Balls and Walnuts
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Peter Boyle, RIP
This morning, I caught the news of actor Peter Boyle’s death on CNN. CNN’s writers hardly softened the sting of Boyle’s passing with the words, “best known as the dad in ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’.” You know, I don’t care if ‘Raymond’ has been on for ten years. I’ve never watched it, and that’s not how I want to remember Boyle.
I’m old enough to remember that Boyle got his big break in the 1970 movie Joe, but I think I first saw him in Diary of a Mad Housewife. (The movies my folks took me too . . . jeez louise.) He’s had one busy career ever since, but I suspect he shunned attention from the press. Based on that IMDB link, he gave precious few interviews, and sadly, I haven’t been able to find a single one online.
You can always count on Wikipedia for biographical info, however:
“Boyle was a native of Norristown, Pennsylvania and was of Irish descent. He served in the United States Army, but his military career was shortened by a nervous breakdown. Boyle was also a member of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, or De La Salle Brothers, a Catholic teaching order, and taught drama at their school in Pittsburgh before turning to acting. He graduated from La Salle University in Philadelphia in 1957. He was briefly part of The Second City Chicago ensemble, and he studied acting with famed acting coach Uta Hagen. He had a brief scene in the critically acclaimed 1969 film Medium Cool.”
There’s more, of course.
I prefer to remember Boyle like this:
. . . as The Monster in Young Frankenstein. Genius casting by Mel Brooks, of course, but would YF have been the same with any other actor in that role? I don’t know. I doubt it. For a part with few spoken lines, Boyle was brilliant. Too bad that, at the end of the movie, he got the short end of the stick.
My favorite character of Boyle’s: Clyde Bruckman in the X-Files episode “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” Boyle played a psychic able to see everyone’s death, including his own, yet incapable of doing anything to change fate. I give credit to the writers too, of course, but Boyle’s performance captured the perfect balance of humor and poignancy — an ideal state I think all drama should aspire to.
Peter Boyle was a star in every sense of the word: a shining light, an actor who grabbed the audience’s eye the moment he appeared in a scene. As I write this, I’m choked up — I’m really not kidding. I’m going to miss him very much.
D.
Urgent appeal!
My pal Blue Gal has the #1 spot in her category for the 2006 Weblog Awards, but the lead is slim. You can vote for her here.
You can vote once every 24 hours, and the contest ends Friday.
D.
Oh, that Tom Delay blog?
Heard on Olbermann tonight: Tom Delay started a blog and had to shut it down minutes later. Why? A slew of comments, mostly hostile, some deliciously so. Down came the blog and all those comments . . . but not before James Risser re-posted everything.
Scroll down the page to read the “offending” comments. Here are a few choice excerpts.
Zalmay Khalilzad is now resigning as ambassador to Iraq. In my opinion, a staunch supporter of the war such as yourself should volunteer to fill this important post. It would do you some good to get first hand knowledge regarding Iraq . . .
Didn’t we already stick a fork in your ass and decide you’re done?
In case you thought this was a one-sided attack by us lib’ruls,
Tom, you corrupted the conservative cause and brought disgrace to our party. We can never forgive you for that. Please crawl back into your hole.
And even some celeb notice:
hi, tom!!!!
so glad you joined the blogosphere! now you can link to my articles and to michelle’s too 🙂
speaking of michelle, she just received a new batch of iraqi baby blood from general pace…if you would like to come up to nyc, drop in and you can suck on some of it too!
and, to you liberals on here….HAVE I TOLD YOU LATELY HOW MUCH I HATE YOU!!!!
December 10, 2006 | Unregistered Commenter ann coulter
Eh, that’s enough. Go see for yourself. (Warning: a lot of those comments are unimaginative, gay-baiting, and/or profane . . . leading me to believe most of these are wingnuts venting their anger. Us lib’ruls are far wittier.)
D.
Logophilia
I’m reading The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, recommended to me by M E-L of Ishbadiddle, and I love it. It’s part SF, part fantasy, all bildungsroman. Click that link if you gagged on bildungsroman . . . cuz guess what, kids, this post is about words.
