I’ve been in a bit of a morbid headspace due to recent events. So, when Twitter lit up with Brittany Murphy RIP tweets, I’m not proud of it, but I popped over to TMZ to see what happened. I made the correct assumption that TMZ would have the most up-to-the-minute info on anything really depressing and dismal involving bad things happening to a celebrity.

TMZ in fact was updating every few minutes with stuff like UPDATE 4:07 PM ET — A rep for Murphy tells TMZ, “In this time of sadness, the family thanks you for your love and support. It is their wish that you respect their privacy.” They followed this up with paparazzi photos of Brittany Murphy’s grieving husband coming back home from the hospital, after his wife had been pronounced dead. Here is where it gets kind of hilarious. If you have a very very very dark sense of humor.

The stated cause of death for Brittany Murphy was cardiac arrest. Because she was a talented actress, it was common assumption, after her star turn in the meth addict movie Spun, that she was a big ol’ druggee. See Robert Downey Jr.’s performance in Less Than Zero for the classic example of this phenomenon. I think that, if I managed actors, I would tell only untalented ones to ever play drug addicts in films.

Brittany Murphy has also long been rumored to have struggled with anorexia. Less mean-spirited people seem to give credence to this, than to the cocaine and methamphetamine rumors. Brittany Murphy often appeared painfully thin and one of the dangers of anorexia is the strain it puts on the heart. She also confirmed in many interviews that the reason she steered clear of Hollywood’s powder rails, even for role research, was having a congenital heart murmur called mitral valve prolapse.

So TMZ posts photos of the widower Simon Monjack on his lawn and there are like twenty pages of incredulous posts from “fans” who just can’t believe someone as beautiful and talented as Brittany Murphy could have married a fat guy. Wow. I wonder why, in a world like that, anyone could have problems with anorexia. It is funny because it is so awful. Hollywood Haunted Tours has added Brittany Murphy’s house to the list of stops on their tour of supa dupa fun celebrity death-related sites.

Why is Roman Polanski’s arrest such a cause celebre? I’m not an expert on the case, but I have read the grand jury testimony of Polanski’s thirteen-year-old victim, and it is pretty convincing and pretty damning. I understand that Samantha Geimer (then Samantha Gailey) publicly requested leniency for Roman Polanski, in the hopes that he could collect his big deal Oscar and she and her family could avoid the pain of being bothered again about something which was now decades in the past.

A lot of people seem to think that the intervening decades Roman Polanski spent in France were some kind of hardship equivalent to prison. First of all, Roman Polanski was a filmmaker in Poland in the 1950’s, but he left for France and then began making movies in the UK in the 1960’s. So the fact that he was making movies in the United States in the 1970’s does not mean that it was a hardship for him to then go make movies in another country. That was something he tended to switch up anyway. And he fled to France allegedly because he thought there was a chance that, instead of just getting the 42 days of time served, the judge might sentence him to a whole 90 days, minus the 42, for a total of 48 days behind bars.

What does anyone think the punishment would be today for a 43-year-old man who got a 13-year-old girl alone, plied her with booze, and then just brought her home after speaking about inappropriate subjects with her. Now add illegal drugs, forced sex, and introducing the girl to her very first anal rape. A new commission of a crime like this would get a long sentence of the sort where he might be killed by fellow inmates.

I understand that Roman Polanski has managed to achieve some great things in the face of horrific hardships. He lost his mother to the Holocaust and he lost his wife to Charles Manson and The Family committing the Tate-LaBianca murders. His wife was his eight months pregnant actress wife Sharon Tate. I do think it makes sense to consider how many forty somethings anally rape junior high school kids without having also had hard lives themselves.

But he still managed to direct Chinatown, a movie about California’s shady water rights history, and make it an interesting noir. Then again, Chinatown also benefited from the talents of the brilliant writer Robert Towne on the job and two actors widely considered to be some of the best of both their own generation and many others, Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It is generally agreed that Roman Polanski got into such heated debates with Faye Dunaway on set that he even pulled out pieces of her hair. So, not a stranger to violence against women.

A lot of people, who aren’t me, also liked Rosemary’s Baby, so I accept that was an accomplishment, even though not entertaining to me. And a lot of people found The Pianist very poignant. The Pianist could have been from the heart or the tale of the talented Jewish musician trying to continue to create under the shadow of the Third Reich could have been a cynical ploy to get an Oscar and get to be self-righteous about not being able to come to the Academy Awards because of fear of arrest.

I’ve lived in Europe and most Europeans agree that France is a wonderful place to live. In point of fact, the Germans have invaded France every chance they got throughout history in pursuit of the best living. Hence the German expression for the best the world has to offer: Leben wie Gott in Frankreich. Roman Polanski has been married to the beautiful actress/rocker chick Emmanuelle Seigner since apparently 1989, when she was twenty-three. Or, to put in another way, there are even more years between her age and Polanski’s than between him and his 1977 victim. But it’s just different when you go after a twenty-three-year-old versus a thirteen-year-old.

So Roman Polanski’s big hardship is that, he couldn’t serve 48 more days in the loony bin ward of the prison (not the main population) and this meant that it is now, thirty some years later, terribly inconvenient for him to go to all the galas honoring him and his achievements. He was arrested on his way to receive a special award at a Zurich film festival when he was detained by Swiss authorities, who are perhaps less sexually open-minded than the French.

