What gadget would you most like to have that you don't currently have?
an invisibulator, or in the alternative, a device for crushing ice for use in fancy crushed-ice drinks -- but it's a pipe-dream that modern science will never achieve.
ogged -- your buddy must find a way to make Mr. MacLachlan his new best friend through shared mutual interest.
Since Twin Peaks he played the underperforming fellow on Sex & the City -- that's something.
That's sensible, text. Then one day, Kyl/e M could be Deep Throat! My latest suggestion was this:
Find a cute woman at the airport, point out KM, tell her that he wants to talk to her, but feels skeezy about using his celebrity to approach strange women. Hang back, watch the fun.
My friend is too nice to pull that, but I think it would be hilarious.
I think the weirdness of celebrities being interested in sports stems from the fact that an actor's fame is often free-floating, or connected to intangibles like charisma, whereas a sports star's is more directly linked to ability. So an actor being interested in sports is like an indirect comment on his own celebrity.
A much better icebreaker would be:
"You kicked serious ass in _The Hidden_, man."
"I thought you were really well cast in The Flinstones."
When are you going to reform the Mahavishnu Orchestra?
6: I'm not sure I get that. Presumably, he's not watching golf because the golfers are famous. At least for my friend, it seems strange that someone famous would have so much time to spend doing something so mundane.
ac is thinking on a higher plane.
But he's oohing and aahing at their ability.
This puts him in the position of a fan. He is someone who has fans, who is, in this instance, a fan. And he is, furthermore, a fan of something that can be measured.
"Remind me. Was Dennis Hopper naked in "Blue Velvet"?"
Ok, clearly it strikes us a little odd that someone who has fans is a fan. But while I can see the difference between the kinds of celebrity, it doesn't seem salient to me. Does anyone really think, "Hey, that's weird, a celebrity whose fame depends on something intangible is watching a celebrity whose fame is based on something measurable"? It's just the fame, isn't it?
Talent can't be measured out in drops, man.
I think that what is odd about a celebrity genuinely liking sports -- as opposed to just going to games in order to be seen -- is that those of us who are really into sports kind of suspect that, if we weren't such losers, we'd have better things to do with our time and energy, like travel to interesting places or talk to girls.
I think it's that we all sort of assume that famous people are all part of the same click. If he was really that interested in golf, he would just be there, hanging out as a celebrity caddy or soemthing. Or, perhaps, his watching the golf game should be like us watching a high school basketball game; and maybe it is, and we just can't tell.
Dude, watching sports is like, the second greatest good, after playing sports that people watch. I was reading through the Normblog profiles one recent sleepless night, and person after person answer the "thing people like that you don't care about" question with "sports." This is blogdom's idiosyncratic pathology. Sports are good, you should watch more of them.
Agree with #21 completely. Except it's third. After resetting the Tivo.
If you can reset the Tivo while watching sports--which, let's admit, we've all tried to do--then you are truly alive.
Who wants a date?
Apparently I am, in fact, thinking on a higher plane. Or on some plane of my own. I think this is something actors notice about themselves, though, that they don't hit home runs, that they're dependent on reviews and the zeitgeist and the fickle fickle public, &c. I think this feeling would especially surround someone with the air of has-been--who has been largely forgotten by the public. What athletes have is somehow more true.
What about playing sports that no one watches? Is that not the higher form of artistry?
Ogged,
Was "Sports are good, you should watch more of them." addressed to me? Trust me, it would be hard for me to watch more sports. My only point was that sometimes I can't help thinking that if I liked my life more, I wouldn't be living vicariously through Rip Hamilton right now. But that does beg the question I admit.
It was addressed to anyone tempted to listen to you. I know you're a fan. You should live vicariously through Ben Wallace though.
Ok, seriously, I think watching sports is great, but it can surely be pathetic--but I'm not sure the pathos is measured in hours or even the intensity of one's interest. I'd guess it's pathetic if the watcher is already pathetic.
You know, someone I was dating actually offered to reset the Tivo while I watched a ballgame, and I turned it down. I think, like the two-woman fantasy, it's a dream that lives best as a dream.
28: I may have been thinking of Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, or at least, what I thought that book would be like before I read it.
Or perhaps any sport, really, at the amateur level.
Maybe you're right about what the actor thinks, ac. I don't know any actors well enough. (Interesting how you use the word "true:" independent, grounded.) I suppose the fame could be salient to them.
You're a decent guy, Timbot. Or there's some other, more disturbing, explanation.
But what about the important issue -- does Kyle look hot? How about a cameraphone snapshot?
(Interesting how you use the word "true:" independent, grounded.)
Like metal. There is no good or bad metal, only TRUE and FALSE metal. Death to false metal!
I highly recommend reading the section on truth and falsity in metal here. (In the section about Death Church, the first band.)
All I got about his looks was "shoulder length hair and just barely tinted glasses."
33- You thought the Balzac would be a meditation on the intrinsic quality of an artwork, separate from how it was received?
Sort of—the image reflected in my mind's reading glasses was of a book in which no one ever knew about the painting.
I might also have been thinking about the hunger artist, but then he did put on a show, even if no one understood that he just wasn't hungry.
You can't trust people who wear tinted glasses.
We're agreed on that, PG, but the rules might be bendable for celebrities.
Sometimes dyslexics wear tinted glasses as a means of combating the effects of dyslexia. Why do you hate dyslexics, pg?
