How do high schools cover the Clinton impeachment?

I've wondered for years how high schools were covering the impeachment of Bill Clinton. How do they avoid the question of whether oral sex is sex? It seemed like the conservatives were guaranteeing that every child in America would have at least one classroom discussion on this subject.

But there were plenty of things they skipped over in my day. It was stuff I had to learn from the movies.

I remember them telling us that a prisoner was yelling to the crowds to get them to storm the Bastille and start the French Revolution. I remember the teacher mentioning that there were only a few prisoners there and that one was a sex offender. But how could they not mention that it was The Marquis de Sade? It seems rather significant. If not significant, then interesting. There've been a couple of movies about this, one performed by puppets, if I remember it correctly. It's been a long time.

They talked about how the Tsarina's relationship with Rasputin upset the Russian public. They didn't really spell out why----that Rasputin was a swinger. Since no one knew about the tsarevich's hemophilia, there was only one reason they could think of for her hanging around with this guy. I didn't quite realize this until I saw the movie the  Rasputin and the Empress (1932)

I don't recall any mention of Roy Cohn's homosexuality in discussion of the McCarthy era, although that was central to the Army-McCarthy Hearings which put an end to McCarthy. The Army got a lawyer who was as sleazy as McCarthy and Cohn. He showed a cropped photo of Roy Cohn with a hetrosexual they were suggesting was his boyfriend. This was from a group photo that was cropped to look like it was just Cohn and this other guy.

Where did the picture come from, the lawyer asked. Did the pixies bring it?

McCarthy asked him to define "pixie"

It's closely related to a fairy, the lawyer said.

I wonder what else I missed all those years.

I did have a teacher who told us about a new book out which claimed that Queen Elizabeth I was a man. But part of the evidence was that she wore a wig and smoked cigars, which seemed pretty stupid.

I had a teacher in junior high school who told us that one (male) historical figure "preferred young boys". I'm not sure if he actually preferred young boys or if he was simply gay. The teacher, by the way, preferred young girls. One day, I was home, sick. There was nothing to eat in the house so I walked to the McDonald's that was a block away and there he was on a lunch date with an 8th grade girl.

A couple of years later the history teacher went into Thomas Jefferson's thing, but there was no avoiding it at that point.

But I did have a class in Greek Mythology. The textbook included the story of Ganymede without explanation. 

Edgar Ulmer's Strange Illusion, Claude Chabrol's Merci Pour Le Chocolat

So I watched a B movie, Strange Illusion, made in 1945, directed by Edgar Ulmer, a film noir based loosely on Hamlet, starring Jimmy Lydon, the kid who played Henry Aldrich in that series.

Lydon plays Paul, a teenager who for some reason is spending the night in a cabin with his psychology professor. He has a terrible dream! His mother is dating a new fellow! Nothing happens in the dream to indicate anything bad about this, although he does has a flashback to his father's death in an accident at a railroad crossing.

The movie wasn't that bad. The acting wasn't great, but the performances had their charm.

"Hey, Vixen. What's mixin'," Jimmy Lydon says when he calls his girlfriend from a sanitarium. "Are you missin' my kissin'?"

I watched it not long after seeing Claude Chabrol's Merci Pour Le Chocolat. It reminded me of that movie a little. They're about wealthy families. In each, an amateur sleuth starts collecting evidence even though they have no reason to really suspect anything, and they were both rather talkie and they were both about rich young people looking into their rich elders' marriages/marriage plans. They both had tennis and piano playing. And they both put their characters through the crucible of polite social interaction.

But Ulmer's movie, if he was to be believed, was filmed in six days on a 2:1 ratio. It was made for PRC, the most impoverished of the Poverty Row studios.

Pope quits

First the Queen of Holland abdicates, now the Pope is calling it quits.

I wish the Queen of England would give it up and let someone else have a turn. It would make things more interesting. Not only would Charles move in and take over, but it would open things up to demands that Charles abdicate and let his more popular son, William, take over.

Even if William didn't want to shove his father out of the way, it would still create a bitter rivalry between father and son, like Jack and David Cassidy. Who wouldn't want to see that?

How do I get out of buying stuff from the Boy Scouts?

I feel stupid buying Girl Scout cookies. I don't really like them and the Girl Scouts themselves don't get that big a cut of the money. I'd rather make a direct cash contribution, but when you're confronted by children selling cookies, what can you do?

Then you have the Boy Scouts. I've had them come to the door selling stuff, raising funds. How can I tell them, "No. You're anti-gay and you don't let atheists in." So I'd buy whatever they're selling, and it was usually terrible. A very bad value for the money. I paid several dollars for what turned out to be a relatively small bag of carmel corn.

