开云体育

Nothing succeeds like success

The week's good cause.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am appealing to you today on behalf of that selfless and dedicated body, the World Center for Hangover Research.

I know that hangover is not one of those illnesses that people like to talk about publicly, but if the Center is to succeed in its noble work then the first step must be to clear awaysome of the myths about hangover.

In the first place, hangover is not infectious. Nor can you pick it up off a barstool seat. For that reason its treatment does not require isolation of the patient. The barbarous practice of refusing to speak to him and making him get his own breakfast, sending the children off to stay with the grandparents.

The sad fact of the matter, my friends, is that there is no known cure for hangover. That of all the illnesses, for the sufferer few inflictions are more incapacitating, debilitating, and downright humiliating.

On opening the eyes the first sensation is an immediate and overwhelming conviction that one's body has been taken over by an alien lifeform.

To the very extremities of one's nerve endings, all one is conscious of is the massive THUD THUD THUD of the kitten walking across the carpet. Downstairs.

Then, trying to dismiss the feeling that one's tongue is wearing a full-length coat, one makes one's way to the bathroom feeling extremely titubant, and one inspects one's face in the mirror.

All right, you say it is all very well harrying us with these awful details, but hope can you offer us? What research is being done to wipe out this distressing and widespread complaint.

Well, my friends, mankind's ONLY hope lies with the Hangover Research Center. Here, a small band of dedicated boozers are laboring ceaselessly and selflessly. Every night from opening time onwards, they fill themselves with booze.

Then, the following morning, gin leaking out of their ears, the temples throbbing like a schoolboy at a Swedish film, they sample every known antidote.

And yet no government subsidy attends them. It is all done by voluntary contributions.

This, despite the fact that if the hangover figures continue their upward spiral it could mean the end of drinking as we know it.

So therefore, my friends, may I appeal to you to give generously to give to this cause. I know you have many other calls upon your resources but DO consider this. There is nothing is the whole world that looks for outside assistance more desperately than an unwell drunk. Or, as the proverb so succinctly abbreviates it, nothing seeks aids like sick souse.

741119
Denis Norden 588b

The mean matron (played by Grace Coppin) also kills a pet bunny. Delicate Dolores (whose name means sorrows) can't take the abuse; in the film's climactic scene, she is found dead by hanging - a suicide. Cut down by Paul Henreid with what was supposed to be noble regret, I am sorry to report that the great actor used the scenes of cutting down my dead body as an excuse to run his hands over my breasts. We did many takes, and, of course, being dead, I could not even flinch, let alone protest. The subtext was funny: Paul Henreid never seemed to realize I was wearing falsies, and he was sneaking feels of foam rubber. An undercurrent of unwholesome desire runs-unintentionally, I am sure-through Paul Henreid's performance. Sometimes the camera reveals more truth than the actors intend: There is a close-up of him looking down at Anne Francis that definitely borders on lechery.

Rita Moreno " Rita Moreno" (2012)

Experts have long wondered who wrote "Could only have been painted by a madman!" on the painting. Now, they think it was the artist, Edvard Munch. The message could have been aimed at critics.

Experts have long wondered who scribbled on Edvard Munch's classic painting "The Scream." The faintly penciled words on the canvas translate to, could only have been painted by a madman. Turns out the graffitists was most likely Munch himself. Experts say the handwriting checks out. It's probably a shot at critics who questioned his mental state after laying eyes on the painting

An Indiana man who has a tattoo with the words crime pays on his forehead might want to think about getting it removed. Donald Murray was wanted in connection with a vehicle chase. Police shared a mugshot from one of his prior arrests, got a bunch of tips on his whereabouts - possibly because it's easy to spot a guy with crime pays tattooed on his face. Murray turned himself in, and he's being held on bail. Crime doesn't pay.

Jailed For Being In Debt

By Chris Serres and Glenn Howatt

Minnesota's leading newspaper, following up on a tip that the number of arrest warrants was rising, discovered in 2011 that collection agencies used sheriffs deputies to arrest people with unpaid debts, many of whom were released after posting bail equal to the debt. Since the three-part series by Minneapolis Star Tribune reporters Serres and Howatt ran, newspapers in Arkansas, Georgia, and other states have shown how widespread this practice is.

As a sheriff's deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer's purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.

No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after sixteen hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense - missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt. "They have no right to do this to me," said the fifty-seven-year-old patient-care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. "Not for a stupid credit card."

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the nineteenth century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to forty-eight hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona, and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt, and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Illinois, man "to indefinite incarceration" until he came up with $300 toward a lumberyard debt.

"The law enforcement system has unwittingly become a tool of the debt collectors," said Michael Kinkley, an attorney in Spokane, Washington, who has represented arrested debtors. "The debt collectors are abusing the system and intimidating people, and law enforcement is going along with it."

How often are debtors arrested across the country? No one can say. No national statistics are kept, and the practice is largely unnoticed outside legal circles. "My suspicion is the debt collection industry does not want the world to know these arrests are happening, because the practice would be widely condemned," said Robert Hobbs, deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center in Boston,

Debt collectors defend the practice, saying phone calls, letters, and legal actions aren't always enough to get people to pay.

"Admittedly, it's a harsh sanction," said Steven Rosso, a partner in the Como Law Firm of St. Paul, which does collections work. "But sometimes, it's the only sanction we have."

Taxpayers foot the bill for arresting and jailing debtors. In many cases, Minnesota judges set bail at the amount owed.

In Minnesota, judges have issued arrest warrants for people who owe as little as $85 - less than half the cost of housing an inmate overnight. Debtors targeted for arrest owed a median of $3,512 in 2009, up from $2,201 five years ago.

Those jailed for debts may be the least able to pay.

"It's just one more blow for people who are already struggling," said Beverly Yang, a Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation staff attorney who has represented three Illinois debtors arrested in the past two months. "They don't like being in court. They don't have cars. And if they had money to pay these collectors, they would."

THE COLLECTION MACHINE

The laws allowing for the arrest of someone for an unpaid debt are not new.

