Here are two tidbits -- something old, something new -- from the weeklies that arrive at my snail-mail address. First the old. From the Sept. 27 Newsweek, the hideous verb re-up has now entered the realm of surrogate motherhood:
"We had all of these embryos left over," [Joan] Lunden told Newsweek. "Jeff and I have been banking these embryos for a while. It's funny, you pay freezer storage on embryos and I got the 'Do you want to re-up on your freezer storage?' and Jeff and I said, 'Oh, there's a little sibling in there somewhere very, very cold."
A rhetorical question that was too pregnant with meaning for Newsweek to address on its Newsmakers page: What the ethical implications when would-be parents choose not to "re-up on your freezer storage"?
Now for the new. From the Oct. 1 issue of Entertainment Weekly, comedian Joan Rivers continues her work as an ambassador of love:
Resplendent in a silver jacket, luxe fur scarf, black pants, and rhinestone-studded heels, Joan Rivers is angry as ever. As she frenetically paces the stage at the Stardust in Las Vegas, the crowd eats up her barbed mots on this steamy night in June. She tosses out a few zingers about Donatella Versace's face -- punctuating the joke by scrunching up her own famous enhanced visage -- and Rosie O'Donnell's hygiene (not printable in a family magazine) before directing her rage at born-again Christians. "I hate Jesus freaks," she declares. "They're ugly, she seethes, her huge cocktail ring bouncing sparkles around the room with every pointy gesticulation. "'Jesus loves me,' they say. If he loved you so much he would have given you a f----ing chin." If anyone in this blue-hair Vegas audience is offended, their qualms are buried by a room exploding in laughter.
A blue-haired Vegas audience bellowing at cheap-shot humor? Can it be? And if poor beleaguered Brad Stine were to do that last joke, aiming it at any other faith and its adherents and (of course) substituting freaking for Rivers' F-bomb, how long would his next Promise Keepers gig last?