Spencer Tweedy, who writes well, considering his youthful appearance, writes:

Soo I watched Harold & Maude last night. So good! I love the kind of movie (or book) where they leave enough for you to interpret or figure out. That way every time you watch/read it you think about something new.

I tend to read a lot of quirky bloggers, and I must note that that quote comes from a post on Tuesday entitled, "your hands smell like diapers". That qualifies as quirky enough, doesn't it? He says it's a quote from Sam, and the full quote is “Your hands smell like diapers.. in a good way.” I'm not sure how to take that either. When I worked in the R&D lab at Drackett, we called the Renuzit Powder Room air freshener "baby butt" because it had the same fragrance as baby powder.

I'd previously run a gas station, and cleaned a lot of restrooms. Women are much filthier than men, and I was aghast when I found there was a Renuzit fragrance named after women's restrooms. Yuck. Of course, there was also a floral fragrance that reeked of the lavender perfume used by old women. They tended to use a lot of it, as I remembered from my youth, possibly because older people lose their sense of smell - and they aren't too fastidious about bathing, so maybe dumping on tons of lavender is not a bad idea. But that fragrance wasn't given such a disgusting name.

Leaving Enough Out

Blondie was playing Funny Girl when I went down for supper. That's another movie that gives you a fresh experience every time you see it, even when you've memorized most of the lines. I suppose part of it comes from the songs. Good song lyrics are complex and they leave you room to interpret them differently every time you hear them.

Isobel Lennart wrote both the scripts for the Broadway musical and the movie, and she did a wonderful job, although she took some liberties. Jules W. Arndt Stein, who went by the name of "Nick Arnstein", was actually Fanny Brice's second husband, married from 1919-1927. Her first husband (1910-1913) was Frank White, a barber (although he performed small roles in 3 movies in 1947 and 1948.) Fanny was married to Billy Rose from 1929 to 1938. She had two kids with Nick, Francis (who married Ray Stark) and William.

Ray Stark, of course, was a famous producer, coming up with such films as Annie, Steel Magnolias, The Goodbye Girl, Murder By Death, The Electric Horseman, Night of the Iguana - and he produced Funny Girl and Funny Lady both on stage and on film. He originally wanted Anne Bancroft, and only settled on Barbra Streisand when Eydie Gorme and Carol Burnett also said no.

People Who Need People

In the movie, Barbra sings an intro to "People" that never made it onto the 45, an intro that talks about going through life single-file. It fools me every time I watch the movie, because I always think, I know all the songs in this movie, every last one, so why don't I know THIS one? And then after the intro, the song turns into the musical release, and I get that Curses! Foiled Again! feeling.

And it's really a shame that they left that out, because that's what the movie, and the song, are all about. I've heard more than one stand-up comic on Short Attention Span Theatre ridicule that song. What does it mean? What kind of people need people more than other people? And why are the people who need people luckier than the people who have people?

If you're too young to remember dial telephones, you probably don't remember Short Attention Span Theatre, either. Back when the Comedy Channel was new, they had two franchises that defined them. One was Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which they later allowed to move to the Science Fiction channel. It featured old "B" movies, mostly science fiction and horror movies, with the silhouettes of a few characters blocking the bottom of the screen, as if you were in a movie house, and these characters would make fun of the dialogue, the special effects, etc. It was devastatingly funny. SAST consisted of clips from various comedy clubs around the country, with stand-up comics of varying, often substandard, talent. They would run SAST for 5 or 10 minutes between other shows.

You can tell when a television channel gets successful, because they stop doing the things that made them successful. I'm not sure who said that first. It may well have been someone on SAST, fifteen years ago. But originally, CNN broadcast the news, 24 hours a day, instead of broadcasting twitters from viewers, A&E broadcast shows on arts and entertainment instead of gritty documentaries about ax murderers, and MTV broadcast music videos. Although The Daily Show is incredibly good at times, and the Colbert Report spinoff tends to be fairly good, the Comedy Channel is probably the most mismanaged channel on cable/satellite, in that it has the potential to be great, and to attract much larger audiences, but overall, it's fairly mediocre.

Single File

And if you've forgotten the topic at hand, I was talking about watching part of "Funny Girl" while I ate my supper, and taking away something new every time. I'm not sure whether it's because it's such a deep movie, or because it's dealing with an area where just about everyone over the age of 25 can be considered damaged.

As Blondie's Law puts it, "Nobody was ever loved in quite the way they thought they ought to be loved." And yet, the problem with Fanny and Nick was not that they didn't love each other, but that they couldn't stand to live as a married couple.

I tend to write a lot about relationships, and consequently, I get a lot of letters from people, telling about their relationships. Half of all marriages end in divorce, and of the half that end in death, a good deal of them ought to have ended in divorce, but either the couple couldn't afford the divorce, or else someone died too soon. In very few cases, though, do I find that married people fall out of love with each other. They simply have an unworkable relationship that no amount of love can overcome.

The Laumann Effect

A team of scientists, including Dr. Edward Laumann, the sociologist from the University of Chicago, did a study that was released as two books, one technical, and the other one a popular version of the study entitled "Sex In America."

The purpose of the study was to look at how venereal diseases spread, in order to determine whether an AIDS epidemic was likely to kill off most of the world's population. The study turned out to be unnecessary. The mechanism by which AIDS kills is very similar to the way the Black Plague killed, and people whose forefathers lived in the crowded filthy parts of Europe where the Black Plague hit hardest have inherited genes from the survivors that make them AIDS-resistant.

