Pirate1974

Kenneth Branagh

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Richard Harris

This is the version of that story that appeared in one of the alternative newspapers here recently:

She never named her child god. Her daughter China was forever dubbed "god" by the media circus following an offhand remark by Grace after her daughter's birth. An overly upbeat nurse had irritated Slick throughout the ordeal. Following China's arrival, the nurse came into the recovery room with the official birth certificate. She explained this certificate was given to all the new mothers in the hospital. She wanted to get the entry right: "What are you going to name the baby?"

Grace had enough of "Nurse Sunnyside." She noticed the nurse was wearing a crucifix.

"god. Her name is god, with a little 'g.' We spell it with a small 'g' to keep her humble. She didn't believe it. I told her again."

The nurse walked out to call the San Francisco Chronicle. Birth of a child. Birth of a myth.(Creative Loafing; November 14, 2006)

Band of Angels

Sidney Poitier

In the Heat of the Night

There's no question that Richards should apologize in person to these two guys, but they don't deserve an Indian head penny in compensation for their "injuries."

I find it interesting that in this group of 20 people, Kyle Doss and Frank McBride are the only two who felt "threatened" by Richards' tirade. Were they the only African-Americans in the group or just the only ones willing to play the victim card for the national media in hopes of getting a nice little settlement check, after Gloria Allred takes her 1/3 cut, of course.

Doss says "To have him do what he did to me ... I can't even explain it. I was humiliated, even scared at one point." Scared? Please!! Did he honestly think a 57-year old man was a threat to him and his group? Did he think Richards might pull out an Uzi and spray the room? He couldn't do what myself and 99% of rational people would do, get up and walk out?

Gloria Allred, who once sued the Boy Scouts for not admitting girls, says, "Our clients were vulnerable. He went after them. He singled them out and he taunted them, and he did it in a closed room where they were captive." Oh my gosh!! I had no idea that The Laugh Factory locked these guys in and wouldn't let them leave until Michael Richard was through with his rant. That is just not right!!

Is it just the "n word" that gets everybody's panties in a wad? Andrew Dice Clay could call women in his audience "dumb c*nts" and nobody went running for a lawyer. They walked out and eventually his career went into the toilet, but I don't think anybody felt "threatened." Sam Kinison used to go on and on about the ragheads and the gooks and the f*gs. Don Rickles always talked about the "colored guy in the back of the room" in his act . I guess the "n word" is just over the edge, when said by certain people, of course.

She did talk with us regular folks, but she didn't really seem too interested in talking about the old Airplane days. She mostly talked about her artwork. Very down-to-earth kind of person. If you didn't already know who she was, you would never know she was famous from the way she acted.

Rupert Murdoch choosing common decency over bucks?

Will wonders never cease?

Went to one of the local malls tonight and dropped it at an art gallery there, not something I would normally ever do. However, I was intrigued by the artist who was there tonight showing some samples of her work.

At first glance, she looks a normal 67-year old woman who took up painting late in life and has made a pretty darn good career out of it. Heck, she looks she could just be somebody's grandma.

Nothing really remarkable about her until you hear her name.

Grace Slick.

Say what? This little white-haired lady couldn't possibly have fronted Jefferson Airplane, could she? Can this be the composer of "White Rabbit?" I guess Woodstock really was a long time ago.

She's an interesting character, pretty salty as you can probably imagine. I'm sure she's shocked some of the usual art gallery patrons. I don't know beans about art, but her stuff looks pretty good to me. A lot of it is portaits of Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and illustrations from Alice in Wonderland. Some of the Alice stuff is pretty hallucinatory, like Timothy Leary as the Mad Hatter.

If her show comes into your area, check it out.

Emilio Estevez

Young Guns

Jack Palance

OJ is the ultimate scumbag. Even if he was completely innocent, coming out with a book called "If I Did It" is just sickening beyond belief.

How is it that most people are certain that OJ guilty? Well, you can start with the fact that he had motive, opportunity and the complete lack of any alibi.

Then there's the day of the slow motion chase circus when OJ got into the Bronco with Al Cowlings carrying his passport, thousands of dollars in cash, and a disguise kit. An innocent man on his way to an international costume party, I suppose.

Then there's the trail of Nicole's blood that led from the murder scene to the Bronco to OJ's bedroom. All planted by the LAPD, of course, who were carrying a Mason jar of blood all over the city.

Then there's the tearful admission to Rosey Grier in jail that "He didn't mean to do it." Didn't mean to do what? Such a lousy job of acting in "Capricorn One?"

The case was truly botched by the prosecution and it all came down to how many times Mark Fuhrman had used the "N-word" in his life and the comical glove size demonstration. Just because he was acquitted, it doesn't make him innocent.

I wonder how his search for the "real killer" is coming along?

A new low in the history of sleaze television.

Reports are that any profits from the book are being paid directly to the kids so the Goldmans can't touch it. What a scum bag.

The Towering Inferno

Steve McQueen

The Great Escape

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. - Some of the letters are comical (a man asking God to let him win the lottery, twice), others are heartbreaking (a distraught teen asking forgiveness for an abortion, an unwed mother pleading with God to make the baby's father marry her).

The letters — about 300 in all, sent to a New Jersey minister — ended up dumped in the ocean, most of them unopened.

