So these are party highlights, right?
Oh, in other gossip news, David Hyde Pierce is gay gay gay. Shocking, I know, but I have mixed feelings about the idea that he seems to have been pushed out by Musto.
Huh. I wonder why he took so long to come out -- I remember back in the Frasier era being mildly surprised that he was straight. But I have completely non-functioning gaydar -- it's not that I don't form opinions, but I've learned not to rely on them until someone actually tells me what sex people they date.
You're just baiting the UK crowd, aren't you, ogged.
Wait, when was David Hyde Pierce ever straight?
David Hyde Pierce tried to claim he was straight?
Sometimes, slol, straight actors play gay characters. But you probably don't watch Walker, Texas Ranger.
Sometimes Nathan Lane plays gay characters too, it doesn't mean he's straight.
I love the Sun's three-point list of sins (Snorted! Licked! Shouted!), complete with bullets. Sweet.
I remember seeing somewhere as a comic factoid that wasn't it funny that out of Frasier, Niles, and their father, the only gay actor was the father. This was apparently false, but I'm pretty sure that was the public story back when the show was on the air.
I have a blight upon the earth game tonight.
Oh my goodness that George Best tribute clip is astonishing.
Hey, has anyone been following European soccer? How is my man Ribéry shaping up?
Your best bet is to rain fire down on that there blight of the earth. Exhausting, though.
I"m well aware that especially when it's time to stretch themselves for an Oscar, straight (or allegedly straight) actors might take on gay roles. ("I'm not a gay man, but I play one on TV!")
(a) David Hyde Pierce never struck me as one such;
(b) Niles Crane was not a gay role, at least, not back when I was watching that series.
re: 10
Wikipedia notes pointedly that John Mahoney (the Dad from Frasier) 'has never married'.
Ironically, given that he usually plays all-American guys, he's English.
Well, I guess Blackpool is in fact in England.
That guy on Battlestar Galactica and Hugh Laurie both do pretty credible Americans even though they retain their British accents offscreen.
And don't forget Stringer Bell (although his accent doesn't always work).
re: 16
Yeah, moved to the US as a young man, I believe.
re: 20
A few black actors in the US are actually British. Including Idris Elba. The Guardian had an article about it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/features/story/0,,2018733,00.html
And don't forget Stringer Bell
And Dominic West.
Dominic West.
Yes, but his accent doesn't work at all.
BWIM, I didn't catch on to his Brititude until I read about it somewhere.
Yeah, I don't actually remember if I caught it or read about it, but once you know, it's noticeable.
To my ear Elba and West provide an excellent case study in how and how not to do an American accent.
I wish to put an entirely unscientific but anecdotally supported proposition that the British actors who can do American accents come and do them in Hollywood: because all the ones I've ever seen on British television do a terrible job of it.
For a while I thought the archetypal example of a foreigner doing an unconvincing American accent was Madeleine Stowe, particularly in Twelve Monkeys. Then it turns out she's from California.
Yeah, what is the deal with Dominic West? I mean, The Wire isn't always aiming for verisimilitude, but his accent is so weird from the get-go. It's as if he's supposed to be From Somewhere Else, but everything about McNulty's character development suggests he's straight up local white ethnic cop material. Is it just paradoxically understated stunt casting?
I'm in the middle of Season 3, and it seems as if Bunny's right-hand man is the first person with a real Balmer accent they've had on the show.
There are a couple of real honest-to-God white-Balmer-sounding people -- the cop with the glasses and the mustache (is that Bunny's right-hand man?) and the little female teacher with the glasses in Season 4. But not a whole lot of 'em.
Bunny's right hand man, if I'm thinking of the right person (white dude with a bad brown mustache), is the real Jay Landsman. Snoop is also a real Baltimorean, I think.
28 - But Hugh Laurie did his on British t.v.!
It took me a long time to figure out what I had seen Elba in before (a British vampire series, Ultraviolet), because his American accent was entirely convincing to me.
