Renee Zellweger: The Incredible Disappearing Woman

I never thought it would have happened to Miss "You Had Me At Hello": a bizarre miracle of transformation that has rendered her almost unrecognizable to her fans.

We all know what she looked like "before", though sometimes it was evident there was a little brow-lifting and Botox-ing going on. She wasn't a ravishing beauty, but then, she wasn't supposed to be! She was Bridget Jones! She was the chick in Jerry Maguire! She was Rene Zellweger, everybody's girl friend, with the pouty lips and the great cheekbones and the Icelandic heritage that lent her a tinge of exoticism.

Not any more. This is what she looks like now.

Uh, maybe like Candace Bergen's younger sister? There's still something Nordic going on, but - hey, who the hell IS this anyway? The weird black line drawn around her jaw and chin had me thinking, just for a minute, that the glue on her mask was still wet and it was being held on with a string.

Uh. . . Liv Ullman's younger sister, maybe?   One wonders who she was trying to model her face on. Not on herself, obviously.

What bugs me however is how she has lost her personality along with her old face. Renee was always sort of neurotic, sort of apologetic, sort of tearful. She fretted, she brooded, and sometimes she girlishly giggled and turned cartwheels of joy. It was just the kind of character she was good at playing. Now she's - 

. . . extremely thin. Gone are the extra 20 pounds of puppy fat she gained to play Bridget Jones. She's thin as a stick, so that it looks like she's somehow attained a new body, too. I guess it goes with the blandly Barbie-ish face.

I've written about plastic surgery before, and I'm tired and weary to be writing about it again. An actress shouldn't erase herself like this. Though she may believe she'll get more parts now because she looks so "great", so "young", so "beautiful," etc.,  no casting director in the world will want her now because she is not recognizably herself. If you want Renee Zellweger, you want Renee Zellweger, someone who has a huge fan base and has been familiar to audiences for 20 years. If she shows up looking like this, with Renee's slightly nasal, slightly squeaky voice coming out of Barbie's mouth (unless she has also somehow erased her voice too), people will be more than slightly confused.

I have to reluctantly admit that, given Hollywood's dread and hatred of the ageing process, most actresses feel compelled to have some repair work done as time grinds them down. Susan Sarandon doesn't seem to have fallen victim yet, Helen Mirren has the best bone structure in human history, and Judi Dench can play anyone from age 40 to age 80, rearranging her face at will. But the rest of them - perhaps it's forgiveable, though a couple of years ago I was pretty horrified to see Helen Hunt with a completely paralyzed forehead. Her eyebrows never moved, removing half the expression from her face and clashing most awfully with her more age-appropriate 40-year-old throat.

For Renee, however, I predict this won't be a good move. She'll have to change her name or something, start all over again. If Tom Cruise showed up on a set looking like - God, like who? Like Shia Lebeouf or whatever-his-name-is - ? The point is, if Tom Cruise suddenly looked like a male mannequin approximately 30 years of age, he might have problems being cast in anything. Nobody would know who he was.

This is the most eerie example I've ever seen of a human being erasing herself. It could not possibly have been done as an act of self-love. (Narcissism, perhaps, but that's self-obsession.) I remember writing a post about Renee's public drunkenness at the Oscars in 2013 (which everyone seems to have forgotten). Though excuses were quickly invented that she had taken a Valium to calm down, her slurring and inability to read three words off a card that night created a lot of buzz. 

I guess it's no stretch to say this isn't a happy woman, but what bothers me most of all is that she'll probably never work again. You can't start all over again and just be someone else (though in a sense, that's what the picture business is all about). In a very sad way, given Hollywood's obsession with appearance, Renee Zellweger no longer exists. There is no longer any brand recognition. She has erased it permanently. Her "old"  self has been shoved away in an attic somewhere, like the picture of Dorian Grey.

It's been good to know you, Renee. I'm sad we'll never see you again.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

OMG, I found it: Ladies' Own Erotica!

I talked about this book in my post about Bigfoot erotica, but it took quite a while to find it in my massive and dusty collection of paperbacks. The cover is baby pink, with an elaborate scrollwork heart in which the title curls in Harlequinesque script: Ladies' Own Erotica (formerly titled Ladies' Home Erotica).

