Thorsten Kaye! That's THorsten.
With a th-.
Like think and thing and...um...thistle? Sure. Why not?
Reason I Assumed Sweetie Liked Him: Looking at the picture Sweetie posted:With a th-.
Like think and thing and...um...thistle? Sure. Why not?
You don't know him without you have become acquainted with "Actors Who Dislike The Letter H," or are an expert detective, like I am.
Seriously. Those are really the only two ways to know him, especially if you're Sweetie, who swears she doesn't watch soap operas even though soap operas frequently turn up on our DVR -- turn up more frequently than The Daily Show, which I try to tape and which never tapes so that when I go to find it on the list to watch it, I can't, and I have a conversation with Sweetie that goes like this:
Me: Did "The Daily Show" tape?
Sweetie: I don't watch soap operas!
Me: I'm not sure why you'd bring that up, but now that you mention it, there are, like, 50 soap operas taped here.
Sweetie: Mr Bunches isn't wearing pants!
In fairness, almost every one of our conversations ends that way these days.
But Thorsten Kaye has really only appeared in soap operas. According to his IMDB page, he's been in soap operas since 2000, with only bit parts before that. Or at least I think they're bit parts; for all I know, "Dr. Nick Harris" may have been the lead in Shark Attack 2. (I never watched that movie, because I didn't see Shark Attack 1, so I worried that I'd be lost in the plot: Why are these sharks attacking? I need context!)
Thorsten Kaye was also in the movie that is one of my biggest pet peeves ever, the stupid movie "The [Stupid] Bone [Stupid] Collector," the movie with Denzel Washington as a paralyzed guy who solves crimes by using Angelina Jolie as his eyes and ears (and legs and arms, etc.) That movie was stupid on a lot of levels (as I very subtly hinted at there) but none were more so than the fact that the killer, in the end, turned out to not only be the last guy you'd suspect and also the guy who's closest to Denzel Washington... his nurse [AHA! SEE? I DIDN'T GIVE YOU A 'SPOILER ALERT!' BECAUSE I HATED THIS MOVIE SO BAD I WANT NOBODY TO WATCH IT AND NOW I WRECKED IT FOR YOU!]. No, it's not bad enough that the movie drops into cliches like that. To make it worse, the writers of the movie also gave the only clue or background to the nurse's being the killer during the opening credits montage, when you as the viewer are zoning out, eating your snacks and wondering why moviemakers just don't start the movie without title sequences.
The opening credits for The [Remarkably Stupid] Bone Collector are a bunch of images of newspaper articles about how brilliant Denzel is -- because in real life police investigators are not mentioned here and there and sometimes profiled in the papers; no, in real life, investigators (like millionaire industrialists) are in the main headline every single day on every single news source.
And buried in those images is a quick headline about a guy whose dad is killed or something and he turns out to be the killer's dad, so the killer (we're left to imagine) went to school and learned to be a nurse and then got himself hired by a crippled policeman without any kind of background check and then didn't immediately kill him but let him suffer for a while...
It was stupid.
And Thorsten Kaye
was a stuntman in it.
So, anyway, that's how you know him: he was in a stupid movie, or he's in soap operas that Sweetie never watches ever, ever, or...
Thing That Makes You Go Hmmm About Him: you know of the apparently-secret and obviously-small group "Actors Who Dislike The Letter H."
I wasn't told in advance who this week's Hunk was, and I got up this morning to write this and didn't want to wake Sweetie up, so I had to do some detective work. Not "detective work" like "Lie in a bed while Angelina Jolie crawls through a tiny passageway and a nurse who will improbably turn out to be the killer hovers nearby," though. It was more like "Look at Sweetie's Internet Search History" detective work, going back to Thursday to find an image labeled as being from Thorsten Kaye, and then googling him to see if he matched the guy whose face has been plastered all over our desktop this week.
He did, and about as I found that, Sweetie also came down.
"I figured out who your Hunk of the Week is," I told her.
"How'd you do that?"
I explained, and said "It's Thorsten Kaye," pronouncing his name the correct way -- that is, with the "h" pronounced because I am a firm believer in Pronouncing The H.
"Torsten Kaye," Sweetie corrected me, not Pronouncing The H.
