(no subject)

Egad. It seems that Will Ferrell is slated to play Ignatius Reilly in the upcoming film version of A Confederacy of Dunces. According to what I read on the Internet, anyway, and we all know that you can always believe that. But apparently Ferrell did do the part in some sort of staged reading put on by the producers in Nantucket in June. I think they were considering Philip Seymour Hoffman, but I guess that fell through. That's too bad--I think he would have been really good.

But Will Ferrell?!? I don't think so. I liked him on Saturday Night Live, and he's probably fine in the goofy little movies he's done (most of which I haven't seen), but I can't see him being able to handle this. To me he's one of those guys who is fantastic on SNL but doesn't have much of a place in a full-length movie of any consequence. So I'm just not seeing it. It makes me wonder if the people producing the movie understand the book at all.

I probably shouldn't watch this movie if and when it comes out. It'll quite possibly only piss me off.

(no subject)

Good night. I'm not one of those people who go around looking for things to be offended by, but sometimes it happens. One of my work responsibilities is keeping the reprint correction file, where we keep records of errors that might be fixed if a book is reprinted. So I just got a forwarded email from an author who wrote:

I've only found one typo, but here it is: Page 139, line 8, "things gets ugly." It should be, not surprisingly, since I don't come from the rural south, "things get ugly."

Who the fuck would say that? I mean, even if you were ignorant or misguided enough to think that only Southerners don't know proper grammar, that's not the kind of thing you send in a professional e-mail. Unless you're a pretentious sack of hot dog shit, that is. It's all I can do right now not to send her a snarky reply. Let's see what I can come up with.

Dear Ms. Fisher,

I do come from the rural south, and since moving away from there I've noticed that stupid people are everywhere. And while working at the press, I've discovered that some of them even write books. Imagine that.

cordially,
Savage Henry

I was also thinking of this:

deer Miz Fisher, ask yo mama. i'm sure she no alot about when things gets ugly. like when she had you. bitch.

Lonnie Dewayne

"he hates these cans!!!"

When Eliza and I were at Urban Outfitters yesterday we saw a T-shirt that read "FUCK OFF" in funky letters so you had to look at it just right to know what it said. It made me think of a movie where there was a little kid with a shirt that had a similar obscene phrase on it--but I could NOT think of the movie or the exact phrase. The only possibility I could think of that I'd seen recently was The Jerk, but that didn't seem right because there weren't any kids in it. It bugged me all night.

So today I was walking through the grocery store and the realization stopped me right in my tracks: it WAS The Jerk. It was the scene in which Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters first meet. He's the engineer for the train at the circus, and she's looking for the little boy she's brought with her:

Have you seen a 5-year-old boy, blonde hair, and he's wearing a T-shirt that says "bull shit" on it?

No--there was this one kid earlier had a T-shirt that said "life sucks" on it . . .

And sure enough, right then, there comes the little boy driving the train, and he's got a shirt with "bull shit" on the back in those oh-so-'70s iron-on letters. That movie kicks holy ass. I hadn't seen it in years, so I got it from Netflix last week, and it's still just as good as I remembered it, if not better. And Bernadette was fine yo.

Anyway, I called Eliza to let her know that I'd solved the mystery. She was obviously relieved and said that she'll sleep much better tonight.

(no subject)

weird word of the night: maybe