But they are MY family, and I love them all.
Gray out, but rain has stopped.
Is Brad Oscar in the film version of The Producers, or did Nathan Lane not want the competition?
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An ideal world -- that is, a world run by me in contravention to all laws of physics and biology -- would mandate an ideal "Producers" starring Nathan Lane and Gene Wilder. Alas, back here in the real world, Stroman's film stars her legit boards boys Lane and Matthew Broderick, Mostel having gone on to that great delicatessen in the sky and Wilder pretty much retired. It's not that Broderick is bad, or even disappointing; he's something far worse -- he's not Gene Wilder. He doesn't have Wilder's God-given gift for suggesting a hysteria more intense than a seizure, which it resembles and which twists his rhythms into giddy pulse-crazed gibberish sited on the outer reaches of human irrationality. He goes hysterical the way bullets go ballistic -- at hyper speed and damn the consequences -- then returns in a flash, crisis solved, to sweet-natured, blue-eyed docility. Broderick is just Matthew Broderick: hardworking, decent, possibly charisma-challenged. When he goes hysterical, it's just an actor doing a fair hysteria, not a man touched by the deity speaking in tongues.
But I know some of you are Zero's people. Zero had the most astonishing comb-over in captivity, and that dainty fat-guy fussiness. He seemed to possess a size 54 waist while wearing size 5 shoes, and was astonishingly light on his feet, like a 600-pound Tinker Bell. His eyes narrowed into psychotic greed with extreme passion and his fat fingers seemed hungry to rip more more more flesh off the carcass. It was great, I give you that, and it's just taste that you favor Zero and I favor Nathan. The case for Lane rests on those really cool aigu-et-grave- accent eyebrows going for him, which means that everything he says is deeply insincere. I treasure that in a man. He makes lies sound like lies and the truth sound like even worse lies. He's a belter, too. He seems to be channeling Ethel Merman, and when he power-blasts a number you can practically feel the spit-spray through the screen.
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SCIENCE
Notebook
Monday, December 26, 2005; Page A17
Harry Potter's Protection Spell
It's not wizardry, but Harry Potter apparently protects his legions of youthful fans from injuries, at least during the weekends his newest books keep them huddled indoors on reading marathons, British researchers said.
Stephen Gwilym of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and his colleagues counted how many 7-to-15-year-old children came to the emergency department on the weekends when J.K. Rowling's two most recent tomes were released and compared them with other summer weekends from 2003 to 2005.
The number of children brought in with injuries during the weekends "The Order of the Phoenix" and "The Half-Blood Prince" were released was about half the usual -- lower than any other weekend in the three-year period, the researchers found. There was nothing else unusual about those weekends, such as odd weather, that could explain the findings, they added.
"Harry Potter books seem to protect children from traumatic injuries," the researchers wrote in the British Medical Journal.
"It may therefore be hypothesized that there is a place for a committee of safety-conscious writers who could produce high quality books for the purpose of injury prevention," they wrote, noting, however, that "potential problems with this project would include an unpredictable increase in childhood obesity, rickets, and loss of cardiovascular fitness."
-- Rob Stein
Of course I find Mr Broderick way more attractive than I do Mrs Broderick.
FUDGE! Reading about BK eating DR Jane's fudge has made me very hungry for some. I'm going to check my care package from my mom and if there isn't any in there, I may have to go to the store and get the ingredients. I'm sure Sam will want some sweets....yeah, that's the ticket....it's for Sam!!
George... I got your package on Saturday afternoon... thank you for the Christmas present!!! I listened to it while I was cleaning cooking etc thank you!!
Of course I find Mr Broderick way more attractive than I do Mrs Broderick.
I'll confess to never having seen a King Kong movie - yet.
And only because I really liked these two paragraphs from Stephen Hunter's review of "The Producers" in The Washington Post...My nomination for the guy who should play Zero in the bioflick: Jack Black. He might have to shave his head, or some of it, but he's crazy enough to pull it off.
DR Laura and DR Tomovoz - Thanks so much for the info on that quote.
I trotted it out during the Hannukah celebration at my brother's tonight and everybody seemed to enjoy the sentiment.