Flotsam du Jour

There’s an article in Rolling Stone on the new Bond girl (HATE that moniker!). It makes out like she’s some miraculous street urchin BUT at the same time it’s selling her as a safe rich girl type. This seems to be how she bills herself and they’re going along with it. They're each having it both ways. On the one hand, she's the exotic and beautifully romantic orphan, abandoned and making her own gritty way on the streets of Paris. On the other, she's the cultured and alluring offspring of extreme wealth, raised with refinement and superior artistic tastes.

This bullshit's a bugaboo of mine—folks who play like they’re from lowly backgrounds, up by their bootstraps but in reality, no, not so much. I’m thinking, just at this moment about that fetid, putrescent skin sack, that horrifically embarrassing example of humanity, Trump. He claims he's self made. His father gave him just a wee million dollar loan to get started in biz.

Now, if you think $1,000,000 doesn’t sound like all that much, consider this: one million dollars in 1970 is equivalent to six and a quarter mill (or more) now.

Everyone, it seems, wants to be able to claim that they've come from nothing, that they've struggled to get to the top, that their fame and fortune were hard earned. It's a better, more compelling, romantic and engaging story. And it's often a work of fiction.
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Back to Bond though, I’m looking forward to seeing Spectre. From what I've read, his ultimate love interest is, for the first time in 52 years, a woman near his own age.

...during an interview with Red Bulletin, when his interviewer suggested that Bond in this film was shown “succumbing to the charms of an older woman”, aka Bellucci, ironic considering Bellucci is only four years older than Craig.

“I think you mean the charms of a woman his own age,” Craig responded. “We’re talking about Monica Bellucci, for heaven’s sake. When someone like that wants to be a Bond girl, you just count yourself lucky!”

Grown ups!
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It is now catalogue season. You may've noticed. We’re getting ad collections from companies we’ve never even heard of. Why? I order on line from L.L. Bean, Daedalus Books and Sundance on occasion so I’m on the list. (insert ominous, scary music here)

Pajamagram? Oh c’mon now, how many of us REALLY want or are even capable of getting our entire family dressed in matching Christmas themed jammies?

And their ad copy “Give on the Wild Side” beside a young woman wearing a decidedly mundane PLAID flannel number? This is what passes for wild? Where? In Lubbock, Texas maybe?

I know, I know, I’m hardly one to criticize nor am I their target market.

In the Company of Dogs? Hello?! This is a house of cats!

Backcountry? Why am I getting a catalogue for a joint that sells ski equipment and rock climbing gear? These are two activities that I will never, ever do. Mountains—they’re made to be admiringly gazed upon not tumbled down arse over tea kettle. This being precisely what’d happen if I attempted either enterprise.

I also get catalogues from assorted art museum stores. This, OK, is understandable but still, I do not need these glittering gimcracks—oh no I don’t.
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Robert Lewis Dear is the appallingly vile and stunningly disgraceful example of humanity who shot up the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Colorado Springs yesterday. What better way to absolutely, beyond question, prove you're pro life than to murder three people, eh?

On that note, I believe it's time to suit up and ride before the cold rain begins. Triking—it's wonderfully meditative. Zen-ish, is what it is.