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IT’S IN THE BAG!, (aka THE FIFTH CHAIR), Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Don Ameche, William Bendix, Victor Moore, Jerry Colonna, Rudy Vallee, Robert Benchley, Binnie Barnes, 1945

Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, the court of the first empire ( PDFDrive )

(January – June 2024)

128. The USAF airbase near Steve and Alma in Alvescot.
Brize Norton.

129. New Haven townie queen with curly brown shag, more of a mullet, townie queen to end all townie queens.
Gary Greco.
(This came to me because I remember Noël Canfield saying the name c. 1973.)

130. Who was that strange guy in a tunic with a pickup truck in Wisconsin who had a weird surname like hannipaw or silly paw or something paw.
Supernaw. Or Suprenaw.

131. Who was that ghastly jewish artist with the cartoony primitive style.
Marc Chagall.

132. Admiral of the ocean sea, harvard naval historian, family seat at nahant, samuel eliot something…
Samuel Eliot Morrison.

133. What was the play that robt morley was interested in doing, adapted to a Brit idiom, which made no sense at all?
A Gore Vidal one, maybe.
Yes, Visit to a Small Planet. Actually that might have worked, but the number of changes would have made it an entirely different comedy.

134. Female vector illustrator who does juvenile books but did the Eurostar posters 25 years ago.
Nicki Slater, Nicola Slater.
This took a while. I could remember Nicki, had to search fiercely till I found her surname. If only I’d linked her mentally to Nigel.

135. Actor who played jackson bentley, created biff….Arthur Kennedy?
Easy to mix him up with George Kennedy or the near-identical Kevin McCarthy or John Ireland.

136. Jew who was original Willy Loman.
Lee J. Cobb.

137. Winefest and I…what is the name of Richard E Grant film?
Withnail and I.

138. Woman who married Dick Goodwin, LBJ biographer.
Doris Kearns Goodwin.

139. Female illustrator who mostly drew girls in mob caps.
*Kate Greenaway

140. F Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel. (don’t look it up)
This Side of Paradise?

141. Writer, screenwriter I’m thinking of. Sweet Smell of Success.
Ernest Lehman?

142. WTF is the cemetery in Cambridge?
Not laurel hill.
Mount Auburn.

143. The english constitution by walter…badger, biggot, baggins?
Walter *Bagehot (badgit).

144.Javascript framework that installs in remote server and is basis for a million things. node.js

145. I brined something recently, what was it? Oh salmon. It was good, I probably had the skillet too hot.

146. Fort in Alabama with Indian massacre early 1800s…
*Ft Mims.

147. The girl who got away Frank Capra movie 1934, gable and colbert.
It Happened One Night?

148, 149.  Michael, john Murphy’s friend from Michigan and that private school the son of the Rambler guy went to.
Mitt Romney went to Cranbrook.
Michael —— and Susan Bauer.
Michael now calling himself Mika.
Cooper. Okay.

150. The old entrepreneur who took Moki and me to lunch at Travers Island in July 2019. Had a bicycle shop in Westport. Told us about the Ashtabula crank. What was his name? Family was from MS, clergymen.
I remember a Jerry I think, and look him up.
Jerry *Allmand. Must be French.

151. CK designer whose minipurse I have, whatever his initials. Drawing a blank. MK. Michael Kors.

152. Word for prescription…like bird man of alcatraz’s ….
oh specifics, Stroud’s Specifics.

153. Those tart little reddish brown onions I like so much.
*shallots…i had to look up an image chart of onions.
[Note: This is the second time this has been in the list.]

154. Ricky Vaughn’s real name. Douglass…
Mackey! Got it.

155. Head of religious studies department at yale in the 70s…think he was head of grad school too… sort of a science fictiony name like Blunt Spearski…German Hungarian maybe… Strooth Furtherman…something about a bird, a pigeon, Bix Pigeonman…
JAROSLAV PELIKAN.

156. The Williamson guy who dives in and out of social media and posts scary clowns and once wrote for National Review and told Brendan Michael Dougherty these rural losers should get the hell out of Garbut.
Kevin Williamson.

157. Plessy v Ferguson. For a moment I could not remember the case name.

158. Mulatta obama advisor…i have to go to stuff i forget to find it…6 years ago! that makes two double forgetting, but at least i knew i’d forgotten it before.
*Valerie Jarrett.

