We read Life After Life for our book club. That’s one that will stay with you, but (for me at least) not in a good way. Beautifully imagined and written, though.

Faye Dunaway’s “temperament” has been the stuff of legend for decades. When I read about this (in the New York Times, but that’s behind a paywall and not really worth it if you don’t subscribe, so here’s the Hollywood Reporter):

I’m sure Marianne is ALL about the probiotics. She probably makes her own out of fans’ donations. 

BTW, this was a joke. A weak one, apparently.

Nike somehow managed to trademark “Just Do It.” Can you imagine how many parents run afoul of the trademark laws each and every day? “Because I’m your mother/father and I say so. Just do it.”

One of my favorite factoids about the British monarchy is that the Queen doesn’t have a passport. Wiki explains this more succinctly than I could:

And Tinseltown buzz has it she’s attached to play the lead in Sofia Coppola’s “Autobiography of Malcolm X.” 

I probably was looking in the wrong places. The internet was fairly new so I didn’t get a lot of hits from my searches (I used AltaVista, which I loved, that’s how long ago this was.) A couple of places were on Jermyn Street, which rung a bell, but those were the ones that didn’t rent.

Oh I self-excluded. She was like, “Oh Max, don’t be ridiculous, just put on something nice, you clean up well.” But I had met her parents, and lots of her friends, and I knew I’d stick out like a sore thumb to the point of being distracting.

First, I’ve always loved your user name, because my dog too is a genius.

I was a little surprised about this myself, because I watched Michael Moore’s “Where to Invade Next.” I know Norway and Sweden are two different countries, but I would have thought that they were even closer culturally than the US is with Anglophone Canada (aside from the national politics, which is always a wild card…

I just had an amazing revelation. Trump dresses the way he does because every domestic public event is like he’s attending an outer-borough wedding held at a tacky venue like one of his golf clubs. He has to “dress up” but the clothes don’t fit and he, and the other attendees, don’t seem to notice, because what…

What was the reason for your banishment, do you know? I always ask whenever a commenter mentions it. The process, who am I kidding, there is no process, the act seems so wildly capricious. Meanwhile none of the sites seems to be following/ungraying many people anymore, so the commentariat is shrinking. The way kinja…

I don’t know how old Junior is or whether you’d be up for it but there’s an episode late in the “Mad Men” series where the characters, in different scenarios, watch the moon landing. It really evokes what the period must have been like, the awe and wonderment of it. And given Matt Weiner’s obsessive attention to…

When my sister was going through chemo word spread throughout the town and, unbeknownst to her and her family, decided that every day one of them, on a schedule, would make something for them for dinner and drop it off. She has a husband who’s actually a pretty decent cook for simple stuff, they wouldn’t have starved,…

I was thinking of you the other day. I clicked one of those “As Seen Around the Internet” links you get at the bottom of web pages. It was called something like “10 Places Abroad You Can Retire To On Less Than $30,000/Year” (that’s for a couple.) Panama came in at $24,000. I forget where the other places were. I think…

The fear and loathing of the left-handed goes all the way back to the Romans. The Latin word for left hand is sinestra, from where we get the word sinister. The word for left handed in French is gaucher, which English took on as “gauche” (that’s also the word in French for left, like the Rive Gauche is the Left Bank…

As is:

There’s a persistent rumor that John McCain didn’t vote for himself in 2008 because he was so horrified by Sarah Palin and the prosepct of her assuming the presidency should something happen to him. Why he let his campaign foist her on him, and us, is also a matter of deep speculation. Personally, I think of her as…

And quahog season is just around the corner, if we all make it through this ghastly heat wave. It’s going to be a long summer.