Sleeping Muse and Falling Rocket

1977. Studio Arena, Buffalo, N.Y. Twelve years old. I was goofing around in the lobby. Tall guy, jeans and leather jacket, walked by and gave me a nod. I played it cool for a couple of decades... BERNARDO! It was BERNARDO!!

"G etting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”                                   -Philip Roth

"Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink." On this day in 1834, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge died in the Highgate home of his doctor, James Gillman. Coleridge had lived with Gillman for 18 years, in an effort to cure his opium addiction. Just over the square from Gillman's, however, was a chemist's. Coleridge would go to the red door at the side to get his fix. An albatross round his neck indeed.

It began as The Booker-McConnell Prize. Then it became The Man Booker Prize. Should it not now be called The Crankstart Booker Prize?

The line 'Release the Kraken,' from Clash of the Titans, was written by Beverley Cross, husband of Maggie Smith.

Daughter on Tolkien: "So he was a linguist, an historian, and a storyteller. He studied Anglo Saxon, Old Norse, Icelandic, Welsh... He created Elvish, Dwarvish, Entish...  And the best he could come up with was "Mount Doom?"

Don Warrington as King Lear.

I had no idea that the screenplay for Yentl was co-written by the great Jack Rosenthal!

After Goldie Hawn and Bill Hudson, of the Hudson Brothers, divorced, Hudson married Cindy Williams  of Laverne & Shirley.      

The girl next to Nancy Culp is Sharon Tate!

Referring to Raymond Queneau's 1959 novel Zazie dans le Métro and Louis Malle's film adaptation as "the Zazie franchise" makes un peu malade.

The Harmonia Gardens set from Barbra Streisand's Hello Dolly (1969) was reused a year later in the temple scene of Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

The spell check on my laptop recognizes the word 'lacuna.' (A gap in the text of a manuscript). It does not, however, recognize 'Rembrandts as a plural.