What is new is the rise of well-funded, aggressive, and centralized collection firms, in many cases run by attorneys, that buy up unpaid debt and use the courts to collect.

Three debt buyers - Unifund CCR Partners, Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc., and Debt Equities LLC - accounted for 15 percent of all debt-related arrest warrants issued in Minnesota since 2005, court data show. The debt buyers also file tens of thousands of other collection actions in the state, seeking court orders to make people pay.

The debts - often five or six years old - are purchased from companies like cell-phone providers and credit-card issuers, and cost a few cents on the dollar. Using automated dialing equipment and teams of lawyers, the debt-buyer firms try to collect the debt, plus interest and fees. A firm aims to collect at least twice what it paid for the debt to cover costs. Anything beyond that is profit.

Portfolio Recovery Associates of Norfolk, Virginia, a publicly traded debt buyer with the biggest profits and market capitalization, earned $44 million last year on $281 million in revenue - a 16 percent net margin. Encore Capital Group, another large debt buyer based in San Diego, had a margin last year of 10 percent. By comparison, Walmart's profit margin was 3.5 percent.

Todd Lansky, chief operating officer at Resurgence Financial LLC, a Northbrook, Illinois-based debt buyer, said firms like his operate within the law, which says people who ignore court orders can be arrested for contempt. By the time a warrant is issued, a debtor may have been contacted up to twelve times, he said.

"This is a last-ditch effort to say, 'Look, just show up in court,' " he said.


GO TO COURT - OR JAIL

At 9:30 A.M. on a recent weekday morning, about a dozen people stood in line at the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis.

Nearly all of them had received court judgments for not paying a delinquent debt. One by one, they stepped forward to fill out a two-page financial disclosure form that gives creditors the information they need to garnish money from their paychecks or bank accounts.

This process happens several times a week in Hennepin County.

Those who fail to appear can be held in contempt and an arrest warrant is issued if a collector seeks one. Arrested debtors aren't officially charged with a crime, but their cases are heard in the same courtroom as drug users.

Greg Williams, who is unemployed and living on state benefits, said he made the trip downtown on the advice of his girlfriend who knew someone who had been arrested for missing such a hearing.

"I was surprised that the police would waste time on my petty debts," said Williams, forty-five, of Minneapolis, who had a $5,773 judgment from a credit-card debt. "Don't they have real criminals to catch?"

Few debtors realize they can land in jail simply for ignoring debt-collection legal matters. Debtors also may not recognize the names of companies seeking to collect old debts. Some people are contacted by three or four firms as delinquent debts are bought and sold multiple times after the original creditor writes off the account.

"They may think it's a mistake. They may think it's a scam. They may not realize how important it is to respond," said Mary Spector, a law professor at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law in Dallas.

A year ago, Legal Aid attorneys proposed a change in state law that would have required law-enforcement officials to let debtors fill out financial-disclosure forms when they are apprehended rather than book them into jail. No legislator introduced the measure.

JAILED FOR $250

One afternoon last spring, Deborah Poplawski, thirty-eight, of Minneapolis was digging in her purse for coins to feed a downtown parking meter when she saw the flashing lights of a Minneapolis police squad car behind her. Poplawski, a restaurant cook, assumed she had parked illegally. Instead, she was headed to jail over a $250 credit-card debt.

Less than a month earlier, she learned by chance from an employment counselor that she had an outstanding warrant. Debt Equities, a Golden Valley debt buyer, had sued her, but she says nobody served her with court documents. Thanks to interest and fees, Poplawski was now on the hook for $1,138.

Though she knew of the warrant and unpaid debt, "I wasn't equating the warrant with going to jail, because there wasn't criminal activity associated with it," she said. "I just thought it was a civil thing."

She spent nearly twenty-five hours at the Hennepin County jail. A year later, she still gets angry recounting the experience. A male inmate groped her behind in a crowded elevator, she said. Poplawski also was ordered to change into the standard jail uniform - graywhite underwear and orange pants, shirt and socks - in a cubicle the size of a telephone booth. She slept in a room with twelve to sixteen women and a toilet with no privacy. One woman offered her drugs, she said.

Joy Uhlmeyer, who was arrested on her way home from spending Easter with her mother, said she defaulted on a $6,200 Chase credit card after a costly divorce in 2006. The firm seeking payment was Resurgence Financial, the Illinois debt buyer. Uhlmeyer said she didn't recognize the name and ignored the notices.

Uhlmeyer walked free after her nephew posted $2,500 bail. It took another $187 to retrieve her car from the city impound lot. Her eighty-six-year-old mother later asked why she didn't call home after leaving Duluth. Not wanting to tell the truth, Uhlmeyer said her car broke down and her cell phone died.

"The really maddening part of the whole experience was the complete lack of information," she said. "I kept thinking, 'If there was a warrant out for my arrest, then why in the world wasn't I told about it?"

The next day, Poplawski appeared before a Hennepin County district judge. He told her to fill out the form listing her assets and bank account, and released her. Several weeks later, Debt Equities used this information to seize funds from her bank account. The firm didn't return repeated calls seeking a comment.

"We hear every day about how there's no money for public services," Poplawski said. "But it seems like the collectors have found a way to get the police to do their work."

THREAT DEPENDS ON LOCATION

A lot depends on where a debtor lives or is arrested, as Jamie Rodriguez, forty-one, a bartender from Brooklyn Park, discovered two years ago.

Deputies showed up at his house one evening while he was playing with his five-year-old daughter, Nicole. They live in Hennepin County, where the Sheriff's Office has enough staff to seek out people with warrants for civil violations.

If Rodriguez lived in neighboring Wright County, he could have simply handed the officers a check or cash for the amount owed. If he lived in Dakota County, it's likely no deputy would have shown up because the Sheriff's Office there says it lacks the staff to pursue civil debt cases.

Knowing that his daughter and wife were watching from the window, Rodriguez politely asked the deputies to drive him around the block, out of sight of his family, before they handcuffed him. The deputies agreed.

"No little girl should have to see her daddy arrested," said Rodriguez, who spent a night in jail.

"If you talk to fifteen different counties, you'll find fifteen different approaches to handling civil warrants," said Sgt. Robert Shingledecker of the Dakota County Sheriff's Office. "Everything is based on manpower."

