We're into those hot, humid days where everything just melts outside. Algae starts growing over everything, and this weekend Mr. B. cleaned off a bunch of mildew from the garage door. However, it's excellent weather for tomatoes and cucumbers, which continue to produce at just the right pace for salads. And I love hanging clothes out on the line.

In the garden pests department: Remember how I accused the rabbits of eating hostas in the yard? Well, something has been eating my zucchini plants, which don't even get a chance to set fruit. One day there are flowers, the next day they're gone. I blamed the bunnies.

Mr. B. and I were putting the finishing touches on a new flowerbed early Monday morning, when the neighbor's cat strayed into the yard. He marched straight for the zucchini plant and started to munch away. Not just nibbles, but big mouthfuls; you could even hear the crunch, crunch. He left tooth marks on the leaf, and then moved over to the juicy stems. For a moment I just stared, then felt sorry for him. I shooed him away from the plant and offered him some water, but he wanted nothing of it.

At that point I was ready to spray him with a water bottle, just to get him away from the plant, but he left. Then daughter Anna casually remarked, "Did you know that in Africa, lions will sometimes go into gardens and eat melons?" I didn't.

Well, zucchini's a cucurbit, so I guess that counts. But it would have never occurred to me to suspect a cat.

* * * * * * *

We saw Dark Knight, and loved it. The comic book movie has now come of age, in moving beyond slapstick or the simple shoot-em-up. Ledger's performance was phenomenal, and he really didn't have to *do* all that much to look completely demented. It was a good example of the "uncanny valley" - he affected these small twitches, lip smacks, tongue movements, and held his head and body just a *bit* off, to give this really creepy effect.

It made me think that an accurate Gaston Leroux Phantom of the Opera movie would make use of similar acting - where Erik would look "uncanny" not so much from exaggerated face makeup, as from uncanny face and body movements which would leave the viewer very unsettled, without knowing consciously why.

All of St. Louis today was convulsed by the horrific shootings in Maplewood, a suburb of Victorian homes and modest bungalows just a bit west of the St. Louis city limits. Apparently, early this morning a man set fire to his truck to lure in emergency personnel. When they arrived, he opened fire, killing a paramedic and wounding two firefighters. By this afternoon the house had burned to the ground, presumably with the gunman inside it.

This strikes very close to home for me, because I live just a few miles from where this happened. I travel on the nearby major road all of the time. Normally I think of where I live as quiet, boring even. Then something like this happens, when yet another fractured individual breaks, and sets off a chain reaction of horrors.

Someone here heard on the radio news that the gunman had boarded up his windows, so that no one could look in. He was apparently reclusive:

... [N]eighbors say they really did not know the man who lived in that home.

”I have no clue who he is,” says Phil Browne, who lives directly across the street. Browne’s home has been in his family for three generations. He’s lived on Zephyr his entire life.

”It’s just that one person on the street, he’s totally unaccounted for,” says Browne. “Almost everyone I talked to today doesn’t even know him, has no idea who he was.”

Neighbors say he never spoke and rarely waved. (link)

When the reporters sift through the debris of the gunman's life, I wonder if they will find a history of mental illness, of rejection by family, of the too-typical rot of modern rootlessness. I don't want to see us go back to the time of Titicut Follies, of Big Nurse and lobotomies and the "cuckoo's nest." But it's not enough to give people medication and expect them to work out their own problems on their own, either - as too often happens in the USA. Those not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid; those without medical insurance; those whose medical insurance provides only paltry mental health coverage - all can go without diagnosis and treatment, and often do.

I'm not sure how treatment is supposed to work, though, when we live in a time and place where people experience such fundamental isolation from one another. It's almost as if the question has completely fallen out of favor. Why look at the collapse of communities; of ugly and oppressive environments, of problems of poverty or family strife, when everything can be "explained" on the basis of "faulty brain chemicals?" Perhaps it's not always the chemicals running the show; perhaps loneliness and frustration and fear affect the very machinery of the brain itself.

Mr. B. lobotomized my laptop tonight, so now it speaks Ubuntu. So now I have to learn the graphic image processing program GIMP, instead of my better-known PaintShop Pro. Now all that remains is to get my totally spastic keyboard replaced.

