DOES ANYONE ELSE FIND THIS HILARIOUS?

There's a series of television commercials currently airing for reverse mortages from the Senior Lending Network that feature Robert Wagner as their aged-yet-cool spokeman, the company relying on Wagner's affable charm and recognizable status from his run on HART TO HART (1979-1984), starring opposite Stephanie Powers (formerly April Dancer, aka THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E.).

That's all well and good, but I have to question the choice of Wagner for this position because, well, would you create a series of ads meant to engender trust that starred a guy who played a master thief in a once well-known but now somewhat glossed over entry in the 1960's spy craze, namely IT TAKES A THIEF (1968-1970)?

Wagner played Alexander Mundy, the world's greatest thief, who, once apprehended, was pressed into service by the fictional SIA organization to steal for the US government (in the interest of protecting the country's interests of course). Al's international adventures were chronicled over three seasons and were greatly entertaining, still holding up some four decades after the fact and amounting to what was in my opinion the finest of the American spy shows from that period (there are those who consider THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. as the gold standard for such things, but I doubt they've seen it for a while; the first season was very good and quite imaginative, but after that...).

Robert Wagner back in the days.

Yeah, yeah, I know that he's an actor and all that, but the TV-viewing public has a long memory and in some cases tends to think of the actor in question as the character they played, so I would have ruled Wagner as a questionable choice for the mortage gig. But then again, I hadn't seen IT TAKES A THIEF since I was very little, yet remembering it fondly and only recently rediscovering it thanks to DVDs acquired through the collector's gray market, so what the fuck do I know? Nonetheless, I find Wagner hilarious in this capacity. I mean, would you buy any kind of mortgage, reverse or otherwise, if it was being shilled by Ernst Stavro Blofeld?

"Yes, Mister Bond, I am now in the business of selling reverse mortgages. And I expect you to buy!"

BEFORE GOLGO 13, THERE WAS...007?!!?

Takao Saito's long-running manga series GOLGO 13 is often described as the Japanese answer to James Bond, but what many fans/geeks don't know is that Saito actually adapted four of Ian Fleming's 007 novels into manga form some four years before he launched the adventures of Duke Togo. Believe it or not, Saito, with the approval of Gildrose — the company that owned the rights to Bond — translated THUNDERBALL, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, and LIVE AND LET DIE into comics, but for some unknown reason Gildrose put a stop to further adaptations despite the works being officially licensed. That may have had something to do with Saito's versions being described as "loose" versions of Fleming.

Whatever the case, 007 provided Saito a perfect dry run for GOLGO 13, even down to the visual similarities between 007 and Togo. For example:

Saito's James Bond, 1964.

Duke "Golgo 13" Togo, as seen in his first appearance, 1968.

Duke Togo, after Saito (or one of his studio drones) refined his look, ca. 1980's.

And, just for the hell of it, here's a page from Saito's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN:

Looks like the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. It's all about the sideburns, baby. It's all about the sideburns.

TO BOLDLY CAVEAT WHERE NO EMPTOR HAS CAVEATED BEFORE

Thanks to La Biche for this one.

Trekkie Sues Christie's
By ARTINFO
Published: January 1, 2008

NEW YORK—A Star Trek fan who paid $6,000 for a poker visor that was said to have been worn by the character Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation claims in a lawsuit against Christie's that the prop is fake.

Ted Moustakis said he took the visor, which he purchased at an auction of CBS Paramount props in 2006, to a convention in August to have it autographed by Brent Spiner, the actor who played Data, and Spiner said it was a fake, and that he had sold the actual prop himself.

Moustakis filed the lawsuit in state court in Manhattan, demanding millions of dollars in punitive damages and a refund for the visor and two other items he purchased: a table that was part of the set, for which he paid $6,600, and a uniform from Data's wardrobe, for which he paid $11,400.

Christie's representative Rik Pike says the case has no merit.

