MCML

During the nineteen-nineties I was always wondering why various copyrights were listed as MCMLXXXX... - when the reality is, when you don't think in decimal, but rather in Roman, you'd use MXM... or MVM when you got to 1995.   This I believe is two-fold.  One, the Roman's had a wonderful laziness about their math, that got convuluted down the road.  And the other is how blind we are.  We are truly pathetic...  Oh, cry me a river.

During the nineteen-nineties, I often wondered why Bryant Gumbel didn't make an uproar over the mistake of 'not' using MXM...!   I used to think this while the Today show listed its copyright as MCMLXXXX...

But then when you think about it, wasn't the whole last half of that century just wrong...  shouldn't it have been MLM and not MCML?

Real Ingredients

This is something of a news flash.  A Kraft Salad Dressing commercial just aired, and I swear to God, they reported that their dressing is made with real ingredients!  Can you imagine?  I couldn't believe my ears, so I had to repeat the commercial, and by golly, that's exactly what they said... It's made with real ingredients!  Believe it or not...

Makeup

I have some vague memory of seeing John Holmes in a porn movie;  the memory is of some old beatup man wearing makeup.  I just did a search of the web for JH photos and found only a couple. The pictures looked nothing really close to this memory; but then again were of a younger man.   Apparently he died of aids and continued making porn even after he knew he was infected, so maybe that's the man I saw.  Well, I should say freak I saw; as that is sort of what the memory is of... Some sideshow freak, this one with an anomaly not fit for a normal sideshow.

I woke up the other morning, with a piece of a song in my head;  the only line I could actually remember was just like an old time movie...  I knew I should've remembered more of the song. When I found a moment I used google to find the song.  There it was:  Gordon Lightfoot.

The night before last, I was changing channels and stumbled on Wonderland.  Perhaps it was the music that made me keep watching.  But I barely noticed the music until the end, when the titles rolled to the beat of Gordon Lightfoot singing If you could read my mind.

I waited for the credits to roll to the songs (always last for some reason...) and then noticed all the songs I'd been hearing.

Val Kilmer played John Holmes.  For some reason I was thinking, that's not the way I remember him.  For some reason I thought the performance would've been better if he was wearing eye makeup.  Mascara could've rolled down his cheeks with the blood.

I suppose I could do a little investigative work and find out more about this story, but the story in this movie seems, to me at least, to be enough.   The man is dead now and whatever judgements you might feel compelled to make are really of little consequence.  But there was something about the story and about the man that makes my skin crawl.  Presumably a much more realistic version of the fantasy played out in Boogie Nights.

I liked it; one of the better pictures I've seen in a while.

I should add that in my little search for JH on the web, I was informed that If you could read my mind was JH's favorite song, and that he sang it to his girlfriend on a regular basis.