Balls and Walnuts
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Agent behaving badly
Just checked my hit counter and . . . sucky Sunday! I should be whoring my little loins off with a Technorati-laden post, but I don’t have the heart for it today. Instead, I would like to follow Beard’s lead and talk about the latest Barbara Bauer brouhaha.
Eureka!
What I learned in my Ancient Civilizations class at Berkeley: you’re supposed to pronounce it Oy-reka. Cyrus King of Persia should be pronounced Surrus, and Darius, Dar-yoosh.
Oy-reka!
We saw elk on the way down and on the way back. Here are a few females.
We never made it to the kinetic sculpture races. We did, however, make it to CostCo and PetCo. Tells you something about our priorities. Two other things:
- I finished The Book Thief today. I cried all the way through the last 60 pages of this sumbitch. It deserves a much more comprehensive review than that, so I’m going to save it for another day. It’s GOOD, though, REALLY GOOD. Check it out over at Barnes and Noble.
- I had a great conversation with a cobbler this morning. He told me his life story, and it was a corker. The guy used to be a PhD/MPH researcher, but he gave it all up in the 70s to become a cobbler, a trade he had learned from his father and grandfather. I’d say more about him, but I do have a few local readers. I feel a little funny spilling all the stories he told me this morning. (Dummy! I could have asked his permission.) Cool guy. Meeting him was the highlight of my one-day vacation.
Did I mention yet that I passed my treadmill test with flying colors? And did you know that they had to shave off bits of my torso to attach the EKG electrodes? All weekend, I’ve been scratching my chest and belly. The remaining hair tickles the shaved areas. It’s maddening.
So I shaved it all off earlier this evening. I must look awfully weird, with my monkey arms and monkey back and naked chest & belly. Weirdest of all, though, is the fact I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I’ve never seen this body before. The last time my body was this bare, I weighed 100 pounds.
Strange stuff. Karen, to her credit, did not laugh, but even if she did, it would have been worth it. I’m not itchy any more.
D.
Friday night reading material
Paperback Writer recently discussed posting short stories on one’s blog. You can blame her for this.
Here’s a link to “The Mechanic,” a story I published in 2004 at a small but very cool crime zine, Crime Scene Scotland. Of all my shorts, it’s my favorite. Best characters, best narrative drive, best ending. What, that isn’t enough? But wait, there’s more:
Pickle deep-throating!
Spanking!
Automotive violence!
I might turn it into a novel one of these days (I would flash forward twenty years and have my two protagonists meet again). Who knows.
Use this post as your comment thread on the story, if you’d like.
D.
For you frogger wannabes
I guess my faux FAQ on poison dart frogs didn’t answer all your questions. Here’s a real FAQ for you would-be froggers.
I’m in a frog-buying mood
We’ll get to the frogs in a moment. First, I wanted to ask you guys why my hit counter is going nuts with searches for this image:
Billy Munster all grown up, you say? No, it’s Justin Theroux, and he’s obviously supposed to be a bad boy. Aaaah, I get it: Theroux will be playing Detective Larry Zito in Michael Mann’s upcoming movie version of Miami Vice. Karen and I saw a trailer for Vice last weekend, when we saw The Da Vinci Code. Looks good, although if I were creating a Vice trailer, I would have placed Gong Li front and center.
Mmmmm. Gong Li.
Back to the frogs we want to buy. This is kinda sorta my father’s day present. If Karen gets to keep 40 tarantulas, I should be allowed to buy six more dart frogs. It’s only fair.
Pix below the cut.
Thirteen favorite movie quotes
Let’s make it fun. I give you the quote, you name the movie. I’ll list the answers in the comments. Here we go . . . easy ones first. Extra points if you can name the characters.
1. Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
2. Great balls of fire. Don’t bother me anymore, and don’t call me sugar.
3. Yo, she-bitch! Let’s go! (Hint: Shop smart. Shop S-mart.)
4. Mom, Dad! Don’t touch it! It’s evil!
5. I’ve seen the EXORCIST ABOUT A HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SEVEN TIMES, AND IT KEEPS GETTING FUNNIER EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT!
6. Q: If you’re the Devil, why don’t you make the straps disappear? A: That’s much too vulgar a display of power . . .
7. Hallo. Vould you like a roll in ze hay? (Hint: What knockers!)
8. Q: If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly, why didn’t you just ask Him? Why didn’t you ask God? A: Because He doesn’t talk to me anymore.
