Kate Hit, Remembered

The death of Katharine Hepburn, for most of us, meant a day of quiet reflection and mourning. For Pulitzer Prize winner A. Scott Berg, however, it meant a day to crook his arm and pull his fist back while making a noise like that of a cash register. His book Kate Remembered, which was finished in 1999 and sat in a vault counting the days until Berg's "friend" of 20 years Katharine Hepburn died, has just come out and is revealing quite a lot about the private life of this movie icon.

This article at CBS News gives the lowdown on the book and includes the following passage, which caught my eye for reasons that will become plainly obvious to you after you read it:

    Berg writes that there was one big reason why Tracy and Hepburn never married besides Tracy's Catholicism, his guilt over his son's deafness and his wife's refusal to divorce him:

    "I never wanted to marry Spencer Tracy," she told Berg...

Berg should have included the whole quote, however, and I'm hoping that the misquote-catching folks over at Spinsanity give him what for. Here's the quote in its entirety:

    "I never wanted to marry Spencer Tracy because of his Catholicism, his guilt over his son's deafness and his wife's refusal to divorce him. Also, he was an abusive drunk who liked to backhand me in public. Plus, I have vaginal warts. Please don't tell anyone any of this, A. Scott Berg."

There are two things that I found incredibly interesting about Berg's book:

    1) Hearing Berg on NPR was how I found out that Hepburn died like two weeks ago.

    2) In researching this piece, I was reminded that Gregory Peck just died.

After I continued to dig, I found out that a book similar to Berg's Kate Remembered, but about Gregory Peck, had been released shortly after his death. It's called Greg: Finally Dead, So Here's The Book, and it was written by none other than famous movie actor Gregory Peck.

There were a few Katharine-Hepburn-level revelations in the Peck book. Among them:

    Gregory Peck, toward the end of his life, used to go to the grocery store sometimes as often as twice a week, just to have something to do.

    On the set of How the West Was Won, Spencer Tracy once gave Gregory Peck a dirty look, but it turned out that Tracy had just eaten something very sour.

    Peck used to mow A. Scott Berg's a. front yard in an effort to convince Berg to write a book about him. It didn't work, but Berg had the worst looking yard on the whole block.

    Peck originally died in 1998, but decided to try it again when his first death failed to make a splash.

    Gregory Peck was not gay or anything.

    On the set of To Kill A Mockingbird, Robert Duvall and Gregory Peck became close friends.

Whoa! Let's keep it clean, Peck!

rock 'n' roll & news parody: both found dead. nation mourns, does not actually mourn.

Sorry for the light week this week. Two friends of mine both moved away this week (today specifically) which has meant a lot of staying-out-too-late and drinking-too-much. I've gone to more bars this week than I otherwise would have. Let's just put it that way, okay?

Also, I don't want to burn myself out before I take over blogging duties at Neal Pollack's site next week while he's on tour.

That all said, I've just got a few things to mention.



Rolling Stone takes on Canada's poor math skills.
Rock and roll apparently already successfully destroyed.

Thanks to Paul Serilla (currently piloting Whatevs) for mentioning a RollingStone.com contest whereby some lucky person can win a trip to New York to see the Strokes appear on Conan O'Brien's program. I entered the contest, partly because I do - no matter how uncool it is or how full of it they are - like the Strokes. Also I really like Conan O'Brien (now finally on at 12:30 in Detroit!), and I've seen his show before and it was a blast.

Anyway, as I was clicking through the rules, I found an interesting passage. It turns out that if a Canadian wins, things get a little more complicated:

    Canadian residents selected as winners will be required to successfully answer a time-limited, unaided, mathematical skill-based question prior to being awarded a prize, and failure to successfully answer the question will cause the prize to be forfeited and awarded to an alternate winner.

That's no-fooling straight from the rules. Can anyone explain this to me? I mean, I know as much as the next guy that Canadians have been getting a free ride for far too long and have simply relied on their American neighbors for arithmetic help, but why is this the proper venue for setting things straight? Do you think the Strokes added this rule? It would be so like them.

Or maybe this is a really common thing and I'm just an idiot. Someone set me straight.

happy birthday us

Two years ago, four brave men set out on a journey so daring, so grand and so wonderful that words can express neither the heroism of these wonderful men nor our debt to them.

