“Bloom where you’re planted,” they told her. And she did. She adapted and persevered, thrived and blossomed. She was a country girl with the greenest thumb, but she could sparkle with the best of them under the city lights. She grew herbs on a tiny terrace in Queens while listening to Johnny Cash. She took a tract house and made it her own, with purple paint in the bedroom and a vegetable garden in back. And there were always flowers wherever she roamed. She gave bouquets of kindness to everyone she met.
Welcome to my April A-Z! This month I will be posting about James Bond 007 every day except Sunday, mostly focusing on the movies, not the books. Enjoy!
Richard Dawson Kiel was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1939. He reached the extraordinary height of 7’2″ due to excess growth hormone. His family moved to California when he was 9 and he graduated from Baldwin Park High School. Richard held a bunch of odd jobs, including a cemetery plot salesman and math teacher, before he found his way into “the biz.” Naturally, he was often cast as the bad guy, including in the second episode of I Dream of Jeannie (1965), where he plays Ali in ancient Persia. But we are here today to focus on his iconic role as “Jaws” in the James Bond franchise. He was one of the few villains who showed up in more than one film
Richard first appeared as Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). He working as an assassin for baddie Karl Stromberg and was outfitted with special steel teeth to make him look extra-scary. Kiel said the teeth were hugely uncomfortable to wear. He doesn’t speak in the film, but he certainly smiles. Jaws was supposed to be killed by a shark after escaping from Stromberg’s ship before it was torpedoed, but he was so popular with the test audience that the producers decided to let him live. He played Jaws again in Moonraker (1979), where he was given a larger role.
In Moonraker, Jaws becomes more of a comedic figure than a ruthless killer, even though he still looks terrifying. There are some spoofy type fight scenes, where he’s clearly stronger than Roger Moore’s 007, but Bond overpowers him by zapping him in the teeth with a broken lamp. Silly but fun. Jaws is working for baddie Drax but turns against him and helps Bond defeat him. This is primarily motivated not by Bond’s persuasiveness but by Jaws’ new love interest ~ the blonde, pigtailed Dolly who also does not talk. In both films, Jaws survives ridiculous situations which would be fatal for any normal human, such as the aforementioned shark battle and also falling several thousand feet after he screws up his parachute (in Moonraker). He gets up and straightens his jacket in the same manner as Bond himself. At the end of Moonraker, Jaws and Dolly survive the collapse of Drax’s space station, and he gets one line. “Here’s to us,” Jaws says as he pops a bottle of champagne with his teeth. There were plans to bring Jaws back for a third Bond adventure, but that didn’t happen.
After Jaws, Richard Kiel had a few more roles, notably as Mr. Larson in Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore. He also co-authored a biography of the abolitionist CM Clay and published an autobiography as well. Kiel was a born-again Christian, which he said helped him overcome his alcoholism. He was married twice. Diane Rogers, his second wife, was only 5’1″ and they were married 40 years until Kiel’s death. With Diane, Kiel had 4 children and 9 grandchildren. He passed away in 2014 of a heart attack right before his 75th birthday.
Tune in tomorrow for more A-Z Bond!
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Information and images from Wikipedia, Fandom, and Pinterest.
It was fun looking through the box of unsorted photos and finding this gem from around 27 years ago ~ Dad and my eldest in the backyard of our old Huntington Beach house. If he were still around, I’d probably be baking his favorite fudgy brownies for a birthday celebration tonight. Miss those days. Love you, Dad, RIP.
Welcome to my refreshed Monday Peeve! Unburden yourself of an annoyance and you’ll feel better afterward. Or not. Complain in my comments or crab in your own post. Doesn’t have to be on a Monday. You do you.
