insufferable that Quakers would enjoy beating them up, surround them with giggling, bone-dense sorority chicks whose cup sizes match their IQ's, and then drool out knuckle dragging, dirt eating nonsense to an audience simultaneously producing its own red eyes with shots of Jagermeister and Red Bull.

Red Eye specializes in right wing humor, which means the weak, the poor and the infirm deserve the same kind of "light belittling" the barbarians inflicted upon Rome. Like all other programs on Fox News, a dress code of tin foil hats and wife-beater shirts is mandatory. The jokes shoot out with all the ferocity of a clogged sphincter and tend towards the same hipness as eight tracks and pet rocks. Punch lines sink faster than the moral reputations of revelers Larry Craig and David Vitters. The writers are all graduates of the All Children Left Behind for Good Cause School of schlock and yawn. They work in crayon, because pencils and felt tip pens have points far too sharp for their dull minds. The show's graphics are meant to reassure the viewer that there are other reasons to learn to read besides following the directions on home pregnancy tests and signing domestic disturbance police reports.

Don't take Red Eye seriously. None of the comedy clubs in this country do -- otherwise you would see its participants working the rooms rather than busing the tables. You have the pretty currency, so let us have our loonies.

Anyway, get off of our backs. You Canadians had the opportunity to arrest Bush in Calgary (in an earlier posting I said Ottawa by mistake--me bad, especially in geography) when he gave his first post-1600 Pennsylvania Avenue speech. Perhaps you were hoping he'd take Harper back to the States with him. Up there, Bush was quoted as saying he was writing an authoritarian book on his 12 toughest decisions. Obviously, working his act on foreign soil made him even dumber. I didn't know our ex-president could count to double digits.

This Bushism is not Red Eye humor, unlike their tasteless jokes about Canadian deaths in Afghanistan. The word "authoritarian" has far too many syllables for anyone on the show to pronounce correctly. Secondly, malapropism sounds like a disease that can only be cured through faith-based intervention, and that's far too sacred a subject to joke about. Finally, what's so hilarious about the truth? Eight years of authoritarian rule could only produce an authoritarian book.

Watching Red Eye tends to produce in foreign viewers who are not familiar with our Athenian-like culture, a tendency to pee directly onto the television screen or take a claw hammer to the boob tube. Don't fall into that trap of hating all of us because Fox News produces more crap than an army on laxatives. The cretins on Red Eye are just that. They laugh at their own half-liners, ending each show with a rousing rendition of erectile dysfunction jokes. Even in the smallest bit of witless humor, signs of autobiography exists. Cue the drum roll and the rimshot please!

Fatty Foods and Neighborly Love

Norman McLaren, Canada's greatest animator, won an Oscar for his 1952 study of neighborly love. Spend a leisurely afternoon in between looking for that now elusive job, eh? Kick back a last nourishing LeBatt's before repossession of hearth and home, eh? And enjoy his wonderfully quirky and totally original short pieces, found on any video download site where X does not mark the spot. You need not have the art house maven gene to appreciate McLaren.

I am reminded of his classic pixilation short, "Neighbors," because at this very moment two men in adjoining apartments below me are once again going at it hammer and tong.



I wish my specialty were sitcom writing, but, alas, it is not: It is bad check writing. Throughout my entire life I have been told my sense of humor is no funnier than a burst anal fissure (remind me one day to tell you about my colonoscopy visit), so I am passing along the makings of this idea into the hands of smarter, funnier, and more devious purveyors of the human spirit than myself. Remember me on stage during the Emmy acceptance speech. I'll try not to sue.

My new neighbors are Calab and Cleon. Both moved out here from the Midwest, not to change their names, but with that same wild-eyed crazy kid dream of one day opening up Michelin-rated French restaurants back in their home states. Their first choice, Paris, was financially out of the question for them; however, for people not living out here, the City of Angels is no flash in the frying pan when it comes to eats. LA has some top-tier culinary schools: Otherwise why would we have so many fast food joints with exotic sounding names featuring chicken, lamb, and schnitzel? I told these guys about the cooking schools in Paris, Texas, but they looked at me glaringly and knew right away I was from Wisconsin.

I like both men, for they are completely neurotic about and borderline pathological towards the preparation of food. Even more intriguing, neither future Auguste Escoffier apparently likes the other, although both attend the same food classes. Irony and adjacent apartments brought these two strangers together. As all the cooking shows on cable networks detail, future master chefs are petty, whiney, immature monsters in the making -- more territorial than bull elephants during prom season. Caleb and Cleon dance around each other the way two rival chefs might do when battling for the same floor space at an upscale strip mall. They cook and cook and cook and begrudgingly share recipes with each other. I think it's because their wives demand it.

