Pearly, Whites

Oh, un-credited Life Magazine journo. Your lede is a whole mess of contradictions - as if her first name wasn't a wink in and of itself. - Life Magazine, December 1952

I Guess She Made It

The title makes me cringe just a wee bit, but anyway, imagine my surprise when I found out a certain publisher makes this book?

And here's something else I found when googlin' dixie. God Bless you, Bernice.

Cavity Creeps! Watch out, Toothopolis!

Thanks, Gawker, for putting together this collection of 80s TV commercials. All my Nostalgia Buttons were tickled simultaneous, or whatever.

Remember My Buddy? Terrified me. IRONY


Teddy Ruxpin was pretty scary too, but that lil' kid was soooooo cute. Why was the narrator (pronounced nar-RAT-er) British?


For at least ten years, my dad woke me up with this line.


Ooh ooh! The Cavity Creeps? Does anyone else find this one a little phallic around the 17 second mark? Or am I just a big perv?


They've got more on the site, including that lady that fell down and couldn't get up and the Flintstones. Thanks, Internets.

Viscous and Sawdust

The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera. It's a fortunate reader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime. I know one, Pnin, having read it half a dozen times. When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). Even the architect's claim on his creation seems secondary to your wonderful way of living in it.

Zadie Smith on my favorite Nabokov novel, one that I too have read a half dozen times, and given away at least that many.

(And yes I realize in the photo that it is literally Nabokov on Zadie Smith, rather than Zadie Smith on Nabokov. And I didn't have a squirrel but the little buddy I used otter be close enough.)

Happy Happy Hippo

Now this here, this is a nice story.

Happy The Hippo was - irony alert - anything but. Much like Amber, when he lived in Washington, DC he was as glum as a goose. His mom had passed along, and he was living out his days in the hippo house all alone, and apparently afraid of people wearing hats. (Good thing he left DC before Aretha did the inauguration).



Happy-ly, he was relocated to Wisconsin - making the reverse trek our friend did - where he met a few lady hippos, including one he may breed with. 28 years later, he's a cheerful fellow.

My favorite part? Happy The Hippo literally gets a new dating pool. I mean, come on. This stuff just writes itself.

Picnic, Lightning

Now, the truth of the matter is that while I work in BOOKS, I'm not the biggest reader of fiction. Nonfiction is more my game, with memoirs from and histories of Hollywood's 'Golden Age' being one of my favorite BISAC codes.

Oh, sure, I just finished An American Wife and liked it very much - it was an excellent romance novel set in the White House (and I'm mildly jealous since I took an English Comp class with the author in college), and just yesterday I finally bought a copy of Lush Life, at the soon to be extinct Biography Bookshop a few blocks south of me - Irony Alert! It's NOT a biography!

Speaking of Irony, nobody did it better than Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, who is no doubt my favorite writer. His genius positively staggers me, and I can read and re-read my favorites by him multiple times with new rewards with each flip of the page. One of my most prized possessions is a first edition of Pale Fire, perhaps my favorite book of all time.

(It's worth noting, in the great CRD Venn Diagram, that Miss Shelley Winters starred in a rather Kubrickian (very Kubrickian, I guess) production of his most famous novel).

Anyway, just last week his son took a break from opera singing and race-car driving to publish The Original of Laura, the novel VN was working on when he died. It is unfinished, and was supposed to be burned, and yet now, for the price of almost two Andrew Jacksons, we can flip through the master's note[card]s.

I'll get to that in good time and perhaps will even report back, but today I'm enjoying flipping through this slideshow from the Wall Street Journal. These are re-designed jackets for some of his classics.

Mr. Chip Kidd tackles Ada, something I personally have tackled multiple times in my life (from memory: in 1998 in Austin, TX, 2005 in the Catskills, NY, and 2009 in the Chelsea River Park), never getting much further than page 100, but loving the battle.

Stephen Doyle re-does Pale Fire, which thrilled me both in 1996 in Poughkeepsie, NY and 1997 in Miami Beach.
I can't even remember how many times I've read Pnin - at least a dozen. Carin Goldberg takes this one on, and while I prefer my banged up mass market edition, seeing this makes me want to break my heart all over again with this tale of viscous and sawdust.

Mr. Nabokov, my hat tips to you.

Let Me Stand Next To Your Fire; or, Adventures In The Spice Trade

Remember when Zach got famous?


Well I get to rub his nose in it, since I'm famous now too. Click here to go read the tale of Irony, Spices, and Fire.

Of course, Zach was a cutie in his pic, and I'm maybe not looking my most sultry. Also, only one of us got a bellyache.

Such is life!

Amber & CRD's Biznuss

Hello, dear Internals Plural readers. It's me, ALH, sometimes guest blogger for CRD while he is away in Florida. Or is he?

I felt horrible about letting him down yesterday by not getting around to guest blogging, and then I started to ask myself Don't they have Internet in Florida?

I mean, sometimes I blog from Splashing Laundromat, which is, in some ways, way more remote than Florida.

And then I read this article in the Mail Online. And I noticed the "coincidences" just piling up. CRD is "away," "someplace without Internet," and he "doesn't answer his cell phone."

Remind you of anyone? I think by "business trip" CRD means "three day bender with some mountain gorillas." The facts speak for themselves.

Caprice-ush-ness

So last night Amber and I watched Caprice, Doris Day's 1967 flick with Sir Richard Harris.

Now, I picked the movie out of the masses at the NYPL because the cover, as depicted above, screamed out to me. It promised to be a zingy mix of Alias & With Six You Get Eggroll, and how could that possibly go wrong?

Now, to be sure, this is as promised my new favorite movie. However, it wasn't until after we had watched all 98 minutes and had started in on the bonus features that we discovered it was in fact a spy spoof. The fact that Doris & Sir Richard were spies looking for the secret formula for waterproof hairspray? We weren't in on the joke.

Lesson learned. Sometimes, you DO want to watch the bonus content first.

Amber & Abandonment Issues

Hello, Internals Plural Readers. It's me ALH, a guest in the house of CRD's blog.

Ho hum.

CRD has retired from book binding to Florida.

Kevin and Diana are moving to Ireland to learn Riverdancing.

And I'm left all alone to mind the store and gardens.

Sigh. I sure hope I make new friends soon.

Is it ironic that I moved back and then everyone else moved away?

Irony, San Francisco Style

Tyler was SO excited to go to Alcatraz Island, it was all he could talk about on our trip. I liked it when people called it The Rock because I thought we were going on a trip to see the Other Rock, but no dice.

Sadly, the tour was SOLD OUT on the day we planned to go. We learned that to Assume you can get tickets the day before makes an Ass out of U and Alcatraz.

So close, and yet so very far away.