Almanac for May 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for May 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/May-18-Go-Tell-It-On-the-Mountain-C0C01FR4CC

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Bertrand Russell

Bummer May 18th

May 18, 1927: Local school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe rigs explosives inside the Bath Township, Michigan elementary school to explode. He murders his wife and sets his house and barn on fire. Kehoe also fills his automobile with nails and explosives, detonating it and killing himself and sending shrapnel flying. The local mail carrier loses a leg when the vehicle explodes and later dies from his injuries. 

As a result of the school explosion and detonation of the vehicle, 38 children and a total of five adult victims are killed. The exact reason for Kehoe’s rampage is unknown, but he may have been upset about losing a local election and his wife’s increasingly poor health.

May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington State, erupts. An estimated 57 people die as a direct result of the volcano, and over one billion dollars’ worth of property is destroyed.

May 18, 1996: 29-year-old musician Kevin Gilbert is found dead of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation at his home in California.

May 18, 2017: Musician Chris Cornell, age 52, dies of suicide by hanging.

Now let's move onto something significantly more life-affirming: My all-time (2017-2026) most-played songs on Spotify, Part II.

"Love Is Blindness" by Jack White is the only cover of a U2 song that I actually like better than a U2 song.

"Gettin' It" features into the plot of the tv series Blindspotting, an amazing musical love story starring the uber-talented Jasmine Cephas Jones of Hamilton (the musical) fame. Her character's beloved is played by Rafael Casal and he is also great in this. He's basically playing the most ride-or-die husband in modern musical history.

Cillian Murphy has his own tag HERE.

"Ava Gardner" has its own post HERE.

I like the soundtrack to Disney's The Greatest Showman a normal amount. Don't worry about it. It's probably fine.

"Soul Kitchen" by the Doors is playing in the Umbrella Academy episode where Klaus meets Dave, the closest thing he has to a love of his life. It's beautiful and tragic and I was more than a little obsessed.

I should watch the Bruce Springsteen movie starring the gorgeous Jeremy Allen White of The Bear fame. (The Bear also had Jon Bernthal, who is about to return to playing The Punisher on Disney+. Right after the latest season of Daredevil: Born Again showed us Jessica Jones and Luke Cage as a couple, with their daughter, future Captain America Danielle Cage. I hyperventilated. JonesCage was all I ever wanted out of Marvel's The Defenders. Well, that and for [spoilers] Electra to still be alive, but we can't have everything, can we?)

(P.S. Jon Bernthal is also starring on Broadway in the theatre version of the classic Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon. And while I have mixed feelings about Jews and Italians being used interchangeably in media - don't get me started again - that's pretty fuckin' awesome. I love that guy. I just love him, period.)

I'm done listening to Nicki Minaj now that she's joined Team Maga (a.k.a. the American fascists who want to reinstate white supremacy) and how we just all know instinctively that if she was in that juke joint in Ryan Coogler's Sinners, she would have let those vampires in and fixed them a Myx Moscato to boot.

Doechii is a better rapper, anyway.

I like Murray Head a normal amount. Don't worry about it.

"My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors" has its own page HERE.

"Buttons" is a very catchy pop song, and also I hear it in the voices of Bob Belcher and Jimmy Pesto (senior). And this makes me laugh.

"The Future" from Batman (1989) isn't actually my 121st most-listened song, it's in fact the first song I ever listened to on Spotify on March 31, 2017. I wonder what I was thinking that day. It's true that as a 12-year-old in 1989, I was hella excited about Batman, and I saw it in the theater twice, once regular movie theater and once drive-in. Maybe I was leaning into 1980s nostalgia, as I sometimes do, with or without Murry Head. Maybe I was fantasizing about Christian Bale's Batman, as I sometimes do, with or without Cillian Murphy.

Anyway, those are my songs. 

Almanac for January 30th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 30: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-30-In-a-Dark-Dark-House-R6R419KB8R

Artist Birthday: Christian Bale

Beatles Trivia

January 30, 1969: The Beatles perform a 42-minute concert on the roof of their Apple Corporation record company building in London, as documented in the concert film Let It Be. It will be their last public performance together.

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Romeo and Juliet

Bummer January 30th

January 30, 1926: 29-year-old early Hollywood actress Barbara LaMarr dies of nephritis and pulmonary tuberculosis.

January 30, 2006: 55-year-old playwright Wendy Wasserstein dies of lymphoma.

January 30, 2021: 34-year-old electronic musician Sophie Xeon dies from injuries suffered from an accidental fall from a roof in Athens, Greece, where Sophie had climbed to look at the full moon.

Bummer February

This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer February post with the update.

February 1, 1891: Newspaper publisher Ignacio Martínez is assassinated by two men in Laredo, Texas, because they disagree with his newspaper’s criticism of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz.

February 2, 2014: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Truman Capote in Capote, dies of an apparently accidental overdose of prescription medicine and heroin.

February 2, 2022: A pastor in Nashville, Tennessee, holds a burning of books he deems “demonic.” According to his loosely-organized, conspiratorial beliefs, a book counted as “demonic” if it was “anything tied to the Masonic Lodge.” It’s unclear whether these actions were influenced more by religious fanaticism or by mental illness.

February 3, 1959: “The Day the Music Died,” when early rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were all killed in a plane crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The musicians had performed at Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom and were on their way to their next show in Minnesota. This accident is remembered in poetic form through the Don McLean song “American Pie,” recorded on May 26, 1971. 

February 6, 1998: Austrian “Rock Me Amadeus” rocker Falco (Johann Hölzel) dies in a traffic accident while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. He is 40 years old.

February 7, 1497: On Shrove Tuesday in Florence, followers of the monk Girolamo Savonarola burn art, books, their cosmetics, fancy clothes, playing cards, and other cultural objects they associate with sin in the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities. Sadly, irreplaceable ancient art and manuscripts were lost to this religiously-fueled war on anything that represented luxury. 

