Reno and Beyond: La Dolce Vita

The minx has been working like a dog lately so lately so its been hard to put forth my usual effort. All I can manage to do these days after I get home is let Bjorn the Houseboy massage my feet and drink the pomegranate martini #1 husband Luigi makes for me each night before I head off to bed.

• First, I just had to respond to this letter to the RGJ editor by Ron Newton of Yerington who writes:
  

  Kudos to Ty Cobb for voting against (Barbara) Buckley for speaker of the Assembly [RGJ, Feb. 6].

  As Chuck Muth so aptly put it, “Finally, it appears there’s at least one [member] of the Assembly with not only the courage of his convictions, but a little backbone as well.” We have at least one assemblyman who did not join the other 41 lemmings in their rush to the precipice.

  No, Buckley, it was not a “freshman mistake” as you suggest. Rather, it was a legitimate vote from an individual with a mind of his own. Our Assembly is not, and should never be, a “good ol’ boy” club.

  Good for you, Ty! Keep it up. Your strength of conviction just might rub off on some of your colleagues.

  Conviction my ass. What Ty Cobb did was demonstrate his lack of respect for Speaker Buckley and the rest of his Assembly colleagues. Protesting a ceremonial vote can hardly be claimed as a demonstration of any kind of independence or be held up as an example of how the Assembly is a “good ol boys” club. The fact that so many of the “good ol boys” in the Assembly took Cobb to task is actually a triumph against that network. And furthermore, Cobb’s ridiculous move was anything but strategic–a necessary quality in any effective Assemblyman. Either Cobb is truly a dope, or he’s trying to make a name for himself in anyway possible, and at the expense of well-respected colleagues. That kind of behavior should not be rewarded.

• Unfortunately, exactly what I was afraid of happening happened. Marcotte resigned from the Edwards campaign. Let us all do our best to reward Bill Donohue for his efforts.
• I agree with Cintra Wilson on Anna Nicole Smith, “a bonfire in a hailstorm:”
  

  What needs saying — what it seems nobody has yet said — is that when she was able to suppress her demons enough to pull herself together and look her best, she was fabulously gorgeous. Numerous red-carpet moments, the footage of which we now run over and over again like a televised rosary in order to understand her death, reveal this. Anna Nicole was a star because she possessed an unusually large amount of beauty. At her best, she didn’t evoke Marilyn Monroe so much as Anita Ekberg in “La Dolce Vita” — the strapless black dress, mounds of white flesh, piles of blond hair. She was indelicate, but an unstable element nonetheless — not so much a candle in the wind as a bonfire in a hailstorm. But the real similarity between Anna Nicole and Marilyn was their shimmering tension — an unsettlingly powerful physical beauty, collapsing irresistibly in real time beneath the frailties of its hostess. She was entropy porn at its finest.

  Our fascinated gaze was her real addiction — and the humiliating media tractor pull between our disgust and our attraction for her was, in all likelihood, both her lover and her murderer. Fame, the only chemotherapy available for the desperate toxicity of narcissism, proves once again that it is deadly enough in its own right to be avoided.

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