Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: The Fearful Meme
Way too much information
Kris sent this to me. Since I’m supposed to send it on to a few other friends, it certainly qualifies as a meme (technically, it’s a chain email). But why send it to a few people when I can blast all of you with it?
Renee preempts everyone else. Sorry, folks, but if you post sex toy pics in vivo, that deserves recognition!
Lyvvie the technical first digs BLTs, Men’s Health, and urine-soaked children
SxKitten lurves the pretty-colored stones, too
Dean likes his ice cream chocolatey
Like Dean, microsaur hates the Stupids
Pat’s not playing, but he is such a rocker
If you want to play, cut and paste it to your own blog, then change all the answers.
Now, here’s the interesting question, in my opinion. This Q&A is supposed to help you learn more about me. But since you already know everything there is to know about me, is it possible for you to know me better afterwards? *scratches head*
Here we go.
Stop snickering
Via Shakespeare’s Sister,
You are Cleopatra
Beautiful and Charming. You are able to persuade anyone to do anything you would like, because of your hotness and charisma. You are an expert in gaining power over anyone you choose. |
D.
SBD: Sex, Gatsby, and overreaching
You might not think Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby have much in common, other than the fact both focus on the lives of the shallow, nouveau riche, but for Beth’s Smart Bitches Day (which I have ignored these last several weeks for lack of anything to say), I can do better than that.
But first, you’re probably wondering what happened to me yesterday. Or not. Maybe I shouldn’t assume your lives depend on me posting at least once a day, hmm? Anyway, let me quickly say WE’RE BOTH FINE. It’s good for hospital morale if the employees see their physicians (and soon to be chief-of-staff, I might add haughtily) use the emergency facilities. It fills them with confidence. And besides, the nearest larger hospital is another seventy miles south, not that that had anything to do with our choice of hospitals. Nope, nothing at all. In any case, I don’t have pneumonia and Karen didn’t have a heart attack so I guess we’re both a couple of hypochondriacs.
Am I boring you yet? Here. Check out Renee’s Christmas card to me. One question, Renee: is that mistletoe hanging over your girlfriends, and if so, may I please have a raincheck?
Onward to more serious Smart Bitchery . . .
The wonder of me
SxKitten posts the following challenge:
The Holiday Challenge: Post your 4 virtues – 4 things you like about yourself.
The Hard Part: No qualifiers, no but’s, no apologies, no back-handed put-downs. You have to give yourself 4 solid, undiluted compliments.
SxKitten’s done it (linked above). Dean’s done it. Now it’s my turn.
By the way, I’m still thinking about Renee’s challenge. Hmm . . . funny, sexy story, eh? But sex is so bloody serious.
Back to my virtues.
1. I’m funny. I laugh at my own jokes constantly. As a kid, I had to be funny. It was the only way a little pisher like me could effectively deal with bullies — all the bullies, not just the ones in my family.
2. I’m a damned good chef. I can wow the socks off dinner guests and I can even impress my wife and son.
3. I have a great brain (not to be confused with a beautiful mind). It has served me very well these many years and has shown itself up to every challenge. And I have a string of A+’s and a magna cum laude from Berkeley to prove it 🙂 so there.
4. I’m a good doctor. My patients love me and I have to admit their affection is well deserved.
Hey, that was easy. Do I have to stop at four?
Your turn.
D.
Six strange and wonderful things
It’s Lyvvie‘s meme. Blame her.
ONE
Karen: You got the money?
Me: Yeah. You hang on to it.
Karen: No, you can hang on to it.
Me: No, I’ll just spend it on cheap whores.
Karen: I’d like to know where you intend to find expensive whores around here.
**more below the cut**
The Hanukkah meme
Holiday spirit? Fvck yeah, why not? But Christmas isn’t precisely my holiday. If you want the original Christmasy version of this meme, you’ll have to check Tam’s blog.
This is my version, such as it is.
1. Manischewitz or Kolobarra Hills Shiraz Cabernet 2004? Vintage, man. You kidding me?
2. Does the Hanukkah Lobster wrap presents or just sit them under the Hannukah Shrub? Hanukkah Lobster has claws, so he tends to tear the wrapping. He prefers to guide the presents under the shrub with his blessedly strong tail.
3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? Huh? We still have the (nonfunctional) Xmas lights from our house’s last owner, the Imelda Marcos of Brookings. They’re colored. I’m the only one here who could take them down, and I’m too lazy. So . . . colored.
Heh heh. Yer kinda cute fer a Christ-killer.
4. Do you hang mistletoe? I prefer to kill it by lethal injection.
5. When do you set out your menorah? Usually on the second or third night of Hanukkah, accompanied by that famous Hanukkah Carol, Kids, I Missed The First Night AGAIN. Damned lunar calendar.
6. What is your favorite holiday dish? Oooh, that’s easy. Latkes (potato pancakes).
7. Favorite holiday memory as a child: My mother giving me all my presents weeks ahead of time, so that when Hanukkah finally arrived, my only presents were socks and shirts. THANKS, Mom.
