A Brief One

I’m trying to get into the habit of writing something here (almost) every night just so I don’t disconnect any more than I already have in recent months. Tonight I’m tired and don’t have much time to throw anything together, but maybe this weekend Crankenstein and I will do our own version of an Oprah’s Book Club round table discussion about what’s currently on our coffee table.

Before gathering printing quotes for the 3D figures, I had to do a little math to determine what size(s) they should be. For half-scale you take each character’s height in inches and divide it by 24. For some reason I always think Jaclyn Smith is taller than she is, and I recalled a mention of her height in one of her lifestyle books — I’m lazily assuming that by now she’s published several — so I dug it out to verify that she was in agreement with Google.

The American Look: How It Can Be Yours, published in 1984, is her (markedly less deranged) version of Joan Crawford’s My Way of Life. In it she shares a formula for determining your weight allowance; that’s where she mentions her height. I bought an old copy for roughly the cost of postage a couple years ago because it was on a list of candidates for a Cranky Book Club feature that was going to kick off with a forensic accounting of the bickering between Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson in their respective ‘90s memoirs.*

Now Crankenstein, who normally prefers poetry, history, fantasy and humor, can’t stop flipping through it. She’s probably amused by all the things we do wrong, like not owning dressage-ready equestrian helmets and wearing ratty old t-shirts on the weekend instead of leotards.

* That was a major undertaking that I quickly began to reconsider, mostly because I don’t want to put a bunch of work into something that’ll be ripped off by lazy YouTubers.

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