These early morning sounds are not connected with the construction of the building next door: cutlery crashing on the floor, dishes breaking, and the mournful screams of disgust spoken in French (though one guy is from Nebraska and the other from Kansas). When children fail to do their homework the night before, the rush to prepare for school has a universal language all its own.

This is Los Angeles, where apartments are mandated to have paper-thin walls and faulty window sealant. The distinctive love noises of men in broil, bake or sauté mode are now as recognizable to me as my own more common non-connubial sounds of grunting, groaning and grimacing. The smells wafting upwards from their respective apartments are far more exotic than those found on Hester Street at the turn of the last century. Those fragrances, whenever I smell them, whisk me immediately back to the good old days of Greenbush where all immigrant cooked and spouses fought pitched battles with each other.

Those two lovely wives of Caleb and Cleon – their respective partners, both majoring in online hospitality degrees – make it abundantly clear, in their own passive-aggressive fashion, that each finds the other man's cooking better. I guess this is a motivational technique learned from years of watching telenovelas, though neither women understands Spanish. Did I not say somewhere that this had all the ingredients for a sitcom? Throw in some car chases, fist fights, earthly annihilation and loud music and you have a Bruckheimer comedy. These women apparently love living on the edge. I wonder if there is a dish called "homicide au gratin?"

I'm a sadistic "ho" with no conscience, who eats both ends against the middle – and lately, since the battling chefs have moved into the apartment complex, my middle has expanded exponentially. Several times a week, I'll put on sackcloth and ashes and waddle on downstairs, first to one and then to the other, asking for handouts. Strumming my lute, I make clear to them in my best Oliver Twist, doe-eyed lamentation: "my own gruel be cruel, eight days a week." They never laugh at anything I say, but they do welcome me and my stomach in.



I never have any idea what I'm being served. I just know it's French because half-way through each meal I stand and sing Le Marseillaise, and then reflexively kiss someone on both cheeks. Baeckeoffe, Quiche Lorraine, Magrets de Canard aux cerises, Baked Apricots, Boeuf Bourguignon, Tarte Flambée. My palette is from Wisconsin, so its sophistication level is two floors below mulch. My mom would tell me as a kid when putting food down in front of me, "If it don't make you heave or rush to relieve, then remember bucko, it's free."

Lately after these gluttonous visits, I spend long hours at the computer looking up the recipes to see whether I've broken not only any ancient dietary laws but those federal laws about eating endangered species. If I could only find a woman who could cook like this and humiliate me in front of others, I would be in Crème Patisserie heaven. Then all I would need is a job.

Avatar Hot Boy

I spend hours a day on the computer looking things up, jumping from one link to another and wondering how the world survived without a search engine. The Google is the best little engine that could since my college girlfriend researched and wrote all of my papers during the four years of the Revolution when I was out doing god knows what. I paid her well for keeping me afloat during those turbulent times. At that point in my life, I was young and healthy and my get up and go had not yet gotten up and left. I also still had all of my teeth.

I received a rather strong GPA from all of her efforts; yet that one-sided relationship set in motions years of selfishness and ego-maniacal behavior, for I believed every woman in the world would treat me with such kingly Rush Limbaugh subordination.

Then I woke up and discovered it was a dream, and I have been hugging a very animated adult Chia pet ever since. I still have my college girlfriend's magical Underwood typewriter, just in case the UW ever asks me to prove I did my own papers; she has certain Polaroid’s that the FBI would find interesting to fill out certain archival questions. We haven't exchanged Valentine’s Day cards since Watergate.

I digress, for I have eaten only almonds today. For some odd reason, eating almonds makes me nostalgic. I have no idea why; neither do any of the clinicians I keep on the payroll. Now back to today's subject.

Avatar Hot Boy is the title of today's post. Sounds pornographic, perhaps it should be, but it isn't. Due to ways Google algorithmic spiders work (and don't ask me how because I can't even follow the explanation on Wikipedia myself), typing these three words into the search engine popped my blog up nearly to the top of the list. I know this because a reader from Hanoi did just that recently. The poor guy ended up temporarily looking at all of my swirling pictures of dancing cows, marching bands, Ellis Island immigrants and most importantly, the schematics of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile before clicking out. I hoped my reader from Hanoi stuck around long enough to play the University of Wisconsin Marching Song.