8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? The very first time I saw a department store Santa Claus and asked my mom if I could meet him. Mom’s reply was something like: Yeah, right. You believe that?
9. Do you open a gift on Hanukkah Eve? Yes, you poor I-only-get-to-open-presents-on-one-day goy. We open gifts EVERY night of Hanukkah. (Not strictly true. By the time I hit my tenth birthday, my family had left the Hanukkah gift-exchange behind. Nowadays, we throw a few presents around. No biggy.)
10. How do you decorate your Hanukkah Shrub? With decorative gefilte fish balls. Our cats love us.
11. Snow! Love it or Dread it? Outside of a paper cone, I fear it.
12. Can you ice skate? With rare exception, Jews don’t ice skate. We’ve been known to kvetch to the rink manager, “Can’t you warm it up a bit in here? I’ll catch the double pneumonia.”
13. Do you remember your favorite gift? No. I really don’t.
14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you? I get lots and lots of time off from work — mostly to keep my employees happy, but to keep me sane, too.
15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert? Poppy seed hamentashen. So what if it’s a dessert for Purim. You didn’t say which holiday.
16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? “But it’s my birthday” sex. Again, you didn’t say which holiday.
17. What tops your tree? Sorry, ladies, only Karen gets to top my tree.
18. Which do you prefer giving or receiving? As I’ve said before, GIVING. I can receive myself two or three times a day, but it takes a partner to do some righteous giving.
Okay, okay, enough with the double entendre . . .
19. What is your favorite Christmas Song? Invader ZIM’s Christmas Carol, of course!
20. Candy Canes! Yuck or Yum? Yuck. Yuuuuuck. Does anyone like these abominations?
Anyone can play this meme. Trust me, it’s much more fun if you monkey with the questions first.
D.
SBD 2: Bushnelled
Whenever Jake has Taekwondo, I have an hour of down time. Today, I went to our local megalomart in search of a good book. God forbid I should try to sit alone with my own thoughts for an hour. Anyway, here’s what I found:
I loved the TV show well enough to write a horror spoof of it (“Sex and the Single Wendigo”, waaaay up in the upper lefthand corner). So I should love the book, too — right? Well. I’m only 2.5 chapters into the book, so it would be unfair to judge it so soon, but so far: Meh.
The book and the show seem so fundamentally different. The women in the show approached relationships and sex with inexhaustible hope and gusto, while the men and women of Sex and the City le book have in place of hearts, lumps of coal. The show was a romance, the book, anti-romance.
But it was the Introduction to this edition (pictured above) which really grabbed my attention. The author herself wrote the intro, dated 2001, and oh boy is it an eye-opener. See, I always thought it worked this way:
- You write a book.
- If it gets published, and if it assumes some degree of social or literary significance, brainy types will pen brilliant criticism discussing your book.
It had never occurred to me that the author could pen her own brilliant criticism, but that’s what Candace Bushnell has done. From her Intro:
I suppose that’s why Sex and the City is such an unsentimental examination of relationships and mating habits. Although some people find its lack of sentiment and cruel humor disturbing, it’s probably only because the book contains some kind of universal truth.
What possessed Bushnell to write a new ending for SatC? No insight there, but she does reveal the ending. That’s right — she gives a spoiler for her own book. And then she analyzes the new ending and tells us what it means!
And so, at last, the book has a real ending, in which Carrie and Mr. Big break up. [WTF? That’s not how the series ended!] It’s a bittersweet ending [Really? You thought so? How good of you to tell us how to feel] — not just the end of Carrie’s relationship with Mr. Big, but the end of her dream of finding the proverbial Mr. Big — a man who doesn’t really exist [While you’re at it, please provide a list of all symbols used in the book and tell us what each symbol represents.] If you read closely [Are you listening, all you barely literate readers who fail to understand my all new ending?], you’ll discover that even Mr. Big himself points out that he is a fantasy in Carrie’s imagination, and that you can’t love a fantasy. And so we leave Carrie to enter a new phase of her life when she understands that she will have to find herself (without a man), and in doing so will hopefully be able to find a relationship.
Maybe I’m not as unsentimental as I thought. [But are you as arrogant as you thought?]
This is breathtaking, really breathtaking. I’m all snarked out.
D.
SBD: In dreams
This will be an odd sort of Smart Bitches Day post. I’ve been meaning to write up my final impressions of Gabaldon’s Outlander, but I just don’t have it in me today. In a nutshell: technically excellent, entertaining, but predictable. I even read the sneak preview at the end, but I’m not sure I want to continue with this series — I mean, a twenty year lapse? What’s up with that? Where did these kids come from? And what’s with the POV shift? To quote Beth, GAAAAAH.
I often wonder if my subconscious believes everything it tells itself in my dreams. I think sometimes it just wants to fvck with me. Last night, I dreamed I attended a high school writers’ club, hosted at the house of one of the students. One teenage girl bemoaned the fact she had been writing for OVER A YEAR! and hadn’t been published yet.
I heard myself spouting that often-repeated “wisdom” that you have to write a million words before you arrive at publication quality. “In the first five hundred thousand words,” I told her, “you master technique, everything from grammar all the way up to plot mechanics and characterization. That last five hundred thousand words, that’s when you figure out how to write stories that will sell.”
