Balls and Walnuts
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Me first by myself
Travis Frey, a 33-year-old Iowa man, is facing charges that he tried to kidnap his wife. She has provided to prosecutors the “Contract of Wifely Expectations” he asked her to sign. She didn’t sign it . . . and yet, jeez, she still married the guy. When someone opens up his heart to you like this and shows you the maggots inside, don’t you, um, think twice about saying, “I do”?
When we are at home , and alone as a family, you will be naked within 20 minutes of the kids being in bed, and then sleep naked, unless instructed otherwise. If I am not home when the kids go to bed you are still to be naked before I return home. The only exception will be during your menstrual cycle.
This is a man whose marriage manual is Pauline Reage’s The Story of O. How soon before he insists on branding her?
During my time, you WILL —
1. Be submissive, subservient, and totally obedient.
2. To do what you are asked, when you are asked, exactly how you are asked.
3. . . .
There’s more. Much more.
What would you put in your marriage contract?
Hat tip to Daily Kos.
D.
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Pestopia
I remember the first time I held hands with a girl, and I remember my first dish of oh-my-God-what-IS-this-stuff pesto, and I would be hard-pressed to tell you which moment was more intensely pleasurable.
Better than sex, that’s for sure. Capellini con pesto, angel hair pasta with pesto, piping hot on a plain white dish served from a hole in the wall restaurant somewhere on the Venice Beach Boardwalk. I was twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, and until that moment I had thought scampi was the ultimate food. Never more.
Tangent Online reviews . . .
For what it’s worth, my reviews are up:
“Different Flesh” by Claude Lalumière (but you might also want to check out PBW’s comments, below).
Top of the page at Tangent, you’ll find E. Sedia’s review of Apex #4, and Paul Abbamondi’s review of Shadowed Realms #9.
Also, many thanks to Hedgehog and SxKitten for telling me how to show off my ass to best advantage. They don’t teach these things in school.
D.
My ass is back
After working out three times a week for six weeks, including 35 to 45 minutes on the elliptical trainer at each workout, my ass has returned and is here to stay.
Sadly, the picture doesn’t do it justice. What you really need is FeelAround.
“It’s no good,” I told Karen. “It just looks like a standard skinny white guy’s ass. If my pants slipped any lower, I’d look like our plumber.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s the best of the dozen. I’m not taking any more.”
“You need to take a photo of it without all the clothing in the way.”
“No. Uh-uh. No way.”
“But –”
“Besides. You’d have to shave your ass, or else people still wouldn’t be able to see it.”
Okay. I’m game.
D.
2089 words
. . . and it feels good. I wrote the opening to Flight this morning. As I mentioned previously, even though Flight is all written, I have a good deal of scene addition/scene subtraction to do. Flight needed a punchy opening, and I think I managed it. See what you think of the first two paragraphs:
The odor came from his grandson’s duffel bag. Ankh knelt beside it, worrying the lock with his talon. What sort of nine-year-old locked his luggage? He smelled something musty in there, something long dead.
Dirty laundry. Ankh hopped from his study to the kitchen closet where he kept his tools. He snipped off a length of stiff brass wire, then used his beak and hands to shape it. That’s all it is. Dirty laundry. The way Jeryn and Kord rushed off this morning, it’s a wonder they got the boy here with any of his things.
Ankh gets a panicky phone call. While figuring out that his world has changed forever, he also manages to unlock his grandson’s duffel bag and discover what’s inside.
Maybe it’s a cheap trick, but I thought it worked well.
D.
Somebody kidnappable
Somebody Wonderful by Kate Rothwell
It is true that I made Karen read this book first. Because, you know, my wife’s a chick, forty tarantulas notwithstanding, and chicks know romance. “Here, you read this,” I said, and Karen plowed through it in a day.
It’s also true I only picked up Somebody Wonderful to see if Kate knew how to write something other than a blog. By the third or fourth page, I was in a state approaching awe. I was reading a romance . . . and I liked it!
Finally, it is true that I would be reluctant to give a friend’s book anything but a glowing report. So you’re probably wondering if you can trust this review.
You’d do better to wonder about the worth of a review written by a guy who has only ever read two other romances, both of which had paranormal mishegas — Holly Lisle’s Last Girl Dancing, and Lilith Saintcrow’s The Society. Despite my shameless pandering to the romance crowd, I’m really a romance virgin.
Or, you know, whatever it is you call those girls who do it a few times and then wear white gowns at their weddings.
If only Karen liked flowers
It doesn’t get much more clever than this.