I think that the very rare plague of carp blight upon the earth is called for in this case.
That's who I was referring to, Jay Landsman as Dennis Mello. And that's fascinating that the dude gets to be the basis of one character on the show and play another.
It's remarkable how un-sexy are those grainy B & W pix of Best doing remarkable things with unclad women. Particularly as the photo of Ms. James further down the page is rather inviting.
(She is not, however, the Casey James who pops up, out, & everywhere on a Google image search.)
Which reminds me to wonder whether Belle du Jour was ever outed?
But Hugh Laurie did his on British t.v.!
In what? The only British t.v. I've seen him on is Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder.
Elba gets away with mumbling some of the stuff that he can't successfully Americanize, and "motherfucker" just kills him.
Is it a false memory? I seem to remember him doing American reasonably often on A Bit of Fry and Laurie.
40 to 38. I've never seen Fry and Laurie.
"motherfucker" just kills him.
Clip!
I'm imagining something like, "When you say it like this, it's a different word: Motherfuckaaaaaaa!"
One interesting thing is that there are a few words, that the average person might not pronounce more than once a year, that can completely give away whether an actor is a Brit posing as American or vice versa; even if his accent is perfect, he may not be aware that the accent is different on some word like "debris" or "strawberry".
Oh, I'm stupid. Never mind.
the accent is different
to reduce confusion, replace "accent" here with "emphasis".
Slol, you're an apologist for a drug dealing killer. It's always "muthafuckah" with that guy. He makes it seem as if it's the result of venom, but really it's just because he's a Brit.
29: On the other side of that, I once had a half-hour conversation with a lonely old lady in a chip shop in Brighton, at the end of which it came out that I was from California and she was amazed, having thought I was a Brit.
If necessary, I can call on the British friends who were present to testify that I was *not* faking an accent; the old lady was just nuts.
Who has good Wire commentary? Since I'm several years behind, I wasn't looking for it as it ran. I remember a few stray Yggles comments. Is there anything else good going on?
47 could be usefully shortened to "I met an old lady who was nuts".
49: But then it isn't funny, or relevant to the accent discussion, see.
By the way, Wrongshore, another interesting casting move is that the Deacon is one of the people Avon is based on--a former big time dealer who was busted by series co-writer Ed Burns.
I think Jim Henley has a bunch of Wire talk in his archives, though I haven't actually checked to see if I'm imagining that or not. Television Without Pity has gone back to the beginning to do full recaps of the whole thing -- they're a good chunk of the way through season 1 at the moment -- but that may not be sufficiently commentaryish for you.
I crossed paths in Colorado with some hikers from Pennsylvania (where I'm also from.) "What's that accent?" they asked. "Pretentious," I confessed.
I'm trying to remember the name of the blog that does big posts that David Simon comments on sometimes...gimme a minute...
52: Thanks.
51: Haven't met the Deacon yet.
You can't just flout Grice's maxims willy-nilly, B. There's an art to it.
Yeah, at least buy Grice dinner first, you slut.
I think this is the one I'm thinking of, and look in the right sidebar here for more. We've had some Wire posts too.
Flout you, Ned. Flout you very much.
Dudes, I don't even know who Grice is. If the man can't be bothered to introduce himself, it's not my problem.
58: Excellent. Yet another day that I will contemplate--nay, live--the difference between having a job and doing a job.
And there's a good post on the depiction of economics in the Wire here.
Elba is quite good in Ultraviolet and of course unspeakably hot. I would almost watch The Wire just for him but I can't imagine anything less interesting to me than the lives of drug dealers and drug cops in Baltimore.
B. Wakes up after a night of intense, red-hot flouting, looks at the head on the pillow next to hers, and she wonders: "Who's that guy?".
Science is born in wonder.
Idris Elba is indeed very, very, very hot.
