"Rod Taylor?"

Bill Harshaw makes a suggestion in the comments to "If there's a rule of 3 about celebrity deaths, we have a set of 2." I connected Anita Ekberg and Taylor Negron based on their appearance in iconic movie scenes — "scenes so utterly memorable that when the death is announced, everyone seems compelled to put that scene first."

I saw the obituaries yesterday, but I'd skipped blogging Rod Taylor's death, even though I love the movie "The Birds."

I don't think of him as being iconic in any scene in "The Birds" though. He was just continually around for Tippi and Suzanne to bounce off of. And Veronica and Jessica. That's a woman movie.

The man is only there because you've got to have a man somewhere, like to put a table in front of the fireplace when birds take it into their heads to come down the chimney.

The table-in-front-of-the-fireplace is perhaps the 20th image you'd think of from "The Birds."

Camille Paglia has a book about "The Birds." Too bad it's not on Kindle, but at least Amazon has a "look inside" function for it, so it's possible to see the extent to which she saw Rod Taylor as important. I searched for "Taylor," and got 6 hits, excluding the index, and 2 of them aren't Rod Taylor — they're Elizabeth Taylor. Elizabeth Taylor is, of course, not in "The Birds." The remaining 4 mentions are minimal, with the only substantive statement being: "Taylor is all male, with a bluff Australian heartiness that doesn't qu...."

I actually have this book and have read it, but I can't find it, so I have to go on memory and what Amazon gives me before clipping it short. (A bluff Australian heartiness that doesn't quite... what?!) But I think it's fair to say that Taylor is in "The Birds" to be the hunk of masculinity for the actresses to play against.

There's also "The Time Machine":



I've seen the movie. It's much worse than that poster, but that's a great poster.

I need to get back to my "tidying up" project. If I'd only gotten through the book stage — which comes second, right after clothing — I would have easily found Camille Paglia's "The Birds," assuming it passed the "spark of joy" test:

"The criterion [for books] is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it. Remember, I said when you touch it. Make sure you don’t start reading it. Reading clouds your judgment. Instead of asking yourself what you feel, you’ll start asking whether you need that book or not. Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn’t that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be?"

"I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife."

I wonder if "the latest thing" was a new expression back in 1922 when F. Scott Fitzgerald started writing "The Great Gatsby." Was "the latest thing" the latest thing, that is, new slang? If so, it's even funnier to see it used sarcastically like this. What a crazy trend it would be — a fashionable sex kink?

But then maybe there actually is such a trend these days. The "cuckold fetish" is a routine subject in Dan Savage's sex advice column, e.g., "Fuck My Wife, Please!"

Anyway, the sarcasm in today's "Gatsby" sentence is sublime. There's "the latest thing" and "sit back and let" and the marvelous "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere" — all of which only become funny — painfully funny — when you get to the tragically pedestrian phrase "make love to your wife."

It's also amusing that the problem is less that somebody is fucking his wife than that a nobody is fucking his wife. Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, who — if you violated the rules of the Gatsby project and go beyond the sentence — is the (supposedly) great Mr. Gatsby.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill Harshaw uses The Great Google to show that "the latest thing" was, in fact, a well-established expression. The casual use of the word "thing" seems like modern slang. There are a lot of common phrases like "the thing to do," "a [fill in the blank] thing," "it's my thing," and "the real thing" that seem like things people would have said 100 years ago.

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: Much discussion about how far Mr. Nobody really got: What did "make love" mean in the 1920s?

The 4 Mistakes of Ezra Klein... [ADDED: or Rich Yeselson].

1. He's written a blog post titled "The four habits of highly successful social movements," but he never talks about any habits.

2. He does have paragraph containing "four things," but the verbiage is mind-numbing and lacking in parallelism:

Whether [the Occupy Wall Street protests] will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things: the work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

3.  He evokes the best-seller title "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"  which prompts us to think about his ineffectiveness.

4. He promised a list of a specific number of items and then he didn't put it in the form of a numbered list. People love numbered lists. The internet is full of them. They're highly clickable. What's wrong with us? Why do we keep falling for that? 

ADDED: The post is signed by Ezra Klein but has an italicized parenthetical at the top saying he asked Rich Yeselson, a research coordinator at Change to Win, for some "thoughts on Occupy Wall Street." The post I'm complaining about is introduced as "some notes" from Yeselson, which Klein says he thinks are "worth publishing in full." Obviously, I didn't think this was worth reading in full, but now I assume the published text is completely the work of Rich Yeselson. As Bill Harshaw alerts me in the comments, this is "The one mistake of Ann Althouse." This is the great danger of pointing out someone else's mistakes: You look especially bad if you make a mistake yourself — and chances are you'll make the mistake at that point. (It seems everything every time I decide it's worth mocking a typo, I make a typo.)