I had written a post about Avatar: The Last Airbender, several weeks ago, complaining that once more Hollywood was walking down the Charlie Chan route of casting white actors in Asian roles. A live action movie was in the process of pre-production planning and the Asian community was up in arms at some of the major casting choices. Granted the creators of the animated series were white as were most of the primary voice actors, but the cartoon design and story arcs were straight anime, giving off the impression that this was a non-western series. My point was why would Hollywood court a racially insensitive problem it could so easily avoid?

The complete title of the post was Hot Air Bender is still Old Hollywood Gas. Okay, it was a silly sounding title, punning "hot air" with "Hollywood Gas". So sue me for making it as clever as boiling water. The word "Hot" combined with a partial listing of the blog name,Greenbush "Boy", plus the word "Avatar, was enough information for Google to go to town.

But why did he (I presume it is a he) sequence these three words together in the first place? Initially I had no idea. Today he came back again Googling the same three words. This time I did some backtracking on Google links (the closest I will ever get to forensic diddling around), and discovered my visitor was not interested at all in the cartoon series. Even in Hanoi the making of James Cameron's Avatar is news enough to track. My visitor was searching for the latest images of Na'vi, an incandescent blue female (I wonder how you can tell?) that, except for the tail, looked similar to Mystique.

This Avatar design is hot...boy is it hot! Apparently this was one of dozens every teenage boy and man-child thought initially was the alien look for Cameron's decade long in the making sci-fi epic. Well it ain't, because dozens of web sites have their own "this is the true version" of Cameron's vision and none of them are correct. So many of these images are now floating out there in the cold waters of the Internet, they're forming their own icebergs in the North Atlantic and crashing into each other. So my curious friend in Hanoi, keep reading blogs like EW.com, io9.com, First Show.net, or Cinematical, because one of them will eventually hit design pay dirt for you.

This has given me an idea. As a blogger I face millions of others who shoot off their mouths daily for no other reason than they can and someone has been kind enough to make them breakfast. How do I market my blog? Make it visible? Keep people constantly coming back for more? I mean the Wienermobile can travel only so far!

From now on all of my posts will have one or more "hot" words in the title: Porn, Hemorrhoids, Murder, or Implants, for instance. The subject matter will have little if anything to do with the title, a bait and switch technique I first discovered while running for Mister Congeniality in grade school. With provocative keywords like these, who knows who else might stumble onto my blog site? Perhaps even Bin Laden will drop by long enough to stop using Master Chief as his dance instructor and listen to "On Wisconsin".

Come to Your Senses Day

I spent most of the day yesterday sleeping off the effects of a box of Godiva chocolates I gave to myself because my true love pulled a Crater recently with my former best friend, the one I loved like a brother even though he was dumber but more handsome than me, and now both live in some unincorporated area of Idaho protected by Rabid rottweilers and a bunch of survivalists who were hippies at one time, but now are all loons waiting for some asteroid to hit Earth and take them up to some planet just north of Capricorn. Damn! Glucose-induced run-a-muck sentences are sure fun to write. I wish I could speak this coherently during therapy.

Because I was twitching yesterday (not to be confused with Twittering), I missed posting this important post-Valentine Day holiday message: February 15th is duly recognized throughout the feminine world as Come to Your Senses Day and should not be confused with But He Was So Nice to Me Before I Slept with Him Day, Can I Get My Money Back from Him Day, or Restraining Order is now Finally in Effect Day.

I'm a fan of some of the holiday's progenitors such as Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, and Melvin Dewey; this important date is circled on all my calendars throughout my apartment, so had I been all together yesterday, this post would not be coming out today. I have no calendar in my bedroom, but I do have a three-minute egg timer on my nightstand to remind me of those days when I did have someone important in my life.

OMG, Librarians are really Hip

"The Graveyard Book" by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Dave McKean

Bookstores and libraries beware! Prepare for a mad dash of children coming in search of the 2009 Newbery Award winner, instead of just the usual crowd of well-meaning parents, guardians, nannies, and other individuals with constipated expressions searching for "legitimate" children's books to thrust onto book clubs.

Kids reading for fun and excitement in the post-Harry Potter era: What a concept! After years of selecting novels that gather dust on bookshelves after the initial hype has blown them out to sea, and with the debate raging about its own relevancy for kids in today's marketplace, The Newbery Award committee threw the betting crowd a real long shot when it bestowed this year's honor on "The Graveyard Book."


Who would have thunk that writer Neil Gaiman and his longtime illustrator, Dave McKean, would win the top children's book prize of 2008? Remember these are children's librarians who issued this award. The guardians of civility, top drawer manners, and "no talking at any time" are suddenly going rogue and kicking off their orthopedics; unbuttoning the top fastener of their "Little House on the Prairie" blouses; letting their buns down; and handing out their most important literary emblem to the geniuses behind The Sandman. Now roaming the halls of the San Diego Comic Book Convention really does have literary merit, Mom.