Son David and I were sitting on the deck,talking, when I got up to pull some weeds out of a deck window box. There were some plants growing in the drainage tray (in which the window box sits.) As I yanked on one of the weeds, what felt like a red hot needle jabbed through the tip of the ring finger on my right hand.

I knew something had gotten me, but didn't stick around to find out what. I ran into the house, where Laura made up some baking soda paste. Mr. B. put on his "doctor" hat (he's really not one, he just plays one whenever somebody gets hurt), looked it over and pronounced, "Ice water." So we filled a bowl with ice water, threw in the baking soda, and in went my hand.

It was like being worked over at the ER. Within a few minutes they'd added more ice, gotten me Benadryl *and* ibuprofen. Then David and Mr. B went out to hunt for the offending creatures with badminton rackets and bug spray. They found the hornet's nest lodged under the deck rail, and bombarded it with chemical warfare.


Baby hornet on left, carpenter bee on right. Also lots of pupae. (Yuck.)


There were hornets flying everywhere, some of them quite large. I'm not sure whether one of the big adults got me, or a little one.

It hurt like a bitch for awhile, but floating on a cloud of benadryl has made it all better. I can even type ... which is good, because I'm back to writing again.

Needless to say, I'm very happy about this. jennie_jay, you were right - I really needed some time to recharge the mental batteries by taking a break from it for awhile. The plan is for me to finish my romance/erotica novel (lightly based on Phantom, but channelling a good deal of Falstaff energy as well), and then edit Seal Beach. I'm not thinking much past that.

filmnoir6 tempted me, and I did meme.

- Tagged people: answers can go here or on your LJ. Replace any question that you dislike with a new question.

- Tag 8 people to do this quiz.

- Anybody else who wants to play, go ahead!

( Meeeemage )

Tagging: peekadora, malica, tangofiction, mlfoley, sabrinafair2, inlaterdays, nabanean, imp_o_light

From realcdaae, who is sputtering in horror, the plot:

As for "Phantom . . . Once Upon Another Time": It's set in 1906 in Coney Island. The Phantom, aka Erik, having fled Paris, is running a freak show. At night, he crawls into his lair and makes love to an automaton that looks like Christine.

Christine, meanwhile, has become a famous opera singer. But she's fallen on hard times because her husband, Raoul, has squandered their fortune. So she's accepted a high-paying gig from a mysterious impresario to open a new amusement park. On her first night in New York, she draws back the curtain in her hotel suite and comes face to face with her new employer - flash of lightning, crash of chords - the Phantom!

Christine has a child, Gustave, but is his father Raoul or the Phantom? I can't tell you because no one's seen the second act yet.

But I can tell you that Raoul, who was so handsome in "The Phantom," is now a drunken wreck.

I have a few new readers perhaps less versed in Phantom of the Opera lore, so a bit of background. Once Upon Another Time is loosely based on action writer Frederick Forsythe's "approved" sequel to Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Phantom of the Opera stage play. In The Phantom of Manhattan, the Phantom has fled to New York, where he spends some time as an automaton-maker on Coney Island, and later becomes an engineering enterpreneur with a big corporation and a penthouse apartment. Like Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was snubbed by NY opera high society and denied a box in the "old" NY opera house, and who built the Metropolitan Opera to spite the snobs, Erik has built a splendid opera with which to lure his lost love Christine to the New World.

Christine obligingly shows up with her dutiful but sadly impotent husband Raoul in tow. Raoul has lost his manhood in some street fight where, to his credit, he was doing something noble (although I can't exactly remember what.) Anyway, nobility is in character for him, so that's not so bad. However, I hate this "impotent" or "sexless" or "banished from Christine's bedroom" Raoul theme, because what it boils down to is that Raoul - by having sex with his wife - is somehow Profaning the Sacred Vessel Worthy Only to Carry Erik's Very Special Sperm. In fact, irkage over that theme was one of the spurs which led me to write Phantoms of the Past, so that I could give Christine an Erik Love Child *and* a good sex life with Raoul too.

