Month: May 2022

Classic Beauty: Greer Garson

Classic Beauty

It is a great pity that most memories of flame-haired beauty Greer Garson are going to be in black-and-white, because she was extraordinary even by the standards of her time.

The best part about Garson is that initially, she never had any intentions of becoming a movie actress. She graduated from university with a degree in French and 18th-century literature and worked in an ad agency in her native London. Then she got into some stage acting, and when she was spotted at a performance by L.B. Mayer, he offered her an acting contract on the spot. Her effect was immediate: she got an Oscar nomination (the first of seven) for her very first movie role in Blossoms In The Dust, and won Best Actress for Mrs. Miniver  just a couple years later.

Most British actresses were portrayed in the contemporaneous stereotype of the calm, classy woman, but Greer Garson somehow managed to escape the typecasting occasionally, such as the dancer in Random Harvest (coincidentally, one of my all-time favorite romantic movies, by the way):

…and she was also capable of being not just beautiful, but sexy as well. Here she is in (yet another of my favorite movies) Mrs. Miniver, showing off her new hat to her husband, wearing a nightgown which… I don’t wanna talk about it:

Maybe it was an inadvertent act on the part of the movie’s director (I doubt it), but that scene is one of the most understated yet sexiest ever filmed — no nudity, no sexual banter, nothing but Greer Garson’s astonishing beauty. And in both the above movies (they came out in the same year, 1942) she was already thirty-eight years old, an advanced age by Hollywood standards.

Here are a few more examples of what I’m talking about:

If only they’d been taken in glorious Technicolor… but hey, I’ll take what I’ve been given.

The Relaxed Life

Old Fartism

One of the things I noticed on this last trip up to Idaho from Texas is how much I yearn to return to an older, more relaxed style of life.  To be sure, this was triggered in no small part by the very frequent glimpses into small-town life Mark and I encountered as we drove up (more on this later), but lately I’ve been hankering to get further away from not only cities, but also the suburbs, “ex-urbs” and their concomitant lifestyle.

Everyone here knows, of course, of my love for older things, be they cars, guns or manners, and maybe it’s time for me to talk with New Wife about reverting to an old-fashioned lifestyle, where life is simpler and just… easier than the rat race we have to deal with now.

It doesn’t help that Mark and his wife recently left metropolitan Houston and moved far away to a small town in South Texas.  His description of their new life made me, in a word, jealous.  He and his wife are much younger than New Wife and I, so he can handle the more physical aspects of a small farm whereas we couldn’t.  And I wouldn’t want to do that even if I were younger;  I’m still a city boy at heart, but I have to think that I would be prepared to sacrifice proximity to gourmet restaurants and Central Market in exchange for a more relaxed lifestyle.

New Wife has often expressed her desire to live in a small English village, in a cottage like this one:

(Lest anyone wonders how, I should point out that our current 2BD 2BA apartment is about 970 sq.ft., so we’ve already downsized.)

We’re not going to do that, of course — we could, as she’s a British citizen — but no, because of all the usual reasons:  expense, upheaval, weather and of course British gun laws.

She’d also prefer to live on the coast somewhere (I wouldn’t mind), but to be honest, cost is a major deterrent.

Another problem is weather.  I’ve come to absolutely loathe Texas-type hot weather, and neither of us could handle the work of living in extreme cold in, say, northern Idaho or Montana.  Somewhere, there must be a happy medium, but damned if I can find it without some serious other negatives.

It’s also gotta be reasonably pretty.  I’ve had enough of flat Texas and, both of us having grown up in hilly Johannesburg, we yearn for that kind of scenery again.

So far, the rural states which occur to me are Kentucky and Tennessee — and by “rural” I mean that part which isn’t called “Nashville” or “Lexington”, and in each case also means “eastern”, as far as I can tell.

So, O My Readers:  talk to me, in Comments and by email, and tell me where I might find that kind of life as expressed in the picture at the top of this post.

