“People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he remembered. “The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive.”
Lots more Jack LaLanne video here. Here's one you probably don't need. And here he is with his dog Happy ("Right in the mouth with the foot he's putting"):
"The primary story here is not that interesting... People lie and cheat and steal all the time. That’s a fact of life. But rarely does a national news organization give them an unverified megaphone to whitewash it."
[Bob Ennis, former husband of TV reporter Carol Anne Riddell], now head of the digital media practice at the investment bank Petsky Prunier, did not have a high opinion of the Times even before this incident. “I’m happy if they spell all the headlines on the front page correctly,” he says. “The idea that they’d fact-check a style story — I don’t think that’s incumbent on them. But there’s a difference between that and publishing a choreographed, self-serving piece of revisionist history for two people who are both members of the media industry.”
Oh! I love how this is turning into a Forbes vs. NYT journalism showdown — with the help of the jilted husband, who's got the help of Forbes now, getting his side of the marriage breakdown into the national press.
Although his ex-wife said she and her new husband volunteered to tell their story to the “Vows” column partly “for our kids’ sakes,” Ennis says he is angry primarily because of the effect he sees this episode having on those same kids.
Right. Don't forget the kids. Everyone is premising his/her self-serving statements on the kids now.
“These folks are well within their rights to tell whatever version of reality they want to tell, and if The New York Times is gullible enough to print it, that mostly reflects poorly on the Times,” he says. “The picture of my daughter is another matter. I sure as hell would have objected if they had told me they were going to print it.”
Which one is his daughter? Is it the sad-faced girl with the bow in her hair in profile at the right-hand side of the photograph? Look at her and think about how she might feel as she gazes at the brown wedding-cake about to be put asunder by the gleaming knife gripped by her outreaching mother whose hand is overclasped by the (diamond?) ring-wearing paw of her new husband, the erst-while friend of her parents, whom she's long known as the dad of her kid-friends, who are now strangely intruded into the confusing, ever-changing zone that bears the label "family."
Or is his daughter the sweet little child in the husband's arms? Imagine how her father's heart aches to see that man with one hand grasping his daughter's rear and the other hand grasping his ex-wife's hand and, inside that, a knife. The new husband and wife are performing wedding theater for the NYT photographer, and they don't know that the frame the Times will select is the one where their smiles look like predatory grimaces and everyone else in the photograph looks like they belong at a funeral.
“Maybe The New York Times has forgotten, but New York can still be a dangerous town for children of wealthy people. I want to find out from the Times how that occurred and I will expect some sort of response and if I don’t get one I’ll take further measures to achieve one.”
Ugh, the stink of a threatened lawsuit drifts into the room. But don't worry: It's for the children.
***
And don't miss the extra photograph at the original NYT story. The woman's long-clawed hand drapes over the shoulder of her conquered beast, who seems drained of life force. His ring-wearing hand lies limply on the table next to a drained bottle of beer. In the original story, when he told her he loved her, she knocked a beer "into his lap" — that is, onto his genitals. The liquids have all spilled out, and the phallic symbols are empty.
For me, this is — by far — the #1 most-nostalgia-provoking cake in the world. What kind of packaged cake did you grow up with? Hostess? Little Debbie? Drake's? Entenmann's? Sara Lee? My hometown cake is TastyKake!
The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.
I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same occurrence were important to their interests. But the black beetles took no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not on terms with one another.
These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder. In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and she looked like the Witch of the place.
"This," said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, "is where I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here."
With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and there and die at once, the complete realization of the ghastly waxwork at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.
"What do you think that is?" she asked me, again pointing with her stick; "that, where those cobwebs are?"
"But it wasn’t that. It was just that I couldn’t accept that they would call us by number, because I thought it would make it easier for them to kill us if they had to kill an object, a number."
Betancourt says she made some immediate decisions about her new life: First, she would wear perfume every day; second, she would never deny herself the opportunity to eat cake.
"I promised to have ice cream in my diet, and I promised to change my priorities," she says. In the jungle, one of the few books Betancourt had access to was the Bible, and she read it over and over again. One passage stuck out: "It says that when you cross the valley of tears, and you arrive to the oasis, the reward of God is not success, it’s not money, it’s not admiration or fame, it’s not power. His reward is rest. So that’s what I want for me now."
Her book is a big best seller. I wonder how many readers come to that cake-and-ice-cream part and think: Yes! I must eat cake and ice cream.... even though in their whole lives they've never left the oasis.
It's nice to think that the hyper-glamorous affair went humble and comfy as the night wore on. Or am I being a chump to consume this PR that's intended to make people — face it, women — think the Clintons are just folks?
... where the nice lady kept the place open for an extra 15 minutes so that Meade could have a smoothie and I could have a peppermint tea with a shot of internet. We were the only customers, and Meade said you must do very well in wintertime, and she said that's what she, a transplanted San Diegan, thought when she moved up here and opened the place. But the truth is, no one comes in the winter. The customers come on the sunny warm days (which are few, up north).
In winter, where does everyone go? Don't they want to be somewhere cozy? We drove quite a ways in the Chequamegon Forest. And what we saw were bars, bars, bars. Bars and bowling alleys. The culture up north isn't so much about coffee and WiFi. It's more about beer and bowling. That was my observation, as I drove by....
... with my vision admittedly blurred... by speed, not beer. I was on peppermint tea...
... and to-go chocolate cake, leftover from lunch.
This is why I don't have kids. At least I can stop [at] a YT video....
At first I was all "WTF?!" Then I chuckled. Then a creeping feeling of inexorable dread washed over me and I began to despair of the world and the future and I knew, in the core of my shivering, embattled soul, that the universe was cold and empty except for hideous, immense, eternal beings who do not notice our existence and will destroy us without a thought like gods of old, Ba'al, Chalmecatl and Wodan, who people tried to appease with human flesh. Then the video ended and I felt better. I think I'll go have a cupcake now. Mmmm... cupcakes.
Cute. I laughed. Also, WTF is wrong with you people?