But anyone who has been following the careers of these Englishmen know they have wandered into the realm of children's literature before. There was The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (1998); The Wolves in the Walls (2003); and, of course, the much heralded, Coraline (2002), soon to be a major motion picture. All well worth the time to find, to read, to savor.

I've stood in line dozens of times at comic book conventions for Gaiman and McKean's autographs because I am a geek and this is a far more exciting thing to do on a Saturday's than ironing more wrinkles into shirts. Somewhere in the black hole I call my apartment, I have an original piece of artwork from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth that I purchased more than 20 years ago when comic book artwork was not bathed in gold. The piece is dark; it is horrifying in its intensity; it makes your skin crawl and your teeth rattle. That's why for years I hung it in my bathroom, so I could study it when I didn't feel like reading.

Gaiman is an amazing writer; McKean is a phenomenal illustrator. It's comforting to know that we old time graphic novel readers have something now in common with today's Vanessa Bruno clad librarians. I wonder if they will still force us to "shush" in the library?

Clever, but Tasteless

What Bush and Cheney Thought Brought Down the Plane in the Hudson

Stepping on a Fox's Tail

I fell asleep reading Kafka and so...

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon at various hardware stores, battling with members of Beverly Hills gangs of liberals and progressives -- punching and screaming and carrying on as if we were all after the same plasma television at a Circuit City liquidation marathon. I don't remember being in so many cat fights since I stopped to ask for directions at a local trucking establishment east of Reno several nights ago. That was a great dream as well.

The Inauguration was less than 24 hours away. Therapists had been notified; prescriptions filled; my heart monitor was at the ready, but there was so much more to do. Still, I was not truly prepared for the upcoming event. I knew the dangers that lay ahead. Prepare sloppily and my entire neighborhood was at risk -- pets would never poop properly again, and apartments and homes within a three mile radius of where I lived would be uninhabitable for weeks. Hence the need to visit hardware stores. It all made so much sense to me. I could hear myself snoring.

It was a chance worth taking. I needed to witness the destruction myself. Without it, January 20th would simply be another 24 hours in our nation’s history.Anyway, I like looking at new brands of cyclone fencing.

At 3 a.m. this morning, the police arrived at my door. Some irate loser in my building reported I was making too much noise during my pre-celebration festivities: Something to do with hammering so early in the morning and off-key whistling of Disney songs.

I greeted the officers with a nail gun in one hand and a moderately sized beach umbrella in the other. I don't know where that other hand came from, but it held a very large whisk broom. I was wearing a hurricane slicker, size ten hip boot waders, and a welder’s helmet -- the exact outfit I used to wear whenever I went quail hunting with the vice president.

I looked around. I had covered my entire apartment, walls, ceiling, carpeting, and furniture with the two-ply, heavy duty, water-proof plastic, the sort Dexter uses to wrap his victims after he fillets them. Was I expecting Jackson Pollack for breakfast? one of the cops asked. Pretty amusing I thought: A police officer who has David Kelley writing his dialogue.

But the boys in blue knew exactly why my apartment was one big drop cloth. They showed me memos alerting Interpol of potential early morning rowdiness by a certain select troublemaker. They warned me if my activities became to grandiose, I would be arrested under some Homeland Security proviso and sent to a castle as a lifelong juror. They did fine me, however, for using a brad nailer rather than a framing nailer when putting up the plastics.

It was 5 a.m.. Everything was ready around me. My herbal teas, pop tarts, and two day-old pizza were all under heavy plastic bags ready for consumption. I turned on my television to That Network, the very same one I watch only when I want a quick cardiovascular work out. My head exploded so often watching That Network that I could now look up in the middle of my living room and see constellations.

Today would be different. What could anyone on That Network say? Would the news readers keep their cool? Disappearing quickly, eight years of preaching an alternative reality, officials scurrying away like cockroaches in sunlight. Would any of the punditry last the day or would they self-detonate or melt before my eyes. Unharnessed kinetic energy can be a real mess to clean up. I've read the X-Men. I hoped I had enough plastic.

Fulminations. Blasts. Diatribes. Harangues. Jeremiads screamed from the TV set. For the next ten hours I witnessed with awe and near reverence the violent effects of No Drama Obama on this wandering herd of confused and lost pundits, commentators, and experts. Funny but none could recall ever saying that Obama was too black, not black enough, a secret Muslim, a jihadist, far too cerebral, much too elitist, not really Middle American, valueless, un-American, not American, a lousy bowler. January 20, 2009 was not the start of a new mandate, but one in which celebrity crazy America, ever ready for the next sparkling info product, had, hypnotically cast their ballot for the new guy. History would one day judge the previous administration differently, much like the way the crew of the Titanic would eventually reevaluate the role of the iceberg.

