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We might sing like angels with each arm in a sling
I washed my hair with my regular shampoo last night and today my head smells like an ersatz strawberry. Without changing a word of their packaging, Pantene has switched the scent of its products—including the kind I've been using for years—from relatively neutral and mildly floral to fake fruit air freshener. Sickly sweet, intensely artificial, chokingly strong. It filled the shower. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel coughed, "It smells like Strawberry Shortcake," and then had to explain that he meant the doll character, not the dessert, which tends to smell a lot better, generally like actual fruit. I stood in the shower for ten minutes after my hair was done, just trying to wash the smell out. It wouldn't leave. It was on my hands. It was still clouding in my hair when I woke up, clinging to my skin. I didn't even have any other shampoo to fall back on: I'd run out earlier in the day and bought a new bottle from CVS as usual, not suspecting it had undergone a noxious alchemy. I didn't have any reason to. On the shelf, it looked like the same stuff. So this afternoon I went back to CVS and purchased some alternate shampoo options, at least one of which should not smell horrific when applied to my hair and not trigger any allergic reactions either, but I am frustrated and disappointed and sad. I have used Pantene for more than ten years now. I am used to its scent, which I think of as part of my own. And if they were going to make their shampoo and conditioner smell like a chemical accident in a jam factory, they could at least have said so somewhere on the bottle.
Some things from the internet. Via the internet, at least:
1. The AV Club, in praise of David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin: "There was no template for a character or a man like him, and the element of the unknown was enthralling." My mother loved The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and especially McCallum's intellectual, enigmatic character; decades later, she wanted to name my brother Ilya. My father vetoed it on the grounds that, as family legend has it, "'Sonya and Ilya' sounded like a Russian vaudeville routine." So my brother ended up named after her favorite character from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) instead, and it's worked out fine as far as I can tell, but I still don't think her first choice would have been such a terrible idea. My father, of course, was the one who counter-proposed "Igor."
2. While we're on the topic of spy shows, please enjoy one of the weirder pieces of pop culture I've run into recently: The Londonairs, "Dearest Emma." I can find no information about the band except for the songwriters' last names and the fact that the record was recalled for copyright infringment after about a week of airplay, because it's a fan song to Diana Rigg's Emma Peel and its opening fanfare is right out of the theme music to The Avengers (1961–69). I am fascinated by its existence and the fact that it's kind of unapologetically kinky. We faint at the things you do, though red-blooded men / Now that just ain't good for us, but do it again . . . We'd take all that you can give and come back for more / You'd find we look great piled up in heaps on the floor. Nowadays, you just record this sort of thing and put it on the internet.
3. This has been around for a year, but I just saw it now and it's wonderful: "Deaths in the Iliad: A Classics Infographic." Paris is correctly rated "Most Useless."
4. Etruscan shark's tooth pendant? Yes, please.
5. I wish I owned a DVD of Leslie Howard's Pimpernel Smith (1941). I've mentioned the movie before: it's his WWII retelling of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the definitive movie version of which had starred Howard in 1934; it downplays some aspects of the original story and sharpens others, it's weirder and more numinous than any film in its genre except Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944), and it stars an unabashedly intellectual hero. I love that while Percy Blakeney only plays at being a brainless fop, Horatio Smith really is an idealistic academic; his disguise is a broadly drawn version of himself, the archaeologist so unworldly, he'll tramp cheerfully through the Anschluss to excavate the rumor of an ancient Aryan civilization predating the Semitic Near East. (Historically speaking, this is as much garbage as Reichminister von Graum's ponderous insistence that Shakespeare was really German, but it's such an irresistible coup for the Nazis, they let him right in.) He's introduced lecturing on classical sculpture; he pronounces the word chiton correctly. Where most men carry a pin-up or a picture of their best girl, his wallet contains a photograph of Aphrodite Kallipygos. His intelligence and his erudition and even his eccentricity are real; it's his pretense of scholarly shortsightedness—a man so concerned with the past that the present is of no consequence to him, even when it contains concentration camps—that's the front. He's a tricky hero, not a two-fisted one. He falls for the girl who sees through his stories, like Odysseus with Athene. Because it features a heroic archaeologist battling the Nazis, I would love to be able to consider the movie a predecessor of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but I've never heard that anyone involved in that production actually knew about Pimpernel Smith. It did inspire Raoul Wallenberg. Anyway, I'm thinking of it because of this gifset of Smith showing off his photo of the woman he loves, marble draperies and all. The pose looks more like Aphrodite of Knidos, but I'm willing to believe she has a very beautiful ass.