I wonder if I really believe that. I’m in that second-half territory (maybe even beyond a million words, if I count my blog posts). Have I figured out how to write stories that will sell? I hope so. I think my romance is marketable. If I could only finish editing the mofo, maybe I could find out for certain. But, anyway, do I believe all this BS? And is there any truth to it? And why should I give any more credence to things I hear (or spout) in dreams than to anything else I read or hear?
In my dream, the girl was the daughter of a man I despise in real life. She told me that her parents’ idyllic marriage was a farce, and she was really getting tired of all the noise her dad made at night, banging his 20-something-year-old mistress up against the wall, like Sonny and the bridesmaid in The Godfather.
Do I believe it? Is there any truth to it?
Oooh, I dearly hope so.
D.
What do women want?
So I figured I’d better write a Smart Bitches Day post or Miss Beth will forget all about me. So here goes.
What do women want?
Ruminations apropos of Outlander
How many of y’all have recommended Outlander to me? And how many have told me how very very much they loooooove Jamie? I’ve lost track. And while I am not in the dating game, I’m still not so dead between the legs as to not obsess over What Women Want.
Trouble is, I’m clueless. I still don’t understand what you gals see in Hugh Jackman, and despite the Paul Newman fans who responded to this old post, in my own informal polling, Robert Redford still has Newman beat 2:1, much to my consternation. What is it about Redford? He’s so . . . so . . . so corrugated.
Growing up, I soon figured out that women wanted guys who were taller, meaner, scummier, taller, and taller than me. In that order. I kept wondering, Why do women fall for scum? but I should have been asking, Why am I attracted to women who fall for scum?
But then I graduated Elementary School and everything changed.
Back to Outlander. (Can you tell this is not going to be one of my more coherent SBDs?) Um . . .
SPOILERS
Which is kind of a ridiculous warning considering how many of you have committed this book to memory. NO, I am not going to trash your precious Outlander. I’m enjoying it. Really, I am. Even if I can’t tell when the characters are having sex because Gabaldon likes to play coy about such things, damn her.
Suck his cock already, wench — oh, whoops. You just did. And now he’s going down on you, or maybe you’re giving each other back rubs because DAMN IT I CAN’T TELL!
I think it’s a guy thing. I don’t do well with understated sex scenes.
So why do women love Jamie so much? Is it the kilt with the badger skin sporran? Of course not. I’m not dense, I know what it is.
He’s gallant. He takes punishment intended for that teenage girl and he has no expectation of reward. He got the skin whipped off his back and he didn’t even whimper about it. And he’s willing to give his life for Claire.
And then there are the physical characteristics. He’s a big motherfucker — I think Claire comes up to his bellybutton — not an effete, hairless, slender dude like her husband-from-the-future (present?), who slips from the reader’s (and Claire’s) memory as soon as she plummets back in time. In contrast, Jamie is a Manly Manâ„¢.
He’s a virgin, too, so Claire doesn’t have to worry about that narsty-assed 17th century syphilis. And he’s kind and considerate, an all-around sweetie.
Okay, that’s what women want in their fictional men; but what about real life? I’m curious about your bare minimum requirements. If the gallantry were there, how much slack would you cut a man with regard to physique? And if he were built like Jamie, how much slack would you cut him for a lack of gallantry?
You know, I’ve changed my mind. Forget gallantry and Manly Manlinessâ„¢. I think it is the kilt.
D.
The Five Truths Meme
This meme comes from Pat, to whom I say: five truths? Only five? Hey, this is like a Thirteen, only 62% easier. Or something like that.
Before I give ya five, don’t forget: the Blogwhorgy is still going hot and heavy, and the sperm-swallowing contest is open, too. Just scroll down the page.
List five truths. Five things that are on your mind. Good, bad, it matters not. Lift some weight off.
1. In one form or another, love is the most important thing in my life.
2. To all those geezes who complain to me, “The Golden Years? Meh. They’re not so golden,” I say this: being alive to bitch about it sure beats the alternative.
(I think I’ve blogged this conversation before, but it’s worth repeating.
Me: So, how are you doing today?
My 80-something-year-old patient: I woke up on this side of the dirt, so I’d say I’m doing pretty damned good.)3. There’s only one form of afterlife that’s guaranteed: the bits of ourselves we leave behind in others. And no, I’m not talking about STDs or unwanted pregnancies.
4. You know that injunction, primum non nocere? I realize that no matter how hard I try, I’m going to hurt a few people in my life — strangers, patients, loved ones. I might know this but I still try my damnedest to avoid it.
I’ve built it up into a neurosis, I think.
5. Here’s what blogging means to me: some of my best friends are people whom I’ve never met in person.
Damn, that was tougher than it looked. If I had to do thirteen, I’d plotz.
Then pick five people to do the same.
Aw. You would have to make me tag people.
How about Michelle, Dean (or SxKitten, I’ll let you two fight about it), Corn Dog, noxcat, and Kate.
D.