Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Pix
My wife is one fine piece of arm
How low will I stoop to draw blog traffic?
That’s a difficult question. Yesterday, I learned over at Non Compos Mentis that I’ve been going about it all wrong. Why putz around with Technorati tags when one photo of nude women wrestling, appropriately labeled (or inappropriately labeled, as you shall soon see), will launch your blog into the stratosphere? Sex. Free porn. Nude photos. That’s where the action is.
I have two problems with this plan.
One: most of y’all are of the feminine persuasion, and while I don’t think of you as prudes, I don’t want to alienate you, either. You come here for the humor (I hope), not for photos of naked women making out. If I did put up photos of women with huge breasts french-kissing, you would think that I had photoshopped Ann Coulter’s and Michelle Malkin’s faces onto the relevant parties first. And you’d be right.
Two: if I do something like this, it had better be funny. Despite the things I say sometimes, I’m not a blog traffic whore. Much. I mean, I have to draw the line somewhere, and shameless exploitation of anyone except me, my wife, my son, and certain media figures who richly deserve it — oh, and actors and actresses and other people who catch my attention, not to mention old friends and acquaintances and other family members, associates, and folks I meet in the blogosphere — well, it’s just not right, and I’m not going to do it.
Besides: do I really want tons of traffic from pimply faced kids with megadoses of testosterone surging through their bloodstream? Well, sure, if they decide to stick around for the humor.
These two concerns have led me to make the following two self-imposed requirements. Any naked skin which I show on this site will be (1) non-exploitative, and (2) humorous in some way.
Before I unveil my creation, I need to do something first. I have to frame the image with lots of raunchy words. I apologize if you’re offended by phrases such as
Tasty Bulgarian virgins bare all!!!!
Shaved underage midgets engage in unspeakable acts!!!!
Tentacle sex, cold pasta fetish, exquisite tickle torture, and more!!!!
HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT!!!
You must be 18 years old or older to view the image below. Click here if you are under 18.
Behold:
Girls so young they have acne on their tender buttocks!
Scroll down for more!!!!
Okay, I’m back. That’s Karen’s arm, bent at the elbow. Now think about all the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds across America who are doing unspeakable things with that image up on their computers.
See how much she loves me?
D.
Your morning dose of fugliness
Because I love y’all so very, very much.
Six degrees of me
Remember the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game?
1. Kevin Bacon sucked in Footloose with Sarah Jessica Parker,
2. Sarah Jessica Parker sucked in Sex and the City with Kim Catrall, who sucked more often, and
3. Kim Catrall didn’t get to suck Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China.
Thus, Kurt Russell’s “Bacon Number” is 3. The University of Virginia’s Bacon Oracle can connect Kurt to Kevin in 2 steps, but I think my links are more fun. You ought to get points for fun.
After much consideration, I’ve decided I’m a full six degrees away from Kevin. Here’s the connection:
1. Kevin Bacon played with Benjamin Bratt in The Woodman (2004).
2. Benjamin Bratt played with Michael Keaton in One Good Cop (1991).
3. Michael Keaton played “Himself” on three episodes of Fred Rogers’ “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” (1975).
4. Fred Rogers hosted a special episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in which he costarred with Koko, the sign language-facile gorilla (1998). Here they are in a loving pose even Bam couldn’t snark:
5. Koko once attended a halloween party at the house of molecular biologist Larry Kedes.
6. Larry Kedes was my PhD thesis advisor.
By this reckoning, my Bacon Number is 6. Are you surprised I had to go through an ape to get to Kevin? Even if she is a very, very intelligent ape.
This isn’t my lowest Bacon Number, but it is the most entertaining connection I could find. If my Bacon Number translated into something practical, such as income, status with literary agents and publishers, or ease of accumulating female groupies, then my Bacon Number would be 2.
What, you don’t believe me?
1. Kevin Bacon played in The Big Picture with Eddie Albert (1989).
2. Eddie Albert costarred* with Yours Truly in Green Acres (1970).
You realize what this means, don’t you? All of you are, at a bare minimum, only three degrees of separation away from Kevin Bacon.
We can all die happy.
True Koko story:
Larry Kedes knew Koko by way of a post-doc in his lab. This post-doc was, at the time, Penny Patterson’s photographer and significant other. Penny is Koko’s teacher and bestest friend.