THE NAUGHTY SIREN SINGS NO MORE: R.I.P. RUTH WALLIS (1920-2008)

Back in the days there used to be a genre called "party records," slabs of vinyl intended for play at grownup parties — "smokers" as they were then called — that featured jokes by "blue" comedians like Red Foxx and Pigmeat markham, extended bits like the infamous "Farting Contest," and songs of a questionable nature by pioneering chanteueses Rusty Warren and Ruth Wallis (pioneering for white chicks, that is). Of these two broads Rusty Warren was by far the raunchier of the two, coming off like an even more boisterous fusion of Roseanne and Ethel Merman, but the sweet-voiced Ruth Wallis was easily the funnier of the two. She had a tone like some dreamy-eyed fairytale narrator, but her material could often make a listener do a double-take. I first heard her when, at the age of eight, I stole one of my parents' albums and delighted in "The Dinghy Song" ("Of all the dinghys that sail the sea/Davey's is the only one for me!"). From today's New York Times:

Ruth Wallis, Singer-Writer of Risqué Songs, Dies at 87
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: January 3, 2008

Ruth Wallis, a cabaret singer of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s who was known as the Queen of the Party Song for the genteelly risqué numbers she performed for happy, and very occasionally horrified, listeners worldwide, died on Dec. 22 at her home in South Killingly, Conn. She was 87. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her son, Alan Pastman, said.

Ms. Wallis, who began her career performing jazz and cabaret standards, soon became known for the novelty songs — more than 150 of them — she wrote herself, all positively dripping with double entendre. Even today, only a fraction of her titles can be rendered in a family newspaper, among them “The Hawaiian Lei Song,” “Hopalong Chastity,” “Your Daddy Was a Soldier” and “A Man, a Mink, and a Million Pink and Purple Pills.” Her signature number, “The Dinghy Song,” is an ode to Davy, who had “the cutest little dinghy in the Navy.”

In 2003, Ms. Wallis’s work was the basis of an off-Broadway revue, “Boobs! The Musical: The World According to Ruth Wallis.”

Though Ms. Wallis performed in some of the most glittering nightclubs in New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and elsewhere, her career was largely overlooked at the time. Few mainstream newspapers, after all, dared print even faintly suggestive titles like “Johnny Has a Yo-Yo,” “De Gay Young Lad,” “Stay Out of My Pantry” and “Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew.” Nor could they reproduce Ms. Wallis’s lyrics, in which body parts, real or merely implied, tended to loom large.

In Boston, Ms. Wallis’s songs were banned from the radio. In Australia, her records were seized by customs agents when she arrived there for a tour. Both incidents only made her more popular, according to later news accounts.

Ruth Shirley Wohl was born in New York City on Jan. 5, 1920. She chose her stage name in honor of Wallis Warfield Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, her son said.

Ms. Wallis’s marriage to her manager, Hy Pastman, ended in divorce, though they were later reconciled, her son said; the elder Mr. Pastman died in 1987. Besides her son, of South Killingly, she is survived by a daughter, Ronnie Ramistella of Monterey, Calif.; and one grandchild.

COMIC BOOKS BE EDJUMACATIONALOUS

Coming soon to a classroom near you!

Thanks to Mark G. for alerting me to this one. From the New York Times:

Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Published: December 26, 2007

Some parents and teachers regard comics, with their sentences jammed into bubbles and their low word-to-picture ratio, as part of the problem when it comes to low reading scores and the much-lamented decline in reading for pleasure. But a growing cadre of educators is looking to comics as part of the solution.

In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

“It’s very much a teacher-led kind of movement in that teachers are looking for ways to engage their children, and they’re finding some of that in comic books,” said Michael Bitz, who founded the Comic Book Project as a graduate student and is now its director. “For kids who may be struggling and for kids who may be new to the English language, that visual sequence is a very powerful tool.”

The recent interest in comics as a literacy tool comes as graphic novels have cemented their status as sophisticated works of literature, and as teachers nationwide are struggling to boost reading scores. Proponents of comics in the classroom say that they can lure struggling readers who may be intimidated by pages crammed with text. They also say that comics, with their visual cues and panel-by-panel sequencing, are uniquely situated to reinforce key elements of literacy, like story structure and tone.

Still, skeptics fret that in the wrong hands, comics could become simply a vehicle for watering down lessons.

“If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool,” said Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. “What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step.”

Lisa Von Drasek, the children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education, said that “not a semester goes by that not a parent or a teacher expresses a concern about a comic-format book that their child has taken out or is using for their reading time.” Usually, she said, the critics come around. “What we say is, ‘Whatever works.’”

Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland’s schools superintendent, said that years ago, she noticed teachers’ discomfort when their children were spotted with comics. “They tried to justify it by saying to me, ‘Well, this student or this group of students, they hate reading, and we’re just trying everything,’” she said. “We’re trying to open the eyes of teachers and educators to this as a possibility, this as something that might really help children and is good education.”

