Author: DOuG pRATt

Bettie’s Bangs and Hard Knocks

Betty Page was a one-of-a-kind pinup girl. Appearing mostly in low-brow magazines, Bettie’s appeal was more kitschy than sleazy. Bettie (her preferred spelling) was happy to pose nude, but Irving Klaw never had her do that in his famous fetish photos. Personally, I don’t get the attraction of fetish material, and Bettie thought of it as a funny performance.

Bettie Page Reveals All, an affectionate yet unflinching portrait, is on Amazon Prime. The documentary is a bit amateurish, like the magazines Bettie appeared in, but I recommend it for both the cheesecake photos (there’s an old-fashioned term) and for Bettie’s life story.

For years, Bettie’s fans wondered where she was. The documentary really does reveal everything, including how she went from this…

… to this.

Bettie’s resurrection was thanks to comic book artist Dave Stevens. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Dave saved Bettie’s life, as the documentary explains. Bettie died less than a year after Dave’s untimely passing. Tim Estiloz, a comic book fan and friend, who I met through Joe Sinnott, once interviewed Bettie.

Wrongs on the Right

In 10th grade American History class, 50 years ago (!), we had a discussion about determining fact vs. fiction. One of the kids said he’d heard there was a miracle carburetor. It got incredibly good mileage, but the oil companies and auto manufacturers were keeping it a secret. There was, and is, plenty of justification for doubting the integrity of oil and car companies, but my classmate’s claim reminded me of the “Paul is dead” hoax from a year earlier.

My family had visited the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, MA. A featured exhibit at the time, and of greatest interest to me, was Hitler’s Mercedes convertible touring car. It had mechanical fuel injection, and learning about that made the existence of a “miracle carburetor” seem very unlikely to me.

So here we are today, with people continuing to be sucked in by obvious hoaxes. But unlike Paul is dead or the claim of a miracle carburetor, or even the JFK conspiracy theories, they aren’t harmless. They are malicious lies that can hurt people very directly and personally, as this Associated Press article explains.

Foresight Was 20/20

Once again I have praise for The Premonition, by Michael Lewis. It’s a story of unwavering individual competence in the face of systemic incompetence.

Lewis shows how the pandemic revealed the inefficiencies of both the private and public sectors. If there’s an overarching theme, it’s that the CDC no longer does it job. Trump was the final blow to a once-great organization that began to decline 40 years ago, with Reagan and the AIDS crisis.

Square Songs

The extent of my awareness of SpongeBob SquarePants is pretty much limited to knowing what it is. That changed just a bit when I heard this song on one of my favorite SiriusXM shows, Drew Carey’s Friday Night Freak-out.

It sounds like a song-writing collaboration between Brian Wilson and Margo Guryan. That turns out to not be surprising, because the song was written by former Brian Wilson producer Andy Paley.

How about another square song for kids? As featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hmmm… that album cover looks square.