Happy Birthday Ellie!

Today is a day of reverence.

Willikers, it's a good thing Stinky's ball-and-chain does not read his blog, 'cause she can get mighty jealous, the little minx.

Here's a Happy Birthday wish to the delightful Miss Eleanor Powell, high on the list of Stinky's Top Ten Crushes of All Time. And to celebrate, Stinky is going to lock himself up in his room with a Family Size bag of dill pickle-flavored potato chips and a half-gallon of Rocky Road, fire up the ol' DVR, and watch some of those MGM Musical Extravaganzas that Turner Classical Movies broadcast today.

Miss Powell is always a joy and a pleasure, and the music is top-notch, but with leading men like Robert Taylor, Red Skelton, and George Somebody, and with Buddy Ebsen contorting his gangly frame and calling it dancing, it may be occasional tough slogging. Stinky only hopes he doesn't get a cramp with his thumb perpetually poised over the fast forward button.

And if Stinky begins to feel a little queasy, it's likely due to Robert Taylor, who's every bit as oleaginous as the potato chips. Maybe oleaginouser.

Ellie! Ellie! Over here!

Stinky Was Robbed!

Stinky normally has little call to bellyache, what with his looks, and his smarts, and his charisma that makes the ladies swoon, and his charmed life in general, but this time, Stinky is compelled to say that Stinky was robbed. For those of you preoccupied by less important things and not in the know, Stinky was running for Class President of I. P. Daley Middle School. And the results, shall we say, were not of the expected variety.

There were several candidates running against Stinky, including Jill Stye, a mashugana who wanted clean, filtered H2O in the water fountains, and the double-phallic named Rod Johnson, who insisted on the decriminalization of chewing gum in the classrooms. Crazy talk, Stinky knows, so naturally they had no chance of garnering any votes.

Then there was this other kid, Ronald Rump, who looked like, if he bathed at all, he bathed in Coppertone QT. He exhibited occasional troubling behavior, like threatening everyone with lawsuits,  giving little kids noogies, and grabbing girls any size by the pussy. "They just let you do it," was his defense. This earned him the nickname of Orange Roughy. But this did not preclude him from running for higher office, because it is a free country. For now.

Stinky does not wish to sound catty, so he will admit that some of Ronald's platform had some appeal to the student's baser instincts: free dessert bar in the cafeteria, and make the teachers pay for it; expulsion of all students from the Eastside who have a generous allowance of melanin; teachers to display their teaching certificates (long form) in the classroom; and the return of the decimated Yearbook publishing jobs back to the local economy. How he would accomplish this did not occur to anyone to ask.

The name-calling was especially discomforting, particularly when it came to involve Stinky. Ronald referred to Jill as "Pig Stye", and Rod as "Little Johnson", which, likely due to a locker room incident, made him weep a little. Hilarious, to be sure, but Stinky draws the line when Stinky is attacked. He began calling me "Crooked Stinky", Stinky assumes because of his poor posture. Over the line! says Stinky.

So Election Day rolls around, after a brief 15-month campaign, and Stinky is feelin' pretty good, what with all the projection polls in Stinky's favor. In fact, Stinky overwhelmingly wins the popular vote, by some accounts in the double digits. Then Stinky is informed of something called the Electoral Middle School, an illogical and arcane way of distributing the popular vote to determine the winner. It makes Stinky's head spin, and other parts of him don't feel too good, neither.

Is it any wonder that Stinky maintains that he was robbed? Does Stinky dare say the process is rigged?

Yes, Stinky do dare.

I wore my best clothes, and I still lost!

Stinky's Election Choice!

Amongst the tens of Stinky's readers, commonly known as Stinkers, virtually some of them are likely curious as to Stinky's choice in the upcoming, one may even say imminent, Presidential election. Their curiosity is understandably understandable,  considering the unslakable thirst Stinkers have for all things Stink-related.

Unfortunately, Stinky's participation in this election may be in question, what with his age, his various felony convictions, and whatnot. Those whatnots may prove to be especially problematic. But Stinky definitely has a preference, and Stinky would definitely never vote for Trump, because Stinky does not like people who refer to themselves in the third person. Very creepy, if you ask Stinky.

Stinky's new crush.

Glenn Ford Tribute!

