Joss the Box Office Slayer

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

This isn’t another review of The Avengers, but it is part of our impromptu Shoot Your Heroes Week here at PFC.  While I’m not sure exactly what that means, I think it sounds rather dramatic and subversive enough to be one of our themes.  Perhaps it will one of many, or perhaps this will be the first and last.

‘Shoot Your Heroes’ comes from the fact I’ve only had two heroes in my life, one of whom—a producer I admired more than any other in the business—I ended up wanting to kill after she tried unsuccessfully to fuck me over by poaching my investors on a film.  The other, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, died in 1890, but I’m pretty sure I would have want to shoot him, too, at some point.

French legend Annie Girardot

Remembering Annie—Part Three

Please read Part One and Part Two first.

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Recently, I’ve come to view a person’s path in life as being guided by something akin to a GPS navigation system.  I’ve even taken to calling the chick who lives inside that system, placidly and emotionlessly issuing directions, as Felicity Common-Sense.  The mistakes we make, major or minor, silly or fatal, are those turns in the road Ms. Common-Sense told us to make that we ignored.  Never mind: she usually resets and finds an alternate route to get us where we are meant to be.

As a modern Don Quixote, I have often switched Ms. Common-Sense off completely, no doubt annoyed by her monotonous robotic drone pointing at obvious directions that haven’t excited me, preferring instead to go off on my own tortuous, seemingly nonsensical path.

Viggle Room

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

“I used to think I had narcissistic personality disorder,” James Tuttle once commented to a post of mine on the subject.  “Then I discovered I just enjoyed being good-looking.”  Tuttle is not just good-looking.  In online parlance he is “VGL,” or Very Good-Looking, which from the early years of hooking up online I have been calling “viggle.”  This is because invariably some total tool who would refer to himself as VGL in his profile is not that at all, and is therefore worthy of ridicule.

If you ever need a dose of viggle, ohlalamag.com is the place to go. This detail is from a recent Dolce & Gabbana campaign, a.k.a. Me and My Boys (I wish).

Indeed, one of the first rules of online dating is that a guy is rarely the adjectives he uses to describe himself.  “Hot,” “sexy,” “hung” are common enough delusions/mendacious cacas, but my alarm bells sound loudest when some dude describes himself as “sane,” “normal,” “fun,” “smart,” or, worst of all, “cool.”