It honestly strikes me that Roman Polanski was going to get just a slap on the wrist for a pretty serious acquaintance assault because people felt sorry for him for having had bad things happen to him and maybe enjoyed his work. It seems like he might have gotten at least a few of his awards for the same reason because it seems peculiar that Americans go on and on about his greatness as a filmmaker without being able to name ten things he has done.

And does good art entirely excuse really bad behavior?

In 2005, an Alaskan named Billy Powers and his kids built a sixteen foot snowman. It is not clear how the giant Frosty lookalike came to be known by the moniker of Snowzilla, but the attributes of being monstrously giant and made of snow probably both had something to do with it.

There is nothing like an enormous snowman to capture the hearts and minds of people who love to frolic in the snow. I hope the denizens of Anchorage enjoy frolicking in the snow. According to City Data, Anchorage has a significantly above average crime rate, but Alaskans get to enjoy sixty inches of snow a year to make up for the extra arson, assault, murder, and so forth. Then again, the Anchorage airport is named after extremely indicted U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, so maybe the people of Anchorage enjoy crime more than snow after all is said and done.

Somebody in Anchorage sure is Grinch-y, anyway, because city zoning stopped the Powers family and friends from completing their annual Snowzilla in 2008. Apparently, some Scrooge felt that the joyful snow behemoth disrupted traffic patterns by attracting rubberneckers and camera crews. Reportedly, all but the head of Snowzilla was complete when the order for his execution was handed down. Snowzilla may be missing his head, but some people in Anchorage are going to be getting coal in their stockings this year for lacking a heart.

People tend to be most open-minded about trying new things when they are first being romanced. For example, most people are extra-likely to taste a new food or listen to a new band then they start dating someone new. By this scientific equation, I hope that readers perusing the erotic portraiture of BlueBlood.com will be feeling extra-receptive to new ideas.

One of the most important messages I would like people to internalize from Blue Blood is that having purple hair or a tattoo or a pervy wardrobe in no way makes a person a second class citizen. You are entitled to the rewards of the larger society. You are entitled to the same love as anyone, whether or not your sex is a bit kinkier than average.

The ancient Romans celebrated Lupercalia on the Ides of February by whipping hot girls with portions of sacrificed goat. (The Ides is the 15th day of a month, for those of you who have repressed your Julius Ceasar studies.) Historians can’t agree on the origins of Lupercalia or precisely which gods the festival honored. They are pretty solid on the format for the party though. If you wish to throw a Lupercalia event, you will need a variety of eligible maidens, two goats, and a dog. The idea is to sacrifice the animals and then hit the girls with pieces of them in order to ensure fertility, painless childbirth, and general sensuality. A match-making lottery is optional but considered to be part of the tradition. Sort of the bloody pagan version of a 70’s key party. Blue Blood is not really down with the animal sacrifice portion of the show because we love our dogs and goats far too much for that.

In non-ancient Roman and non-70’s times, having an unusual piercing or wearing your lingerie in public can mean that your love life is limited to brief conversations with strangers off MySpace you message for 2am threesomes. But it doesn’t have to. There is no rule that thinking for yourself, owning your sexuality, and dressing flamboyantly equals eschewing all sentimentality and always feeling alone on Valentines Day. So I’m thinking I know more people who celebrate Valentines Day than Lupercalia.

Historians appear to be even more confused about the origins of Valentines Day than they are about the origins of the older Lupercalia. There are three different dudes various factions present as being the patron saint of romance. Most folks these days celebrate Valentines Day February 14th with hearts and flowers and, of course, sentimental greeting cards in both digital and paper form. Some scholars argue that the match-making lottery tickets of Lupercalia were the first Valentines. I feel that a date lottery ticket is no more a Valentine than the keys to some guy’s Porsche (unless maybe I got to keep the car.) The medieval Xtians appear to have come up with a variety of different mythologies and rituals in attempts to co-opt and dilute the pagan Lupercalia rites. Difficult to discern which one was the most successful, but, by the 1700’s, it is well-documented that there was a thriving Hallmarkian industry which created pre-made cards for Valentines Day and produced books with suggestions of how to express one’s love.

So flowers are pretty and an obvious gift, but how did hearts get associated with Valentines Day? Cadbury, founded in 1824, is credited with producing the first heart-shaped box of chocolate. Perhaps it is because of the way one’s heart beats when aroused or in love. Not that a heart shape is shaped much like a human heart. There are vaguely disgusting treatises on how what we consider to be heart-shaped is more similar in structure to a cow’s heart than a human heart. I’m not sure if those who study this are proponents of cattle-fucking or what.

Whether you prefer pieces of sacrificed animals or pieces of chocolate, there is someone out there who is the perfect match for you. If you have already found them, Valentines Day is the perfect holiday to celebrate your good fortune. As part of Blue Blood’s Valentines Day greetings to all of you, Forrest Black and I photographed a professional piercer, the lovely purple-tressed Natalie Addams, cutting out her own heart, gift-boxing it, and sewing up the “wound” with quite genuine play piercings. The Cadbury chocolate boxes of the mid-1800’s were made with velvet and mirrors. So we just had to say Happy Blue Blood-style Valentines Day with a bloody heart in a spooky ornate gift box! We’re traditional like that.

Happy Valentines Day!