The very definition of a venereal disease is "an illness that is so hard to spread, that you can't catch it except by very intimate contact," so that was a factor, too. On the other hand, Laumann's study taught us much about the way that people pair up.

Islands In The Heartland

It turns out that socially, we tend to form "islands", groups that are fairly homogenous as far as age, religion, income, and education. (I may be forgetting a factor here.) Each island tends to be people who all know someone at the "hub" of the group, the hub being one person, or perhaps a very few people. These people will also know some other people on the island, but not all of them.

Obviously, you know people who are off your island. You may live on several islands, one being the people you work with, one being the people you attend church with, perhaps another island consisting of the people who all have cottages on the same beach, but you'll have most of your social relationships on just one island, unless you're very unusual. There are some people who have very close relationships on a lot of islands, but relatively few of them.

You are at a much higher risk for contracting AIDS if someone else on your island has AIDS - but you're also much more likely to be aware of AIDS in that case. Because of that, Laumann predicted that others' visions of an AIDS pandemic was overstated.

Nobody's Getting Laid Much

The other thing that Laumann's study showed was that, despite the so-called "sexual revolution", there is very little sexual promiscuity - depending, of course, on your definition of promiscuity. The number of people who have sex with more than one person in a given year is small, the number of people who have sex with more than two persons in a given year is much smaller, and if you have sex with more than one person in a given year, it's usually because you're ending one relationship and starting another. The number of people with 10 or more partners in their lifetime was an incredibly small percentage, and the number of people who have sex only with themselves (or even claiming to be not engaging in masturbation) is incredibly high.

The word claim ought to raise some eyebrows, of course. They didn't have private detectives following people around, but rather interviewed them. It's a given that people lie about sex, but Laumann took a number of precautions in interviewing people. The questions were carefully worded so as to not suggest any answer would be more acceptable than another, the interviewers were carefully trained to not reveal attitudes in their facial expressions, and a number of questions were asked repeatedly, in slightly different ways, to see how many people were giving false answers. Laumann concluded that he was getting pretty good information from his sample.

Getting The Science Right

His sample was also carefully chosen. When Kinsey did his study a half century ago at Indiana University, he ended up interviewing a highly atypical population, including a lot of college students, and including a lot of men in prison for sex offenses. Because of that, some people have argued that Kinsey's numbers were grossly exaggerated when it came to things like engaging in sex with farm animals.

And it takes some effort to understand what Laumann's study is reporting. For instance, one might ask how many people are homosexual. Well, that's actually multiple groups. There are those who describe themselves as homosexual, those who say they have had consensual sex with a member of the same sex, and those who say they are sexually drawn to members of the same sex. Believe it or not, there are members of each group that do not belong to either of the other two groups.

But That's Just Sex

One is tempted to say, "But there's a difference between sexual relationships and romantic relationships." In fact, it turns out that there's not that much difference. There are many people who have sexual relationships without any romance, and those who have romantic relationships without any sex, but it turns out that people tend to choose partners for each type of relationship from the same pool.

We keep hearing that the country is going to Hell in a handbasket, that morals have declined, and that sexual immorality is rampant. Fooey. It's not. If there's anything the numbers tell us, it's that most relationships end sooner, rather than later, and that there are long dry spells between relationships. Blondie's Law isn't just true in terms of quality of being loved, but in quantity of being loved.

Maybe you're in a relationship right now, and you're head over heels. I envy you. Maybe your marriage is doing well from your point of view. The statistics say that your partner may not feel the same way - and we all know friends who've been blindsided, being served divorce papers with no warning whatsoever. If you are happily married today, you may well be crashing on a friend's couch tomorrow night, because there's a protective order keeping you away from your home.

The Takeaway Truth

The takeaway truth is, uh, well, I haven't really got one. There are books and movies that are fresh every time you experience them, sometimes because the subject matter is deep, not easily plumbed in a single experience, and sometimes because it triggers something deep within us that may be changing from day to day. There are a lot of Eleanor Rigbys and Father McKenzies out there.

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name; nobody came. Father McKenzie wiped the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave; no one was saved.

All the lonely people. Where do they all come from? Take a look to the left of you, and to the right of you. Of the three of you, probably two of you are lonely - and perhaps it's three.

My Earwig

I've had an earwig the past few weeks, off and on, and it's not a complete song, only a lyric fragment, and after hours of googling to figure out what it is, I've come up empty. I think the song is to someone, perhaps a lover, perhaps a daughter, who is moving on to another stage in her life, and the singer asks her to remember that "part of you is me."

They used to say that if you don't use condoms, that when you sleep with someone, you're having sex with everyone she's ever had sex with, and everyone they have sex with. Increasingly, we're finding out that isn't precisely the case - but everyone out there is carrying a piece of everyone they've ever loved.

Daffy Duck, staying at the Notel Hotel, calls room service, and asks for a condom. "Yes, sir, we'll have it right there, sir. Would you like us to put it on your bill?" Daffy says Don't be thucking thupid I'd thufficate!!!!

Condoms, used properly, can help prevent the spread of disease, but until they come up with a condom for the heart, they don't result in safe sex.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
AIDS - Barbra Streisand - Black Plague - Comedy Channel - Daffy Duck - earwig - Edward Laumann - Eleanor Rigby - Fanny Brice - Harold & Maude - Kinsey Institute - powder room - Renuzit Air Freshener - safe sex - Short Attention Span Theatre - unloved