"In discussions of the film 'Groundhog Day' on this blog, I’ve noticed a couple of people questioning..."

"... why the Bill Murray character would find Andie McDowell’s Rita deserving of all those years of his devotion and energy. For example, '…[W]hat, exactly, made the lovely but, let’s face it, vapid Rita worthy of Phil’s centuries of effort?'"

Was it centuries? I haven't seen that movie since it came out. I didn't remember the extent of the time frame. I can't picture myself in the mood — ever — to rewatch that one, but I do have a special affinity for stories and, especially, humor that has to do with extravagant comparisons or variations in size. So, here, that would be what appears to be a day is reframed as a century. The single funniest thing I ever heard in my life was: I was cutting someone's hair and I noticed a bright red dot on his scalp. I said: "What's this red dot?" And he said: "That's my Santa Claus hat."

I wish I'd made a tag for this concept long ago, because it would have collected a lot of different things that are impossible to put together retrospectively. It's not like, for example, deciding after 9 years of blogging that I ought to have an Andie McDowell tag. I could easily do a search. Also, that tag could only have one possible name. This other tag... what would I call it? Size? That size thing I like? Size-osity? Big and small? I have a "light and shade" tag, so I think I'd do big and small. Too late now. But not a century too late. Only 9 years. Oh, what the hell. I'll start now.

That reminds me: Have you ever seen this? It's the best graphic representation of all time (and all space).

"If a woman’s hair is her crowning glory, Ms. Brooks’s is a particularly noteworthy diadem."

"It reminds me of nothing more than the coifs of the women beloved by so many pre-Raphaelite painters such as Rossetti, whose Helen of Troy is typical of the genre..."

"I had the thought last week that this entire thing is charade designed to sell a book."

Yeah, my thought too. That's why I didn't blog about "My Personal Credit Crisis" — by Edmund L. Andrews — when I read it last week. And it's a long article. It's very rare that I go all the way through a long article and refrain from blogging it. Normally, I taste things, and the decision to consume them in full is automatically a decision to blog them. But I felt aggressively hostile to giving Andrews any attention. It was a readable article. I'll give him that. But I wanted to smack him.

AND: Neo-Neocon wants to smack him too. In the comments, Beth said...

I read this with disbelief. This guy, after child support, was bringing home less than $3k a month, and his fiancee at the time had no job at all, and it made sense to borrow HALF A MILLION BUCKS???? He keeps saying how easy it was to borrow it, but until months after the bills actually start coming in, he never thought about how hard it would be to pay back. That's the kind of thinking I've seen in friends with manic depression, in a manic phase.

It seemed to me that the guy did whatever he could get away with. And now he writes a confessional memoir about his shamelessness with the NYT as his springboard.