Ironically, Savonarola will later be excommunicated and convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. As punishment, he is hanged and his body burned in the same plaza where the Bonfire of the Vanities occurred. It will be forbidden for any Christian to possess copies of Savonarola’s writings. 

February 9, 1963: In a racially-charged incident captured in song by Bob Dylan, 51-year-old Hattie Carroll is working as a bar server at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. The hotel is hosting an event called the Spinster’s Ball. One of the guests, Billy Zantzinger, who is white, is excessively drunk and physically and verbally abusing both his wife Jane and the African-American wait staff at the event.

Zantziger hurls racial slurs and other verbal abuse at Carroll, then strikes her in the neck/upper shoulder region with his cane. Carroll immediate begins feeling numbness in her arm, and her co-workers notice her speech is slurred. She’s taken to the hospital, where Carroll dies of a brain hemorrhage. Zantziger is convicted of manslaughter for Carroll’s death, but his sentence is a paltry six months in prison and a $500 fine, plus a fine of $125 for assaulting the other wait staff.

February 10, 2005: Playwright Arthur Miller dies of bladder cancer.

February 11, 1963: Poet Sylvia Plath, who struggles with clinical depression, dies by suicide, inhaling gas by placing her head inside an unlit gas stove. She is 30 years old.

February 11, 2012: 48-year-old singer/actress Whitney Houston is found unresponsive in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Paramedics attempted CPR but are unable to revive her. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office attributes her death to atherosclerotic heart disease, cocaine use, and drowning. 

February 12, 1980: Two days after 34-year-old Patricia Frazier of Texas saw a CBS network TV broadcast of the movie The Exorcist, Frazier kills her 4-year-old daughter Khunji and cuts out her heart. According to Dr. Leon Morris, a psychologist who spoke with Frazier after the crime, Frazier believed Khunji was possessed by demons and trying to harm her (Patricia). A jury of her peers finds Patricia Frazier not guilty by reason of insanity.

February 13, 1945: U.S. and U.K. forces drop incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, causing fires with the intention of destroying munitions factories in that city. A second round of bombs are dropped in the early hours of February 14th, calculated to hamper the efforts of rescuers on the scene of the first round of bombings and fires. It’s estimated that between 22,000 and 25,000 Germans are killed, almost all of them civilians.

Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is there as an American prisoner of war being held by the German army. The experience forms the basis of his science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

February 14, 1929: In what becomes known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone’s gangsters line up seven members of Bugs Moran’s rival gang and machine gun them to death. Police arrive in time to find one survivor, Frank Gusenberg, suffering from 14 bullet wounds. They ask Gusenberg to name his killer, but Gusenberg refuses before he succumbs to his injuries.

February 14, 1989: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issues a pronouncement urging faithful Muslims to assassinate Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s magical realist novel The Satanic Verses depicts a fictional version of the Prophet Mohammad as a character, which the Ayatollah considers blasphemous.

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February 15, 1998: 89-year-old war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, struggling with ovarian and liver cancer and failing eyesight, chooses to end her own life by swallowing cyanide.

February 17, 1673: French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who wrote under the pen name Molière, suffers a tuberculosis-induced pulmonary embolism while performing in his own play The Invalid. He finished out the show, but was carried immediately home afterward, where he died.

February 18, 1718: French-born English writer Peter Anthony Motteux dies of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation inside a brothel, although the circumstances of his death were considered suspicious at the time. This may be the oldest recorded case of autoerotic asphyxiation.

February 19, 2013: The body of Canadian student and tourist Elisa Lam is discovered in the water tower atop the Stay on Main hotel in Los Angeles, California. Lam is believed to have entered the tank of her own volition and accidentally drowned, possibly while experiencing the effects of withdrawal from her psychiatric medications.

February 24, 1809: London’s Drury Lane Theatre burns down. No one is injured, but the loss of the building is a financial disaster for its owner, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

February 25, 1983: Playwright Tennessee Williams dies of an apparently accidental overdose of the barbiturate medication Seconal.

February 26, 2015: Australian author Jessica Ainscough, age 29, dies of a rare cancer, epithelioid sarcoma. In 2008, her doctors suggested amputating her affected left arm at the shoulder, which would have given her a greater than 50% chance of surviving for ten years or more. Ainscough chose to treat her cancer with alternative therapies rather than having the amputation. She used the alternative treatments for six years, only returning to conventional medical treatments near the end of her life when she developed a tumor that bled continuously for ten months.

February 28, 1909: Actor Irene Muza (a stage name) dies when her hairdresser accidentally sets her on fire. According to a Perth, Australia, newspaper account published March 30, 1909, “Before taking part in a charitable performance on Tuesday she sent for her hairdresser to come and dress her hair. The hairdresser had applied a petrol lotion, when a few drops of it fell upon the kitchen stove. The stuff, ignited in an instant, and the flames caught the actress's hair and her dressing-gown and the clothing of the hairdresser. [...] In a moment she was a mass of flame. A friend who was in an adjoining room tried to save her by tearing away the burning gown, but before this could be accomplished she had sustained terrible injuries. She was conveyed to the hospital, where she expired. Her hairdresser, who was also badly injured, lies in a precarious condition.”

February 28, 1916: The Turn of the Screw author Henry James dies of pneumonia.

February 29, 1960: Melvin Purvis II, the FBI agent who shot and killed John Dillinger (and who was played by Christian Bale in Public Enemies), dies by suicide.

Bummer August

This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer August post from 2022 with the update.

August 1, 1994: An electrical fault sparks a fire at Norwich Central Library in Norwich, England, that destroys an estimated 100,000 books and historical papers.

August 1, 2018: 32-year-old Canadian model, artist, and actor Rick Genest, known as Zombie Boy for his numerous bone- and viscera-themed tattoos, dies from an accidental fall from an icy balcony where he has apparently gone to smoke a cigarette.

August 2, 1973: Approximately 50 people are killed when the Summerland indoor amusement park catches fire. The building’s ceiling is constructed using a transparent acrylic material, which melts, raining burning-hot liquid acrylic down on the victims of the fire.

August 2, 1997: William S. Burroughs dies, having had a heart attack the previous day.

