I used to follow Belle de Jour - the diary of a London call girl - back in the days when I was still living in the UK capital. It was titillating and seemed authentic despite the anonymity of the author. The writing was excellent and the subject matter was naturally quite interesting. I was not surprised when the blog won the Guardian best written blog award in 2003. The online success was followed by a few books that proved quite popular (but I never read). However, the identity of the author remained elusive. Until now.
Behold, Belle de Jour is Dr Brooke Magnanti, a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science. She is a specialist in neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology currently working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. In an interview for the Sunday Times she confirms that she was a call girl for 14 months:
From 2003 to late 2004, Brooke worked as a prostitute via a London escort agency; she started blogging as Belle de Jour — after the Buñuel film starring Catherine Deneuve as a well-to-do housewife who has sex for money because she’s bored — shortly into her career as a call girl, after an incident she thought funny enough to write down.
She charged £300 an hour for her services, of which she got £200. The average appointment lasted two hours; she saw clients two or three times a week, “sometimes less, sometimes a great deal more”. How many men has she slept with for money? “A lot.” Dozens? Hundreds? “I can’t honestly remember,” she says, laughing. “Somewhere between dozens and hundreds.”
Apparently today everyone who goes by Dimitar or some derivative has a name day. I had totally forgotten about it. So when my boss saw me in the morning and headed toward my desk smiling I thought, “Damn, I must be really good at this job if I’d accomplished something praiseworthy even before fully waking up.” Alas, my parents had done the laudable deed by following the naming convention of the day. A bit of a downer.
The earliest written accounts of his life were compiled in the 9th century, although there are earlier images of him, and accounts from the 7th century of his miracles. The biographies have Demetrius as a young man of senatorial family who was run through with spears in around 306 AD in Thessaloniki, during the Christian persecutions of the emperor Diocletian or Galerius, which matches his depiction in the 7th century mosaics.
That is right - I have not one but two name days. But if I remember correctly, as a kid I would have much preferred to have two birthdays instead.
Petya kindly invited me to join a chain of posts. I put down my list in google docs about a month ago and then forgot about it. So, here they are.
1. Coffee. Does not matter if the source is an espresso machine, french press or filter coffee maker. I crave the substance and I drink at least a few cups every day.
2. The return of Fake Steve Jobs. The funniest blogger on my side of the internet is back with the familiar tagline “Dude, I invented the friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it?”
3. House MD. I count the days (42) to the premiere of season 6. I used to wake up at 4 in the morning to grab the latest episode from the torrent sites.
4. Stumbling upon a film I should have seen a long time ago but did not. The freshest one in this category is Martin Scorsese’s American Boy. The movie was actually never released to the broad public but this did not stop movie buffs to seek, watch and directly lift ideas from it. Certainly everyone reading this can recall Uma Turman snorting heroin and OD-ing in Pulp Fiction. The scene below has almost a one to one correspondence with a story told in American Boy.
I have no problem with the good directors borrow, great directors steal approach.
On another note, if you, for some freakish reason, have not seen Pulp Fiction - Get out of here right now! I will quote Marsellus Wallace about the situation your lack of curiosity for quality cinema entertainment has created.
Yeah, we cool. Two things. Don’t tell nobody about this. This shit is between me, you, and Mr. Soon-To-Be-Living-The-Rest-of-His-Short-Ass-Life-In-Agonizing-Pain Rapist here. It ain’t nobody else’s business. Two: you leave town tonight, right now. And when you’re gone, you stay gone, or you be gone. You lost all your L.A. privileges. Deal?
5. Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself. I find it extremely useful in making sense of web content. Check it out.
6. Not playing WoW any more. It is nothing less than triumph of my will power. Let’s see how long it will last…
This is the trailer for the new Coen brothers film. A Serious Man seems to be a darker and deeper trip in paranoia than the excellent Burn After Reading. It will be great. The brothers can do no wrong on screen.
On an 1976 August morning, French New Wave film maker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro stabilized camera on his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 and raced through the streets of central Paris. Lelouch dubbed over the sound of a Ferrari 275GTB to create the impression for an even higher speed. He did not have permits to stop traffic and film. The director was arrested for endangering public safety shortly after the first screening. C’était un rendez-vous (It was a date) was done in one take without stuntman or special effects. It is nine minutes long.
I am a movie junkie. Take away watching films and I will do anything, no matter how horrible it might be, to get it back. So when I came across The 50 [allegedly] Greatest Trailers of All Time, I had to spend the next 2 hours going through the list. Some of the films that made it there are good, some of them are truly great. Enjoy.
To all my friends in the US and New England in particular - happy Fourth of July. I miss you all and hope to see you again sooner than later. The photo above was taken in the legendary Toast House on this day a few years ago. Cheers!
Humanity has never been smarter and wealthier. The good ol’ times were not as good as now. We live at (the beginning of) The Age of Mass Intelligence
Third, what does all this say about the widespread view that societies are dumbing down, educational standards are crumbling and people’s ability to concentrate is collapsing? The reply must be that it cannot be true across the board and that for a significant number, the opposite is the case: people want more intellectually demanding things to see and hear, not fewer. Surely both things are happening at once: part of the population is dumbing down, part is wising up. But something has changed. H.L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore, said: “No one in this world…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” A growing number of people are proving him wrong.
I have had plenty of arguments about this issue. Let’s hope the next one will be soon while the data from the article is still fresh in my mind. I pity the fool who will dare question the statement.
About Monevnomics
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