Hollywood Squares Quotes

I love L.A. It's a great, sprawling, spread-to-hell city that protects us by its sheer size. Four hundred sixty-five square miles. Eleven million beating hearts in Los Angeles County, documented and not. Eleven million. What are the odds? The girl raped beneath the Hollywood sign isn't your sister, the boy back-stroking in a red pool isn't your son, the splatter patterns on the ATM machine are sourceless urban art. We're safe that way. When it happens it's going to happen to someone else.

California, Labor Day weekend...early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Fricso, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur...The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches...like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and non given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know...Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on...Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more...tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder...

Success in the pulps depended on speed and imagination, and Hubbard had both in abundance. The church estimates that between 1934 and 1936, he was turning out a hundred thousand words of fiction a month. He was writing so fast that he began typing on a roll of butcher paper to save time. When a story was finished, he would tear off the sheet using a T-square and mail it to the publisher.

When live entertainment was not available, women delivered the film and ran the projectors for the hundreds of movies that were shown to the soldiers. Frances witnessed the popularity of movies time after time; they were shown in warehouses, airplane hangars, on battered portable screens, or projected against the wall of a building in the village square where townsfolk crammed in around the soldiers. “Charlie and Doug” were the two favorites, but anything showing familiar sights from home—the Statue of Liberty, a Chicago department store, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—created a sensation and bolstered morale. Toward the end of the war German propaganda films left behind by the retreating army became a prime attraction.30 Frances traveled to and from Paris for a few days at a time, usually arriving on or near the front after a battle to witness doctors and nurses doing what they could for the injured in the shattered villages and burying the dead. She was struck by how thoroughly exhausted the Europeans were after four devastating years of war.

Show me." He looks at her, his eyes darker than the air. "If you draw me a map I think I'll understand better." "Do you have paper?" She looks over the empty sweep of the car's interior. "I don't have anything to write with." He holds up his hands, side to side as if they were hinged. "That's okay. You can just use my hands." She smiles, a little confused. He leans forward and the streetlight gives him yellow-brown cat eyes. A car rolling down the street toward them fills the interior with light, then an aftermath of prickling black waves. "All right." She takes his hands, runs her finger along one edge. "Is this what you mean? Like, if the ocean was here on the side and these knuckles are mountains and here on the back it's Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West L.A., West Hollywood, and X marks the spot." She traces her fingertips over the backs of his hands, her other hand pressing into the soft pads of his palm. "This is where we are- X." "Right now? In this car?" He leans back; his eyes are black marble, dark lamps. She holds his gaze a moment, hears a rush of pulse in her ears like ocean surf. Her breath goes high and tight and shallow; she hopes he can't see her clearly in the car- her translucent skin so vulnerable to the slightest emotion. He turns her hands over, palms up, and says, "Now you." He draws one finger down one side of her palm and says, "This is the Tigris River Valley. In this section there's the desert, and in this point it's plains. The Euphrates runs along there. This is Baghdad here. And here is Tahrir Square." He touches the center of her palm. "At the foot of the Jumhurriya Bridge. The center of everything. All the main streets run out from this spot. In this direction and that direction, there are wide busy sidewalks and apartments piled up on top of shops, men in business suits, women with strollers, street vendors selling kabobs, eggs, fruit drinks. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. And there's this one street...." He holds her palm cradled in one hand and traces his finger up along the inside of her arm to the inner crease of her elbow, then up to her shoulder. Everywhere he touches her it feels like it must be glowing, as if he were drawing warm butter all over her skin. "It just goes and goes, all the way from Baghdad to Paris." He circles her shoulder. "And here"- he touches the inner crease of her elbow-"is the home of the Nile crocodile with the beautiful speaking voice. And here"- his fingers return to her shoulder, dip along their clavicle-"is the dangerous singing forest." "The dangerous singing forest?" she whispers. He frowns and looks thoughtful. "Or is that in Madagascar?" His hand slips behind her neck and he inches toward her on the seat. "There's a savanna. Chameleons like emeralds and limes and saffron and rubies. Red cinnamon trees filled with lemurs." "I've always wanted to see Madagascar," she murmurs: his breath is on her face. Their foreheads touch. His hand rises to her face and she can feel that he's trembling and she realizes that she's trembling too. "I'll take you," he whispers.

One afternoon I orchestrated a walkout, and maybe twenty of us took the subway up to Times Square, which was still the Pit of All Sins in those days. It wasn’t Disneyfied yet, it was more like this really twisted alternate-universe Disneyland for hookers, strippers, dope addicts, and assorted perverts of every disgusting type. It was like a little strip of Hell right in the middle of Manhattan, unbelievably scuzzy and depraved. Yeah baby.

1995: The Hollywood Squares becomes incredibly dull and ratings plummet during the years after special guests Jacques Lemaire and Lou Lamoriello develop a strategy that involves never doing anything except going for the block.

