Balls and Walnuts
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Category Archives: Favorites
We don’t look a day over 9000
Blue Gal and I passed a milestone this month: we each received over 10,000 hits. Yay, BG! Go, me!
As much as I appreciate all my readers, my regulars have a special place in my heart. THANK YOU. I shall make my thank you more concrete in a moment, but for now, thanks to all the li’l people who came here looking for this
or this
or this
Yes, Balls and Walnuts sails past the 10K mark on the strength of our uncredited use of stolen images. Teh Intranets are kewl.
Back to my regulars, the ones I lurve, the ones I bloody well write this blog for day after day cuz I know you’re out there reading me because you like me, you really like me. Sure, some folks blog to vent, some to change the world, some to network, some to practice their exhibitionistic skills. I’m partial to all those motivations (and, give me a sec, but I’m about to indulge one of them big time), but the real reason I do this is because you fill me. You make me complete. I know I shouldn’t look outside myself for that, but I am what I am. I need an audience.
Blue Gal gave her readers a You Tube music video; but what could I give you?
Me.
All of me.
Below the cut.
California dreaming
When my uncle died, the house on Atlantic Boulevard stood vacant save for decades-old furniture, piles of trinkets (in Yiddish, tchotchkes), and garbage of one form or another. My parents wanted to know if there was anything I wanted, so I told them: one thing, only one thing. I wanted my grandfather’s talent agency publicity photo from his time as a failed actor.
I liked Papa better than any of my other grandparents. I suspect he related better to kids than my other grandparents. We had/have similar personalities, too. We’re both dreamers and bullshit artists. We’re both forever imagining riches around the corner. For Papa, it was the breakout acting career, or the properties in Hesperia and Ontario, or (I discovered today, talking to my mother) investments in Long Beach oil. For me, it’s the breakout novel, the movie deal, or (when I’m feeling glum about the writing) a stroke of luck with the lottery.
Thirteen for the short list
Erin O’Brien has a short list which keeps getting longer all the time:
“If Rally Caparas comes here and wants to have sex, it’s pretty much a done deal,” I say to the television, from whence the Weather Channel is broadcasting the Travel Update.
“Ol’ Rally made it to the short list, did he?” says my husband from behind the newspaper. “What if there’s a logistical miscalculation and he comes here when I’m home?”
“You can go for a nice walk,” I say.
One of my older patients likes to call me Dr. Phil just to irritate me. Thus, I get to be Dr. Phil on occasion. (Don’t see the logic in that? Tough noogies, as my sis would say.) When I read Erin’s short list, I thought, “This is a healthy relationship. We should all have short lists. Spouses having lots of imaginary sex with celebrities is good for a marriage.”
With that in mind, here’s my short list.
Vertically challenged
I’m not hung up about my height, but my subconscious is. Right now, my subconscious is sobbing with laughter at my expense.
In the dream, I’m young, twentyish, and there’s no wife, no girlfriend, nada. I’m in the market, metaphorically speaking. Literally speaking, I’m in some kind of casino. I run into a woman whom I knew from med school — she was my second-year resident in General Surgery. Not a beautiful woman but not homely, either. But she’s big, big-boned big, zaftig-big, six-inches-taller-than-me-big. And is she ever happy to see me.
Soon, the sexual innuendo between us is thick as fog, so silly and graphic that I’m glad no one else is within earshot of our conversation. I can’t be misreading these cues. It’s not possible. She wants me.
We’re talking about camping and she can’t believe I haven’t hiked the local trails. Below the surface, it seems to me she’s speaking in code: she can’t believe I’ve never had sex under the open, star-filled sky.
“Any time,” I tell her.
“How about right now?”
Oh, yeah. I haven’t misread this one. But there is still one problem.
“I don’t have a sleeping bag. I don’t have any gear at all!”
“Don’t worry,” she says, “I have extra.”
I follow her out of the casino, skipping with joy, goofy I’m-gonna-get-some grin plastered on my face. On the way out, I recognize a nurse I know from the hospital, a 5′-0″ firecracker who could probably kick my ass halfway down to Eureka (she wins weight lifting competitions). She’s at a poker table. We exchange a glance. I know that she knows that I just got lucky. Or am about to.
(Thanks to Kate and her family for the apropos frog pic.)
We walk to my zaftig gal’s house. She lives less than a block from the casino. Her parents are home, so she makes me wait outside. I remember something: I’ve been eating a sandwich with onions.
“Grab some toothbrushes and toothpaste,” I call after her.
“I only have one toothbrush!”
“We’ll share,” I say, thinking, hell, we’re about to share a lot more than that.
Then, while she’s scrambling around her house gathering camping supplies, this guy shows up with an enormous backpack slung over his shoulder:
Thirteen crushes
Funny, how some of them still own a piece of me.