Local police also can enforce debt-related warrants, but small towns and some suburbs often don't have enough officers.

The Star Tribune's comparison of warrant and booking data suggests that at least one in six Minnesota debtors at risk for arrest actually lands in jail, typically for eight hours. The exact number

THE SECOND SURPRISE

Many debtors, like Robert Vee, thirty-six, of Brooklyn Park, get a second surprise after being arrested - their bail is exactly the amount of money owed.

Hennepin County automatically sets bail at the judgment amount or $2,500, whichever is less. This policy was adopted four years ago in response to the high volume of debtor-default cases, say court officials.

Some judges say the practice distorts the purpose of bail, which is to make sure people show up in court.

"It's certainly an efficient way to collect debts, but it's also highly distasteful," said Hennepin County District Judge Jack Nordby. "The amount of bail should have nothing to do with the amount of the debt."

Judge Robert Blaeser, chief of the county court's civil division, said linking bail to debt streamlines the process because judges needn't spend time setting bail.

"It's arbitrary," he conceded. "The bigger question is: Should you be allowed to get an order from a court for someone to be arrested of such arrests isn't known because the government doesn't consistently track what happens to debtor warrants.

"There are no standards here," said Gail Hillebrand, a senior attorney with the Consumers Union in San Francisco. "A borrower who lives on one side of the river can be arrested while another one goes free. It breeds disrespect for the law."

Haekyung Nielsen, twenty-seven, of Bloomington, said police showed up at her house on a civil warrant two weeks after she gave birth through Caesarean section. A debt buyer had sent her court papers for an old credit-card debt while she was in the hospital; Nielsen said she did not have time to respond.

Her baby boy, Tyler, lay in the crib as she begged the officer not to take her away.

"Thank God, the police had mercy and left me and my baby alone," said Nielsen, who later paid the debt. "But to send someone to arrest me two weeks after a massive surgery that takes most women eight weeks to recover from was just unbelievable."

Jailed because they owe money? You've got to remember there are people who have the money but just won't pay a single penny."

If friends or family post a debtor's bail, they can expect to kiss the money goodbye, because it often ends up with creditors, who routinely ask judges for the bail payment.

Vee, a highway construction worker, was arrested one afternoon in February while driving his teenage daughter from school to their home in Brooklyn Park. As he was being cuffed, Vee said his daughter, who has severe asthma, started hyperventilating from the stress.

"All I kept thinking about was whether she was all right and if she was using her [asthma] inhaler," he said.

From the Hennepin County jail, he made a collect call to his landlord, who promised to bring the bail. It was $1,875.06, the exact amount of a credit-card debt.

Later, Vee was reunited with his distraught daughter at home.

"We hugged for a long time, and she was bawling her eyes out," he said.

He still has unpaid medical and credit-card bills and owes about $40,000 on an old second mortgage. The sight of a squad car in his rearview mirror is all it takes to set off a fresh wave of anxiety.

"The question always crosses my mind: 'Are the cops going to arrest me again?'" he said. "So long as I've got unpaid bills, the threat is there."

This article first appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on June 6, 2010.

David Cay Johnston "Divided" (2014)

There is also reason to believe that in addition to frequenting Graffiti, [Clarence] Thomas was an avid consumer of sexually explicit magazines while Hill was working for him at the EEOC. Kaye Savage, the White House appointee, recalled visiting the chairman's first real bachelor pad in the summer of 1982, not long after Hill had moved to the agency and toward the end of the period that she identified as the hiatus in Thomas's attentions. It was a junior efficiency apartment in a high-rise building in southwest Washington, where he had moved after leaving Gil Hardy's spare bedroom.

Savage was friendly with both Thomas and Hill. Having learned that Savage was a jogger like himself, Thomas had offered to go shopping with her over a weekend for special running shoes designed for city pavements. Since becoming chairman of the EEOC that May, Thomas had relied on the agency's car and driver for official business, but this left him stranded on weekends. So Savage had agreed to pick him up at his apartment.

He had only recently set up housekeeping, and the place, as she recalled, was still underfurnished: there was little more than a mattress on the floor and a stereo. But one other feature made a lasting impression on Savage. Thomas had compiled and placed on the floor "a huge, compulsively organized stack of Playboy magazines, five years' worth of them, organized by month and year." The walls of the apartment were also memorably covered. There was only one main room, but all of its walls - as well as the walls of the little galley kitchen and even the bathroom door - were papered with centerfolds of large-breasted nude women.

Savage recalled staring awkwardly about her; the, display seemed so out of character with everything else she knew about Thomas. He was a fanatic about discipline and a daily churchgoer. He was serious about his career and honest to the point of indiscretion about his ambitious plans for the future. (Thomas had told her, as he had told others, that he planned to replace Thurgood Marshall on his retirement from the Supreme Court.) But his evident enthusiasm for pornography suggested to Savage that Thomas had a private side that was very different from his public persona. To her the contrast seemed, as she later put it, "a little crazy."

Savage couldn't contain her curiosity, so she asked Thomas why he had so many sexually explicit magazines. "I don't drink, and I don't run around," he replied, implying that the magazines were his one recreational vice. In fact, she later told a congressional investigator, Thomas said that the magazines were the only possessions he had deemed worth taking with him from his collapsing marriage.

It was a little unusual, Savage believed, for a man of Thomas's age to remain so absorbed by girlie magazines. As it happened, she thought it odd enough to mention in passing one day to Hill, with whom she occasionally went shopping in consignment stores on weekends.

"Yeah," she remembered Hill's saying wearily, without a flicker of surprise, "that's Clarence."

Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)

When Stanley slogged through the Congo on his Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Casement accompanied him for a week. "A good specimen of the capable Englishman," noted the explorer in his journal, not noticing that Casement was Irish. Casement was a better judge of Stanley, for although the explorer remained something of a hero to him, Casement recognized Stanley's sadistic streak. After seeing that Stanley's dog lacked a tail, he learned to his horror that Stanley had cut off the tail, cooked it, and fed it to the dog to eat.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

The World Health Organization sets the number of people killed worldwide from food borne microbial diseases at 20 million a year, with animal products topping the list of causes. The WHO attributes the global rise in food borne illness not only to the "greater consumption of foods of animal origin, but the "methods of intensive production" required to supply such a demand." About half of all known foodborne pathogens have been discovered within just the past 25 years.

