They have brownie vendors in Brooklyn parks now?!

Ice cream in the park is one of those ultimate parental carrots for coercing niceness out of little boys and girls - if we don't have ice cream, what will we use to bribe the children into good behavior or punish them for being naughty?

When you say 'invite', you mean 'command', right?

At Bodyguard, we were at the showing from Hell, with numerous May-December couples consisting of pretty young things and their sugardaddy boyfriends. At the end, the lights came up and all the girls were crying so their BFs could console them in a manful kind of way.

I watched Titanic with a girlfriend when it came out. After sitting through the whole thing and having the theater erupt in paroxysms of romantic mush, I had exactly the same feeling I had when I went to see Bodyguard upon its release: Did I enter an alternate universe for the length of the film and watch something…

The joke, and the cultural context. I feel edified.

Who would have thought a post with Madness in the title, dealing with sex and chocolate, would be so vanilla?

Well, this is turning out to be depressingly pedestrian.

That would require a complete rethinking of the assumption that women are supposed to be eager and enthusiastic about sex because, well, duh, they just should!

Good point.

I'm trying to remember Marcello Mastroianni's reply when an interviewer asked him what it was like to be perceived as a great lover. It was something along the lines of: "Well, they should tell that to all the women I've slept with, because if memory serves, no one has ever sat up afterwards and applauded."

Yet another stellar example of why sexism and the expectations/inter-relational dysfunction it promotes are bad for everyone.

Could he BE any more heroic?

That's all true, but more importantly, can I say how much your sig cracks me up?

Yeah.

Yeah, ok, fair enough on the Luddite comment. I'm annoyed and when I'm annoyed I get kicky.

You know really cooks my goose? When it's assumed that I don't want to make changes like this because I'm a slow-adapting Luddite.

I KNEW it!

There are few things sorrier in the world than willful ignorance.

Why do you think there's the Hollywood cliché of the drunken older actress?