So, in the grand old tradition, also along for the ride is Christine's love child by Erik - nominally Raoul's, but sired upon Christine under unexplained circumstances one really can't picture in the musical.

Now it is no secret that I am highly partial to Raoul as a Phantom character - even in the ALW versions, especially stage!Raoul, whom I think is brave and loyal and full of warm masculine sex appeal. It is true that ALW is not kind to Raoul in his stage play, making him at the end a decrepit and wheelchair-bound wreck who clings to souvenirs of the past. However, in POM, at least he has stayed by Christine, even though his injury has made it perfectly clear that her son is not his.

We knew from press releases earlier that ALW did fire Frederick Forsythe as a script writer, and that there would be major changes from the POM storyline to Once Upon Another Time (OUAT.) But it's terribly disappointing that those changes have to take the hackneyed, cliched, fourteen-year-old-phanbrat route of Drunken!Abusive!Profligate!Gambling!Raoul.

As for the Phantom having a Christine!Real Doll, that's just too full of LULZ to be believed. I know some of the more talented among you can come up with a really obnoxious macro / motivational poster / movie poster to riff off Lars and the Real Girl. (You know who you are.) Or maybe ALW has been reading this chock-full of meta-y goodness thread on "Erik and the Real Girl," started by the astute sabrinafair2.)

ETA: my_daroga has the Best Crackfic Explanation ever. I am going to poke her repeatedly to encourage her to write it.

It's only been a little under a month since the summer solstice, but already the days are noticeably shorter. My little plants were maidens a month ago; now many of them are mothers, although it's still touch and go with some as to whether or not they will bear.

I transferred all the plants I could to the backyard garden. This was instructive, for when I unpotted a few of the stunted peppers I met with a dreadful smell. The roots had partially rotted, probably because of either a bad potting mix, poor drainage, or both. I'll see if they do better out back. In general, container gardening probably isn't the best choice for my own back yard, although it is a good way to keep some "understudies" in the wings if the primary performers croak.

Here are some garden pictures. I'm trying to get better with the photography, but I still do dumb things like put my finger in front of the lens. (You don't get to see those.) Also, notice the icon? I got brave about putting my mug out there, even though I usually don't like how I look in photographs. (Mr. B. took it.)

( Garden picspam )

One out of the garden, actually. (No, the pic to the right isn't mine; it's from www.voices.gardenweb.com.) The fruit was little and warty (with those spines you have to wash off), but it was quite delicious. Not bitter, not too seedy, with just a faint tang to it. There are a few more that will be ready in the next day or so. I wish I'd planted five more of those particular plants.

I'm in the process of trying to transfer plants from containers to the garden. Some of the container plants don't look so hot (peppers, I'm looking at you), and I'm hoping the change of scene will perk them up. I'm getting a bit discouraged with container gardening as a whole. It was good to have somewhere to put the plants during our spring monsoon. However, I've observed that you need quite large containers (like the ones our trees came in) and huge amounts of water (once a day, or even twice if it's very hot.)

Cost is a factor as well. Although I get my containers free from the garden center recycling bins, container dirt is more expensive than what I can get to condition my garden soil ($1 a 40-lb bag, last run), and water is shooting up in price like everything else.

My stranglehold in expanding the garden is that we have a small lot with limited sun, and the space we do have competes with clothes drying and a trampoline. I have a little room to expand, though, hence the transfer of the plants from driveway to yard.

Other random triviamentia: Daughters Anna, Laura, and I went out for Japanese food for lunch today. I tried a new "seaweed and cucumber salad," but couldn't work up much enthusiasm for what looked like the green stuff that used to get down my swimsuit as a kid at Rockaway Beach.

We stopped by the local library, which has a "free book exchange" rack in the lobby, and picked up some gems: Brave New World, The Waste Land, All Quiet on the Western Front, Equus, and RD Laing's The Divided Self, among others. Someone had also unloaded their whole library of Freud, apparently, but my arms were already full. So now I have to purge a little here and take some books up, to keep the karmic flow going ... ; )

Over at men_in_full, I discussed the question of whether or not WALL-E bashes fat people. (I don't think it does.) Now I want to explore some of the film's deeper imagery.

