Dec 9, 2009 AN octogenarian and his roommate were fighting over pornography at an old folk home.

The men caused an uproar at the home in Bahau, Negri Sembilan soon after midnight on Monday.

One of them, an 83-year-old man who was sleeping at that time, complained of being awoken by the loud volume on the television.

He alleged that his 75-year-old roommate was watching pornography in the room at that time.

“It was too noisy and disturbed my sleep,’’ he told China Press.

He asked the roommate to switch off the television but the latter refused.

A heated argument ensued.

One of them was said to have grabbed a stick and attempted to attack the other. Luckily, he was stopped by the caretaker of the home.

Police arrived to find out what had happened following a distress call.

The roommate, however, denied that he was watching pornography.

“It was two years ago. I have not been watching pornography recently,’’ he said.

Bahau councillor Phoon Kow Chai, a committee member of the home, said the duo had been placed in different rooms now.

He said this was the fourth time the octogenarian had complained about his roommate.

“We have warned the roommate not to cause any trouble to the other people in the home anymore,’’ he said.

He said there were 18 live-in old folks at the home.

Funny cone-headed man, sitting in
red-rust velour – - o, splendor! – -
by the shadow of the glass next to
absently rounded table,
for whom do you wait?
What stories could those
rheumy bright
eyes cased in thick bifocal lens
pass on,
bright stories of other cities explored and
strange persons visited?
Who will be the one to walk through
the rotating door, drawing
your uneasy glance up from
age-spotted hands tapping crinkled newsprint?
How often has someone said (shhh – -
compassionate hush now)
beloved
in your presence?

Dear red velour man, I should very much
like to know your name.

Hello you beautiful people.

It’s been a hot minute since the blog’s been updated.  A week and a day, to be exact.  It’s a good thing that no one’s being paid to write on here, otherwise they’d have been fired for lack of production.

That’s not to say that we haven’t had people visiting the site, however.  Indeed, on any given day, we have had between 5 and 8 views.  From a statistical standpoint, we’re getting more hits than an anti-Spice Girls site that hasn’t been updated since 1999.  I’ll take those numbers.

The way people are coming to the site troubles me a little.  For those of you who have not discovered the joy of WordPress yet, each blog is given a “dashboard”, where the creator/handler of the site can analyze how many individuals visit the site, and what search terms are used to bring people to the site.

At the beginning, we had the standard search-term fare.  Lady Gaga, Mark Sanford, Sarah Palin, et cetera.

However, ever since Aaron wrote his entry about the epidemic of old men being naked in locker rooms, the search terms have been getting…well…weird.

The past couple of weeks, the search terms that have brought people to our site have included “naked old men”, “nude public shower room”, and my personal favorite, “elderly nude”.

I really have no idea what the people who typed in those terms were looking for.  Well, I have an idea, but I don’t want to think about it more than I have to.  All I have to say, though, is if you are one of those people who typed in one of those terms, hoping to find material of a more…adult nature…sorry.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m ecstatic that you decided to click on the link to our humble little site, but if you were coming on here in hopes of octogenarian intimacy, sorry to disappoint.

Being the dedicated researcher I am, I decided to put those search terms in myself, and see where our site showed up.  It both bothered and pleased me that the site didn’t show up in the first five pages.  Pleasing because I’m fairly sure the last thing we want is to be known as a hub for love, elderly style.  Bothering, because this means that whoever typed those terms in was clicking far into the search queue.  I guess, perhaps, they had grown tired of the mainstream stuff, and were looking for something a little rawer.

In conclusion, keep on typing those wacky search terms, true believers.  They brighten my day.  Mostly.

ZA

The play I’m going to write, whose working title is now Accidental Roommates, has just three characters. The forty something woman, her sixty something mother, and her eighty something grandmother. By a stroke of fate, namely the sixty something’s husband dying in a tragic accident, the two older women become roommates. Their interaction provides the humor, tenderness and drama of the play. The forty something woman makes intermittent appearances in the play, but she is not in every scene. And, even when she is, she is not central to the plot, but merely an observer.

Act I – the moving in, or the first year

Act II – the stroke (the forty something might be in this act most, I would guess)

Act III – back at home.

Of course, all that is subject to change, as my writing tends to have a mind of its own, sometimes not even letting me in on the direction its going. That is what I so love about writing. Even I don’t know where it’s all going sometimes. For Act I, I have my memory of the events and exchanges, my notes on what was said, but for Acts II and III, I have this blog as my notebook or journal of events.

As I read through some of the posts, I might actually publish this as a book first and then write the play of the book. Or the movie of the book. Hmmm… In any case, and no matter what literary form it takes first, I must include today’s few scenes observed by the forty something woman.

FORTY SOMETHING WOMAN enters the house of the accidental roommates.

She doesn’t see either of the roommates at first glance. She thinks, as SIXTY SOMETHING told her in a phone call half an hour before that she was getting ready to shower EIGHTY SOMETHING, that perhaps that is what is going on. But the bathroom door is open and the bedroom door closed, so she assumes the shower is over and done with, and they are in the bedroom getting EIGHTY SOMETHING dressed.  So, she begins making herself a quick bite to eat.

[For a moment, FORTY SOMETHING thinks of Monday evening back at the rehab center, when someone came in EIGHTY SOMETHING’s room to offer her a nice shower. EIGHTY SOMETHING was still riding the wave of knowing she was leaving Wednesday, so much of her rehab routine was being refused or thwarted. Although FORTY SOMETHING tried to talk her into a shower so showering at home with only SIXTY SOMETHING’s Not trained help would not become one of the first hurdles they had to jump together, there was no talking EIGHTY SOMETHING off her “I’m leaving wave”.]

SIXTY SOMETHING: (from bathroom, unseen) Well, you might just have to live in this shower the rest of your life. If you can’t stand and I can’t lift you, you might just have to stay here.

