Yeah, well, I was tired yesterday and I needed to do some bike training (mainly wearing calluses into my tender tootsie) ahead of my summer bike trip, which is in July this year. That's why I'm talking about something that came up while I was half-finishing the March II postblogging.
The Special Report in the 7 March issue of Newsweek covered the then-ongoing movie industry revival, and the 28 March issue has some letters about it, including a self-promoting but still valid explanation from Lester Rand of the Youth Research Institute (kids like going to the movies), and a letter from Zira Siegel of Culver City, California, pointing out how extraordinary this self-portrait with the Junior MGM Players, shot by Newsweek staff photographer Dale Healy is. Siegel asks whether it is a composite, and the Editor replies that it is not. Leslie Caron is 20ft behind the lens; Debbie Reynold is three feet away leaning in, and Pier Angeli is sitting on a pillow.
Dean Schary doesn't even appear to have an online biography. He was just one of the anonymous staffers who made Newsweek, in spite of itself, a great magazine. And speaking of "in spite of itself," I first encountered the "U-bomb" in The Periscope, which feature, as was its way, got the whole thing so hilariously wrong that I was sent down the very productive rabbit hole that makes up most of this post. The U-bomb, it explains, means that the American atomic stockpile has been suddenly increased ten-fold, that there are enough bombs to "knock out the USSR with radioactivity," and that since the U-bomb "does not, (contrary to some reports) necessarily require a hydrogen bomb to set it off, the Soviets are in a position rapidly to overtake our lead."