Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 3:34 PM GMT

Have you finished tweeking the size of your points? Good.

And 'Ugh!', Steven Norris?

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 3:38 PM GMT

I have no control over it - it's all big blue black little, any minute it please itself to be. Argh!

And Norris was on the MINGER list!!!!!!

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 3:51 PM GMT

i'm not at all sure what you mean by 'involuntary fantasies'. But I've never had any crushes on either old men OR old women, so there you go.

I find, as I've noted on my own blog, that my media crushes are more oriented to the character than the actor (which is why I have always liked Alyson Hannigan and never had much of a thing for Sarah Michelle Gellar; I would far rather share my life and/or a hammock with Willow than with Buffy). But I must admit, nearly all of my crushes are on women younger than I am these days, but it's not like I want or asked to be 41, now, is it?

I do still rather like Kim Delaney who has just reappeared on NYPD BLUE, and I think she is my age or a little older, and while I can't call it a crush, I'd certainly be happy to tie Madonna down to a motel bed for a long holiday weekend. But that's about as mature as my tastes get, I'm afraid.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 4:11 PM GMT

Does Susan Sontag count? Okay, she's not exactly ugly, but at 70, she's seriously ancient. And I know at least one bloke who's been fantasising about her for many years ... erm, right.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 4:41 PM GMT

Ah well, I think she fits the subcategory, where you're not repelled by the outside (fortunately), but she has an interesting brain.

I didn't blog this category, out of sheer embarrassment, because for me, this lot aren't really sexual fantasies anyway, just ... erm ..... niiiiiice, and plus also, they're excruciatingly embarrassing people.
For instance, Tom Cruise, Patricia Highsmith, William H Macy, George Clooney, Ted Hughes, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kurt Vonnegut, Camille Paglia, John C. Reilly and (ulp) Julie Burchill.
I'm puce, now.

Thanks for the comment!

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 5:31 PM GMT

I have to admit that I'm guilty of the old man thing -- Alan Rickman is one of my longest-standing involuntary crushes. Although you'd never get me to call him ugly. As for the girls, I can't say that I've ever crushed on an old woman, but I have had a crush on Franka Potente for going on four years now.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 5:33 PM GMT

Ooops, sorry! I must've been blinded by sight of his name.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 5:41 PM GMT

So THAT'S how he does it!!!!

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 6:13 PM GMT

Involuntary would require too much graphical detail to explain properly. Let's say 'dream about' and pretend we're all six years old and Rebecca Hazlitt invited us to her super party next week.

SMG always looked better in bed than Willow would, to me. More ... ahem ... bouncy. And with the hairs on the forearm thing.....
Yes, well. I did like Willow when she was geek and klutzy, but when she came out as gay, she just turned wuss in my eyes.

I've been thinking about the old woman thing, and I think it might be down to smell. Not that old women smell. I've sniffed old lady crotch, and it smells of fancy perfume, ime. I mean a kind of indistinct, indefinable pheromone thing that old women just don't have. You don't turn round as they walk in the room in the same way.

Mind you, you don't do that for ropey old blokes, either. I'm going to have to think about this one for a while longer.

And shower. I stink.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 6:24 PM GMT

There's the whole 'Malvolio' category, isn't there, of actors who hog the screen.

Gary Oldman, Al Pacino, Billy Bob Thornton (who's nearly at the two year mark where he'll move into an official 'crush' for me).

Although, according to this, they're all screaming queens who are rude to waiters.

Ooooooh. Looks lasciviously back over the list. Nurse! The restraints, please.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 7:59 PM GMT

Ooooh! Franke Potente! Yes yes yes! Very yummy.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 9:49 PM GMT

I have never fantasised about an old man whilst in the act of pleasure or otherwise. The thought of Arnie would deflate me to an unacceptable degree.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 10:02 PM GMT

I had to google. That woman in Run Lola Run? Sheesh, come over to Europe you guys, there's tons who look like that.

"Punk style" my bottom.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 10:04 PM GMT

Older crushes? I really don't know. Offhand the only older woman I can think of is Dyanne Cannon (sp?) and I don't have a crush on her. I do think she looks good for her age, though.

Older men - Sean Connery

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 10:05 PM GMT

That's where I *know* you haven't tried. Go on, try a spot of homo-erotic bishop bashing. You can blog it after........

Pump up! (snigger)

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 10:26 PM GMT

Oooh, ooh, Kat, genius as ever - you made me think of Gwyneth Paltrow's mum. She's lavvvvvvverly. Ogh, egads, what's her name?

Aha!!!! Blythe Danner.

