Watching The Long Kiss Goodnight and enjoying it as much as I did in 1996.

I find that I have regularly misquoted a favorite bit of dialogue. My memory for wording is usually better than that. Perhaps I inherited a mild case of Mom’s lifelong malapropism; but that would not explain another anomaly: I also misremembered that Patrick Malahide made an atrocious attempt at a Dixie accent, rather than using his own voice. Perhaps that was another role.

Somehow I never had anything by David Bowie in my collection (other than a German version of “Heroes” on some sampler album, and “Under Pressure” on the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack) until recently when I picked up Best of Bowie (2002), which makes me wonder what the fuss is about. Perhaps he is celebrated for something other than music?

Okay, “Modern Love” is catchy.

A key scene in the above-titled flick cannot work unless the two leads have very similar breasts; and now I’m curious about the casting process.

Rhino Records made a series of CDs of Billboard Top Ten songs for various years. I wonder, if you summed every sequence of 52 consecutive weeks, how many songs would show in those Rolling Top Tens that never made a calendar year Top Ten?

Being nerdy, I might suggest this to Rhino: package the Top Ten of the chart’s first 52 weeks, and thereafter make a new package each time ten songs not in a previous package have reached the Rolling Top Ten.

I have a very vague – call it abstract – memory of watching the beginning of this movie, but it seems not to exist, so I guess it was a dream.

The main character is a spy’s only daughter. Daddy (now dead) taught her to lose a tail, improvise a disguise, pick a lock, do basic forgery; normal father-daughter bonding stuff. She is now grown up with a career to which such skills are irrelevant, but in establishing scenes she practices them for fun.

She meets a girl (~14) who is running from Bad People and distrustful of the ostensibly Good institutions. She becomes the girl’s protector, and suddenly spycraft matters.

The local spooks become aware of her and are rattled. Who is this new player? How long has she been here? What else has she been up to, and for whom?

A generation ago, it was reported that Readers Digest Condensed Books planned an edition of The Bible, provoking obvious jokes that it would cut three Commandments and four Apostles.

Now that I’m reading the thing, though, I do see where it could be shortened with little risk of offense.

• Genesis and Exodus contain several repeated genealogies.
• Exodus 36–39 could be summarized: “The tabernacle and its furnishings were made according to the detailed plans dictated to Moses by The LORD in chapters 25–27.” (I mostly skimmed over these chapters.)
• Leviticus 1–7, prescribing rituals of sacrifice for all occasions, could be put more concisely in table format, as could various parts of Numbers.
• Leviticus 13–14, concerning skin infections, may be obsolete.
• Leviticus 18:6–18 details varieties of incest, all equally forbidden, and could be collapsed with “or”.
• Joshua 13–21 mostly details the boundaries of the lands allotted to each of the tribes.

I will likely add to this later.

In some places the repetition makes me think the tale was relayed orally for some generations before being written.

The refrain of P. F. Sloan’s song “Let Me Be” (recorded by the Turtles) concludes,

I am what I am and that’s all I ever can be.

Defiance or fatalism?