Lethal Dose

I had this:

but damn! I didn’t have this:

Now I wish I had them both so I could get Don Rickles to sign them - he’s on a book tour.

For what memorial day means to me, click here.

For what it means to me this very second, I quote:

Polymorphic light eruption is a common rash that occurs as a result of photosensitivity. Polymorphic light eruption (PMLE) generally occurs in adult females aged 20 to 40, although it sometimes affects children and rarely males. It is more common in places where sun exposure is uncommon, such as Northern Europe, where it is said to affect 10% of women holidaying in the Mediterranean. It can be the first sign of lupus erythematosus, but this is not usually the case. The name ‘polymorphic’, or ‘polymorphous’ refers to the fact that the rash can take many forms, although in one individual it usually looks the same every time it appears. The commonest variety is crops of 2-5 mm pink or red raised spots occurring on the arms. Other areas may be involved, particularly the chest and lower legs, but the face is usually spared*.

*Oh thank you Princess Luciana, who I’m convinced must be dead by now, because she is obviously my patron saint. After hanging at my little cabin in the high desert last week, then lounging all day yesterday at Malibu (SPF 60! umbrella! hat!), my own personal ‘curse of Job’ has returned. I will have to call the dermatologist first thing. I hope I get to undergo some kind of “treatment.”

If it wasn’t for a 24 hour marathon of Bob Dylan’s theme time radio hour (my own personal church … I want to give up everything and just follow Bob forever, as he plays music and gives me little tidbits about life that I never knew,) my weekend would be … dare I say the word … UGLY. (I shudder just writing it!)

You all know how I love Porter. A certain “reader” (I guess he doesn’t know that I get email and URLs) wrote, “Porter Wagoner? GIVE ME A BEAK!” so now we all say “give me a beak!”

”
porter’s got a good beak, don’t you think?

Anyway, I digress. Porter’s new video, “Committed to Parkview” can be seen on the Wagonmaster’s myspace page here. Mr. Lethal brought me home a Porter plate, an autographed pic, and the box set of the early stuff on his last trip to Nashville to make up for the fact that he got to see him at the Opry. If that ain’t love, grits ain’t groceries!

Here’s Porter and Dolly doing “Milwaukee Here I Come”:

Danielle and I like to make each other’s skin crawl by doing “Eww! Remember this song?”

I did a blog back when on Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Let me recap:

Man, these songs are SICK. If he were recording these today, he’d be arrested. It’s as if he read “Lolita” and made at least four songs out of it.

“Young Girl”

With all the charms of a woman
You’ve kept the secret of your youth
You led me to believe
You’re old enough
To give me Love
And now it hurts to know the truth, Oh,

Young girl get out of my mind
my love for you is way outta line
better run girl, your much too young girl

Beneath your perfume and make-up
You’re just a baby in disguise
And though you know
That it is wrong to be
Alone with me
That come on look is in your eyes, Oh,

Ok, so he keeps warning her: “Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon.” In other words: then it’s too late - and your fault!

Then there’s the lovely, “This Girl is a Woman Now” - from the playground she learns her lesson and grows up fast. Courtesy of Gary. Read on and get nauseous:

This girl walked in dreams
Playing in a world of her own
This girl was a child
Existing in a playground of stone
Then one night her world was changed
Her life and dreams were rearanged
And she would never be the same again
This girl is a woman now, and she’s learning how to give
This girl is a woman now, she’s found out what it’s all about
And she’s learning, learning to live
This girl tasted love, as tender as the gentle dawn
She cried a single tear, A teardrop that was sweet and warm
Our hearts told us we were right
And on that sweet and velvet night
A child had died, a woman had been born

Disgusting!

damn, the vid’s on youtube but disabled. i hate when thy do that! well, here’s the link if you wanna look.

When he finally gets her, of course she cheats! “Woman, woman - have you got cheating on your mind?” Therefore giving him carte blanche to haunt playgrounds once again.

Tho my fave is the relatively clean, “Lady Willpower” … finally, she’s boss! I’m going to cover “Young Girl,” but change it around of course, Shangri-La’s style:

Beneath your leather and tattoos

You’re just a boyscout in disguise

Here’s Lady Willpower - great Ed Sullivan!

next up: Mac Davis and Dr. Hook. Break out the calamine lotion. My hives continue and I’m just tormenting myself.

I have hives.

Eve and I are chatting. “I’m convinced I have pneumonia, and the more symptoms I Google, the more of them I instantly develop,” she says.

I agree. Googling is the hypochondriac’s nightmare. What would Felix Unger do? I’m starting to google “hives” and suddenly I’m in trouble. What if I have them for life? Do I have the “right” kind? Let’s do an image search for hives:

Wow! How did she get here? Did Dolly have hives too?

