Category Archives: asides


Dr. Strangelove spanks the monkey?

From Indecision Forever, who are cool enough folks that they STILL have me on their blog roll even though I’m hardly funny anymore, here’s Sara Benincasa* doing (excuse me) Delaware Senatorial Candidate and all around blessing to comedians everywhere, Christine O’Donnell.

Hey! I’ve got jury duty on Monday! And in honor of this solemn civic responsibility, I have a question. What book should I bring, you know, to flash around, so that no lawyer in his right mind would allow me to pass voir dire?

Makes me regret that I donated 120 Days of Sodom to the local public library . . .

(Note to the local magistrates who work so hard to keep our courts clean and honest and oh so squeakily just: kidding. KIDDING! I would never try to swing things so that I’m kicked off a potential jury. Never never never! I believe in America. America has made my fortune. Often I say to my wife, “For justice, we must go to Don Corleone.” Oh — oops!)

D.

*Who I would so send mash notes to if I weren’t married.

I want one

The car. Maybe the bear, too.

D.

9/11

On Thursday my anesthesiologist, a Fox-watcher and all around asshat, relayed with some glee that fellow asshat and would-be Koran-burner Terry Jones would halt his book-burning plans in a tit-for-tat deal with Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to move the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Never mind that Jones was overstating his supposed deal, has since recanted his narcissistic plan, and that the “Ground Zero Mosque” would not be built at Ground Zero nor was it even a mosque. The media was all over it and this guy, my anesthesiologist, who incidentally knows my political leanings (I once told him that I, too, am unhappy with our President, since he’s far too right-wing for me), had to needle me with this non-story.

This is for him.

dangle-2

Lloyd Dangle, Troubletown, Buy this cartoon

Let’s hope no one does anything stupid today.

D.

Quest for furniture

My son doesn’t understand why I keep spending money on a room which he claims will never get used. He’s not entirely right; I would argue that the room’s usefulness is already evident. My books are out of their boxes, the boxes are out of the garage, and that wasn’t gonna happen without bookshelves.

The $599 sofa bed that wouldn’t fit through the doorway? I have to admit, that was a mistake. “Why would you buy something like that without measuring the doorway?” he asked yesterday. “Sheer stupidity,” I said. It never occurred to me someone would build a sofa bed that wouldn’t fit through a bedroom door. Or that someone would build such a narrow door in the first place.

First place I checked out yesterday showcased rustic Spanish pieces built from reclaimed wood. (It’s here, the Capri, catalog #228 if you’re curious.) $350. The table rests on sturdy legs, looks the sort that with a glass top, could be a prime surface for Mexican drug lords to cut lines of coke from their personal stash; looks the sort that would soon have dust motes and small pets swinging around it in perfect elliptical orbit.

(more…)

Not what Bako would prefer to be known for.

I will find a city, find myself a city to live in.

One of our local doctors (not someone I knew) was found dead in a chimney a few days ago. Internist Jacquelyn Kotarac was apparently trying to break into her boyfriend’s house and opted to do so via chimney. Her body was found some time later when the lady who came over to feed the owner’s fish discovered a stench and “fluids” dripping into the fireplace.

The homeowner/boyfriend speaks:

Dr. Jacquelyn Kotarac was a very intelligent, attractive woman and a gifted doctor, estranged boyfriend William Moodie said.

“She was absolutely brilliant as a doctor,” he said.

Moodie declined to talk about his relationship with Kotarac or what their status was as a couple when she showed up that night.

But he’s tired of people saying negative things about her and said it’s time to leave her alone.

I have nothing negative or positive to say about a woman I never knew, not even by reputation. I will say that this story is so far out there, I doubt we’ll ever know the truth of what she thought she was doing or why she did it. I’ll file this as a Great Mystery.

For the record, though, Bakersfield would prefer to be known for its Basque restaurants and Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace.

Oh, and don’t worry about me and Bakersfield’s record-setting ozone and particulate pollution. Got my lungs tested last week and I’m just fine.

D.

My little library is taking shape

I’ve been working at converting our spare bedroom into a library/guest bedroom. It used to be a pink-striped nightmare (a little girl’s room, for parents who see their daughter as a little princess, no doubt), but we got it painted. Last weekend I assembled the bookshelves, and this last week we had a new ceiling fan installed. Nice dark blades instead of those peppy white blades. I bought a rug, too. It’s all coming together.

Today, we took delivery on more furniture: an easy chair and sofa bed. Sadly, the sofa bed would not fit through the door, even after we took the door off its hinges and took the legs off the sofa bed. My bad for not measuring the doorway and the sofa bed. I don’t think about such things. I really don’t. I guess I imagined that such things are standard, that no one would create a sofa bed that couldn’t fit through a doorway.

And so we left the sofa bed in the living room, which is making the cats very happy (much softer for their tushes than the black vinyl sofa we’ve owned since my residency). The black sofa is in the bedroom, which is less than ideal since it’s not a sofa BED.

Tonight, I unloaded five boxes of books, which is about 1/3 of what I need to unload. I’ve unloaded my Gaiman and my Burroughs and my Conrad. My Dick is still in the garage. (Philip K Dick, that is.) I unloaded my Shakespeare and my Shaw. My Martin Cruz Smith and my Crumley and my Goodis. Oh, and I discovered that I must have gone through one hell of a Roald Dahl phase, because we own a LOT of Dahl.

