The Information Age

I am going to make an admission here, I am an information junkie. I need to know everything about whatever is tickling my fancy at the time and I need to know now. I have always been this way. When a boyfriend told me about a group he liked, I read everything I could find about them in the library and listened to every record they had. When I was in love with football, I checked out every book my college library had on Walter Payton. After watching Eight Men Out I actually wrote a paper on the 1919 Black Sox. This habit has only gotten worse with the advent of the Internet. I am constantly looking someone or something up on google, testing out theories I have...I am a little sick, I know.

Where I am I going with this? I'll tell you. I couple of years ago I was watching something about Bob Hope. They were talking about how he entertained the troops for all of those years, from WWII to Vietnam and beyond. Now I am not all that old, 38, so I only remember Mr. Hope from all of those specials he had on as I was growing up, and I had no sense of the kind of man he was. I assumed he was a good man because he really put himself in harms way to entertain the troops, especially during WWII. Then they (whatever show it was) showed a pic of him with Frances Langford, a singer in his show. Something about it made me think that ol' Bob had more going on than met the eye. I researched and found a book The Secret Life of Bob Hope by Groucho Marx son Arthur. I had suspected that Bob was a bit of a philanderer and Arthur confirmed it for me. However, instead of being happy that my hunch was right, and that I found my answer, I was disgusted. With Bob... why no. Arthur Marx quite obviously hated Bob so much that everything he (Bob) did was somehow nefarious. EVERYTHING. He only entertained the troops so he could screw around, in Arthur Marx's opinion that is. A few of the women that he messed around with met bad ends YEARS AND YEARS after their involvement with Hope, but somehow it was his fault. He did well with realestate investing, that means he's evil! I recently picked this book up again and was mad all over again reading this smear job. Now I will say that if half of the things Arthur Marx says about Bob is true (and probably more than half are true), then he was a bastard in many ways. It's just that the book was written in such a mean spirited way that instead of changing my high opinion of Bob Hope, it has soured me on Arthur Marx.

Okay, vent over.