Strange bedfellows

Does this ever happen to anyone else? Over at Mike Norton's blog, I recently confessed to always getting Roddy McDowell confused with Meadowlark Lemon. It makes no sense, but it's hardly the only case where I have some sort of inappropriate dysphasic linkage going on. For example, whenever I think of Richard Chamberlain, haplessly good looking actor some of you may remember from the best version of The Three Musketeers as well as that dreadful Thorn Birds thingie, I find his image hopelessly conflated in my brain with that of infamous 16th Century Welsh poet Robin Clidro.

I can't help myself. It's a disease of some sort.

It's not just people. I deeply admire Angelina Jolie, and not just for her puffy lips and fine, fine rack, either. Despite all this, however, whenever I think of Angelina Jolie, I cannot help but associate her with the rind of salt around a drunkenly discarded margarita glass, as well as the distinctive stench of maple flavored ether. It's madness, and I know it, but there it is, and I can't deny it, either.

Meanwhile, the concept of antipodean hurricanes always puts me in mind of Da Vinci's drawings of people with six arms pretending to be windmills, and that singular design for a pedal driven velocipede he drew on Lorenzo DiMedici's left shoulderblade with a squid-bladder one night after they'd both been drinking far, far too much schnappes. I don't know why, unless it's because I know such windspouts blow in the reverse direction from those closer to home, and I've long suspected something similar about the Menace from Venice his damn self.

I can also never look at a camel, one hump or two hump, either in the zoo, or in a movie, or standing on the other side of our backyard fence leaning its hideous, hairy head all the way over to nibble at some of our badly untrimmed hollyhocks, without immediately conjuring up a vivid image of the entire front line of the 1986 Chicago Bears, universally garlanded with leis and bedecked in grass skirts, as they slowly and sensuously sway their hips to the langourous rhythms of Don Ho singing "Tiny Bubbles" through a tinny AM radio speaker.

It's a curse, I tell you.

And I've just discovered that whenever I hear the name Cyrus Schulte-Hordelhoff, I am suddenly paralyzed by the sensation of falling out of the sky at high velocity and slamming hard into a stand of crisp winter aspens. Go figure.

I have to put my head down on my desk for a while now.