And then there are all those math, physics, and chemistry textbooks which will go to waste if Jake decides to become a botanist or a history major. Karen has some pretty heavy duty shit, I’m telling you. Complex analysis, exotic algebras for quantum mechanics. They’re the kind of books that don’t go bad, but I suspect they’re too high level even for our local Cal State library.

Yes, I should donate more of my books. It’s bizarre, really, even a little crazy to want to hang onto books I’ve read but have no intention of reading again, all because I liked them so much the first or second or third time through. I guess there’s no predicting what I might yet decide to re-read, but still . . . it’s nuts. I think I’ll go through the lot of them yet again, next time we move. Whenever that is.

Still to come: we need a little table next to the easy chair, and a reading light to go atop it.

D.

What blogs are good for

For Jake’s World History class, his first assignment is to generate 10 important dates from world history and 10 important dates from his personal history*. The world history bit is easy, but personal history? We’d be lost without this blog.

First class, the teacher lectured to them about the importance of history. What a waste of a day. I know, I know — not all kids are created equally, and for some, justification like this is necessary. But honestly, I’m not impressed. Add to that the recycled chestnut, “Those who don’t remember history are condemned yatta yatta yatta**,” and I’m REALLY not impressed. I’m starting to recall how uninspired most of my high school classes were.

D.

* Because, dontcha know, DATES are so incredibly important to history.

** Consequence of a 1970s Hebrew School education — we heard this one ad nauseam.

Vintage TV

We spent the last hour treating Jake to one of our favorite examples of 1960s television: The Outer Limits’ “Controlled Experiment,” featuring Carroll O’Connor and Barry Morse as Martian agents Deimos and Phobos, tasked with understanding the uniquely human art of murder, and Grace Lee Whitney (y’know, Yeoman Rand?) as the would-be murderess. “Controlled Experiment” was probably the best satire of science fiction prior to the advent of Futurama, The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy.

You can watch the full video here, but it’s also available without commercial interruption through NetFlix. Enjoy.

***

Jake had his sophomore year orientation today; school starts tomorrow. They saw fit to lecture the kids for a solid hour on the evils of sex-texting and e-bullying. My son, so wise in the ways of most things digital, is a backward child when it comes to instant messaging. He’s our kid (neither one of us ever figured out how to use the IM feature of our phones). So of course he tuned it all out, or as much of it as he could.

They also blithered on about relationships. There was some sort of diagram where the inner circles represented closer relationships, the outer circles more distant relationships. Outermost were strangers, second-to-innermost were “soul mates” (how PC of them! I would have expected “husband or wife”). Innermost? God.

My atheist son tuned out that bit, too.

And I had always thought orientations were about giving you your locker combo and berating you about the dress code.

D.

Back like a bad penny

To answer Rella’s question, yes, the house in Harbor is still standing. What’s that flowering plant that has blue blooms in basic soil, and red blooms in acidic soil (or vice versa)? Well that plant is HUGE now. Our rosemary bush is still huge, as are our cherry and deodora trees. Most exciting: my Monterey Pine is really tall.

Now that you know what my priorities are . . .

The new flooring looks great as does the new roof. Once we finish siding the garage, we’ll have all new siding and the place will be good as new. On the outside, anyway.

We had a fun vacation, took lots of pictures, but we’re exhausted and y’all will just have to wait.

Didja miss me?

D.

Busy day

* Got up at 7, had breakfast, went to the hospital, got lots of hugs. I’m missed.

* Picked up coffee for Karen, came back to the hotel, mobilized the family. Went out for more coffee for Karen.

* Took Jake to Stout Grove & Smith River. We took tons of photos but I don’t have the adapter for the computer, so you’ll have to wait a bit for our own photos. Here’s one I pinched from the net.

stoutgrove

Mother Nature was good to us today. At Smith River alone, we saw a crayfish, dozens if not hundreds of tadpoles, and a similar number of tiny frogs. We found some ripe blackberries which were absolutely die and go to heaven. And the weather, though overcast, was perfect.

* Next we went to Harris Beach and did some rock-climbing and tide-pooling. I wasn’t feeling very well balanced so I didn’t follow Jake out onto the rocks. He, on the other hand, had his usual immortal fearlessness and went further and further out, snapping picture after picture. He knew full well that the tide was coming in but he had to shoot those pictures.

By the time he’d decided to come in, his return path was by no means obvious. With water so shallow, he could have returned in a few minutes if he’d been willing to get his feet wet.

“Don’t worry about it,” I called out to him. “If your feet get wet, we’ll pick up some shoes at Fred Meyer.”

He took this as a challenge. He would NOT let the ocean defeat him! And, indeed, my stubborn son (he gets that from his mother) made it back with dry feet.

* We returned to the hotel, dropped off some blackberries with Karen, and then drove down to Trees of Mystery to buy a redwood burl.

* And then back to the hotel to see if Karen had shaken her headache well enough to come with us to dinner. Sadly no. So Jake and I went out with my former receptionist to Thai House, one of two really great restaurants in Crescent City (the other is Sea West).

* After that, Jake and I drove back to Oregon to meet with Peter, the fellow who is taking care of our house. We had a big discussion over what to do with the place and came up with a plan of attack. And Jake had a long discussion with someone who is roughly his age (Peter’s daughter).

Long day. And now we’re winding down.

D.

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