( Quite a bit on WALL-E, with many spoilers ... )

... but I think this virus has taken more out of me than I thought. I've been pretty wiped for the past 48 hrs ... Better now, though.

Hope everyone who celebrated the holiday had a great time.

So I come back to the keys to find benicek enthusiastically continuing our fine July 4th tradition, of reminding me how it "Burned, burned, burned / And we're the ones that did it," which requires an obligatory recollection of the Battle of New Orleans. As well as speculation that we would have done better remaining with The Crown. I love my f-list ... ; )

We barbequed Friday:

- pork steak with high-fructose corn syrup-FREE barbeque sauce that actually tasted good;
- apple/cabbage/carrot coleslaw with apple cider vinegar and maple syrup;
- fruit salad;
- green beans sauteed with bacon and almonds;
- poppy seed / almond muffins

Mr. B's brother and nephews came over for a little spud gun fun in the backyard (no potatoes, just rags) and fireworks. Then later that evening, we went over to their house and enjoyed their water garden on one of the coolest and least-humid holidays we've had in decades.

Instead of going over to watch the fireworks directly (too crowded), we walked down the railroad tracks and watched them from behind a screen of dead trees. Supposedly the railroad doesn't run trains on that line on the night of the Fourth - I guess it was true because we didn't get run over. Railroad ties are just as I remembered them from childhood - too far away and yet too close together to walk on comfortably.

Garden update: There are little patty-pan squashes and cucumbers, as well as tomatoes; a few orange peppers and exactly one pathetic little hot pepper. Unbelievable; I may actually somewhat know what I'm doing out there.

Thanks so much, everybody who sent good wishes for my stubborn summer virus. This is my first day up and running around *without drugs,* so I think I'm going to live. But I am only operating at about 60%, so it is going to take some time.

So I thought I would prepare some garden pics. Overall, the relatively hotter, muggier weather has tickled the fancy of the tomatoes, squashes, and eggplant. However, one of the container tomatoes started looking very peaked, with the bottom leaves dying and one of the fruits (horrors!) even rotting. So Mr. B. dug a hole in the yard and we planted it there, while I supervised and tried not to cough on him.


Backyard garden plot (before tomato rescue operation.) I may dig the bricks in when I get more energetic. You can see the French Drain in the top lefthand side (it just looks like a pile of gravel - on the surface.)

( More garden-y picspam )

... and watching some Babylon 5. Man, that's good television. Probably TMI - but if I lie down all the time, my nose and ears and all the pipe-y, tube-y things in my head get all stopped up. Yuck.

OK, the book meme, because the f-list is doing it. Supposedly most people have only read about six of these books, which is a bit hard to believe.

Bolded = Have read
(*) asterisked = Partially read
Italics = Want to read someday

( Too sick to write anything worth reading ... )

No, I don't own one of these...


I have some kind of flu - not enough to knock me on my ass and keep me in bed, but just enough to make me miserable. Gypsy Cold Care tea and elderberry syrup are running out of every pore. Poor Anna has it worse, though.

Blargh. Off to bed.

Son David is squared away with college registration. He will be going to community college for two years, courtesy of the state of Missouri (part of a scholarship program) where he will study a pre-engineering curriculum. Not sure yet what kind of engineering he's interested in; I hope it's not something that's easily outsourced.

Daughters Anna and Laura and I saw an indifferent production of The Producers at the Muny. People, if you're going to offer an edgy musical, please for the love of the spirit of the Blessed George Carlin, do *not* censor it. The proper line delivered by Max Bialystock when Leo Bloom is all a-tingle over blonde bombshell Ulla is, "It's called an erection," NOT "Didn't your father ever have this talk with you?" Sheesh. Also, Roger De Bris really needed a form-fitting dress, not a tent, and "This dress makes me look like the Chrysler Building" sounds so much better than "This dress makes me look like the Basilica of St. Louis," because no one here calls it that. (Locals refer to it as the "St. Louis Cathedral.) Roger delivered the line, and was met by a second or two of dead air. Then people "got it," and there was some half-hearted laughter. Anyway, if you're going to dress up as the Cathedral, the color is green, not blue. Yeah, I know, kvetch, kvetch.

