Roll This Sentence Around on Your Tongue for a While

"Now a married mother living in Hawaii, Geimer was 13 when she told authorities Polanski raped and sodomized her during a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson’s house."

(courtesy LATimes.com)

Pretty amazing, eh?

The only way I can think of to make it better is to add "while Burt Reynolds watched from the kitchen window and Jay Leno fixed a car in the garage" to the end of it.

Now, whether it was rape or consensual sex with an underage girl is immaterial--can you imagine fucking a 13 year-old girl in the ass? I mean...WOW...that's really going for it.

Even if she did want to have sex with Polanski--which it appears is not the case--that's like if an actor auditioned for a role in a Wendy's commercial and the director suddenly demanded he recreate Daniel Day Lewis' performance in My Left Foot from start to finish.

What brought Polanski to the point where he thought giving a 13 year-old Quaaludes and fucking her in the ass was a totally normal thing to do? What had he done before that moment that made this evening just another night of fun, in his mind?

Can you imagine the shenanigans that went on at Jack Nicholson's house that never made it to the papers? And those that happened at Robert Evans' house?

I can. And it's blowing my mind...

Roman, Jack, and Robert Evans after a night of fun at Evans' house
(photo courtesy GoodtimeCharlie)

If you want to learn more about the escapades of guys like Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski (who partied together quite a bit), you should read High Concept, by Charles Fleming, which focuses on the life and times of one of the craziest sex freaks in Hollywood history--producer Don Simpson.

Here's a taste of what it has to offer, courtesy of Salon.com:

Simpson created an infamous persona -- he'd have hookers flown to his film sets, for example -- and eventually established a reputation as "the town's most notorious bad boy." He also had, for a few years, a nearly perfect instinct for what the public could be sold and a peerless story sense, manifested in cocaine-fueled, 40-page faxed memos.

It's hard to tell where Simpson's narcissism ended and his insecurities began. He subjected his chunky, 5-7 frame to epic quantities of drugs and booze, to late-night binges on peanut butter and hamburgers, to crash diets and workouts, to testosterone implants and to at least 10 procedures by plastic surgeons, including a butt lift and a penis enlargement. When Simpson died in 1996 at the age of 52, the coroner found 27 prescription drugs in his blood, plus cocaine, heroin and booze.

And from his wikipedia entry:

Simpson's unusual personal life has been documented in a number of sources. A chapter in the book You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again (which describes four prostitutes' stories about their sexual encounters with Hollywood celebrities) discusses his preferences for S & M and videotaping of their sessions. He is also known to have had several plastic surgery operations, allegedly including a collagen injection to his penis. People magazine, in an article after his death, alleged that he was a fan of snuff films.

Yeah. I guess when you're hanging around in this sorta circle, fucking a drugged 13 year-old girl in the ass is probably way closer to the line than it is for most people, thankfully.

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This Little Piggy Fell into the Gutter and Was Never Seen Again

Fortunately, this little fella's got a couple to spare.

In my best Jerry Seinfeld voice, I ask you this: What is going on with stroller manufacturers these days?

About 1.5 million Graco strollers sold at Wal-Mart, Target and other major retailers are being recalled after some children's fingertips were amputated by hinges on the products.

The Exton, Pa., company received seven reports of children placing their fingers in a stroller's canopy hinge as the canopy was being opened or closed. Five children had their fingertips severed and two children received cuts on their fingertips.

The strollers were made in China by Graco and sold...nationwide from October 2004 to December 2009.

In announcing the recall Wednesday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said the strollers pose an amputation and laceration hazard to children when opening or closing the canopy. The government advised consumers to stop using the strollers and contact Graco to receive a free repair kit.

This is the second major recall in recent months of strollers that led to fingertip amputations and injuries. Last November, about a million Maclaren strollers were recalled after there were 12 reports of children's fingertips being amputated by a hinge mechanism.

The safety commission is now examining all strollers with the designs that have caused the fingertip amputations, said spokesman Scott Wolfson.

(courtesy LATimes.com/AP)

What the F?

So...the fingers of children across the country have presumably been getting amputated since 2004 and the Consumer Product Safety Commission is only now looking into it? Is anybody else thinking about Fight Club right now?

Q: How many severed baby fingers does it take before people give a shit?
A: Seventeen. Duh! Ask me something hard next time...

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News Flash: People on Morphine Don't Care About Anything

Having trouble with that trick knee, soldier? Does it remind you of when that car bomb blew up and a child's severed head catapulted across the square and shattered your tibia into a million bite-size pieces?

Have some more morphine!

You'll be fine as long as you take something that allows you to sink into the couch and stare at the ceiling, thinking about nothing all day, ignoring the shrill cartoons blaring from your TV, ignoring the machinations of your own brain, as your run-ragged wife serves you sugar cookies and bug juice, then sits in the kitchen smoking 100s, wondering if people would really blame her if she ran away and never came back.

Overall, experts estimate that about 20% of troops and veterans suffer from PTSD, along with 8% of civilians.

Hmmm...so 20% of the troops we send to Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban, in part by destroying the poppy crops that fill their war chests, need pharmaceutical-grade morphine made from those poppies in order to function once they get home?

What kind of fucked-up joke is this?

"Beware the military-pharmaceutical complex..."

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Thanks for Playing

Indie 103.1 FM

Obituary

A few days ago, as I sat at a sidewalk cafe in Larchmont Village, I read in the LA Times that my favorite radio station was dead.

The news explained why the comforting voice of Steve Jones was nowhere to be found on the dial at 12 bells, replaced inexplicably by the same Mexican music blaring from 80% of the other stations on the dial.

The news hit me like a ton of bricks.

I listened to Indie pretty much every day. Aside from Jonesy's Jukebox in the afternoon, I greatly enjoyed The Last of the Famous International Morning Shows, hosted by small-time-punk Joe Escalante, featuring a cryptic weather report phoned in by David Lynch and an always-entertaining frantic sports report from Timothy Olyphant.

It was the perfect way to enjoy a morning drive to work, just as Jonesy was the perfect way to while away an hour stuck in traffic in the afternoon.

So why did the good times have to end?

Well, here is one explanation, courtesy of the LA Times:

"The station cultivated an aura of hipness and iconoclasm – great for making a small and loyal audience feel like part of an exclusive club, but not necessarily a good business model. In the most recent Arbitron ratings, Indie ranked 38th in the market, averaging just 0.6% of the listening audience, compared to the 3.5% for alternative music outlet KROQ-FM (106.7)."

I know radio is 'a dying medium' and there is 'no market for good music anymore' but I thought Indie had found its niche in one of the few cities that could actually support such a station. LA is the home of numerous shitty bands, and numerous losers, but also the home of a multitude of hipsters and artists with pretty good taste in music.

I figured they all listened.

Maybe they did--I mean, how does anybody know if I am listening to the radio in my car? 0.6%? Do they get those statistics based only on call-ins or random telephone polls or something? How can that be accurate?

And yet, when I brought this news of cancellation up to my friends, I discovered none of them were listening. So maybe I was, indeed, one of the few, proud, and now sad.

I no longer use my radio. Hardly anybody I know does. Why would they? An era has ended.

Thanks, corporate America! And goodnight, sweet prince.

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