1. T. I’m two months shy of my third birthday. She’s an older woman, maybe four or five, a head taller than me, and she won’t let me stand on top of that hill. Damn it! The game’s called King of the Hill, not Queen of the Hill! No matter how many times I try to fight my way to the top of the hill, T pushes me down again and again.
This establishes my lifetime attraction to doms.
2. S. I hope you’re still reading my blog, S, cuz this bit is about you. Remember how I chased you around in kindergarten, trying to steal kisses? Kinda scary to think what would happen to me now, behaving like that. Expulsion for sexual harrassment, no doubt. Back then, I spent countless hours (okay . . . minutes) in that gulag known as The Kitchen, Mrs. Bisetti’s time-out zone, but it did no good. The next day, I was back at it again.
3. Shirley Temple. Yes, there was a time in my life when I dug giggly, chubby-cheeked blondes. Imagine my consternation when I found out she was as old as my mom.
4. Elizabeth Montgomery. Okay, Liz Montgomery I knew had to be as old as my mom, but she was just so cute in Bewitched. One day, I was home with a fever, and I decided Liz was the gal for me. That crush lasted all of a day. It broke with the fever.
5. G. On to more age-appropriate interests. G held my fascination all through first grade. I’ve quite forgotten why.
6. B. What can you say about a ten-year-old girl with boobs? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. Yet extremely slow to realize why I loved playing touch football with her.
7. T. Towards the end of 7th grade, T’s friend told me, “She likes you. She thinks you’re cute.” Then she dragged me out of the library, where T waited on the steps. T wouldn’t look me in the face. She was trying very hard to explain my appeal to another friend of hers: “He’s cute!” Then she noticed me standing there and ran off.
I thought about her all summer. I’d never noticed her before, but that didn’t matter — she liked me! She thought I was cute! Those were two very potent aphrodisiacs, and indeed, they seemed like perfect (and sufficient) prerequisites. At long last, I would have a girlfriend.
Beginning of 8th grade, I learned that T had moved down to Rosemead. I never saw her again, but it took me two years to get her out of my head. Not that there weren’t others vying for head space . . .
8. L. Cute li’l thing and fellow brainiac. We danced the slow dances together in 7th and 8th grade. By 9th grade, she had developed an interest in older boys. She would still flirt with me, but that was the limit. Unless I suddenly developed facial hair and my wallet sprouted a driver’s license, I wasn’t in the running. No way, no how.
After I broke up with GFv1.0 (#11), I wrote L a letter. She wrote me back, telling me about her ambitious and soon-to-be-wealthy her fiance. I recall the phrase, “I know where to butter MY bread.” I never wrote her again.
9. L. We could never manage to be interested in each other at the same time, dammit. Certainly one of my most beautiful crushes. (Candace Bergen, circa 1975: my most beautiful crush.) Eventually she married young, and the marriage ended in disaster. But before she divorced that creep, I met up with her again. I hadn’t seen her since 9th grade. She told me, “Don’t ever get married,” but it was the depth of her pain that touched me — and made me fall in love with her, if only for that instant. She has a permanent bit of my cerebral real estate.
10. S. In 10th grade, I relocated to Alhambra High School. One of the first girls I noticed was S. Mornings, she volunteered in the school library. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her hair. It was amazing! A year later, I confided this in J, AKA GFv1.0, who laughed at me. “You idiot. That was a perm!“
Nevertheless, S served to distract me from my growing interest in J.
11. J. She sat behind me in 10th grade biology and entertained me with a seemingly endless supply of snark on the other kids in class. If Smart Bitches had been around back then, J would have been a founding member. For my part, I did her dissections for her, and I suspect I was pretty funny back then, too. It took me a whole year to realize I’d fallen in love with her, can you imagine? A whole year. And when it hit, it hit like a semi.
This was the girl I would marry. We’d raise a family and grow old together. I couldn’t imagine a future without her in it.
Things flew apart in our second and third year together, largely thanks to me. But even as I was busy sabotaging the relationship, I was still talking marriage. “You know,” she said about six months before the break-up, “you keep assuming I want to marry you.”
Yeah, I took a lot of things for granted. Which was the problem, really.
12. C. Towards the end of my second year at Berkeley, I met C — aw, Carmela, okay? God knows I’ve talked about her enough. We took German together. One evening, our class went as a group to a German restaurant in downtown San Francisco, and Carmela wore ruby slippers. Ruby slippers! How can a guy not fall for a girl who owns a pair of ruby slippers? But what really hooked me on Carmela was her schtick. One day after class, we sat together on a patch of lawn near Wheeler Auditorium, and we started riffing off each other. It was . . . oh God this is trite . . . it was magical. Somehow, we had launched into a mutual standup comedy routine, unplanned, unscripted.