Eve continues, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If I don’t feel better tomorrow, I’ll call Dr. Bombay. I’m just getting over food poisoning, so that may be why I ache all over, too. We get no sick days here, so everyone comes in sick as pups. Do you have a good network of doctors out there? I love Dr. Bombay.”

We don’t have sick days either, but staying home with hives won’t do me any good. I would have too much time on my hands to think about how itchy I am. Eve has a good doctor despite her protests:

“You might add that Dr. Bombay will prescribe anything for me except laudanum, which I’ve been asking for for years. He insists they don’t make it anymore, but I think he’s just hoarding it all for himself.”

This was sent to me as a link from TunaCrust. I love that train accidents are uniting us all over the globe! It sounds so much better in Aussie English, too.

News.com.au reports “Train track death plot backfires“. The article talks about a man, nay a dumbass, who got himself a bit dead when his attempt to kill his girlfriend took a bit of twist.

It seems that the man and his girlfriend were having an argument. It also seems that the man came up with quite a novel way of resolving the argument. He parked the car that his girlfriend was in on a level crossing in the San Fernando Valley neighbourhood of Sunland. So far he hasn’t achieved argument resolution.

Argument resolution came in a disguise. A pretty good disguise too. It appeared to all that saw it that resolution came disguised as a 450 tonne commuter train with 132 passengers aboard. If there was a door prize for best disguise at that argument, resolution would have won hands down.

So now we have a girl sitting in a car. We have a car, with a girl in it, parked on a level crossing. Given the choice it seems like being outside of the car would be a better place then inside the car. Especially with 450 tonne resolution approaching.

And then there’s the twist. Resolution, disguised as a 450 tonne commuter train with 132 passengers aboard, hits car. Car hits boyfriend. Boyfriend dies. Girl ends up in hospital, alive, but injured.

updated in today’s LA Times: she changes her story!

And I’m match-gaming it, b/c of a nasty email i got from .. oh never mind.

Based on ___’s statement and witness accounts, detectives have deemed the incident to be “an attempted murder-suicide,” Rock said.

But in a telephone interview with a Times reporter Tuesday afternoon, ___ said ___ never intended to kill her.

“He wasn’t trying to kill anybody,” she said. “He was trying to outrun the train.”

___ said the couple had been rushing from one auto body shop to another looking for a car part. She said she had an 18-month old daughter waiting for her at home.

“I didn’t tell them that my future husband was trying to kill me,” she said. “He wouldn’t do that.” Wright, who also denied that the couple had been arguing at the time of the crash, said she was dazed when she talked to detectives. “I told them I didn’t remember nothing,” she said. “I told them he was trying to outrun the train.” Wright said she had known ___ for years and been romantically involved with him for three months. But during her interview with a reporter she seemed unaware of his death.

“Where is ____?” she asked at one point.

Several members of ____’ family also dismissed police accounts of what happened.

“For them to say it was murder-suicide — it was not right,” said Michael ____, ___’ uncle. “That is not him. It was just bad judgment.”

Police said ___ survived because ____ might have pulled slightly askew onto the track, causing the train to hit the car’s rear quarter panel and passenger door and sending it spinning into the guardrail.

When the train hit the car again, ____ was ejected, Rock said. ____, who remains hospitalized, suffered numerous cuts and a concussion.

In today’s news:

Fasting programs are getting more popular, but watch out for the risks

Popular detox diets promise to flush poisons from your body, purge pounds of excess fat, clear your complexion and bolster your immune system.

But experts say there’s little evidence that extreme regimens such as the Master Cleanse or Fruit Flush do anything more than lead to unpleasant, unhealthy side effects.

Beyonce Knowles attributed her 20-pound weight loss for the movie “Dreamgirls” to the Master Cleanse — a starvation diet whose adherents swallow nothing but a concoction of lemon juice mixed with maple syrup, water and cayenne pepper, as well as salt water and a laxative tea for 10 days.

The idea of detoxifying or purifying the body of harmful substances has been around for centuries and cycles back into popularity now and again. There are no hard numbers on how many people have tried the latest fashionable plans, much less stuck with them, but dozens of new do-it-yourself fasting books are glutting bookstore shelves.

Ha! This is nothing new, as our Higher Power Princess Luciana knows. Let’s take a peep today at “The Beautiful People’s Diet Book,” and see what she has to say.