EIGHTY SOMETHING: Well, how did I do it before?

SIXTY SOMETHING: You didn’t.

EIGHTY SOMETHING: You mean I’ve never taken a shower here before?

LAUGHTER

SIXTY SOMETHING: Not like this.

FORTY SOMETHING listens closely but continues making her sandwich.  She is sure that SIXTY SOMETHING heard her come in, and knows if she is needed SIXTY SOMETHING has no qualms about calling her.  Does the audience know this, though? Should they? I don’t know. But, FORTY SOMETHING has been in this position in the business world many times.  The two she is overhearing are in a training period. Not Trained Players, they are. But, they will have to develop some sort of plan on their own to get the work done, and her intrusion on their learning process could easily stifle the development of that plan more than it could help. Oh, it could help in this moment, at this time, but for the long term co-existence of the other Somethings, they are best left to develop their own system for accomplishing these things. She is merely there in case of impasses or emergencies.

[Side note: Might be interesting that the oldest something’s name is not known. – as in blog.  If you think about the conversational interaction between three generations of women, the only one who never has her name used by the other two is the oldest. She is either Gramma or Mom. And the only one who has her name used all the time is the youngest. The middle one has a name, but it is only used by the oldest.]

The FORTY SOMETHING takes her food to the table and is eating in the dining room when the others finally emerge showered and dressed from the bathroom. EIGHTY SOMETHING takes a seat at the table just off the kitchen and bathroom. While SIXTY SOMETHING talks to herself while she gets everything cleaned up or whatever (something that has to be included – Mom’s habit of talking to herself is very funny), EIGHTY SOMETHING bursts into laughter.  FORTY SOMETHING, eating within sight of her in the dining room, starts to laugh as well.

SIXTY SOMETHING: (still unseen, but to FORTY SOMETHING who is the only person in her eyeline) What are you laughing at?

FORTY SOMETHING: I don’t know. She’s laughing at something.

SIXTY SOMETHING: (still unseen) What is so funny, Mom?

EIGHTY SOMETHING( pointing at the cat, who is still sitting just outside the bathroom door) He was sitting there the whole time. Lord only knows what sights he saw, and what he thinks of all that happened in there.

EIGHTY SOMETHING sits in that spot for sometime. Every so often SIXTY SOMETHING breezes through and  asks how she is, does she want to go to the porch, does she want to go to the living room. Each time, EIGHTY SOMETHING says no, she wants to sit right here.

After lunch, FORTY SOMETHING gets on the computer. EIGHTY SOMETHING is still in the seat just outside the restroom. SIXTY SOMETHING is running hither and yon completing laundry started earlier in the day. Throughout her movement she is, as always, in full conversation with herself. Finally, while folding towels in the living room she looks to FORTY SOMETHING.

SIXTY SOMETHING: What did I just ask myself?

[Okay. I spent my entire childhood asking of my self-talker of a mother, “Are you talking to me?”  To which she would 99% of the time answer no. However, if asked, I could always tell Mom what she was just saying, where she put stuff because she would “announce it” to herself. She got this habit from her grandmother, the infamous Dora, who has appeared in these posts. As I got older it got a bit distracting to keep up with what she said and what I was watching, thinking, listening to –I think it was when the FORTY SOMETHING struck me. Now, I pay little attention to her self-talks.]

FORTY SOMETHING: I wasn’t paying attention.

SIXTY SOMETHING: (to herself) What was that?

FORTY SOMETHING exits.

When FORTY SOMETHING reenters after leaving for awhile to check on some things, EIGHTY SOMETHING is still sitting at the table. But now SIXTY SOMETHING is getting her dinner ready for her. EIGHTY SOMETHING has dinner while the others are watching the news.

From the angle of the living room, a walker enters the room first, followed by the EIGHTY SOMETHING, the cat right there to keep track of her movement.  She is headed to the recliner SIXTY SOMETHING has made ready for her.

FORTY SOMETHING: (looking at the recliner with several layers of pillows and things on its seat.) Is all that stuff on the chair for a reason?

SIXTY SOMETHING: Yes. I wanted to make it higher so it’s easier for her to get out of.

EIGHTY SOMETHING gets to the chair, maneuvers her walker perfectly to sit down in the stacked seat of the chair. Once she plops down, she starts laughing immediately. FORTY SOMETHING glances over thinking The Not Trained Players strike again. EIGHTY SOMETHING is perched at a good 45 degree angle, her body in a straight line from the floor, where her feet no longer touch because of the padding SIXTY SOMETHING has provided her.

EIGHTY SOMETHING: (to FORTY SOMETHING, laughing) You see how she fixes me.

FORTY SOMETHING (laughing as well, now) Yeah. (to SIXTY SOMETHING) You think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?

LAUGHTER

Everyone gets to laughing so hard, it is difficult for EIGHTY SOMETHING  to get up so SIXTY SOMETHING can remove the padding she thought such a great idea when she placed it there. But finally they get it straightened up and everyone is comfortable.

I wish I had my camera at the ready for those scenes, especially Gramma perched in her chair. For those who thought perhaps the posts would end with Gramma’s return home, rest assured.  The Not Trained Players are not finished yet.

Word: octogenarian [ok-tuh-juh-nair-ee-uhn] adj. 1. of the age of 80 years 2. between 80 and 90 years old ∞ n. 3. a person who is between 80 and 90 years old 

Birthday: Jefferson Davis (1808), Josephine Baker (1906), Tony Curtis (1925), Allen Ginsberg (1926), Chuck Barris (1929), Raúl Castro (1931), Larry McMurtry (1936), Curtis Mayfield (1942), Billy Cunningham (1943), Anderson Cooper (1967), Rafael Nadal (1986)

Quotation: And in today already walks tomorrow. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tune: “After Hours” by We Are Scientists was released last year but it could’ve easily been used in a 1980s John Hughes film.

