Marilyn

This excerpt is more about Jack Kennedy and does not actually involve Marilyn directly, but as it comes from our Marilyn book and captures the ambience of these social circles, we are using it. Again, no real authority on history is likely to credit this as a true occurrence, but this will not deter us from our historical and literary studies.

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Later, when Sinatra asked JFK what he might arrange for him during his stay, JFK told the singer, “I want to have a Naked Lunch.” Kennedy was making a hip reference to the scandalous and avant-garde William Burroughs’ novel, Naked Lunch, but Sinatra misunderstood.

“Okay George can arrange that by the pool,” Sinatra said. “I’ll show mine if you’ll show me yours.”

“You don’t get it,” JFK said. “My favorite naked lunch is shaved pussy sprinkled with cocaine.”

After he recovered from his surprise, Sinatra said, “I can arrange that, too, I’m sure.”

-- Darwin Porter, “Marilyn at Rainbow’s End”

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( Pics )

“An early morning shower?”

Pi says, “An early morning shower?”

Monk says, “Yeah, Pop is blaring his country music this morning, and since I needed a shower today, I thought it would be better to freshen up now, instead of having my time in the evening feel all crowded. And I needed to be wakened up and roused.”

She says, “Wouldn’t this have been a good morning for a walk?”

Monk nods, “I know and I thought about it. But I am feeling a little weak and wobbly.”

Daimon says, “Does that mean we can consider this to be that break in your run of good health.”

Monk says, “I don’t know. I only feel like I am 10% off my game. It’s mostly this tickled throat, with a bit of a cough that won’t quit. I only have the slightest fever, and my nose is not particularly runny.”

Pi laughs, “Give it up, Monk! You’re sick.”

Monk shrugs, “If you guys want to count this, go ahead! I can understand. But I haven’t even felt like popping my Nyquil, which I personally consider to be the true benchmark of illness, with the real clincher being when I am bedridden. As for what I got now, this is just a minor annoyance. But it is borderline, I grant you. And I am a little worried: this could continue to get worse.”

Inauguration Morning

I catch a little of MSNBC’s coverage of the inauguration. I like Chris Matthews’s take, recalling that he has always been enthusiastic about Obama.

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Rachel Maddow says, “Chris Matthews, I think of this as Chris-Christmas.”

They laugh. Chris says, “Yes, it is. I just love it. And I think about the alternative that could have been today: John Bolton becoming Secretary of State, or a war in Iran, the Koch brothers up on the platform with Donald Trump, yukking it up. It’s not that day, is it?”

-- MSNBC

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Yes, it could be worse.

The Public Inauguration

A good ceremony and a good speech.


( Speech Excerpts )

Scientology

An interesting historical note on the foundation of Scientology.

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The IRS presentation had been a complete success. Scientology emerged victorious from a "two-decade" showdown with the agency that included a huge campaign of lawsuits ("200 lawsuits on the part of the church and more than 2,300 suits on behalf of individual parishioners in every jurisdiction in the country," according to Mr. Wright). The IRS granted Scientology tax-exempt status as a church, forgiving it most of $1 billion in unpaid back taxes. A thousand Scientologists met at the Los Angeles Sports Arena to celebrate that "the war is over!" The "imprimatur of the American government on the church as a certified religion" rather than a "commercial enterprise," Mr. Wright argues, has shaped the movement's subsequent history, giving it financial security, long-sought legitimacy abroad and the ability to invoke freedom of religion as a justification for the whole range of its activities.

-- Paul Elie at The Wall Street Journal

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Daimon says, "As if the Catholic Church were not bad enough."

Football and the Theater of Pain

There has been a lot of attention over the last year or so on the harm that football players suffer in their profession and game. And, yes, we are talking about real football, not soccer, that game which everyone runs around in shorts, but the game where you go out in helmets and pads and beat the hell out of each other in full manly glory, the game that more people are thinking may be too violent. This excerpt comes from another account on this dark side.

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The perspective of pain is what this story is about. For fans, injuries are like commercials, the price of watching the game as well as harrowing advertisements for the humanity of the armored giants who play it. For gamblers and fantasy-football enthusiasts, they are data, a reason to vet the arcane shorthand (knee, doubtful) of the injury report the NFL issues every week; for sportswriters they are kernels of reliable narrative. For players, though, injuries are a day-to-day reality, indeed both the central reality of their lives and an alternate reality that turns life into a theater of pain. Experienced in public and endured almost entirely in private, injuries are what players think about and try to put out of their minds; what they talk about to one another and what they make a point to suffer without complaint; what they're proud of and what they're ashamed by; what they are never able to count and always able to remember.

According to a study conducted by the National Football League, the approximately two thousand players active on the thirty-two NFL teams suffered about forty-five hundred injuries in 2011, for an injury rate of 225 percent. These were injuries that caused not simply pain and discomfort but also cost players at least two weeks of playing time; these were not simply bruises and scratches and abrasions but also concussions, torn ACLs, ruptured Achilles tendons, high ankle sprains, hyperextended elbows, broken metatarsals, turf toes, stretched or compressed spines, pulled hamstrings, and torn muscles, along with assorted strains, contusions, and herniations. These constitute, for the players who experience them, at least the first paragraph of the writing on the wall — because in the NFL the writing on the wall is always written directly on the body.

-- Tom Junod at Esquire

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Pi says, "What about the harm they cause? against non-players. Like the bullying and the rapes."

Daimon sighs, "One social issue at a time, please!"

Daily Fun

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