Fifty Shades Of Hay

The film Fifty Shades Of Grey continues to take the box office by storm, racking up an astonishing $400 million dollars worldwide in its first two weeks alone.

Based on the novel by author E.L. James, the erotic odyssey has divided audiences; some praise it as a tale of female sexual empowerment, while others dismiss it as "mom porn," or worse, a handbook for domestic abuse.

Of course it's no secret that Fifty Shades Of Grey started out as nothing more than steamy Twilight fan fiction. James wrote a series of salacious adventures starring Edward and Bella  and uploaded them to an online forum. Fans were so delighted by the tale they demanded she publish it for real. Fans who, by the way, obviously had no earthly idea how copyright laws work. 

James ultimately agreed with the public and decided her lascivious love story needed to be shared with the world. To that end she simply took her derivative work and replaced Edward and Bella with Christian and Ana, removed all the vampire and supernatural elements and violin! She had a brand new original soft porn trilogy fit for publishing. 

Against all logic, common sense and reason, Fifty Shades Of Grey became a huge hit, and James sat back and watched the semi trucks full of cash roll in!

I was so inspired by her success that I decided to start writing my own erotic fan fiction, based of course on one of my favorite TV shows, the 1960s sitcom Green Acres.

In my story, Betty Jo Bradley is an innocent young women who lives with her family at the Shady Rest Hotel in Hooterville. One day local farmer Oliver Wendall Douglas visits the Shady Rest, ostensibly to get away from his home for a while. He  tells Betty Jo that his wife Lisa finally had enough of country life and left him, moving back to New York City. The two begin a casual friendship.

Douglas begins taking a special interest in young Betty Jo, giving her lavish presents and showing her the night life in nearby Pixley. Betty Jo is taken by Douglas' sophisticated big city ways, and becomes enamored with him.

Douglas invites Betty Jo to his farmhouse and asks her to sign a non-disclosure agreement, laying out the "terms" of their relationship. She adds a few terms of her own to the contract and then signs it.

He then shows her a secret room under his dilapidated home, filled with numerous excess farm implements sold to him over the years by Mr. Haney. The two then begin an erogenous and often violent sexual relationship involving role playing and bondage, as Douglas uses the various farming tools on the innocent Betty Jo.

I call my new erotic fan fiction Fifty Shades Of Hay. If you need me, I'll be sitting by the phone, anxiously awaiting a call from a Hollywood producer who wants to turn it into the next box office bonanza.

Yeah, I know, this was a long way to go for that joke.

It's A Gen-You-Wine Fixer Upper

I was doing my decennial house cleaning this week and I found this old photo. It's a picture of my house from several years ago, right before I moved into it.

Looks a bit, er... unkempt, eh?*

You know, this photo reminds me of something, but I can't quite figure out what. Hmm... now where have I seen this before?

Oh yeah. Now I remember. It's practically the same house!

Pity the place didn't come with a hot Hungarian wife though.


* Don't give me that look; I've made a lot of changes and cleaned it up quite a bit since this was taken.

R.I.P. Frank Cady, aka Sam Drucker

Every now and then I think to myself that I'm gonna stop writing celebrity obits on my blog; for one thing by the time I get around to it everyone from CNN.com all the way down to the Stammerville Weekly Shopper has already covered it, plus it's kind of morbid. But then someone whose life actually meant something to me dies, and I think, "OK, one more time."

This time it's actor Frank Cady. The name might not be familiar, but his face certainly will be if you watched any TV at all in the 1960s and 1970s. Cady died June 8, 2012 in his Wilsonville, Oregon home. He was 96. His daughter didn't mention a cause of death, but it couldn't be too awfully hard to figure out. The man was nearing 100.

My first reaction upon hearing the news of his death: Sadness or course, followed by open mouthed surprise. I honest to god didn't realize he was still alive.

Cady's most famous role was of course that of Sam Drucker, owner and proprietor of Drucker's General Store on Petticoat Junction and Green Acres. Sam Drucker was a regular on both series, and even made a few appearances on The Beverly Hillbillies.

All three series had a shared continuity and existed within the same world, one that I always called the "Hooterverse," named of course after the fictional town in which Petticoat Junction and Green Acres took place.

That makes Frank Cady one of the only actors I know who regularly played the same character in three different shows. The only other actor I can think of that comes close is Richard Anderson, who played Oscar Goldman simultaneously in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman.*

Cady guest starred on many other TV shows prior to his Hooterverse role, including The Andy Griffith Show and many, many Western TV series. He was also in several of my all time favorite movies, including The 7 Faces of Doctor Lao and When Worlds Collide. After seeing his earnest and over-enunciated performance as Sam Drucker my whole life, it was a bit jarring to see him in anything else, especially as a villain in When Worlds Collide.

* It's entirely possible that an actor has played the same character in several of the various Law and Order series, but I've never watched a single episode of any of those, so I can't say.