I hate to quit procrastinating!

I'm just resting from about an hour in the basement. I cleaned out the north port of the garage, hoping that a vehicle can get in there, close enough to my car to jump-start the motor. In a few minutes I'm going to take a long hot shower, then gargle half a bottle of peroxide in hopes of washing off or killing any basement germs. It might be nice to be grounded for a week, if not for worrying about all the places I should be going and things I should be doing. Not to mention running out of cigarettes and cat food, whiskey and shotgun shells and things.

Pat's blog entry about Beverley Nichols got me looking at biographies of old British writers. In my biographical scrapbook, there's an article about Roald Dahl, English eccentric, RAF hero, 30-year husband of actress Patricia Neal, and writer of the most controversial children's stories since the demystification of the Brothers Grimm. His plane ran out of gas in the 1940s and he crashed in the middle of the Libyan desert, fractured his skull and mashed his nose in. He wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, Boy, and Matilda, and many others, then died at age 74 in 1990.

It's strange how handsome Englishmen get so ugly when they get old, while handsome American men just get better looking; cf. Dick Van Dyke, Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, Harry Belafonte, Tony (the singer whose last name I have trouble remembering), et al. Tony Bennett? I say Clint Eastwood, remembering Susan's blog entry about him, although Clint was never any Marvin Behlke. But then, who is?

That is, unless the handsome American goes and gets plastic surgery. Richard Chamberlain and James Garner, two of the handsomest actors ever, both looked like freaks after their facelifts.

To the showers!