[edit] Trying to find a better shot of Smith's Aphrodite, I've found this article from a 1941 issue of Picturegoer in which a critical fan attempts, on the set of Pimpernel Smith, to persuade Leslie Howard to play more romantic parts and leave the intellectual ones alone. I am afraid my first reaction to this argument was, "What an idiot." No, Mr. Cole, I should not have liked Howard to throw over his "bespectacled Professor Higgins" or "his archaeological-minded Mr. Smith." We can agree that it would have been a shame to lose him as an actor entirely, but your ideas of a romantic hero evidently differ from mine. Rest assured that there is a thriving population to this day who find Leslie Howard disheveled and snappish in nerd glasses to be one of the hotter things filmed in 1938. Show me a leading man who tinkers with oscilloscopes or knows his classical Greek and I'll show you someone I pay attention to. The smarts are part of the sentimental appeal. Fortunately, Howard appears to have been unmoved: "This, considering I had just finished delivering an impassioned plea for Howard to give up the intellectual stuff, was a bit of a blow. Rather like lecturing somebody on the danger of playing with matches and, at the end of it, being idly informed that he was planning to set fire to a cathedral." Well, here's to pyromania.
derspatchel coughed, "It smells like Strawberry Shortcake," and then had to explain that he meant the doll character, not the dessert, which tends to smell a lot better, generally like actual fruit. I stood in the shower for ten minutes after my hair was done, just trying to wash the smell out. It wouldn't leave. It was on my hands. It was still clouding in my hair when I woke up, clinging to my skin. I didn't even have any other shampoo to fall back on: I'd run out earlier in the day and bought a new bottle from CVS as usual, not suspecting it had undergone a noxious alchemy. I didn't have any reason to. On the shelf, it looked like the same stuff. So this afternoon I went back to CVS and purchased some alternate shampoo options, at least one of which should not smell horrific when applied to my hair and not trigger any allergic reactions either, but I am frustrated and disappointed and sad. I have used Pantene for more than ten years now. I am used to its scent, which I think of as part of my own. And if they were going to make their shampoo and conditioner smell like a chemical accident in a jam factory, they could at least have said so somewhere on the bottle.Some things from the internet. Via the internet, at least:
1. The AV Club, in praise of David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin: "There was no template for a character or a man like him, and the element of the unknown was enthralling." My mother loved The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–68) and especially McCallum's intellectual, enigmatic character; decades later, she wanted to name my brother Ilya. My father vetoed it on the grounds that, as family legend has it, "'Sonya and Ilya' sounded like a Russian vaudeville routine." So my brother ended up named after her favorite character from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) instead, and it's worked out fine as far as I can tell, but I still don't think her first choice would have been such a terrible idea. My father, of course, was the one who counter-proposed "Igor."
2. While we're on the topic of spy shows, please enjoy one of the weirder pieces of pop culture I've run into recently: The Londonairs, "Dearest Emma." I can find no information about the band except for the songwriters' last names and the fact that the record was recalled for copyright infringment after about a week of airplay, because it's a fan song to Diana Rigg's Emma Peel and its opening fanfare is right out of the theme music to The Avengers (1961–69). I am fascinated by its existence and the fact that it's kind of unapologetically kinky. We faint at the things you do, though red-blooded men / Now that just ain't good for us, but do it again . . . We'd take all that you can give and come back for more / You'd find we look great piled up in heaps on the floor. Nowadays, you just record this sort of thing and put it on the internet.
