WINGING IT

RIP to Dick Gautier, who played Conrad Birdie on Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie, and Hymie the robot on Get Smart, passed on at 85. Last night I watched him in an episode of the short-lived sitcom When Things Were Rotten, in which he played Robin Hood, facing off against The Black Knight, played by the recently late and much-lamented Ron Glass.

A Canadian entomologist has named a newly-discovered species of moth Neopalpa donaldtrumpi after our incoming President, on the basis of a similarity in coiffure.

The difference is, it works on the moth. Most becoming.

You can read about it in the Washington Post, although presumably that makes it fake news. Anyway, in the creature's honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...we can hardly do other than to acknowledge Mothra...

...star of the 1961 classic and many subsequent Toho favorites. We'll be lucky indeed if The Moth's Eponym in the White House wreaks no more havoc than Toho's larger but far less repulsive bug.

It was also pointed out to me that Turner Classic Movies is showing the Budd Schulberg-Elia Kazan classic A Face in the Crowd on Inauguration Day.

Great movie, great gesture, but I don't think I can watch it, anymore than I can watch the spectacle itself. That movie came true, and what's heartbreaking is that the tape exposing the character of the real Lonesome Rhodes (far more reprehensible than Andy Griffith's character in the film) surfaced, right on cue, and the public failed to give a shit. As cynical as they always seemed, it turns out that Schulberg and Kazan overestimated us.