Month: June 2022

Weirdest public service job o’ the day

UncleScoopy

The sentence begins: “The New York Police Department said its beekeepers division …”

Say what?

Is ABC looking for a new scripted series? Police Beekeeper sounds like a winner to me. In an earlier day, I can see Leslie Nielsen gunning down the bees one-by-one with his police-issue 38 special.

The saga of the rugged Police Beekeepers reminds me of my own most famous acting role in The Battlin’ Bellhops, a partially fictionalized story about the legendary 603rd Airborne, which played such an important role in the liberation of Luxembourg. All of the members of that brave battalion of enlistees were former hotel bellmen, and most were just barely old enough to serve, yet they became lionized not only for their courage in battle, but for their steadfast unwillingness to accept tips from the liberated populations. They always stirred the Europeans when they marched into liberated towns wearing their little round red caps in lieu of standard military headgear. I had the supporting role of Skeeter, the naive and doomed German-American kid from Brooklyn who got separated from his unit and was mistakenly shot by an American sentry. The MP heard Skeeter speaking German to the locals and became convinced he was a spy, a suspicion which turned into certainty when Skeeter could not correctly identify the name of the famous Brooklyn baseball team. His crusty “sarge” delivered the funeral oration, in which he declared Skeeter to be “a swell kid, and a real great American, even though he obviously wasn’t much of a baseball fan.”

The original Emma Peel

UncleScoopy

There was another Emma Peel before Diana Rigg. I didn’t know that until I researched Brainscan’s latest collages of Rigg as Mrs. Peel.

From this page:

After several months of auditions, actress Elizabeth Shepherd (pictured right) secured the role of Emma Peel. It was decided that a new character would accompany Steed on his missions, as Cathy Gale was so synonymous with Honor Blackman. Emma Peel was born out of “man appeal” or “m-appeal”, and thus a new era of The Avengers began.

Filming started, and Shepherd completed the episode The Town of No Return and only half of The Murder Market after which her contract was terminated. The producers felt she was not right for the part, but a definitive reason for her departure has never truly been uncovered.

Shepherd herself said: “After I was the first Emma Peel in The Avengers series, they said, ‘We welcome your ideas.’ I emanated them with ideas, but they decided I was too difficult so they got rid of me, but kept the ideas.”

This is what she looked like as Emma Peel:

Way back in 2008, Oz reported her one and only topless scene (to my knowledge) in an obscure 1970 film called Hell Boats (clicking on the pic leads to the full collage):


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More of Shepherd in that role, thanks to Oz:


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Mike Pence calls for a national abortion ban

UncleScoopy

“The former vice president and other prominent Republicans are not only praising the end of Roe v. Wade but signaling bigger plans to strip women of their rights”

I don’t doubt that he sincerely believes this to be right, but there is more than his moral conviction behind this public declaration. In pursuing the 2024 nomination, Pence is looking for a strategic differentiation from Trump and DeSantis, and this is an obvious appeal to the powerful evangelical base of the conservative movement.

Given that conservatives are feeling their oats because of the current configuration of the Supremes, many are wondering which other “unenumerated rights” may be threatened because they are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.

Clarence Thomas seems to have his sights set on other cases involving the right to privacy:

  • The right to contraception that the court set out in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut.
  • The court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas that the Constitution prevents states from criminalizing private homosexual conduct
  • The court’s declaration in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that gay individuals may marry the person of their choosing.

Thomas’s interest in Obergefell is an especially interesting one, since a direct precedent of that decision is Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which the court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. In Obergefell, the Supreme Court invoked Loving, among other cases, as precedent for its holding that states are required to allow people to marry whom they choose, under both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause.

Thomas is a black person married to a white person – the very situation that led to the conviction of the Lovings, which was overturned by the decision of the Supremes! If Loving were to be challenged, would Thomas have to recuse himself?

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Yes, that’s right. It seems impossible to believe, even for those of us who have lived through all the turbulent subsequent years, but as recently as when I was in college, Virginia had a law forbidding interracial marriage.

Mrs Peel bootylicious

UncleScoopy

Collages and comments by Brainscan:

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Collages of Diana Rigg in her first season on The Avengers.

I’m a decade too young to have cared about her in 1965 but by 1972, when the series replayed on a local channel, I watched every second. All my friends and I loved her smile and her wit and her delightfully lithe body – they shaped our tastes in women for the rest of our lives. When she left the show, I was devastated, as though the woman of my dreams had gone away forever. Talk about your foreshadowing.

Anyway, Diana as Emma Peel walks around in something sort of see-through in episode 5.

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Then, dressed as Robin Hood for a costume party, she flashes some wondrous rumpus in episode 24.

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