Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Playing too much Bioshock
I really, really want to write a post raving about Bioshock, but the words aren’t flowing tonight. They’re not flowing because I played too much Bioshock last night and had bad dreams and slept crappily*. Like:
Karen and I are trapped at one end of our house. Downstairs, there are zombies. [No zombies in Bioshock; just little girls who harvest precious Adam from fallen corpses, that’s all.] At the other end of the house are our eight-year-old daughter and our new baby girl. [No, we don’t have two daughters. It’s a DREAM.]
Harvest or rescue the Little Sister? Choices, choices . . .
I make my way through the attic until I am over the girls’ bedroom. I lower myself through the attic door, grab the baby, and pull her to safety. Then I hear the vanishing scream of my older daughter as she is dragged away by zombies.
The baby, I tuck between sheets of fiberglass insulation, where she will be safe. Safe from zombies, anyway. She’ll probably die from a horrible lung disease at age 35 from fiberglass and rat shit in her lungs, but at least she’ll live to age 35. I have another goal now: I have to find the older girl.
Creeping through the house, armed only with a wrench, I enter a darkened bedroom. Two women are asleep in the same bed. Twins. Zombie twins. But are they zombies, or are they victims of zombies? There’s only one way to find out. I stroke one woman’s cheek. It’s cold, and she does not react. I stroke the other woman’s cheek. Also cold.
Her eyes open. So do her sister’s.
“Pearl wants to meet you.”
They grab my wrists; my wrench is useless. One of them pats my stomach.
“You will make tasty carnitas. We must take you to Pearl!”
The dream ends with the knowledge that, without me to defend them, my wife and daughters are toast. And I?
I am a soft taco.
D.
*Like happily, only crappier.
Ouch.
Maybe I’ll write another post later this evening, once I regain the vision I lost after looking at this.
Damn you, Hello Kitty!
D.
Why I’ll never make it as a chick lit author
1. I refuse to work a pun into my title.
From the blurb for Kim Wong Keltner’s The Dim Sum of All Things,
Have you ever wondered:
- Why Asians love “Hello Kitty”?
- What the tattooed Chinese characters really say?
- How to achieve feng shui for optimum make-out sessions?
- Where Asian cuties meet the white guys who love them?
. . . which leads me to,
2. I cannot write saccharine cutesy-pie synopses.
3. I don’t accessorize well.
From Sophie Kinsella’s Remember Me. Emphasis mine:
When twenty-eight-year-old Lexi Smart wakes up in a London hospital, she’s in for a big surprise. Her teeth are perfect. Her body is toned. Her handbag is Vuitton. Having survived a car accident—in a Mercedes no less—Lexi has lost a big chunk of her memory, three years to be exact, and she’s about to find out just how much things have changed.
4. I’m not good with cliches.
From Jennifer Weiner’s In Her Shoes. Emphasis mine:
Meet Rose Feller, a thirty-year-old high-powered attorney with a secret passion for romance novels. She has an exercise regime she’s going to start next week, and she dreams of a man who will slide off her glasses, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she’s beautiful. She also dreams of getting her fantastically screwed-up, semi-employed little sister to straighten up and fly right.
Meet Rose’s sister, Maggie. Twenty-eight years old and drop-dead gorgeous. Although her big-screen stardom hasn’t progressed past her left hip’s appearance in a Will Smith video, Maggie dreams of fame and fortune — and of getting her big sister on a skin-care regimen.
and
5. All the trite titles have been taken.
Meg Cabot has Boy Meets Girl, Every Boy’s Got One, and The Boy Next Door. Jennifer Weiner has Good in Bed, In Her Shoes — and in case I wanted to consider any polyglot shenanigans, Gut im Bett and En Sus Zapatos, too. Carly Phillips has Sealed with a Kiss, Claire Cook has Life’s a Beach, and as I have already whined, Megan McCafferty has Sloppy Firsts, damn her. (I really wanted that one for my romance.)
See? It’s hopeless, I tell you. Hopeless.
Can I count this as an early Smart Bitches Day Post?
***
Live blogging: tonight at 7:00 Pacific. See you there!
Make it 7:40 PM. Gotta eat first.
Did I say 7:40? I meant 8:20! I bet you’ve all bailed . . .
D.
First beach day of the season
Yay! I’m done photo-futzing.
After a week of rain, we had sun today, and here at Chez Walnut it was deceptively warm. Jake and I noted the low tide and decided it would be a good beach day. We didn’t account for the wind-chill factor.
Photos below the cut. (Big, non-cropped versions here, at Flickr.)
Listening to
They Might Be Giants: Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
From Wikipedia, we learn
It was originally recorded by The Four Lads on August 12, 1953.
and
One of the more recent, better-known versions of the song is the cover by the rock group They Might Be Giants, who released it on their LP Flood in 1990, and on its own EP that same year. TMBG’s version is at a faster tempo than the original and contains a distinct klezmer influence, including a violin introduction and some accordion parts.
The Duke’s Men of Yale, an all-male a cappella group at Yale University, perform the song at the end of most of their concerts. The song has been in the repertoire of the Duke’s Men since 1953.
