nancynall.com » Yikes.
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Yikes.

You’ve heard of a bad hair day? I woke up hav­ing a bad hair, face and body day. The dreaded triple! And, iron­i­cally, on the first day in many that I actu­ally feel pretty good, my cold hav­ing been defeated by the supe­rior forces of Immune Sys­tem Sys­tems, Ltd. My plan for early this morn­ing was to rake leaves under the dreary gray sky. Then I saw myself, and thought, not even that, until I get a shower, a lit­tle mas­cara and a two-week juice fast.

Of course I feel this way. It’s Novem­ber. My birth month, Kate’s birth month, Alan’s birth month — one long sprint from Hal­loween to the hol­i­days. Any­one would fall apart mid­way through.

But speak­ing of women and their looks. I saw Queen Noor the for­mer Lisa Hal­aby (sorry, but I find it impos­si­ble to call Amer­i­can women by their phony-baloney Arab-royalty titles, par­tic­u­larly when they rule over a place like Jor­dan) on Ander­son Cooper the other day. She is a beau­ti­ful woman, in the Grace Kelly mode — an Amer­i­can girl ele­vated to a pro­foundly un-American place, and seem­ingly rather con­flicted over it. She was talk­ing about the bomb­ing in Amman, of course, not say­ing much of any real inter­est; I recall some­thing about Jor­dan being like one big fam­ily. So my atten­tion wan­dered to her per­fectly made up and chem­i­cally frozen face. I’m not one of those women who can read plas­tic surgery at a glance — it’s just not that inter­est­ing to me — but it’s hard not to notice when a woman is speak­ing of a tragic bomb­ing in her adopted coun­try and she can’t seem to make a facial expres­sion of con­cern about it.

It was remark­able. Her lips were mov­ing, and occa­sion­ally her eye­brows would make a heroic move of a mil­lime­ter or two, but oth­er­wise, her face was as ani­mated as porce­lain. She seemed to know this, and was com­pen­sat­ing by mov­ing her head instead, lit­tle dart­ing motions here and there that never gave the cam­era oper­a­tor prob­lems, but pre­sented the semi-illusion of a spirit behind the words.

Very strange. I’ve never been a beauty, so I never had to worry about the Tragedy of Los­ing One’s Looks. (Like Nora Ephron, I’ve found that I tend to gain them over time.) It fre­quently seems beauty masks a howl­ing void of insecurity.

I read some­where that Lisa’s hus­band had a thing for the nan­nies. Figures.

OK, blog­gage:

The Jour­nal Gazette back in the Fort has been doing a lively series of edi­to­ri­als lately, “When One Party Rules,” address­ing the county’s decades-long path under an insur­mount­able GOP major­ity. It’s been amus­ing, if for no other rea­son than this: The GOP likes to mar­ket itself as the party of fru­gal spend­ing and lean gov­ern­ment, when in truth they’re as greedy as any prof­li­gate Demo­c­rat admin­is­tra­tion, when given the chance to feed at the pub­lic trough.

But this edi­to­r­ial points out one of my favorite strange quirks of Indi­ana law, one that never failed to get a jaw-dropping reac­tion from newly arriv­ing reporters in my time there: In the Hoosier state, county sher­iffs are in charge of col­lect­ing delin­quent taxes. And to make it worth their while, they get to skim 10 per­cent off the top of any monies collected.

Not for their office-administration fund, mind you. For the Sup­port Your Local Sheriff’s Bahamian Vaca­tion fund. For his (or her) per­sonal salary.

As my ex-colleague Bill said, when he heard this: “Where are we? Medieval France?”

P.S. How much extra did the Allen County sher­iff earn through this lit­tle fringe ben­e­fit in 2004? Only $128,334.

Nice work if you can get it.

Now to the show­ers, before I break any more mir­rors around here.

Posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 9:01 am
in Uncategorized.

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17 responses to
“Yikes.”

  1. brian stouder said on November 15th, 2005 at 9:30 am

    “I’ve never been a beauty”

    bzzzzt!!! wrong-oh!

    I real­ize you’re not fish­ing for com­pli­ments, but that remark is sim­ply untrue. Granted — I’ve only seen you ‘in per­son’ on two occa­sions, 20 years ago; but you came across telev­sion quite well, and your N-S pic was always pleas­ant — and to top it off, you have a great voice for radio (cou­pled to a lively MIND — which is a rare, rare thing on Ft Wayne radio stations)

    Any­way — couldn’t let that one go by

  2. Nance said on November 15th, 2005 at 9:38 am

    OK, stop now.