The minister died two years ago at 79. How the letters, some dating to 1973, wound up bobbing in the surf is a mystery.

"There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach," said Bill Lacovara, a Ventnor insurance adjuster who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted a flowered plastic shopping bag and waded out to retrieve it. "This is just a hint of what really happens. How many letters like this all over the world aren't being opened or answered?"

Many of the letters were addressed to the Rev. Grady Cooper, though many more simply said "Altar." According to the text of several of them, they were intended to be placed on a church's altar and prayed over by the minister, the congregation or both.

Some were neatly written in script on white-lined paper, others in a feverish scrawl on tattered scraps of parchment or note cards. Many were crinkled from being in the water and then dried out after Lacovara fished them out of the sea.

A dog-eared business card inside one of the letters identified Cooper as associate pastor of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Jersey City. A woman who answered the phone at the church office confirmed Cooper once was a minister there, and had died nearly two years ago. The current pastor did not return several calls from The Associated Press over the past few days.

Unanswered Prayers

Interesting, but what really caught my eye, was the last line:

Lacovara said he is sad that most of the writers never had their letters read. But he hopes to change that soon: He is putting the collection up for sale on eBay.

Say what?

Deconstructing Harry

Woody Allen

Hannah and Her Sisters

I've been on the other side of that customer service situation and I can tell you for a fact that dealing with the general public every day can be an absolute nightmare.

For 10 years I was customer service manager for a furniture retailer here in North Carolina. A large part of our business was from people in other states who ordered furniture from us and had it shipped to their homes because the prices in NC were so much lower. We special-ordered everything from the factory which could take up to 3 months and then the delivery process could take 2-3 weeks, and we had people who would .... and moan through every step of the process.

"It's taking too long to get here." "The truck is too slow." "They won't deliver at the time I demand it." "This doesn't look exactly like what I saw in the catalog in Phoenix or on the floor at the store in Buffalo." "This pine furniture has too many knots in it. Why didn't they use a piece of pine with no knots?" "The wood grain in my oak dresser looks different than the wood grain in my oak headboard."

It was absolutely unbelievable. I was screamed at, cursed at, threatened, reported to the BBB and various tv consumer help lines, and even had one person try to intimidate me by suggesting that they were connected to a well-known group of Italian businessmen. All this for things that I had no control over. No amount of screaming would make the guys at Thomasville work one bit harder or the truck driver go any faster.

The absolute worst group of people that I ever had to deal with, no question, was:

Housewives from New Jersey

Nothing personal, just my own experience and observations. I had ladies from the Garden State call me every single name in the book, including a couple who called me a m***erf***er, which was a bit of a shock. There were several times that I just laid the phone down my desk while a member of the fairer sex ranted on and on. I'd pick up the phone a few times to throw in a "Yes, ma'am," here and there and put it back down until they blew themselves. I had women who even after I had solved their problem insist that I listen while they blasted me as an ignorant rube from the South who didn't understand how things were done in the big city. Several women got mad when I called them "ma'am," saying, "I'm not a ma'am!!" Whatever.

I was personally served papers to appear in court in Bergen County, NJ over a problem that a one hour visit from Furniture Doctor resolved. It was wacky.

I took pride in what I did and worked hard to try to satisfy people in what truly was a thankless job. Through all that, I managed never to yell back at anybody, though it was very difficult and I did engage in several episodes of telephone receiver abuse after another fine person hung up on me. There's never any excuse for rudeness, but that experience did help me not to get too upset with things that are clearly out of an employee's control. If somebody acts like they just don't care, that's a whole different story.

Drew Barrymore

Batman Forever

Tommy Lee Jones

Madonna

Evita

Antonio Banderas

OK

Ernest Borgnine

From Here To Eternity

Burt Lancaster

Same thing happened in Pennsylvania last Friday. Must be a trend.

It was pretty chilly here in NC too. Only got up to 73 today.

That's it.

Rick Nelson might have looked good, but he might be the single worst actor ever to appear on network television. He was the dictionary definition of "wooden."

You know, I could lay a big line on you and we could do a lot of role-playing, but the simple truth is, is that I find you very interesting and I'd really like to make love to you.

The Aviator?

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Cold Mountain

Jude Law

This gave me cold chills when I first heard it.

Oct. 5, 2006 — The oldest of the five Amish girls shot dead in a Pennsylvania schoolhouse is said to have stepped forward and asked her killer to "Shoot me first," in an apparent effort to buy time for her schoolmates.

Rita Rhoads, a midwife who delivered two of the victims, told ABC News' Law and Justice Unit that she learned of 13-year-old Marian Fisher's plea from Fisher's family.

What's more, Fisher's 11-year-old sister, Barbie, who survived the shooting, allegedly asked the gunman, Charles Carl Roberts IV, to "Shoot me second," Rhoads said.

"They were amazing," Rhoads said, "absolutely amazing. There was a tremendous amount of calm and courage in that schoolroom."

"Marian, the oldest one, did ask to be shot first," Rhoads said. "The faith of their fathers really was embedded in them. … How many adults are willing to do that? Not many."

Marian Fisher is being buried today, along with Naomi Rose Ebersole, 7, and sisters Mary Liz Miller, 8, and Lena Miller, 7.

Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, is to be buried on Friday. (ABC News)

Wow. Pretty unbelievable. I don't know that there are very many people of any age that could do something like that.