I was when I first saw them, but as usual these days I lost interest real quick:
"‘Most Interesting Man’ takes land mine role; The Vermont actor who found fame as the Dos Equis ad star has a new global pitch: dismantling land mines" by Bryan Bender | Globe Staff, January 19, 2014
Few people know his name. But for millions he is immediately recognizable, even to the president of the United States.
As the surprise guest at President Obama’s private birthday weekend at Camp David, he was snuck onto the archery range — where multiple arrows were placed in the bull’s-eye — to wait for the guest of honor to arrive.
When Obama approached from behind and marveled at the mystery archer’s astonishing aim, Jonathan Goldsmith turned and quipped, “You’re late.”
The leader of the free world took one look at him and doubled over in laughter — and later insisted he sit next to him at every meal.
Did he go down on him?
Goldsmith is “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” the gray-maned, debonair adventurer who stars in a series of deliciously satirical commercials for Dos Equis beer that have won him a cult-like following.
Sigh. So once again I have my Jewish media promoting a Jew (and beer, I guess it's a two-fer) that is reinforcing the stereotype I find in my $elf-centered jew$paper regarding the benevolent, well-meaning, altruistic and paternalistic Jew.
Sorry, folks, but I'm sour on that $hit. Real sour!
Nothing against this guy personally, but I'll never see the adverti$ement the same again! Thank God I don't drink.
Equal parts Don Juan, James Bond, and Indiana Jones, his aristocratic bearing, feats of daring, and irresistible magnetism for man, woman, and beast have made him an Internet sensation.
Now the 75-year-old journeyman actor — who lives a mostly quiet life in Manchester, Vt., with his wife and agent, Barbara— has decided to leverage his notoriety as chief spokesman for a Mexican beer brand to pursue a higher purpose: raising money for humanitarian groups struggling to remove old land mines from forgotten battlefields around the world.
Okay, it is definitely a laudable goal, something other people have already been working on for years, but I'll hold off on criticism. What I do wonder is the beer company couldn't do better than a joorneyman actor for its ads?
He considers it a redeeming endeavor after an eventful, if obscure, career as a Hollywood character actor and later a business executive.
“I fell off more horses in Hollywood than anyone else. There was very little of societal value,” Goldsmith recalls of his long list of mostly forgettable film and television credits that included countless appearances in television series such as “Dynasty,’’ “Charlie’s Angels,’’ and “Knight Rider.’’
I don't remember him.
He has joined forces with Clear Path International, a de-mining group with offices in Vermont, and the British-based Mines Advisory Group, which both work with the US State Department to minimize the risk of leftover bombs that continue to kill and main people.
As we drop them on other places. I suppose it keeps someone employed (or not).
Goldsmith recently traveled to Vietnam to see the efforts firsthand, sharing the experience with millions of fans via YouTube who are more accustomed to seeing him surrounded by beautiful women, uttering, “Stay thirsty, my friends.”
I'm saturated with this $hit, sorry.
In a recent interview, while smoking a pipe next to a crackling fire and his pair of beloved Anatolian shepherds, Goldsmith described his reaction when he was approached to help.
*********************
He said he is even more driven after having met some of the farmers and children being victimized by wars that long ago disappeared from the front pages — like a young boy in Vietnam who had been burned by a phosphorus grenade two weeks earlier.
This article never mentions US and Israeli use of the stuff since the Vietnam days, nor does it mention US opposition to land mine bans and treaties (they cite Korea as an example of why they need to keep 'em).
According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, in 2012 there were 3,628 reported casualties caused by land mines or other so-called “explosive remnants of war,” in 62 nations around the world. That is nearly 10 per day.
Where? Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, and wherever else the EUSraeli empire has dropped bombs over the last decade?
Advocates for land mine removal are placing high hopes in Goldsmith, especially since they can no longer rely on some of the big names who previously helped raise awareness, including the late Princess Diana and Beatle Paul McCartney.
This is about where I started losing interest. According to the elite paper of wealth and privilege here, the only causes worth it are ones headed but celebrities and other elite. They aren't hearing the people despite their vaunted claims to corporate liberali$m.
James Hathaway, cofounder of Clear Path, said the movement is confronting “a crisis of interest.”
No. I'm just jaded from lack of change after so many years of being here day after f***ing day.
“In the late nineties and early 2000’s people really cared about this issue,” Hathaway said, “but over time we have lost a princess and a Beatle. This loss of high visibility advocacy has had a serious impact on grass roots support as well as support from private foundations.”
Well, if you hook your $tars to…. never mind. Why am I wasting time typing?