Gallimaufry: Two nights into Conan O’Brien’s reign as the King of Late Night as host of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and the verdict? So far, so good. Not much has changed. Max Weinberg and the band are still in play. Andy Richter is back after nine years. Quality stuff. ∞ A new social research study is suggesting that we lose half of our close friends every seven years. According to Gerald Mollenhorst of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, our social networks do not diminish in size but 50% of the roster changes. 1,007 people were interviewed. Seven years later, 604 of them were re-interviewed. With the advent of Facebook, I’m not sure that Dr. Mollenhurst wouldn’t be better served starting over. ∞ I consistently mock individuals who preach the dangers of Twitter and Facebook screwing with people’s privacy. I still think the danger is minimal but, listen, you have to use common sense. Don’t be like this guy and announce to the world that you’re in a totally different city, miles and miles away. Why? Because just maybe someone will find out where you live and steal shit out of your house. It’s not the technology that’s dangerous. It’s the lack of common sense.

Incoming: Tomorrow – Hollywood’s Quest to Remake Every Goddam Thing ∞ Friday – 3 Things To Do In Philly When You’re Dead

Oh shit, S.D. happened upon his photo album. Yes, I indeed dug the motherfucker out of my crawlspace, dodging Black Widows and some shriveled up widow I divorced 30 years ago, she looked like hell. But seriously, here’s some photos past and almost present, almost…that I came across. Enjoy!

S.D. Gets Attacked by a Bear at the Duluth Zoo

S.D. Laughs After Sexually Assaulting a Llama

S.D. Blocking Out the Handicap Sign Because He's an Asshole

S.D. is About to Vomit After Scoping an Octogenarian

S.D. Racing Some Guy Who Slightly Resembles Shane Moore. Side Note: S.D. Has a Line of Pissed-off People Behind Him Because He's Going 1 mph.

S.D. Thought His Wardrobe was Cool Back in the Days. And No, He's Never Been to Hawaii.

S.D. May Be Blind. Or It Was Really Dark When He Reached into His Closet.

S.D. Finally Burns the Bad Shirts and Gets Sunburnt. Hence the saying, 'White Boys Don't Tan...'

S.D. With a Punk Hairdo After He Listened to Rancid, Accompanied by His Beautiful Wife.

Now S.D. Thinks He's Andre the Giant.

Tough Guy in a Gangsta Shirt. Yeah, I'm Packing Pistols, Baby!

S.D. Clearly Irritated by This Fucking Kid. And No, It's Not My Kid.

S.D. Dribbled His White Russian. What a Slob!

S.D. is a Door-to-Door Dead Salesman for Halloween

S.D.'s Old Townhome Decorated for a Halloween Party

The World's Ugliest Baby. And No, for the Last Time, It's Not My Kid! And It's Not Me! It's the Cousin of a Cousin of my Wife's, or Some Shit Like That.

I think that’s enough humiliation for now. So laugh it up. Laugh it the fuck up, fellow readers.

Oh, yes. Something definitely happened on the first Monday of May. Something about the #ghostedhouse. Something happened in the week to follow. Something at Tillie’s house. But we have barely begun  our histories as of yet. And history’s dependence on secrecy demands that the events of yesterday close over themselves so that they may unfold in the present of a future. There are marks and traces, and you could pace them if you feel, to paraphrase Spinoza on superstition, greedy of temporal advantage.

I want to go back to Brooklyn. Not the Brooklyn of last week. To Tillie’s house right after signing the papers at the closing table. From signing with pencil to unlocking with key–these are fellow travelers. I wrote myself into Tillie’s house.

Key in hand, trying to open the four front door locks set in a double set of doors, I realized that the house had been meticulously sealed up by the octogenarian brother since the walk-through with the real estate agent the day before, just as he had done after the two previous visits I had made when looking at the house, as I am sure he had done after any of the showings by the real estate agent, Ross. Ross sold his first house to me; I bought my first house through Ross. Ross was young, still in college, and did not yet have his real estate license. He was attending Brooklyn College where I taught for several years during graduate school.

For his first go, Ross’ company assigned him the listing of Tillie’s house because it was too far north of the south Brooklyn, 18th Avenue range covered by the agency. The agency specialized in Italian clientele, and while north Bushwick and Ridgewood had once housed such a community, that time in New York’s history receded from the architecture and lived lives of inhabitants into the living memories of people who participated in this battle. Rudy Guiliani celebrated his victory; Tillie’s brother did not. Not all of the old ‘family’ neighborhoods receded, and Ross’ Italian mother and uncle inhabited such a continuation in 18th Avenue but they also actively remembered the transcoding of Italianate Bushwick and Ridgewood. Ross’ uncle gave him the job at the real estate agency that he owned, the agency that represented Tillie’s house, because despite Ross’ father’s ‘heritage’, Ross was family. Tillie’s brother sought out and entrusted this agency  because he knew that they understood family. This was a poor financial choice. Tillie’s octogenarian brother made this choice in pursuit of a lived and living memory of neighborhood ethnic politics, in pursuit of long gone and long dead family.

House for sale

Agencies from Williamsburgh had just ‘discovered’ “East Williamsburgh”–the name given to the northern and western portions of Bushwick–and any of these Billyburg agencies specializing in the ‘up-and-coming’ would have marketed the house quite differently. ‘Up-and-coming’ always carries ‘down-and-going’–even when the ‘going’ cash out. But Tillie’s brother, despite fulfilling his duties as executor of Tillie’s estate, put off cashing out for two years. Tillie had no children. The neighborhood that was ‘down-and-going’ was his, was him.  He put his own living remains on the market.

