Richard Avedon, I’m not
Dean has posted more photos of the b’stila. I love this guy cuz he makes my food look AMAZING.
Speaking of photography: of the 41 shots I took on this vacation, perhaps six are keepers. What is my problem? Why do I have such a fascination with the backs of people’s heads?
In the days to come, I’ll subject you to a few of the nicer photos. Let’s start with Jake at the Vancouver Aquarium:
Now, if you’re one of those people who don’t give a damn about other people’s kids, you can appreciate the crisp blue sky, the feathery clouds, and the funky Pacific Northwest First American sculpture. But if you can indulge a proud papa, follow me below the fold . . .
Old timer
Yes, we’re back in the land of Net access — Seattle. For some odd reason, my Blackberry would not work north of the border. Very weird and not a little annoying.
Check out Dean’s blog. Go now. Look at the lovely bstiya. Mmmmmm bstiya. B’stila. Whatever.
I want to tell you about this creepy exhibit at the Vancouver Science World museum. I wrote my friend about it this morning, and I hate hate HATE typing with my thumbs, so I’m going to cut and paste from the letter. I think she avoids my blog like the plague, so I’m probably safe. If not — sorry! At least I told you first!
Here goes:
Incommunicado
We’re in Vancouver. Try as I might, I cannot get a network connection for my Blackberry; I’m writing this on the Sylvia Hotel’s remarkably slow lobby computer.
So it looks like I won’t have anything for you until we get back to Seattle, late this coming Monday. Oh, well! Hopefully, I’ll have some stories to tell.
By the way: driving from Seattle to Vancouver yesterday was NOT fun. Six hours drive time, three of which was spent in traffic at the border crossing and shortly beyond it (when the 99 narrowed from four lanes to two). Gaaah . . . but the family held up remarkably well.
D.
Travel notes
I know it’s not Thanksgiving, but I’m thankful we made it through baggage claim, car rental, and hotel registration in record time: one hour from plane-landing to ass-sitting. Not bad!
And I’m thankful that SFO’s food court hasn’t wrought holy hell upon my colon. Yet.
I’m also thankful for the innocent smile of the 10-month-old blond cherub who sat in front of me on the plane, bouncing up now and then to declare, UH-OH!
And lastly, I’m thankful for the ample cleavage of the young woman sleeping beside me on the plane, for giving me something to look at when my book failed to titillate.
Kushiel’s Dart, by the way, a book SxKitten recommended. NINE HUNDRED PAGES LONG. So — if I tried to sell my trilogy as fantasy rather than SF, could I get away with a 300K-word story, too? Too bad it’s SF. ALTHOUGH it’s never too late to throw in a magical golden dragon . . .
D.
World’s worst poem
I thought perhaps it was just Leslie Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume 1; but, no — About.Com thinks so, too. The world’s worst poem was penned by William Topaz McGonagall: “The Tay Bridge Disaster” (1890). You can read more about McGonagall here.
About.Com has the whole thing, but here’s the astonishingly bad ending:
It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
In our household, we like to say, “That’s not funny, that’s painful” (usually in response to one of my puns, but also useful for just about any Saturday Night Live skit since the mid-1980s). But McGonagall’s poem reeks in such a special way, I find myself wanting more.
World’s Worst Poetry: A Compilation of Rhyme Without Reason by Stephen Robins may be the ticket. Editorial Reviews has the following book description:
The world’s most odious odes, from Solyman Brown’s epic poem of 1833: “The Dentologia—A Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth†to James Henry Powell’s “Lines Written for a Friend on the Death of His Brother, Caused by a Railway Train Running Over Him Whilst He Was in a State of Inebriation.â€
240 pages of poetic disasters . . . but somehow it seems more appropriate to report the weight of such a thing (9.1 ounces) or the eerily appropriate publisher (Prion, which Wikipedia defines as “a type of infectious agent composed only of protein. They cause a number of diseases in a variety of animals, including BSE in cattle and CJD in humans. All known prion diseases affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue, and all are untreatable and fatal.”)