August 3, 1924: Author Joseph Conrad dies of a heart attack at age 66.

August 3, 1966: 40-year-old comedian Lenny Bruce is found dead of an apparently accidental morphine overdose.

August 4, 1875: Hans Christian Andersen dies, possibly suffering from liver cancer and never having recovered from injuries from falling out of his bed.

August 4, 1962: Marilyn Monroe dies, apparently by suicide, of an overdose of prescription sleeping medicine.

August 7, 2016: 10-year-old son Caleb Schwab is killed while riding the Verrückt water raft ride at Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City, Kansas. The tallest such ride in the world at the time, the ride had a screen over the top, held in place with a series of metal support rings, to keep guests from accidentally flying off the ride in the event that the raft should become airborn. Caleb, who was riding on the front of a raft with two unrelated women riding on the back, struck the metal support ring and was decapitated when his raft became airborne.

August 8, 1965: American author Shirley Jackson dies at age 48 of cardiac arrest, possibly brought on by her alcoholism and use of a variety of prescription medicines. 

August 10, 1978: Three teenage girls, all members of the Ulrich family, are killed in an automobile accident while riding in a Ford Pinto. The state of Indiana charges the Ford Motor Company with homicide, claiming that the company was aware of manufacturing defects that made the vehicle more likely to cause death in the event of certain types of accidents. Ford is found not guilty.

August 12, 1964: Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, dies.

August 12, 1982: Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashes into a mountain after the pilots lose the ability to steer the plane. Of the 509 passengers and 15 crew members, only three passengers and one crew member survive. Rescue operations are delayed due to darkness and mountainous terrain, which means many people who may have initially had non-fatal injuries died of exposure, blood loss, and other conditions. 

August 12, 2022: Indian-British* author Salman Rushdie is stabbed ten times at an event in Chautauqua, New York, allegedly by a 24-year-old man from New Jersey. Rushdie suffers nerve damage to one arm, one eye, and his liver. The attacker was apparently motivated by a late Iranian religious leader’s description of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as blasphemous since it depicted the prophet Muhammad as a fictional character. 

Rushdie is an atheist. The attacker had not read The Satanic Verses.

*Rushdie now lives in the United States with his wife, American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

August 13, 1521: Hernán Cortés and his small army of Spanish conquistadores conquer the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán after an extended siege that began in 1519. 

August 13, 1944: Lucien Carr, friend of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, stabs and kills his acquaintance David Kammerer. Carr will serve two years in prison for manslaughter, then go on to father children who include novelist Caleb Carr.

August 16, 1949: Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell dies in the hospital of injuries she sustained on August 11th when she was struck by a speeding car with an intoxicated driver. The driver was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months in jail. 

August 17, 1966: English race car driver Ken Miles is killed when the Ford Mk IV he is test-driving crashes at over 200 miles per hour.

                  Christian Bale played Miles in Ford v. Ferrari. Here is a fic that I particularly like.

August 18, 1992: On or around this date, 24-year-old adventurer Christopher McCandless dies of apparent starvation in the Alaskan wilderness. The story of his nomadic, short life is the basis of the book and film Into the Wild. 

August 19, 1936: According to LitHub, “Federico García Lorca—the Spanish avant-garde poet, playwright, and ardent socialist—was shot and killed by Nationalist militia before being buried in an unmarked mass grave somewhere outside Granada, where he remains to this day.”

Lorca had predicted his manner of death in his 1929 poem “The Fable And Round of the Three Friends:”

“Then I realized I had been murdered.

They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches

…. but they did not find me.

They never found me?

No. They never found me.”

https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Federico-Garc%C3%ADa-Lorca-FIGHT-FASCISTS-by-ErinORiordan/142424208.EJUG5

August 21, 1986: A naturally-occurring limnic eruption of Lake Nyos in Cameroon releases poisonous carbon dioxide into the air, killing 1,746 people. 

August 23, 1981: East German comedic actor Rolf Herricht suffers a heart attack and dies while performing in Kiss Me Kate at Berlin’s Metropol theatre.

August 25, 1984: Truman Capote dies of liver disease.

August 25, 1914: During World War I, German troops occupying Leuven, Belgium, set fire to the city and destroying almost half of it. 300 civilians die. Included in the burning and destruction is the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, which loses approximately 230,000 materials, including priceless medieval manuscripts.

August 25, 1992: The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina is destroyed by Serbian bombing during the Siege of Sarajevo.

August 26, 2001: Tit and I got out of bed this morning and turned on the news to hear that the singer/dancer/actor Aaliyah had perished in a plane crash in the Bahamas. Born in 1979, she was only 22 years old.

August 27, 1883: Mount Krakatau (Anglicized as Krakatoa), which had begun to erupt on the 20th of May, intensifies in seismic activity with an eruption that destroys more than two-thirds of its island. The eruption is one of the loudest sounds ever heard by human ears, with the explosion being heard 4,800 miles away from the Indonesian site of the volcano. Pyroclastic flows, ash expelled into the atmosphere, and resulting tsunamis are estimated to have killed more than 36,400 people. Only the 1815 Mount Tambora explosion is thought to have been deadlier.

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August 28, 2020: 43-year-old actor Chadwick Boseman passes away from colon cancer.

Opinions on Fictional Men

 On Thursday, May 2nd, this came up in my Facebook memories:

"111 Male Characters Of British Literature, In Order Of Bangability"

by Carrie Frye, April 29, 2011

It's been 13 years, but I have thoughts. I'll skip the characters I don't know from books I haven't read.

111. Frankenstein’s Monster (Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus). Fair, judging solely by the book. But in Maggie Gyllenhaal's forthcoming The Bride of Frankenstein retelling The Bride (2025), the Monster will be played by Christian Bale. Which bumps him up to #1. I apologize in advance for the feelings I will feel about that movie.

110. Uriah Heep (David Copperfield)

109. Casaubon (Middlemarch). If I remember Middlemarch, the main character's elderly husband looked like the philosopher John Locke, but I pictured him as Lost!John Locke. Not unhot.