Yeah, yeah, old news, I know, but even so I would like to peeve about junk calls today. There are the flat-out scams, of course, which are horrible (Trent posted about his recent experience). Then there are the endless surveys, which waste time even to hang up on them. Go away! Around election time (and when isn’t it anymore?), you get the volunteers bugging you about candidates and issues. Go away! At work, I answer endless calls from people needing to “update their information” on us, ugh. Mostly garbage. And yes, my cell phone provider does a pretty good job of marking the worst calls as spam or telemarketing, but some slip through. It’s just so irritating to spend any time on this and block their numbers. Sometimes you’re expecting a call, but you don’t have the person’s number in your contacts, so you can’t screen and must pick up. It feels so much more invasive than the junk mail in my mailbox, especially when a real person is jabbering on the line at me so fast I can barely get in a “no thanks” before I disconnect. They must go to some rapid-fire speech training class. And what is the point? I guess it’s worth it if one in ten thousand buys some dumb thing. The rest of us just get annoyed with the company/candidate/whatever.
GRRRRRR! Okay, that’s all. Your turn.
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Image is mine, altered from the original on Pixabay.
Welcome to my April A-Z! This month I will be posting about James Bond 007 every day except Sunday, mostly focusing on the movies, not the books. Enjoy!
Dame Judith Olivia Dench was born in 1934 in York, England. She began her stage career in 1957 as Ophelia in Hamlet and ever since has received honors for her stellar acting abilities. She’s been nominated for an Academy Award seven times and won once (for her supporting role as Queen Elizabeth I in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love). She is considered one of the greatest actors of all time and often tops the list of Britain’s favorites. In 1988, Ms. Dench was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, which is a British order of chivalry that rewards contributions to the arts and sciences, among other things. This is why she is called “Dame,” which is an honorific.
Today, however, we want to focus on her role as M in the James Bond franchise. Ian Fleming created the character of “M” in his 007 novels to be the nickname for the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, which is known as M16. There have been four actors who played M in the Eon (Broccoli) films: Bernard Lee, Robert Brown, Judi Dench, and Ralph Fiennes, the incumbent. In the non-Eon movies, M was played by John Huston, David Niven, and Edward Fox. Ms. Dench first portrayed M in 1995’s GoldenEye, which starred Pierce Brosnan as Bond. She continued to play M in the next three Brosnan 007 films, and again when Daniel Craig took on the 007 role in Casino Royale (2006). Ms. Dench played M for another three films with Craig as Bond, and met her tragic end in Skyfall. She is the first M to be killed in the line of duty.
The film character is supposedly based on Stella Rimington, the real-life head of MI5 between 1992 and 1996.
Ms. Dench was married for 40 years to the actor Michael Williams (d. 2001); they had one daughter, Finty (who has a son). In 2010, Ms. Dench met conservationist David Mills and they’ve been a couple since. Ms. Dench is a Quaker.
Tune in tomorrow for more A-Z Bond!
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Information and images from Wikipedia, James Bond Wiki, and Metro News.
You sailed over the pink pearl seas, steady as a heartbeat. Lavender dawn enveloped the earth as you flew on, silken wings tirelessly playing the rhythm of our love song.
You never left me crying in the mortal night, not when I was the moon, surrounded by eternal skies and tended to by stars. You forgot to bring lightning to the gods; that’s how enraptured you were.
Your devotion drifted through me like a cloud… angelic mist, of no use to me now.
“Bang!” is a 2020 song by AJR Productions. It’s the lead single from the band’s fourth album OK Orchestra. AJR stands for Adam, Jack, and Ryan Met ~ three musical brothers from New York City who write and create music in their apartment in Manhattan.
AJR played cover songs for years, busking as relative unknowns, until Ryan tweeted one of their original songs to a bunch of celebs. That did the trick and they got signed to Warner Music in 2013. Apparently, they had a big commercial hit with their kickoff song “I’m Ready,” which is a spoof of SpongeBob SquarePants, but I never heard of them until “Bang!”
The song hit No. 8 on Billboard Hot 100, which makes it their first top 10 and their highest charting single. I love this catchy tune and the fun coming-of-age lyrics.
Bang!