I'm of course talking about myself and the other Editors (Matthew Tobey, Dennis Proctor, and Sam Forsyth) of Haypenny.com.

On October 1, 2001, the world got its first look at a Haypenny Feature. My Feature from that very first Issue, though not as good as something I might write today, still fills me with sorrow and regret - just like it did lo those many years ago.

I know I keep repeating it, but I think it's necessary that people understand since we started having Dailies (on October 15, 2001 - Daily Archive), we have never missed a weekday. Ever! Can any other site say that? No!

Here's a little-known fact about Haypenny: It was supposed to go live on September 1, 2001, but we Editors decided that we'd better wait, what with 9/11 about to happen and all. It's a fact!

Anyway, to honor myself and to justify some light blogging this week, I've penned a letter to the readers of Haypenny that you all can read too.


Also, don't forget that next week I'll be guest-blogging for Neal Pollack while he's on tour. Donnie Boman (from Left Pedal) is over there now doing a fine job. After me it'll be Monks, Popp, and then Tobey. Rock on.

Personal stuff

There's a new Issue of Haypenny up today. On Wednesday, Haypenny will celebrate its two year anniversary. Or birthday. Whichever it is that websites celebrate. The point is that we've been kicking for two years, and that's pretty amazing. We've posted over 500 Dailies and over 270 Features. I did a site summary yesterday and found out that we have over 1,000 pages in our web, over 20,000 hyperlinks in our web, over 700 images - just staggering numbers if you ask me. Haypenny kicks maximum ass. It's too bad that I absolutely despise doing the updates on Sunday nights.

Anyway, here's to two more. (raises glass)

On Friday, my band Havilland will be rocking Jimmy's Sports Rock over on Detroit's upper east side. You should go.

Next week I'll be guest blogging for Neal Pollack. (October 6-10. Don't forget.)

And then later on this month, my band Havilland will be opening up for Neal Pollack and Jim Roll at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor. Check out Neal's tour info here.

Dan Kennedy is also on tour. Go see him.

My good friend Jeremy (of La Beta Corpo fame) is in town before he moves to Brazil. We got to hang out on Saturday night and we had a pretty alright time, though he left his jacket over here. Anyway, we're glad to have him.

Finally, I saw Lost in Translation Friday (official site) and I have a few things to say about it.

First of all, it's a fine movie. I'm sure that's not news to any of you who've read reviews of it. That Sofia Coppola is something else. If you haven't seen this yet, I'm not sure what you're waiting for, but I want to talk to you about it, so you should go see it soon.

But what I really want to say is this: I thought Scarlett Johansson was hot way back in the Horse Whisperer. Actually, she was in a YM or Seventeen magazine for promotion just after the film had come out and she was hot in those pictures. Anyway, I called it. I win. I'm the winner.

I'm a winner.

we believe in very little

Apparently, Elton John is a minimalist.

"Singer" Elton John has decided to sell all of the contents of his London home according to a Yahoo! News piece. It seems that the Great Pink Knight wants to experiment with minimalism after living a life of opulence and excess. I thank God everyday that I haven't been burdened with "possessions" and "fame" - that I have the opportunity to live a simple, thankless, terrible existence, and that I will be forgotten almost instantly after I die.

The contents of the estate will go up for auction (handled by Sotheby's) on September 30, and they estimate that the whole lot should bring in about £800,000 ($1.2 million). Nothing says "minimalism" like going liquid for over $1 million on a Tuesday morning by selling all of your assets at prices that I can only imagine are fairly low.

So why is Sir Elton John, Knight of the Upside-Down Triangular Table, doing this? Good question. Here's another good question: is there even a slight chance that he's not somehow bankrupt?


In other "music" news, Jeremy at La Beta Corpo (blog) links to this neat piece in the East Bay Express, which is some sort of periodical. Here's the experiment: take a classroom full of fifth graders and make them draw while they listen to Radiohead. What do you get? Strange shit.

A couple (like the one to the left) depict "hell" scenarios. (The booth in the center reads "Free Suicides" - that's right: free. This kid is clearly a communist. He needs to be stopped immediately.) Others seemed to react to the melancholy and sometimes somber tone of the music. One girl says the music is about "bummed out dolphins," which means she either

    A) totally got it,
    B) thought she was listening to Live (whose songs really are just about bummed out dolphins), or
    C) was going to draw dolphins no matter what music was on.