108. Bradley Headstone (Our Mutual Friend)

107. Samuel Pickwick (Pickwick Papers)

106. Gussie Fink-Nottle (Right Ho, Jeeves)

105. Keith Talent (London Fields)

104. Jerry Cruncher (Tale of Two Cities). Domestic violence perpetrator; deserves to be at the bottom.

103. Hercule Poirot (The Mysterious Affair at Styles). What's wrong with Poirot? He's smart, he's Belgian, he keeps his moustache neat. In the movies he's Kenneth Branagh. What have we got against Poirot?

102. Ham Peggotty (David Copperfield)

101. Thorin Oakenshield (The Hobbit). This is just anti-dwarfish. In the movies he's Richard Armitage. That gay Brit is pretty hot. Adaptational attractiveness? Sure, but still, I think a lot of Tolkien men are ranked too low on this list.

100. Tracy Tupman (Pickwick Papers)

99. Julian Malory (Excellent Women)

98. C.J. Stryver (A Tale of Two Cities). This one is correct. Sydney Carton is the hot one at this law firm.

97. Charles Arrowby (The Sea, the Sea)

96. Dr. Watson (“A Study In Scarlet”). Wrong. Watson is a catch. He's a Victorian 10.

95. Willy Wonka (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Ma'am, he has unlimited access to chocolate. That should bump him into the Top 50, at least.

94. Jim Dixon (Lucky Jim)

93. Edward Ferrars (Sense and Sensibility). I'm sorry, but in what universe is Edward Ferrars less bangable than George Wickham? Carrie Frye, did you read these books all the way through to the end?

92. Colonel Brandon (Sense and Sensibility). EXCUSE ME?!?

91. Percy Mannering (Memento Mori)

90. Edmund Bertram (Mansfield Park)

89. Augustus Snodgrass (Pickwick Papers)

88. Mr. Micawber (David Copperfield)

87. Bertram Wooster (“Extricating Young Gussie”)

86. Everard Bone (Excellent Women)

85. Peregrin Took (The Lord of the Rings)

84. Will Ladislaw (Middlemarch). EXCUSE THE FUCK OUTTA ME?! Will Ladislaw INVENTED fanservice.

83. Flashman (Flashman)

82. J.P. Worthing (The Importance of Being Earnest)

81. Holly Martins (The Third Man)

80. Charles Bingley (Pride and Prejudice). Fair. Bingley is about as attractive as a golden retriever.

79. Alec Warner (Memento Mori)

78. Leopold Bloom (Ulysses)

77. Timothy Cavendish (Cloud Atlas)

76. Kubla Khan (“Kubla Khan”)

75. Aylwin Forbes (No Fond Return of Love)

74. Falstaff (Henry IV, Part I)

73. Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe (Ivanhoe)

72. Stephen Colley (I Capture The Castle)

71. George Smiley (Call for the Dead)

70. Charles Ryder (Brideshead Revisited)

69. Simon Cotton (I Capture The Castle)

68. Peter Pan (Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up). MA'AM HE IS A LITERAL CHILD. HE SHOULD NOT BE ON THIS LIST.

67. Long John Silver (Treasure Island)

66. King Lear (King Lear)

65. Reginald Jeeves (“Extricating Young Gussie”)

64. Henry Pulling (Travels with My Aunt)

63. Romeo (Romeo and Juliet). Another literal child from the reader's pov, but pretty bangable to his age-appropriate partner, I guess?

62. Tristram Shandy (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman)

61. Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

60. Roland Michell (Possession)

59. Crow (Crow)

58. Brigadier Etienne Gerard (The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard)

57. Tertius Lydgate (Middlemarch). I don't remember who this is.

56. Lord Sebastian Flyte (Brideshead Revisited)

55. Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park)

54. Frederick Wentworth (Persuasion)

53. Edward Murdstone (David Copperfield)

52. Desmond Ragwort (Thus Was Adonis Murdered)

51. Captain Hook (Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up). I feel like he should be closer to 111. Unless we're talking about that one adaptation with Jason Isaacs. I like Jason Isaacs.

50. Charles Darnay (A Tale of Two Cities). That's pretty fair. Sure, he looks exactly, weirdly like Sydney Carton, but Charles Darnay has another golden retriever personality. Pleasant, I suppose, but not sexy. Plus he's probably sad about his dead son.

49. Dorian Gray (The Picture of Dorian Gray). He could have been much higher if not for the murder.

48. King Arthur (The Once and Future King)

47. Mortimer Lightwood (Our Mutual Friend)

46. M. Héger (Villette)

45. Legolas (The Lord of the Rings). Tolkien elves are hot.

44. Robin Hood (Piers Plowman)

43. Inspector Alan Grant (The Man in the Queue)

42. George Emerson (A Room with a View)

41. Alan Breck Stewart (Kidnapped)

40. Rockingham Napier (Excellent Women)

39. Mr. Neville (Hotel du Lac)

38. St. John Rivers (Jane Eyre). Colonialist. Not sexy.

37. Remus Lupin (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

36. Lancelot (The Once and Future King)

35. Othello (Othello, The Moor of Venice). He definitely killed his wife. We saw him do it. Therefore, unbangable.

34. Tarzan/Lord Greystoke (Tarzan of the Apes). I know he was on my Disney "would" list, but let's be honest: The real sexiness is Tony Goldwyn's.

33. Severus Snape (Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone)

32. Aslan (The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe). Ma'am, he is a literal lion. He shouldn't be on this list. I'm pretty sure he's an asexual untame talking lion.

31. Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities). Should be closer to #1 OBVIOUSLY.

30. John Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility). This much higher than Edward Ferrars? Really?

29. Thomas Cromwell (Wolf Hall)

28. Maxim de Winter (Rebecca). Um, didn't he kill his wife?

27. Simon Bakerloo (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase)

26. Sirius Black (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). Yeah. Or maybe a little higher, even. This is not an endorsement of J.K. Rowling, whose attempt to gaslight the Internet into ignoring Nazi anti-lgbtq+ violence makes me ill. If I were a billionaire writer with a huge platform, I simply would not use my huge platform to target a vulnerable minority.

