I hope my age is not characterized by pointless crabbiness.

Hey, my youth was, why should my decrepitude be any different?

Yeah, don't get me started on how cool smoking is with all the fun stuff and business to do. Except it only gives you something to do with your hands in the privacy of your own home anymore -- at least where I live, you can't smoke inside anywhere else.

Every third improv scene on earth has someone smoking and probably for these very reasons.

When I was a kid, I got these fake cigarettes from some mail-order novelty shop. They had red foil on the tips, so in the right light and from a distance it really looked like you had a lit cigarette.

ION:

My name is tommyrot and I have an addiction. An addiction to Jelly Belly Raspberries and Blackberries. They're sorta like regular Jelly Bellys, but instead of a hard shell they have many tiny jimmy-like dots on the outside (making them look sorta' like berries). So nummy, and rather expensive. Saturday I took a train to downtown Chicago just so I could go to Neiman-Marcus and buy some.

I am all for looking at things in there time. Because siletn film started in this area - and we now have a silent film museaum and theater in the neighborhood, I have seen a bunch. sterotypes - male/female , race ,otr ethnic are prtetty rampent. Plus the number of films that have drug useres ( needle) on screen is amazing. sometimes it is uncomfortabe. It should be. That doesn't mean I don't watch. Some films are good despite the sterotypes. - others might have been good films at the time, but they just don't reach a modern audience. Actually, they now have as part of the announcements a reminder that some of the things we see on screen might not be acceptable to today's audiences.

we now have a silent film museaum and theater in the neighborhood

I've seen a fair number on TCM. And yeah, some of them can get pretty embarrassing. Even into the sound era -- I saw Harold Lloyd's first talkie, Welcome Danger, over the weekend, and a fair number of Chinese stereotypes kept taking me out of the movie (the plot involves a dope ring operating out of SF Chinatown).

Sad, because there's some pretty fair slapstick in there (though eventually it gets to be a bit much).

Holy CRAP those Windsor boys are pretty. [link]

Ain't they just?

sigh.

Getting some fresh genes into that bloodline helped out a lot with the looks, even if it did shake up the family's moral certainty.

I think Harry is kind of handsome, in a redheaded jock sort of way, but William to me always looks a little freakish -- too much like if someone took photographs of his mother at that age and mathematically adjusted them to show what she would have looked like if she had been born a man.

Though bon bon's picture does make him look very nice indeed.

Didn't need to say it twice.