159. Strange guy with big nose CPA n England pretends to be TS.
Miranda Yardley (took a while).

160. Also Fionne…what is last name?
Orlander*

(Additions 10 Aug 2024)

161. “not a cloud in the sky, and I won’t be surprised if it’s a dream” from what?*Carpenters song

162. The Reach for the Sky guy. *Kenneth More

163. What the Mo’nig Indians are really called. Shinnecock.

164. That Texas governor with the weird hair. “Po’ George, he can’t he’p hisself. He was bo’n with a silver foot in his mouth.” Ann Richards…took me a minute.

99. DRAFT HEALTHCARE, Draft FCB. What was the old parent company name? FCB? Foote Cone Belding

100. The movie about working at Vogue, with Meryl Streep as a mean Anna Wintour and Stanley Tucci as the friendly flitty stylist. Who is the star? *The Devil Wears Prada *Anne Hathaway

101. The Lowe Bell lady whose name I borrowed for hotmail login …ah caroline sturdy

102. Orange brown little tart onions… *shallots

103. That strange guy who published books and pamphlets about the jews etc. Morris something. Book on that poet. Ezra Pound. Eustace Mullins

104. The Jewish premier, the milk drinker. Mendes-France

105. College in Northhampton, where Claire went. Mt Holyoke

106. frank e funeral parlor on mad… Frank E. Campbell

107. The jerk in Urbana, on Usenet. Jason Heimbach? jason heimbaugh jason r heimbaugh

108. the part of LA where UCLA is…Westwood

109. Ad agency in Pan Am building where I worked for two days in Sept 1979. (Foote Cone and Belding…oddly enough I worked for them again, or a branch, as DraftFCB Healthcare in 2010.)

110. PM 1979-1988 Maggie? Oh Thatcher

111. head of Lib party after Jo Grimond…Jeffrey? Jeremy Thorpe

112. term for hourglass figure on a woman…hourglass…thinking of buying a Chemex

113. kooky long cloud
cloud cuckoo land
couldn’t remember expression

114. bill bundy’s father in law
dean acheson

115. Josie Kulikowski’s mother…took a moment
Kiki Reynolds

Josie’s mother Kiki’s stepbrother was Edward Gorey

What’s Gorey’s Story?

116. screenwriter of darling, two for the road… frederic raphael?

117. kennels’ basset hound…what was the name??
son of the sufferns’ dog c 62 or 63 Katie
timmy and i had a song to the angels 63 hit ‘my boyfriend’s back’
something, something, the puppy’s back
Jason

116. Boston store with brown bread and baked beans, like S&S Cross
SS Pierce

117. Salesia, East Prussia, Pomerania
could not remrmber Salesia
Silesia

118. Deborah Friedell in LRB 19 January 2023 said JPK was removed as ambassador for his defeatism. This did not happen.

‘Lindbergh argued that it was ‘obvious’ the British were losing the war; indeed, they were destined to lose to Germany, no matter how much assistance the Americans provided. Roosevelt had recalled the American ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy, for saying much the same thing.’

FDR in fact insisted on keeping JPK on nearly a year longer than JPK wanted. But this is a minor point, one more instance of British vagueness about American political history. (Like journalist Francis Beckett who in a biography of his father, described the Hiss-Chambers case as Whittaker Chambers shopping his old colleague Alger Hiss to Joe McCarthy: a confoundment of epic proportions.)

119. James Whitmore in Oklahoma film…could not come up with his name
as the farmer

120. Pile of leaves and decaying veg matter to be used as fertilizer
compost heap….came to me later

121. Town in VA, battle in Dec 1862. Fredericksburg

122. Elyse HF’s name. Maxwell

123. John Waters movie with Elizabeth Coffey…had to look this up. Pink Flamingos

124. Squid rings you eat… calamari!

125. British Jew playwright…Arnold Schindler or something.
Wrote the servant, the cocktail party
married to antonia fraser or another catholic antonia
pinter
what pinter?
Harold Pinter

126. Strange quasi-tranny who briefly wrote for SpliceToday then TheMarySue. All I could remember was the surname was Riedl. Sam Riedel

127. Star of Double Jeopardy, along with Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce Greenwood. Anna Yount? Something Judd? Ashley Judd.
Have had trouble remembering that name in the past. She had a brief career.

Here we have Diotima and Hannibal in the tiki torch parade on 11 August 2017, also Avalie and Augustus around the same time, and random other images.

