Balls and Walnuts
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Wheel of Fortune
Before it became a showcase for the talent of Vanna White, the Wheel of Fortune was a tarot card symbolizing change, luck, the whimsy of fate. Great card if it’s dealt in the standard position (as shown), the pits if reversed (upside down). That’s Fate for you — a strict 50-50, like the coin flip of Batman’s nemesis, Harvey Dent. Heads, you win the lottery. Tails, you’re blindsided by a trucker asleep at the wheel of his semi.
I bought my first tarot deck, one of the classic Rider-Waite decks, my first quarter at Berkeley. Old-timers here at Balls and Walnuts will remember that I had a spooky period — read lots of Castaneda, futzed with my dreams, wandered the Berkeley streets at night like I was on some kind of vision quest. Tarot was part of it.
How does a chemistry major reconcile something as obviously bogus as fortune telling? My theory of tarot, circa 1984, posited that folks reveal far more in their body language than they do with their words. I might not understand what their body language had to say, but my subconscious did. Using the tarot as a sort of Universal Translator, I could free-associate my way through a reading, blathering on and on, wandering from one card to the next and then back again, generating hypotheses, testing for internal consistency, and ultimately arriving at a coherent story.
I’ll bet you’re thinking, “Yah, that’s how all the charlatans work. They throw out a million darts, hoping one or two will be bullseyes.” The trouble with that theory is, I never asked the recipient of the reading for verbal feedback. If he even spoke, I’d interrupt: “Don’t feed the reader. I don’t want you to say a word.” I was reading their body language, you see, and the cards merely catalyzed the process. (more…)
Read it ‘n weep
Someone or something stalks the boys and young men of the Reach, kidnapping them, abusing them in the worst ways, killing them, and discarding their mutilated bodies. Dubric Byerly must find the killer and bring him to justice. He’s accompanied by his squire, Dien, his pages, Lars and Otlee, and the ghosts of all who have been murdered during his watch.
Threads of Malice follows Ghosts in the Snow, Tamara Siler Jones’s first Dubric Byerly novel. Since I’m fated never to read a series in the appropriate order, I started with Threads. It’s a credit to Jones’s characterization skills that Dubric and his comrades sprang to life for me within the first twenty-five pages. No backstory, by the way — scarcely a peep about what happened in Ghosts — and yet Dubric, Dien, and the boys captured and held my attention from the start.
Jones has horrible things in store for this foursome. If I remember correctly, PBW likes to ask her main characters, “What’s the worst thing I can do to you?” — and then, she does just that. I suspect Jones did the same thing when she conceived Threads of Malice, only she must have been having a bad day. I mean, a really, really bad day, because man, is she ever cruel to her characters.
What an incredible one-two punch this is: deft characterization plus Jones’s willingness to tighten the screws far past what would be acceptable among polite sadomasochists. Repeatedly, I found myself thinking, Oh, no she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t . . . I can’t believe it, she DID! She pulled very few punches indeed. As a result, I ripped through this book in a week, which is light speed for yours truly.
I cared deeply for these characters, and, yeah, I admit it: she made me cry. Y’all know what a crybaby I am (Sheila, you got me in StarDoc — damn you!) but still. A writer has to have a good deal of competence to turn on my waterworks. I’m impressed.
This novel features gruesome torture-murders, nasty-nasty autopsy scenes, slimy critters that bring to mind the best stomach-churning images from Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels, and two love stories: something for everyone.
I can only fault Jones on one thing: she keeps the pressure on almost until the very last page. Although the ending wrapped up the plot, I wanted a longer cool-down period, a chance to live with the characters during the aftermath. I want to know what happens next to these guys! Do I really have to wait until Fall 2006 for Valley of the Soul? This woman’s cruelty knows no bounds.
I’m sounding like a fanboy, huh?
D.
This is progress?
Question: do any of you have as much trouble reading this font as I do?
What I Did Today
by
Doug H.
With much crying and gnashing of teeth, I:
- Switched to the only other WP theme I can use without figuring out precisely where to put new downloaded themes. (I thought I had this one figured out. I really did. But the new themes do not appear as options.) Consequently, my sidebar and my posts now line up.
- Figured out how to move my sitemeter to this site.
- Crashed the old site.
- Uncrashed the old site, mostly.
- Managed to move over 27 of the 500+ posts from the Blogger site before the importer-software-thingy seized up and wouldn’t transfer any more posts.
- Categorized those 27 posts because it was one of the few things I could figure out how to do.
- Finished the laundry.
- Did the grocery shopping.
I also finished Tamara Siler Jones’s Threads of Malice. Wow. More on that later this evening.
I wish I could:
- Figure out how to get the rest of my Blogger posts over here. When I try to repeat the import, the computer monitor stares back at me slack-jawed as a Deliverance banjoist.
- Figure out how to employ the template of my choice. I’ve put it in the right directory, but it’s still not showing up as an option.
- Not quite as important, but I’d love to learn how to customize the header like some of y’all have managed to do.
Back to real blogging soon. I promise. Meanwhile, I’m going to try out Dean’s Tortiere recipe. (Damn. Forgot the celery salt!)