I dreamt of heads exploding outward, limbs twitching and flying away, and teeth shooting forth like missiles. I was ducking and covering. My television morphed into a Gatling gun, rapid firing canines and molars towards me. The floors and ceiling melted away into rivers of brainstems and eyeballs.

Wow! This is what happens after eight years of regurgitated miscalculations, misjudgments, guesstimates, broken promises and asinine justifications! I was swimming in bits and pieces of Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Neil Cavuto, Morton Kondracke, Ben Stein, and dozens more who had taken money for sitting on their brains and getting everything wrong. Were they too asleep when we thought they were awake? All that was missing from this carnage was Charlton Heston and a burning bush.

But the dream continued. After some commercial breaks all the Beltway boys and girls returned as verbally dense as before, ready to blow apart like mini Vesuvius mannikans. So many befuddled individuals twisting into yoga pretzels, emphasizing their relevancy and denying they were still part of the James Buchanan administration. They talk lovingly of Kumbaya moments, bipartisan appeals, and Congressional checks and balances. These guys were backtracking so quickly from their previous words that GPS units later found them on Jupiter.

"The Fox Hunt" by Winslow Homer

I laughed. I cried. I fell in love. I wake up. The Network is running for its life. Barack Obama is about to give his speech. Unlike Marley and Me and Seven, this day will have a happy ending.

I’m now sweeping out the apartment and doing some dusting as well. Now I know I'm back to dreaming because I would never do either action fully awake. My television appears ruined as is my Hummel collection of weird looking gnomes. I also discover that Easy Off does not work on carpets. I see so much viscera left on the walls and floors that I think I'll make sausage tonight.

How will That Network survive? Well there are still gays, guns, God, and the assault on Christmas so I guess they'll do just fine. My quick cardio workouts will continue.

Life is good. It's morning in America again. Actually it is late evening. Most of all, I am happy that Obama mentioned the word “science” in his Inaugural Address. Once more it is safe to believe the earth rotates around the sun rather than the other way around. And that ain't no dream.

The Gates of Eden

If Jean-Luc Godard Directed Garfield the Cat

Earlier today, a friend commented that my blog had, after only one month's worth of existence, become blurred and neglectful of my original objective of uploading all of my animation and live action treatments onto this site. Her evaluation has some merit, since only one example exists online to read. My posts tend to ramble and stumble around from one subject matter to another, much like the two bad ants in Chris Van Allsburg's children's book; but I have been told I have a winning smile.

She says I can't focus on one thing at a time. She's a doctor, and trained, as far as I know, not to operate on two patients at once; she has a different perspective about how many plates can be spun at any one time. Plate spinning reminds me of the Ed Sullivan Show. Could this be worth a post?

I'm not doing much at the moment except watching some Smothers Brothers retrospective, downloading Buddy Holly onto my iPod, microwaving dinner, listening to my neighbors explore new meanings for the word "evolution," doing laundry, vacuuming, and dusting. I only do vacuuming and dusting at this time of the evening when I need to find clean dishes and silverware, so that really doesn't count as an activity. I hate eating with my fingers, especially since tonight's meal doesn't look Moroccan. I don't know where I placed my cell phone earlier today. I wonder if the doctor is still on hold.

I was going to upload another idea tonight, but I love little kitten videos -- especially clever ones. I'm glad I discovered Henri. This could be the only chance I get to learn French in 2009, since I can no longer afford the services of either French maids or their outfits.

If the Jean-Luc Godard reference in the post title is a mystery, then I suppose I should save my Jean Cocteau joke for later. I don't think I ramble at all.

Atul Rao's Channel Runs on Animation Voltage

Atul Rao, a Canadian animator and friend, recently posted his latest piece of wacky animation online and, as usual, it's pretty funny. This guy is so prolific that he has his own channel. Not even David Sarnoff programmed every time period on NBC, and he ran that joint for 50 years.

I've liked cutout and collage animation since I first noticed it while watching Monty Python's Flying Circus. I've worked in cutout collage for years. Just today, I placed all of my store coupons in a neat little pile at the checkout counter in a very provocative fashion.

Manning the Barricades One Last Time

Does this man not deserve his own Wikipedia entry?

Ever since I first discovered the tubes and piping called the Internets, and with it the invention of Wikipedia, I’ve waited for someone with knowledge of the man to write up an entry for Harvey Goldberg. Is it important to recognize him in this fashion more than two decades after his death? I think so, otherwise why would I bring it up?