McCartney’s former wife was deeply involved with the land mine issue, Hathway said, and McCartney has been less visible since their divorce.
Hathaway says he is banking on Goldsmith to “introduce our cause to a new audience.”
I love all the subtle puns and wordplay. Makes reading the Globe interesting!
Goldsmith already seems to be having an impact….
Not here.
Goldsmith was an unlikely choice for the role of The Most Interesting Man in the World, which was created by the marketing firm Euro RSCG Worldwide in 2006.
He was up against, in Goldsmith’s retelling, hundreds of mostly “Juan Valdez types.” He was not Latino, nor did he speak Spanish (though he is now learning). In his late 60s, he was also quite a bit older than what the creators were looking for.
Much to his surprise, however, he rose to the top of the pack.
His inspiration, he says, was the late Fernando Lamas, his friend and fellow actor.
Barbara Goldsmith said she thinks one thing that helped her husband clinch the job was her response to the concerns about his age: “How can you be the most interesting man in the world if you’re young?”
Eight years and dozens of commercials later — Goldsmith currently is in California shooting a new batch — the persona continues to be wildly popular, measured by not just by beer sales but the steady number of Internet users plugging in the search term ”most interesting man in the world” to watch the spots.
A few of “the most interesting man’s” calling cards? He can parallel park — a train. Sasquatch takes pictures of HIM. He rides a wild rhinoceros. His passport requires no photograph. The circus ran away to join him.
“He’s helped transform the character into an icon that’s now woven into pop culture,” said Gwendolyn Boyce, the brand director for Dos Equis, which is owned by Heineken.
Aaaagggh! Used to drink that stuff and it is bitter $hit.
Goldsmith clearly relishes the role. Indeed, sometimes it is difficult to tell him apart from his character.
I no longer believe anything I see on a TV screen after all the staged and scripted fabrications and hoaxes. Sorry.
When a reporter asks what makes his portrayal so magnetic, he whispers, “Magnetic?” Then he leans over, and with a devilish grin, pretends to gently caress the questioner’s hand.
But the truth is Goldsmith really has seen it all. He has gone from rags to riches and then done it again.
(Blog editor nearly laughing because of the reinforced dogma regarding the victimized, heroic Jew. Ha-ha-ha-ha! Oh, this is good stuff!)
In the early years, he co-starred with some silver screen legends, such as Burt Lancaster and John Wayne, and caroused with literary icons and playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
But he never really broke through….
He was once so down on his luck he painted houses with fellow out-of-work actor Nicholas Colasanto, later known as the irascible barkeep Coach in the hit television series “Cheers.’’ For a time he drove a garbage truck.
Where everybody knows your name?
When he finally quit Hollywood in disgust — he said he was tired of being told he was too short, too old, or too “swarthy-looking” — Goldsmith managed to remake himself….
Well, he is Jewish. What did he do, grow a few inches?
Then he says he lost it all, going from a jet-setting millionaire with a palatial 122-acre retreat in the Sierra Madres to a nearly penniless drifter living in a campground outside Los Angeles….
Hey, life stinks for a lot of us (and those tent cities are huge now).
It was after reaching retirement age — and facing an uncertain final act — that he reinvented himself again, into his current incantation.
I've never "reinvented" myself. Iyam what Iyam and that's all that Iyam.
At this stage, he says his goal is to leave behind something beyond simply fortune and fame.
There is little in his professional background he is proud of, he acknowledges. But when he looks back on the span of his career two previous roles stand out — and coincidentally, both were about the war in Vietnam.
One was in “Go Tell the Spartans,’’ in which he played a veteran Army sergeant suffering from battle fatigue who commits suicide.
We got a problem with suicides in the military now, I mean like, record levels.
Hello?
The other was in the award-winning TV movie “Green Eyes,’’ about a disillusioned Vietnam veteran who returns in search of his orphaned son.
“I thought about Vietnam my whole life,” Goldsmith says. “I was very concerned about it.”
He now sees his land mine work as a way to help try to do something about that sad chapter in history — “giving back a little of the heart of America, to apologize in a way,” he puts it.
I've already spoken for us on this blog, thanks.
“We ruined an agrarian society,” he added. “For what?”
To destroy a possible model different from private central banking and dependence on globalized corporate trade, and discourage anyone else from even thinking about it.
Goldsmith is planning more travels to highlight the plight of victims in other countries and is also taking up other causes, such as canine cancer, through his work with the Morris Animal Foundation. He plans to take part in an upcoming USO tour to visit American military personnel overseas….