The kind folks at SaveMyAss will mail your sweetie flowers on all the major dates, and send her flowers randomly every four to six weeks:
If you’re a successful professional whose career demands the bulk of your time, you know the situation. You want her to be happy, but work keeps you so busy… and maybe you’re just not as good at being romantic as you’d like to be. Imagine how she’d feel if you sent her flowers on a regular basis. Sign up for this service once, and we’ll take care of the rest.
I wonder. If I asked nicely, would they send Karen tarantulas instead?
Hat tip to Ishbadiddle.
D.
Reading, riting, but no ‘rithmatic.
Don’t know about you, but I’ve had a productive day.
After a satisfying bit of Technorati whoring (see post below), I spent the morning shuffling scenes and chapters in order to create a Book Two. Working title: Flight. The trilogy will be Nest, Flight, and Shrike. Book Two will pack even more of a cliffhanger than Book One, I’m afraid, but I suspect if folks stick with me that far, they’re in it for the long haul.
Flight will be a tougher edit than Nest, with more scenes to add and subtract (maybe I will work in some ‘rithmatic yet!) and quite a bit of gruntwork with regard to one of my major storylines. I’ve fixed some problems in my head, but I still need to fix them on paper. Or, as we used to say in med school, “in computero.” What fun.
Next, I reviewed a cool story for Tangent, “Different Flesh” by Claude Lalumière. If you don’t want to wait for my review to show up at Tangent, I give high marks to “Different Flesh”. Go. Read it. Enjoy.
Good, you’re back. I finished up some laundry, then burned a box of Nature magazines from ’97. Slowly but surely, I’m cleaning out our garage. Charged up by my pyromania, I finished my other assignment for Tangent, Amityville House of Pancakes. Now I just have to write the reviews. Verdict: of the four stories, one is meh, one is godawful, one is good, and one is so great I went online and bought the author’s first novel.
Her name is Adrienne Jones, and her novella for AHP, Gypsies Stole My Tequila, rawked. I read lines out loud to Karen, that’s how good it was. For more details, you’ll have to wait for my review. But Tequila was so good I bought Jones’s Oral Vices, and paid hardcover prices for a paperback (what’s up with that?), so you can bet I’m going to review it here, good or bad.
And since I can’t order only one book from Barnes and Noble, I also bought Mel Helitzer’s Comedy Writing Secrets. Because, you know, making y’all spray your monitors with coffee isn’t good enough for me. I want you to piss your pants, too.
D.
Have a Dowdy morning
My favorite Guerilla Woman from Tennessee has posted the full text of Maureen Dowd’s column, Hunting for a Straight Shooter. Dowd neatly summarizes the Shape of Things to Come vis a vis the Plame Affair:
It was at the end of his interview with Brit Hume, when Shooter talked about Scooter, that his eagerness to share important facts with the press and public — a well-concealed trait in recent days, years and decades — burst forth. He pronounced himself a Great Declassifier.
Asked by the Fox News anchor if a vice president had the authority to declassify secrets, Mr. Cheney replied that there’s an executive order giving him that power, adding: “I’ve certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions.” This neatly set up a defense for Scooter, who testified that “superiors” had authorized him to leak classified information on Valerie Plame.
President Bush signed Executive Order 13292 on March 25, 2003, amending a Clinton-era order, to grant the vice president the same power as the president on top-secret material. W. must have been concerned that Vice didn’t have enough power to abuse.
Earlier this week at Daily Kos, georgia10 reported on this maneuver. I don’t know how many Kossacks there are in the audience, but georgia10 consistently amazes me. According to her blog, she’s a 23-year-old law student. But she writes like no 23-year-old I’ve ever read. I anticipate great things from this woman.
But what to do, what to do? Will Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney wriggle out of the Plame Affair thanks to dubya’s wand-wave? Can an Executive Order trump reason? The overall tone of discussion in response to georgia10’s article was grim. Our only hope, the commenters seemed to be saying, is that the American people will at last smell a skunk.
Most already have. As Tennessee Guerilla Woman reports, Bush’s approval rating is lower than ever. But it’s not enough. Impeach now? No, not while the Republicans control Congress, and impeachment would be toothless.
Between now and November, I’m aiming my donations towards key elections across the country. We need to unseat Republicans wherever they are vulnerable, and we need to unseat Vichy Democrats wherever possible, too. Want a good place to start? Visit ActBlue and contribute what you can. I’ve contributed to Ciro Rodgriguez and Ned Lamont.
D.
Technorati tags:
Maureen Dowd Bush Dick Cheney King George Republican Propaganda Impeach Bush Cheney Rumsfeld Dowd
Nipples! Pubic hair! Butt cheeks!
Over at YesButNoButYes, view the trailer for The Curious Dr. Humpp.
No, really.
Clearly, I specialized in the wrong branch of medicine.
D.