Ok, ogged, but (related to link) when you see a white male with a white van, do you immediately think "serial killer"?
Generally I think "white guy"--->"serial killer." I'm often pleasantly surprised.
I am sitting in an airport without either Kyle McLachlan or tinted glasses. Nor is there golf. Please, entertain me.
Dance, monkeys! I been saving my slols for ages. You can't imagine how difficult it is to exchange Moldavian currency.
You know that Far Side strip about the collision of herpetology and boating, in which the panel is divided into two, diagonally, and each sub-panel has a dude saying something like "she's a beaut, Norm. What is she, a 24-footer?"? Well, there's a web page that shows jargonic confluence like that, except in real life.
One of the most interesting, because it had to do with the same phenomenon observed from two different perspectives which nevertheless came up with the same term to describe the relevant aspect for that perspective concerned inbreeding. Y'see, in the first place, it makes the family tree, if it's carried out along multiple generations, a mess of crisscrossing lines, such that you can practically turn it sideways and read it as legibly as when it's rightside up (and that can even help you get a perspective on relations that would otherwise be obscured). It also makes it harder for geneticists to track emergence of traits and ancestry using DNA, because of the limited pool of contributors. (I didn't understand that part as well, I have to confess, and metafilter's timing out for me AOTW.) Here's the thing: both genealogists and geneticists refer to what's produced—the tree in the former and the DNA record in the latter case—as a "palimpcest". Neat, huh?
Psst. I don't think that's how you spell "palimpsest." Otherwise, worth 20 slols, easy.
Jinx, you're to be drawn and quartered!
That's how I always played anyway.
I'm rubber & you're glue so something or other.
So your jinx bounces off me and sticks to apostropher.
You people are fools. Incidentally.
It's "palimpcest" because it's a palimpsest caused by incest. Hello.
No fair. That's like making up a jargon term for giving in really graciously, and spelling it "supercede."
It's a friggin' pun-based joke, people. Sheesh.
I have very emphatic feelings on the subject.
I confess I did not get the joke. Worth 25 slols!
Yes, I really didn't. Can't speak for ogged or apo.
I don't know, ac, but they did all seem delighted to have the opportunity to correct me.
It's possible that I have been trolled, I have lost, and I should just have a nice day, though.
You seriously misoveresitimate my attention span if you think I can read a comment that long with any care.
You could have read it on waste with that much care, then. *sniff*.
OOps. "I don't know" above was supposed to link here.
Okay, I re-read it. It was much nicer now that I know I missed the point the first time. Humility must improve comprehension.
Great. When can I expect those slols?
I really thought there was a whole other layer to the joke, that they were pretending not to get it just to frustrate you.
No, no, that imputes a wonderful degree of cleverness and malice to me I cannot honestly claim.
And I was impressed that they were doing it in concert.
Airport observation: the trend among young persons of wearing shorts emblazoned with slogans on the derriere is irredeemably unfortunate.
Don't me rehash the post about how stupid I am now, ac.
It's possible that I have been trolled
It's possible. But not this time. The w-lfs-n wins again and again. Yo black, some of you are all in.
Now that I'm imagining Ogged talking with a Jamaican accent, everything just got much funnier.
Clearly I should just read the back numbers.
Dat Swede, she nuh wan' none dis Ogged.
There's way too much English in the world.
This may come in handy.
wan' = waan
Anybody else here been to Jamaica?
Every time I've gone, I've had a stunningly large number of conversations start with some variation of: "Ya de whitest mon on de beach, chief. Yah lay down in de sand, yeh disappear. Dey hide yah from de sun back 'ome?"
My complexion seemed to amuse them to no end.
Well, I've only been once, and what I remember best is that once off my campus, the laws of the universe reasserted themselves, and the philosopher-sized guys from schools I'd never heard of got all the female attention and I got very, very drunk.
Okay, really not interested in reading 102 comments before commenting (or, why I mostly don't comment here any more, especially knowing most comments will be one-liners), but I used to hear KM anecdotes several times a week back in 1983 when one of my housemates spent a lot of time working on sets at the University of Washington Drama School and bitching about that sonofabitch lead actor she'd mention by name each time being so obnoxious all the time.
However, gosh, how could you not give him due credit for his work in Showgirls?
I could ask what's up with the slashes, but I expect it's another local reference I missed.
Gary Farber, we remember you fondly! Seems ol' KM has settled down into a sedate life of golf-watching. I put the slashes in out of kindness, so that google will not find him here, and he won't find himself being talked about.
I take non-offended exception to the one-liners thing: when the topic is serious, smart discussion happens between the liners.
I think, like the two-woman fantasy, it's a dream that lives best as a dream.
This is a complete misconception. The two-woman fantasy is a dream that's best lived. I assure you.
Seriously, a whole plane schlep later and all you did was eleven comments? People.
Maybe you're right about what the actor thinks, ac. I don't know any actors well enough.
So I come late to another interesting discussion. Sigh.
Actors think "Four hours to kill in a friggin' airport. I suppose I can watch the PGA." Other actors think "Not many people know how much of an actor's time is spent sitting around and waiting, killing time."
Wouldn't it be better to de-Google by izzle talk? Kizzyle McLizzachlan? (Also, I think slashing "Kyl/e M" was a bit much. And the junior senator from Arizona is going to be very disappointed when he finds this page.)