25. Brian de Bois-Guilbert (Ivanhoe)

24. Adam Dalgliesh (Cover Her Face)

23. James Bond (Casino Royale). James Bond's behavior and personality are offputting. The only thing that ever makes James Bond sexy is when he's played by Daniel Craig.

22. James Steerforth (David Copperfield)

21. Tom Bombadil (The Lord of the Rings). Accurate. Tom Bombadil might not be a permanent keeper, but he does sound fun.

20. Edward Driffield (Cakes And Ale)

19. Sherlock Holmes (“A Study In Scarlet”). I never get very strong sexy vibes from book!Sherlock. Watson does more for me. But the sound of Benedict Cumberbatch's voice is an entirely different story. (Hours spent reading Johnlock fanfic? Who, me?)

18. Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon (These Old Shades)

17. Robert Frobisher (Cloud Atlas). That's about right. Sexy, but sad. Depraved bisexual trope, but sexy.

16. Eomer (The Lord of the Rings). Yes.

15. Michael Cantrip (Thus Was Adonis Murdered)

14. Algernon Moncrieff (The Importance of Being Earnest)

13. Randolph Henry Ash (Possession)

12. Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights). I have normal, proportional feelings about Heathcliff and about Ralph Fiennes playing him. I'm normal about Byronic antiheroes.

11. Maurice Bendrix (The End of the Affair)

10. Beorn (The Hobbit)

9. Orlando (Orlando: A Biography). Strongly agree. Ms. Carrie Frye and I are on the same page here.

8. Oliver Mellors (Lady Chatterley’s Lover). I get it.

7. Lord Peter Wimsey (Strong Poison)

6. Don Juan (Don Juan)

5. The Beast (“The Tiger’s Bride”)

4. Eugene Wrayburn (Our Mutual Friend)

The top three are fine. I feel like there should me more Shakespeare in here somewhere, though. I feel like the unsexy Shakespeare characters are covered better than the actually hot ones. Benedick, anyone? Dom Demetrius, afraid of yet intrigued by Helena's sub tendencies?

3. Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice)

2. Strider/ Aragorn (The Lord of the Rings)

1. Mr. Rochester (Jane Eyre)

Four Vignettes

I don't know what this is. Maybe it was inspired by my Spotify Wrapped? I'm still not sure I'm using the word "pastiche" correctly. I pulled at a few different threads and I wove this, whatever it is.

I.

Robert Sheehan is outside my window again. Lucky for me, I'm on the 2nd floor, in my writer's studio above the corner bodega and he's standing on the sidewalk.

The window is open.

"Eileen!" he shouts up. "Come on, Eileen."

I leave my chair, push aside the pink-and-gray buffalo check curtain and peer down at him. 

Putting his Irish accent on thick, he sings, "Believe me, if all those enduring young charms..."

"I'm dreaming," I say, interrupting his croon. "This is because I said you should play Kevin Rowland in a movie about Dexys Midnight Runners."

"Not a dream," he half-says, half-sings. "Don't you want to come down and go for a walk with me, just around the neighborhood?"

"No." The smell of hot tortilla chips warming in the bodega below makes my nostrils flare. I imagine the salt crystals on their flat surfaces. Craving the warmth and salt, I feel a hunger pang.

"Why not?"

"I've got things to do."

"Like what?"

I gesture at my laptop. "I have to write things. Legitimate things, fresh things, not just this Joyce Carol Oates pastiche."

"Eileen, you ain't telling the truth."

"Not my name," I remind him.

"Eileen, Erin, whatever. This is your day set aside for going for a walk with me and you know it."

I feel threatened. I close the window and go back to my laptop.

II.

I walk into the little Historic Downtown Irvington shop on Washington Street that used to be the ice cream shop that sold bubble tea. I see the new owner has rebranded it as a 1950s-themed nostalgia diner. The bubble tea options and anime keepsakes are gone, but the ice cream counter remains, as do about a dozen shiny, chrome milkshake blenders.

The brightly lit Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner plays “Drugstore Rock'N'Roll” by Janis Martin. The cheerful song paints the perfect picture of midcentury innocence.*

At one high table sits Edgar Allan Poe. His dark brown suit fits him well, although the foot that dangles from the long-legged chair has an untied shoelace. Catching me in his blue-eyed gaze, he says, “This was her favorite place.”

I’m confused. He died in the 1840s, over a century before the trope of the ‘50s malt shop emerged.

“I’m sorry?” I say. “ 'She’ is –?”

“Was,” he corrects me. “She was my Annabel Lee.”

I shake my head as I take the seat across from him. He offers me a sip of his milkshake, turning the straw toward me. I know I shouldn’t, but I indulge myself in a sweet sip of Poe’s chocolate malt.

I then continue, “This couldn’t have been her favorite place; that’s a line from that MC Lars song, 'Annabel Lee R.I.P.’”

He shrugs. Poe looks sad and beautiful but not morose. Despite his Gothic reputation, there’s nothing gloomy or goth about him. He’s every bit the Southern gentleman, gracious and effortlessly charming. I want to touch his dark hair where it starts to curl, just behind his ear.

I excuse myself to use the restroom. In the mirror, my eyes are less green and much more hazel than usual. Am I Christian Bale? No, I’m Augustus Landor. My clothes are careworn and I want to go back to my cottage.

Well, perhaps one more sip of Poe’s chocolate malt first.

*The song is about a drugstore. The former drugstore with the soda fountain, the one robbed by John Dillinger, is up the block a bit and on the other side of the street, across from the present-day library.

III.

John Legend, wearing a fashionable off-white suit, sits at his white piano, playing me a Christmas song in front of a roaring fire. Actually, he’s singing me “The Christmas Song.”

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”

“Happy birthday,” I blurt out.

“My birthday isn’t until the 28th. I’m an after-Christmas baby.”

I say, “You’re the Christmas baby; you’re Jesus Christ Superstar.”