In the 2005-6 school year, teachers at eight Maryland schools taught lessons based on old Disney cartoons as part of a Comics in the Classroom pilot program. Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, were commissioned to evaluate the program. They did not try to gauge how much students learned, but found that teachers and students had positive perceptions of the program.

“There were some teachers at first who thought: ‘Oh, my God, comics? What’s next?’” said Susan Sonnenschein, an associate professor of psychology at the university, who was one of the evaluators. “I think the teachers changed their impression.”

The state, working with Diamond Comic Distributors and Disney Publishing Worldwide, has since refined the curriculum and invited 200 teachers to take part on the condition that they provide additional feedback. It is also planning to introduce teachers to a new series of original comic books for early readers, to be released starting this spring by Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, and her husband, Art Spiegelman, who revolutionized comics with his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus.”

Ms. Mouly said that she believed her books had “enormous” potential to turn children on to reading. She cited the experience of her own son, now 16, who learned to read through French comics like Astérix. “The one thing that retained my son’s interest night after night was the comics,” she said. “Whatever that light bulb is went on.”

At Public School 59 in the Bronx one recent afternoon, students clustered around tables, plotting out their own comic strips at one of the Comic Book Project’s after-school programs. At one table, Jamie Collazo’s and his friends’ faces lit up when asked about their favorite activity: video games like Ultimate Spider-Man, Super Smash Bros. and Wolverine’s Revenge. “I’m a game freak,” exclaimed Jamie, 11, saying that this was “when you collect a lot of games and you can’t stop playing them.” Reading, he said, “is kind of boring to me.”

But there he was, brainstorming a tale of three powerful gods who land on Nerainis, a planet between Neptune and Uranus.

Gabriel Cid, 10, agreed that “reading is kind of boring,” but said comics were different. “Superheroes, comics, that’s when it gets interesting because you get to see all the cool stuff,” he said. “We get to do our own design, and we get to color whatever we want — create our own characters and stuff.”

By the end of the hourlong session, there were comics about islands populated by Native Americans, and about aliens who communicated in Morse code. There were plenty of misspellings (“to be countind you,” one child wrote in lieu of “to be continued”), but there were also instances in which students asked one another how to spell words like “mysterious.”

Amid the sketching, coloring and debating over the best way to split four panels into eight, Dr. Bitz of the Comic Book Project saw glimmers of learning: children composing, revising and organizing their thoughts into linear narratives. “Because it’s their story,” he said, “they want to make it right.”

SO PASSES THE CHRONICLER OF A SCOUNDREL: R.I.P. GEORGE MacDONALD FRASER (1925-2008)

Harry Flashman: coward, cheat, liar, shameless womanizer, and all-around towering asshole. God, how I loved him, and now his chronicler has fallen. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read on. From today's New York Times:

George MacDonald Fraser, Author of Flashman Novels, Dies at 82
By MARGALIT FOX

George MacDonald Fraser, a British writer whose popular novels about the arch-rogue Harry Flashman followed their hero as he galloped, swashbuckled, drank and womanized his way through many of the signal events of the 19th century, died yesterday on the Isle of Man. He was 82 and had made his home there in recent years.

The cause was cancer, said Vivienne Schuster, his British literary agent.

Over nearly four decades, Mr. Fraser produced a dozen rollicking picaresques centering on Flashman. The novels purport to be installments in a multivolume “memoir,” known collectively as the Flashman Papers, in which the hero details his prodigious exploits in battle, with the bottle and in bed. In the process, Mr. Fraser cheerfully punctured the enduring ideal of a long-vanished era in which men were men, tea was strong and the sun never set on the British Empire.

The Flashman Papers include, among other titles, “Flashman” (World Publishing, 1969); “Flashman in the Great Game” (Knopf, 1975); and, most recently, “Flashman on the March” (Knopf, 2005). The second volume in the series, “Royal Flash” (Knopf, 1970), was made into a film of the same title in 1975, starring Malcolm McDowell as Flashman.

In what amounted to an act of literary retribution, Mr. Fraser plucked Flashman from the pages of “Tom Brown’s School Days,” Thomas Hughes’s classic novel of English public-school life published in 1857. In that book, Tom, the innocent young hero, repeatedly falls prey to a sadistic bully named Flashman. In Mr. Fraser’s hands, the cruel, handsome Flashman is all grown up and in the British Army, serving in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Now Brig. Gen.Sir Harry Paget Flashman, he is a master equestrian, a pretty fair duelist and a polyglot who can pitch woo in a spate of foreign tongues.