A. : Drugdealers and cops in Fargo. The mean streets of real Fargo, I mean, not the Coen Brothers fake Fargo.
Rob, you don't know what you're missing. It's awesome.
It's awesome.
It really really is. No showtunes, though.
49: So Bridgeplate still has the fastball, s/he just deploys it strategically these days.
B. Wakes up after a night of intense, red-hot flouting, looks at the head on the pillow next to hers, and she wonders: "Who's that guy?". says, get me some coffee.
"Unspeakably hot" comes as close as anything to describing Elba.
As a sidenote, just to refer back to the original post for a sec, it strikes me that Calum Best exemplifies a sort of untrustworthy neck musculature I've tried unsucessfully to describe before. This photo is probably the clearest place to start.
Also, no thanks to the rest of you, I've learned that Ribéry is about to join the Bayern team.
Interestingly, I had no clue that anyone would find Stringer Bell hot until one of the other characters described him as "fine" and some women gushed about him in some question/answer session on the DVD. Can I be straight now?
Can I be straight now?
What is this, a referendum?
untrustworthy neck musculature I've tried unsucessfully to describe before
Can you try again, now that you have visual aids?
What is this, a referendum?
I could ask you the same thing.
Interestingly, I had no clue that anyone would find Stringer Bell hot until one of the other characters described him as "fine"
Dude, you're a fucking psycho.
I could ask you the same thing.
But I was addressing ogged. Ogged appeared to be addressing the populace.
Dear SPQR,
Can I be straight now?
It's awesome
You know, I'm going to have to move The Wire up on my list of random things to do, or look at. I think I saw most of Season 1 and part of Season 2 when they first aired.
The oddity (or not) is that given that I've lived in Baltimore for over 10 years now, it's actually a little painful to watch the show. The junkie population here is inordinately, rather shockingly high, and the sullen despair registered in that show can be felt around the city.
I'm really liking it, although I suppose after I finish it I'll have to watch some television with women in it. I liked Ogged's comparison to the social sweep of Dickens -- very good comparison.
Oh, and of course I've met Deacon. Thanks for all the references. Idris Elba is preposterously hot. You may be straight.
Is that a permissive or a probabilistic "may"?
Looks like it was Jackmormon who made the Dickens comparison.
I took my shoe off while typing a paragraph at work today, but it just didn't have the same effect.
Can you try again, now that you have visual aids?
I'm really not sure I can do better than "look, look, doesn't that show a swagger that's all laziness! Do you see how his underdeveloped---yet oddly puffy---forward-canting neck forms an almost perfect cylinder? And yet he has the elongated neck-vertebrae that speak of vanity?" It's hard to put into coherent words.
83: Depends on what he thinks of the girl in the College Humor/Harvey Danger video.
Maybe I'm touchy because I think his neck looks like my neck, JM.
Ogged, I've met you. Not the same neck.
It looks like skinnyflabbybeerneck to me.
I conclude from this that the Graham/Melville School of Characterological Anatomy Studies has a great deal of work yet to do.
Owing to copious drink of weak, watery ale and long evenings of nodding and ear whispering in dark, loud venues, Calum's smooth oblong noggin rested atop a column smoother than soap stone: unform and girthy, with neither shadow nor sinew to speak for it, lacking even the small burnishments of the Doric school. The pedestal craned outward from shoulder ever-so-slightly; nay, not stooping, or if stooping, stooping in ignorance of the fact. It was a neck for sitting on bar stools.
Hey, wait a minute. Is BitchPhD really Celine Dion?
My kid's way cuter than that grimacing little freak.
Yes, but is he cuter than her son?!
97: "cuter than that grimacing little freak." Cuter than the big one goes without saying; a carp is cuter than Celine.
a carp is cuter than Celine
You misspelled 'crap.'
Carp are cuter than almost anything. Carp are cuter than Heeby's butt.
