Going to Wicked; Rotten Biographies Library; Italian Job

Spent most of the day scraping paint off the west side of the house. Arms hurt... back hurts... but... must... blogggggggg...

• Tomorrow I'm taking The ♥G♥ downtown to see Wicked: The Musical. I think it's a good example of how reinvention of an existing concept/set of characters helps promote interest in those books/movies/etc. from which the reinvention was invented. Unfortunately, EMI does not feel that way about the Beachles guy.
• Good reading at the Rotten dot com Library's Biographies section: William Marston, Richard Scarry, Barbara & Jenna Bush, Philip K. Dick, Salvador Dali, Gene Roddenberry, Walt Disney, Torquemada, Friedrich Nietzsche, many, many others.
• We watched the original version of The Italian Job (from 1969) last night. Pretty entertaining heist movie; well worth watching. One of the interesting things to me was that the film featured the following content: The mob blowing up a guy in his car; The protagonists ambushing police and striking them on the head with baseball bats; Use of the word "bastard" in a non-geneological manner; and, LBNL, the strong implication that Michael Caine's character had a nine-way (that's 9-way!) sexual encounter set up by his girlfriend with her and seven other women*, and then a four-way (4-way) sexual encounter during which he was walked in on by his girlfriend. The funny thing was that the brand-new MPAA gave it a G-rating! -- "For General Audiences." Now the whole thing was charming and amusing, very much the type of thing that inspired Austin Powers. But it is illustrative of the controlfreakish, fanatically PC assembly line into which that institution has evolved when we compare the ratings given films by the young, (maybe more-thoughtful, less-formulaic?) MPAA, to those assigned similar films by the dinosaurish, bureaucratic MPAA today.

*Not that such a thing is in any way appealing, of course.