He laughs, and I can’t tell whether he’s more surprised or amused.

Presently the fireplace-warmed air grew hotter. This was no winter wonderland. Were we in Jerusalem? Beyond John I spot a man with copious sandy-blond hair wearing black eyeliner and a keffiyeh.

“Judas,” I say upon the appearance of Tim Minchin.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, approaching John, seemingly moving in to kiss him. They lock eyes and I feel I’m witnessing something I’m not meant to see.

“…Superstar,” I mutter to myself as I turn away to give them their privacy. I muse aloud, “I can appreciate casting Alice Cooper as King Herod; I appreciate his showmanship. You know else might have made an interesting casting choice? Murray Head, the original album-Judas Superstar, coming back to play King Herod.”

We stand before his throne now: King Murray Head.

Blame W. Somerset Maugham. He had a birthday (January 25), I remembered that his Oriental Hotel suite is name-checked in “One Night in Bangkok,” and soon I’m detecting something wistful in Murray Head ballads that speaks to me as something other than merely an ‘80s kid.

“Now see what you’ve done?” Jesus Christ Superstar admonishes me. “You chose to lean fully into your 1980s nostalgia and now I’m going to be crucified.”

Is Tim Minchin Judas wearing lip gloss? And is it a bit smudged now?

“I’m not interested in matters of Jewish law tonight,” King Murray Head says in the crispest English accent you’ve heard since Ralph Fiennes. Offering me a doubtful smile, he adds, “My dear, would you care to join me in the Somerset Maugham Suite?”

“I thought you got your kicks above the waistline, sunshine,” the saucy Aussie chimes in.

King Murray Head shrugs. “I’m only human. We can’t all be Jesus Christ Superstar.”

I’m sexualizing that old man. I desire him carnally. But will he love me tomorrow? I'm guessing no, but that's ok. Nothing lasts forever.

IV.

I’m tucked snugly, quite comfortably into my 4-post bed, the curtains drawn around me, blissfully asleep in the warm and the dark. The sound of my name awakens me.

“Who’s there?” I ask. It had better not be Robert Sheehan.

“Charles Dickens,” comes the reply. This is what I get for reading Greg Jenner’s Dead Famous before bed.

But I know that distinctive voice. I part the bed curtains. “Dan Stevens?!” I ask incredulously, laying eyes on the extremely handsome English actor in the early morning light.

“It’s Charles Dickens,” Dan Stevens insists. He’s brought a friend.

“And John Forster,” adds Justin Edwards-in-Victorian-costume.

Accepting that these British thespians are in character as their The Man Who Invented Christmas counterparts, I ask, “Are you the Ghosts of Christmas Past? Am I dreaming?

“Neither,” says John/Justin, pulling a pie sprinkled with sugar seemingly out of nowhere.

That explained nothing. I thought back to Robert Sheehan telling me his creepy Oatesian visit wasn’t a dream. I then grew distracted by the state of my bedroom, suddenly filled with evergreen trees and boughs decorated with silver baubles, iridescent glass bubbles, and magical flickering candles. I smelled cinnamon and cloves; was someone mulling red wine in my bedroom?

It was beginning to look a lot like Victorian Christmas and smell like it too. My chamber suddenly possessed a long dining table on which there lay a roasted turkey, an enormous figgy pudding, and a rapidly-multiplying host of 19th-century holiday delicacies that would have made Ichabod Crane’s head explode.

“And you’re saying you two are not the Ghosts of Christmas Past?” I asked my guests for clarification.

Seating themselves at the table, they denied being ghosts a second time as they helped themselves to a portion of the mouth-watering feast.

“Tuck in,” said Charles/Dan.

I serve myself, but soon notice how the actors favor each other’s company, eat from each other’s plates, and feed one another. They’d constructed an elaborate ritual that allowed them to touch one another without social judgment.

“What is this?” I wonder out loud.

“You could think of it as recursion,” Charles/Dan says. “Each Christmas harks back to every other Christmas. This Christmas reminds you of childhood Christmases, which in turn retains elements of Victorian Christmas past, which in turn bears marks of earlier traditions, and so on.

“One might say,” remarks John/Justin, “that, in a sense, there has only ever been one Christmas and we return to it every year. We practice the myth of eternal return when we practice Christmas.” His thumb traces a line of cream that Charles/ Dan has smeared on his cheek, then eats the errant cream.

“I still don’t understand why I’m here,” I say. “Why was it necessary for me to be the Scrooge in this drama?”

“It isn’t,” Charles/Dan says flatly. “We merely need your bed.”

With that they abandon their feast and retire to my comfy bed, drawing the curtains behind them. I politely ignore their pleasured sighs as I slice into a steaming plum pie, but internally I wish they’d gotten a different room. I knew the Somerset Maugham Suite at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok had recently been vacated.

* * *

Author’s Note: Oliver Sacks wrote that Charles Dickens had a haunted mind, but didn’t explain that statement and then very sadly passed away. I began to understand it when I read about the railway accident he was involved in. I now believe that perhaps Dr. Sacks also meant that Dickens was haunted by his childhood poverty. This is depicted in The Man Who Invented Christmas and discussed in Dead Famous.

But then in this podcast, Helena Kelly spilled the absolute tea on Dickens and found out that he might have been lying about working in a boot blacking factory?! And he probably had syphilis, which he gave to Kate and the children - some of them may have died from it! - and maybe her sister too?! I don’t want to slut shame Charles Dickens, but I do think I understand what Dr. Sacks meant a lot more deeply now.

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But I wouldn’t be sad if the ghost of Dr. Oliver Sacks wanted to visit me and talk about it. 

Unfortunate (Mostly) Literary Happenings of Past Februaries

Previous Installment in the "Bummer" Series: Bummer New Year

February 1, 1891: Newspaper publisher Ignacio Martínez is assassinated by two men in Laredo, Texas, because they disagree with his newspaper’s criticism of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz.

February 2, 2014: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Truman Capote in Capote, dies of an apparently accidental overdose of prescription medicine and heroin.