Better watch where you step.
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Also see: Clearing a Path
That would be the snowstorm omitted from my paper.
I $uppo$e I'm ju$t as bad a junkie as the next gal:
"Heroin gains a deadly foothold in Vermont; A flood of cheap heroin has thrust Vermont, land of green hills and sweet vistas, into an addiction crisis, a grave threat to younger residents and to a way of life" by Brian MacQuarrie | Globe Staff, January 19, 2014
ST. ALBANS, Vt. — The 26-year-old single mother of two has no job, cannot afford to fix her car, and faces eviction from a household where chaos is commonplace and opiates remain a temptation.
The view from her kitchen window suggests another life entirely, a postcard world….
A few miles east of St. Albans in far northern Vermont, snow-topped mountains rise majestically from the thick forest. It is a jarring contrast — the serenity, the desperation — that has come to characterize a corner of New England many Americans associate with covered bridges and dairy farms.
Here in Franklin County, hard by the Canadian border, cheap heroin and stolen prescription drugs have ravaged many of Samantha Emerson’s generation and the teenagers coming up behind them. Although Emerson says she is sober now, the battle against addiction still boils inside her and in the state she calls home.
Given her troubles I can understand the wish to get high. Given a choice between suffering straight and suffering in an altered state of mind, who wouldn't?
Vermont, according to its governor, Peter Shumlin, is confronting a “full-blown heroin crisis.”
Gee, I wonder who could be bringing it in.
Interesting, huh?
**********************
Here, the remoteness that makes the state attractive to many Northeast city dwellers has a perverse effect on the price of drugs. It’s a place where dealers from out of state can make much bigger profits than in urban markets where the supply is greater.
I hate to say it, but…. legalize (there I said it quick).
“Every week, our Drug Task Force estimates more than $2 million of heroin and other opiates are being trafficked into Vermont,” Shumlin told lawmakers Jan. 8 in a State of the State address that focused almost exclusively on drugs. “In every corner of our state, heroin and opiate drug addiction threatens us.”
I think I know who is bringing the stuff in, and the money-laundering banks and CIA drug-running operations probably don't help much either.
************************
“We all have friends whose car has been broken into, whose houses were broken into, and we didn’t used to see that,” Shumlin said in an interview in his office. “I’ve just heard of too many Vermonters who are concerned that their safety and security, which we all consider sacred, are being threatened.”
Will a jury convict me if I kill them?
Pinpointing the reason that heroin and other opiates have hit the state hard is difficult, Vermonters say.
No it isn't; it's the left-wing liberal lifestyle.
The scourge here began about a decade ago with drugs such as OxyContin and Percocet, opiates that physicians prescribe as painkillers — often in large amounts to minimize the need for a quick, repeat visit, given that many live a great distance from their doctors, health officials said.
Oh, the GATEWAY DRUG was the PRE$CRIPTION PHARMACEUTICALS, huh?
The pharmaceuticals the doctors are paid for based on how many they pre$cribe?
The pills would often be stored at home in accessible places like medicine cabinets, where teenagers could easily gain access.
And yet authority is all worried about kids getting access to medical marijuana.
As the high became more seductive, authorities said, so did robbery and home invasions to support a habit for drugs such as “Perc 80s,” popular pills that cost about $100 each and pack 80 milligrams of the painkiller Percocet.
“I was literally in love with OxyContin,” said Emerson, who lives off a muddy dirt road….
But at that price, a habit that cost hundreds of dollars a day became difficult to sustain.
Not if you are in the 1%.
And then pharmaceutical manufacturers repackaged drugs such as OxyContin, which users previously had crushed into powder and snorted, to make them harder to abuse.
Enter heroin, an opiate with a vastly cheaper price….
See: Heroin is Here
How ironic that the pre$criptions turn them into heroin addicts, huh?
Maybe you kids should try meth instead.
Here on the front lines of battle, activists such as Dr. Fred Holmes, a longtime local pediatrician [and] slight, gray-haired man with a gentle smile, said, “It’s part of their culture.”
The war framing and terminology on every issue seems to be part of my paper's.
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Talking forthrightly about opiate abuse has become central to the counterattack against drugs. Frank discussion was slow to begin in Vermont, but the floodgates have opened in a state where Yankee reticence is strong….
They got a film you can watch.
“If you were here a year ago, you would have seen a downtown in decline. It looked that way, and it was getting worse,” Gamache said. “Now we’re feeling good about ourselves.”
On a high, huh?
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Gratefully, my fix is the smells-like-a-pos Globe. and I'm not as delusional.
