Birthday Rambling
Happy birthday to me! It's fitting that I share my birthday with heavy-hitter saints whose feast day is today: Gerald of Mayo and Roderic of Spain.
Yeah, I'd never heard of them either. Sigh. Oh well, In lieu thereof, I'll dedicate the rest of my birthday post to substitute saints of the virile sort.
"While filming Predator, Jesse Ventura was delighted to find out from the wardrobe department that his arms were 1” bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger's. He suggested to Arnold they measure arms, winner gets a bottle of champagne. Ventura lost, as Arnold set this up with the wardrobe department." From Reddit's "Today I Learned" page.
"Robert Aldrich's 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly [was] an adaptation of Kiss Me, Deadly. Hammer once asserted his authorial rights so aggressively that an entire 50,000 print run of Kiss Me, Deadly had to be pulped because on the cover someone had accidentally left the comma out of the title." Link.
During my late teens, I went on a Mickey Spillane kick. I can't find the books now, but I know I read Kiss Me, Deadly and I, the Jury, and greatly enjoyed them. The Manly Handbook, incidentally, recommends a few Spillane novels:
The Ten Greatest Manly American Books
1. I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane
2. My Gun is Quick, by Mickey Spillane
3. The Virginian, by Owen Wister
4. Death in the Afternoon, by Ernest Hemingway
5. Deliverance, by James Dickey
6. The Big Kill, by Mickey Spillane
7. Will, by G. Gordon Liddy
8. An American Dream, by Norman Mailer
9. Me, Hood, by Mickey Spillane
10. The Girl Hunters, by Mickey Spi8llane
Speaking of G. Gordon Liddy (#7 above), anybody remember his radio show? I listened to it all time during its early years. Really enjoyed it. I wonder if he returned to his Catholic faith? I checked the Google Machine briefly, but nothing turned up.
"Mike Hammer drinks beer instead of cognac because I can't spell cognac." Mickey Spillane.
Mark Steyn, however, indicates we shouldn't be fooled by Spillane's posing: He was no hack, not at all:
In 1956 a ranking of the all-time bestselling American fiction found that six of the top ten books were by Spillane; a quarter-century later the all-time top fifteen boasted seven of his titles. Sales aside, I disagree with Chandler: I don't think you can love the English language and not love what Mickey Spillane does with it. Once, for a satirical column about the monumental uselessness of the British police, I attempted a Spillane parody based on the whimsical notion of Mike Hammer taking a job with some slothful pen-pushing paperwork-shuffling English constabulary. I discovered, like many would-be parodists (Mordecai Richler, for example, who attempted something similar for a chapter in Solomon Gursky Was Here) that writing Spillane is a lot harder than reading it. He's got so much precision in even the most unimportant sentences.
