Some questions don't get asked often, but when they do, everyone shrugs. Here are a few of my favorites.
Q. Do you think Mary Engelbreit ever secretly draws kinky little erotic cuties? Like when she passes away, her heirs will find thousands of naughty little fishnet and leather-clad cutie pin-ups stashed away somewhere?
N. The reason I ask is that I was thinking the other day, wouldn't it be cool to see the deluxe hard-cover edition of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty with 500 full-color illustrations by Mary Engelbreit? (Gawd, I really adore Mary's work, and have often thought how lovely it would be to have an original to hang on my wall... I would invite her to illustrate A Harlot of Venus any day! She's probably out of my price range, though. I've never paid more than $300 for a painting...)
Q. Aren't you glad we don't have six legs?
N. Now honestly, can you imagine having to wash all those extra socks? And what about those times when your washer eats a sock or two (never in matched pairs of course)... with six legs, you'd have to toss out five unmatched sockies instead of just one. Unless of course you're a person who likes to wear mismatched socks... (And if you get that far, check out the roommate from hell. Ooh! I once shared an apartment with biohazards like that!)
Q. Really? You toss out those singleton socks when the mates mysteriously disappear in your washer?
N. What do you do with them? (I save them for a very long time hoping they'll turn up on a milk carton. Only after four or five years do I toss them out. And of course I don't literally throw them away where they'll end up in a landfill, because I live in San Jose where we recycle our used socks. I still have one of my favorite Santa Claus Christmas socks from 1993. Its mate is somewhere between here and Alpha Centauri, I'm sure...)
Q. How come Cinderella's glass slippers didn't just disappear along with everything else?
N. Sheesh. Question of the millenium, isn't it? I'm glad someone finally had the insight to answer it, but why it was never answered before is a real stumper. Read "Ella Enchanted", the best-ever treatment of the Cinderella tale. The glass-slipper thing will finally make sense. But a caveat: the film is a travesty, having nothing to do with the book. As I wrote in a review, "this is the best example I've ever seen of how to utterly screw up an adaptation of a book."
Q. Why can't you find any Marion Davies movies for sale or rent on VHS or DVD? It appears the only thing available is the nice documentary "The True Story of Marion Davies"... But her movies have disappeared. The only one you can find on DVD is "Quality Street", which is available only because it's on the disk with the documentary! When will this horrible lack be remedied? The lady was in 48 films and produced another 14 over a career spanning from 1917 to 1937. She survived the switch from silent films to talkies... And yet her films are totally unavailable. In fact... how can they be rated by users on IMDB.com if nobody can find them to watch?
N. Uh, good question, considering the millions of DVDs in print. I've never seen a Marion Davies flick, and famous as she once was, I'm not likely to see one on DVD. It looks like "Going Hollywood" is available on VHS, probably only because it has Bing Crosby in it. I guess poor Marion's rep got so trashed by "Citizen Kane" that nobody wants to remember her... Very sad.
Q. If "Intelligent Design" is so intelligent, how come we don't see Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims flocking to learn and teach it in equal proportion?
N. Wow... Maybe in the bell curve of human intelligence, all the Creationists are at one end?
Q. What is the joke, or the story, behind the phrase Sophie Thompson Slept Here?
N. The phrase appears in a long close-up shot of a brass plaque behind a door about 21 minutes into the film Road to Bali with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. These days, the only Sophie Thompsons one can find on the web are the British film star (e.g. in Gosford Park) and the young sculptor of the same name. Perhaps that brass plaque is proof that time travel is possible.
Q. Why don't you have any more questions in this list?
N. Uh... Well, now that's a Stumper! Why not ask a librarian? I used to subscribe to the Stumpers list in the dark ages before the web, and I quite enjoyed being a secret wombat. See if you can find any of my questions or answers in the bowels of the archives...
Last updated December 09, 2008
Copyright © 2004-2008 Rick McGowan