Amongst the countless number of Stinky readers, likely climbing into the double digits, there is one fellow who goes by the moniker of "Unknown", a frequent commenter (twice), who seems to be fairly obsessed with Glenn Ford. Glenn Ford? you may ask incredulously. Stinky knows, hard to believe. And yet what is even more harder to believe is he is not the only one. Check out this Glenn Ford tribute, with glamor-puss pics of Ford with hairstyles ranging from long, greasy and cowlicky to short, greasy and cowlicky, accompanied by the delightful stylings of Kay Starr.  Probably better than he deserves, but for some reason, it tickled Stinky.

On the other mitt, one could do worse than having a tribute sung by the delightful Kay Starr, the most awesomest singer of all times. In fact, when Stinky goes, in about seventy years, he would like to have a   tribute just like this one afforded to Glenn. See what I did there?

Stinky's new crush.

Zolapalooza!

When Uncle Dave gives me money for my birthday, he says it's an investment in his future, meaning that Stinky will be less likely to murder him in his sleep with a rusty machete. Oh, Uncle Dave, you're so amusing. Actually, Uncle Dave is a pretty nice guy who is relatively low on the list of people that Stinky is likely to horribly mutilate.

Ha. "Horribly mutilate". Is there another way to do it? But Stinky digresses.

For an adult, Uncle Dave is fairly tolerable, except when, Stinky assumes, he is trying to be funny. Like when he says stuff like, "Roseanne, bar the door" and "Do you know why exorcisms are legal? Because possession is nine-tenths of the law." Hilarious*. But Stinky is certain that Uncle Dave reads Stinky's blog, which is more than Stinky can say about his other friends and fambly members. In fact, Uncle Dave gave Stinky his first opportunity in the blogosphere, undoubtedly the finest piece of writing ever to grace Uncle Dave's blog, Born Under Pants, or whatever it is called.

So after reading Stinky's last blog entry, Uncle Dave said, "Nice to see you are finally reading The Classics, little man, and not wasting your time with the graphic novels and the hippity-hop music, or whatever people of your ilk and generation cotton to these days. By the bye, the passages you quoted seem to me a precursor to the final paragraph in Zola's Nana."

Well, that's Uncle Dave for you, using made-up words like "precursor" to make himself sound smart. He also said that Nana was a novel about a Parisian courtesan who meets a frighteningly nasty and disfiguring demise from smallpox, following a life of dissipation and moral turpitude. Yes, Uncle Dave tends to talk that way. But this made Stinky eager to read the book, especially after he looked up the word "courtesan".

For those of you who wish to commit yourselves to the preceding 400 pages, go right ahead. For those of you with busy schedules, like Stinky, the rest of the novel can wait. Here is the final paragraph describing the beautiful Nana's grisly end, which does not disappoint:

                     Nana was left alone with  upturned face in the light cast by the  candle. She was the fruit
                   of the charnel house, a heap of matter and blood,  a shovelful  of  corrupted flesh thrown
                   down on the pillow. The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched
                   its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed  the grayish  hue of mud;  and  on  that
                   formless pulp, where the features had ceased to be traceable, they already resembled some
                   decaying damp  from  the grave.  One eye, the left eye,  had completely foundered  among 
                   bubbling purulence,  and the other,  which remained half open,  looked like a deep,  black
                   ruinous hole. The nose was still suppurating. Quite a reddish crust was peeling from  one 
                   of the cheeks,  which it  distorted  into a horrible grin.  And over this loathsome  and  gro-
                   tesque mask of death the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed down
                   in rippling gold.   Venus was rotting.  It seemed as though the  poison she had  assimilated 
                   in the gutters and on the carrion  tolerated by the roadside,  the leaven with which  she had 
                   poisoned a whole people,  had but  now  remounted to her face and turned it to corruption.

Most awesome paragraph of all times? Probably.

Thanks, Uncle Dave.


*Sarcasm

Nana. But Uncle Dave says it's A Classic, Mom.

         

J'accuse...! Emile Zola of Being Pretty Awesome!

Stinky's tired, so he's gonna let someone else do all the heavy lifting this time.

Here's another pretty good writer called Emile Zola. Stinky was impressed with these passages from Therese Raquin, published in 1867. Lazy horndog Laurent croaks his lover's husband by tossing him in the Seine. Then Laurent visits the Paris Morgue for several weeks, hoping to identify the discovered corpse:

        One morning, he was seized with real terror. For some moments, he had been looking 
          at a corpse, taken from the water, that was small in build  and  atrociously  disfigured.
          The flesh of  the  drowned  person  was so  soft and  broken-up that  the running water 
          washing it, carried it away bit by bit. The jet falling on the face bored a hole to the left
          of the nose. And abruptly, the nose became flat,  the  lips  were  detached, showing the
          white teeth. The head of the drowning man burst out laughing. 