The harbingers of the ‘up-and-coming’ could’ve easily marketed to me. My ex-husband’s Italian last name would’ve mattered little to them whereas other statistical bodies through which I live would’ve been appealing. Of course, my improper proper name did matter. Had Tillie’s brother not turned to 18th Avenue and had Ross’s uncle not handed the out-of-bounds listing to young nephew Ross, the house would not have been priced ‘below market value.’ It was not just that the octogenarian brother felt comfortable with my last name as I mentioned in my first post, an entire network of ‘family’ politics laboriously converged and circulated such that I might find myself at the top of the stoop of Tillie’s house unlocking her doors.

When I managed to get the first two locks and first door open, I stood in the tiny entry facing the second front door. I was in. It was mine. I thought about the address, my mail, the post office, and the change-of-address form in my backpack that I could now send. I could walk across the street to the corner where the entry to the Catholic Charities Retirement Home opened and place my official change-of-address form in the blue U.S. Postal Service mailbox, while all of the inhabitants of the Home watched, as they always watch everything from out of their windows or from their seats on the brick ledge lining the front of the builiding.

I knew they were watching now as I opened the front door. I turned to catch them looking, witnessing me. As I turned to the right to look back out the first set of doors to the street and my witnessing neighbors, I caught something that I had missed when I came to look at Tillie’s house each of the three previous visits.

Embedded in the wall between the doors were two mailboxes, the kind that sit flush to the wall and that the postal carrier uses a key to open. When the key is turned, the mailboxes drop open from the top and the mail is placed in the appropriate box. These are usually found in big apartment buildings. I had seen the slot in the outermost door for mail to be shoved inside and it was evidently in use–the ground was littered with ads for car services and Chinese food take-out restaurants. Somehow, the inset mailboxes kept themselves secret.

The names on each of the mailboxes popped out. Analog recording devices could be so exquisitely tactile. Shaped like a gun with a heavy duty but thin roll of plastic tape fed into the the typeset hammer, the user would have set each letter and then pulled the finger trigger with equivalent force to pop the hammer through the set. No leveraging the effort. Each letter of a proper name shot into plastic, adhesive tape, raising it from the strip and lightening the color of the plastic through the stretching of the medium. A labelling gun, writing the inhabitants into the house, a convergence of proper name and property.

I never removed the raised names from the boxes. The writing and the house remain, the Forlenza’s and the Petrullo’s are gone and dead. My arrival made it so.

Front door

I saw two dumpster divers yesterday:

They didn’t look like the stereotypical diver left, but even destroyed my preconceptions.  This is how:

Incident 1:

I was carrying trash to a dumpster, when a white-haired spandexed cyclist stopped me in my tracks.  He was head-first in the dumpster–my dumpster.

Should I keep going?  Or wait?  Would he be embarrassed to know I’m watching?

Eventually he emerged.  He mounted and sped by me (I, hiding my trash behind my back).  He must have been in his 50s or 60s, and I still wonder why of the situation.

Incident 2:

Another man head-first in discards, this time a recycling bin.

In his left hand, bottle caps.  His right was submerged in plastics, shuffling through them, fishing for more caps.  (Caps of inferior plastic can’t be recycled.)

I wonder too, why he would waste his time when city employees get paid to do what he was.  He was also old, also cycling, an also baffling to me.

Muzak has been piped into retail establishments, elevators, restaurants and the work place since 1936.  For years, it was in the category of music my folks would listen to.  Toned down popular tunes for their age group.  At first, the company merely re-packaged it as bland  instrumentals.  Volume was kept low at almost subliminal levels.  Psychological testing was done and it was found that the pace and style of music affected workers in factories when it was played.  By limiting the dynamics and tempo of the music; it would not intrude on worker production.  Similar ideas were carried through to offices as well as stores.  The Muzak was noticeably present in quiet areas like elevators thus it earned the nickname “Elevator Music”.  It wasn’t until the 1980s that the move from those bland sounds began.

Being recently unemployed, I’ve been traveling with my wife to the supermarket weekly.  One of the amazing things that struck me is the music that is played over the PA system.  Normally, I’ll tune out anything that might distract me in a store.  I’m there for one purpose and it’s to purchase what I went for.  Since men don’t make out any type of shopping list, we have to keep a clear head and focus on what we’re there for.  And we proudly walk out of the store, usually a home center, with what we went there for only to discover, at home, that we forgot an item or two.  Since she diligently makes out a shopping list, I’m free to take in the ambiance and place bad things in the shopping cart to try.  Done scanning the ’snack-food’ aisle, I noticed that the music coming over the PA was a bit ‘peppier’ than what I remembered from the past.  Listening, I started to sing along with Foghat’s “Slow Ride”.  ”Slow Ride” playing in a supermarket!  I couldn’t wait for the next tune!  ”Sunday Morning” by No Doubt, “The Devil Inside” by INXS, “What’s Your Name?” by Lynard Skynard, “Space Age Love Song” by Flock of Seagulls, and the hits just kept on comin’.  I began to think, as I saw an old couple that had to be in their 80s slowly pushing their cart down the aisle, what are people this age thinking about this music?  It must be jarring to their sense of hearing to listen to this or maybe they can’t hear it.  Anyway, I got complete satisfaction out of the thought that they may be irritated by what they’re hearing.  After all, I had to deal with their brand of maudlin tunery ever since I was a kid.  Now the tables have been turned!  The weird thing is that in the weekly jaunts we’ve been making, I’ve never heard any song that’s newer than 1o years old with most of the playlist going back to the mid-60s through the 70s.  Hmm, that means that they’re now targeting a demographic of Baby Boomers through Gen-Xers.  Does this mean I’ll be hearing music that’s popular now when I’m an octogenarian?  I wouldn’t give “50 Cent” for it!

Grandpa took me up on my offer. He’s taking the red eye to New York with his octogenarian man-friend and will be sitting in the fourth row.