Anyway, Larry thought it would be a hoot to have Koko over for Halloween. She could answer the door and hand out candy, and the neighborhood kids would all figure Koko was a human in a gorilla suit. Since Penny always treated Koko as if she were a human in a gorilla suit, it all made sense, sort of.
Think about it: if you wanted to invite a gorilla over to your house, wouldn’t your first question be, “Where will she crap?” Brilliant ape that she is, Koko is toilet trained. Larry thought he had all his bases covered.
In his plans, he unfortunately neglected one detail. Koko had never before seen a bidet.
I wonder who cleaned up the mess?
Koko, if you’re reading this, here’s how to use a bidet.
D.
*I’ll admit my choice of verbs stretches credulity.
THIS JUST IN
Oh, man, this is just too good not to share. Thanks to Ishbadiddle for this link to a remixed trailer for The Shining. This is fluffing brilliant.
A Birthday Wish List: Part 2
#7: A wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Sometimes, bad things happen to bad people, and the spirit of Schadenfreude takes hold. Like the feeling you get when that jerk in the Trans Am who cut you off three minutes ago gets pulled over for speeding, you know?
When we were kids, my brother and sister had this odd habit. If my brother got punished, my sister would rub her hand over her breastbone and say, “Aaaaaah.” She pronounced it with a guttural flare, as if the sound came from deep within her viscera. If my sister got punished, my brother would return the favor. Since I had a cast iron ass, they got little satisfaction in seeing me punished, and any “Aaaahing” from them would be met by my laughter.
It seems to me that as adults, we get to say “Aaaaaah” far too infrequently. What better birthday present could there be than to see a rich and powerful hypocrite brought low?
What I dream of:
George Bush caught on tape telling us what he really thinks about the displaced poor of New Orleans.
Pat Robertson indicted on child pornography charges.
One day, at a press conference, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan says, “You know, folks? This is all bullshit — I mean, I could tell you stories that would knock your socks off. Aw, hell. No time like the present.”
Rush Limbaugh . . . wait. He’s already shot himself in the foot so many times, what else could happen to the guy?
What I’ll be satisfied with:
Photoshopping rude images of Ann Coulter.
#6: The perfect father for just one day.
Remember the sitcoms of the 1960s? In Father Knows Best, Jim Anderson was, like a modern day Odysseus, never at a loss. No matter what you threw at the guy, he handled it with sensitivity and style. Princess having boy trouble with those creeps from the local frat? Jim would bust a cap in their ass and dance a jig on their graves. Kitten having menstrual cramps? Jim would give her a few tokes from his pipe and teach her the secrets of Far Eastern meditation. Bud busted for having the neighborhood’s first methamphetamine lab? Jim would post bail and buy his son a trampoline so that the boy can channel his energy more constructively.
I want to be that kind of dad, if only for a day.
You know. The kind that never raises his voice, solves every problem, and finds himself at the center of every group hug.
What I dream of:
A day wherein I’m the perfect father to my son.
What I’ll be satisfied with:
Not raising my voice above 80 decibels, and not making the kid cry.
#5: The great discovery!
As a kid, I used to fantasize about black ops agents coming to my school and spiriting me away from my classmates. “You’re far too important to our nation’s security to waste your time here,” one would say. Then the other would chime in: “We need a four-foot-tall boy genius to man our special space ship. This craft will make you the master of space and time. Do you think you can handle it?”
And I’d think: Can I handle it? Fuck yeah!
Only I wouldn’t have used the F-bomb back in elementary school. I’d heard it once or twice, soon learned it wasn’t in the dictionary, and was the only word guaranteed to put my mother in shock. Oddly enough, the word “frig” seemed to have the same effect, even though I was certain I’d made it up. Guess not.
Nowadays, I don’t particularly care to be the master of all time and space. As I learned in high school from watching the movie Laserblast, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’m already a corrupt son of a bitch.
No, I’d be content if someone else discovered me.
What I dream of:
Some big agent, say Neil Gaiman‘s agent Merrilee Heifetz, finds my blog and sends me an email dripping with praise and wishful solicitations. Then comes The Phone Call (cue Scarlet O’Hara’s vocal inflections): “Oh, Dr. Hoffman, Ah am evah so hopeful that you are unrepresented, because it would be mah honah and privilege to be your agent.”