When the disgusting Zionist Ed Koch was mayor of New York, a group of teenagers from the Soviet Union visited the city. They got to meet the repellent swine in his office and he spent several minutes shouting abuse at them telling them telling them how terrible the Soviet Union was. Can you imagine this happening to American teenagers in the USSR? Koch's country, which was Israel, is known mainly for stealing land and murdering children so who was he to criticize anyone?

I'm not going to act like Ed Koch by berating Boy Scouts about their lousy organization.

One time I had a perfectly nice conversation with a couple of Mormon missionaries. They were nice kids. I don't think they realized how hurtful it was that they made no attempt to convert me.

When I moved here at age 8, a hipster architect down the street led a scout troop and they asked me to join. Even back then, I didn't like the idea of wearing a uniform, but they told me his troop wore their regular clothes. I still wasn't interested.

A year or two later, I told a kid on the playground at school that I didn't approve of the American flag on his Boy Scout uniform.

Now the Boy Scouts of America has postponed its decision whether to start letting gay kids join. The Mormon Church, their biggest sponsor, praised the decision to do nothing.

I might mention that there was a teacher in my high school. I never took a class from him, but he had sort of a G. Gordon Liddy look to him with a mustache and shaved head. It was only after he died that I found out that he was the gay math teacher I heard about---I thought it was a different guy. He had had some trouble with a right wing Baptist in the math department.

And, according to his obituary, he was active in the local Boy Scouts.

I attended one Boy Scout event, a kid became an Eagle Scout. I managed to keep from laughing when they played this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5ZGz7h0epU

I don't really have a point here. It's not even cinema-related except for the John Wayne thing at the end.

Richard III

In honor of the discovery of Richard III's skeleton under a parking lot in England, I'm watching Laurence Olivier's Richard III, in technicolor and VistaVision.

It turns out that the guy wasn't in as bad a shape as Shakepeare thought, but I can overlook that since Laurence Olivier wasn't in as bad a shape as the character he was playing.

The studio lighting and the technicolor doesn't give it a feeling of realism. I should watch Roman Polanski's Macbeth and Orson Welles Othello again.

The People vs. George Lucas

I watched the movie The People vs. George Lucas again, about the love-hate relationship Star Wars fans have with Lucas. It was a hard to sympathize with either side in this struggle and it's hard to tell which side was the aggressor. George Lucas suffered terribly. He directed Star Wars and that was the end of his directing career. He wanted to be a filmmaker. He wanted to be an artist. But all his hopes and dreams were consumed by what he considered to be a children's movie and the aging weirdos who kept buying the merchandise.

The fans' lives were destroyed, too. One woman stood in a room with the walls covered with Star Wars toys telling the camera how she lost her husband and children to this nonsense. Another guy told about how he kept buying special edition boxed sets of the movies, paying a fortune for each one because it was slightly different from the ones he already had.

Lucas has been pretty nice about it. He lets the fans make their fan videos, he provides them with downloads they can use and he even has a contest for them. But they still hate his guts.

It was a depressing documentary. Interesting, entertaining, but depressing.

Jim Nabors, newlywed

I don't know if Jim Nabors was openly gay or if it was an open secret or if it was a not-very-well kept secret. It was something I knew but I don't know how I knew.

Nabors has just married his longtime companion. They live in Hawaii but traveled to Washington state to get married.

When Rock Hudson was revealed to be gay, there were some anti-gay pundits who pointed out the reports in the '70s that Hudson had married Jim Nabors. I don't know what their point was, but they thought this was significant.

Back then, there was a middle aged gay couple that had a big party every year. They sent out invitations and as joke said that it was a wedding between Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors. Hudson, they said, would take Gomer Pyle's last name. His married name would be Rock Pyle.

I don't know if it was coincidence that they picked two secretly gay celebrities for this gag, or if they knew. And I don't know if the gossip columnists who didn't get the joke thought it was true because they knew they were gay or if they would have fallen for anything.

But, anyway, Jim Nabors and his spouse have been together for years so they decided to make it official. And good for them.

I only know a couple of Jim Nabors anecdotes. How he was attacked by a Marine Corps sergeant who mistook him for a new recruit when they were filming the episode of Gomer Pyle, USMC where Gomer goes to basic training. Nabors went to use the restroom when he wasn't supposed to so the sergeant grabbed him and dragged him out.

And one time he was on a boat sailing off the coast of France. They saw an island they wanted to go to, but it turned out to be a nudist colony. So they went. He was walking around naked and at least one naked Frenchman recognized him as Gomer Pyle.

He had worldwide fame. But too bad he was typecast.

Look at some other American actors. Fred Gwynne was cast in some high brow European movies.  Eli Wallach became an Italian action star, Henry Fonda became an Italian movie villain, and there was an actor who played sort of a bland college student on The Paper Chase who went on to become an action and science fiction star in Europe. 

That could have been Jim Nabors over there.