So we missed this back in May, on the 100th birthday of Ian Fleming.The Times (London-style) dished up a very slick feature called 100 Years of Bond. It mixes odd notes from Fleming’s life (f’rinstance, Winston Churchill wrote the Times obituary for Fleming’s dad in 1917) with his love affairs and then the release dates of the various James Bond novels and movies.
The Guardian speculates on the fate of Kim Jong-il.The operative question: “If he was dead, how could we tell?”
Good heavens. Colin Firth, also known as Mr. Darcy in the iconic 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, turns 48 today.Which gives us the chance to scratch our head publicly over one of the most famous moments from that film: the lake scene. We’ve heard many, many times about the moment in which Firth strips down to take a swim. The scene is supposed to have the power to make strong women go woozy, and make weaker women swoon outright.
And you thought American politics was getting a little weird.
Rock ‘n roll butterfly Pamela Des Barres turns 60 today.
Sometimes the comic strip Pearls Before Swine just cracks me up.But yesterday’s strip was a double whammy. As editor Paul Hehn points out, Cuba’s Raul Castro actually did make an appearance, however oblique, in ‘Hi and Lois’ on the same day.
Update: Tom Brady is out for the season.
Tom Brady’s season may be over. The New England quarterback went down with a knee injury on Sunday.Before the game, The Boston Globe ran a retrospective that made Brady sound oddly like a missing antelope species which may no longer actually exist.
Richard I of England — Richard Lionheart to you and me — turns 851 today.He’s also called Richard the Lionhearted by some, and Coeur de Lion by the French.Earlier this year, the Daily Telegraph ran an odd little item about a night Richard spent in bed with Phillip II of France.
We’ve finally just seen Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. And what a laugh it was.We first read about the movie in a Vanity Fair article in 2004. The backstory, in brief: in 1981, after Harrison Ford wowed the world as Indiana Jones, a 10-year-old Mississippi kid named Chris Strompolos talked two friends into filming their own shot-by-shot version of Raiders of the Lost Ark.