Homemade pizza tonight; I’m going to prepare the tortiere filling in advance and bake it tomorrow.
D.
I knew I would screw this up.
I don’t know yet whether I’m a little screwed or a lot screwed.
I tried to import the Blogger files to this WordPress blog. Everything went well at first; WordPress claimed it had finished, and was merely adding the files to this site. I watched for half an hour as it slowly added my Shatter files, early ones first, to Balls and Walnuts.
Then it stalled. At least 30 or 40 minutes went by with no apparent progress.
That’s when I screwed the pooch. I figured, “Okay, I’ll just start over,” and did just that. Well, it’s not that simple. Now, my blogger blog is kaput, and I can’t seem to use the Import from Blogger function anymore.
Oy. I’m going to try begging for help from the WordPress gurus.
Note: All is not lost. Blogger still has my files, and I did save my Blogger template before starting all of this. I restored the template, but I think Blogger must still be, erm, disturbed, because I can’t seem to republish the blog. But at least the files are still there!
D.
A few preliminary WordPress questions
I’ve been horsing around with WordPress for the last few hours. Can anyone tell me:
Why are all my links ‘n stuff way down at the bottom of the page?Fixed, using crappy alternative template!- And why aren’t they alphabetized? (I’m anal about such things.)
And if I mess with a new template, will I lose all my links? (Hey, that’s what happens with Blogger!)Answered!How do I transfer my sitemeter over without losing the numbers? (Remember, Type A stands for ‘anal’.)Fixed!- How do I make this place look like MY place? You know, I’d like to doll it up a bit. Hang some pictures, that sort of thing.
How do I un-moderate comments?Answered!
I’ll add and subtract from this list as I grope around in the dark. Bear with me.
Yes, I’m figuring things out slowly but surely. If you haven’t guessed yet, I have no patience. (Please, no dumb puns about patience/patients. Those jokes are right up there with, “Hey, can you see through to the other side?”)
Note: please make sure I have you on my blogroll. If you’re not there and you’d like to be, drop me a note in the comments.
D.
Oyreka!
Know what I remember from the Ancient European Civ class I took in college?
- Historians like Thucydides better than Herodotus
- Writers (like yours truly) like Herodotus better than Thucydides. Herodotus knew how to entertain.
- The ‘y’ in those old Greek names, like the Persian King Cyrus, is pronounced ‘oo’. Thus, Cyrus = Soorus.
- Similarly, the ‘eu’ combo is pronounced ‘oy’.
Eureka = Oyreka!
The boy and I had a good day together in Eureka. True, the neat-o store on 2nd Street which sold carnivorous plants, glass eyes, and faded sepia-toned photographs has closed. It’s a Persian rug store now. Aside from that, however, we had a great day.
The boy and I did lunch at Hurricane Kate’s, where, on the way to the bathroom, I overheard the dishwasher belting out Rod Stewart‘s If You Want My Body and You Think I’m Sexy at the top of his lungs. Yet another food service employee with aspirations towards American Idol.
After lunch, we went shopping for birthday presents —
KAREN, IF YOU’RE READING THIS, STOP NOW!
for Karen, and Valentine’s Day candies too, for good measure. We made a trip to Borders and bought:
For me, Tamara Siler Jones’s Ghosts in the Snow (hey, if I can read PBW’s StarDoc series backwards, I can read Tambo’s Dubric novels out of sequence, too!)
For Jake (think homeschooling), Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Vonnegut’s Mother Night, and The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain.
For Karen (and me, I admit it): a collection of John Varley’s short stories, and Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? That one’s a birthday present — she doesn’t know about it yet.
Jake wanted to get something for Mom that was HIS idea, so we went back to Old Town Eureka, found another gift shop, and Jake picked out a cool tee-shirt with a crane on it, while I lingered over a pack of Rider-Waite tarot cards. I’ll save my tarot stories for another day. For now, since I’m playing with WordPress for the first time, I’d like to try uploading an image:
The Fool, one of my favorite cards.
D.
I’ve moved
Included for the sake of completeness:
Yup, Blogger done buggered me one too many times. Come visit me at
For the time being, it will look bare-bones over there, but that will change.
Update your links, folks. No telling when I might crash this place AGAIN.
D.
My glamorous profession
Warning: don’t read this on a full stomach.
Did I ever mention that Alec Baldwin watched me to get into character for the movie Malice?
It’s true. And for my end-of-residency roast, I did a little stand-up comedy for my fellow residents and my attending physicians, wherein I showed this video clip from Malice:
You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.
Stop video clip. Lights back on me. I’m shaking my head slowly, my mouth agape. Then, I say:
It’s uncanny. That is so . . . ME.
Ah, well. You had to be there. Truth is, if we’re playing God, then God has one messy, messy job. You know what I do more than anything else? I mean, as a simple percentage of time spent? I dig out ear wax. But that’s not the messiest thing I do.
I’m a PusBuster.