The song is on the album Bette Midler Live at Last.
I wonder if I might like any other TMBG songs?
. . . just listened to a few. Definitely an acquired taste.
What are you listening to?
D.
Friday Flickr Babe: Keeping up with the Anacronyms.
Beautiful poster for film “Guernsey”, originally uploaded by Limbic.
It’s a film poster! Completely innocent! You might see this hanging in a movie theater lobby whilst taking eight preschoolers on a trip to see Horton Hears a Who. So get over it, already.
As much as I liked Dean’s pic for today, I thought I’d give y’all more to chew on.
D.
Colonic ills and a contest
Added to the list of things I cannot eat: quiche. Too much dairy, I suspect. And would you believe I made the quiche with me in mind, since I made steak for my wife and son, and I can’t eat beef? (Because, um, it does to me what I now discover quiche does to me.)
Sorry, folks, but if I wrote a Thirteen today, it would probably be titled, “Thirteen Cures for Stomach Cramps and Niagara Bowels.” On the upside, today I bought the new Cosmo, so at least y’all have something to look forward to.
Yeah, me too. You women got nothing on me.
Oh. The contest.
Although I’m still pilfering the last contest for book suggestions, I’m always eager to hear about new authors and great books. Here are the rules:
1. In the comments, tell me about one of the last great books you read. No coprolite allowed.
2. It has to be fiction.
3. And it can’t be a book which was named in that last contest.
4. And since I’m feeling cheap, it has to be available at PaperBackSwap.
At random, I’ll choose one commenter as the lucky winner of a $25 gift certificate to the online bookseller of your choice. Yes, that’s less than I forked out for that last contest. I told you I was feeling cheap.
Depending upon how fast the suggestions roll in, we’ll wrap this contest up on Sunday. Have fun!
D.
Tasty pudding
I have internal nazis. If I eat fatty food, I get cramps which keep me up half the night. If I go more than a week without exercising, my lower back tortures me. And then there’s the guilt nazi, who keeps me on the straight and narrow about everything else.
So, no, I haven’t really tried out this panna cotta recipe, but I have it on the authority of my wife and son that this stuff is GOOD. Easy to make, too — that much, I can vouch for.
Hat tip to Kate
Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene. And if you really want to laugh, do like my son did and look at all the “hidden” comments (comments that have netted more than six ‘thumbs-down’). For example,
who funds these idiots anyway??
***
And don’t forget to check below for the comments to 4000 and Oh, that’s just not right. I wrote a funny I did.
D.
Aging gracelessly
Alternate title: Gracelessland.
It wasn’t enough for 62-year-old Priscilla Presley to covet the face of a twenty-year-old; she also bought into “miracle injections” of auto lube-grade silicone from Argentinian gigolo-doctor Daniel Serrano.
I can’t imagine a worse thing to inject into someone’s face. I can imagine silicone injections, however. Back in training, I treated a young Vietnamese woman who, as a teenager, had silicone injections into her nose to Westernize it. (Low nasal bridge = Asian, high nasal bridge = Caucasian.) She developed recurrent severe inflammation treatable only with antibiotics and steroids, and her nasal bridge had become a scarred mass.
No one in his right mind injects silicone nowadays into any body part — not that I’m aware. If the inflammatory reaction doesn’t get you, silicone granulomas will. And this is medical grade silicone we’re talking about. God only knows what will happen to Ms. Presley’s Dr. Jiffy Lube-injected face.
TMZ.com has even more examples of celebrity plastic surgery nightmares. In fairness, not all of these before-and-afters are hideous. Sylvester Stallone, for example, is just as butt ugly as he ever was; at least he doesn’t look freakier. Dolly Parton — well, no one looks at her face anyway. At the other end of the spectrum are Michael Jackson wannabe LaToya Jackson, Fountain of Youth drowning victim Mickey Rourke (who really should have known better), Surgeon General of Beverly Hills* patient Wayne Newton, and extraterrestrial Joan Rivers.
It seems like most male actors manage to age gracefully. Robert De Niro isn’t trying to look like a 20-year-old. If he had a face lift, his surgeon was an artist — someone who could make a person look younger without leaving him with that “I could bounce a quarter on it!” face. I’ll bet Tommy Lee Jones hasn’t had plastic surgery, and I’d say the same for Morgan Freeman. But Mickey Rourke? Yeesh.
Hollywood isn’t as kind to its female actresses, but these women don’t have to play ingenues all their lives. It’s a losing game, and an unnecessary one. Aging faces didn’t stop Bette Davis or Joan Crawford from working late into their careers, and Lauren Bacall is still at it — and Ms. Bacall has not indulged:
Lauren Bacall, 81 [now 83], recently said she was astounded by the way people were trying to change the way they look. She said: “I have friends who are beautiful women, and they are having liposuction and boob lifts, and I say, ‘What are you doing to yourselves? Stop it!'”
“I disdain this whole youth sickness thing.”
Bravo. Hollywood needs more wrinkly, saggy actors and actresses. And the older I get, the more strongly I feel that way.
D.
*Brownie points for the person who recognizes that reference without googling it.