The Plain People of Rome: O, Ha Ha Ha! Ho Ho Ho! (Sounds of thousands of thighs being slapped in paroxysms of mirth.)
But are carp cuter than Heebie's craps?
You know, I totally thought this thread would be about Pete Best.
a carp is cuter than Celine
There's something deeply unfair about the way Canada shucked Celine off on us while France got Isabelle Boulay and Mylène Farmer. Why do they hate America?
Why do they hate America?
Oh come one, everyone knows that Canada hates America. Asking why is just completely beside the point.
One thing some Canadians hate is the word America for the United States.
106: what about calling Canada "The Maple Leaf State," is that okay?
#105. Some people look at the things that are and ask "Why?"
A friend and I were invited to a party while we were traveling in Canada, and some guy, on learning that there were Americans present, launched into a long, loud diatribe-in-verse against the U.S. After a month of relentless politeness, it was actually pretty refreshing.
"The Maple Leaf Rag" would make an awesome national anthem.
Great...a music segue. I listen to so much shit I can't remember it, but I rank the stuff so it comes up more often, and Magic Sam Maghett came up, and I thought, would ogged, who knows more blues than I ever will, like this? Has he posted about it already?
Cause I think this album is insanely great. I can't seem to stream today, so I don't know if the samples are good enough.
Can't stream in winamp because I got this 24-bit decoder installed, and didn't bother to keep the old one. Highly recommended if you have the hardware to use it.
79 may in fact be the geekiest joke I've ever heard.
105: Isn't it just for bringing down the continental averages?
Everyone in Argentina hates America too. Same reason. I mean, not that there's nothing to hate, but it seems the less like us a country is, the less they bother.
Interesting stuff...Lindsay Lohan has been making the news interesting all freakin' day.
Oh and re: the D. West/ I. Elba issue: the debate over the accent involved is moot. Both of these parts were given to brits for a reason.
I was first attracted to the wire by the realistic dialogue: the black guys sound like black guys: they don't sound like they're trying to make themselves understandable, though I'm sure they are. The one exception is Stringer Bell. He speaks clearly,in mainstream US english, even when using idioms. Similarly, D.W. uses straight english, though one can tell something is off. Both of these chars are trying to be something they're not, originally. McNulty is trying to be something more than a beat cop, and tries to change his speech to match. Bell wants to be a businessman, and tries to speak like one. In both cases, the directors chose a british actor to try to imitate the target speech pattern. Their failures serve the plot.
OT: I went on my date tonight. Highly successful.
OTer: My wife once encountered George Best being thrown off a train because he was sitting in a first class carriage and he didn't have the right ticket. She said it was one of the saddest things she ever saw.
George Best was a sad old fucker. We have a framed picture of him around somewhere, as for a while he was on loan to the team my partner (and my bloody children too, he's done a good job on them) follows.
Calum Best is just a knob though, no redeeming qualities whatsoever. We half-watched the new contestants going into the Big Brother house last night, and one of them said that if she could shag a celebrity it would be Calum Best - which as C pointed out, showed a terrible lack of imagination. Although he seems easy, so maybe she was being realistic.
I passed Best once in Victoria Station in London. Shortly after his liver transplant. He looked really frail, and unwell. He also looked drunk. Very sad.
A friend of a friend used to look the absolute spitting image of Best from this era: http://www.jeremybwilliams.net/photocogitations/photocogitations/images/Best69_Empics.jpg
So much so, that people who see old photos of him (the friend) just assume they are looking at old photos of Best. It's fair to say that he -- the friend of a friend -- has never had any difficulty finding women willing to spend time with him.
119: I take back my comments on your amateur anti-jinxing. Obviously, I didn't know who I was dealing with. Congratulations on your mojo.
Also I'm wondering why Ogged is calling us all gits.
Counterpoint. Jamie's "Bestiebollocks" series was one of his finest hours in a blog full of them.
He probably thinks it's some quaint olde englishe term of affection.
