NYC is in the midst of a massive wave of COVID, reportedly including some cast members. The show went on, but with a skeleton crew, no audience, and no musical guest. It was basically just Paul Rudd, Tom Hanks, Michael Che, Tina Fey and Kenan Thompson for the entire show. (Hanks and Fey welcomed Rudd to the Five-Timers Club.) Che referenced the fact that the actual cast members in attendance were 100% black.

Weekend Update consisted of the Che and Fey show, with the two anchors sitting on folding chairs, sans desk. The other three people mentioned above acted as a makeshift audience.

It was fortunate that they had quite a few taped segments to pad out some time, and they filled out the rest of the show with vintage clips.

The New York Post reported

A set insider has revealed that “four actors” have tested positive for coronavirus — and “three others” have called out because they are now “fearful” about coming to NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Center, where the weekly sketch show is filmed in Midtown.

Oh, those tricky “cc” and “ch” combinations. In the past week I have had to look up the pronunciation of four words that are mispronounced so often by allegedly intelligent commentators that I thought perhaps I had been pronouncing them incorrectly all these years:

machination
chicanery
accede
flaccid

My pronunciations were all correct. People just use words that they don’t know how to pronounce. Those ch’s are really pesky.

they are a “k” in machination
they are an “sh” in chicanery
they are a typical “ch” in chicken

As for the cc’s in flaccid and accede, for centuries they have been pronounced as “k”

(ækˈsiːd)
(ˈflæksɪd)

But many American dictionaries, in the non-fascist spirit of favoring description over prescription, are now listing “a SEED” and “FLAH-sid” as alternate pronunciations because languages are living, evolving entities. If everyone pronounces a word a certain way, it becomes correct by default. In a classic example of linguistic evolution, if you pronounce the word “mauve” in the traditional correct form, almost every American will either misunderstand you or think you’ve messed up! (It should rhyme with “grove.”)

Here are OED’s phonetic representations of those two words:

məʊv
grəʊv

Frankly, I have given up on this one. I deliberately pronounce it “mawv” now so Americans will know which word I am saying. I would pronounce it the traditional way if I were in Canada or the UK, but I’ve never had a need to use that word in those countries, and I don’t expect that I ever will. It just doesn’t come up that often in conversation. Maybe it could pop up in trivia competitions: “Name all of Tom Wolfe’s books.”

“A teenager’s dreams come true when a former porn star (Elisha Cuthbert) moves in next door and they fall in love.” Sung Hi Lee and Amanda Swisten play some of the girl’s porn colleagues. Cuthbert did not do a nude scene, but she did wear a thong.

That could be a fun premise, but it is not a fun movie. In my review, shown in full below the jump, I described it as “Risky Business with with moments of dark, ominous, and sometimes very ugly tone shifts, and at least two other elements which put a lot of emotional distance between the film and its audience.”

Continue reading “Sung Hi Lee and Amanda Swisten in The Girl Next Door”

Camila Queiroz & Agatha Moreira in a lesbian scene in Verdades Secretas (Brazilian series, 2021, s2e49).

The blonde looks a lot like Melanie Griffith in Body Double. The link above is a one-minute version of a much longer scene. (By the way, it can be downloaded with sound via right click. Here is the extended version (five and a half minutes).

Here he is, fucking one of the reindeer. Ah, the innocent treasures of antiquity!

image host

This is one reindeer game Rudolph didn’t mind missing. Of course ol’ Eros seems to come up a little short in the shorts, so maybe the reindeer didn’t even notice.

One related thought, concerning Eros Ramazzotti: that seems to be his given name, not a stage name. When you name your kid “Eros” you’re really rolling the dice, aren’t you? It’s a decent conversation starter if the little nipper grows up to look like Regé-Jean Page or the late Paul Walker, but it’s really a cruel joke if the kid ends up looking like Clint Howard.

Alec Baldwin joked that it was immediately after doing this sex scene with him that Anne Heche decided she was a lesbian.

image host

(As I remember it, the lesbianism didn’t really take. After she broke up with Ellen, she switched teams again. She’s as nutty as a Planter’s factory, but I’ve always found her to be a very capable, if somewhat eccentric, performer.)

“Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is now appearing to reverse course on the probe and saying its findings are “something the public needs to know.””

Stone said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination “to every question” they asked him. Don’t they start by asking his name? How can that incriminate him?

(Now that I think about it, admitting “I am Roger Stone” is an admission that you are someone with seven felony convictions, so maybe he has a point.)