Pus is one of the main reasons I’m late blogging today. That, and my son talked me into playing two games of chess with him, and of course I had to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
In residency, I owned a tiny brown bottle full of oil of wintergreen. When it comes to pus, oil of wintergreen is your best friend. Schmear a bit of it under your nose and everything smells wonderful, even gangrene. Well, maybe not gangrene.
Somewhere along the way, I lost my little brown bottle. Could have used it last week — that pus shot two-and-a-half feet across the room. Thank heavens I wasn’t in its path. My nurse, a woman in her mid-sixties, said that was the worst thing she’d ever smelled. For a nurse (especially one in her mid-sixties!) that’s really saying something.
I’m not complaining. I like busting pus, just as I like cleaning ear wax. Nothing satisfies quite like a good spill of the yellow poo or a big fat plug of the brown-and-hairy. These are some of the happiest patients: in the case of pus, they usually experience a rapid resolution of their pain and pressure symptoms; with ear wax, they can hear again. I’ve been hugged more than a few times.
If I thought about complaining even for a moment, I would force myself to remember my comrades in general surgery, who regularly pull beer cans, beer bottles, and baseballs from people’s rectums; my comrades in urology, who remove bobby pins and other delightful items from people’s urethras; and my comrades in gynecology, who sometimes have to explain to their patients that, no, tampons do not dissolve, and it’s a bad idea to stuff one in after the other.
See? I have it easy. Only the eye docs have it better.
We’re medieval barbers, that’s all we are. Sometimes I try to explain that to my patients. Usually, I stop myself before they get that glazed, wide-eyed look.
D.
PS: Here’s the US Military’s latest recruiting video (NOT). Hat tip to Daily Kos for linking to this biting satire.
We have a winner!
Shelbi wins the drawing. Congratulations!
Thank you, all of you who played. That was a delightful bit of self-stroking for me. If you missed out, don’t feel bad — I’ll have another contest in April when I hit the one year mark.
Shelbi, email me at azureus at harborside (dot) com, and send me your snail mail addie. If you would rather have a gift certificate than Borges’s Collected Fictions, let me know.
Thanks again, everyone.
D.
Thirteen Dreams
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| Thirteen Dreams from Doug Tales from the other third of my life (Other people’s dreams are boring as hell. Let’s see if I can make this work.) 1. The earliest dream I can recall: a pixie lives in my closet, and she alerts me to her presence by playing on a tiny piano. She leads me into a room I had never seen, sunlit, full of toys, a world of safety and beauty.2. My grandfather (he of the surgically removed horns, and the monkey in the attic) and I travel to the moon. It’s so small, I could walk around it in a matter of minutes. I jump higher and higher in the low gravity while my grandfather scratches his bald head and mumbles in Yiddish.
3. Late at night, my parents talk quietly near the gas range. All the burners are on, not a pot in sight. “With all of your problems,” my father says, “it’s a wonder you’re not dead.” My mother falls to the kitchen floor, unconscious. (What can I say — she was a bit of a hypochondriac.) 4. I’m in a car with my brother and sister, and we’re pulling away from a home construction site. We leave my mother behind. She wants to give me some food — a Hershey’s chocolate bar, no doubt — and she runs after the car, holding it out for me to grab. She can’t catch up. That one recurred, haunting me for years for reasons I still don’t understand. 5. I’ve had insomnia for as long as I can recall. I used to tell myself stories to pass the hour or two it would take to get to sleep. Sometimes, it’s difficult to know the difference between a remembered dream or one of those stories. In one, I’m a secret agent, poisoning Hitler’s carrot patch. 6. A woman wakes up in the night to an empty bed. She calls out for her husband, but no one answers. In a panic, she runs outside, calling his name. Terror surges; she passes out in the driveway. She wakes up the following morning in her own bed, and does not realize that the experience hours earlier was a waking dream. This is not my dream. 7. A woman watches a chef boil a lobster. The lobster screams as it is lowered into the pot. He takes it out and removes its limbs, one by one. This is not my dream, either. 8. I am amazed at how readily dreams can reprogram decades of memory. In one recurring dream with many variations, I’m back in that state of loneliness I lived in before meeting Karen. A girl or woman (depending upon how old I am in the dream) lets me know she’s interested in me. Together, we take the first step. 9. Oh, lordy, the student’s dream. My favorite remains the one in which I’m late to the final, but I still have 20 or 30 minutes left. I look at the first question, then the second, then the third. Each and every question is nonsensical — essay questions with numerical answers, mathematical equations with multiple choices covering the gamut from “honesty” to “betrayal.” 10. I’m peeing, and I lose control of my aim. Soon, the ceiling and the walls are dripping in urine. 11. My teeth fall out. 12. I’m in a crashing plane, or a car attacked by gunmen, and in a last minute restoration of faith, I recite the Shema. 13. And then there’s the one about the malt shop — you know the kind, red-cushioned spinning stools beside a long, gleaming countertop. Twelve cheerleaders, sweaty from their last workout, sit atop the stools. They are a Godiva Deluxe Assortment of ethnicities, they are all beautiful, and none of them are wearing underwear. Oh, wait. That’s a fantasy, not a dream. My dreams are never that much fun.
5. Sapphire Writer |
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D.