9. I can’t believe I have a bunch of dead people watching videos in my living room.
10. I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine, that’s all.
Can you do that one without a hint?
No?
Hint: I love you, Honey Bunny.
11. I’m your sister, I’m your sister!
12. My mom’s been fuckin’ a dead guy for 30 years. I call him dad.
13. No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.
Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!
Drop a note in the comments, and I’ll make up some funny sh!t about your 13:
Pat’s got triskadekaphilia. A shot of penicillin should fix that.
Thirteen great Doug Adams quotes from Darla. It’s Towel Day!
Trish’s son: a typical male.
Scarlett’s gonna get callouses if she goes to half these places.
View More Thursday Thirteen Participants
D.
Ninety-two hundred
click to see big mofo hospital
We used to imagine the demolition of Los Angeles County Hospital. Would the city allow spectators? Would they charge for front row seats? How many former residents and interns would return to Big County for the privilege of seeing her leveled?
We eat Dodger Dogs and drink Coke. Or, in a fit of sentiment, perhaps we eat carne asada soft tacos and drink horchata or tamarindo. Someone passes me the pad thai. “Hey, Doogie, choke on this!” Another story for another day.
Someone mentions the Northridge earthquake of 1994. It did $389 million in damage to our auxiliary hospitals (Peds Pavilion, Women’s, and Psych), but Big County hunkered down and rode the shaker like a proud old whore.
The first explosives blow. Dust rises and the wings fall, then the main building, with its central hall so wide you could drive an old Buick through it. “Two,” someone says. “Two Buicks.”
The building crumbles. Big County. Mother County. “Ride this one,” I say.
Q & A: how long is your comment thread?
Alan writes:
How does one drive traffic to a blog? I started mine to keep the folks back in the ‘old country’ up to date with my tomfoolery in San Diego. Now I’m hooked on Blogging. I really enjoy the comments more than the hits. I see some blogs with loads of comments. How does it happen?
My response, over at his place:
Hi, Alan. You were asking (over at my place) about increasing blog traffic. Here’s a must read article: Don’t Dump That Weblog! by one of my favorite bloggers, Paperback Writer. She wrote this article with author/writer-bloggers in mind, but she gives good solid advice which applies to everyone.
I think you have to ask yourself: why are you blogging, and why do you want to increase traffic? For us author-wannabes, the answer is simple: (A) networking with other writers, published and unpublished alike; (B) developing a potential fan base of folks who will not only buy our books but hype them on their blogs*. For folks like me who live in the boonies and can’t make it to conventions, blogging is indispensable.
If you’re blogging for the same reason that folks used to write to pen-pals (i.e., to make friends with people around the world), then keep doing what you’re doing. Offer a bit of yourself on each post and folks will respond to that. Post regularly. I enjoy your posts about the restaurant biz — I think of this as a Kitchen Confidential kinda blog.
On the other hand, if you’re solely interested in boosting traffic and you don’t care what kind of traffic you get, the answer is easy. Post nude photos. And that’s another thing — use sexual keywords. The mere act of writing ‘nude photos’ in close proximity to ’sexual’ will (once the search engines find this post) generate more traffic. It’s a funny thing, but different words work for different people. One of my pals told me that the words tantric sex drove a lot of people to her site. I tried it, and got bupkes. Different strokes, I guess.
*And (C) practice! If I didn’t blog, creative writing would become a weekend-only affair. Not good for discipline. Now, if only I could be even MORE disciplined, disciplined enough, say, to work on my manuscript during the week . . .
Naaaaah.
More below the cut.
Can someone explain to me
. . . this?
Someone named ‘Apparel’ lifts content from other blogs (like mine), links to those blogs, but puts the material under his byline. On initial inspection, there’s no obvious advertisement on the site. But then I highlighted the invisible stuff after “powered by,” and it turns out this site links to golfnewsworld.com.
Strange, huh? Is this some sort of device to boost golfnewsworld’s Google ranking?
***
Blog traffic is way up today. As far as I can tell, people are searching Google and Yahoo like crazy, but not for any particular thing. That means everyone’s blog traffic should be up tonight. Is it?
***
More later this evening. I’m working on a piece about surgical internship, mostly to remind myself I’m being a wussy* for complaining about my work load.
D.
*Cross between a wimp and a pussy. I tend to assume people know that, but they often don’t.