In industrialized countries, the incidence of reported infectious food- and waterborne illnesses has more than doubled since the 1970s. According to the best estimate of the CDC, an astonishing 76 million Americans come down with food borne illness annually. That's nearly one in four every single year. Remember that "24-hour flu" you or a family member may have had last year? There's no such thing as a 24-hour flu. It may very well have been food poisoning. In today's food safety lottery, each year Americans have approximately a 1 in 1,000 chance of being hospitalized, and about a 1 in 50,000 chance of dying, simply from eating.

It may be from E. coli O157:H7 in hamburgers, Salmonella in eggs, Listeria in hot dogs, "flesh-eating" bacteria in oysters. or Campylobacter in Thanksgiving turkeys. According to the executive editor of Meat Processing magazine, "Nearly every food consumers buy in supermarkets and order in restaurants can be eaten with certainty for its safety - except for meat and poultry products.

The latest comprehensive analysis of sources for food borne illness outbreaks found that chickens were the premiere cause overall. In fact, poultry and eggs caused more cases than red meat, seafood, and dairy products comblned. This British analysis showed that fruits and vegetables carried the lowest disease and hospitalization risk, whereas poultry carried the highest. The researchers conclude, "Reducing the impact of indigenous food borne disease is mainly dependent on controlling the contamination of chicken. Good luck. In the United States, the overwhelming majority of the 9 billion chickens raised each year are stocked in densities between 10 and 20 birds per square yard, unable even to stretch their wings. Under the avian carpet is a fecal carpet of filth most of the birds spend their lives upon.

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

Chacun a son gout
(French proverb)

It means to each his taste. Never more so is this true in food. Is it not? I mean really food is very much a question of taste. Chacun a son gout.

This was borne home to me a couple of days ago when my wife was going off to lunch with a rich cousin who was taking her to some French restaurant.

I don't like that sort of food and when my wife went off with her rich cousin to this restaurant I decided to, come lunch time, to cook myself the sort of food. . . ; I normally I cook my own food. I can do this. I have a usually a good lunch of an inch and a half of cheddar and a banana.

But I thought I really have myself a go and do myself eggs and bacon. So I got a book, which my wife doesn't know I've got, called Cooking for Bachelors. It tells you how to do eggs and bacon.

And I got the nonstick frying pan. And it said butter's better for frying. So I got a packet of butter and took it out of its paper and put it in the frying pan and lit the thing and it was smashing.

I figured I'll do about ten minutes and a quart of this hot bubbling butter and lovely sort of blue smoke which is terribly attractive.

And I got this rasher of bacon and put it in this hot bubbling smoking stuff. And this extraordinary effect. After about five seconds it was though there were about seventy tiny, invisible miniature wasps were biting the backs of my hands and my forehead. And this damn stuff was fighting back. Spitting. Like a hysterical cat. And was spitting hot fat at me. it was just a bit worrying.

So I thought I'm not going to get ruined with my hands. So I nipped next door and got this chap's motor scooter. And it's got one of those plastic things at the front to save him from the wind. And I parked this in front of the gas cooker.

So I got a couple of eggs and put them on top of the fridge and went over to look at the book and when I came back the eggs had gone

Apparently top of the fridges aren't necessarily horizontal. And the things roll down and fall off. So I thought I'd put them on the draining-board because there are ridges on the draining-board of the sink. And they sort of rolled even faster down that.

So I got eggs numbers five and six. And it said to tap them against the side of the pan, the frying pan. I don’t see why they tell you to do that because if you do that, half the shell goes into the pan and the other half of the shell AND THE EGG drop into the hinterland of the cooker underneath that kind of barrier bit.

And it says another way of doing it is to crack it very lightly and gently urge both thumbs into the crack and pull slightly apart and never get the egg out without breaking it. Which it did.

I must give the chap credit. It did that.

Looking back, I think I should have done it over the pan. And I found that the easiest way, in fact, with eggs, is to just crush them with your hands because the runny stuff, which is not all that runny is quite sort of thick, seeps between the fingers. You can hold the egg. And if you let that run into a bowl, you can make an omelet.

So I whisked the thing up, as indicated, and put a splosh of milk in, and some salt.

Anyway I finally finished and it was curious. It was kind of burned and raw. And I put it inside this kind of tiny decayed, dead oakleaf in auturmn, which is my bacon. And the omelet was rather like a half rotten black and yellow handbag.

And I'd made it. I'd made it and it was good simple plain food. And I enjoyed it.

And my wife came back and said, "I'd had the most marvelous lunch and I ended up with crepe suzette. And the waiter came beside me with a hospital trolley and a bunson burner."

And she said to him this lovely thing and he flamed it and all the flames roared up and I said, "Rubbish. Rubbish. Ridiculous food."

Mind you, it's everyone to his own taste. Everyone to his taste. But my taste is for simpler, picking away at a bit of fried eggshell from between your teeth. I had a most beautiful simple lunch. Now the food you're talking about, I said the French have an expression for that. That, where the waiter slings on half a bottle of brandy, sets the whole table on fire. And you end up with a tiny bit of soggy mess. I said the French expression for that is
Chuck on . . . arson . . . goo.

741119
Frank Muir
588a

I've known another who has deliberately kept a whole cast and crew waiting all morning to make a point. I was working on a movie with a male star who was very jealous of his time while he was shooting. One day he was called to the set and kept waiting around. I forget why: the light was wrong, or the weather changed or something. One of those things that happen a lot. The following morning he sent a message to say, "Because you kept me waiting for four hours yesterday, I'm going to be four hours late today." There was nothing we could shoot without him so we, the entire cast and crew, sat twiddling our thumbs for four hours. When he finally turned up, everyone looked at me to see what I would do. I think they were hoping I'd have a big row with him, and it's true, I was absolutely furious. But instead I pointedly took him into a corner, put my hand on his shoulder and said, "I just want to say thank you. I was out all night last night and I hadn't learnt my dialogue. Now I've had a fabulous nap, I've learnt my lines and I'm feeling great. In fact, it just occurs to me: I'm going to a party tonight so can you be late again tomorrow? That way I won't be the one getting into trouble." He wasn't late the next day, or any other day.