From the chapter “Exit Fat City,” p. 53, Diet Clubs:

“One diet-club alumna, a former actress, Doris Konowe, says: “The thearpy meeting was like having a sex orgy every week - you were obsessed with it. I lost forty pounds, but I put them back on, in part because you have to measure everything when you’re on the club diet.” Well, we know what kind of actress she was!

p. 59:

“In my opinion, the chief result of fasting would be the sudden understanding that you do not need all that food you have been stuffing yourself with … this may sound harsh, but true concern about obesity often requires an element of toughness- commiseration gets you nowhere; the only way to help is to prod.”

and of course my very favorite PL quote:

“For heightened perception without drugs plus rapid weight loss, nothing beats the oldest known treatment for obesity: total starvation.” She continues: “Because of its association with rites of purification and techniques of social protest, fasting long remained the province of fringe groups: you had to be a crank or a hippie. Even now, the Establishment only recognizes the merit of fasting under carefully controlled conditions.”

The photos in this book are brilliant. They’re all of famous people not eating, with captions like: “During a Rothschild party, Gloria Guinness table-hops as a way to avoid gastronomic temptations,” a photo of the skeletal Betsy Bloomingdale captioned: “Anyone can clearly see that BB, partygoing at El Morocco, is a believer in the body beautiful.” She looks like an x-ray! Another is captioned “You can bet that CZ Guest and Baron Alexis de Rede ate sparingly during an informal luncheon at La Brenouille in New York.” CZ and the Baron Alexis’ heads are together, no doubt trying to figure a way to not eat later on. Oddly, the last photo is of Liz, Dick, and a portly Princess Grace - maybe as a warning?

****
PS. Oh Princess, we need you to do an intervention:

good lord! i just snapped this outside of trader joe’s. i wished i could have gotten closer but my phone makes that ‘camera’ sound. i wanted to rush up to her and shove princess luciana’s books in her hand, but instead, i had to squeeze by her as she diligently read the bus schedule. i finally had to say “excuse me,” but to no avail and my right side was forced halfway into a shrub.

this story is from last week, but i’ve been on vacation. besides, who cares when you’ve got a mug like this? brilliant!

Police arrest alleged flasher

Thu May 17, 2007, 12:51 AM EDT

Framingham -

Police arrested a New York woman they say repeatedly exposed her naked buttocks out of the back of her van Tuesday, flashing drivers, as well as a mother and her two young children.

Shantae M. Cammack, 29, denied mooning people, but her pants were around her knees and she was wearing no underwear when questioned by Officer William Fuer, according to police spokesman Lt. Paul Shastany.

“The officer asked her, ‘What are you doing,’ and she said, ‘I’m just sitting here, minding my own business,’ ” the lieutenant said. “The officer told her they had four witnesses, and her pants weren’t even on when he opened the van’s door.”

Around 6 p.m., a woman was walking near Dom’s Variety Store on Waverley Street with her two children, both younger than 10, when a woman, later identified as Cammack, opened the rear of a parked van, bent over and flashed her naked behind at the trio, Shastany said.

The woman immediately called police.

“When asked if she thought it was on purpose, (the victim) said it was clear, and she was shocked and alarmed,” Shastany said.

The officers walked to the van and as they approached Cammack closed the rear door. Police knocked, and she opened it up for them, but she was sitting alone, nearly nude in the van, Shastany said.

While she was was talking to police, another man walked up to the police. He said he watched from a nearby gas station as Cammack repeatedly exposed her buttocks to passing vehicles.

Cammack, of 145 Third Ave., New York City, was charged with open and gross lewdness and disorderly conduct. Police have no idea why Cammack was showing her buttocks.

“It’s unusual,” Shastany said.

Cammack pleaded not guilty at her Framingham District Court arraignment yesterday. A judge set bail at $250, but Cammack could not make it, so she will be held at MCI-Framingham. She is due back in court June 12.

Daycare shut down after infants found crying in storage closet

A Tennessee father is defending a daycare operator accused of hiding children in a closet during a surprise inspection.

Joel Coe said he has been taking his 3-year-old son, Brodie, to Paulette’s Group Day Care home since he was a baby.

The daycare center is located in Lafayette, 50 miles northeast of Nashville in Macon County, near the Kentucky state line

He said the owner, Paulette Colter, was always good to his son and that she was devastated and misses the children.

“Brodie is just crazy over her. If she was abusing a child, why would my son be crazy over her? He wouldn’t want to come here,” he said.

Coe said Colter was good to all the kids and that she even built an elaborate playground in her back yard for them.

“It was so clean when I went in there that I would eat off the floor,” he said.

But the pictures told a different story.

State inspectors took the images Friday during a surprise check of Colter’s home.

Three crying infants were found in a utility closet next to a water heater and electrical box. Investigators said blankets had been pinned to the tops of the play pens.

Don’t know about you, but I’m guessing that anyone who’d eat off the floor in a day care probably wouldn’t think twice about hiding babies in a closet …

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages. It’s a Time Mag review/interview.