(Roughly) Daily

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With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare….
– George Bernard Shaw

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
– Noel Coward

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
– William Faulkner, on Mark Twain

The gifted can be so…  ungenerous to each other:  from Examiner.com, “The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time.”

As we consider that this may in any case be better than log-rolling, we might recall that it was on this date in 1982 that a member of the Hollywood nobility– two-time Oscar-winning actress, model, and anti-war activist Jane Fonda– released her first exercise tape.

Building on the success of her workout book, published the prior year, the tape helped Fonda popularize workouts for women, workouts in groups, workout videos, and indeed aerobics in general (a family of trends on which Richard Simmons, Judi “Jazzercise” Missett and many others have ridden).  Fonda invested the proceeds of what became a fitness empire into the Campaign for Economic Democracy, an advocacy group founded by her then-husband Tom Hayden (of Chicago Eight renown).   Fonda and Hayden divorced in 1989, and Fonda retired from the spotlight (though, of course, she has returned to the movie screen in the last few years).

The tape that started it all