The irony of all this is that I have a terrible temper myself. But these days I never lose it and I never allow anyone else to lose theirs either.

The last time I blew my top on a movie set was in 1970 when I was making The Last Valley, directed by James Clavell and costarring Omar Sharif. The Last Valley was, like many others of that era, a war movie, but with a difference: it was set in the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years War. I was playing the captain of a mercenary force and, unfortunately for me, that meant horses.

My daughter Dominique was by now an expert horsewoman and, knowing my unhappy history with and sheer terror of horses after my Zulu debacle, had given me some advice: I should ask for a docile mount and stipulate that it should be a mare. Imagine my surprise and delight when I was shown to my horse - the biggest I had ever seen and very obviously a stallion. His name was something Germanic that was translated for me to "Fury." "No, no," I was assured, when I raised a query. "He's as quiet as can be and was chosen with you in mind." I had a few practice rides and Fury did indeed seem to be a gentle soul. Until the first day of shooting, that was. I had got into my costume and thought Fury and I would go for a little trot. The trot quickly became a canter, and the canter became a gallop. Hanging on to Fury's mane for dear life, I really thought I was going to die. Eventually we were brought to a screaming halt (it was me doing the screaming) by a jeep from the unit, about two miles from the set.

As soon as I got back to the set I went ape shit at everybody, yelling and screaming until my voice was hoarse. Jimmy Clavell waited until I had shouted myself out, then dismissed the crew for two hours, sat me down and gave me one of the most useful lessons of my life. "I was a prisoner of the Japanese during the war," he said to me, very quietly and calmly, "and the reason I survived and others did not is that I never lost face. If you lose your temper in front of people you do not know, you are displaying a most intimate emotion in front of strangers. You look a fool and you feel a fool. You lose their respect and it is almost impossible to win it back. You must keep control. If you cannot control yourself, you look weak, and you have no chance of controlling others. And, by the way, the reason your horse ran away was that your sword was slapping against his side. Every time he felt that sword on his side he thought you were urging him to go faster. Now, you are going to have to apologize to everyone on set."

He was right. I did apologize and from that time on I have never lost my temper on a set, no matter what happens. I have also never got back on a horse and nothing and no one could tempt me to do so.

Actually, I did lose it just once recently. Daniel Radcliffe was doing an interview a couple of years ago about Now You See Me 2, a very fun heist movie where the robbers are brilliant magicians. When he was asked what it was like working with me, he said I still seemed to love my job despite my advanced age, and that "the only time he got remotely irate was when a camera smacked him in the head." Even then I only got angry with an inanimate object. I would never, ever shout at anyone less powerful than me. It is not just about losing face: it would be hideously unfair.

If you anger me, or cross me, you will never see me lose my temper. James Clavell taught me that. In fact, you will never see anything, because you would just disappear from my life. My parents taught me that. My dad taught me never to let anyone have two goes at me. And my mum taught me that the worst thing you can do to an enemy is to ignore him. To be angry is to be a victim. To move on is the only victory.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

A national park in Thailand is tired of trash ruining the scenery and harming the animals that live there, so they are enacting revenge on people who dare to litter. You toss trash in the park, authorities will register you with the police - not great. They will also mail your garbage back to your home, along with a note that reads, you forgot these things at Khao Yai National Park.

Al Glasgow, Trump's loyal casino consultant, shook his head in disbelief at the costly warfare, which he called "disorganized crime," among the Trump executives. "Instead of bringing in the business and making money they're all stabbing each other in the back, all busy trying to figure out how to fuck the other guy and get on Donald's good side," said Glasgow, himself a skilled veteran of the in-fighting whose sensitive antennae detected early on which executives were rising and which were heading for the door.

In such a battle a novice like Ivana, working with the Castle, ordinarily would be no match for the competition at Trump Plaza, which was run by the experienced and steady hand of Steve Hyde. But ordinary was poison in the Trump Organization, where ability or even success at bringing money to the bottom line was sometimes less important than one's relationship with Donald. Minor talents sometimes rose to great heights, briefly, before Donald abandoned them. When it came to intimacy with Donald, Hyde was no match for Ivana, at least not at first.

Trump planted stories that Ivana had been on Czechoslovakia's Olympic ski team. She had not, nor had she ever made such a claim. He called her a top Canadian fashion model. She had been an anonymous runway model. He did not mention that Ivana Zelnickova Winklmayr Trump had married before.

After Norman Vincent Peale married them in 1977, Ivana used Donald's growing income and desire for media attention to make them both Manhattan society charity-ball regulars. Now, in the summer of 1985, she reigned over Trump's Castle and the depth of her management talent quickly became apparent.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

The president, though, was more comfortable with his new "chief operating officer" than with almost any previous staff member. The two men swapped jokes like locker room buddies. Many of them were off-color in an old-fashioned sort of way. The two elderly men, for instance, were observed on one occasion elbowing each other like schoolboys after savoring an intelligence report detailing the improbably active sex life of the octogenarian Tunisian president, Habib Bourguiba. Even in jest, however, Regan had ulterior motives; he once confided to an aide that he had stumbled on a key to Reagan's heart: "I always let him tell his joke first." By Easter, Regan got the supreme compliment of being invited socially to the ranch. "Reagan admired Regan," said Deaver, "because, in a sense, he was exactly what Reagan wasn't: hands on."

In fact, an unspoken dividend of "letting Reagan be Reagan" was that this allowed the president to delegate so much to Regan. Reagan was fond of telling his staff, "Don't bring me problems - bring me solutions," and Regan was happy to comply. Before long, critics began to believe that Regan had cast himself in the role of prime minister. As Ed Rollins saw it, "He figured, if Ronald Reagan didn't want to be president all the time, he would be. Probably eighty percent of the decisions made during his era were made by Regan."