    The other day I saw Sarah Sil­ver­man, a woman whom I could not hold a mas­cara brush to, referred to as “aver­age pretty.” By that scale, I think “not a beauty” is a kind descrip­tion. But never mind that. I have a dif­fer­ent scale than most peo­ple, I guess. I still think Richard Belzer is hot. (Although, objec­tively, I rec­og­nize that George Clooney is prob­a­bly the bet­ter can­di­date for GQ’s cover. He’s hot, too. Totally.)

  3. brian stouder said on November 15th, 2005 at 11:44 am

    “I still think Richard Belzer is hot. (Although, objec­tively, I rec­og­nize that George Clooney is prob­a­bly the bet­ter can­di­date for GQ’s cover. He’s hot, too. Totally.”

    It is not orig­i­nal to say this — but the unde­ni­able truth of the cliche’ keeps reassert­ing itself to me — 

    as women become adults their ‘ideal’ tastes gen­er­ally shift to older men; and as men age, their “ideal” remains stuck (by and large) on young women.

    So that these waifs that con­stantly pop­u­late the cov­ers on the mag­a­zine racks look more and more like the girls in the neigh­h­bor­hood, while the men look like their fathers

  4. 4dbirds said on November 15th, 2005 at 1:39 pm

    I had lunch with Sarah Sil­ver­man in a deli a few weeks ago. Well she had lunch in her booth and I had lunch in mine. :)

  5. Nance said on November 15th, 2005 at 1:44 pm

    And what did she have? The pas­trami on rye? Potato salad?

  6. mary said on November 15th, 2005 at 1:46 pm

    Oh. My. God. I think Richard Belzer is hot too. My excuse is that he looks like an old boyfriend of mine, but he doesn’t seem to be an ass­hole like the old boyfriend was.

  7. deb said on November 15th, 2005 at 2:47 pm

    i sense an inter­est­ing thread start­ing here. i agree on richard belzer. i’d also add miguel fer­rer, espe­cially dur­ing his “twin peaks” gig, and j.k. sim­mons, the acer­bic news­pa­per edi­tor in the spi­der­man movies and also — much sex­ier — the shrink in “law and order.” oooooh,

  8. brian stouder said on November 15th, 2005 at 3:23 pm

    Rachel Ray, baby! She can poor EVOO in my house any ol’ time

  9. Dorothy said on November 15th, 2005 at 5:20 pm

    Sorry, I ain’t see­ing it with Richard Belzer. But Colin Firth def­i­nitely has my vote! I never was one to swoon over George Clooney — the only thing I like about him is his eyes.

    But what mat­ters more to me than looks is the abil­ity to make me laugh. So I think I made the right choice in hus­bands! No one makes me laugh like he does!

  10. mary said on November 16th, 2005 at 1:12 am

    Ditto on Miguel Fer­rer. My neigh­bor Rob looks like him, and a few of the moms in the play­ground get tongue tied when he’s around.

  11. joodyb said on November 16th, 2005 at 11:06 am

    ditto miguel fer­rer. and his dad.

  12. mary said on November 16th, 2005 at 12:37 pm

    Raphael Fer­rer, who is Jose’s brother and Miguel’s uncle, was the teacher of the class in art school where I met the boyfriend who looks like Richard Belzer. Spooky, eh?

  13. brian stouder said on November 16th, 2005 at 1:41 pm

    haha­ha­ha­ha­ha­ha­haha!!!

    Too funny, Mary!

  14. 4dbirds said on November 16th, 2005 at 2:18 pm

    Sorry about being so late in respond­ing. Sarah had what appeared to be a Rueben. I didn’t fig­ure out who she was until I left. I kept star­ing at her think­ing she was famil­iar and finally it hit me. I looked her up on the web once I got home just to be sure.

  15. ashley said on November 16th, 2005 at 5:11 pm

    Sarah Sil­ver­man? Jimmy Kim­mel left his wife for her? I don’t get it.

    The Belz, on the other hand, is mar­ried to Lady Chat­terly. Yeah, that one. Boo yah!

    Me, I now have the hots for Sofia Ver­gara. And Jen­nifer Love Hewitt.

  16. basset said on November 17th, 2005 at 12:40 pm

    there are two kinds of beauty… the highly-processed, art-directed movie and mag­a­zine cover kind… and the gen­uine kind, some­one you’d actu­ally encounter in real life.

    or, in male terms, “some­one you might pos­si­bly have a shot at”…

  17. harry near indy said on November 20th, 2005 at 5:24 am

    iirc, under indi­ana state law, the county sher­iff gets a lot of prof­its from com­mis­sary sales and other small things like that.

    some say crime does not pay. some say law enforce­ment, if you get into the right office, sure as hell does.

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