I love all of these Kat posts right in a row! Such fun.

Yeah, I never got into Alias, despite the pretty and the seemingly silly fun.

Getty leaves me cold.

I could own a house someday. In Jamaica. I can't think of anywhere else in the US to move. Florida doesn't grab me, and most everything else is either too cold or far from the ocean.

I think I will be having fries with my Thai curry. Just not yet.

Who is Balthazar Getty? David Foster Wallace can tell you.

Balthazar Getty, about whom the less said the better, probably, except maybe to say that he looks sort of like Tom Hanks and John Cusack and Charlie Sheen all smunched together and then emptied of some ineffable but vital essence. He's not particularly tall, but he looks tall in Lost Highway's footage because he has extremely poor posture and Lynch has for some reason instructed him to exaggerate the poor posture. As a Hot Young Male Actor, Balthazar Getty is to Leonardo DiCaprio roughly what a Ford Escort is to a Lexus. His breakthrough role was as Ralph in the latest Lord of the Flies, in which he was bland and essenceless but not terrible. He was miscast and misdirected as a homeless kid in Where the Day Takes You (like how does a homeless kid manage to have fresh mousse in his hair every day9), and surprisingly good in White Squall. To be frank, it's almost impossible for me to separate predictions about how good Balthazar Getty's going to be in Lost Highway from my impressions of him as a human being around the set, which latter impressions were so uniformly negative that it's probably better not to say too much about it. For just one thing, he'd annoy the hell out of everybody between takes by running around trying to borrow everybody's cellular phone for an 'emergency.' For another thing, he was a heavy smoker but never had his own cigarettes and was always bumming cigarettes from crewpeople who you could tell were making about I percent of what he was making on the movie. I admit I eavesdropped an some of his cellular-phone conversations, and in one of them he said to somebody 'But what did she say about me?' three times in a row. I admit none of these are exactly capital offenses, but they added up. Okay, fuck it: The single most annoying thing about Balthazar Getty was that whenever Lynch was around, Getty would be very unctuous and over-respectful and ass-kissy, but when Lynch wasn't around Getty would make fun of him and do an imitation of his distinctive speaking voice that wasn't a very good imitation but struck me as being disrespectful and mean.)

[link]

Also, we don't know how telegenic he'll look after he's patched up.

But think of the ratings as we all tune in to SEE!

They haven't said he's lost an eye, and the fact that they had to remove part of his skull to ease brain swelling suggests there weren't any big pieces of skull already missing. So those points are in his favor.

Balthazar Getty doesn't have blue eyes. Right? I haevn't seen Alias in a couple weeks, but I did see him on that show.

we don't know how telegenic he'll look after he's patched up.

No, but, of all the High Drama ways to capitalize on bad news, don't you think ABC would love to have a co-anchor with a big, dramatic scar above his collar, a scar everybody knows he got in the process of his work?

It would be like having Captain Queeg be your Staten Island Ferry pilot. Instant marketing hook. (Ironically, the big knock on Woodruff was that he was blandly pretty; maybe now Maureen Dowd will give him a passing grade.)

(I'm sick enough to want Phineas Gage anchoring the news.)

(With rebar still in place.)

we don't know how telegenic he'll look after he's patched up.

He's a guy, scars add character.

No, but, of all the High Drama ways to capitalize on bad news, don't you think ABC would love to have a co-anchor with a big, dramatic scar above his collar, a scar everybody knows he got in the process of his work?

Unfortunately (from I've seen of traumatic injuries) the scars are more likely to be disfiguring than dashing. That is, they'll pull features subtly out of symmetry and push faces towards the uncanny valley.

Jesus, I'm just a ray of sunshine today, aren't I?

Glass half full? Barely a quarter full and that's arsenic!

Jesus, I'm just a ray of sunshine today, aren't I?

Just keep reminding yourself, "science may have advanced in the fifteen years since I dated a med student. science may have advanced in the fifteen years since I dated a med student." That's bound to help.

Seeing now that he played Eliza Dushku's boytoy in Bring It On years later.

Actually her brother and Kirsten Dunst's boyfriend.