Anyway, hope everything's going well for apo and family - it's the big day today, isn't it? Wonder how long it'll take for him to post the news here.
re: 126
"The lad's lady Di" is a cracking line.
He probably thinks it's some quaint olde englishe term of affection.
Apparently it's Arabic for "pregnant camel". Probably borrowed as a quaint olde Farsi term of affection.
119: How were the "eggs" and "coffee"? Did he suspect anything?
One of my favorite quotes came from George Best: "I spent all my money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just wasted."
127: It's today?!? Wow. Do you think we'll get gory photos?
Oh, wow, I'd forgotten. Yay, Apo, R. and the little one.
I'd just like to add my voice to the chorus celebrating the hottness of Idris Elba. godDAMN he is fine looking. also, I liked that Lohan was busted with a "usable" amount of cocaine. I mean, says who?
OT: I wonder how Apo is doing at this precise moment... :)
135: Probably fine. You just blog while they sleep.
135 is not OT, it is nicely in line with 127, 132, and 133.
130: The sex was great. He had to go home to prepare for work early, so he missed out on breakfast, which will be rectified this weekend.
Hooray apo and family! Thus one more blasted redhead enters the world.
How interesting! We get to talk about AWB getting laid and Apo seeing birth.
It's the circle of life, dudes.
AWB is actually eating a seal as she says that.
eating a seal
Or a kitten.
137: That's what I get for not reading the thread.
138: WOW! You go, girl! Sorry the b'fast preparations were for naught. But hey, all that food will still be good tomorrow morning, right?
I just had my own morning-after omelet, made of seal of course, with Bucheron.
148: I did not. I was rather demure, actually, as he was far handsomer than I expected (and expectations were already very high), so when, after two beers and some nice talk, he suggested "getting out of here," I figured he wanted to go home. I have a difficult time reading super-handsome dudes, so I don't pounce on them. But he was raised by two mommies and is kind of a gentleman, so he wasn't pouncing either. How we managed to have two drinks, get back to my place, and have sex twice without either of us making the first move is baffling.
How we managed...without either of us making the first move is baffling
Not to me it's not; that's the way it sometimes feels and it's wonderful.
He had to go home to prepare for work early, so he missed out on breakfast, which will be rectified this weekend.
Apo?
So, communication sounds like it was working fine.
152: Yes, excellent talker and listener, possibly boyfriend material.
155: What, the acronym or the admitting I made a funny?
The acronym. When you do make a funny, I'm sure we'll all acknowledge it.
As demure as a polar bear gets.
"Make a funny" sounds like a euphemism for farting.
149: How we managed to have two drinks, get back to my place, and have sex twice without either of us making the first move is baffling.
If you ever figure it out, let me know.
155: And the jackboot of authority comes down to rest upon my weary neck.
159: Funny, but worrisome. Maybe all those bestiality porn jokes aren't, really?
160:
That sheds new light on LB and Heebie's desire to be thought of as funny.
160: My goddaughter calls them "fluffies" -- as in, "Fluffies sound like doggies in the tushy."
Sweet.
159: Somehow we skipped that position. The pic made me say "Ohhhh!" out loud, though. My people are an attractive people.
Indeed they are. I am always troubled by the fact that my reaction to most several-hundred pound predators is "Oooo, cute. Can I pet it?"
I figure I'd have about the life expectancy in the wild of a paper airplane on the Sun.
NCP's goddaughter sounds funny.*
*Funny as in haha, not that she is a clown or not as in gassy.
On the veldt, some daughters sacrificed themselves to wild beasts so that the rest of the family could escape.
Clownae, stop it right now.
NCProsecutor--"HA! HA!" is an acceptable substiitute. I prefer a single "HA!" myself.
I like Dave Barry's "Har!" myself.
"Heh." is popular with the bloggers.
Technicallly HUALGALALAHUAHUALG isn't an acronym, so that's an option for you.
