Balls and Walnuts
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SBD: Too stupid to live!
For a change, I have some real, honest to Gaaaaah bitchery for today’s Smart Bitches Day post. To wit: Maddie Faraday, heroine of Jennifer Crusie’s Tell Me Lies, is too stupid to live.
I don’t often bail out on a book when I’m past the 100 page mark. I really don’t usually bail on mysteries, no matter how far I am into the book. But in Tell Me Lies, I made it past page 200 and THEN bailed.
I don’t care who done it. As far as I’m concerned, Maddie deserves to get framed with the murder of her cheating, embezzling husband Brent. She has done nothing to earn the love and protection of stock-hunky-hero C.L.; she hasn’t even earned the love of the Requisite Crusie So-Ugly-Is-It-Even-a-Dog?® dog, Phoebe. She definitely doesn’t deserve to retain custody of her lovely daughter Em. The woman will be the death of that child. There should be a special Darwin Award for people who take not only themselves but their children out of the gene pool.
I mean — seriously. Hiding the murder weapon in a Spam casserole? Why is she even touching the murder weapon any more than she has to? And the crap she does with the embezzled money. Why, why, why? Why, if not to further the plot?
And that’s the real bitch of this novel. If Maddie’s gonna get set up, let the murderer set her up. She shouldn’t set herself up. She especially shouldn’t set herself up since she knows she’s the number one suspect!
Soon after Maddie stashed the gun and the money, I closed the book in disgust. Enough already. I admit I’m tempted to flash to the end, but only if it’s to read about Maddie cleaning the Women’s Prison toilets with a bristleless toothbrush; to see her visited by C.L. with a new girlfriend it tow (“Sorry, Maddie, but she was there, and you weren’t. Have a good life”); and to watch as her daughter is raised by Maddie’s evil in-laws, who will lie to the girl and tell her that her mother died in an attempted prison break.
Yeah, sure, I’m cruel. I’m a bastard, in fact. But I wasted over 200 pages of my reading life on that book and I want ’em back.
Oh — forgot to say it. Better late than never.
Spoilers!
D.
Indian weekend
Here’s a change: I’m going to write up a recipe before I’ve ever tried it. I’ll post a followup to let you know how it turned out.
Regulars here know about my favorite Indian cookbook. Last night, I made potato samosas and chicken in creamed coconut sauce; tonight, I’m making a meat curry (gosht kari). Follow me below the fold for some curry, baby!
Lurker roll call
Lurkers, here’s your chance to say hello. I’d love to check out your stuff.
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Anyone up for live blogging this evening?
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And can anyone explain to me the vicissitudes of blog traffic? Total suckitude this week — isn’t anyone searching for cameltoe photos any more?
D.
What might have been
I can well imagine the conversation which took place behind closed doors after I left my interview at Wake Forest University.
“I don’t care what you want,” the chairman must have said. “I want him.”
“We don’t need another assistant prof,” said my would-be boss. “I need a fellow. A FELL-OW.”
“You don’t understand. He’s the future!” (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But it’s my fantasy and I’ll put whatever words I want into the chairman’s mouth.)
“Then you find a place for him in the department, but I don’t want him.”
So the chairman, hoping to find some sort of niche for me at Wake Forest, sent my CV to one of his cancer research buddies — Frank Torti, a guy who just happened to have been on my thesis advisory committee at Stanford.
My CV hit Frank’s desk like a steaming hotcake on a breakfast platter. It cooled over the next four months, buried under reprints and grant proposals. But Frank found it eventually.
Courage. Character.
Most of you have probably heard the bad news: Elizabeth Edwards’s breast cancer has returned (report on MSNBC). This morning, Karen and I followed the story with a lot of concern and anxiety. When we heard the couple were holding a press conference to discuss Elizabeth’s health, we feared the worst.
We support John Edwards — but that phrase barely scratches the surface of how we feel about these two. We’re enthusiastic about John and Elizabeth. We admire them. We regard them as heroic figures.
And neither one of us can remember the last time we felt this way about any candidate for the US Presidency.
Some of you know that Karen and I have been through a certain amount of grief. Nothing like John and Elizabeth, who had to get past the death of their son, Wade, but I think we’ve been through enough to appreciate the difficulty of picking things up and moving forward. Tough enough to just keep going; truly remarkable to turn everything around and live an exemplary life of service to the nation.
Before Wade’s death in a car accident in 1996, Edwards was an extremely successful North Carolina trial lawyer. Judging from his book (Four Trials), the man had it made — a much sought-after attorney who had made his reputation by defending the underdog against big corporations. He writes,
I have always been an optimist, but I was a different kind of optimist before Maundy Thursday, April 4, 1996. That was the day my son died and my world stopped turning.
In spite of disappointments that had been real to me, up until that day I had always known mine was a happy life. And I admit that all along I had a secret sense that it would go on like that forever.
Edwards has since attributed his move into politics to this tragedy. Here is a guy — a family — who got kicked in the teeth, but they got up, dusted themselves off, moved on. They did it again in ’04 when Elizabeth was first diagnosed with breast cancer, and they’re doing it now, with the news of her recurrence.
From the MSNBC report:
Mr Edwards insisted it was possible to combine a vigorous campaign with caring for his wife, promising to be at her side “any time, any place” she needed him.
“We’ve been confronted with these kind of traumas and struggles already in our life,” he said, referring to the death of their 16 year-old son in a car accident in 1996. “When this happens you have a choice — you can go and cower in the corner or you can go out there and be tough.”
If you saw the press conference, you know the bond that exists between Elizabeth and John. It’s palpable. They’ve been together thirty years, they’re true partners, they love each other, and it all shows.
Regardless of your political affiliation, take a moment to check out Edwards’s website. Get to know the man. And you can give them your best wishes and prayers here.