Several days later, Laurent sees Camille, the man he murdered:

        Camille was hideous. He had been a fortnight in the water. His face still appeared firm
          and rigid; the features were preserved, but the skin had taken a  yellowish,  muddy tint.
          The thin, bony, and slightly tumefied head wore a  grimace. It was a  trifle  inclined on
          one side, with the hair  sticking to the  temples, and the  lids raised, displaying the dull
          globes of  the eyes. The  twisted lips  were drawn to  a corner of the mouth in an atro-
          cious grin; and a piece of blackish tongue appeared between the white teeth. This head,
          which looked tan and drawn out  lengthwise,  while  preserving  a  human  appearance,
          had remained all the more frightful with pain and terror.

But wait, there's more:

         The body seemed a mass of ruptured flesh; it had suffered horribly. You could feel that
          the arms no longer held to their sockets; and the clavicles were piercing the skin of the
          shoulders. The ribs formed black bands on the greenish chest; the left side, ripped open,
          was gaping amidst dark red shreds. All the torso was in a state of putrefaction. The ex-
          tended legs, although firmer, were daubed with dirty patches. The feet dangled down.

Imagine opening up whatever people used for Kindles back then, and reading this!

And please don't tell Stinky's mom he is reading this. She is overly-protective after Stinky was diagnosed with something called "walking night-terrors", and she considers Stinky enough of a danger when he is awake.

Reasonable facsimile of Emile Zola.

F**ck Glenn Ford! We'll replace HIM!*

Stinky's heart soared when he recently discovered the glorious Eleanor Powell, and his heart sank even more rapidly when he discovered she was married 15 years to the soul-sucking barnacle known as Glenn Ford. So naturally Stinky was eager to read Peter Ford's biography of his famous philandering father, Mr. Glenn Ford, ready for a great big plate of steamy, creamy, salacious dirt.

Stinky was fairly disappointed. Peter Ford threw Stinky a curve and wrote, if not a dutiful, a respectful and measured biography of his aloof and frequently estranged pappy.  Not what Stinky had in mind. As Stinky's old man says, "If you can't deliver the goods, don't get off the pot." And very little goods were delivered.

Plugging his book in a television interview, Peter Ford said, rather proudly, according to his dad's diary, he counted 143 affairs.  Pretty good by Stinky standards, but not exactly earth-shattering by world-renown celebrity millionaire heartthrob standards, especially over a sixty year span. Stinky's calculator is not working now, but if one could do the math, that comes out to fewer than two a month.

Apparently, Glenn Ford started off as a not-very-good ladies man. First, he declined the advances of Jack London's seventy-something-year old widow (which would have made for an impressive entry in the ol' diary, if you ask Stinky) and he resisted the charms of Bette Davis, even after she presented her copious bosoms. He pleaded fidelity to his loving wife. Stinky's guessing that's the only time that happened.

Only twice does Glenn Ford win Stinky's sympathy: Hope Lange and her sister ridicule Ford as being hopelessly old-fashioned because he once wore a dressing gown with padded shoulders, and those final 15 years of pills, alcohol, illnesses, jealousies, suspicions, and thieving "caregivers" are very sad. Not a way Stinky wants to go. Except maybe for the pills.

Perhaps because Glenn Ford was so enigmatic to his son the biography seems rather superficial. Stinky gathered some mildly interesting trivia, but not much more. Actor Louis Calhern was a lifetime friend, dating back to Glenn's teenage theater days. Ford once tried LSD, but was not especially impressed in a therapeutic way. He hosted parties with intellectuals Isherwood, Huxley, and such. He was a Roosevelt Democrat who morphed into a Nixon Republican. And director Richard Brooks was responsible for Ford's extremely unflattering hairstyle, perhaps the worst of any major Hollywood star.

Ford was a major Hollywood star, probably underappreciated, with half a dozen, maybe more, excellent performances on his resume. And that ain't nothing at which to sneeze.

Which would not be easy for Stinky to admit, were it not for Stinky's magnanimous and generous nature, considering Ford's careless and repeated infidelities to the angelic Eleanor Powell.

And then, thinking he could not love her more, Stinky discovers Eleanor Powell was a huge Fats Waller fan.

I know this post is about Glenn Ford, but who cares?

*What Frank Capra reportedly said when he learned that Ford wanted to replace leading lady Shirley Jones with then-girlfriend Hope Lange.