I hope that, if I can spot him from the stage, I don’t tell the entire audience about this special guest. I tend to have verbal diarrhea problems like that when someone hands me a microphone.

Never Too Late To Become Empowered!

There was an article in a Sydney newspaper a couple of weeks ago about a woman who after 40 years of being widowed,  decided that she wanted to go back to work after being a wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother! 

And so, she applied for a clerk’s position at one of Sydney’s major hospitals.  She applied for this job when she had just turned 100 years young.  And she got the job! 

This amazing little octogenarian is now 107 years young today and continues working part time, enjoys her Independence, lives on her own, experiences good sound health and is a testament to all women that regardless of your AGE, it is never too late to learn new things and empower yourself!

Go Granny!!!  I want to be just like you when I am 107!

Young At Heart is an incredible and lovely movie about the Young At Heart Chorus, a choir whose members’ average age is about 82.

It will uplift you and break your heart repeatedly in the most endearing way, and it will forever change how you hear every song they sing.

Watch the preview right here, and I think it’s still available in Comcast OnDemand. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll love this movie. Oh, and keep tissues nearby.

Nancy Pelosi looks like a shifty character. I’m sure that President Obama has more than one set of eyes on Ms. Pelosi. If he doesn’t,he will regret it.Something about her looks totally untrustworthy.I didn’t believe her when she told Rachel Maddow that she didn’t know that they were going to actually use enhanced interrogation methods.In other words,she denied that she knew that our government allowed people to be tortured.But,you could tell that she wasn’t being truthful. It’s all in her body language.

And she really looked irked by Rachel Maddow’s questions about what she knew.Politico.com has a very interesting article about Nancy Pelosi’s habit of making lists.They claim that she has a “disfavor file” which consists of all of those who have gotten on her bad side.After that interview with Rachel Maddow,I suspect that Nancy Pelosi might be considering adding her to the aforementioned D-day list! Here’s more on that list from Politico.com:

“But she has also moved to strip power from longtime adversaries — and she has a propensity for remembering slights and grievances for years. Hawkish Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who clashed with Pelosi on Iraq and intelligence policy, assumed she was in line to become chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee when the Democrats seized control of the House in 2006. But Pelosi refused to appoint Harman to even a seat on the committee, and she handed the chairmanship to Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas).

As speaker, she did nothing to stop her ally Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) from ousting Rep. John Dingell as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee after clashing with the octogenarian Michigan Democrat on energy policy and global warming.The list, Pelosi allies say, is real — even as they warn that overstating her vindictiveness feeds into the right-wing caricatures of Pelosi and perpetuates ethnic and gender stereotypes.

Moreover, they argue that portraying her as payback-obsessed misses a fundamental political point: Despite her commanding majority, Pelosi is painfully aware that powerful speakers, including Republican Joe Cannon, have been toppled for using their power heavy-handedly. “She’s not a vengeful person, per se, and she thinks that people who do bad things eventually get their due without her intervention,” a longtime associate said on condition of anonymity. “But that doesn’t mean she forgets.”

So who’s on Pelosi’s list now?

1. Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.). No Democrat has done quite so much in so short a time to arouse Pelosi’s disdain as the failed-Redskins-quarterback-turned-ambitious-North-Carolina-congressman. The conservative, anti-abortion Shuler would have made the list for voting against both bank bailout bills and the stimulus package, but the way he went about it didn’t help; Shuler told an audience back home that “House leadership and Senate leadership have really failed” on the $787 billion package. The thing that riles Pelosi most, according to several House aides, is that she believes Shuler’s motives are as much political as they are ideological — and that he’s picking a fight with her to position himself for a run against Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) next year. Unless Shuler is planning a long House career, picking a fight with Pelosi may indeed have its advantages: His 2006 opponent, incumbent GOP Rep. Charles Taylor, scored points by portraying Shuler as a Pelosi acolyte. “I don’t know if Shuler is talking without thinking or if he’s just making the calculation that distancing himself from Pelosi is never a bad thing to do,” said a senior House leadership aide.

2. Rush Limbaugh. He’s Pelosi’s sworn enemy — and she views him as beneath contempt and unworthy of her comment. Asked about the right-wing talk-radio king the other day, Pelosi said: “I don’t speak to that. I’m the speaker of the House. I don’t get into the popular culture.”(End of Excerpt) Read the rest here.

Anna Nicole Smith loved to be naked, and being naked is what she did best. Anna was like a parody of her own stereotype, the Texas stripper, a big blonde blow up doll, dumb as a post, the laughingstock of Hollywood. She’ll forever be seen as the train wreck gold-digger who wasn’t sure who fathered her child. The fat jeans model junkie who took advantage of an 89-year-old man, married his money, was unfaithful, gluttonous, and voracious for drugs, food, and sex.

Her overdose death in 2007 shocked no one, and nor did the infant grab that brought a bunch of Baby Dadas and a grandmother out of the woodwork. Of course, these people cared about Anna’s child,, and not at all about the possibility she could be worth half a billion dollars. The saga of Anna’s fated fortune, from her second husband the oil tycoon, had been going on as long as we could remember. By the time she died, it was just another event in a long saga of her tabloid stories.

In 1994, New York Magazine featured a picture of the world’s dumbest blonde in cowboy boots and not much else, digging into a bag of cheese puffs. Anna had no idea that  the words White Trash Nation would be emblazoned across the page. She’d been under the impression that she’d be shown as an all-American girl, and the magazine argued that yes, she had. It wasn’t a nice trick to play on a dimwitted bimbo, but the fact remained that nothing could be closer to the truth. It was a few months after her wedding to octogenarian J. Howard Marshall, or rather, to his fortune, or so they said. And when  she fled the honeymoon bed for a trip with her bodyguard lover, her motives were absurdly transparent.

Or were they? To the day she died Anna was big, blonde and stoned in court, fighting for her money. J. Howard’s son was trying to keep it from her- or, more realistically, keep it for himself.