Provided the rest of the book is good stuff, I don’t mind an onslaught of obscure words. Reginald Hill’s Dialogues of the Dead comes to mind — a book I loved right up until the resolution of the mystery, then hated. But Hill’s book was all about a love of words, and I learned many cool ones by reading it. Words like bheesty (a water-carrier) and dogsbody (a drudge). Yeah, I knew ‘dogsbody’ from watching Black Adder, but Hill’s book forced me to look it up for a change.
With The Shadow of the Torturer, I’m not sure how many of these are real words and how many are neologisms. I haven’t had a chance yet to look up every last one, but I intend to. Meanwhile, I’m scribbling strange words on my bookmark.
Here they are. Recognize any of ’em?
thurible
paphian
anacreontic
epopt
matross
peltast
cataphract
anagnost
psychopomp
uhlan
caique
paterissa
baldric
sabretache
bartizan
flageolet
lansquenet
. . . and several more. Some of these I think I should know (baldric, psychopomp, thurible, cataphract) but many of them are as familiar as the surface of Neptune.
I know obscure words bother some readers, and they bother me, too, when they’re out of place. In this book, they all seem strangely appropriate. (Yes, I’m still tweaked over the opening of Stephen King’s Gunslinger. Apotheosis of deserts, really.)
Here’s one I thought Gene Wolfe had made up: sardonyx. But I was wrong.
How about you guys? Have any favorite obscure words?
D.
Brittle
Typical doctor, I’ve never handled my own illness well. Even as a kid, I would become emotionally fragile with a common cold. Fever, in particular, tended to lay me bare. I remember bursting into tears over an episode of All in the Family.
I’ve never had that male barrier to crying — not much of one, anyway. I guess my father never shook me by the shoulders (the way Don Corleone rough-housed Johnny Fontane in The Godfather — Be a man! What’s the matter with you?) No, he tended to push my older brother my way, saying, “Go see what’s wrong with him.” Like that ever helped.
It took me a while to learn you simply didn’t cry in front of people. Least of all people you cared about. You could tear up and discretely wipe your eyes — yeah, that’s cool, no one looks askance at that. But the big emotional outpouring? Nah. Folks tend to think you’re tetched.
The urge to tear accompanies any of my strong emotions. In the past, I may have told the story of the time I developed an autoradiograph and got the result I needed to complete my PhD thesis. I called Karen and she couldn’t understand why I was crying. For me, that autoradiograph meant seven years of my life brought to a successful conclusion. I was RELIEVED. What couldn’t she understand about that?
When her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, that choked me up, too, and I think it confused her. Why should I be that upset over her father’s illness?
Certain memories I keep at a distance because, well, they’re just too embarrassing. Back in high school, I was a bit too emotionally naked for my girlfriend at times. That’s an understatement, you understand. I suspect she thought I was a raving lunatic.
But that’s adolescence, right? We get to write off lots of bullshit, blaming it all on childhood or adolescence. But I know I’m the same me, older and wiser perhaps, better able to keep things under wraps. One thing I’ve learned is that the emotions of the moment are not to be trusted — and are certainly not to be acted upon.
I’ll be a lot better once this crud passes. Once I can stop taking enough cold meds to anesthetize a draft horse. I won’t have to fend off these wandering thoughts and emotions that rise unbidden from the limbic system, fingernails on the cortical chalkboard.
Maybe my muse will wake up, too.
D.
Krugy gets a threesome
You remember Krugy, my wandering sperm? That lucky boy has seen some lush boobage as well as some delightful back-door action. Now, he’s experienced every spermatozoon’s wet dream: the ménage à trois.
First came Kris,
Then came Rella,
Then Krugy got down to some hot pussy action:
Six strange and wonderful things
It’s Lyvvie‘s meme. Blame her.
ONE
Karen: You got the money?
Me: Yeah. You hang on to it.
Karen: No, you can hang on to it.
Me: No, I’ll just spend it on cheap whores.
Karen: I’d like to know where you intend to find expensive whores around here.
**more below the cut**
Caption Contest
Win . . . um, the respect and love of your peers?
Hat tip to Smart Bitch Psycheros (in the comment thread) for this lovely image:
Caption away, folks!
D.