I bought this because, well. It came out in 1984, and at the time was considered extremely daring. As far as I knew, it was the only book of women's erotica, at least written by women, that existed at the time. It was written by a lace-doily-and-teacup group called the Kensington Ladies' Erotica Society.
In the introduction, they claim to be (gasp, taboo-shattering sound) OVER FORTY, but still interested in, well, you know, or at least writing about it. Sort of.

I don't know where to start, honestly. The coy little line drawings look a bit like New Yorker cartoons without captions. I'm hard-pressed (and hard-pressed, and hard-pressed) to find anything the least bit sexually explicit in this book. Only tender longings, kisses that go on a little too long, women who have the hots for the doctor, and fancy underwear bought for a clandestine weekend with a fantasy lover.

OK, let us plunge in: this is a wistful poem called It's Always Summer.

It's always summer when you're around

isn't that funny?

Even when it's raining outside,

and we lie on our bed shivering

Your hands are warm

your body toasts me,

your lips are warm rivers

I drift down the Mississippi.

Your skin is golden

it shines all over me,

Your eyes are rays of sunshine

that sparkle in the dark.

Your arms are branches of tall trees

that enfold me.

Green leaves and honey bees.

Buzz around me loverboy,

I need more summer.

OH KAY then. No Bigfeets here, none whatsoever, though the verse is so chaste it could refer to a handsome golden retriever.

Here's another:

Prince Charming

They tell me

there is no

Prince Charming,

He is a fantasy

of the unliberated

masses.

Then why do I stroke

your silky skin

with such pleasure

and caress your

lean back with

trembling fingers?

If you aren't Prince Charming

who are you?

Keep in mind that the cover of this thing calls it "The Irresistible Bestseller!". So back in '84, women must've been pretty desperate for this stuff.

There is, yes, a recipe for chocolate fondue that involves fingering fruit to make sure it is ripe enough: "When no one is looking, I reach out and fondle the fruit. I like the flesh to feel firm with just a hint of resistance, and I secretly thrill to the touch of peach down or the unblemished smoothness of a ripe plum. . . "

Another chapter is about, oh dear, Bernadette's Warthog Pie ("Turn your attention to the savoy cabbage"). There is nothing sexual in this recipe whatsoever, nor anything more sensual than you'd find in Rachael Ray's latest cookbook.

OMG, and here's another one: Rose's Spring Lamb! I guess all the ladies in the collective submitted a favorite recipe for this book of erotica. It's completely weird, and reveals the level of profound inhibition and taboo around women's sexuality a few decades ago. It all had to be carefully sublimated into love of food.

Listen, I can't do much more of this browned, page-spewing old thing, with that punky smell of decaying ink and crumbling pages.. It seems all I can find are food references. But I'll leave you with one that jumped (I almost said humped) out at me. This is one of the more torrid love scenes:

"Then he proceeded to caress each toe, one by one. Lilah leaned back and closed her eyes. The tenderness that Alan lavished on each worn callus made her feel totally adored. Suddenly a velvety warm wetness engulfed her big toe, sending an electrifying jolt straight to her inner core. Lilah opened her eyes and gasped. Alan was sucking her toe.

'Oh don't!' she moaned. 'That's too much.""

Yes. Indeed. Calling Bigfoot!  Please. But one more chocolate lust scene, please (and by the way, this was book was NEVER advertised as food porn):

"Then, very slowly, she lowered both hands into the remaining fondue, raised them up, and watched the chocolate glaze ooze, She sucked each finger, dipped them in again, and delicately pressed a pattern of perfect handprints upon the table top."

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Oh, Mary! This is your underwear speaking

Oh, poor Mary. She smells so bad that not only does her dress talk to her, her undies and even her THERMOMETER talks to her, and they ALL say she stinks!

The most terrifying video I've ever seen

Back when this first came out, in 1968, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. It was just some kind of nonsensical sci-fi vision of something we knew would never happen.

And it's all coming true.

Bigfoot porn: the modern-day fuck book

I have something to say about all this, but I'm not sure what.