We then went back and forth a few times, with me pronouncing the H and Sweetie not, before we both got the distinct feeling that up in his room, asleep, Mr Bunches didn't have pants on, and that ended it.
But I can't let it drop. His name is Thorsten Kaye. There's an H in it. And yes, I know that I have an "e" on the end of my first name that is stupid and a silent e and that is not pronounced, but silent e is a concept that has long been recognized in Western Society, whereas silent H is not... not... a concept that is recognized by anyone outside of Sweetie, Tiffani Amber Thiessen, and my old anthropology teacher who used to say "neander-tall" instead of "neander-thal," and who drove me nuts for an entire semester with that.
Here's why I'm so opposed to a Silent H: It sounds dumb. When someone says Torsten Kaye or Tiffani Amber Tiessen or neandertall, our minds all mentally flash the way the word is spelled on a screen in our brain. We see Thorsten and Thiessen and neanderthal and it makes us think that the person talking has some sort of speech impediment.
Also, isn't one silent letter enough? Where's this going to end? Can we all just pick and choose which letters we're going to pronounce and which one's we're not? Are we not that far away from someone introducing themselves by handing us a card that has the name "Jefferson Louis Smitherton" on it and they say "It's pronounced Jon. The e, f, f, e, r, s, o, n, L, o, u, i s, S, m, i t, h, e, r, and t, are silent."
Or what about someone who decides all the letters in his or her name are silent? How long until Prince tries that one?
So let's just get this straight: Silent H is not okay. It's not a thing we're going to do, as a society. If there's an H in your name, you pronounce it. I'm putting my foot down. And I'm in charge of things like this, because I said so. So Thorsten, Tiffani, and neanderthals -- and people who want to talk about them -- say the H. Or I will be mad at you.
Seriously. Those are really the only two ways to know him, especially if you're Sweetie, who swears she doesn't watch soap operas even though soap operas frequently turn up on our DVR -- turn up more frequently than The Daily Show, which I try to tape and which never tapes so that when I go to find it on the list to watch it, I can't, and I have a conversation with Sweetie that goes like this:
Me: Did "The Daily Show" tape?
Sweetie: I don't watch soap operas!
Me: I'm not sure why you'd bring that up, but now that you mention it, there are, like, 50 soap operas taped here.
Sweetie: Mr Bunches isn't wearing pants!
In fairness, almost every one of our conversations ends that way these days.
But Thorsten Kaye has really only appeared in soap operas. According to his IMDB page, he's been in soap operas since 2000, with only bit parts before that. Or at least I think they're bit parts; for all I know, "Dr. Nick Harris" may have been the lead in Shark Attack 2. (I never watched that movie, because I didn't see Shark Attack 1, so I worried that I'd be lost in the plot: Why are these sharks attacking? I need context!)
Thorsten Kaye was also in the movie that is one of my biggest pet peeves ever, the stupid movie "The [Stupid] Bone [Stupid] Collector," the movie with Denzel Washington as a paralyzed guy who solves crimes by using Angelina Jolie as his eyes and ears (and legs and arms, etc.) That movie was stupid on a lot of levels (as I very subtly hinted at there) but none were more so than the fact that the killer, in the end, turned out to not only be the last guy you'd suspect and also the guy who's closest to Denzel Washington... his nurse [AHA! SEE? I DIDN'T GIVE YOU A 'SPOILER ALERT!' BECAUSE I HATED THIS MOVIE SO BAD I WANT NOBODY TO WATCH IT AND NOW I WRECKED IT FOR YOU!]. No, it's not bad enough that the movie drops into cliches like that. To make it worse, the writers of the movie also gave the only clue or background to the nurse's being the killer during the opening credits montage, when you as the viewer are zoning out, eating your snacks and wondering why moviemakers just don't start the movie without title sequences.
The opening credits for The [Remarkably Stupid] Bone Collector are a bunch of images of newspaper articles about how brilliant Denzel is -- because in real life police investigators are not mentioned here and there and sometimes profiled in the papers; no, in real life, investigators (like millionaire industrialists) are in the main headline every single day on every single news source.
And buried in those images is a quick headline about a guy whose dad is killed or something and he turns out to be the killer's dad, so the killer (we're left to imagine) went to school and learned to be a nurse and then got himself hired by a crippled policeman without any kind of background check and then didn't immediately kill him but let him suffer for a while...