He is also a scoundrel, a drunk, a liar, a cheat, a braggart and a coward. (A favorite combat strategy is to take credit for a victory from which he has actually run away.) Last, but most assuredly not least, Flashman is a serial adulterer who by Volume 9 of the series has bedded 480 women. (That Flashman is married himself, to the fair, dimwitted Elspeth, is no impediment. She cuckolds him left and right, in any case.)

Readers adored him. Today, the Internet is populated with a bevy of Flashman fan sites.

Flashman’s exploits take him to some of the most epochal events of his time, from British colonial campaigns to the American Civil War, in which he magnanimously serves on both the Union and the Confederate sides. He rubs up against eminences like Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde, Florence Nightingale and Abraham Lincoln.

For his work, Flashman earns a string of preposterous awards, including a knighthood, the Victoria Cross and the American Medal of Honor. Mr. Fraser was so skilled a mock memoirist that he had some early readers fooled. Writing in The New York Times in 1969 after the first novel was published, Alden Whitman said: “So far, ‘Flashman’ has had 34 reviews in the United States. Ten of these found the book to be genuine autobiography.”

The son of Scottish parents, George MacDonald Fraser was born on April 2, 1925, in Carlisle, England, near the Scottish border. His boyhood reading, like that of nearly every British boy of his generation, included “Tom Brown’s School Days.” In World War II, Mr. Fraser served in India and Burma with the Border Regiment. His memoir of the war in Burma, “Quartered Safe Out Here” (Harvill), was published in 1993.

After leaving the military, Mr. Fraser embarked on a journalism career, working for newspapers in England, Canada and Scotland. He eventually became the assistant editor of The Glasgow Herald and in the 1960s, was briefly its editor. Tiring of newspaper work, Mr. Fraser decided, as he later said in interviews, to “write my way out” with an original Victorian novel. In a flash, he remembered Flashman, and the first book tumbled out in the evenings after work. “In all, it took 90 hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table,” he said in an interview quoted in the reference work “Authors and Artists for Young Adults.”

Mr. Fraser’s survivors include his wife, Kathy; two sons and a daughter. Information on other survivors could not immediately be confirmed.

His other books include several non-Flashman novels, among them “Mr. American” (Simon & Schuster, 1980); “The Pyrates” (Knopf, 1984); and “Black Ajax” (HarperCollins, 1997). With Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson, Mr. Fraser wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film “Octopussy,” released in 1983. Mr. Fraser’s latest book, “The Reavers,” a non-Flashman novel, is scheduled to be published by Knopf in April.

For his work, Mr. Fraser received many honors, among them the Order of the British Empire in 1999. This award, according to every conceivable news account, was entirely genuine.

Flashman, as rendered by the legendary Frank Frazetta.

For a comprehensive look at Flashman click here .

SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS (1982)

While not a movie per se, the anime landmark SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS (MACROSS for short) is certainly epic enough to warrant attention here and is available in a subtitled and uncut version on DVD (if you can find it; the motherfucker inexplicably went in and out of print in 2002 and can be prohibitively pricey if located on eBay or Amazon).

In the year 1999 a city-sized extraterrestrial battle cruiser crashlands on Earth, and over the next decade scientists and engineers repair its damage and refit it into a hybrid of human and alien technologies. What the Earth-folks don't realize is that the ship has been tailed by an entire armada of heavily armed space battle cruisers who seek to claim the ship and its secrets for themselves. The aliens, called Zentraedi, are a formidible race of giants who have been bred for warfare, but as they approach their presence triggers a booby trap on the downed space-fortress — called the Macross — that plows through them with a devastating energy weapon. Thinking the Earth fired upon them intentionally, the Zentraedi retaliate, thereby launching Space War I. Realizing that it would probably be a good idea to move the confilct off of the Earth (which has just gotten over a long on-planet war), the captain of the Macross orders the use of the ship's untested "fold" system to warp the ship to the dark side of the moon; the warp is initiated, but it brings the small city that had grown around the Macross with it, plus, to the horror of all involved, they find themselves just outside orbit near Pluto (that's what you get for fucking around with technology that you don't know how to operate!). And as if that isn't bad enough, the fold system has completely vanished, leaving the ship's crew and the now-rescued inhabitants of the city no alternative but to make their way back home using only conventional engines. And as the Macross crawls back to the Earth, the enemy fleet is not far behind...