Don’t know if Ms. Heifetz has a Southern accent — actually, I kind of doubt it — but that’s part of the fantasy. I’m sure she’d oblige.
What I’ll be satisfied with:
Getting my damned sitemeter to top 100 for the day. Where the hell do you people go on the weekend? Don’t tell me you have lives.
D.
Your morning blast from the past
This is my favorite photo of me and Jake. We took it at my parents’ fiftieth anniversary celebration in Las Vegas — about six years ago, I think.
Cute kid, eh?
D.
The Distaff Blog
Karen never does anything halfway. When she decided to raise chameleons, we bought sixteen Ficus trees so each adult could have his or her own tree. I imagine she used to spend hours misting the chameleons, hand-feeding them, cleaning up their poops.
Nowadays, she has tarantulas, forty of them, and she fusses with them as though they were AKC-pedigreed poodles. I’m quite sure I’d get more attention around here if I had four extra appendages, but then, she’d probably go and sprout fangs.
She has become a news junky, too. She used to be an Arachnopets junky (a bbs for spider people), but I guess that got boring after a while. Now she spends hours a day surfing the net, hopping political blogs and other news sites.
I’ve been after her for weeks to start her own blog. As you might imagine from an intelligent person who spends hours a day, seven days a week at the same thing, she has become a fairly sharp analyst. Why blog? Why the hell not?
So here’s an open invitation: come check out Chelicera, Karen’s political blog. No pretty window dressing — Karen’s into the Zen minimalist thing.
(Note added later: all the Chelicera posts have been moved here, to Balls and Walnuts.)
D.
Gross Anatomy 101
Blog block vanished when I read Brian’s post today on FAF (Beaches) . I remembered something from high school — something you don’t need to know. But what the hey.
GF v1.0 and I used to agree that there were some high school couplings best left out of the imagination. One pairing in particular scandalized us. Let’s call them Archibald and Patricia.
Though blessed with a good heart, Archibald had one flaw which should have doomed him from any hope of young love. He looked goofy, and in high school, looks are everything. Patricia, on the other hand, only had a goofy personality. Actually, that’s too kind. If you spent any time around Patricia, any time at all, your face would freeze into an expression like this:
Because she was that weird. Honestly. (God. Do I really look that fat? And it looks like I’ve had hair plugs!) Nevertheless, these two goofy people found one another, and, soon thereafter, were sighted holding hands in the canteen, making eyes at one another outside of AP Calculus, even dating.
Every year, the school schlepped us smart kids down to Newport Beach as some sort of reward. We never thought to question this elitism because this was one time when the deck was stacked in our favor. After all, the lettermen got all the cute girls, the stoners got all the loose girls, and what did we get? The beach trip. It was better than nothing.
How it happened, we shall never know. Perhaps Archibald’s choice of bathing trunks was some sort of precognitive wardrobe malfunction. Perhaps things were going too slowly in that department and Archibald thought shock therapy would be just the thing. Perhaps he was simply too much man for Woolworth’s Clearance Table swim shorts. But the facts are clear: at some point during the beach trip, Patricia spotted Archibald’s package.
And the experience was sufficiently traumatic that she broke up with him that day.
GF v1.0 and I speculated endlessly about this. Was he that big? Or was he that small? Had Patricia never seen a penis, not even in books? Had Archibald suffered some horrific accident as an infant? Maybe, in the deep, dank, salty darkness of his drawers, this is what she saw.
Now, come on. Just because it was hyperlinked didn’t mean you had to click on it. If all your friends were clicking on a hyperlinked cliff, would you click on it, too?
I knew you would.
D.
Unrequited lust
John Scalzi openly flaunting his metrosexuality got me thinking: how many times has a gay man made a pass at me? I can count this on one hand, and that would be the hand of some guy who likes to use his band saw after two bottles of Thunderbird. Trouble is, that number still totes up higher than the number of hetero come-ons pitched my way.
Not that I’m complaining. Gay come-hithers leave me feeling good about myself. After all, what could be more flattering than the approval of some fella who might one day star on Queer Eye? But the hetero advances never fail to leave me nauseated and vaguely confused. After nearly 21 years of marriage, I’m still getting used to the idea that my wife is willing to have sex with me. Of course, it might be relevant that, left out in the cold, I become unbearably pissy. Whining: Spanish Fly for the 40-something Guy.
