Balls and Walnuts
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Damned chipping Sodburies
This is what I get hanging around at Lilith’s blog.
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My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Duke Douglas the Edible of Chipping Sodbury Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title |
The Edible seems so apropos . . . considering the fact that tomorrow is Global Orgasm Day.
D.
Thirteen college memories: freshman year
What, only thirteen? Yes, you can regard this as an extremely limited selection. I’ll be attempting to come up with tales you haven’t heard before. No small feat.
1. Shin splints. During orientation, on our walking tour of the Berkeley campus, the guy walking next to me noticed me limping.
“Don’t baby it,” he said.
“Huh? It’s shin splints.”
“Yeah, I figured that out. But don’t be a wimp. Walk through it.” And that’s how it went for the next hour or two — me limping, him ragging on me to stop being such a pussy.
His name was Russ, and he became my roommate, and remained so for all but one year.
Blankie
My stomach woke me up last night — never a good thing — but I had been dreaming about my brother, a squicky eeew kind of dream which brought back some early childhood memories. I almost woke Karen up to tell her, Do you know what he used to do? Stuff which taken out of context sounds awful, but when I think about all the other general squickiness of life back then, it fades into the background. Ambient color.
I remembered my baby blanket. Like Schultz’s Linus, I had a baby blue blankie. Damn thing was falling apart and my father eventually threw it out. Thing is, I haven’t thought about that blanket in years, so where did that memory come from? And what else sits around in my hippocampus, dormant, waiting to spring out with a little prodding?
I have no interest in recovered memory — you know, the fake stuff a suggestible brain manufactures, a fantasy with the street cred of reality. In dreams, my subconscious (which hates me — have I mentioned that? But what other conclusion can I come to when I never ever get the girl?) has tried to convince me of various incestuous dalliances which I know never took place. I wish I could confront this subconscious, grip him by the shoulders, and ask him, What the hell is the matter with you? On the other hand, I’ve learned that the safest thing, the best thing for my mental health, is to give such dreams all the care they deserve: none.
Maybe that’s why my subconscious has it in for me. I keep flipping him the bird.
It was nice, though, remembering that blanket, rather like finding a photo stuffed behind another photo in an old album. Sometimes I see myself as a set of memories. I suppose there’s more, but that’s the part of me I understand. When I look within, those memories are the only thing separating me from a featureless wall. I wish there were more memories (even if most of them are unpleasant, my blanket notwithstanding), enough that I might forget about the blankness altogether.
D.
Animals love us
Specifically, they love to die in our attic.
We fell for this house because of the deck and the view. Took one step into the living room and failed to notice the shag brown carpet, or the kitchen done up with a Brady Bunch palette; headed straight out to the deck and breathed a collective sigh. Even the not-quite-up-to-code narrow stairs bothered us — shag baby blue carpet leading up to a master bedroom with more of the same, a monster bed too large even for king-sized sheets, baby blue tile around the fireplace, livid maroon carpeting in the giant upstairs roomlet that had functioned as clothes- and shoes-repository for the Imelda Marcos of Brookings. The view, man, the view! We’d always wanted an ocean view. Now we would have one.
Something happened between that first viewing and our move-in date. Something very large and very ill moved into the attic and died, right above our front entry way. We thought perhaps a mountain lion had expired up there. Or a skunk. Or both. And the flies! I must have vacuumed up a thousand flies. The only thing missing was the deep, raspy voiceover: Get oooouut of the hoooooouuse.
TIME’s Person of the Year: Me!
Like there was ever any doubt?
But what’s with this mirror b.s.? They could have used any of my pubbed photos, or I could have posed for a new one. It took me ten minutes to, ahem, whip this one out:
This isn’t an original idea. Blue Gal got there before me (with a very creepy offering), as did Commandante Agi (whose cover featuring Rick Santorum’s family out-creepies Blue Gal. Truth is always stranger than fiction). Read Commandante Agi’s message thread for more photoshopping goodness; and if you do one of your own using Commandante Agi’s blank Time cover, feel free to post a link below.
That’s it for me for this evening, my lovelies. Yesterday morning, I thought I had at last beat this evil crud, but by Sunday evening it had returned with bells on. Is it a new virus? Has the old one mutated? Who knows! Who cares! Shoot me now!
Tomorrow: de-ratting our house, the Next Chapter.
D.
You will believe a dragon can blow hot air
My son lost his innocence yesterday.
“At first it was like a love-hate thing, but then I just hated it,” he said afterwards, and proceeded to recount all the many ways in which the movie screwed up the book.
Take that chick standing to Eragon‘s left. Would you believe she’s an elf? Notice the lack of pointy ears or funky-colored skin. You could have knocked me over when Jake told me she’s supposed to be an elf.