February 3, 1959: “The Day the Music Died,” when early rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were all killed in a plane crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The musicians had performed at Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom and were on their way to their next show in Minnesota. This accident is remembered in poetic form through the Don McLean song “American Pie,” recorded on May 26, 1971. 

February 7, 1497: On Shrove Tuesday in Florence, followers of the monk Girolamo Savonarola burn art, books, their cosmetics, fancy clothes, playing cards, and other cultural objects they associate with sin in the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities. Sadly, irreplaceable ancient art and manuscripts were lost to this religiously-fueled war on anything that represented luxury. 

Ironically, Savonarola will later be excommunicated and convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. As punishment, he is hanged and his body burned in the same plaza where the Bonfire of the Vanities occurred. It will be forbidden for any Christian to possess copies of Savonarola’s writings. 

February 10, 2005: Playwright Arthur Miller dies of bladder cancer.

February 11, 1963: Poet Sylvia Plath, who struggles with clinical depression, dies by suicide, inhaling gas by placing her head inside an unlit gas stove. She is 30 years old.

February 11, 2012: 48-year-old singer/actress Whitney Houston is found unresponsive in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Paramedics attempted CPR but are unable to revive her. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office attributes her death to atherosclerotic heart disease, cocaine use, and drowning. (Ok, this one's not really "literary." I'll allow it.) 

February 12, 1980: Two days after 34-year-old Patricia Frazier of Texas saw a CBS network TV broadcast of the movie The Exorcist, Frazier kills her 4-year-old daughter Khunji and cuts out her heart. According to Dr. Leon Morris, a psychologist who spoke with Frazier after the crime, Frazier believed Khunji was possessed by demons and trying to harm her (Patricia). A jury of her peers finds Patricia Frazier not guilty by reason of insanity.

February 13, 1945: U.S. and U.K. forces drop incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, causing fires with the intention of destroying munitions factories in that city. A second round of bombs are dropped in the early hours of February 14th, calculated to hamper the efforts of rescuers on the scene of the first round of bombings and fires. It’s estimated that between 22,000 and 25,000 Germans are killed, almost all of them civilians.

Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is there as an American prisoner of war being held by the German army. The experience forms the basis of his science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

February 14, 1929: In what becomes known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone’s gangsters line up seven members of Bugs Moran’s rival gang and machine gun them to death. Police arrive in time to find one survivor, Frank Gusenberg, suffering from 14 bullet wounds. They ask Gusenberg to name his killer, but Gusenberg refuses before he succumbs to his injuries.

February 14, 1989: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issues a pronouncement urging faithful Muslims to assassinate Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s magical realist novel The Satanic Verses depicts a fictional version of the Prophet Mohammad as a character, which the Ayatollah considers blasphemous.

February 15, 1998: 89-year-old war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, struggling with ovarian and liver cancer and failing eyesight, chooses to end her own life by swallowing cyanide.

February 17, 1673: French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who wrote under the pen name Molière, suffers a tuberculosis-induced pulmonary embolism while performing in his own play The Invalid. He finished out the show, but was carried immediately home afterward, where he died.

February 18, 1718: French-born English writer Peter Anthony Motteux dies of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation inside a brothel, although the circumstances of his death were considered suspicious at the time. This may be the oldest recorded case of autoerotic asphyxiation.

February 19, 2013: The body of Canadian student and tourist Elisa Lam is discovered in the water tower atop the Stay on Main hotel in Los Angeles, California. Lam is believed to have entered the tank of her own volition and accidentally drowned, possibly while experiencing the effects of withdrawal from her psychiatric medications.

February 25, 1983: Playwright Tennessee Williams dies of an apparently accidental overdose of the barbiturate medication Seconal.

February 26, 2015: Australian author Jessica Ainscough, age 29, dies of a rare cancer, epithelioid sarcoma. In 2008, her doctors suggested amputating her affected left arm at the shoulder, which would have given her a greater than 50% chance of surviving for ten years or more. Ainscough chose to treat her cancer with alternative therapies rather than having the amputation. She used the alternative treatments for six years, only returning to conventional medical treatments near the end of her life when she developed a tumor that bled continuously for ten months.

February 28, 1916: The Turn of the Screw author Henry James dies of pneumonia.

February 29, 1960: Melvin Purvis II, the FBI agent who shot and killed John Dillinger (and who was played by Christian Bale in Public Enemies), dies by suicide.

Now, after all that bad news, if you want to take a little Public Enemies sidebar and learn about the song "Blue Moon," read here. 

And you can always read my work in progress, Erin O'Riordan's Almanac, on Ko-fi.

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'Haunted Indiana' by James A. Willis

I finished this short book yesterday. The author is from Ohio, but I'm from Indiana. This is my two cents and experiences with Haunted Indiana: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Hoosier State.

Ghosts of Northern Indiana

The first section is called South Bend and Northern Indiana, which is where I'm from. The very first story is about Bremen, a very small town which can be most easily reached by going next door to South Bend - to Mishawaka - and then heading directly south on the highway. I've only been to Bremen a few times and know little about it, but apparently when teens go legend tripping, they go to Ewald Cemetery, reach through the high fence, and try to throw coins onto the graves of children, hoping to hear the ghostly voice of a child on whose grave a coin lands. 

Now, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any actual living person has heard such a ghostly voice. That's the main drawback to this collection: the tales may be creepy, but they're basically only creepy rumors with nothing substantial to back them up. 

The third story in the collection is about a circus train that originated in Peru, Indiana, which during the 20th century billed itself as the Circus Capital of the World. There's still a circus museum there, but I've never visited it. (Peru is also the hometown of Cole Porter.) In 1918, the circus train from Peru got into a terrible crash with another train in Hammond, Indiana. Hammond is a stop along the South Shore train and is located in Lake County, technically the only part of Indiana that counts as Greater Chicagoland. 