Maybe no one cares for my two cents on the issue, but too damn bad. Aside from a few million men with their pants around their ankles, a few bewildered exes, and a daughter who will never know her, there’s no one left to speak Anna.

And it’s my job to ask this: why does everyone feel sorry for poor J. Howard? Is the public so sexist  that they think a billionaire oil tycoon, a Yale law professor, no less, was the hapless, helpless swindle victim of a simpleminded stripper? J. Howard is not the first and nor will he be the last man to throw his money at a naked woman. Why in the world would anyone assume that a big shot lawyer wouldn’t know that the wife young enough to be his great granddaughter would be good for half his money? Certainly he didn’t expect to live forever, and he was clearly old enough to decide for himself whether to marry. The man was not a fool, and I doubt her extracurricular activities were a big surprise to him.

The truth of the matter is that J. Howard was a man who frequented a peeler bar on a daily basis in his wheelchair, threw thousands of dollars around, was nearing death, and had his heart set on heaven on earth. He  lavished Anna with flashy gifts, plied her with hundred dollar bills, and begged her to marry him.

This was no shotgun wedding- Anna turned him down repeatedly, because she wanted to make a name for herself in, er, nude modeling. Though he dangled his billions in front of her for nearly three years, she ran off and landed the Playboy photo shoot that would catapult her to celeb status. She lived the playbunny life of fancy clothes and champagne and drugs and boys, but she talked to J. Howard on the telephone every night out of the kindness of her heart. Finally, she decided why not make an old man happy? Who could say that that, in and of itself, is not love? And if she loved him for his money, did he marry her for her brains and her soul?

Anna’s detractors wonder how they practiced intimacy. None of our business. Did she have to formally have intercourse with him to ‘deserve’ the money? It is not for us to determine what did or did not go on. Marriage takes place all over the world for many different reasons- arrangements, political unions, convenience, immigration, dowry, retaliation, enforcement, bla bla bla. If a brilliant law professor is not capable of deciding to marry, then who is? And why wouldn’t Anna want to do a sweet turn for a nice rich man’s dying days when he spoils her rotten?

Consider the cesspool of trailer trash she inherited in the genetic lottery. It’s easy for us to poke fun at her repellant stupidity and repetitive nudity, but should we? Drugs and alcohol are certainly rampant in Hollywood, where everyone wants to party. But the tragic hot mess of Anna Nicole Smith has its roots a long way from glamourous hedonism. Recall that one of the old-school staple reasons for self-destructive drug use is childhood abuse, the desperate pattern of escapism from grim reality. It goes above and beyond the lure of hot tub parties. Its seeds are planted when your daddy is planting his seeds in your garden, uncommon nowhere, and extremely common in the kind of world Anna grew up in. Don’t you all wonder why she so cruelly and consistently refused all contact of her children with her mother? Classic- mom said nothing. Moral morons wrote all over the net about poor maligned mom Virgie, and how Anna’s drug habit separated them. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Anna was born in 1967 in backwater Texas, the second child to Virgie Arthur. Virgie at 14 had a son with her brother. Oh, sorry, her stepbrother. That’s right, a very merry brady bunch and the ensuing bundles of joy. It’s likely she was also the victim of abuse, as the cycle goes, and maybe forced to have her brother’s baby. Later, he was allegedly convicted of child molesting for something else. Though Virgie was the deputy sheriff and worked in law enforcement for most of her life, her private life was not exactly law and order. She had a long string of husbands, perhaps six? and most of them were sex felons. Anna, nee Vickie Hogan, was fathered by Don Hogan. There was some kind of rape scandal involving this man and Virgie’s ten-year-old niece. Dad was exchanged for another Donald, this time Hart, whom Anna maintained raped her from ages nine to 14. She escaped from home to live with a relative.

We all know what happens next in tragic stories like these- Anna became pregnant soon after. She married the boy, Billy, and they had a son named Daniel. He was the true joy of Anna’s life and the most normal player in the trailer trash saga. The rapist step dad had children with another mom- one of those sons was later convicted of kidnapping a paraplegic and using her as a sex slave. Train wreck? It gets worse.

The story from here was the same as every other inbred trailer queen’s story, up until the implants, anyway. Still named Vickie, she failed most of high school and worked in a fried chicken joint, following her story’s stereotype with uncanny precision. And that’s where she got knocked up. Now, Anna wasn’t playing with a full deck. But Billy- he was lucky if he had one or two cards. He was 16, a year younger than Anna, when they married. She left with baby Daniel for Houston not long afterwards.

The pages of the stereotypical drama turn predictably still. Anna- well, Vickie- worked at Wal Mart and Red Lobster, trying to make ends meet for her and her very beautiful baby. One day she passed by a nightclub flashing a neon dancer in cowgirl boots. Anna went in, showed her assets, and began dancing. This was her calling, and her true gift, and her patrons were dumbstruck by her big blinding blonde beauty. She was sweet, stupid, and sensational without her clothing. Sadly, she felt insecure with her pert B cup boobs, and decided to take her career to the next level with massive breast implants.

Enter J. Howard Marshall, barely able to sit up in his wheelchair. Every day he came  to watch the mesmerizing Anna. He paid her hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars just to sit topless near his wheelchair and they talked and giggled the day away. He drowned her in gifts. Not every stripper is even lucky enough to make a living, and Anna had never seen so much money. She was still a total hick, with no idea how to manage what was coming in, and she blew it on baby and on bling. J. Howard was begging her to marry him before he died, but Anna had other beaus and other plans- she wanted to fulfill her lifelong dream.  She wanted to be a playboy bunny just like Marilyn Monroe.