This concentration of power put a great strain on Regan and his staff, a staff not particularly adept or experienced. Regan methodically filled crucial While House posts with loyalists, many from his Treasury staff. Observers like Max Friedersdorf, who had worked with five chiefs of staff before Regan, described the staff as "obsequious yes men" who would laugh at all his Jokes. It was just sickening." A more generous view was that they were a well-meaning and able enough group of mostly young men who were simply cast in the wrong roles. They inherited a second-term White House badly in need of fresh political thinking but, in the words of one of their own members, Christopher Hicks, "we were implementers, organization guys not policymakers." Moreover, Regan didn't like being contradicted.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king's flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize, with surprise, that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. It was one thirteenth of the African continent, more than seventy-six times the size of Belgium itself.

To make clear the distinction between his two roles, the King of the Belgians at first considered calling himself "Emperor of the Congo"; he also toyed with the idea of outfitting loyal chiefs with uniforms modeled on those of the famous red-clad Beefeaters at the Tower of London. Then he decided to be merely the Congo's "King-Sovereign." In later years, Leopold several times referred to himself - more accurately, for his main interest in the territory was in extracting every possible penny of wealth - as the Congo's "proprietor." His power as king-sovereign of the colony was shared in no way with the Belgian government, whose Cabinet ministers were as surprised as anyone when they opened their newspapers to find that the Congo had promulgated a new law or signed a new international treaty.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

The American Protein Corporation is the largest spray-dryer of blood in the world and advertises blood products that can even be fed "through the drinking water" to calves and pigs. The majority of pigs in the United States are raised in part on spray-dried blood meal. According to the National Renderers Association, although young pigs may find spray-dried blood meal initially unpalatable, they eventually get used to it.

Dateline NBC quoted D. Carleton Gajdusek, the first to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on prion diseases, as saying, "[I]t's got to be in the pigs as well as the cattle. It's got to be passing through the chickens. Paul Brown, medical director for the U.S. Public Health Service, also believes that pigs and poultry could be harboring mad cow disease and passing it on to humans, adding that pigs are especially sensitive to the disease. "It's speculation," he says, "but I am perfectly serious."

Since 1996, the World Health Organization has recommended that all countries stop feeding remains of cows to cows, yet the U.S. government still allows dairy farmers to feed calves gallons of a mixture of concentrated cow blood and fat collected at the slaughterhouse. Industry representatives continue to actively support this practice. "It was the farmers' fault," one young victim whispered to her mother from the bed where she waged and lost a painful, prolonged battle against vCJD.

Since 1996, the World Health Organization has recommended that all countries test their downed cattle - those animals too sick or crippled even to walk - for mad cow disease, yet the U.S. government tests but a fraction of this high-risk population. The beef industry calls U.S. surveillance "aggressive" and doesn't think more testing is necessary. Stanley Prusiner, the world's authority on these diseases, calls U.S. surveillance "appalling."

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

A nightingale in the sycamore
(Underwoods by Robert Louis Stevenson)

I wish I could remember the name of that pub. I can't even remember the area it was in. Somewhere around Labroke Grove or Shepherd's Bush.

It's terribly annoying. I've been asked to write an article in the series The Most Unforgettable Character I've ever met.

I can't remember him. No. I can remember HIM. I'll never forget HIM.

It's where he was that I can't. It'll come back to me.

I know it was at a pub. Because I'd just bought this drink. I was astonished to see this elderly man at the other end of the bar holding an umbrella.

I know you're thinking what was astonishing about that. What was astonishing about that is that the umbrella was UP.

This old bloke was sitting at the end of the bar holding an open umbrella over himself. And what's more it was one of those new type of umbrellas which come right down over your shoulders, you know the kind, like sort of plastic dome of St. Pauls.

And there he was, sitting inside it. And the remarkable part. This is the remarkable part. He was puffing at a pipe.

Can you visualize what happens when a man smokes a pipe inside one of these transparent umbrellas? The whole upper half of his body simply disappears from view. The smoke just PILED up inside the dome 'till eventually it was just like looking at cumulous formations on type of the pair of gray flannel trousers.

That was nothing to what happened next.

When the umbrella was completely full of smoke, he ducked out of it, then holding the umbrella so that none of the smoke escaped, he took from a carrier bag a large round plastic sheet with a little hole in the middle. And he slipped the hole over the handle of the umbrella. Then he gradually worked the plastic circle up the dome and sealed it to the ends of the umbrella spokes. You understand what I mean? So that all the smoke was now sealed inside this umbrella dome.

And he put the whole thing on the floor and just sipped his beer as though nothing had happened.

I don't know if you could have kept quiet to this affair. I couldn't. I said, "Excuse me, sir. I wonder if you could tell me. What's your racket? To what purpose do you intend to put that umbrella full of smoke?"

And he was kind enough to explain. It all sort of fell into place. The point of the whole thing was many many years ago he had been unfortunate enough to get married to one of those kind of women whose only response to any statement you make to her is some homely old saw or axiom.

If you were to rush in and say, "Oh darling, we've lost all of our savings. The baby has fallen out of the pram. And the bathroom's just caught fire." What she'd say was something like, "Oh no, no use crying over spilled milk. Every cloud has a silver lining. Least said soonest mended."

"Thirty-five years I've lived with that," This old man said to me, "It's been like co-habiting with the Oxford Book of English Quotations. So the day I retired from work I made a vow, sir. I vowed I would dedicate the rest of my life to finding answers to them proverbs of hers. Now, this." And he patted the umbrella, "This is for the next time she comes out with, 'there is no smoke without fire'. As soon as she says it, out I'll go to my shed bring in the umbrella, shove it in her face, say 'What about this, eh'?"

I said, "I see. I see. Do you have other sort of ammunition in that shed?"

I've got a few things, sir. There's a small round stone with a bit of moss on it. There's the two dozen eggs that I DID manage to teach my grandmother to suck. And they are all in one basket, I might add. Well, it's been nice talking to you, guv. I must be shoving off. I'm making the wife a birthday present at the moment. A little purse.

