Archive | October, 2012

What would Miss Manners say?

4 Oct

October 4, 2012

I was faced with an etiquette dilemma yesterday. Etiquette is an interesting subject. There are rules for every situation. Which fork do I eat my salad with? How long do I wait before writing a thank you note? Should I tell my date she has food stuck in her teeth? Stuff like that. Not that I really care. These are the stupid rules that I don’t live by. Which fork do I eat my salad with? Whichever is in my hand. How long do I wait before I write a thank you note? I dunno, never wrote one. I said “thank you” at the time the event I was thanking them for occurred. Should I tell my date she has food stuck in her teeth? Not if I want her to put out.

But I do have to admit that once in a while I am faced with some social situation that I wish there was a handbook for. For example, I think there was a dead man in the men’s room yesterday.

At times like this I wish Mr. Know-It-All was still around because this is right up his alley.

Let me say a (mercifully very) few words about my bathroom philosophy. In a nutshell, I am all business. I don’t talk or socialize, I don’t conduct business, I go in and do what I am there to do and leave as soon as possible. OK, maybe I’ll send a text while I’m siting there but who hasn’t done that? There is nothing enticing to me about the men’s room. I will therefore avoid anything less than clinical in this description. 

I went into the men’s room at The Company I Am employed by and was immediately struck, almost physically struck, by the smell. It was a stench the likes of which can only be found in Satan’s can of air freshener. In normal situations I’d turn around and use the facilities on another floor, but in this case I really had no choice. Not if I wanted to retain my dignity. So I went in and rushed to the urinal and yada yada yada the stink only got worse the longer I stayed there. So I rushed over to the sink (no matter how diabolical the odor I still wash my hands and you better too!) and as I was washing I looked in the mirror and had a view of the closed stalls behind me.

I thought I was alone. There was not a single sound, other than those I made, the whole time I was in there yet the mirror showed me the feet of a man in the stall. Nothing remarkable about the shoes. They were the average shoes you’d see on a businessman, and I am not enough of a lavatory detective to identify a man from his shoes in the bottom of the bathroom stall, nor do I care to be.

But they didn’t move.

The stink was only getting worse yet whatever was causing it was doing so soundlessly. The man in the stall seemed to be totally motionless. And the stink in the men’s room could only be caused by the rotting dead.  Either that or it was the stench that killed the guy and I wasn’t sticking around to find out.

I hurried out and went back to my desk.

What should I have done?

A- Ask the guy in the stall if he is OK.
This makes no sense. If he is fine then it will do no good to embarrass the guy by pointing out that he stinks like road kill. If he is sick then I sure don’t want to catch the evil effluence that he has. And if he is dead then the question is moot.

B- Inform someone that there is a dead man in the men’s room.
If I am wrong then all I have done is embarrass myself, not to mention the guy in the stall when security arrives to investigate.  And if he is dead then my filling out forms and spending time telling various authorities about how I found the corpse on the toilet will not do him any good, let alone me.

C- Do nothing and pretend you were never there.

C. I did C.

I never did find out if the guy was dead, but when I went back at the end of the day the bathroom had been sanitized to within an inch of its life.

 

For another men’s room etiquette issue, click here.

You know another guy who doesn’t follow social conventions? Larry David. Here is one of my favorite bits.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Late Night Movie House of Crap: The Nude Bomb

3 Oct

October 3, 2012

No Classic Repost today, Mr. Blog is all new!

I consider it a hard and fast rule to never put the word “bomb” in the title of a movie. You’re just asking for trouble. And it this case it is justified.

I’ve seen this film. And I have asked myself, over and over and over, “why would anyone make a softcore porn version of Get Smart?” Now I admit, calling this softcore porn is a stretch. There is no frontal nudity. But the jokes are a little on the risqué side, especially for anyone who grew up with the sanitized 50’s-era TV show upon which this is based. And Don Adams working blue? Why? As you’ll see in the trailer, they take a typical Get Smart joke- Don shooting himself with his gun- and turn his catchphrase into a double entendre. Meanwhile, the rest of the TV cast? Gone. In later years in later Get Smart revivals, this film is mercifully ignored.

As befitting a bomb of a movie, I’ve gone to a bomb of a website for more info. From wikipedia:

In the film, Smart is called back into service in order to stop a nefarious KAOS terrorist plan from exploding a bomb that destroys only clothing, so as to leave KAOS as the only supplier of clothes to the entire world.

Adams’ cousin Robert Karvelas (Larrabee) is the only other cast member from the television series to return for this film. Dana Elcar plays the Chief in this film (as Edward Platt had died in 1974); no reference is made to Barbara Feldon’s character from the TV series, Agent 99, or even her marriage to Smart. Sylvia Kristel, at the time well known for her appearances in the Emmanuelle film series, makes a brief appearance as Agent 34, with actress Andrea Howard playing as Agent 22 (Agent 99-type role) and Vittorio Gassman playing the Blofeld-like villain. Agent 13 was recast as Joey Forman, who played Harry Hoo in the TV series. Pamela Hensley, who was by now well known to science fiction fans for playing Princess Ardala in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, appeared as Agent 36.

Smart’s agency, called CONTROL in the TV series, was called PITS in this film, an acronym standing for Provisional Intelligence Tactical Service.

In spite of the title, the film was given a PG rating because there was no frontal nudity in the film. There are five times in the film where the bomb is detonated, but in each case the actors cover up their private areas with strategically placed briefcases or guns (Buckingham palace guards) or are shown only from the waist up. In one case members of a football team are in a huddle when a bomb detonates, revealing bare behinds of some of the players. In the final scene, the three stars of the film are rendered nude by fallout from the destruction of all the bombs at the enemy headquarters, but are seen from the backsides from a distance, and then with a “the end” caption covering each of their backsides.

The film was a box office disappointment. Nearly a decade later another revival film was produced, this time for TV, on ABC. Get Smart, Again! would feature most of the surviving original cast members and ignored the events that took place in The Nude Bomb for continuity purposes. This was followed by a short-lived revival TV series for Fox.

And just for fun, here is a truly funny foreign movie poster.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →