Ken Curtis Fan Club.

So, "Gunsmoke" is a show that is actually new to me, because I never really got to see it in syndication until recently on ME TV. The run of "Gunsmoke" overlapped my early years, but my memories of 1972-5 could be called hazy at best. I was too busy learning to walk and talk and use a big girl potty to pay much attention to tv, and westerns weren't really my parents' bag, anyway. For some reason, the character of "Festus" bothered me. The idea of the rural character who can barely be understood isn't too much of an oddity--Boomhauer on King of the Hill boasted a dense patois that I vaguely understand. Brad Pitt's character in Guy Ritchie's "Snatch" was well nigh incomprehensible, and one of the running gags in the long-running Italian police drama Commissario Montalbano is that the character of Catarella is barely understandable and frequently gets big words and proper names wrong.

But Ken Curtis, who portrayed Festus, had a voice that didn't match up with his face. But I recognized it. So, I had to look into it, and he was a big-deal singer with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and the Sons of the Pioneers. And, while his character on Gunsmoke was notoriously scruffy, Ken Curtis himself cleaned up beautifully. And in early episodes of Gunsmoke, they even let him sing. So weird he played such an odd character, but then had, you know. That voice. Glad I checked it out.

Bill Cosby is a Problem

I'm from Philadelphia and Bill Cosby is a huge part of my experience. "Fat Albert" was as much a part of my childhood as "Super Friends" or "American Bandstand". I saw the HBO specials and I watched "The Cosby Show". I grew up with "Picture Pages" and in a world where comedians found having a Bill Cosby impression up their sleeve de rigeur.

In a way, I have not ever not known of Bill Cosby and liked him as a kind of father/teacher figure. He has been a person who succeeded in my city, a person who attained his goals mentally and intellectually. A smart man. A funny, successful actor. A pillar of our regional community. A supporter of athletics and learning.

His delivery as a comedian and ability as a storyteller influenced me a lot. He did not need to use blue language, because he could make a sound or a facial expression that said a thousand things more than a bad word would.

But I believe women. I do. I have to. Women are abused by rich men and poor men, by nice men and mean men. It's always their word against the other person. But when there are so many women, fifteen, now, that have come forward, it really becomes difficult not to see a pattern, and a bad one. Fatherly, professorial, funny, gentle, interested, gallant, Bill Cosby, who I have liked for all my life, did bad things to women. I liked him, and he was not a good person to those women. He is a person who I felt so sorry for when his son was murdered, and whose wife I wanted to cape for when people questioned her for thinking out loud whether racism killed her boy--

People gave her grief for wondering if racism was why her child was victimized. They seriously did. People with no authority at all wanted to question her lived experience as an educated aware black woman with a dead son. And I would still hit anyone who wanted to grief her for that line of thought.

But I can't stand up for Bill Cosby Himself. After hearing all the stories, I can't. I believe women. so I can't. I can't see how this many women are liars, and their stories are so similar, and plausible.

And I have all the shade for Don Lemon, who seriously asked a victim why she didn't bite an irrumator on his cock for violating her mouth. Because there is no instinct for a drunk and drugged person to do that? Because hard dicks are actually hard? Because when it's shoved in, you open so you can breathe and not feel sick or gagged? Because she did not want a tall, athletic man to smack her teeth in?

I hate like hell to totally understand that this shit was okay with the network PTB--but that's what I think happened. They understood Bill Cosby was a sexual sadist liability, and they were making a shit-ton of money. And that money made the bad stuff ok.

They did not get it is never ok. It is never okay to accept that your star is a rapist and let him go ahead and keep raping. I mean seriously? WTF?

Celebrities for Your Consumption?

There is, obviously, a fascination with celebrity and carnivorous consumption on this humble blog, so naturally, this little site that promises to one day make literally taking a bite out of your favorite celebrities a reality has piqued my interest. There is a tongue-in-cheek quality to it that makes me suspect that this is actually a riff on our consumption of celebrity culture (seriously:

The Franco salami must be smoky, sexy, and smooth. Franco's meat will pair with lean, strong venison. Sharp Tellicherry peppercorns and caramelized onions provide Franco's underlying flavors, complemented by a charming hint of lavender. The Franco salami’s taste will be arrogant, distinctive, and completely undeniable.

 as opposed to a real dystopian cannibalism-fetish wish-fulfilment scheme--but I have been wrong about things before.