Look at all those dudes (and the elf chick), posing like it’s a high school football team picture. Ooooh, they’re tough. Too bad Eragon (18-year-old newcomer Edward Speleers, looking like a younger, softer Michael York) has all the stage presence of dragon poo, so that in his scenes with Jeremy Irons, Irons seems to be monologuing. Irons does his best with a script that feels computer-generated; he and uber-evil Durza (Robert Carlyle) are the only watchable foci in an otherwise lukewarm cast.
Yeah, that’s John Malkovich over there on the right, playing the eeeevil King Galbatorix. But it’s a one-note performance and the guy has maybe two minutes of screen time. I liked Malkovich best in Being John Malkovich, incidentally, or perhaps Ripley’s Game. When he’s good, he’s very good. But I’ll never forgive him for his sterile Kurtz in the 1994 television version of Heart of Darkness.
Back to Jake’s loss of innocence. Think about it: his sole prior experience of books translated into movies was the Harry Potter series, which followed the books slavishly, often (IMO) to the detriment of the movies’ flow. I don’t think he’s ever seen one of his favorite books butchered.
Karen read the books, too, and she said the biggest flaw of the film was the lack of character development. Jake agrees. That was obvious even to me, the virgin viewer. Jake disliked that they glossed over Eragon’s magic training, but here are his top three crits:
1. “They completely rewrote the fight between Eragon and Durza. Eragon didn’t get his back injury.”
2. “They completely undermined the Ra-zac. The Ra-zac got killed! They’re not supposed to get killed until their third book! And they completely forgot the Ra-zac’s parents, which are their mounts.” (Eeew. Purge image of me riding either of my parents.) “The Ra-zac are much more powerful in the book. They had the power to put a human into a dreamlike state so they could attack them. The Ra-zacs were black, not green. And they wore cloaks and they could talk. And they could attack in the night.”
3. “They didn’t give Brom’s character enough attention. He was much more interesting.” (“More three dimensional,” says Karen. “And a lot grumpier in the book.”)
Karen adds that in the book, the relationship between Eragon and his dragon, Saphira, had more depth. And there you have it, a family meta-review . . . but I forgot one thing.
My number one crit has to do with the dragon, Saphira. Rachel Weisz is the voice of Saphira.
Mmmm. Rachel Weisz. What was I saying?
Oh, yeah. They could have saved a ton of money by using all of Ms. Weisz, not just her voice. Picture it: a few blue scales around her eyes, a few more down her naked back. Some cool-looking wings or something to explain how she can fly. Forget all that CGI dragon stuff; let Eragon ride Ms. Weisz into the sunset.
Now, that’s a movie I’d see again.
D.
The things I’ve learned
1. Jokes based on somewhat obscure literary works tend to fall flat on their faces. Or on their chocolate ears.
2. Today is the first day of Hanukkah. It falls on a different day every year. Damned lunar calendar.
3. Cats like me better when I’m drunk.
4. Karen’s “You never change” charge (see #13 of this last Thursday’s Thirteen) has more to do with personal philosophy than with any shortcoming on my part. “I don’t think anyone ever changes,” she told me when she read that bit. “You can’t change your personality.”
Do you think she’s right?
D.
Mistah Korto—he dead.
Ever wonder what sorts of presents ear, nose, and throat docs give one another? Contrary to popular belief, we don’t make candles from saved ear wax. That would require too much effort.
Here’s what I received from this dude, one of my favorite ear surgeons:
Cufflinks? Perhaps, but who wears cufflinks anymore? And that goes for tie clips, too. You might as well send me a sterling silver snuff spoon for all the good a tie clip would do me.
Expensive jewelry, perhaps? Heavens knows I’ve sent Joe lots of patients. Yeah, that’s it. To show his appreciation, he’s sent me something loaded with sapphires . . . something I could drop on the wife, score some major league points. Heck, yeah!
But when I opened the box,
Thirteen disquieting statements
For me, Thursday Thirteens provide a means of examining my life through an ever changing lens. A micro-autobiography, perhaps, where the challenge is to be honest, entertaining, and (hopefully) insightful. Like any memoirist, I suppose, I am the topic that fascinates me most. The “entertainment” angle hinges on how well I can convey that fascination to my readers — and, let’s face it, it depends on precisely how honest and how insightful I can be.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Maybe I’m more introspective these days because we’re approaching the end of what has been, for us, a difficult year. The stress has done weird things to me . . . weird in ways I can’t even begin to discuss here. Or even hint at. Suffice to say (despite #13 below) I’m feeling a lot like a pupa, and I haven’t a clue what’s going to hatch out at the end of this metamorphosis.
Below the fold: thirteen disquieting statements. Things folks have said to me which stuck like peanut butter to the palate. They don’t hurt anymore. Mostly.