I said, "That'll be nice."

He said, "Pricey though. You wouldn't credit the cost of those sows these days."

And I watched him leave. The most unforgettable character that I've ever met. But where that pub was. Was it at Maider Vale, in the Red Lion. No. I've got it. I've got it. It was exactly where that quotation of Robert Louis Stevenson indicated. It was at Nottinghill. In the sycamore.

Dennis Norden 574b

Being a decent human being is difficult for everyone from time to time but it seems there are particular challenges for those who become stars in their worlds. In some ways, being decent becomes harder, just at the point when your behavior becomes more noticeable and more important. Harder, because once you enter that bubble of stardom you can lose touch with reality and become demanding, egotistical and unreasonable almost as a way of life. More noticeable, because everyone is watching, all the time. We love to know what famous people are "really" like. Did you lose your rag in an airport queue? Or did you take time out of your day to smile at a little boy, sign an autograph and tell him to be good for his mum? Either way, whoever witnesses it will extrapolate an entire personality for you, and tell all their friends. More important, because the more successful you become, the more your behavior sets the tone for everyone around you.

Stay grounded

Some huge stars completely lose touch with the real world. Frank Sinatra, for example, was an extremely generous member of the secret philanthropists' club of Hollywood - a circle of big stars who took care of less successful actors as they grew older or fell on hard times - and became a great friend of mine. But he was a law unto himself and everything was on his terms. For example, Frank had a Twenty Minute Rule. He would not travel for dinner more than twenty minutes' drive from his house in Beverly Hills. If he had been invited to dinner and had been in the car for twenty minutes he would command his driver to turn around. "I'm twenty minutes," he would call out. "It's too far. We're going home." Mind you, he was also known to fly to Paris for dinner when he was staying in London. And he would always have people fussing around him.

I remember once one of his guys whispered to me conspiratorially, "Frank's in a great mood today."

I said, at normal volume, "What about me? What about my mood?"

And the guy looked at me like I was crazy. "Who cares? No one cares how you feel."

I have known stars who have demanded private planes, drugs, full interior design for their trailers. It goes on.

I was lucky. I always had my family to keep me grounded.

There's nothing like your mum saying she's had enough of LA and wants to go home to London to catch up on her favorite soap, or your wife saying, "You want a cup of tea? Sure, the kettle's over there," to remind you that no matter how much adulation and validation you're getting in your professional world, at home you're just plain old you. Not a star, not a god and quite possibly not the person who has had the hardest day.

The other people who have always kept me grounded are taxi drivers. In fact, I sometimes think Shakira keeps a few cab drivers on retainer just to stop me getting too big-headed. The other day, I got into a cab to go out for dinner and the driver, who must have been about fifty, looked in his mirror and said, "My grandfather loved you. He saw all your films." There was a little pause. "He's dead now."

"Oh" I said "Have you seen any?"

"I don't think so."

On the way back I got into a different cab. I saw the driver clock me in his mirror. "Hey, I know you," he said. I nodded encouragement. I was hoping for something about how brilliant I'd been in Batman. Instead. "Didn't you used to be Michael Caine?"

Alec Guinness, that great British theatre and film actor, perhaps best-known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movies, but also acclaimed for his work with the greatest director of his era, David Lean, in films like Great Expectations. Oliver Twist and The Bridge on the River Kwai, told me he had similar luck with cabbies. He once got into the back of a cab and the driver said, "I know you." Alec opened his mouth to confirm that he was indeed Alex Guinness and the driver said, "No, don't tell me. I'll get it. Before you get out, I'll get your name." As Alec was paying the fare, the driver said with a flourish, "I've got it. Telly Savalas."

So Alec says, "No, that's not it."

"I bet you wish you was, though," says the cabbie. Alec nodded, with a rueful Obi-Wan smile, and walked off into the night.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

the U.S. Department of Agriculture removed Wakanda from its list of free trade partners. Yes, Wakanda, as in from the movie "Black Panther." There is no trade war looming with this fictional country, but someone found it on USDA's online tariff tracker. For a moment, you could import things from Wakanda, like cows and water chestnuts, tariff-free. Sadly, a spokesperson told NBC it was just a test file that had been mistakenly published.

Really big players got royal treatment from Harrah. He had two private planes to ferry customers. In the early seventies, his casino hosts spent more than one thousand dollars per week on call girls for his best players, charging their services to internal account 619 and sometimes writing on the voucher "customer satisfaction refund." When IRS auditors in 1976 found these expenses taken as business deductions they righteously objected. Harrah's agreed not to ask taxpayers to subsidize the sexual adventures of its high rollers and the IRS dropped the matter.

Some folks remarked how Harrah's Lake Tahoe reported more winnings than even bigger casinos in Las Vegas and wondered how Harrah could do it. Some speculated it was the size of his players' bankrolls. But what mattered was how he counted the money-no skimming allowed.

Harrah's prosperity attracted interest from a lot of places, including a motel chain out of Memphis that had been one of the hot success stories of the fifties and sixties but was now foraging for new profits.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" (1994)

On that Friday evening, while attention was riveted on the unseemly and irresistible spectacle of Regan's graceless departure, Cannon had quietly slipped into the White House to begin his confidential mission. Baker assumed there would have to be major changes in the staff. But before he made them, he needed to understand how the old White House team had functioned - or not functioned.

At Baker's instruction, Cannon embarked on a series of exhaustive interviews with the members of the White House staff, trying to determine what had gone wrong. It was like interviewing witnesses in a political mystery. For six years, Ronald Reagan had been the most commanding presence in American politics, a president of apparently limitless popularity and success. But for the past four months, ever since the news had broken that he had secretly sold weapons to the government of Iran, his presidency had seemed lifeless, a hollow shell. Reagan had been elected by a forty-nine-state landslide only twenty-seven months earlier, but the polls now showed that his popularity was plummeting. He had been praised for having restored the credibility of the office, but more than half the country thought he was not telling the whole truth about either the arms sales to Iran or the diversion of money to the Nicaraguan contras. More than any recent leader, Reagan had shown an instinctive ability to please the American public, yet he had blundered into a misbegotten set of policies that no one, no matter where they stood on the political spectrum, could support. How, Cannon wanted to know, could this have happened?

