Once Upon a Time on TCM
Walnut sez: Balls never goes halfway with things. Why buy 100% Kona coffee from Hawaii when you can buy it green and roast it yourself? And why grab pastries at the supermarket when you can make your own puff pastry?
Well. She doesn’t do that too often, but you get the idea. Lately, she’s been watching movies. The same movie. Over and over again.
Thank God it’s not Titanic.
Below the fold: Thirteen Things about Once Upon a Time in the West, by my beloved Balls.
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Caption Contest: Debra “I hate all Iranians” Cagan
The prize? The love and adulation of your peers, naturally!
Debra Cagan is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs to Defence Secretary Robert Gates. She made her comments to a group of British MPs visiting the Pentagon.
I have a few ideas on this one, but I wouldn’t want to interfere with your muses.
D.
Drop me in that alternate universe where I get laid every night.
On my birthday, O’Brien said,
I always get mad when I have a dream that is sexual in nature, but features my husband instead of, say, that one guy who worked at the car place and whose nametag said James. Shouldn’t a person be allowed to screw James in a dream without a lot of brouhaha?
Yeah, I have the same problem. I’ve never run the stats, but I would guess 3/4 sex dreams feature Karen. Happy, Karen? The other 1/4 usually feature strangers. I can’t remember the last time my dream self got to nail some woman I know.
Since I’m a very principled sort of guy, in these 1/4 dreams, my subconscious edits out my whole marriage. I might as well be a hero in a romance novel (only I’m never as alpha as a romance hero). (Which reminds me. BETA READERS: I’m not going to turn Brad into an alpha, but I’m wondering if I should make it a running joke, how NOT an alpha he is, and how his friends keep telling him to be more alpha, and how thoroughly it backfires when he tries to be an alpha . . . damn, that’s almost a whole story right there!)
Can you tell I got nothing tonight? Fatigue. Got lots of that.
Here’s that alternate universe linky.
And more people need to give me presents like this. Female people. Dean, Pat, microsoar, protected static: I do NOT want to see your racks. I’m sure they’re very nice man-racks, but I don’t want to see ’em, okay?
Maybe I’ll make more sense tomorrow.
D.
Two down, five to go, and more
I received my first two nays from agents today. Two down, five to go.
***
Finally got around to figuring out who sings that wonderfully haunting tune in V for Vendetta . . . the song playing on V’s juke box when Evie comes in out of the rain.
The artist is Cat Power. The song is “I Found a Reason,” and oh, what a voice. I bought two CDs online, and I promise I’ll review them here.
***
Shaina, you come around to some old guy’s blog to tempt him with your boobs, and that makes the old guy the perv?
Fine. I’m a perv. And you got a great rack.
D.
We have a winner!
Lyvvie wins the Challah baloo contest. This evening, I’ll check to see if I have your snail mail addie, and if not, I’ll drop you a line.
I wish you all could have won, but that damn cookbook is spendy. Oh, but I love it. I’ve been reading through it this past week, and I’m itching to try Julia’s rye bread, rugelach, brioche, and pumpernickel.
***
A. J. Jacobs must have the most sadistic muse on the planet. He’s the guy who wrote The Know-It-All, a memoir about the time he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica; and if you think that’s High Concept, you haven’t heard about his latest: The Year of Living Biblically, which documents his attempts to abide by every last commandment, including the stoning of adulterers. (He gets around the obvious lawbreaking aspect of the commandment by hurling tiny pebbles.) The man has a fine sense of humor, I’ll give him that:
This isn’t a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him.
I fish out my pebbles from my back pocket.
“I wouldn’t stone you with big stones,†I say. “Just these little guys.â€
I open my palm to show him the pebbles. He lunges at me, grabbing one out of my hand, then chucking it at my face. It whizzes by my cheek.
I am stunned for a second. I hadn’t expected this elderly man to make the first move. But now there is nothing stopping me from retaliating. An eye for an eye.
I take one of the remaining pebbles and whip it at his chest. It bounces off.
“I’ll punch you right in the kisser,†he say.
“Well, you really shouldn’t commit adultery,†I say.
We stare at each other. My heart is racing.
Yes, he is a septuagenarian. Yes, he had just threatened me using corny Honeymooners dialogue. But you could tell: This man has a strong dark side.
So . . . what should A.J. do next? That evil muse of his will probably convince him to become a homeless person entirely dependent upon the kindness of strangers, but I think A.J. needs to take the reins here. His long-suffering wife has proven her ability to weather the most obnoxious of projects; surely she won’t object to a year of nightly sex, rain or shine, no heed paid to backaches or headaches or intestinal flu, and to really spice it up, every night has to be something completely different.
I can hear him now. “Come on, honey — it’s for my art!”
D.
Computer me literate not
I had to laugh when, in a recent email, Eugie Foster rejoiced over me being a WordPress blogger. She thought I might be able to bail her out of certain problems she’s having with The Fix’s reviewer interface.
But if you had a moment, I’d appreciate any insight you had that would keep me from having to wade into the code and hack it up from scratch.
And a moment later she’s talking about tweaking Stylesheets, like that’s something I know how to do. I guess I’m flattered. And I guess this makes me more sympathetic to my patients who greet me with blank looks when I lapse into Medicalese.
