Vancouver WA cow
Somewhere I have a picture just like this of Bob in Germany posing with a cow. I’m going to look for it this weekend.
Bob went down with some horrible non-Superbowl related flu on Sunday. He’s been staggering around here with a sad look on his face. One more day at home and he should be back in action.
This morning I finished my book The Dirt by the band Mötley Crüe. I was a big Crüe fan back in the day and saw them when the Shout at the Devil tour came to the UCSB campus. I would love to have been a bug on the wall in the ECEN (the venue) admin office the Monday after that show. I’ll bet a few heads rolled. My own personal experience of that weekend lived up to the Crüe search and destroy ethos and was fun the way that the irresponsible and inconsiderate asshole behavior is when you’re 20 years old. We’ll leave it at that.
At one point, I owned every album up to Girls Girls Girls. I didn’t think I had any of them any more but I was wrong. I still have Too Fast for Love AND Shout at the Devil. I listened to a little Shout at the Devil yesterday afternoon and it sounded fantastic.
The first 100 pages of the book is hard to read without running to the bathroom to take a shower. A phrase like pure unmitigated debauchery doesn’t begin to cover it. And they went on like that for years. Drugs, booze, women and destruction. And they’re pretty straightforward about their personal shortcomings.
But after awhile they’re just whiny and come off as addicted to their own victim-drama. How sorry am I supposed to feel for a filthy rich and famous rockstar who’s indulged himself in every urge to please himself at the expense of everyone around him? Like it’s a major personal insight that life is hard and less of an insight that they brought a lot of it on themselves.
After I finished the book I did a quick trip through the NY Times and there’s a story about Jay McInerney and he’s going on about what it was like being young and successful and famous and how hard it was to hold it together. wah.
I wish I skied. I don’t think there will ever be a better day to ski in the PAC NW than this Sunday.
100 Best First Lines from Novels
#7 riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. -James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
On the basis of this I can tell you with great confidence that I will never read this book.
#17 Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. -James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Now I can tell you that I will never read James Joyce, period.
#21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. -James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Oh. Maybe I’d try this one.
Two favorites from books I’ve read:
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. -William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. -C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
Two favorites from books I haven’t read:
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.-George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.-Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
Last night I got a call asking me to participate in a survey having to do with healthcare in Washington. My usual policy is to refuse to talk to anyone I don’t know when they call me on the phone during the evening while I’m trying to eat and watch my shows. But in this case, I’d already eaten and I did have a vague recollection of some flier sent to the house about a problem with Washington healthcare so I went along with it.
He said it was 15-20 minutes and he wasn’t kidding. Geez, there are few things we didn’t talk about. Both actual questions about my health, habits, recent illnesses mental and physicial and questions about my healthcare coverage and random situations in my household. Like: did we have a carbon monoxide detector? (no) did we read the little flier we get about our drinking water quality? (yes) do we have a gas powered generator in our home? (no) in the past year have we gone without phone service for more than two weeks not related to weather outages? (no) have I ever heard of radon? (no).
It went on and on. A lot of the questions were about my general health and as we were going through it was like, “I am kicking ass on this survey!” have you been so depressed you couldn’t get out of bed? (no!) have you ever been diagnosed with heart disease? (no!) used drugs with needles even just one time or had sex w/ someone who has? (no!) something about chicken pox in the past 2 years (no!)
Then we got to the alcoholic beverage intake question: in the last 30 days, how many days have you consumed at least 1 alcoholic beverage? (um, 30) how many days have you consumed at least 2 alcoholic beverages? (um, 30) how many days have you consumed 4 or more alcoholic beverages (zero, yes!)
I already posted this once and then deleted because it was taking too long to figure out exactly what I wanted to say and it didn’t come out sounding right. Instead of an opinion I’ll just give you the URLs and you can track down the stories and think about them quietly to yourself.
Recently several writers have been revealed as big fat liars. First, there was J.T. Leroy whose fake past included a stint as a truck-stop hooker and a drug-fueled time in San Francisco. I read one J.T. Leroy thing and thought he was a fawning nitwit. Turns out he was invented by a couple who claimed to have saved him from this life and was played by the man’s half sister.
Then there was James Frey whose tall tales were exposed by Smoking Gun and he got a good public flogging on Oprah for his trouble.
Then there’s the author whose fake name is Nasdijj who pretended to be a Navajo Indian when he wrote his heart-wrenching and totally made up memoir. The LA Weekly provides evidence that the writer is actually a former actor and gay porn writer.