Cannon had talked with the president's aides late into Friday evening and through most of Saturday. By the time he returned home quite late on Saturday night, he had been tired, dispirited, and very worried.

Now, in Sunday's early light, he began to draft his report for Howard Baker He looked again at the notes he had taken during the two days of interviews. The picture they presented of Reagan's White House was nothing short of astounding.

Cannon later recalled his impressions: "Chaos. There was no order in the place. The staff system had just broken down. It had just evaporated.

There was no pattern of analysis, no coming together. Individual cabinet members were just doing whatever they wanted to do - the ones who were smart had realized that the White House really didn't matter. They could go around the White House, and no one would retaliate.

"I took a look at some of the staff's paperwork and was stunned at their incompetence. They were rank amateurs."

But more chilling than anything else was the portrait these aides drew of the president they served. They spoke with Cannon in confidence; one by one, he recalled, "they told stories about how inattentive and inept the president was. He was lazy; he wasn't interested in the job. They said he wouldn't read the papers they gave him - even short position papers and documents. They said he wouldn't come over to work - all he wanted to do was to watch movies and television at the residence.

They felt free to sign his initials on documents without noting that they were acting for him. When I asked a group of them, who among them thought they had authority to sign in the president's name, there was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then one answered, 'Well - everybody and nobody.' "

Sifting through his notes, Cannon couldn't shake his astonishment. He was of course an uninitiated outsider; he'd had only a brief glimpse into the inner workings of an enormously complex organization. But he had seen enough to find the situation frightening - for him, for the party, and for the country.

Cannon reopened his copy of the Constitution and found, almost at end, what he had been searching for: Section Four of the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

AMENDDMENT XXV SECTION FOUR. Whenever the vice president and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the vice president shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.

Cannon stared hard at the provision. It had never been invoked; deceptively simple, it was a straightforward procedure for removing the president from office if he were no longer competent to govern. All it would take would be the agreement of the vice president and a majority of the cabinet. After a good deal of thought, Cannon reached a conclusion that would seem extreme, maybe even bizarre, to those who only knew the Ronald Reagan they saw on television and who hadn't heard all that he had over the past two days. But Cannon wasn't concerned with public perception; his primary loyalty was to Baker, to whom he felt he owed his unvarnished judgment. So he carefully typed out his first recommendation:

"Suggested priorities, March 1, 1987:

"I. Consider the possibility that section four of the 25th amendment might be applied."

**

That evening Cannon took the finished memorandum - which included several recommendations for immediate action - to Baker's home in a posh wooded enclave of Northwest Washington for a confidential meeting. Two of Baker's other trusted aides had also been asked to attend:

A. B. Culvahouse, a bright young lawyer who had cut short his vacation to take over the next day as the White House counsel, and Thomas Griscom, another transplanted Tennessean who had been Baker's press aide and would soon become the White House's director of communications. Griscom already knew what Cannon thought. He too had been asked to interview the White House staff over the weekend, and he had been similarly appalled. By Friday night, he was so shocked by the stories he was hearing that he kidded Cannon that they should be given medals for even daring to go back to the White House the next morning. The two had exchanged notes on their findings during a late lunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill on Saturday, and although they had thought they were starving, by the time they had realized the magnitude of the crisis they were facing, neither had had any appetite left.

In the privacy of Baker's home on Sunday night, Cannon warned Baker and the others that what he was about to say was extremely serious. Baker assumed his practiced poker face and waited. Sparing no details, Cannon then repeated what he had heard from the president's aides. The man they described, he told Baker, had no interest in running the country. In his estimation, and as the only one in the room who had previously worked in the White House, Cannon told Baker that his first decision should be whether to set in motion the involuntary retirement of the president on the grounds that he was no longer fit to discharge the duties of his office. Such a move could cause a constitutional crisis, Cannon realized. But, he said, if the president was as incompetent as his aides indicated, invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment could be the only way to serve the national interest.

There was a long, sober silence. During Watergate, Howard Baker had been a senior member of the Senate's investigating committee, and he understood as well as any politician in the country the implications of Cannon's words. But neither Baker nor his aides dismissed the constitutional remedy as beyond the realm of possibility. Instead, after hearing Cannon out, Baker finally said in his Tennessee drawl, "Well, it doesn't sound like the Ronald Reagan I just saw, but we'll see tomorrow"

On Monday morning, March 2, Cannon, Baker, Culvahouse, and Griscom gathered in the West Wing of the White House. They planned to watch the president closely, to determine whether he appeared mentally fit to serve. First they observed him from across the room as he chaired a formal cabinet meeting. Then they accompanied him to one of the weekly "issues luncheons," a free-flowing discussion with members of the White House staff that was also held in the Cabinet Room.

One of Donald Regan's aides guided them to seats alongside the French doors that lined the side of the room and led out to the Rose Garden. But Cannon insisted on four seats at the table; he wanted a closer look at Reagan. The four men deliberately bracketed the president: Baker on his right side, Griscom on his left, and Culvahouse and Cannon directly across from him, so that they could look into the president's eyes.

Reagan seemed relaxed and animated. He swapped a few familiar jokes with Baker. There was the one about the lady from Tennessee who was a stern teetotaler. A friend had protested, "Even Jesus drank a little wine," to which she had replied, "I would think more of him if he didn't." Everyone laughed. The tension evaporated. Then Reagan reminisced a bit about being governor of California. He seemed so alert and attentive that Cannon began to wonder about everything the White House staff members had told him.

Perhaps Donald Regan's henchmen had exaggerated the president's frailties, he thought. Perhaps they were trying to justify an internal coup, an arrangement whereby the chief of staff would make others believe he had been forced to act as a kind of regent for a disabled president. Could the president they described - the inattentive, incurious man who watched television rather than attending to affairs of state - be the same as the genial, charming man across the table?

What the hell is going on here? Cannon wondered. The old fella looks just dandy

And through it all, Ronald Reagan always did,

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)