High on the hog

Pig bomb! (Via Brent.)

The Florestine Collection

A story about Helen Hill and how her husband Paul Gailiunas finished her last film.

I'm heading to South Carolina tomorrow for the premiere; it is a bittersweet prospect, but it will be good to see so many of Helen's family and friends gathered in one place, and of course I am very much looking forward to seeing the film itself. I visited Helen and Paul in New Orleans not long after she had first discovered those dresses in trash bags on the curb, and the brightness of her face as she described the treasure and showed me some of the dresses is still very vivid to me.

(It may have been the same visit where she introduced me to Rosie the pig, a delightful housemate, and warned me that if I had a lipstick in my bag, I had better put the bag up out of reach on a high shelf: pigs will root through handbags and snuffle up as delicious anything that is made of animal or vegetable fat!)

Postscript

My favorite animal that I saw in Costa Rica was neither indigenous nor wild. We were sitting at a roadside place eating tipico for lunch and something caught our eye: a little boy walking along the side of the road with the most adorable little black piglet tucked under his arm! The woman he was walking with had another one (each was wrapped in a bandana), and they came over and let us hold them ourselves; NB these were not rustic pigs, they were pigs bred for the pet market, our guide gathered that they cost about $85 each and wouldn't grow to be very large. These little pigs were the cutest things you ever saw! I wanted one desperately...

(There were also any number of appealing dogs wandering around - pets, but untethered pets - dogs of all shapes and sizes, and even a cat or two, including a slightly battle-scarred gray-and-white cat that seemed to live at the Hotel Fonda Vela. Costa Rica is a nation of animal lovers!)

Schweine!

I would love to see the Stuttgart pig museum... (Link via Marginal Revolution.)