Like many little girls, and like most raped and orphaned girls, Anna looked up to spectacular sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, who was a molested orphan who became a legend. An unconscious empathy takes place between victims, but Anna couldn’t have understood how Marilyn was deeply intelligent, because she herself could barely read. She did see the rags to riches, the glamourous transformation. She wanted to be a breathless blonde bunny, and a famous actress-model.

Now the early ‘90s in fashion was a long way from bodacious, and the kinder of Anna’s cronies advised her to abandon embarrassment and continue to entertain in Texas, where everything was bigger and better. Ironically, it was J. Howard who encouraged her dream of modeling. Though he wanted to provide for her, she wanted to make it on her own. And so Barbie put her five-inch stilettos on and stormed into the offices of Playboy magazine. Against all odds, she strode out with a contract.

In fact, the photographs of Vickie- this was still her name in her first magazine appearance- were of that breathless blonde beauty that had seldom been seen since her idol Monroe, or Jane Mansfield. Anna was unbelievably photogenic and loved the camera. She was larger than life, and stood out from the other models by more than her big Texas hair. Layout schedules were bumped so that Anna’s nudie pics would be featured sooner than planned. J. Howard had been wooing an unknown stripper- now he was begging for America’s flavour of the month.

Her celebrity was instant, and in keeping with the stress, Anna’s drug and alcohol use went up. So did her consumption of food. She went from big boned to bigger, and gossip started. Anna could also guzzle several bottles of champagne and her lack of decorum and daftness quickly became as legendary as her helium ta-tas. Though she filled out her Guess Jeans with unending bootyliciousness, stunning her naysayers with a wildly popular and fully clothed modeling contract, her life had begun to spin out of control. By then she had known J. Howard for almost three years, and spoken to him every night on the phone, even at the peak of her fame. And she thought he would be a calming and sweet force in her chaotic life, and that she would make an old man a happy one.

Their wedding stirred a media circus, of course, as he sat crumpled in a white tux, shriveled in his wheelchair, and Anna dwarfed him in voluptuous white, endless yards of it, massive puffed sleeves, with her legendary mammaries going down the aisle before her.

Anna did make him happy for the last year and a half of his life, though by now she was a razor’s width from the edge. J. Howard couldn’t even get out of his wheelchair, never mind save her from the overdoses, excesses, and pain that her past and her exposure brought her. She was far too unsophisticated to handle the press attention for Goldie gold-digger, and too damaged not to take all the media fat jokes personally. Anna’s career, reputation, and physical peak tanked miserably. She was out of her mind, and when J. Howard died, she dramatically wore her wedding dress to the funeral. Depressed, she watched TV, ate, and took drugs. More scandals ensued, including bankruptcy, the war with J.’s family because she wasn’t specifically mentioned in his will (neither were they), and the alleged sex abuse of one of her employees, which may or may not have been just a case of drug regret. Anna was in and out of court, fighting for her estate, and in and out of rehab, and in and out of her mind.

Later, Anna was savvy enough to realize in her broke and hazy fugue that if the public loved to laugh at her, then she would let them, and she started her own reality show. The Anna Nicole Show was the highest order of pure campiness, in god-awful taste, featuring endless boring dioramas of the train wreck crashing, the blimp getting bigger, and an arsenal of queens attending to their reigning trash heap. She stumbled, drooled, and devoured her way back into the public eye, because she desperately needed to pay her outstanding debts for the lifestyle she’d never been able to afford on her own.

Anna had never made a decision to ‘clean up her act’ but unexpectedly and miraculously, she lost 70 pounds and landed a contract with Trim Spa, the diet aid. And although the nature of her strange ongoing relationship with her lawyer slash lover will never be fully understood, she left with the other Howard Stern for Bahamas, to be out of the public eye, and was soon photographed by tabloids with a natural beauty we had never seen before- straight hair, tailored but sexy clothing, and nearly no makeup. She announced with great joy that she was pregnant. The buzz was instantaneous- another bastard heir to the billionaire.

Though Anna’s bewildered boy toy, the jaw droppingly gorgeous and totally effeminate Larry Birkhead couldn’t understand why she took his offspring to be to the island, he understood that she was deeply confused and needed time to put the pieces of her shambles together. Anna was so broke by the time Dannielynn was born, she sold photographs of herself in the hospital, looking exhausted but strangely stunning, with her brand new bundle. Daniel, her handsome son, came from the States to spend the delivery days with Mom, and the broken and bizarre bunch was clearly blissful. Her lawyer Howard Stern was there, too, standing in as the proud new father and caretaker of the newly cleaned up Anna Nicole.

The rest of the story is even weirder. The cheery family reunion was ripped apart when out of the blue, the strapping and healthy 20-year-old Daniel died at his mom’s bedside, right there in the hospital. At the moment of their deepest happiness, embracing a brand new sibling and new start, he was torn from his mother in a mystery overdose of antidepressants and methadone. It would be no surprise that Daniel was taking prescription antidepressants, given his tumultuous heritage. But even a pill popper has no use for multiple Zolofts.  Still, Larry Birkhead said he noticed strange behaviour from Daniel in the few months before his death. Daniel allegedly stole some of his mother’s methadone, and he had hired a private investigator for unknown reasons. (Later speculation buzzed that a Svengali was poisoning Daniel, and that Anna was under his control as well.  The truth is, nothing is farfetched when we are talking about a potential half billion dollars, and now one heir was out of the way.)