Anyway, I’m wondering whether to upgrade to WordPress 2.3, but I don’t understand what any of the improvements mean. Not a single one. How can I appreciate native tagging support when I don’t know what a tag is? What are canonical URLs? And what is TinyMCE? It sounds like a midget rapper.
And I’m sure this post of Dean’s is funny, but I don’t even have the knowledge base to make a mistake like that, let alone understand why it’s so moronic.
Bottom line? All I want from WordPress is the ability to post videos. Lyvvie figured it out. Time for me to try, too.
D.
I love this guy.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has a blog, and now that he has a new book, you can no doubt look forward to appearances on The Daily Show and Colbert Report.
Watch him not hawk his new book, Supercapitalism.
Interestingly, on his blog he recommends tax cuts to help avert the coming recession — but not tax cuts for the wealthy, who he correctly points out already spend as much money as they please:
It’s middle and lower-income Americans who spend more when their taxes are cut. And because the biggest tax they face is the payroll tax, the payroll tax needs to be cut in order to keep them spending and avoid a recession.
I say exempt the first $15,000 of earnings from payroll taxes for a year, starting as soon as possible. Sure, this may cause the budget deficit to widen a bit. But if the economy goes into the tank, the deficit will be far bigger.
Makes perfect sense to me . . . and we could easily offset the tax cut by rolling back some of W’s breaks to the super-wealthy.
D.
Saturday Flickr Babe: Dominatrix
Dominatrix Submissive Gimp, originally uploaded by fishsuckeggs.
I love the composition here, the heavy emphasis on narrative, the beauty of the sub. Reminds me a little of my friend Kenney’s paintings.
Live Blogging tonight: I expect I may be a little late, perhaps 8 PM PST. I hope some of you can make it!
D.
This disturbs me.
Oh, you say, but it’s only doll shaped like a cute li’l miniature baby.
No, it’s not. It’s a doll shaped like a 14 centimeter-long premature infant. That’s an 18-week gestational age, not-quite-200 gram premature infant. According to the site I just linked, the survival of premies 21-weeks gestational age or younger is 0%. Zero. So the person in the ad is holding a doll shaped like an infant that has no chance whatsoever of living to see his first birthday.
The manufacturer, Ashton-Drake Galleries, calls their creations “Heavenly Handfuls” and “Tiny Miracles.” One of their dolls is the “God’s Greatest Gift Tiny Sleeping Baby Figurine.” I hear choir music.
Is it just me? Do you have to be a doctor to see in this “tiny miracle” a world of parental grief, the suffering of a truly helpless and hopeless infant, and medical costs that could easily bankrupt a family?
No, I’m not the only one. Follow that link (a blog entitled “A Little Pregnant”, circa 2005) to witness this cruel joke of a doll as well as the blogger’s photoshopped spoof. From A Little Pregnant’s comment thread,
You forgot to mention that the baby should come with realistic hardened skin patches and white scars on its cheeks, from the surgical tape used to hold the baby’s oxygen tubes (CPAP and canula) in place. And underneath the adorable cap–which should, of course, be a tube of stockinette pulled off a roll and tied with curling ribbon–there should be another IV bruise, from the head IV done after all the little arm and leg veins had bruised and collapsed.
EXACTLY. But I doubt the target audience, whoever they might be, would think of that.
It gets worse. Far, far worse. Another “artist” apparently creates lifelike dolls to memorialize deceased preemies. The doll is described as “reborn” and has been given what I suppose might be called a “rebirthdate.” The “artist” is proudly Pro-Life.
Reality check: here is a premature infant born at gestational age 27 weeks, weight 280 grams.
I’m suspicious that the Ashton-Drake people have a political agenda, but I can’t prove it; so, for the time being, I can’t make this a Pro-Life (hah! riiiight) vs. Pro-Choice issue.
It’s a simple matter of poor taste.
D.
The beat-yourself-up meme
Dan tagged me. Here’s the idea: I’m supposed to identify my most frequent writing mistake, then tag five other bloggers to do the same.
Trouble is, I don’t make mistakes. But I do have a tic: I love exotic punctuation. Colons, dashes, ellipses, parentheses are like an irresistible plate of hors d’ouevres. Why stop at one? I’d rather fill up on them!
I think I have this tic because I’m a control freak, and I love controlling rhythm. I want the reader to hear the same linguistic tune that’s rolling through my brain, and I don’t trust mere commas and periods to do that for me. Why is this a bad tic? Because it draws attention to the writing. As I’ve said in the past, I would prefer the writing to drop away and leave the reader with nothing but story. Anything that calls attention to the writing (or, God forbid, the writer) breaks the meditation. For example, yesterday I looked at a column written by Christopher Hitchens, in which he not only used a two-bit word (etiolated) but linked it to its Dictionary.com definition. “Blanched” or “anemic” would have worked just as well, but Hitchens went with etiolated.
Now I get to tag five blogger-writers. I’ll link y’all later, when I have access to a computer that’s not Flintstone-aged. (There we go!)
Blog about it if you like, or answer in the comments. (Oh, and if you’d like to play and I haven’t tagged you, be my guest.)
With any luck, I’ll have something truly disturbing for you, either later today or sometime tomorrow.
D.