That's the basic setup, but what makes MACROSS stand out from the plethora of alien invasion space operas that came before it — most notably the classic SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO (1974) — is its focus on the human element of its story, becoming in essence a soap opera in sci-fi drag. Nearly every character is in some way flawed, and despite the military experience held by many of them, that experience frequently proves moot in the face of deep space combat and technologies that they simply do not comprehend. The ostensible hero, sixteen-year-old stunt pilot Hikaru Ichijo, comes of age during the course of the narrative and we follow him through every awkward step, tracing his evolution from prodigy civilian airman to ace space-fighter, as well as seeing him swallow his reluctance to kill once he joins the United Nations Space Navy (annoyingly dubbed the "UN Spacy" for short). Hikaru's also at the center of a love triangle that sees his emotions split between a cute Chinese girl who ends up going from waitress to pop idol overnight, and his by-the-book career military commanding officer; this triangle is milked for all it's worth and is the primary reason that the series proved so popular with female viewers, along with the romantic trials and tribulations of the rest of the voluminous cast.

The MACROSS cast.

Another thing that sets the series apart from the cliche template is the pan-cultural scope of the cast. The hero may be Japanese, but the rest of the characters run the ethnic gamut, the bridge crew alone being comprised of a couple of Russians, an American or two, an Italian, and a black chick. This was very refreshing at the time, with the then-most-contemporary multi-culti cast of characters being found in the various incarnations of CYBORG 009, but each member of that international team was drawn in the most broad of ethnic stereotypes. Not so with MACROSS, which didn't make a big deal out of the characters' ethnicities and saw only the Chinese character standing out because of her frequently-worn Hong Kong-style dresses and hairstyles.

And while the show certainly has a contingent of fans who revere it for its space battles and transforming mecha, I have to say that I love it most for starting things off on a footing that allows the viewer to think they know exactly where the story's going to go and then consistently pulling the rug out from under them. The love triangle plays out in a way that sees all three participants change and grow, the B-characters go through some serious drama involving the tragic casualties of war and the possibilities that can blossom between even the most bitter of enemy rivalries (let's hear it for Max and Millia!!!), and even the enemy aliens prove to be far more than just stock evil world-conquerers when their strange and ancient history proves that there really is something to the universal nature of basic "humanity."

SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS is easily the most well-crafted and intelligent of the space operas from the 1980's, both in terms of narrative and visual impact, and totally raised the bar on how such material can and should be handled. In fact, the only serialized alien invasion show to come along since that even comes close is NEON GENESIS EVANGELION (1995), a series that wears its MACROSS influence on its sleeve but somehow comes up a lot less satisfying. If you can get your hands on the Animeigo boxed sets of the original unct and subtitled MACROSS series — avoid the sequels and the not bad Americanized version, ROBOTECH — do yourself the favor and check them out, starting with episode number one because the whole thing's one long story told in thirty-six chapters. Even if you're not an anime fan I urge you to TRUST YER BUNCHE on this one. Space operas seldom get any better than this, and SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS sure as hell beats the three recent STAR WARS atrocities.

ADVICE COLUMN SNIPPET OF THE WEEK

This one made my day. From the never-less-than-entertaining SAVAGE LOVE, by Dan Savage:

Q. I'm 19, female, bisexual, and have been with the same guy for a year, and things are great. I came home for Christmas and he went to his parents' house, and I'll see him in a few weeks. For Christmas, my mom got me some typical "mom" gifts—socks and underwear—but the panties had Disney princesses on them. I feel like a pedophile just owning them! I get it: She doesn't like the idea that I might be having sex, especially with the alarming rate that babies are popping out of teenage girls. But come on. —Holiday Blues

A. Even if Mom was trying to send you a coded message—and I am not convinced that was her intent—you can turn the lemons of your mother's disapproval into the lemonade of a good, safe, responsible sex life. So Mom is not happy about her daughter being sexually active—that's too bad for Mom, right? Show Mom that her fears were misplaced by making sure you don't get your 19-year-old ass knocked up or knocked around.

As for feeling like a pedophile, HB, there's nothing pedo about a 19-year-old bi chick in Disney-princess underpants. A little girl in those panties is innocent and darling. A sexually active 19-year-old in those panties is ironic and daring. (A quick poll of straight men—or man, as the sample size was small—also revealed that 100 percent consider 19-year-old bisexual girls in Disney panties "sexy as fucking hell.") So when your boyfriend eats your pussy through a pair of your new Disney underpants—when he filters your vaginal secretions through an image of Jasmine or Ariel or Belle—he will not only be helping you assert your right to sexual fulfillment despite your mother's disapproval, HB, but helping you deconstruct a patriarchal hetero-normative discourse that reifies female purity and holds up female undergarments as moral status markers. And when he services your clit, HB, the boyfriend will also be servicing those princesses. His efforts will transform them into the fully sexual beings their corporate creators never intended them to be.