Anna’s surfacing to sunlight from the maelstrom was brief, and she submerged again into the twilight world, popping more pills than ever before and mumbling to herself, seldom making sense. When she was led zombie like in front of the cameras for a ‘commitment ceremony’ with Howard Stern, the waves began of who was Dannielynn’s real father. The birth certificate said Howard. Anna’s trash talking sister said she had frozen the oil tycoon’s sperm. Larry insisted baby was definitely his, and some said Anna had never had a romance at all with Howard, that she was just his mannequin and his motives were unscrupulous. Others said the commitment ceremony was just to make a few bucks from paparazzi pics, because she was so desperate.  Regardless, after Daniel died, Anna was completely emptied, roaming blankly wherever she was prodded. She was way out of it, sick, crazy, strange. Why she was not in a mental hospital for rest is unclear, and many still wonder if it was all in Howard’s plan, if that’s why he took her to the Bahamas, away from the laws and the friends who might notice she was fucked.  Most of the time, Anna could barely hold her infant, and she was cruelly photographed passed out and dribbling vomit. She was simply the living dead.

The ending of the story was no surprise to anyone.  Five months after Danielynn’s birth and Daniel’s death, Anna, while sick in bed, overdosed for the last time.

The DNA circus began full force. Suddenly, Anna’s mom was a glowing picture of maternal concern. Virgie had never been around to help her daughter through the vicious struggles she had bequeathed to her. But now she accepted cash handouts to be photographed sobbing at the grave, and used her law background to move full force into custody battle for the billion dollar baby. And Anna’s grieving ‘husband” seemed remarkably composed in the aftermath, even as it turned out that most of the eleven drugs in Anna’s body had been prescribed in his name, not hers! Immediate speculation began over whether he had eliminated the oldest heirs and now had sole custody of the , conveniently his own flesh and blood. And to be fair, there was nothing outlandish about such theories: Howard’s presence was certainly mysterious, and his role of power over her money and health were obvious starting points for conspiracy.

But that blew up in his face, of course, when it turned out Larry had been telling the truth all along and Dannielynn was his baby. Virgie was outraged that she didn’t get custody of the baby.

Perhaps the details of Anna’s life and death are just the tragic outcome of destiny, larger than life because of her celebrity status. But it’s also clear that wherever there is money, drugs, and sex- and here were all three in spades- there is potential for drama of every kind. Add to that the fact that Anna was easy to take advantage of, an easy target for ridicule, and not in any semblance of control of her life, and you get this brutal tangle.

We may never know, and perhaps no one cares. Society, after all, cares little for whores. The Internet is oozing comments that Anna was nothing but a selfish set of tits and ass who only cared about partying. Does no one care that a girl was in trouble? Never mind that she may have been a victim. One can get away with swindling, target, murder, drugs, and blackmail, as long as the victim is a whore, not a human.

In the end, it is only fitting that little girl lost followed in the footsteps of her heroine, Marilyn Monroe. They had little in common but their trademark red lips, va va voom curves, Playboy cover, and then, cruelly, the circulating photographs of each of them, their bodies blue on the morgue gurney. And so it is that the big boned girl with the big smile and big bank account, larger than life, went from this world. The blow up doll deflated. The end.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The first time I watched the Sound of Music, I was seven and genuinely perplexed as to why such a smashing young nun would fetch up with an octogenarian with a whistle fetish.

As I grew older, I realised why. He had a bloody great big house.

Last night, having been strong-armed to watch the Sing-a-Long version of The Sound of Music at the theatre with my daughter, I found the tables had turned. I was  actually LUSTING after Captain Georg Von Trapp and his long, hard whistle. My hills were alive. I wanted him to ford my stream, climb my mountain and add certain of my body parts to his list of favourite things.

I'll blow your whistle, Captain, oh yeah. I'll blow it real nice

Even though – and perhaps because –  his name is pronounced Gay-Org (gay.org for those readers under the age of 25) I had suddenly discovered Captain Von Trapp’s allure. Definitive proof that the portrait ageing on my behalf in the attic affects only my body and not my mind – I may look like a 22-year-old glamour model, but inside I have the mind of a wizened 37-year-old. It’s like that Benjamin Button film in reverse. I think – I haven’t seen it.

While innocently looking for  red hot pictures from the Von Trapp’s honeymoon online, I happened upon the BBC’s plans to maintain public morale in the event of a nuclear disaster which involve none other than Gay-Org himself. Academic Dr Ian Bradley revealed the in-bunker entertainment for the dignitaries, celebrities and brown-nosers stashed underground while the rest of us are burning to death in the streets: “Shortly after the siren sounds, we can expect to see and hear Julie Andrews,” he said. Along with the three other riders of the Apocalpyse, presumably.

On the plus side, commoners like you and I (this is a vast generalisation, apologies to dignitaries, celebrities and brown nosers reading) will not have a place in one of the 20 bunkers around the UK that will be screening The Sound of Music on a continual loop for 100 days. On the minus side, that’s because we’ll probably be dead.

For those of us left above ground, the most sensible thing to do will be to reach for the Government’s Preparing for Emergencies booklet, which advises us not to panic. Not panicking is especially easy if you have been reduced to dust by an atomic firestorm.

If you’ve made it through the initial blast, and are simply waiting to vomit up your liver when gamma rays permeate through the double glazing,  you can always summon up a little of the BBC’s plan to inject the feelgood factor back into your life by singing the songs from The Sound of Music yourself.

I can see it now, the family huddled around grandma, who is still burning brightly, and trying to remember the lyrics to Favourite Things:

“Toxic rain on babies and weeping sores on kittens, bright orange fireballs and radiation-proof mittens, deformities caused by rogue DNA strings…these are a few pesky nuclear war things.

“Incinerated ponies and crisp quick-fried poodles, sirens and screaming and living off Pot Noodles, wild geese that fly with scorch-marks on their wings…these are a few pesky nuclear war things.

“When the bomb hits, when black rain falls, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember Gordon Brown’s underground, and then I don’t feel so bad…”

Really, though, check out the Von Trapp fox, ladies. All aboard the time machine, I’m heading for the hills.

Try to figure out the meaning of the image before you click here to buy the shirt, cuz that site gives it away. But also, that site charges a bundle for shipping. You’ve been warned.

Hat tip to my friend Petra Funkenstein.