Hollywoodland

I love the Olympics. I love what they stand for even if they don’t always quite meet the mark. And I will watch the weirdest sports I wouldn’t ordinarily watch during the Olympics. Like boxing. I hate boxing. Except during the Olympics. And weightlifting. Not a priority. Except during the Olympics. Table tennis. Except… well, you get the idea. I discovered last night that one member of our track & field team goes to school (or went, I’m not sure) here in Arkansas. He’s been wearing a racing suit that’s like the one Jesse Owens wore in the 1936 Olympics when Owens beat the pants off Hitler’s so-called superior race. Hah! Anyway, then they had swimming. I was in little doubt that Michael Phelps would make the team. Also making the team is Ryan Lochte who I hadn’t realized was such a hottie. With dimples. I have a weakness for dimples. Ahem. Where was I? Oh, yes. Back to track & field, on the pole vaulting team we have Jeff Hartwig, another Arkansas college attendee, made the team at age 41! And he lives in the Missouri town where I spent most of my childhood. So guess who I’ll be rooting for?

Last night I also watched a couple of episodes of the old (circa 1955) What’s My Line and in one, the mystery guest was Alfred Hitchcock. I never realized what a sense of humor he had. The panelists are always blindfolded for the mystery guests and one panelist, Random House editor (yes, one of the regular panelists was a BOOK EDITOR! You’d never see that nowadays!) Bennett Cerf, trying to determine if the guest was a man or a woman, asked if the guest was a gentleman. Mr. Hitchcock replied in this funny little voice, “Sometimes.”

Tonight, it’s more Olympic trials and The Middleman which moves to its normal time slot of 9pm Central.

I took last night off from doing research for the murder mystery.

Reading: Finished up The Case of the Murdered Muckraker. This is another of my favorites in the series. Maybe because Daisy & Alec (her husband) visit America and meet a real person (as opposed to only fictional people). Bessie Coleman was quite an amazing young woman. She was the first African-American (of either sex) to become an airplane pilot. And she was the first American of either race or sex to get an international pilot’s license. No flying schools in the U.S. would accept her because she was black and a woman. (Sexist bigots!) Not letting that stop her, she went to France where nobody cared about her race or gender. When she returned to the U.S. she became a barnstormer, doing all kinds of dangerous stunts. She died in 1926 at age 34 when a wrench slid into the gearbox of her plane and jammed the gears causing the plane to crash. 5000 people attended her funeral.

Now I’m reading Mistletoe and Murder by Carola Dunn.

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