Balls and Walnuts
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The Dark Lord speaks
Now edited — for pronouns!
As many of you have heard, Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange’s condition has been upgraded to “aura slightly tweaked, but rallying nicely, thank you very much” by the healing wizards of Hoppesheadde Hospital. The circumstances of last Monday’s wand injury remain somewhat mysterious, owing in large part to Lord Voldemort’s reluctance to speak.
Fortunately, Balls and Walnuts enjoys an excellent working relationship with Severus Snape, Hogwarts’ Potions Master and Defense Against the Dark Arts Instructor. Although Lord Voldemort declined interviews with CNN and MSNBC, he agreed to talk either with Brit Hume of Fox News, or Severus Snape of Balls and Walnuts. Upon reflection, he granted the interview to Severus, stating, “Hume’s a softball-lobbing simpleton, a moron and a muggle. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Full interview below the cut. (Technorati tag: Dick Cheney)
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That was fast!
Check it out. Mel Gibson, Tom Delay, and Alan Rickman are over there offering their sympathies.
D.
My mishpucha
Last night, I discovered that I have a very low gag reflex.
Morning wake-up call
PBW’s post pointed me towards The Generator Blog, which in turn led me to Atom Smasher’s Graffiti Generator, which allowed me to produce this:
which means I must have more politics than sex on my mind at the moment. How odd!
Make sure you don’t miss out on The Machine, too (see my last post) — another great toy.
D.
PS: As long as you’re wasting time, why not play the Dick Cheney Quail Hunting Game?
Get out the scissors!
Stay with me to the end — you’ll be glad you did.
***
I have a devil of a time inventing fresh ways of saying the same old thing. How many different ways can I say, “Nemara took flight”? After a while, it gets to be a real challenge, especially when I exclude passive constructions (“. . . and Nemara was airborne”).
More troubling still is the challenge of coming up with eye-poppingly fresh word combinations. Hard enough to avoid trite phrasing, but innovation? That’s work. And yet, that’s just the sort of thing which makes readers (and, I hope, agents, editors, and publishers) love a writer. How do I make my brain do that?
On this Valentine’s Day, I really, really do not love my cats
I know what you’re thinking: another writer writing about his damned cats.
Sure, some writers do a great job writing about their pets. Pat Kirby can do it, but then, what sort of hard-hearted sumbitch wouldn’t love Rat Dog? But me: if my animals aren’t having sex, I’m usually, well, uninspired.
Until now.
You know the creepiest thing about Cheney’s hunting ‘accident’?
I predicted it in my trilogy-in-progress.
Sure, in my version it wasn’t the Vice-President involved, but the President, his sons, and some security guys. And they weren’t human, but birds. With, um, arms instead of wings. And they weren’t hunting birds (not intentionally, anyway) but giant killer centipedes. And the outcome was quite a bit bloodier than what happened to Harry Whittington.
Other than that, I nailed it, nailed it cold. Life imitates art.
D.
Technorati tag: cheney
Sexual selection: isn’t it romantic?
Callou, callay, it’s Smart Bitches Day!
Casting about for motivation for your main character? Is she looking for wit, wealth, or wicked good looks in her man?
Nope. What she really wants is a top-notch gene donor. Brains and beauty are indicators of high quality DNA, and wealth should improve the chances that their many babies will survive and breed unto the next generation.
So goes the theory of daddy-daughter team David and Nanelle Barash, who last year released their sociobiological interpretation of literature, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries. Sexual selection, a key element of Darwinism and a centerpiece of the Barashes’ thesis, refers to traits which may not necessarily be adaptive but help to attract mates. Think about a peacock’s iridescent tail feathers, which attract peahens and predators alike. Think about Porsches and Beamers and big fat gold chains hanging on the necks of certain rappers.
Not that any of you would be that shallow.
In some instances, the Barash method yields fresh ways of looking at things. From Denis Dutton’s Washington Post review:
. . . discriminating human females are central to the world of Jane Austen, whom the Barashes call “the poet laureate of female choice.†Selecting a good mate is Austen’s major theme. She is particularly adept at bringing out, against the vast intricacies of a social milieu, the basic values women seek in men, and men tend to want in women (shortlist: good looks, health, money, status, IQ, courage, dependability and a pleasant personality — in many different weightings and orderings). Not being a peacock, Mr. Darcy does not have iridescent feathers, but for human females his commanding personality, solid income, intelligence, generosity, and the magnificent Pemberley estate do very nicely.
Madame Bovary’s Ovaries has its flaws, which Dutton’s review illuminates nicely. I encourage you to read the whole thing. But it occurred to me that, flawed or not, the premise of Darwinian motivation for literary characters has, at the very least, comic merit.
A few ideas:
- One male suitor attempts to topple another by sending his lady love a faked lab report demonstrating that the rival male has a precariously low sperm count.
- To get noticed by an aloof beauty, a wealthy (think Bill Gates) geek sets up a contest for Best DNA of the Year. He bribes the judges, naturally. A witty but bald and short and slightly overweight molecular biologist becomes suspicious and uses statistical arguments to prove the fraud. The beauty and the molecular biologist go off into the sunset.
- You know how Law and Order keeps reusing the sperm donor plot? Arrogant fertility doc only uses his own sperm to create viable embryos for implantation, starts killing people who find out, yatta yatta. How about the distaff version? Arrogant female fertility doc uses her own eggs to create viable embryos, etc. Yeah, she harvests eggs from women, but destroys them. The Bush Administration finds out, makes it a federal case, and Bill Frist & Gonzo Gonzales team up to prosecute.
What’s that? No romance in that last one? Well, how about this. Our perp has been at it for the last 25 years. Unbeknownst to her, her handsome young defense lawyer is actually her son! And she falls for him! We’ll call it Oedipus 2020.
Yeah, you’re right. I don’t understand the romance genre at all.
D.
Clafouti notes
Success!
Well, near disaster, as the damnable thing almost slid off the rimless cookie sheet when I lifted it out of the oven. Nevertheless, Karen gave it a big thumb’s up, I liked it too, and Jake declared it flavorless. As Meatloaf used to sing, two out of three ain’t bad.
Here are a few adjustments to the recipe:
1. Since I had to throw out my flour yesterday (too worried about the possibility of glass splinters landing in there), I used Jiffy Pizza Mix, which is essentially just flour and baking powder. This worked fine.
2. I used fewer blueberries, perhaps 1.5 boxes worth. I didn’t pack them in as densely as I did yesterday — that seemed like blueberry overkill.
3. Most important thing to note: I had to bake it for 90 minutes, not 60. That seems typical for my oven, however; I usually have to bake things longer than the recipe claims.
4. I added a little cinnamon and nutmeg to the powdered sugar. Probably unnecessary.
5. Only 10 calories per slice!
Just kidding about that last bit (unless you serve five degree slices).
D.
A shaggy meme
Candy put me up to this. Which ten celebrities would I most like to shag?