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Hear she got some friends together and put on a show. Missed it. Sushi & too-low-flying airplanes in Arlington. When Tina first broached Topic A, she threatened/promised more Larry than Charlie; if Gawker’s transcript of the Brown-on-Diller&Gladwell action’s any indication, she delivered. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
But in her Times column, she kicks herself (“I should have booked Celine Dion.”), Philip Johnson-style, who quickly called himself a whore before anyone else could beat him to it. But in an article where she also describes the dismal White House Correspondents’ dinner, is not the whores, or even Celine Dion (ba-dum-bum), but a horse, whose image lingers longest. Not just any horse, mind you, a “Republican warhorse,” the best the dinner could do in the “celebrity” department, Bo Derek.
“Horse,” a not-unimportant word to the actress herself (more on that later), turns out to be one of only nine words (7 distinct words, 9 total) I actually remember hearing from Bo Derek’s mouth, in a torturous scene from Tarzan, the Ape Man. Derek, as Jane, and her father (played by the late, lamenting Richard Harris) had been captured by (literally whitewashed) savages. As the savages prep her as an offering to their Chief, Bo, on all fours, moans the immortal line, “They’re painting me! They’re washing me like a horse!” It’s worth noting that the director who put Bo in this scene was her husband (and Richard Harris age-alike), John Derek. (See another clip here for some equally unforgettable readings.)
Rather than buy this horrible movie (which is only on VHS, anyway), why not get Bo’s revealing new book about her relationships with her creepy old ex-husband and his other ex-wives, Ursula Andress and Linda Evans. It’s title? Riding Lessons: Everything That Matters in Life I Learned from Horses Let’s see Rick Santorum explain that one. Forget Celine. Tina on Bo and Rick: now that’s a 3-way worth watching

I told this, the newest Worst Joke In The World, last night at dinner, which turned out to be an inadvertent prelude to a Night Of Canadian Hilarity.
Talked about the AM script, which has several Canadian settings and elements, and is, obviously hilarious. Talked about South Park, too.
Read this funny, slight Timothy Noah piece in Slate about “the novelty of seeing the words “danger” and “Toronto” in the same sentence.”
Saw the kooky Mayor of Toronto on The Daily Show. He reminded me of Robert Novak doing a bad Ed Koch.
But the surprise was a midnight screening of the first contemporary film to deal with the Torontonian Threat, a film I only recently learned was about the US staging a phony war against Canada, a film you might even call the 300-pound gorilla of Blame Canada Movies,Canadian Bacon.
It was largely funny, intermittently hilarious, but it had some really slack moments, too. Like Orgazmo, Gangs of New York or The Cremaster Cycle, Canadian Bacon feels made by a supreme creator, someone who can’t/won’t take (or doesn’t get) any suggestions or advice. They’re all unconventional concepts coming from auteurs with unassailable-seeming points of view, which may inhibit people from giving suggestions. Maybe the auteurs, having convinced themselves that no one else could understand their vision, closed themselves off to outside perspectives. Whatever, in any case, all thesemovies had tremendous promise, moments of greatness and unnecessary flaws.
Perhaps one IMDb user said it best: “Of course, only somebody like Roger Moore could make this movie.”

The Amtrak I took from DC to NYC this afternoon hit a person on the tracks, just north of the North Philadelphia station. While it took them nearly half an hour to inform us, it was immediately apparent to those of us in the first car that the person had died. Nearly two hours later, another northbound train stopped alongside, and TV news helicopters hovered overhead as all 2-300 of us climbed aboard.
Many people began trading our respective fragments of information. They’d seen a knot of policemen on the tracks, but had heard only there was “an obstruction” and a “mechanical problem”; while we’d been told immediately that the train had hit “a tresspasser,” later overheard to have been a “suicide,” but we never saw any sign of the accident. Finally, once the second train was underway, a conductor announced there had been “a fatality.”
In awkward cell phone conversations, we all tried to explain our delay, conflicted over sounding either too callously selfish or too fascinated.
[update: The Inquirer mentions the suicide in “Accident, derailment delay SEPTA riders.”]