It was stupid.
And Thorsten Kaye
was a stuntman in it.
So, anyway, that's how you know him: he was in a stupid movie, or he's in soap operas that Sweetie never watches ever, ever, or...
Thing That Makes You Go Hmmm About Him: you know of the apparently-secret and obviously-small group "Actors Who Dislike The Letter H."
I wasn't told in advance who this week's Hunk was, and I got up this morning to write this and didn't want to wake Sweetie up, so I had to do some detective work. Not "detective work" like "Lie in a bed while Angelina Jolie crawls through a tiny passageway and a nurse who will improbably turn out to be the killer hovers nearby," though. It was more like "Look at Sweetie's Internet Search History" detective work, going back to Thursday to find an image labeled as being from Thorsten Kaye, and then googling him to see if he matched the guy whose face has been plastered all over our desktop this week.
He did, and about as I found that, Sweetie also came down.
"I figured out who your Hunk of the Week is," I told her.
"How'd you do that?"
I explained, and said "It's Thorsten Kaye," pronouncing his name the correct way -- that is, with the "h" pronounced because I am a firm believer in Pronouncing The H.
"Torsten Kaye," Sweetie corrected me, not Pronouncing The H.
We then went back and forth a few times, with me pronouncing the H and Sweetie not, before we both got the distinct feeling that up in his room, asleep, Mr Bunches didn't have pants on, and that ended it.
But I can't let it drop. His name is Thorsten Kaye. There's an H in it. And yes, I know that I have an "e" on the end of my first name that is stupid and a silent e and that is not pronounced, but silent e is a concept that has long been recognized in Western Society, whereas silent H is not... not... a concept that is recognized by anyone outside of Sweetie, Tiffani Amber Thiessen, and my old anthropology teacher who used to say "neander-tall" instead of "neander-thal," and who drove me nuts for an entire semester with that.
Here's why I'm so opposed to a Silent H: It sounds dumb. When someone says Torsten Kaye or Tiffani Amber Tiessen or neandertall, our minds all mentally flash the way the word is spelled on a screen in our brain. We see Thorsten and Thiessen and neanderthal and it makes us think that the person talking has some sort of speech impediment.
Also, isn't one silent letter enough? Where's this going to end? Can we all just pick and choose which letters we're going to pronounce and which one's we're not? Are we not that far away from someone introducing themselves by handing us a card that has the name "Jefferson Louis Smitherton" on it and they say "It's pronounced Jon. The e, f, f, e, r, s, o, n, L, o, u, i s, S, m, i t, h, e, r, and t, are silent."
Or what about someone who decides all the letters in his or her name are silent? How long until Prince tries that one?
So let's just get this straight: Silent H is not okay. It's not a thing we're going to do, as a society. If there's an H in your name, you pronounce it. I'm putting my foot down. And I'm in charge of things like this, because I said so. So Thorsten, Tiffani, and neanderthals -- and people who want to talk about them -- say the H. Or I will be mad at you.
Didn't give me much to go on. Because he doesn't wear a tie? Because he's got that pointy Adam's apple that once you notice it you can't not notice it, ever? Because his hair is kind of wavy?
I decided it's probably the hair. Or the butt-chin. Sweetie likes those.
Actual Reason Sweetie Likes Him: I'll ask her. Hang on:
Me: Hey, Sweetie, why do you like Thorsten Kaye and please pronounce his name with an "H."?
Sweetie: "Because he's ruggedly handsome and he has that butt chin..."
[pause while I raise my arms in victory]
..."and he's that sexy age that you just know he'd be the type that would make you do everything his way and he'd be bossy..." and I cut her off there because Sweetie was about to begin reciting from her erotic fan fiction story based on "Dr. Nick" from Shark 2.
Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him: First, I was right about the butt chin! And second, here's an excerpt from Sweetie's erotic fan fiction, "Dr Nick and The Sharks Of Love:"
"Dr Nick stared into the monitor that scientists use to look at things in movies. Next to him stood the sexy scientist who looked a lot like Sweetie. Her name was Sweetie. She was wearing a scientific bikini. As they both watched the Second Shark approach the boat, Dr. Nick's hand fell across Sweetie's hand when they both reached for one button. Then Sweetie's scientific bikini came off, and she realized that Dr Nick was not wearing any pants..."
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