3. This has been around for a year, but I just saw it now and it's wonderful: "Deaths in the Iliad: A Classics Infographic." Paris is correctly rated "Most Useless."
4. Etruscan shark's tooth pendant? Yes, please.
5. I wish I owned a DVD of Leslie Howard's Pimpernel Smith (1941). I've mentioned the movie before: it's his WWII retelling of The Scarlet Pimpernel, the definitive movie version of which had starred Howard in 1934; it downplays some aspects of the original story and sharpens others, it's weirder and more numinous than any film in its genre except Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944), and it stars an unabashedly intellectual hero. I love that while Percy Blakeney only plays at being a brainless fop, Horatio Smith really is an idealistic academic; his disguise is a broadly drawn version of himself, the archaeologist so unworldly, he'll tramp cheerfully through the Anschluss to excavate the rumor of an ancient Aryan civilization predating the Semitic Near East. (Historically speaking, this is as much garbage as Reichminister von Graum's ponderous insistence that Shakespeare was really German, but it's such an irresistible coup for the Nazis, they let him right in.) He's introduced lecturing on classical sculpture; he pronounces the word chiton correctly. Where most men carry a pin-up or a picture of their best girl, his wallet contains a photograph of Aphrodite Kallipygos. His intelligence and his erudition and even his eccentricity are real; it's his pretense of scholarly shortsightedness—a man so concerned with the past that the present is of no consequence to him, even when it contains concentration camps—that's the front. He's a tricky hero, not a two-fisted one. He falls for the girl who sees through his stories, like Odysseus with Athene. Because it features a heroic archaeologist battling the Nazis, I would love to be able to consider the movie a predecessor of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), but I've never heard that anyone involved in that production actually knew about Pimpernel Smith. It did inspire Raoul Wallenberg. Anyway, I'm thinking of it because of this gifset of Smith showing off his photo of the woman he loves, marble draperies and all. The pose looks more like Aphrodite of Knidos, but I'm willing to believe she has a very beautiful ass.
[edit] Trying to find a better shot of Smith's Aphrodite, I've found this article from a 1941 issue of Picturegoer in which a critical fan attempts, on the set of Pimpernel Smith, to persuade Leslie Howard to play more romantic parts and leave the intellectual ones alone. I am afraid my first reaction to this argument was, "What an idiot." No, Mr. Cole, I should not have liked Howard to throw over his "bespectacled Professor Higgins" or "his archaeological-minded Mr. Smith." We can agree that it would have been a shame to lose him as an actor entirely, but your ideas of a romantic hero evidently differ from mine. Rest assured that there is a thriving population to this day who find Leslie Howard disheveled and snappish in nerd glasses to be one of the hotter things filmed in 1938. Show me a leading man who tinkers with oscilloscopes or knows his classical Greek and I'll show you someone I pay attention to. The smarts are part of the sentimental appeal. Fortunately, Howard appears to have been unmoved: "This, considering I had just finished delivering an impassioned plea for Howard to give up the intellectual stuff, was a bit of a blow. Rather like lecturing somebody on the danger of playing with matches and, at the end of it, being idly informed that he was planning to set fire to a cathedral." Well, here's to pyromania.
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It's incredibly obscure! It might be available on DVD in the UK, but I've never heard of a legal transfer here; I saw it once in 2008 on a staticky videocassette via interlibrary loan from St. Louis. Occasionally TCM shows it, reliably at times of day when it's of no use to me, but I've never run across anyone else who's seen it and wasn't already a Leslie Howard fan. It really should be better known. It's a good version of the Pimpernel story; it's a great role for Howard, who wrote to his strengths while not shutting out the rest of the cast; in terms of being committedly, specifically, openly anti-Nazi while the outcome of the war was still uncertain, it's right up there with Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). I want a DVD so that I can show it to everyone I know. At this point I'd settle for a print coming to one of the local theaters, even if I've only heard of it playing at the BFI. There's slightly more detail about the plot here, in a comment I would have folded into this post if I'd been thinking at all about it. OH DUDE THERE'S A YOUTUBE LINK WATCH IT NOW BEFORE IT DISAPPEARS.