Detective Club - USA Immigration - Dipsomaniac on Parade

ADDENDUM, December 19, 2007 --- Dipsomaniac on Parade ! There is a short memoir on the boozy presence of Nicol Williamson, written by Paul Rudnick, a playwright. It appears in the two-week special edition of the New Yorker magazine ( December 24 & 31, 2007 ). After Rudnick wrote the play, I Hate Hamlet in 1990, he offered the leading role of John Barrymore's ghost, to Nicol Williamson. Rudnick had just bought the Golden Ticket for a one way trip to Dante's Inferno. He thought that Williamson's reputation as a full-time, violent drunkard was over blown. In point of fact, he felt that Williamson would bring a slice of Method Acting to the role of Barrymore. It would prove to be one of those decisions, that during the course of a lifetime, stand out as being on a par with self-mutilation and only slightly less irrevocable than suicide. What a hooched up terror Williamson was! --- he appears to have been stewed to the gills for 25 hours in the 24! Did I say Dante's Inferno? According to Rudnick, working with Williamson would make Dante's Inferno look like a Girl Scout Weiner Roast! The incidents that Rudnick relates --- well, just go out and buy the mag, it'll be on sale for two weeks, so you have time. The price is $4.99, and it's worth every penny!
I Saw Williamson in the Broadway productions of Uncle Vanya and I Hate Hamlet. Very tall and Scottishly pale, he had a piecing tenor voice that he could bring down low, at will, and to great effect. Sometimes excessive alcohol, once removed, gives pleasure to the audience, even if John Barleycorn damages the health of the direct recipient ( don't get me started on my story about Richard Burton and the whiskey shakes! ). Williamson's voice is front and center on the Argo four-disc LP album of Tolkien's the Hobbit --- but the recording has gone out of print and is, nowadays, only available as a bootleg. After 1997, Nicol Williamson has apparently vanished from the face of the earth. For ten years, no hide nor hair of him has been reported. There is an Internet rumor going around, that claims he made a brief appearance on British TV in 2006. But it was probably a bottle of Johnny Walker Red dressed up for Halloween.

ADDENDUM, December 17, 2007 --- Are English Men Fed Up With English Women? From the pages of the Times : I love English women. The great love of my life was English. I always thought I would end up with an English girl. But I’m never getting laid in Britain ever again.

I ensured this by writing an article last week in The Times, comparing British and American women and asking why British women don’t spend the time, money and effort on their upkeep that American women do. What started out as a light-hearted, anecdotal account of my impressions of dating women on both sides of the Atlantic has exploded into a national furore.

Granted, my comments were provocative. I described an English girl I was once set up with as “something that would surely have been happier hunting truffles in the forests of central France”. I also said this woman had been described to me as “having the body of a 20-year-old” to which I responded, “maybe she did ... dismembered in her freezer at home. She certainly didn’t have it on her skeleton”.

I didn’t expect to make friends when I wrote that you “don’t exactly need calipers to figure out in which country the women look after themselves more”. But the response has been insane. A large number of comments on The Times’s website might be 20 or 30: my article drew 550. The Sun ran a spread on my story and The Guardian anointed me Sexist of the Year.

I was utterly unprepared for the avalanche, but I stick to my guns: when British women reach the age where looking good is no longer effortless, they seem unwilling or unable to rise to the challenge. And judging by the vitriol of the response, I realize I’ve not only touched a nerve, I’ve reached into the underbelly of a deep, dark insecurity. Nobody gets that defensive about something they don’t care about.

The comments about my piece fall into several categories. The point most made by a long, long way is that I’m a prat (or as Marv writes, “as shallow as a one-inch pool of frozen water”): tough one to argue with, so I’ll leave it well alone.

After that, by far the most common point the humourless drones want to make is that they’d rather be frumpy with wonderful personalities than Barbie dolls with nothing between their ears.

This argument is so patently absurd that I can hardly believe it. It is not binary: you can have a personality and an arse that doesn’t take up two seats on the bus. If you can retain your wonderful, cheerful, sweet, fun personality and be beautiful is that not better? Or, Anna L from Kent, is your sweet personality inextricably tied to your being a size 16 ... like Samson’s strength is to his hair?

I don’t suggest that British women take the money from your education fund and put it towards plastic surgery. Nor do I suggest you take the hours per week dedicated to cultural and intellectual pursuits and use them for beauty treatments. Just take the time you dedicate to sitting on the sofa eating femur-sized Toblerones while watching EastEnders. (Thank you, Lizzy from Harrow, for the insight that I “will have boring children” ... probably not, as I don’t intend to have children with you).

Next is that British women don’t want to be obsessed with beauty regimes. Again, this is not an either/or.

Many women seem to think that doing anything more than their current routine would deem them fixated. At what point, I ask you, does “a healthy interest” turn into “obsession”?

Flossing? Waxing? Skipping pudding once in a while? Or is the moment you hire a trainer the start of an irreversibly slippery slope to waking up one day as Joan Rivers?

ADDENDUM, December 17, 2007 --- Tough Talk in the UK. Tomorrow Liam Byrne, the Labour Immigration Minister, will stand up in Parliament and announce the government's intention to institute a £1,000 cash bond on all non-EU temporary residence visas for entry into the UK. " Over the next twelve months, [ Britain ] will see the biggest shake up in its history!, " he said. It is presumed that the bond would be deemed

forfeit in the event of a visa overstay of one day past ninety. The Conservative Party Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green said that the government plan was " tough talk rather than effective action. " The Labour Party gained only 35% of the vote in the last British General Election, but managed to take about 55% of all Parliamentary seats. The next General Election in Britain does not have to take place until Springtime, 2010. The Prime Minister Gordon Brown ( or Broone as he has often been derisively called ) may just wait that long before he calls for the election. The Labour Party are [ is, in American verb usage ] riding very low in opinion polls at the moment.

December 16, 2007 --- Barack Obama, Superfly! No Black Drugdealer will live in the White House while Hillary's Around! Hillary Clinton instills certain characteristics in her minions, and when those characteristics emerge full blown, they sometimes must be punished, even if the lady upstairs encouraged such behavior, once upon a time. It must be understood that Hillary Clinton is a carnivore. She will start on your toes and feet for breakfast, devour the rest of your limbs for lunch, and chew out your brains for dinner. If your chosen New Hampshire campaign bigwig has shouted from the housetops that Barak Obama has a drug-dealing past, which the Republicans will be certain to highlight if he manages to get the Democratic Presidential Nomination, well then, out you go! Your devalued hide must be sacrificed for the greater good of the Hillster. Now that Mrs. Clinton is starting to fall down to second place in the polls, there are sure to be other sacrifices of downtrodden campaign workers in store! Obama, don't you dare step between Hillary and her intended destination! She'll rip your lungs out, Barack!