Back to gay men, and the few who thought I was hot stuff. In med school, I took my Preparation for Clinical Medicine rotation at the Palo Alto Veteran’s Administration Hospital. I’d partnered with Fred, a classmate with biceps big as my thigh, a guy credulous enough to accept, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, my tale of the Latest Proceedings of the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yet Fred couldn’t believe me when I told him about the slight-framed, red-headed male nurse who couldn’t pass me on the ward without giving me the eye. Homosexuality was not part of Fred’s world view. That sort of thing happened up the Peninsula, in shops like Hard-on Leather or bars like The White Swallow. You’d never — never ever ever — have to face that sort of thing here in the VA Hospital, surrounded by hordes of Bronze medal-punctured amputees with faded DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tatts.
One day, I got my chance to open Fred’s eyes. I spotted my admirer from thirty feet away and elbowed Fred in the ribs. “Watch, okay?” I said. “Just watch.” As we passed my little red-head, he winked at me with his whole face. It looked something like this:
I’m really sorry you had to see that.
Fred dragged me off into a stairwell, nearly dislocating my shoulder. “You weren’t kidding!”
“Of course not. I never kid. And, oh, by the way, we were discussing the fate of Your People at last week’s IJC rally, and I’m afraid there are going to be a few changes around here.”
Kidding about that last bit.
Flash forward to 1990. Internship at Los Angeles County General Hospital, which at the time (pre-Northridge earthquake) ranked as the nation’s largest hospital complex. You would most likely know County from the exterior shot used for the opening credits of soap opera General Hospital.
Mandatory reading for any new intern: Samuel Shem’s The House of God, guaranteed to fill you full of misconceptions on the mechanics of internship — the chief misconception being that every female in the hospital, from medical students to attending physicians, nursing students to ward clerks, would, sans warning, drag you off into a vacant call room/operating theater/pharmaceutical cabinet to jump your living bones.
True enough, there were occasional sparks of interest, like the zaftig Filipina nursing student who always had a smile for me, or the Jewish medical student who had me pegged as a Jew the very first day, and whom I had to beat away with an IV pole because when I told her I’m married her response was So? But, with rare exception, no one got laid at LA County. No one.
Men of ambiguous sexuality abounded: nurses, aides, clerks. You never knew where you stood with these guys; wedding rings didn’t necessarily mean anything. Gay or straight, nearly all wore scrubs, so you couldn’t pick up on visual cues.
I remember one fellow in particular: a night clerk named Bub (not his real name — for a change, I’m not being a total dickwad). Bub was a fifty-something Filipino who wore white shirts stained with Ensure and the various other brands of kibble County fed its patients; white shirts that did remarkably little to conceal his whopping V-bagging elephant scrotum-sized man-titties.
One night, fueled by tapioca, Ensure, graham crackers, and Saltines (the only things available after the cafeteria closed), I worked past midnight on the ward, charting. I sat at the front desk across from Bub’s torpid form. The night nurses floated in and out of my field of vision like huge clumsy moths. My zaftig cutie was there, fighting with an IV drug abuser who insisted on smoking in the central hallway, tangling up her femoral line in the process. I had just reset the femoral line, and I was busy writing up the procedure note. Not easy, considering that every two minutes Bub roused from his heavy-lidded fugue to ask me for medical advice.
BUB: So. Doctor Hoffmah. What do you think of this thing on my neck?
All of my nights on the ward had a dreamlike quality, and this one was no exception. Comes from being half-asleep. My pen kept scratching across the page; the nurses kept flitting about behind me; Bub left his station to fuss with a chart rack. At the dimmest boundaries of consciousness, I felt him behind me, moving about. You know how you can sense when someone’s in your personal space, particularly if you don’t really like that someone? I knew he was back there, but I kept on working, because the sooner I had finished, the sooner I could get back to bed.
Then, without warning, I felt two of the warmest, plushiest breasts I have ever felt squeeze ever so voluptuously into my back and hold there for two full breaths, not that I was breathing, because (tapioca and graham crackers rising in my craw) I was too busy thinking
and then he moved away.
I jerked my head around —
I didn’t know what I was going to say to him but damn it I was going to say something. Interns are paid less than minimum wage! This is harrassment! What did I do to deserve this?
I jerked my head around, and saw my zaftig cutie walking away.
God damn! I wanted to scream. Get back here so I can enjoy it!
D.