Apologies

Writing

As uploading pics is so time-consuming, I’ve had to re-post an earlier blog from 2018 for tomorrow’s Classic Beauty section.

Not that the topic isn’t worth revisiting, however.

Twitchy

Wildlife and Hunting

Here’s a news piece which should engender a familiar response among my Readers:

A fearless badger is harassing passers-by at a renowned beauty spot — leading the RSPCA to warn the public about its behaviour.  Dog walkers, joggers and families out enjoying the countryside have all fallen foul of the black and white menace.

And if the pictures don’t make your trigger-finger itch and want to reach for a .22 pistol, we can’t be friends.

Therapy?

Pussification Parade

Oh good grief:

Will Smith has sought help in the wake of his infamous slap of Chris Rock at the Academy Awards.  Smith, 53, ‘has been going to therapy after the Oscars incident’.

Don’t need therapy, bro — just a testosterone injection will do the trick.

Bitch-slapping a guy for insulting your wife:  good.

Getting therapy to deal with fallout from said incident:  total pussy.

Be a man:  express no remorse and tell ’em all to fuck off.

Back In Time

Bad News

This is being typed on New Wife’s desktop PC, which has a keyboard of the IBM Selectric Model 1 type — meaning that I’ve had to relearn where the various DEL INS BKSP etc keys are located, and also have to pound the damn keys instead of caressing them gently into conveying my fevered thoughts and furious invective onto the screen.

All this, of course, because Moron Kim forgot his laptop’s power cord in Boise, as catalogued on these pages before.

Speaking of fury:  a number of you have emailed me, telling me of your repeated inability to log in to this website.  There’s nothing wrong with your systems;  according to Tech Support II, I may apparently be coexisting on a server at WordPress HQ with another site which gobbles up all the bandwidth, leaving Poor Me to experience delays, 503 notices etc., all of which cause me serial RCOBs not even assuaged by repeated sips of gin.  He has contacted the goblins at WP for guidance, and has received notice that a “ticket” has been opened, but so far no other response.

I myself have had to resort to using a “CTRL-A / CTRL-C” routine prior to posting a new piece, lest the input be forever lost in the Abyss Of Teh Intarwebz resulting in a Grade A (Deluxe) RCOB with many Bad Words uttered to upset the Sikh family living above us.

Don’t even ASK how miserable an experience it is to load pics.  A single News Update, for instance, can take  up to two HOURS to load, with my blood pressure frequently approaching 400/350.  So forget any nude pics of Salma Hayek appearing anytime soon; it’s text-text-text for the foreseeable.

If TS II’s supposition is correct, I’m going to have to make a few changes around here, but we can talk about that later, perhaps after I’ve emptied a few mags downrange.

We’ve also been notified by our slumlord that the rent is to increase, to the point where we might actually have to consider moving.  So over the weekend New Wife and I will be looking at rental alternatives in the area, few of which at a cursory glance seem to offer the same facilities we have in this place.

Ask me again about my RCOBs.

ANYWAY:  all working as planned, I’ll be drawing the lucky ticket for the BoomerShoot ULD Rifle this weekend, and the lucky winner will be notified ASAP.  I have to tell y’all, were it not for that UGLY scaffolding masquerading as a stock, I’d get one for myself.  Once I’d sighted it in (and Mark C. will attest to this), it dropped pretty much every bullet into an MOA group at 400 yards, and its trigger is close to the best I’ve ever fired.  Good grief;  what a weapon.  I might just repeat the choice for next year’s rifle, so much do I like it.  (Caveat:  the PMC .308 FMJ ammo I bought was crap — inconsistent, all over the place.  Had I used proper target ammo, I have no doubt that I could have achieved one-hole groups at that distance.  Lesson learned:  next year, if I go, I’ll take handloads or premium target stuff.)

The multiple AARs of Boomershoot will have to wait for next week, but an executive summary would be that a good time was had by all, and that Friend Mark C. is an absolute monster on a rifle — I am truly jealous.

Till later.