msb-0044 Marilyn Monroe and "moi" (Believe it or not!)

msb-0044 Marilyn Monroe and "moi" (Believe it or not!)

Got Ya!

The closest I ever got to Ms. Monroe was when my father dragged me to the opening of a shopping mall in Ville LaSalle. Yes! Ms. Monroe was opening a shopping mall.

I remember thinking "What's all the fuss about?"

I was a very young boy at the time and wasn't into girls and all that messy biology stuff.

I wasn't drooling and making sidelong glances...

But all the older people were. (I'd call them adults but I suspect that that would be stretching your credulity. They were acting like gawking vessels of hormones. Jeez. You think you know your ol' man and he drags you to this.)

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Hey, she'd be eighty-one years old this year.

She was born on June 1, 1926.

Its now August 2006. Do the math.

She'd be old enough to be my mother.

Now all these years later, it was back in 1961 or so, I am still thinking "What's all the fuss about?"

The mystique, of course, is that she was one of JFK's squeezes.

She was married, briefly, to Jimmy Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.

Of the three, the only one I wonder about is Jimmy Dougherty.

But she left us some great pictures (which are scrolling past every few seconds if you've downloaded this podcast with iTunes) and some good movies.

Unfortunately, we don't get to see them except on occasionally on PBS and on the "Late, late show"on some oldies movie stations because the movie industry doesn't have much use for "dated content."

But at least you can make movies about anything.

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Television has no use for anything that would upset anybody, specially the sponsors.

The less I say about that the better.

Its a hippocritical pipe pumping vapid and vacuous sewage into a wasteland.

Radio's was never much better.

That's why George Carlyn's "Seven Words You Can't Say On the media: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits, even required a Supreme Court Decision. Supreme Court case of FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. (Hey. Its in the Supreme Courts' records. All seven words.)

Unlike Lenny Bruce, the little putz who kept using yiddish euphemisms, he actually managed to get the words out and into the court record.

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But radio is a slightly different medium. It leaves much to the imagination.

You can be middle-aged, fat, balding, have body odor, bad feet and atrophied limbs, but if you sound good and have the right delivery, which means you can read faster than you can talk, you can be a golden boy on radio.

Look at Howard Stern. Nah, I'd rather not.

Or check out the Ouch! podcast from the BBC. Now there's a bunch of people who have their bona fides.

Of course, you still have the restriction on those seven words.

Ohh! What power, what Ju Ju there must be in the utterance of any of those seven words.

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Podcasting is not subject to the FCCs vaguaries (both in form and in application.)

Its not a broadcast. Its by subscription or clearly by request.

But that doesn't mean it not subject to common decency (and the even rarer ... common sense.)

Gratuitous profanity is senseless and I say fuck it.