Outside the box

Indeed, it has been a while since your blogstress has checked in with her public, and for that she is most contrite. For the last several years, your cybertrix has felt the need to accept employment by others and, in recent months, the phenomenon of the pesky day job gobbled up all of the time one would ordinarily use for living and blogging (a.k.a virtual living). So, your écrivaine turned in her BlackBerry and hightailed it back to her beloved Oppo Factory, finding herself better suited to a life of creative poverty than one of well remunerated but restrained prose. But enough about her.

On this evening’s edition of MSNBC’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann entertained the sporadically amusing Michael Musto in a conversation about celebrities and their foibles. Now, your Webwench is prepared to accept at face value the judgment of the critics on Sharon Stone’s latest feature, Basic Instinct II, a film your net-tête will not be seeing. And she let it roll off when the man who reviews film for Washington’s all-news mega-radio station, WTOP, made a crack about Ms. Stone’s new visage, which has acquired a very sculpted look. (Had it not, he’d surely be making cracks about her wrinkles.) But tonight, Mr. Musto crossed the line when he impugned a part of her anatomy whose nickname -- at least in certain parts of New Jersey -- might remind one of the word “impugn.”

You’ll recall that the gimmick that won Ms. Stone instant acclaim with the first Basic Instinct was a scene in which the camera traveled up her splayed thighs, and seeing neither London nor France, it saw on Ms. Stone no underpants. The ruse has reportedly been revived for the sequel, which led Mr. Musto to declare, "The thing is, what ruined the movie is Madonna beat her to the 48-year-old vagina thing...There will, however, be a Basic Instinct 3, and I hear it‘s going to -- the camera is going to zoom in past the Depends and you will see a very hot shot of the catheter."

As one in possession of a similar piece of anatomy of a maybe somewhat similar age as Ms. Stone's, your blogstress found herself to be deeply -- and she does mean deeply -- offended. Apparently having accepted the conventional wisdom about a woman’s legs being the last to go, Mr. Musto appears ignorant of the fact that a lady’s orchid looks not much different at 48 as it did at 28, and every bit as attractive, if your cybertrix does say so herself. Well, except, perhaps to Mr. Musto, whom your net-tête suspects has little interest in that particular variety of flora, regardless of its age. In this case, Mr. Musto is just another wag gone off half-cocked.