Could the oversight be due to the paucity of his published materials? Certainly his politics would not have precluded an entry, nor would the intellectual quality of his lectures. Isn't there one hero worshipper out there who knows enough about the man to write an article? Other immortals from my days as a history student at the University of Wisconsin have their free encyclopedia links: the forever provocative William Appleman Williams, the Arthurian legend George Mosse, and the American icon Merle Curti. So why not Harvey?

Countless other UW-Madison professors are listed amongst the millions of Wikipedia entries, but I sat in on classes with these four. Recurring 60s flashbacks allow for only so many memories about that time on campus. I have been told I did not take any courses with Frederick Jackson Turner.

I entered the University of Wisconsin with one goal in mind: to become a history professor. I dreamt of standing in front of an audience packed solid with adoring students, enthralling them with a masterful presence and a clear certitude of righteousness. My words and phrases would be thundering tours de force, a secular evangelical romp, weaving the intricate fibers of 5,000 years of human inheritance into a crisp 50-minute piece of oral acrobatics.

I fancied myself rushing pell-mell down Bascom Hill, class notes, like my long strands of coal black hair, madly flying in the wind; beautiful acolytes following behind me, retrieving from puddles and snow drifts my discourse for the day. I would overwhelm academia with research of such stunning contrarian insight textbooks would have to be rewritten each time I published my brilliant insights. The world would be at my feet, and I would no longer be addressed by my parents as “Hey You.”

The rest of the time I would kick back and play hearts in the Memorial Union , or drink brew at any one of the dozens of beer joints around the campus, while preparing my thoughts for the next day’s classes. Life would be so sweet I would develop a chronic sugar rush. Then I woke up and discovered it was a dream. I heard Harvey Goldberg throw down a lecture and realized the only part of my fantasy that would come true was the tossing of hearts at 2 AM and the drinking of slosh at the nearest pub. I also remembered my hair was brown.

Goldberg’s grasp of history was so prodigious and his mannerisms so entrancing that even the asbestos flecks that form the foundation of the Humanities Building refused to fall during his lectures. One could imagine Harvey rushing UP the Odessa Steps to confront the Czar's troops; leading the members of the Estates-General into the streets towards the Bastille; manning the Parisian barricades in 1870; taking that fateful bullet in 1914 that would claim the life of Jean Léon Jaurès.

For a quarter of a century, Goldberg's reed thin voice never faltered; he danced out his words from memory, a verbal misstep was as unheard of as a yawn from the audience. He spun rhetorical gold, his oratory soaring over the stellar landscape of the University of Wisconsin History Department, stimulating the standing room only crowds to ponder, if only shortly in their undergraduate lives, the march of the common man over that of common stocks.

Before lunch, we paraded the Parisian streets, rallying against the Bourbon dynasty and the Ancien Regime, an emotional cataclysm made comprehensible even though the names today are better known for flan than for flames. The lives of long dead and all but forgotten men and women crackled with high tension, for individuals, even the most seemingly insignificant, lead and bleed movements. An hour of a mystical Harvey harangue would have turned even the drones, clones and fem-bots at Fox News into the proleteriat, Googling and Mapquesting in search of the closest barricades to man.

My encounter with Professor Goldberg has already been journalized for embarrassing posterity. I have no qualifications to work up a Wikipedia entry for Harvey. My skills are limited to doing dishes once every three months and signaling when I turn right at a red light. I would hope that one of his grad students or a current professor who worked a PhD under the Master would think Harvey worthy of such an entry.

Who knows, perhaps in the future some kid looking for a plastic surgeon or a podiatrist or a brain specialist stumbles instead onto the Goldberg Wikipedia article and rummages around long enough to click onto the Harvey Goldberg Center link. This could lead a future scholar into a world where teaching became more than a dry syllabus full of irrelevant facts and unremembered figures.

Harvey Goldberg and George Mosse discussing Marxism and Fascism for all eternity at Forest Hill Cemetery.

Note: The above photographs were taken at my behest in 40 degrees below zero temperatures by one of Madison's top bloggers and the class historian of the late and much missed Madison Central High School. She had the wherewithal to e-mail me the pictures before wandering off into the snow drifts, muttering something about "Fugu for Foodies." She was last seen between the Conrad Elvehjem marker and that of John "Snowball" Riley. Only the spring thaw will give us the truth.

Metaphors Are My Friends

Several weeks ago, we residents were given an early 2009 bonus: notification by a budgetary official in Sacramento that California could be in the "Brother Can You Spare A Dime", riding the rails category within two months.