Regardless, the experiment is interesting and some of these children require, I think, immediate psychological attention. So do all the Radiohead fans that don't realize that elementary school teachers are Radiohead fans now. Pretty alternative, eh?


Lastly, Jeremy from La Beta Corpo (blog) also gave me a link to an article on Salon that does a much better job of saying what I was trying to say yesterday. Jeremy didn't phrase it that way, but I will. It's a great piece. I don't read Salon enough, because I hate having to do that day pass thing. Just like how I don't visit NYtimes.com because I hate logging in.

Anyway, from that Salon piece, I found Iraq Today, which is calling itself the "Independent Voice of Iraq." I read this article: Basrah Moves Towards Religious Stability.

We are nihilists, We believe in nothing

The other day, I was surfing the web, as I am wont to do, and I discovered some fairly interesting (if by interesting I mean either actually interesting or easy to make fun of) sites that I thought I'd share with you, my loyal following.

My adventures started over at left pedal, run with grace and cunning by the keen Donnie Boman. While reading Donnie's witicisms, I glanced over at his links list to make sure that WWKAD? was properly represented. It was. So I looked around a bit and saw a link that read "The Situation Room" and decided to click on it.

I really didn't read a whole lot of the site, but I did a lot of clicking. Some of it pleased me and some of it did not. This is nobody's fault but my own, and I understand this completely. This should be considered neither praise for nor an indictment of this website, but rather a collection of web oddities that I happened to find all at the same place. Understood? Great.



Classic rock music videos in ASCII. Pretty cool.
I'd like to see some contemporary videos.



A collection of subversive posters that almost all miss the point from Wake The World.

I would never try to suggest that I am currently or that I ever was completely satisfied with the administration's argument for/handling of the war in Iraq, but I have to admit that I'm very, very far away from getting illogically angry about non-issues. Look, for better or worse, I'm glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein, and I believe (if Christopher Hitchens is worth his salt, which I'd bet he is) that many people in Iraq - and in the Muslim community - are glad to be rid of him. Does the end justify the means? No, of course not, which is exactly why we'll elect someone else in November of 2004 and hurriedly purge ourselves of the Patriot Act and all the other filth this administration will have left behind. That said, who gives this much of a shit? Not me.

The first poster reminds me too much of the WW2 propaganda posters, coffee table books about which probably exist in most of our homes. Why is it that we can look at these old propaganda posters and laugh at their naivety, but the dillweed who designed this "Fashion 2003" (which by the way is a terribly lame title) poster thinks he's just written the next Doonesbury?

And the second poster: Nothing says "I... uh... I'm not really sure... uh... what I believe... in..." like this poorly-kerned (and, as far as I'm concerned, therefore poorly designed) nonsense palindrome!

    If this one doesn't tickle your fancy, try our "Rise To Vote, Sir!" poster where the word "Sir" looks like it's made out of ice cream!

And to ignore the ambiguous pronoun answer the question of the third poster (which thoughtfully asks "Why isn't it called Terrorism when it's committed by the United States?"): because they're different things. They have different purposes and are carried out in different ways. Let's not forget that the United States didn't invent war. We're not the ones who codified it.

The only good poster of the whole bunch (that I saw, that is; I stopped looking after I'd found enough to make fun of) was the one that The Situation Room had displayed (I should have just stayed there).

It looks good. It's funny. It's not decidedly idealistic, but it's smart enough to know that. In fact, if you added breasts to this poster, I'd marry it.

So Much For The Protestant Work Ethic

Without internet access at home (including no phone line for dial up--it was supposed to have been installed yesterday) and an ever increasing feeling among my boss and my coworkers that I ought to be getting stuff done, it's become very hard for me to blog a lot lately, and I super apologize.

And I know we're all shook up over the David Kelly suicide thing, and the realization that Laci Peterson probably killed herself too and that one woman probably raped herself, but I have no choice but to post fewer posts this week. So sorry.

In the meantime, check out:

City of Floating Blogs
Life and Times of Deckie Holmes
Jesse Popp
I Am The Stallion
Left Pedal
Utter Wonder

...and all of the other sites I've linked so far.

Thanks.