I get up I get down And I’m jumpin’ around And the rumpus and ruckus are comfortable now Been a hell of a ride But I’m thinking it’s time to grow Bang! Bang! Bang! So I got an apartment across from the park Put quinoa in my fridge Still I’m not feeling grown Been a hell of a ride But I’m thinking it’s time to go Bang! Bang! Bang! (Here we go!)…
What’s the difference between my social media presence now and how it was before Covid, the election of 2020, etc.? Welp, several things have changed. First, I’m mellower now, and I prefer lightness and kindness to intense conversations online. That may seem strange, given that so many others seem harsher, less forgiving, and more argumentative. But I’ve never been one to follow the crowd, and I see nothing beneficial in fighting with trolls or even interacting with angry, stubborn, opinionated “friends” who would never consider another POV.
My two-year Facebook break put a lot of things in perspective. While I focused on blogging and tweeting, I realized that not only do I enjoy nice things, but it is within my power to create them. Instead of moaning about all the T* in my feed, for example, I began hiding and blocking the accounts who focused on him 24/7. Suddenly, my reading selections were much more fun. I even muted accounts I agreed with, if they were solely posting negative stuff.
Then I turned the lens on myself. I deleted posts and tweets that were full of nasty sarcasm and toxic words, or agreeing with same. I dumped my “dating stories” because even though some were funny, most were just a big fat bitchfest. When I returned to Facebook, I was surprised at how much worse it had become in two years. People were constantly seeking confrontation! Reluctantly, I began to hide/block the worst offenders, which sadly included a few long-time friends. We do have the tools to curate our own experience, which to me is preferable to continuing to complain about other people’s speech. I take responsibility for what I allow into my life.
Here’s another example. I have managed to rid my feeds of most celeb stories in the past month or so by religiously blocking all garbage media at the source (aka tabloids) and hiding celeb articles from sources I like otherwise. Now, I’m not so frustrated when I go to read real news. It really makes a difference to use the tools we have at our disposal.
Welcome to my April A-Z! This month I will be posting about James Bond 007 every day except Sunday, mostly focusing on the movies, not the books. Enjoy!
Today’s post is in honor of the British writer Ian Fleming, who created the James Bond 007 character and wrote the original Bond novels. Ian was born on May 28, 1908 in Mayfair, London and died on August 12, 1964 in Canterbury, Kent on his son Caspar’s 12th birthday ~ Caspar committed suicide at age 23. Ian was only 56 years old at his death, but he had been a heavy smoker and drinker all his life and suffered from heart disease.
Like many writers, Fleming had a complicated background. He came from a wealthy family, but he didn’t do well at school, where he was bullied and had physical problems. He also hated the food. He began Eton College in 1921 and excelled at athletics; he also edited a school magazine. But he still had problems with authority and ended up leaving early. Ian next went to the Royal Military College where he dropped out after catching gonorrhea. Next, his mother sent him to schools in Austria and Switzerland. In Geneva, Fleming began a relationship and became engaged, but he broke it off when his mother disapproved. He then failed the exams to enter the Foreign Office, but mommy got him a job as a sub-editor and journalist with Reuters. Finally, he went into banking due to family pressure.
Ian had a long relationship with Ann O’Neill (née Charteris), who was married to a baron and had numerous affairs. After divorcing the baron, Ann married a viscount, while still carrying on with Fleming. Eventually, the viscount caught onto their shenanigans and divorced her, at which point Ian and Ann finally tied the knot themselves and had a son. But they both still constantly cheated on each other.
Ian worked for Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division during WWII, where he picked up many of his ideas for his 007 books with their complex plots and layers of bad guys. He wrote his first Bond novel Casino Royale in 1952 and it was a success. He quickly followed up with eleven more Bond novels and two short story collections. The Bond books are ranked among the best-selling fictional series and have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Fleming also wrote the children’s story Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang as well as non-fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked him as 14th on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Two of Fleming’s 007 books were published posthumously, and there have been more since, written “in the style of.” The originals are the best, imo. The films don’t necessarily follow the novels closely except for the basic character of James Bond. You don’t mess with 007!
Tune in Monday for more A-Z Bond!
PS: Sorry about all the errors in this post ~ I am grateful for my careful readers and appreciate any catches.
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Information and images from Wikipedia and Pinterest.