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 11:05 PM GMT

It doesn't delete it, you just have to go to the main comment page to find it.

see

Thursday, 30 October 2003 - 11:13 PM GMT

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Darn. You are the second blogger in two days who has taken approximately three seconds to prove themselves infinitely cleverer than me.

Boz runs the Bozzies awards blog. Which Kat won! Kat who comments here! With the scary Hallowe'en blog!
I was blegging and tarting myself for a Bozzie next year. And @#%$! it up mightily. Bah.

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 1:25 AM GMT

Seriously, what do women see in creepy old men. A woman told me today that she loves Sean Connery. Why? what is seen in his old ass? Liver spots are sexy? An inability to achieve erection is hot?

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 2:35 AM GMT

Ag, god, I don't want to think about *really* shagging the sad old duffers. Ew!

And Sean Connery, no I couldn't tel you the first thing sexy about a racist sexist wife beating bog trotter like him, no.

So.....erm....... I defeated my own argument.

Damn!

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 7:35 AM GMT

Ah yes. And older actresses tend to not hog the screen. In fact, more often than not, they shrink. So maybe that's it. Maybe as we age, we just get smaller and smaller until we become little old ladies and no one can even see us anymore and therefore, because they cannot see us, they do not desire us. And old men may shrink a little too (eww!) but they overcompensate by talking louder so they will still be noticed. Yessssss... I think I am onto something. Or maybe it's just the gin talking.

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 8:04 AM GMT

yes yes yes! about crushes on characters. i spent 7 years longing after data. brent spiner leaves me cold. (and yes i do realize i have just revealed my TOTAL geekdom on someone else's blog, but hey ho.) alex, from family ties? my first true love. michael j. fox? eh. well, in that case it's not quite the same, because i crushed out about him for a few years following the family ties business. but seriously, alex. finally, and this perhaps seals my geekDOOM, the evil king jared from labyrinth? actually made me hot. david bowie - even though i recognize his empirical hotness - not so much. and the most recent of all : bayliss from homicide: life on the streets. kyle secor just isn't the same without his baby-faced homicide-cop thing going.

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 11:21 AM GMT

I think all your 'character crushes' are very understandable. Being oriented differently I can't say I ever had a crush on any male character, but Bayliss was the only reason I watched HOMICIDE, and when they ran out of ideas for him around the fifth season and started playing with his sexuality, I was definitely of two minds about it. On the one hand, it was good and groundbreaking to see a positive (for the most part) character who had been portrayed as straight up until then come out as bisexual. On the other hand, being a 41 year old prisoner of my cultural reality tunnel, I had to wail "but why did they do it with BAYLISS??" They could have done it with Meldrick Lewis and I'd have cheered, but... BAYLISS? He was so cool!

Ah, well, yes, yes, having been born in 1961, I am tainted with the male homophobe brush. Sad and all, but there it is.

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 11:45 AM GMT

Three things:

Data? Can I just express a full shrug in text format? As ???????

Evil King Jared: Now, you know, I hadn't ever considered it, but - weird - I can see that one. He's got the 'thin', yeah.

Kyle Secor: now you are speaking to my own personal crush demons. But you got the wrong one on the show. Secor always played it poofy. It's ANDRE BRAUGHER who's the fit puppy. Lyon has turned your brain if you're going for the camp fat one instead. :-D

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 11:47 AM GMT

My parents were born in the year dot, and they're not homophobic. Eww. Anyway, Bayliss was always poofy, but I know what you mean about lewis. But PEMBLETON was the hottie!

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 11:57 AM GMT

Deanne, you're pretty much usually right on your blog, and I thinkn you're right again here. I swear your new job is working as some sort of transcendental meditation for you.
I wondered if Helen Mirren fit your theory (dunno if you've seen her over there - she's very much the star article in anything she plays over here - Prime Suspect comes to mind - and she's a fine actress, but somehow is famous for being old but with great knockers and neverending legs). Or Judi Dench. Or Dame Maggie Smith. Eileen Atkins? They've all played attention hogging roles, like Medea, but once in the movies, they're all squeaky quiet.

Yeah, you're right. How else could Smith move from the arrogant glory that is the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to the wizened a-sexual villain of Mission Impossible if not by 'taking up less space' in the world.

And as for the theory about men taking up more space, more loudly, well, gawd, if my theory about the sex wars reversing their power balance is correct (where a younger 3/10 becomes a 9/10 as he ages) then of course they'd get cocky and loud.
Gah.

Nice ideas, Deanne. :_D

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 2:28 PM GMT

I'm not homophobic about chicks, just guys. It's a typical pattern for males of my generation and before it, and in fact, it still seems to hold, at least, among the vast majority over here.