It's the site of the crash that's said to be haunted. People report hearing the disembodied sounds of people and animals in distress as they would have been after the horrific crash of the wooden train cars and the fire that followed. (Wooden train cars were lit with kerosene lamps in the 1910s; that's just asking for trouble.) I've read this story before, although I can't exactly remember where. Maybe Wikipedia, maybe a magazine article about Chicago hauntings, since the bodies of the unfortunate victims of the circus train crash were buried on the other side of the Illinois border. 

Next comes the ghost story nearest and dearest to my heart, the one about the old Gipper. Unless you're from South Bend or a Notre Dame alumnus, you may not be familiar with the story of turn-of-the-20th century college football star George Gipp, who died tragically young from a terrible case of pneumonia. If you're old enough to remember former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, you might know that Reagan played Gipp in the movie Knute Rockne, All American. If you've heard of Rockne, you probably know he was Notre Dame's coach in the late 1910s and early 1920s. 

George Gipp is buried in his native Michigan, but an often-told legend around the Notre Dame campus is that Gipp's ghost haunts the old theater building, Washington Hall. Washington Hall is the place where I watched Richard III, but larger productions are now staged at the theater hall Regis Philbin donated to the Notre Dame campus about 10 years ago. I've been to Washington Hall many times, and although I've seen the bat that lives there, I've never seen George Gipp's ghost. 

From Notre Dame, the book skips to Merrillville and then to Lake County's Gary, both of which are said to have vanishing hitchhikers of the kind one might read about in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The next ghosts occupy a cemetery in Crown Point, a pretty little Lake County town you'll glimpse in the Christian Bale movie Public Enemies. Its jail once held the notorious Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger. 

Dillinger is buried in Indianapolis (his hometown), but Dillinger-related hauntings don't merit a mention in Haunted Indiana. He's sometimes said to haunt a building he once robbed in South Bend, a building that longtime SB residents will know as the Dainty Maid bakery building. One of my cousins used to work as a baker there, but she never saw the ghost. 

Nor is there any mention of Posey Chapel, where my sister-in-law was once menaced by some of kind of spirit as a Ouija board-wielding teen. Skipped, too, is Mishawaka's haunted house, now a Hacienda Mexican restaurant (part of a local chain) but once a home belonging to the Kamm family, whose former brewery is only a few yards away. The former Kamm house is said to be haunted by the spirit of a servant who killed herself over an ill-fated affair with a Kamm heir. 

Mention IS made of Mishawaka's tiny eastern neighbor Osceola. A house there is said to have been troubled by a poltergeist. The paranormal activity begin and ended, once and for all, in 1966. If you get a chance to visit Osceola, do so not for its alleged poltergeist, but for Ferrettie-Baugo Creek County Park. Baugo Creek is very pretty place to go for a peaceful canoe ride on a hot summer day. 

Ghosts of Indianapolis

If I wanted to get haunted in my current home of Indianapolis, where would I go? The two most likely candidates, according to this book, are the Slippery Noodle Inn and the campus of Marian University.  The Slippery Noodle claims to be the oldest continually-operating bar in Indiana. Located near Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, it's tremendously popular on the days of Colts home games. I'm ashamed to say I've never been there, even though I was within walking distance when I lived downtown.

It's said that barware at the Slippery Noodle will sometimes be moved around by ghostly hands, but for your best chance to spot a ghost, you have to go to the second floor. That's where the old bordello was. The ghosts of sex workers are said to prefer female visitors and may occasionally slap a man who wanders into their territory.

Marian University has two mansions on its campus that are said to be haunted. One is the current Admissions building, which used to be the private home of Frank Wheeler. Wheeler shot himself to death with a shotgun inside the home, but the most commonly reported haunting there is a phantom carriage that pulls up into the porte cochere. A phantom woman gets out of the carriage, heads toward the house, and disappears. Marian's other haunted house is Riverdale, the former home of James Allison, one of the founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Allison is said to occasionally rearrange the books in his former private library. 

Should pandemic conditions ever lift and I ever go to see a show at the Old National Center, formerly the Murat Shrine Center, I might see the ghost of the old Shriner's temple's builder, Elias J. Jacoby. 

And those are the hauntings closest to me. What's haunted in your town?

The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman #Nonfiction

Christian Bale: The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman by Harrison Cheung

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Harrison Cheung, a Canadian who loves movies, was Christian Bale's unpaid personal assistant for many years. He does not have a very high opinion of Mr. Bale, whom he characterizes as incredibly self-centered. Disdainful of publicity to an extreme, Bale didn't even attend Heath Ledger's funeral because he didn't want to face the public, even though Bale and Ledger had become friends. (Some people get along with Christian Bale. Heath Ledger was one, and Russell Crowe is another.)

This book is full of short, interesting tidbits, but it also contains some strange errors and omissions. When mentioning Christian's interest in playing Mercutio in the Baz Luhrmann 'Romeo + Juliet' film of the '90s, Cheung and co-author Nicola Pittam mention that Bale lost the role to "an African-American." What an odd, vague way to describe Harold Perrineau, the actor who not only steals the movie with his impassioned portrayal of Romeo's volatile friend but is also well-known to American audiences through the TV shows 'Lost' and, now, 'Claws.' Do the authors really not know who Harold Perrineau is?

Another section refers to Colin Farrell as a British actor. Colin. Farrell. Is. Irish. Irish people are NOT British, and since Cheung lived with a British family (Christian, Louise, and David Bale - brother, sister, and father) for years, shouldn't he know this?

Cheung also has a low opinion of Winona Ryder, a former friend of Bale, his co-star in 'Little Women,' and the one who introduced Bale to his wife, Sandra (Sibi) Blazic. He describes the petite star as foul-mouthed and rude.

The whole narration has to be taken with a small grain of salt because Cheung obviously has a bone to pick with the Bale clan. They owe him thousands of dollars, if he genuinely never received a paycheck for working as Bale's personal and social media assistant from the earliest days of the Internet. Maybe he's exaggerating, or maybe he has cherry-picked the incidents that paint Christian Bale and his semi-con-artist father in the worst possible light. I don't know. It was still an interesting, relatively quick read.

I purchased this book at Barnes and Noble with my own funds as was not obligated in any way to review it.

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