About a zillion years ago, I blushingly bought a book called something like "Ladies' Home Delight: Women's Erotica". Never did it mention genitals, breasts, or anything except dishy gamekeepers and chocolate fondue. No kidding, one of the only stories I remember involved a woman sneaking into an empty banquet room and messing about in the fondue pot, sticking her hands in it and rubbing it all over her face and body. In an especially steamy scene, she licks the palms of her hands.  In another entry, a woman describes in ludicrous detail biting into a large, steamy sausage.

And now this!

There's a whole new genre out there geared specifically towards women (I think). What age and station they are, I do not know. This is loosely called paranormal erotica, though that title encompasses unlikely historical romps and bestiality (especially in the form of wolves) and - well - dinosaurs, who aren't quite paranormal but who haven't been around in a while, except in museum form.

I stumbled across references to Bigfoot porn quite some time ago, but shook my head and moved on. Quickly. There were claims these authors sold millions of Kindle copies and became multi-bestsellers spewing out stuff that would have given women heart attacks a couple of decades ago.

Even Harlequins have turned dirty, but I don't even want to find out HOW dirty. Women now masturbate to these things the way men used to masturbate to the old-fashioned fuck book. I don't know exactly why this is done, but an incredible number of them feature nude male torsos (never with a head) with washboard abs you could play like a xylophone. All the covers look like tkey were designed by one artist, maybe someone who was put out of business when Fabio got too old to pose. These books never exist singly, but multiply into many-volumed series in the author's secret lab in the basement (or something). 

Which is OK, I guess. I have nothing against masturbation, but have always chosen to invent my own fantasies, which are pretty damn tame compared to this stuff. What sort of a dirty mind would even go there? As the authors of the Bored of the Rings parody wrote, "It's us, buddy. CHING!"

(P. S. I can't help but notice the mass-produced-sounding names of these authors, obviously invented for legal protection as well as uniformity. Like those covers, perhaps these are all cranked out by one person, like Harlequins used to be before they became too dull to give anyone an orgasm. My personal favorite pseudonym is Dixie Swallers, and I won't go into why.)

Meet The Stay-At-Home Mom Who Makes $30K Per Month From Her Bigfoot Porn Novels

BY ROBO PANDA / 01.16.14
#AMAZON

“From within the tufts of matted hair, the creature released a huge pale c*ck that defied logic.” That purple-headed prose sprang from the mind of Virginia Wade [not her real name], a stay-at-home mom from Parker, Colorado, who stumbled upon a way to make huge sums of money from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. The quote is from Cum For Bigfoot, a bestseller in the subgenre of cryptozoological erotica (AKA “monster porn” or “monsterotica”).

Wade has published sixteen short novels about messin’ with Sasquatch, in addition to less successful erotica about pirates and dark lords. She told Business Insider that she makes up to $30K per month in Amazon sales alone from her Cum for Bigfoot series. It still pulls in $6K per month during slower times. Why the hell am I still typing this when I could be writing dinosaur porn?

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing pays 70% royalties for books priced at $2.99 or more, and it pays 35% royalties for books under $2.99. Meanwhile, authors for mainstream publishers receive only 8% to 15% royalties. Wade’s first Bigfoot porn novel (only 12,000 words long) was priced under a dollar, but it sold over 100,000 copies on Amazon in 2012. The book was also selling on iTunes and other stores.

Wade tells Business Insider that her Bigfoot porn was her most profitable series.

“I started cranking them out,” she says. “If there was a market there for monster sex, I was gonna give it to them.” She even brought in her family to help with the workload. “My dad, who’s an English instructor, was my editor,” Wade says. “My mom did the German translations” — including the equally popular “Komm für Bigfoot.”

[...] “I was putting my daughter through college with the profits,” Wade says. “I used to joke with her, ‘Bigfoot smut is paying for your school.'”

So many things about those quotes. Referring to a writing career as “cranking them out”. Asking your parents to edit and translate your Bigfoot porn. Telling your daughter that Bigfoot porn pays her tuition. This is mesmerizing.

Wade ran into some trouble last year when more than half of her ebooks disappeared from Amazon after The Kernel published a story about businesses allowing the sale of ebooks with “rape fantasies, incest porn and graphic descriptions of bestiality and child abuse.” The Kernel’s article triggered a kerfuffle in the UK, and many stores (Amazon among them) pulled several titles, including some featuring mythological creatures.