I am, intellectually, not homophobic... I'm quite capable of very sincerely saying all that usual crap we closet pouf-queases say... 'as long as it doesn't have anything to do with me', etc, etc. But where chick on chick, of course, turns me on (sorry, it does, damned if I'll lie about it), guy on guy troubles me on some deep thalmic level. Intellectually I'm tolerant(although I don't care for gays who are confrontational about it), emotionally, I still get a bit put off, though. It's just a thing. I could be friends with a gay guy, maybe even a gay couple, but if they were doing PDAs in front of me I'd have to leave.

Now, this emotional immaturity also manifests itself in my pop culture fiction when someone takes an established character I like and makes them gay. You'd think I wouldn't mind with a chick, but, well, it annoyed me with Willow (it was simply wrong, she isn't gay, at most she's bisexual, and if you listen to the comments tracks on Season 4, you find Joss admits they had no idea she was gay until they made it up, and I hate that kind of bad writing) and it always annoys me when they do it to a male character I like. I realize that IS certainly homophobic, but, well, Bayliss isn't a real person and if they were going to make someone in the squad bisexual or gay, I'd rather they'd done it to a male character I didn't like at all, like Lewis. I admit that's small minded... I wasn't wild about it when they wanted to make Element Lad gay in the Legion, either ('do it to Wildfire! do it to Wildfire!' I wanted to shriek in my best Winston Smith tones). But it's just how I feel, and I'm too old to either lie or apologize for involuntary emotional responses.

As to Braugher being the show's hottie, mind you, I'm just not bent that way. I think Braugher is a fine actor and he's been in some of my very favorite films (Glory, Frequency, among a few others) and I very much liked Pembleton as a character and loved the interaction between him and Bayliss. But I don't evaluate male characters in those terms. I found Pembleton admirable but not at all likable, while Bayliss was the exact opposite, and I felt the writers had created in their partnership a truly symbiotic diad where both supplied elements that the other badly needed. Frank had the cool, incisive, nearly brilliantly deductive intellect but no emotion or empathy; Tim provided a less reasoned, more intuitive approach, and tempered Frank's harsh, cold, furious sense of utterly ruthless justice with the cooling balm of mercy.

Towards the end of run, when an obvious decision was made to downplay the Pembleton-Bayliss partnership and pay more attention to the other characters, I lost a lot of my interest in the show. So, yes, I understand a thing for Pembleton, I like the character as a character a great deal.

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 2:50 PM GMT

Re: the homophobia: pfffft. I feel those twelve days weighing on me now.... :D

Pembleton was a flawed character, deeply deeply flawed, and almost incapable of doing anything more than barely comprehending the flaws that were killing him. That's why he was so compelling. Bayliss *knew* himself (scuse the yawn), whereas Pembleton was my Macbeth.

But you're right about Willow. And whyowhyowhy did they *waste* that gorgeous woman who was dowdied up to play her girlfriend? Insanity.

Friday, 31 October 2003 - 4:27 PM GMT

Amber Benson is, yeah, the whole package... excellent actress, cute in the non-Hollywood way, good writer (or so it seems from some BUFFY comics she's authored) and as we saw in the musical ep, up there with Anthony Stewart Head as the best voice in an obviously very talented and musical cast.

As a writer myself, I fully understand why Tara was sacrificed. There is no better way to buy emotional gravitas in a fictional artifact than killing someone the audience loves. Every other regular character on BUFFY was either there for a reason (I could go down the list, but just take my word for it) or wasn't all that likable (no one would have cared, in the sixth season, if Anya had bought it).

Besides, the controversial 'let's make Willow evil' bit needed a driver, so, Tara had to go. A shame and a waste, yes, but death always is, and BUFFY was good enough fiction that death there SHOULD seem real, and it's not going to if it's just someone we don't give a @#%$! about.

Now, on making Willow evil I'm very much of two minds, but hey, this comment thread isn't about that.

I know. I looked about and expected my homophobia, however I've struggled with it intellectually, to weigh heavily against me on this blog. But I only lie to people I have no respect for, so, despise me if you must.

Sunday, 2 November 2003 - 6:11 AM GMT

I agree with everything you said there about Buffy. Amber Benson! Cheers, I had a total visual, but couldn't remember her name. I loved it when she got popped, though, they'd really wasted her talents as an actor, and wasted the potential of her character, so it was the best, most interesting thing they could have done. After Willow soaked up the books, though, they might as well have stopped that season right there. Feh.

I'm not going to get into it on the homophobia - that's your issue, not mine. And I sense that you represented yourself differently here in these comments than you do on your blog, so I'm not sure I'm getting the full story, anyway.

Live long and prosper, or whatever it is you're meant to say. :D