As it is, the more technical details of thing lend themselves to the suggestion of this being a hoax--like the still cost-prohibitive nature of vatted meat production on any kind of retail scale. Also, celebrities would naturally be circumpect about offering up even a trifling sample of their genetic meterial because of what might be done with it--if charcuterie itself were not outre enough. For one thing, in a world where celebrity-stalkers is a very real thing, and paparazzi and disturbing fan letters alone can give one sleepless nights, who wants to run the risk that some odd person out there develops a real taste for you and decides they would settle for nothing less than a chip off the original block, as it were?   For those who would go through with it, imagine the negotiations for licensing rights for name, image, and protection of said meat? And given what the likely final consimer price would be, naturally a demand for authentication that one was genuinely getting a Bieberburger or whatever could lead to some disputes as to the actual % of Biebermeat vs lamb or just some average mere human vatted muscle tissue. The headaches of this being a real thing abound.

So nearly plausible, but just a bit...off.

Okay--The Onion Just F'd Up Tweeting the Oscars

Quvenzhane Wallis is a nine year old girl. She's already a really gifted actress, but she is still a nine year old girl. You really shouldn't post that about even a grown-ass woman, but whoever was on the Onion Twitter feed tonight? You really, really, really don't use that word about a nine-year old girl. People would be afraid to use that word because that is not a word that civilized people would use. We don't say it about women because gendered slurs are reductionist cheap nonsense--

But that's a nine year old girl in Hollywood you just used that on, Onion. C'mon. The media and the business and all that will surely screw with her brain enough the rest of her life over her being a woman, celebrity, actress, how she looks and how she acts without you dropping a c-bomb on her for a lazy throw-away joke. Grow the hell up and figure out the line between cruelty and humor.

Celebrity hair jam--er, yum?

Jam made from Princess Diana's hair

JAM made from one of Princess Diana's hairs has been selling well at an art exhibition in London.
Sam Bompas, who founded catering company Bompas and Parr, says a tiny speck of the late Princess of Wales' hair has been infused with gin, then combined with milk and sugar to make the preserve, which tastes like condensed milk.

Mr Bompas says he bought the hair off eBay for $US10 ($12) from a US dealer who collects celebrity hair.

This works more as surrealism than food for a variety of reasons. First, the mention of jam with hair in it creates an unpleasant image of something not sanitary (I recall Davy Jones in The Monkees' film Head jokingly requesting a "glass of cold gravy with a hair in it", which made me viscerally grimace the same way--unclean!). But in this case--the hair in the jam is the point. It's supposed to be a minuscule amount, but this leads to a number of interesting cultural questions--

Is any hair the right amount to have in one's jam? And of course, does it matter that the person whose hair it was was a celebrity?

It's infused with gin (might I add, a very English spirit)--so does the alcohol sterilize the weirdness of it being "hair jam"?

And finally--just who is buying this? Because there are some definitely strange and intense people in this peculiar old world, some you might even say have stalkerly-intensity. Are there cults of Diana-worshippers, whose literal renderings of certain archetypes have poetically apotheosized Prince Charles' ex-wife into a goddess-figure whose very hair preserved in a jam (whose ingredient list actually seems a bit easily perishable) would serve as an agreeable sacrament for? Or are they just carefree memorabilia hounds snapping up the jars to sit next to the Royal Wedding hand-painted plates and other Anglophile tourist tat?

(At my darkest imaginings, I envision a solitary paparazzo, gutted with guilt, purchasing jar after jar through proxies and spending sad nights remembering the night she died while slathering the jam on stale crumpets and numbly swallowing each gobby mouthful part in penance and part in some sympathetic-magic urge to incorporate some of her nous into his own corpus and carry her like a cross of fat about his middle for the rest of his life.)

Or, you know, the the usual jam-fetishists. Gooseberries. Poblano chiles. Hair of deceased royalty. All in a day's collections.

It also works more as art because, of course, it's obviously going to depreciate in value once you pry the lid off. There is very little market for used jam. And I can't say I know of any market for used jam with hair in it.

The real down-side though, is with appraisal. All things considered, is it worth anyone's while to DNA-test a batch to see if it really has her hair? (Although this is pointless without a follicle tip I understand. Naturally, one can't expect that from hair purchased at auction and subsequently infused with gin. What a perfect crime for forgers! One could bootleg celebrity-hair jam from Fido's brush for a very profitable period of time.)

It's not exactly something that goes with my decor, personally, as I prefer more traditional objets d'art. Your purloined finger-bones assembled into bird-cages, and miniature books bound wholly in mouse ears. You know the sort of thing.