Things I Love

Today, a bit of a random one, but Billie Piper. I love Billie Piper. Partly this post results from the MP3 choosing both "Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick" and "Honey to the Bee" yesterday. And then I read this inexplicable review in the New Yorker: "Your response to 'Mansfield Park' will depend a lot on how you feel about the performance of Billie Piper as Fanny, a character that Austen's own mother called 'insipid.' Piper, now twenty-five, was a teen-age pop star and tabloid magnet and then became famous again as an actress in the British TV series 'Doctor Who'; her face, with its huge brown eyes and lips that appear to have been stung by an entire press gang of bees, is fascinating without being truly engaging." I can't figure out whether she likes Billie or doesn't, so I'll proclaim right here that Billie Piper took my least favorite Jane Austen novel--in fact, one I actively disliked--and made it bearable. So she gets a shout-out in my Lenten list.