The Golden State has now become so bankrupt the Pacific vacations elsewhere. We're so broke we can't afford a dust bowl. Times have become so tough the Grapes of Wrath are served at The Four Seasons as blue plate specials. Los Angeles is so depressed it no longer wants to waste time asking for an NFL team. Metaphors are so cheap, they're found littering the ground next to hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

Imagine an entire State "shutting shop and buggering the customers" as my Cockney mother might have said. A "For Sale" sign" hung out from San Diego to Crescent City. A whole world of 401K wounded, scuffling mindlessly along in their Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, Miu Miu, and Le Coq Sportifs, clogging up the I's, both 5 and 15. All glory bound elsewhere than here. Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 monumental thesis of Westward Expansion comes in 2009 with reverse gears.

Our biggest concern is no longer who wins the Rose Bowl, but whether the float roses are edible over an unlit Coleman stove seasoned with dirt. Today's big question is one of practicality: Is it more viable to live over an underpass or under an overpass? The opening lyrics of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" have now been changed to "This Land's Defaulting on You and Me."

We've been terminated, decimated, eradicated. So now it might be time to rethink our State Motto of "EUREKA" and maybe change it to "WTF."

The new year is starting off great. Poupon goes well with rock salt.

Some Nights Are Best Served with Cheese

My refrigerator before tonight's little adventure

It is late. I cannot sleep. The walls shake and the cupboards rattle. At any minute I expect blood to drip down from the ceiling. I am suddenly paying rent to live in The House on Haunted Hill, the classic 1959 William Castle version and not the gimmicky 1999 remake. The couple next door continues to celebrate their wedding night, though I swear they first met earlier today during an unfortunate fender bender that has now turned into another sort of bender, both ear piercing in lustfulness and downright objectionable in its intensity. The unusual sounds of squealing pot bellied pigs seeping outward from their apartment walls confuse me, for our units have a strict “No Pets” clause.

Faux Southern California earthquakes make me hungry for cheese. Wisconsin dairy products clog my arteries with abandon. I have a wide variety of brightly colored cheese packages lying around on the floor, thanks to spasmodic movements of my refrigerator. Many are from Brennans Cellars of New Glarus, Wisconsin. I have a friend in Madison who, throughout the year, sends me various cheese blends for she believes I have written her into my will. I have, but only for my eight tracks and early 1980’s Walkmans.

I’m a certifiable cheesehead, so I gobble my bacterial cultures raw from the package. If alfresco dining means eating on the floor with crackers found under chairs, the use of broken plastic knives with things walking on them, the carpet as a napkin, and a Hamm’s beer found from last weekend’s party, then I’m living a tailgater’s life. Thank goodness the Wi-Fi works so close to the litter box, or I wouldn't be able to write this post at all.

It appears tonight will go on forever. Damn the young and their silly endurance games! When I was their age, I spent my Saturday nights playing Guts behind the Big Red Gym with normal reprobates who went on to become lawyers and judges. Now that sweat-inducing activity took stamina! Today's kids have no inkling the difficulties of playing poker in blizzard conditions.

Tonight's edible delicacy is something called Pesto Jack. The wrapping says it can be wonderfully melted on baguettes. Baguettes! You must be joking. I don't eat French unless its fries or toast. The last time I ate something called a "fromage", I was arrested in Paris for brutalizing the language.

As I listen ever so closely to the hanging and banging next door, I offer Cheeseman: The Movie, a hard-hitting piece of cheddar from a very talented young American animator, Thomas Crook, living, I believe, in England and thus, far far away from this madding crowd.

,

Patience is a Virtue and Other Myths

I was thinking about this piece of animation while stuck in a "ripping my eyeballs out with a socket wrench" traffic snarl earlier today. I have no idea what caused the mess that turned the 405 into a personal steel cage match, but that's just one of the upsides of living the good life in Los Angeles.

The freeway problem did not involve road construction, fender benders, drive by shootings, earthquakes, mudslides, volcanic eruptions, or flash floods. It's like magic when this happens, but years of Boy Scout training prepared me for those times when the world moves slower than a statue. I always carry Tolstoy's War and Peace with me. I never know when a freeway slow down will force me to finish reading some of my high school assignments.

The woman in front of me was wailing away at her kids (well I hope they were hers). I found this quite disturbing, as she had one hand on a cup of coffee while the other was full of make-up paraphernalia. Women like this confound me, as I have no idea where they hide their third hand in normal situations. The guy to my left was making out with his passenger, reminding me that I had yet to see Milk. The driver of the semi, clinging so closely to my right side that I could smell his Old Spice, was kicking back and looking over a foldout map of Utah. The kid driving up my tail pipe was lost in a world of haze. Damn this younger generation for not having the 60's manners to share.

