the era containing some of the most gaggingly saccharine child performers ever

I think that Margaret O'Brien and Natalie Wood far outshine all the others. O'Brien's Tootie in Meet Me in St. Louis is one of the most interesting child characters in Hollywood history.

I love Tootie. So funny and odd and adorable with the iceman.

"She has five fatal diseases"
"Gosh, and it only takes one."

JZ - read and backflung. I need to run out get lunch and swing by the PO. I am seriously surprising me with how much I am getting done today.

ION not-of-this-world, NASA says it will send people to the Moon to build a base sometime in the next 10-15 years.

You know, I gotta quote David Cross here: "Put a man on the moon? How about we put a man in a fucking APARTMENT?"

U turn on the telly and every other story
Is tellin' U somebody died
Sister killed her baby cuz she couldn't afford 2 feed it
And we're sending people 2 the moon

I want an apartment on the moon.

Britney Spears Ranked Top Virus Celebrity:

Pop singer Britney Spears has edged out Bill Gates as the celebrity most commonly associated with malicious software distributed via e-mail, according to data released today from security software company Panda Software.

Researchers combed through the seven years of virus-laden messages stored in Panda's malware database to determine which celebrities most often had their names involuntarily used in association with malicious spam. Rounding out the top five in Panda's "celebrity virus ranking," were Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, and Osama Bin Laden.

Also, what would we do with a base on the moon 10-15 years from now? Are we anticipating alien invasion? Is Mars really all that lucrative?

I guess I am that kind of Philistine that thinks, okay, you could do that, but think up something better than the George Mallory reason ("Because it is there") first.

(If you'll recall, George Mallory died due to his reasoning.)

and Osama Bin Laden.

Their definition of "celebrity" is interesting.

I learned that the secret to making the bad weather go away is to get my hair cut extremely short the better to withstand the soul-crushing heat. Pre-haircut, 90º. Post-haircut? 76º! Brilliant!

I fully endorse this summer strategy.

JZ was having a regional-diction-gasm listening to Elsa go all Yorkshire on Mary Lennox's ass. Elsa used to have a cabaret show where she specialized in novelty songs based on regional dialects and such. She was hammering her "thou"s and giggling in her ever so daft fashion.

Dean Stockwell was thoroughly perverse as Colin. An absolute goth-boy-in-training until he's reconstituted by the garden. You could draw a straight line between his performances in A Secret Garden and Blue Velvet.

Also, what would we do with a base on the moon 10-15 years from now?

I think reasonable spending on exploration and science isn't a bad thing. I don't know if a base on the moon would be the most productive use of NASA's 17 billion dollar budget though. Bear in mind that defense spending is about 460 billion dollars.