Last week daughter Anna and I went to the Missouri Botanical Garden, to see the sculptures of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002), a self-taught artist inspired by (among others) Gaudi. (No pics; the camera wasn't charged. Bill and I will go again next week, and he takes far better pictures than I.) Heck, why wait for his? Just check out the photo tour.

The skull ("La Cabeza," right) has a seat inside, and when you look up, a mosaic of the sky covers the inside of its cranium. Anna and I went into it, and when some ladies came up to look at the outside, Anna said loudly, "I demand sacrifices!" Her voice got amplified by the space, and the women jumped back. (We could see them through the skull's teeth.) Then one laughed nervously and said, "There's someone inside there!" They came around to look through one earhole, but Anna beat a hasty retreat out the other.

Bill completed the French Drain; we had a rainstorm this weekend, and the drain worked. No more standing water in the back of the yard - engineering triumphs again! The garden itself is struggling to catch up from all those weeks of abuse. This fall we are going to lay out a more permanent garden structure (beds and all.) Bill was reading something in Barron's (financial magazine) about food prices possibly tripling over the next few years. I have gardened and canned in the past, but never very well. It seems like now is the time to start ascending the learning curve. An interesting note: I see real-estate ads now which mention that a property has an established vegetable garden; haven't seen that in years.

Laura and I went to church again this Sunday. I hesitate to write about religion, because I don't want to offend anyone. Nonetheless, I am trying to find my way and do feel a need to express it. I have this on-again, off-again relationship with the Episcopal church, but am pretty syncretistic and want to find somewhere where I also feel I don't have to put away my statues of Ganesha, my Bacchus artwork, or stop wearing my Ganesha / Shiva necklace. I don't want to feel a conflict between my support for gay rights, my love of writing/reading slash, and my Christian expression. Finally, I am most happy personally when I can take part in worship conducted along the lines of the traditional liturgy, with the "smells and bells" of the High Church sensibility.

Well, we may have found a place - we'll see. One of the most interesting things - the organist had put small animal figurines (stuffed, wooden, etc.) all around the organ pipes. I remarked to Laura, "At least his choir members know what to get him for Christmas presents."

I'm no astronomy buff, but supposedly from 2004 to 2008, Venus is in some kind of prominent planetary position on the three days surrounding Midsummer's Eve. That's got to be a good thing, right?

I feel a little left out of the solstice, not being a pagan but not quite Christian either. (As Neil Gaiman said, "America is a bad country for gods.") I wish I lived somewhere where there was long historical continuity in the seasonal celebrations. Perhaps I'm just longing for "old Europe" in my heart.

If I had somewhere to go, or some way in which to celebrate this solstice, I would. But instead I will content myself with some picspam, much of it inspired by what I imagine Leroux's Christine Daae must have experienced as a child.

(For a Swedish Christine lore one-shot, you are welcome to revisit jennie_jay's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which weaves together the story of that seductive water spirit, the Näcken, and the lore surrounding what to do on Midsummer's eve, to find out who you will marry.)

( Midsummer picspam )

Yanked from peekadora.

Rules: Choose five series (no peeking before you choose them), list them, and then answer the questions behind the cut.

1.) Babylon 5
2.) X-Files
3.) LOST
4.) Battlestar Galactica
5.) Phantom of the Opera (*)

(*) Phantom of the Opera isn't a series, I know, but I just don't watch that much TV...)

( Behind the cut... )

I'm reading Michael Ward's Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. Curiously, I was coming home from the coffee shop this morning, and stopped in at the produce market to buy some apples. The clerk noticed the book, and wanted to know if it was a novel based on the Narnia stories. Not quite, I told him, but almost as good. It's actually an analysis of why the Narnia books are written the way they are.

The Narniad has come under a fair amount of criticism, most notably by J.R.R. Tolkien (but picked up by other critics as well) for, well, not being "Middle Earth." Tolkien created a vast, fantastically rich and detailed world, with its own languages and intricate back story. In comparison, the Narniad feels "sketchy" to some readers and in many places apparently incoherent and inconsistent. Further, while Tolkien created a pretty well-developed set of beings in his world-building, Lewis in Narnia seemingly threw together an odd melange of gods and creatures from already-existing mythologies, like Father Christmas and Bacchus. A consensus has developed among some, at least, that Lewis was in some ways the weaker writer, a more anemic world-builder.