Perhaps her abruptness was merely part of her personality, for she had the appearance of the worst kind of bureaucrat, the aspiring one, from blunt, square haircut to blunt, clean fingernails to blunt, efficient pumps. But perhaps it was me, still morally disoriented from the crapulent major’s death, as well as the apparition of his severed head at the wedding banquet. The emotional residue of that night was like a drop of arsenic falling into the still waters of my soul, nothing having changed from the taste of it but everything now tainted. So perhaps that was why when I crossed over the threshold into the marble foyer, I instantly suspected that the cause of her behavior was my race. What she saw when she looked at me must have been my yellowness, my slightly smaller eyes, and the shadow cast by the ill fame of the Oriental’s genitals, those supposedly minuscule privates disparaged on many a public restroom wall by semiliterates. I might have been just half an Asian, but in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren’t. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver’s license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and this misrecognition punctured the smooth skin of my self-confidence. Was I just being paranoid, that all-American characteristic? Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But as she advanced along the polished bamboo floors, steering clear of the dusky maid vacuuming a Turkish rug, I just knew it could not be so. The flawlessness of my English did not matter. Even if she could hear me, she still saw right through me, or perhaps saw someone else instead of me, her retinas burned with the images of all the castrati dreamed up by Hollywood to steal the place of real Asian men. Here I speak of those cartoons named Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Number One Son, Hop Sing—Hop Sing!—and the bucktoothed, bespectacled Jap not so much played as mocked by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The performance was so insulting it even deflated my fetish for Audrey Hepburn, understanding as I did her implicit endorsement of such loathsomeness.

I like most of my fellow Republicans and conservatives was a victim of the progressive paradigm, embedded in all our institutions of culture, from academia to Hollywood to the media. In this case, the story that we had accepted, like suckers, was the idea that fascism and Nazism are inherently “right wing.” The Left is really good at inventing and disseminating these paradigms. When one of them falls, they simply reach for another. In my previous book and film, Hillary’s America, I challenged another powerful leftist paradigm. This is the paradigm that the progressives and the Democrats are the party of emancipation, equality, and civil rights. I showed instead that they are the party of slavery and Indian removal, of segregation and Jim Crow, of racial terrorism and the Ku Klux Klan, and of opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. My goal was to strip away the race card from the Democrats—a card they had been successfully playing against Republicans for a generation. Incredibly the Democrats had taken full credit for the civil rights movement, even though Republicans are the ones who got it passed, and even though the opposition to it came almost entirely from the Democratic Party. Democrats accused Republicans—the party of emancipation and opposition to segregation, bigotry, and white supremacy—of being the party of bigotry and white supremacy. Talk about transference. This was my introduction to the Left’s political strategy of shifting the blame for racism onto the party that had historically opposed racism in all its forms. So successful were the Democrats in this con that in 2005 a head of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, went around apologizing to black groups for sins that had actually been committed, not by the Republicans, but by the Democrats. 5 Equally astonishing, the Democrats have never admitted their racist history, never taken responsibility for what they did, never apologized for it, never paid one penny of restitution for their crimes. What intrigued me most was how one can get away with such a big lie. The answer is you have to dominate all the large megaphones of the culture, from academia to the movies to the major media. With this cultural arsenal at their disposal, big liars can spin out falsehoods with the confidence that no one else has a large enough megaphone to challenge them. They can have their lies taught in classrooms, made into movies and TV shows, and reported in the everyday media as the unvarnished truth. This is how big lies come to be widely believed, sometimes even by the people who are being lied about. Hillary’s America was met with outrage on the Left, but no one could rebut a single fact in the book or movie. Even my most incriminating allegations proved invulnerable. I noted that, in 1860, the year before the Civil War, no Republican owned a slave; all the four million slaves at the time were owned by Democrats. Now this generalization could easily be refuted by someone providing a list of Republicans who owned slaves. The Left couldn’t do it. One assiduous researcher finally sought to dispute me with a single counterexample. Ulysses S. Grant, he pointed out, once inherited a slave from his wife’s family. I conceded the point but reminded him that, at the time, Ulysses S. Grant was not a Republican. Fearful that they had no substantive answer to Hillary’s America, the mainstream media went into complete denial. If you watched the major networks or public television, or listened to National Public Radio, you would have no idea that Hillary’s America even existed. The book was Number One on the New York Times bestseller list and the movie was the top-grossing documentary of the year. Both were dense with material directly relevant to the ongoing election debate. Yet they were completely ignored by a press that was squarely in the Hillary camp.

If I had a dollar for every brain you don’t have, I’d have one dollar!” –  Squidward on SpongeBob SquarePants

A few of the people I had known were gone—even in that short time—back to the Midwest or to Times Square, or had been busted, or moved to Coffee Andy’s in Hollywood, or gone to Golden Miami. They had disappeared, one day: One day youre here and thats fine, and the next day your gone and thats fine too, and someone has that very day come in to take your place whatever it might have been.

