There was an old Twilight Zone episode I vaguely remember. Burgess Meredith wants to be left alone with his books. He gets his wish, society is wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, and he finds himself alone in the world with no one to bother him. He enters a library, a kind of heaven. But his coke-bottle glasses are broken, and he discovers the need for other people, but it’s too late.
The Internets are like that library, if you’re not careful. Picking through the world and everything in it, until God breaks your glasses. Still; what wonders it shows me from time to time.
March 1st, 1910 – July 29th 1983. No one in Hollywood will ever have as many engaging stories told about their lives. When you share a house with Errol Flynn and call it Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea, I imagine they’d pile up pretty quick.
Niven quit the movies to re-enlist in the British army and fight in WWII. He thought it was in bad taste to recount stories about the war, but like all raconteurs, people endlessly told stories about him.
About to lead his men into action, Niven eased their nervousness by telling them, “Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I’ll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!” Asked by suspicious American sentries during the Battle of the Bulge who had won the World Series in 1943, he answered “Haven’t the foggiest idea . . . But I did co-star with Ginger Rogers in Bachelor Mother!” (link)
More babes than a maternity ward. Let’s party with David Niven! Bonus Max Raabe soundtrack.
-Sit on the bench over there and read the paper. I’ll make joe. No sense tryin’ to drive west in the snow.
-I’ll see if the thieves in the State House are robbin’ me or botherin’ me today.
-If that’s all they’re doin’, they must be sleepin’ in.
-It’s good we got a Catholic in the corner office for an accomplice, anyway. The Curley ain’t Robin Hood, but he’ll do. Got my brother a job on the highway.
-I heard about that highway. Fell in, didn’t it?
-The man’s got the gift, he does, you’ve got to give it to him. They shoved their snoots and pencils in his face and said: The overpass collapsed, and your friend built it. What do you got to say about that…
-Oh, they’ll have to try harder than that…
-As God is my witness, Sonny, he says: “It was an injudicious mixture of sand and cement.” And the damn fool reporter just writes it down!
-What does he care what he puts in his paper? I’d rather read the Blarney, anyway. More interesting than the truth.
-And truer than the truth, maybe.
-Absotively.
-God, I lived in the City when The Curley was mayor. What a scream. The Great War breaks out and a Britisher comes and calls at the City Hall and asks for permission to try and enlist Bostonians of British descent to fight the Kaiser.
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