( Narnia and the seven planetary spheres ... )

In something a bit unrelated, I started thinking about how the "seven planets" archetypes also related in some ways to LOST, especially to the "Oceanic Six" (the six LOSTaways who end up returning to "our world.") In some ways, they're "planetary" as well:

Jack - Saturn
Hurley - Jove
Sayid - Mars
Kate - Venus
Sun - Mercury
Baby Aaron - Sol (the "child of promise")

But that's another thought, for another time ...

Uncanny memories: Mr. B. suggested I go check out Google maps, put in an address, click on the address, and then click "street view." Apparently Google sent people driving around in cars with cameras and GPS systems. It was like playing Myst, but only in a neighborhood. Then I went to my old street in NYC (91st and West End Avenue) where I grew up, and that was strange - almost uncanny, because it really "felt like" being there. One disappointment - I couldn't go into Riverside Park; could only stroll up and down Riverside Drive. I dream about those streets all the time, but in my dreams they look like they did decades ago. Now everything has changed, and it looks "wrong." I haven't dared to "stroll" up and down Broadway yet; that would be disconcerting because probably most of the old "landmarks" I remember will be gone.

Son D.'s 19th-birthday cake: Clicky the cake for the inspirational song. He was quite amused.



( Also: Garden update, with picspam contributed by daughter L. and Mr. B: )

From my_daroga, announcing Phantom Secrets fun over on her LJ:

The Rules (formulated by lizbee)

- Comments on this post are screened, and will not be unscreened.
- Secrets may be submitted anonymously, or not. IP logging will be off for the duration.
- Secrets must be no larger than 600x600 pixels. Secrets submitted in .bmp format will not be accepted.
- Do not use fan art or manips without permission.
- Do not hotlink images.
- Please upload your images to one of the free hosting services. I personally recommend tinypic.com. Useful tip: if you upload your secret at Photobucket, your account name will be on display for all the world to see.

One final word: be polite. We all have opinions. Respect them. There's a lot of possible wank in POTO, though tempers are less high than they used to be (it feels like, anyway). Don't post a secret that'd be offensive if it was directed towards your favorite person/character/ship/canon. There's a line here, and I don't want to draw it firmly. There's a difference between opinion and bashing. If I see the latter, I reserve the right not to post it. Just have fun, and we should be cool.

Finally, and most important: Post this call in your journals or forums with a link back here! We want secrets, and not just mine, because you all know those already.

1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search functions.
5. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.


1. Now watch closely, everyone. I'm going to show you how to kill a god. A god of life and death. The trick is not to fear him.
Princess Mononoke, peekadora

2. Speaker #1: Have you found the secret that I have lost?
Speaker #2: Yes. You and the land are one.
Excalibur, peekadora

3. I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I'm screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand.

4. Longing. Longing for a wave of love that would stir in me. That's what makes me clumsy. The absence of pleasure. Desire for love. Desire to love.
Wings of Desire, thiscorpsebride

5. September 21, 1945... that was the night I died.
Grave of the Fireflies, thiscorpsebride

6. And where were you twenty years ago? Ten years ago? Where were you when I was new? When I was one of those innocent young maidens you always come to? How dare you! How dare you come to me now, when I am this!
The Last Unicorn, peekadora

7. We are dead and this is hell.
The Stand, peekadora

8. Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.
Dr. Strangelove, peekadora

9. Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So, if you're frightened of dying and... and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth. Jacob's Ladder, nabanean

10. I have this phobia about having my body penetrated surgically. You know what I mean?

11. Cirrus, Socrates, particle, decibel, hurricane, dolphin, tulip.

12. Between the mind that plans and the hands that build there must be a Mediator, and this must be the heart. Metropolis (the original Fritz Lang version), nabanean

13. You had him every night in your dreams and you didn't even share!
Dracula 2000, peekadora

14. Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy.

15. I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.
Lolita (Adrian Lyne version), silent_lorelei