D.
Crosseyed and Painless Thirteen
This is, what, the third week I failed to write a Thirteen about my surgical internship? You wouldn’t think it would be such a big deal. After all, I made my romance protag a surgical intern; but I also filled his life with prime booty, and gave him a sex drive powerful enough to overwhelm even the worst internship fatigue.
Yup. Fantasy.
No, the memories are still too tetchy. I might as well try to write “Thirteen Painful Memories.”
Hey, there’s a thought!
Blissed
This is Charlotte, our ferret. We used to have two, but her sister Emily escaped one day and never showed her twitchy nose again. My fault, unfortunately. I’ve never been good at multiprocessing, and one day, I tried simultaneously to give the ferrets some exercise and clean house. Emily slipped out, but the smarter and nicer Bronte remained.
I would love to think that Emily is sipping mojitos with other expatriate ferrets, chatting about the irresistible cache of stray socks and the unbearable yumminess of human toes, but alas, ferrets can’t exist without humans. Ours would only eat one brand of kitten chow and never, ever showed interest in other offerings. If Emily were dying of thirst and found a puddle of water, I doubt she would know what to do with it.
Not to mention the sad fact that something — a dog, perhaps — picked off the cats in that neighborhood. A ferret would be no match.
Charlotte doesn’t miss her sister. Emily was nasty to everyone, her sister included, and Charlotte’s personality improved greatly following Emily’s disappearance. We keep Charlotte up in our master bedroom so that she’ll feel part of the family. Kind of a bitch when she musks, but it’s worth it to keep her happy.
Short blog tonight — I want to start working on my Thirteen. Happy Hump Day!
D.
Naked Couch Day, Sans Couch
D: But but but Dean’s doing it! In two places, even. And Kris is doing it, too!
K: NO. I will NOT let you humiliate us in public AGAIN.
D: Those leopard skin briefs could have belonged to anyone.
K: Anyone with the fur of a Tasmanian devil.
D: Exactly. And that chair photo left a great deal to the imagination.
K: Really? You thought so? I thought it left very little to the imagination. Just a teensy inconsequential mote —
D: You won’t even have to take off your clothes.
K: What?
D: There was nothing in Dean’s challenge that said both parties had to be naked.
K: So I’m not going to regret this later.
D: Not at all.
K: But you might regret this later.
D: I would if I had any shame.
Yes, that’s precisely what led up to this particular photo shoot . . . yielding an image that captured the zeitgeist of a generation, a cover widely regarded as Rolling Stone Magazine’s greatest ever.
Who’d wanna live in a world without wood?
Today’s Smart Bitches Day post brings us Summer Devon’s Futurelove, an ebook I’ve wanted to read ever since I heard the premise. More on that in a moment. As those of you who have tried to get me to read your pdfs and ebooks know, I’m hopelessly slow at reading things off my computer. Dyslexic, in fact. I keep wanting to turn the page. The fingerprints are a bitch.
With the advent of my Blackberry, Summer’s erotica opened up to me like a nubile vixeny refugee from Barely Legal. Come to me, Summer! Show me your stuff!
Here’s the premise. In the future, I don’t know how people reproduce, but it doesn’t involve penises or vaginas. Clones, perhaps, or test tubes. Maybe they duplicate particularly attractive people using a transporter, just like they did in those old Star Trek episodes, Captain Kirk, Space Queen, and Good Kirk, Bad Kirk. I don’t know. Summer doesn’t tell us, and I don’t care, because this is erotica, not science fiction, and in erotica no one bloody cares how anything works as long as people with hot bodies are getting laid and getting laid frequently.
In the future, all manner of physical defects have been genetically engineered out of the human race. The men all have hot bods, they’re super-strong, they don’t fart or snore or leave their dirty socks lying around or ignore their girlfriends just because Monday Night Football is on and if they’re eating anything in bed, it sure ain’t crackers. They lack all of those 21st Century flaws — which would be cool, of course, except for the nonfunctional penis problem.
Welcome to Balls and Walnuts, Elissa and Stan!
Tonight, my friends Stan and Elissa called. I had tried to reach them earlier this week, and was alarmed to discover that their cell numbers, home number, and email addies were all defunct. I googled Elissa and found her at work (hey Elissa, WTF are they doing sticking you at the bottom of the page?), sent emails and left messages, and had begun to despair of ever finding them again.
Yes, yes, I could simply write to Elissa at her work, but you know me. Overdramatic to the hilt.
So to welcome them to Balls and Walnuts, I’d like to point them to a few posts I think they’ll enjoy.
First off, they’re cat people, so they might enjoy the heart-to-heart I had with Mist soon after we adopted her. And then there was the time Faithful and Emerald decided to decorate our bathroom. And guys, if you’re feeling lazy, you can at least check out Spidercat.
Stan may or may not appreciate my Thirteen Memories from Sophomore Year. That’s when I met Stan. And, no, I didn’t work in that story about the fire alarm and a certain Asian dormie clothed only in her loosely bound bathrobe, who, I am given to understand, showed signs of extreme chilliness that evening. I didn’t see it. I have only Stan’s word that it was memorable indeed.
While we’re on the Thirteens, Stan and Elissa have a healthy interest in sex, so I’m sure they’ll appreciate this post — featuring, among many other delightful things, How To Masturbate Your Pussy To Orgasm. (Cat relevance!)
Oh, and Elissa? I’ve been working out lately. Here’s my ass. (Sorry, Stan, just had to flirt with your wife.)
You guys haven’t seen Jake in a couple years, so this photo should bring you up to date.
Stan, to make up for that picture of my ass, I give you this and this.
Hopefully, my friends won’t be too shy. (That means: LEAVE A COMMENT, DAMN IT!) But in any case, would any of you like to suggest one or two favorites of your own?
D.