Wade got around the ban by renaming and re-submitting some titles (Cum For Bigfoot became Moan For Bigfoot). Giving tamer titles to erotic ebooks takes a toll on sales, however. If you want to make the big money on self-published erotica, you’ll need to have an especially on-the-nose title.

Current titles on Amazon — most of which were not written by Wade — include Ravaged by the Hydra, Mounted by the Gryphon, Frankenstein’s B*tch, Taken By Pirates, Taken by the Tentacle Monsters, Fertilized in Space, Sex With My Husband’s Anatomically Correct Robot, and the conversely vague yet direct Gang Banged by Mysterious Monsters in the Woods.

Those are all real and we’re not linking to any of them.

Monster Breeding titles:

Bred by the Centaurs
Bred by the Demon
Bred by the Sasquatch
Bred by the Yeti
Breeding with the Beast
Breeding with the Beast II
Outer Space Tentacle Gangbang

P. S. There's a reason I'm not including an excerpt from one of these things. I can't find more than a single sentence, and they all have "cock" and "balls" in them. You can't find a "look inside" feature for these on Amazon, maybe because they cost a buck and are something like 49 pages long. But don't worry - like a streetcar, there'll be another one along any minute.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The Taekwondo Kid: Ryan breaks a board!

The worst kind of secret

The more I read this kind of stuff, the more I laugh, or groan. It's the kind of "meme" I see on Facebook all the time.

Look at it. I mean, line by line. "So strong that nothing can disturb my peace of mind." A tornado wrecking your house? Losing your child in a car accident?

"To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person I meet." The thug down the street with the handgun? The rapist, or the terrorist disguised as a street punk?

"To look at the sunny side of everything, and make my optimism come true" - You're sure this isn't a 1930s production number by Busby Berkeley?

"To wear a cheerful expression at all times (as they did in Nazi Germany, no doubt, or Stepfordville) and give a smile to every living creature (squirrel? Earthworm?) I meet."

And etc,. etc., etc. After the post, there was the usual riot of gushing comments about how WONDERFUL this philosophy is, without anyone giving the first thought as to how impossible it may be to undertake, let alone how stupid it all is. It's doubtful that any one of them are practicing even the smallest part of it, nor will they in the future.

Then I saw, at the top of the meme-y thing, a red seal with the words "The Secret" on it, and realized: hmmmm, this was something I'd seen before. On Dateline NBC, perhaps. There was a name associated with it, wasn't there? Some sort of . . . bizarre guru?



FELICIA FONSECA

updated 6/22/2011 11:40:32 PM ET CAMP VERDE, Ariz. —

A jury has convicted a self-help author who led a sweat lodge ceremony in Arizona that left three people dead.

Jurors in Camp Verde, Ariz., reached their verdict Wednesday after a four-month trial.

James Arthur Ray was found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide.

More than 50 people participated in the October 2009 sweat lodge that was meant to be the highlight of Ray's five-day "Spiritual Warrior" seminar near Sedona.

Three people died following the sauna-like ceremony meant to provide spiritual cleansing. Eighteen were hospitalized, while several others were given water to cool down at the scene. Prosecutors and defense attorneys disagreed over whether the deaths and illnesses were caused by heat or toxins.

Ray's attorneys have maintained the deaths were a tragic accident. Prosecutors argued Ray recklessly caused the fatalities.

Ray used the sweat lodge as a way for participants to break through whatever was holding them back in life. He warned participants in a recording of the event played during the trial that the sweat lodge would be "hellacious" and that participants were guaranteed to feel like they were dying but would do so only metaphorically.

"The true spiritual warrior has conquered death and therefore has no fear or enemies in this lifetime or the next, because the greatest fear you'll ever experience is the fear of what? Death," Ray said in the recording. "You will have to get a point to where you surrender and it's OK to die."

Witnesses have described the scene following the two-hour ceremony as alarming and chaotic, with people dragging "lifeless" and "barely breathing" participants outside and volunteers performing CPR.