Our dysfunctional culture sends mixed signals about manhood. The world of sports tells me that authentic masculinity is linked to athleticism, physical strength, and winning the game. In short, muscles make the man. The world of finance suggests that my worth is directly tied to the size of my bank account, the square-footage of my house, the brand of watch I wear, and the make and model of car I drive. In other words, money makes the man. Then Hollywood tells me that real manhood is measured by how long I can last in bed and how many women I’ve had sex with. The clear message is: a penis makes a man. To add to that chorus, popular music today tells young urban men that their masculine value is boosted if they act tough, beat up women, use profanity, abuse drugs, outsmart the police, and drink as much alcohol as possible. If they do all these things, someone on the street will reward them by saying, “You da man!” So these guys grow up thinking that bad behavior makes a man, especially if it involves impregnating as many women as possible—and leaving those women with black eyes, bruises, and broken hearts in the process.

For all the screen credits on pictures good and bad, and despite his above-the-line Hollywood friends, the fleeting tabloid television infamy of his drugs arrest had landed him back at Caines buying smokes. “Coke, a smoke, and a raisin square,” they used to say; townie comfort food, stuff you could gum.

Wing chun involves the concept of “wedging out” punches more often than other styles because it uses a square-shouldered stance instead of keeping the power hand back. This means any incoming strikes that happen to travel along the outside of the arms will be redirected away from the head without the need for active blocking. In muay Thai clinch fighting, you use the same wedging process to get your arms on the inside and gain control of your opponent. The “cross counter” is another example of wedging that has been used successfully in boxing and MMA. There are many variations to the technique, but the basic premise involves extending your right cross over the top of your opponent’s left jab. Since your shoulder is below your head, a successful cross counter will direct the jab down and away from your head as your fist approaches your opponent’s chin. If you want a simple example to test out using a wedge at home, have a friend of similar height approach you with two arms outstretched, as if to do the Hollywood-style two-hands-on-the-windpipe choke. As he approaches you, keep your shoulders square and extend your own arms, reaching for his neck or face, while ensuring your hands are on the inside. As he gets closer, the shape of your extended arms will clear his hands away from your neck, and you will be free to put your hands in his face. Figure 4-5. Diagram of a wedge. The applied force comes in from above and is split in two separate output forces, each pushing away from the wedge.

The Inferno was the newest and most fabulous of all the fabulous luxury hotels and casinos in what the home folks themselves refer to as Fabulous Las Vegas. The word when applied to the Inferno was no Hollywood superlative; it was an apt description. It was between the Desert Inn and the Flamingo on the desert end of the Strip. The building was huge, surrounded by twenty acres of landscaped grounds and parking space, and fronted with ten thousand square feet of velvety green lawn.

It is popular now to say that Hollywood is a state of mind more than an actual place, since the Boulevard itself has become as tasteless and as subject to bad elements as that other den of American excess, Times Square

Do you remember the days that followed 9/11?” he asked. “Of course,” I answered. “No one had to say it. It was as if almost everyone had some sort of sense about it, even if they couldn’t put it into words. It was as if the nation had unconsciously heard a silent voice calling it to be still and to return to the foundation.” “The voice of God?” “Yes, and for a moment, America appeared to be responding. The rush and clamor of its culture were stilled. Wall Street came to a standstill. Hollywood grew silent. Throughout the nation there was a noticeable and massive turning away from the superficial and to the spiritual. Even the name of God was taken out of the closet and publicly proclaimed from Capitol Hill to New York City. Multitudes sang “God Bless America” and gathered for prayer. America’s houses of worship overflowed with throngs of people seeking to find solace. In those first few days and weeks after 9/11, it seemed as if there might be a true national turning, a changing of course, an awakening—even a spiritual revival.” “But then America was turning back to God?” “No. America was not turning back to God. It was a spiritual revival that never came. And even the appearance of turning back was short-lived. It had no real root. There was no real change of heart or course, no searching of ways, no questioning if something could be wrong, no repentance. So it couldn’t last. And it wasn’t long before the moment was lost and things began to return to a form of normalcy. The calls for prayer would fade away, the rush and clamor of daily life would resume, the spiritual searching would be abandoned, and the superficial again embraced. The name of God would again be withdrawn from the public square, and most of those who had suddenly flocked to houses of worship would cease their flocking. The nation would resume its departure from God and its rejection of His ways, only now with increased speed.

In a room full of journalists someone would already be doing an impersonation of the Robot Man. We’d also make fun of the smarmy host, who is a bit like Tom Bergeron, host of Hollywood Squares, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and Dancing with the Stars, only cheesier, which is remarkable because Tom Bergeron is already the gold standard of cheesiness, and yet here is this total amateur, this complete unknown, blowing Bergeron away.

Stroll around Liberty Square taking note of the doors, which all have a two-digit number on them. They are designed to look like a street address, but if you put “18” in front of the number, you have the year that style of house would have been popular. The date over the entry door to the Hall of Presidents is the year the United States Constitution was ratified.