Carmela had a gold necklace of the number 13, a gift from her grandmother, a Northern Italian witch whose workbook the villagers burned after her death. Carmela had a recurring dream of herself in ancient Greece. As Carmela got older, the girl in her dreams aged, too. When I knew Carmela, the dream girl had recently married, and her husband had left her to fight in a far-off war. The girl remained behind, like Penelope, biding her time, waiting for her husband’s return.
Sometimes, I wonder if he ever came home.
13. Karen. Long-timers here know the whole story (here, here, and here) of our courtship, but I thought I’d add one detail. After my friend Stan and I crashed Karen’s apartment two or three times, I called him one night. “What do you think?” I said. “Does she love me yet? Why is this taking so long? Gaaaaaaaaaah!“
I don’t recall being particularly coherent. I do recall Stan’s exasperation. He must have felt like he’d created a monster.
Funny thing is, I don’t think I was in love with her at that point. Fascinated by her, yes. Wanted to be around her, learn everything about her, be a part of her life.
I guess that’s love. As I’ve posted previously, I have a problem with the word.
D.
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Don’t get on Trish’s bad side.
The Red Queen has some reading to do.
Ms. Bizarre thinks twice about a piercing. (I think she should have told her husband, “I will if you will.”)
Sapphire Writer gives us her 13 favorite first scenes. (Better late than never, eh, Sapph?)
Kate’s never happy when it rains.
If Sting is the King of Pain, Darla is the Queen of Spam.
Thursdays suck.
Results of the Great 2006 Scone-Off
Our contestants: Beth and Kate. Click links to get the recipes.
Procedure: With meticulous care, I mixed my dried cranberries and cherries in one bowl so that each recipe would have identical fruit. I set everything up so that I could combine my wet and dry ingredients with something approximating simultaneity, in order to bake them all together. Unfortunately, I forgot to add the butter in Beth’s recipe.
V . . . for Virtue
For the Short Attention Span Theater-goers among you: V for Vendetta gets four BIG thumbs up from Walnut and Balls. Bear in mind that Balls is one tough customer when it comes to movies.
On to the review.
I wish I wasn’t afraid all the time.
Imagine being a movie reviewer, and living in fear that someone might mistake you as a terrorist sympathizer. From David Denby’s review of V for Vendetta in The New Yorker:
“V for Vendetta,” a dunderheaded pop fantasia that celebrates terrorism and destruction
Okay, that’s quite enough out of you, Mr. Denby. Meanwhile, around the block at The New York Times, Manohla Dargis chimes in:
Is the man in the mask who wants to make Parliament go boom Osama bin Laden or Patrick Henry? Or just a Phantom of the Opera clone who likes to kick back to the cult sounds of Antony and the Johnsons? Your guess is as good as mine, and I’ve seen the film.
How about that other rock of journalism, The Washington Post? From Stephen Hunter’s review:
“V for Vendetta” is a piece of pulp claptrap; it has no insights whatsoever into totalitarian psychology and always settles for the cheesiest kinds of demagoguery and harangue as its emblems of evil. They say they want a revolution? Then give us a revolution, one that’s believable, frightening, heroic, coherent and not a teenagers’ freaky power trip.
Doesn’t anyone get it? Sure — Peter Travers in Rolling Stone:
Calling Warner Bros. irresponsible for releasing a film that rouses an audience to action is like calling the Constitution irresponsible for protecting free speech. The explosive V for Vendetta is powered by ideas that are not computer-generated. It’s something rare in Teflon Hollywood: a movie that sticks with you.
I haven’t done a comprehensive survey, but it seems like the mainstream reviewers want you to see this movie with a prejudiced eye. It glorifies violence. Its politics are simplistic on the one hand, confused on the other. It is, in David Denby’s words, “a disastrous muddle.” Yeah, I wish I weren’t afraid all the time, too.
Snape hearts Michelle Duggar
The phone rang four times before I picked it up. I sat in bed, benumbed and lobotomized, feeling as though I had just had my eyelids pried open Clockwork Orange-fashion, and had been forced to watch The Sound of Music at top volume. It took me a moment to answer the operator.
“Are you there, sir? Sir?”
British accent. At some level, I knew what was coming. The cheap bastard was doing it to me again.
“Yes,” I said, shaking off my mental haze. “Yes, I guess I am here after all.”
“I have a Mr. Snape here, sir — excuse me, a Professor Snape. Do you accept the charges?”
I sighed, rolled my eyes for Karen’s benefit, pointed at the phone and mouthed the word Snape.
“Oh, all right, then. Go ahead.” (more…)
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)
(more…)