Sherman Alexie read the memoir in galleys and quickly identified it as a fake. In spite of his objections, the book was published. When the author’s alleged true identity was revealed, Alexie wrote a piece for Time:
In 1999 a Native American writer, born fragile and poor on a destitute Indian reservation, published an essay, "The Blood Runs like a River Through My Dreams," in Esquire. It earned a National Magazine Award nomination and was later expanded into a memoir of the same title that became a finalist for a PEN/Martha Albrand Award. That rez-to-riches tale of courage and redemption sounds like a Horatio Alger story, doesn't it? … Of course, I'm biased, because, well, it's my story. Kind of.
Read the full story here.
On that topic, The National Review also does a story about people who claim to be Indian but are not claiming it’s “almost epidemic” which seems a little hysterical to me, but it’s worth a read.
Between 1960 and 2000, the number of Americans claiming Indian ancestry on their census forms jumped by a factor of six. Neither birthrates nor counting methodologies can account for this explosive growth. Instead, the phenomenon arises in large part from the increasingly idealistic place Indians occupy in the popular imagination. Much of it is based on harmless sentiment mixed into a hash of unverifiable family legends and wishful thinking among folks who hang dreamcatchers from their rearview mirrors.
The entire story is here.
A Girl’s First Drill
Remember back in November when I said I asked my Dad for a drill for xmas? (For some reason that’s not linking to the exact post so you have to scroll down to Nov 4 if you want to see it.) Well, I got one. It’s really cool. You have one battery that you charge and an extra so you can drill with one and have another on standby. You know, when you have a really busy day of drilling ahead of you. And it has a keyless chunk and 2 speed gear and there are bits and kibbles and all sorts of neat parts.
I need to think of some drilling projects. Maybe there’s an abandoned house somewhere and I can drill holes in the walls all day. Have you seen that commercial where that girl goes to Home Despot and the employee is this dad-like for real helpful person who helps her get her whole apartment spiffed up in an afternoon? That’s more than I’ve done in the last, um, eight years since we bought the house. Oh well, I’ve seen 5 seasons of Angel and 7 seasons of Buffy. Not like I wasn’t doing anything. And now that I have a drill that’s all going to change.
We’ve got a smoke alarm to reinstall. Let’s see how many holes I have to make before I can get it right.
Later, pumpkin pie baking. After this, only 12 more cups of pumpkin left.
I call this one: Picnic Area Closed
I finished a fantastic book yesterday: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re lucky because you have something to look forward to. I’ve been close to the end for ages but I have such a hard time reading right before bed these days. On the weekdays I’m fried and I’ll read a chapter or two and then I can’t remember anything the next day and I’m too lazy to read it again.
During this book I got some characters confused. But it’s over 800 pages and I was happy to be there for most of it. I woke up at 3am yesterday but I was thrilled because I was wide awake and had no interruptions and could finish the book.
It’s about magicians in England in the early 1800’s and it has so many incredible details, and footnotes and side stories and background stuff that it became hard for me to believe the author had made it all up. (She does blend in some actual historical figures, I understand that she didn’t make those up). I chose a few things to check online and everything lead back to the author. What an imagination.
It’s not raining at this second and it would be a good time to get back out there and hack at the roses, except my hands and arms are sore from yesterday. Perhaps a more powerful pair of nippers is needed.
Happy 250th Birthday Mozart. I was going to write some sort of informative blurb here but I forgot about it earlier and at the moment have no interest. My loss I’m sure. I like his movie, Amadeus and his Kugeln. (Jesus Christ, I wanted to link Kugeln just in case you didn’t know what I’m talking about {delicious candy treat} but I got about 100 links that want you to buy some shite. Commerce and information do not belong on the same highway.)
I found out why the rose bushes that divide our front lawn from our neighbors have been ignored for the past 2 years: they thought they were ours.
As soon as she said it I realized I should have figured that out. I guess I should back up. There are about 8 rose bushes in a narrow dirt plot that divides our front yard from the house next door. When we bought the house I asked about it and the realtors said it was theirs and sure enough, our neighbor Lorraine took care of the roses.
Then she sold the house and it became a rental and new neighbors moved in and being the anti-social person that I am, I only learned the man’s name when he dropped off our netflix that had been mis-delivered and I learned the woman’s name today, while they are in the process of moving out. Go team.
The roses have been 100% neglected since Lorraine left and I decided I couldn’t bear to watch this another year so I’d just buck up and take care of them myself. But as I was hacking away at them, it occurred to me that perhaps I should have at least asked first and paranoid visions of lawsuits passed through my mind, like maybe these roses were abandoned as part of an important NASA science project and there would be untold damages by my clippers.
As I was in the middle of it, the woman drove up so I went right over for the first time in 2 years and introduced myself and expressed my hope that they wouldn’t mind that I’d adopted their roses as a personal project.
“Oh,” she said, “When we moved in we were told they were yours.”