Revolutionary Road Apples

Critics describe Richard Yates as a writer’s writer. No author ever wants to read those words in his or her own obit. That sobriquet is literary code for a tremendous talent dying ignored, unloved, and broke -- capillaries filled with more smoke and drink than could have been found at an unlimited martini lunch at Sardi’s during the 1950s. Authors fitting that description no longer have even their finest novels in print, making them believe in their last moments that their lives were filled with nothing more than well-diagrammed sentences.

Literary snobs scour the arcane articles of The New York Review of Books like archeologists in search of the ruins of Troy, searching for gems lost the day after their publication. Prizes of extra tea and scones at their literary salons are offered to the most "lostest" book found. Without The Review, literary snobs would spend their salon time grousing about spouses, tablecloth designs, and the Johnny Come Lately works offered up by television hosts.

Literary nabobs abhor Hollywood movies and Oprah tie-ins. Hollywood rarely gets a classic novel's nuances correct. Reprint editions have the movie stars on the cover rather than the original old cars or depression era farmers looking glummer than dirt. Reprints cheapen the dog-eared copies with wine-stained pages and bindings choked with ancient flecks of Crème Pâtissière owned by the literati. I am a literary snob; my books are wine-soaked and dessert-clogged. I'm not proud that my original editions can pass neither a breathalyzer test nor a heart stress exam.

I first stumbled down one of the latest of Hollywood's adaptations, Yates's Revolutionary Road, while attending a modern lit class at the University of Wisconsin. I still remember the reading list for that class. Along with Revolutionary Road, we were required to sift through John Barth’s Floating Opera, William Burroughs's Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. I felt really smart back then.

One beautiful spring afternoon, I threw Revolutionary Road at someone who was dressed as a policeman. It was during a demonstration against some third world slight, long since forgotten but, no doubt still quite important. Surprisingly, education at Wisconsin continued in between the tear gassing, the advances of the proletariat, the bad football seasons, and everyone’s favorite dance steps: jogging up and down Bascom Hill with the National Guard. Running from the bulls was a regular nationwide campus activity in the late 1960s, a slight variation of Pamplona's Running of the Bulls. Later that night, I went back to the scene of the misunderstanding and retrieved the novel, lying frontispiece wide open where I had written my name, home address, and telephone number, all necessary information for some to locate me should the text ever be left behind somewhere.

I would never have aced the class had I not had a girlfriend at the time reading the assignments and taking the exams for me. I have no idea what she saw in me, but I've lost it since then. At June graduation, she did give me all my books back and a cold Arctic blast to go with them. That's why I still have my copy of Revolutionary Road, though her extreme temperatures did cause some foxing around the edges.

I primarily go to films where the final act resolves itself through guns, knives, fists, and an occasional meteorite. But since Revolutionary Road is one of my favorite partially-read novels, I was curious to see what director Sam Mendes, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Sam's wife, Kate Winslet, would do with it after so many years of frustrating development.

I have been looking forward to the re-coupling of Jack and Rose ever since Jack went down with the Titanic, but was not surprised that it took so long for the two actors to make a second appearance together. It is possible to look at the movie Revolutionary Road as an unintended sequel of sorts, an extended time line of what might have happened to those iceberg lovebirds had Captain Smith kept awake during the Titanic’s maiden voyage. Add a generation or so to their ages, change the characters names from Jack and Rose to Frank and April Wheeler, and you end up with a perverse example of whom not to settle down with in 1950's Connecticut.

SPOILER ALERT:

Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet cannot appear together in a movie without one of them dying a gruesome death. Halfway through the screening, I began to wonder what their next screen pairing might be. He freezes to death in Titanic; she bleeds to death here. So, logically, their next roles would have them both dying horrible, prolonged deaths, perhaps as two Protestant lovers caught up in Paris during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre with James McAvoy playing Henry of Navarre, Keira Knightly as Marguerite de Valois, the ever versatile Meryl Streep as the vile Catherine de’Medici and Steve Coogan as the court jester, Yankel. By the time I thought of other casting possibilities (Vincent Cassel as the doomed Gaspard de Coligny), the movie was long over and I was being hassled to leave by the cleaning crew.

Once both of these fine actors find a suitable property that kills them off as the end credits role, I would hope to see them in an R-rated Judd Apatow sex farce, possibly a remake of Steamboat Round the Bend.

Leo as Will Rogers

Kate Winslet as Swamp Girl