Two participants — Kirby Brown, 38, of Westtown, N.Y., and James Shore, 40, of Milwaukee — died upon arrival at a hospital. Liz Neuman, 49, of Prior Lake, Minn., slipped into a coma and died more than a week later at a Flagstaff hospital.

Ray's attorneys maintained the deaths were nothing but a tragic accident, and said Ray took all the necessary precautions to ensure participants' safety. They contend authorities botched the investigation and failed to consider that toxins or poisons contributed to the deaths and called two witnesses to support that argument.

Prosecutors relied heavily on Ray's own words to try to convince the jury that he was responsible for the deaths. They said a reasonable person would have stopped the "abomination of a sweat lodge" when participants began exhibiting signs of distress about halfway through the ceremony.

Sweat lodges typically are used by American Indians to rid the body of toxins by pouring water over heated rocks in the structure.

Ray became a self-help superstar by using his charismatic personality and convincing people his words would lead them to spiritual and financial wealth. He used free talks to recruit people to expensive seminars like the Sedona retreat that led to the sweat lodge tragedy. Participants paid up to $10,000 for the five-day program intended to push people beyond their physical and emotional limits.

Ray's popularity soared after appearing in the 2006 Rhonda Byrne documentary "The Secret," and Ray promoted it on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and "Larry King Live."

But his multimillion-dollar self-help empire was thrown into turmoil with the sweat lodge deaths. Ray ended his seminars shortly after but has continued to offer advice throughout his trial via the Internet and social networking sites.

(Emphasis mine.)

So I was right, this "secret" stuff is tied to some very dangerous and toxic events. But wait! There's more! Wikipedia tells me this whole mess started with a wildly popular self-help book called (what else?) The Secret. In a "nut"shell, here is its basic philosophy:

The Secret highlights gratitude and visualization as the two most powerful processes to help manifest one's desires. It asserts that being grateful both lifts your frequency higher and affirms that you believe you will receive your desire. Visualization is said to help focus the mind to send out the clearest message to the universe. Several techniques are given for the visualization process, as well as examples of people claimed to have used it successfully to manifest their dreams.

As an example, if a person wanted a new car, by thinking about the new car, having positive and thankful feelings about the car as if it were already attained and opening one's life in tangible ways for a new car to be acquired (for example, test driving the new car, or making sure no one parks in the space where the new car would arrive); the law of attraction would rearrange events to make it possible for the car to manifest in the person's life.

I haven't figured out yet how you can test drive a car that doesn't exist, but never mind. It's beyond silly: most of us outgrew this kind of magical thinking in the third grade. It places us at the centre of the universe, for one thing, and assumes we have some sort of mystical influence over events that are, at best, random. Perhaps this helps assuage people's powerlessness in the face of a reality that is pretty much oblivious to our existence.

It's obvious that Ray took this all a little bit beyond the new car phase and into self-proclaimed Godhood, where he finally ran aground. According to Dateline, however, and even in spite of his having killed three people and maimed and burned over a dozen others, he still has his loyal followers. My impression is that Ray is a reptile with no higher brain function than a crocodile, though with somewhat less insight and compassion. But there are ALWAYS followers for such demons in human skin, people who sit with fixed smiles on their faces, sopping up all the evil swill their leader bilges out at them. It's Third Reich syndrome all over again. Any leader is better than no leader, right? Am I making sense?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Not the worst toy ever made, but prettinear

  


This doll was eventually yanked off the shelves when it was discovered that in addition to those long gumlike strips that spewed out the doll's back (back??), it also "ate" clothing, fingers and hair. There was no "off" switch and no release mechanism: it was tripped off by sticking the gum in its creepy little mouth, so little girls were soon attached (screaming) to the doll's face while it continued to pull and pull and pull.  Presumably, a big hank of hair would have to be cut off to get her free.  I don't know why they didn't test this doll before putting it on the market. But what about the Easy Bake oven? It still exists, and no doubt still has the capacity to cause third degree burns on children's skin.

The other thing is, I think the voiceover at the end of the ad was done by voice actress Yeardley Smith, who plays Lisa Simpson and sometimes shows up in movies and on TV (most recently, on The Big Bang Theory).