This began in 2017 as a Failing Memory? blog post that grew and grew for a couple of years. In 2020 I added a Stuff I Forget: The Sequel with notes from 2018-2020. Occasionally I noted the day when I when I was trying to remember.

Part III here consists of notes from 2021 and 2022.

I find this Un-Memory Book mildly amusing, but also intriguing and therapeutic. The stuff I can’t remember and strain to recall, or finally look up, doesn’t get forgotten again.

* = I had to look it up. Generally it was through internet search, but in some cases I had had to dig into old books and newspapers.

71. The expensive cupcake store? (*Magnolia)

72. The Less Than Zero guy. (Brad Easton Ellis)

73. Author of Little Women. (Louisa May Alcott)

74. Semitranny from Toronto that G. Eugene Pichler was hot after. (*Nina Arsenault. This took a bit of looking, first with image search, and then I forgot it again so came up with a mnemonic: Gore Vidal’s mother [Nina] has her head sticking out of the Central Park Arsenal.)

75. The Redmond lady, clinical psych, writes about bipolar and lithium? (*Kay Redfield Jameson, not Redmond. An Unquiet Mind was the book.)

76. Willowy Icelandic guy, long blond hair, was with CPTC for a while, running coach, may have worked for Jerry Macari at Urban Athletics. (Toby Tanser. Suddenly came to me after a few weeks.)

77. The Harvard institution up on the hill overlooking DC, where something was founded during WW2. (*Dumbarton Oaks.)

78. The Daily Themes guy. E R or Edward something. (*E. J. Gordon. Found a 2″ obit in the New York Times.)

79. I am confusing La Fontaine and Charles Perrault…one did fables and the other wrote the fairy tales. (*Looked them up.)

80. The jew harmonicist in The Singing Marine, later whined about Red blacklist, comeback on cable TV in the 1980s. (*Larry Adler.)

81. The sports broadcaster who became an anti-Bill O’Reilly political pundit on MSNBC and had a career meltdown, finally coming back with YouTube rants where he sat at an Ikea folding table and pretended he was back on TV. (Keith Olbermann…took a couple minutes.)

82. Who wrote The First Crusade? The GOOD one. Orwell knew him or his son. (*Stephen Runciman.)

83. Who is our junior senator, the blonde lady? Kristin? Went to Dartmouth? (Kirsten Gillibrand. Think I asked Michael for that one.)

84. The other 90s actress not Drew Barrymore. Freeway. Legally Blond. (Reese Witherspoon.)

85. General in Vietnam…northern county in England…(Westmoreland.)

86. Uncle to TR, head of Confederate intelligence. (*James Dunwody Bulloch.)

87. Murdered actress, married Roman Polanski. (Sharon Tate.)

88. Jazz pianist, Take Five. (Dave Brubeck.)

89. Spanish-named twin-tower hi-rise at 90th and CPW. (Eldorado.)

90. The controversial misreport that someone received a very costly set of jewelry. From whom, Baruch? And who received it? And what’s the French word? Paroir? (*Louise Macy, married Harry Hopkins, 1942. Gift from Lord Beaverbrook, sent in diplomatic pouch.It wasn’t a paroir, but jeweled clips from Beaverbrook’s mother. This required extensive search through 1943 news stories. Roald Dahl book mentioned the gift, I believe. It was Walter Trohan who spread the malicious tale.)

91. Those square waxy crayons, usually in black or brick red, made by Caran d’Ache. (Conté crayons.)

92. The type of sound technology in film that became standard in the 30s, with the imprinting of recorded optical lines next to the frames…? (Ah, optical sound.)

93. Redheaded Italian guy on SNL who got old and fat. (Joe Piscopo.)

94. Blonde in Octopussy and LA Confidential. (Kim Basinger.)

95. What you call emplacements of cannons in a fortress? (*Casemates.)

96. What was 1964 Rat Pack Chicago prohibition comedy? (Robin and the 7 Hoods.)

97. Movie in which aria from La Wally figures. (*Diva. Really had to squeeze my brain and hunt for this. The ‘Ebben’ aria is beautiful but the source was treated as something of a joke, since the opera was rather obscure, it’s the only one the composer ever did, and the name sounded silly. Film was flop in France, big splash in America in 1982 but I haven’t thought of it since, except perhaps for the garlic-bread scene, which I couldn’t identify.)

98. Campy interview writer whom NatLamp once listed as a Great Disappointment. (Dotson Rader.)