To think your boyfriend can accomplish all of that—and strike a blow against repressive monarchical systems, too— just by eating your pussy while you wear your new panties, HB! And all you have to do is lie back, pull the stick out of your ass, and enjoy.

WHO WILL BE THE "LAST BEATLE STANDING?"

I've wondered for a while exactly which of the Fab Four would end up as "last Beatle standing," and it looks like my reasoning that Ringo has done especially well in the departments of quality pussy and growing old in style may prove to be the deciding factor. So Ringo's sitting pretty (well, as pretty as he can be, that is), John Lennon's death was not only tragic but also offensive, George's all-too-mortal demise was a sad counterpoint to his spiritual leanings, and since Linda's death poor Paul has been through the emotional wringer (do NOT get me started on that one-legged bitch), so what else could possibly go wrong for "the cute one?" From today's SUN:

MACCA HAS A SECRET HEART OP

By THOMAS WHITAKER
Showbiz reporter

SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY has had a secret heart operation, it was revealed last night.

The 65-year-old megastar underwent coronary angioplasty - a procedure that opens up arteries and allows a greater flow of blood. A source said: “Paul had been complaining about not feeling well and saw a Harley Street specialist at The London Clinic. “Tests were carried out and the decision was taken to operate. Paul had the angioplasty in a private hospital. It was all very routine but any work on your heart is a big deal.”

A friend of the legend said: “Luckily Paul is in very good shape. He does regular exercise and is fit. He eats well and does not carry any excess weight. He has always been in exceptional health, which is remarkable when you think of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle he once had.”

Surgeons perform coronary angioplasty by passing a fine tube in through the groin and up to the aorta. A small balloon at the tip of the tube is inflated at the narrowest part of an artery to squash fatty deposits clogging it and allow blood to flow freely again. A stent - a short wire-mesh tube - is usually left in to prop open that segment of artery. Soccer ace DavidBeckham’s dad Ted, 59, had the op after he collapsed at home with a heart attack.

Sir Paul and bitter wife Heather, 39, have still not reached a financial settlement over the collapse of their four-year marriage. A five-day High Court hearing next month will try to decide how much she should receive from Macca’s £800million fortune. The couple must also work out details for custody of their four-year-old daughter Beatrice. Heather was dumped by celebrity lawyers Mishcon de Reya after TV rants about her marriage. She faces a demand for £2million legal fees.

Last night Macca’s spokesman said of the hush-hush angioplasty performed in the autumn: “It was a routine medical operation.”

Sun GP Dr Carol Cooper said: “About 40,000 angioplasty ops are done each year in the UK because it’s a very good way of treating severe angina symptoms and the success rate is at least 90 per cent.

HAPPY 2008!!!

Well, it's the new year, so I wish everybody an improvement over the last one.

My New Year's Eve adventures were pretty low key this time around, but that's okay because I wasn't really in the mood for the usual viking-level insanity. I found myself at the Upper West Side apartment of my friends Sara and Pat and ended up surrounded by many old friends — Mr. Fun, Hottie Karate, Sexy Lexi, Dr. Slinky — as well as some of my hosts' pals from work and elsewhere. My pal Hughes was in attendance with his lovely fiancee, Natuza, and they made my night by introducing me to Natuza's tasty cousin, Raquel (pronounced "Hah-kell;" in Portugese first names the "R" in pronounced as an "H"). We all had a terrific time, supplemented with an impressive fireworks display witnessed from the apartment's roof deck, and I eventually left to make my way home through the freakshow that is the NYC streets and subway system on New Year's. The journey was a bit less weird than usual, but it did take me nearly two hours to get home; the trip back from where my friends' home should have taken about a half hour since the train in question is an express, but since this was a holiday and late at night train service was completely fucked in the ear. I ended up taking three trains to get anywhere near my stop, and after waiting over twentry minutes for a connecting train one stop from where I live I just said, "Fuck this," made my way above ground and onto the street at Fourth Avenue and walked my ass home, finally settling in at 4:30 AM.

I'm just gonna take it easy today and watch some movies on TV while I make a vat of soup. It's so nice to start the year without a crippling hangover...