But if you’re feeling budget-conscious, online resources abound. Find more McGonagall as well as other notable whiffies here, for example. Or get your fill of anonymous bad poetry at The Los Angeles Relaxorium. Revel in “Angst for Nothing,” which includes the stanza,
i am but a hemorrhoid on the rectum of the universe
prostate with pain
And if you want some truly homegrown stinkers, here they are.
We’re traveling tomorrow. Wish us luck!
D.
What killed me?
No matter how many times I look at Samhain’s list for the final round, my entry doesn’t appear. Oh, well. I made it one round more than I thought I would.
Assuming the editor(s) in my corner didn’t have second thoughts about a doctor who lusts after his patient, I can only assume something in my last line killed me. Here’s the opening, including that deadly last line:
Itinerary
Itinerary is from 1432, from L.L. itinerarium “account of a journey,” from noun use of neut. of itinerarius “of a journey,” from L. itineris.
— From the Online Etymology Dictionary
Ithyphallic:
1614, “poem in ithyphallic meter,” from Gk. ithys “straight” + phallos “erect penis” (see phallus). The meter was that of the Bacchic hymns, which were sung in the rites during which such phalluses were carried. Thus, in Victorian times, the word also meant “grossly indecent” (1864).
— also from the Online Etymology Dictionary, on the same page as “itinerary.” Included in this post for no other reason than it made me grin.
***
On July 4, we’re flying to Seattle, where we’ll be staying at the Embassy Suites near the airport. If all goes well, we’ll be dining out with protected static and his gang.
On July 5, we’ll drive up to Vancouver. I’m not sure whether my family will want to do anything in Seattle first; we went to the aquarium last year and had a great time, but it may be too soon to repeat. Similarly, I have an unquenchable desire for Pike’s Place Market, but I think I’m the only one.
So, yeah, right. Vancouver. I’ve decided we’ll stay at the Sylvia Hotel. If we drive up early, we should be able to hit Science World or the Vancouver Aquarium. Dinner in Chinatown sounds nice . . . it’s been an age since we had authentic Chinese cuisine.
Cool slide show I liberated from the Vancouver Aquarium website:
On Friday, July 6, we’ll do more of the Vancouver thing, and then we’ll be meeting with Dean and SxKitten for dinner. From there, a ferry ride to Mayne Island and SxKitten’s parents’ cabin!
From July 6 until our departure on July 8, I anticipate much merriment and endangerment of small children. I’m told that if I want to cook for my hosts, I’ll have to import the necessities from Vancouver. Since my best dish requires a pasta maker, I’ll need to do some hard thinking to figure out my second-best dish. Hey, SxKitten, do they sell phyllo dough on Mayne Island?
Then it’s back to Vancouver the evening of the 8th, back to Seattle on the 9th, and back home on the 10th. Back to work on the 11th — boooo! hisssssss!
I’ll be Blackberrying it all the way, of course. This will be somewhat easier than usual thanks to my Father’s Day present, a detachable Blackberry keyboard. But no pix, sorry to say, until we get home.
Wish us luck!
D.
Speaking of noses
Live-blogging tonight: 7:30 PM PST, or thereabouts.
We were watching the end of Dirty Dancing this afternoon, and I said, “Whatever happened to Jennifer Grey?” She was adorable in that movie. Can’t say I ever thought much of Patrick Swayze, but Jennifer? Yum. Guess how old she was in that movie. Don’t cheat, guess. I’ll tell you later.
“I think her career tanked after she got her nose job,” Karen said, which sparked my interest, given our discussion of noses in yesterday’s post. So I decided to see what I could learn on IMDB and Wikipedia. Now remember what I said — don’t cheat. Think back to Jennifer’s role in Dirty Dancing and guess, damn it, guess!
Friday Flickr babe: appealing
Appeal, originally uploaded by vandemyse.
My search term today: appealing.
I like black and white photos. I’ll leave it to Dean to tell me if this one is as well executed as I think it is; I’m one of those “I knows what I likes” photography connoisseurs.
And I like this woman.
There’s character in her eyes, beauty in her bone structure, and she has kissable lips. Speaking of which . . .
It has been a fascinating exercise, parsing my opening line by line, wondering what might be a poison pill. With the second sentence, I worried the editors might gag over a sentence fragment. No! (And among the various entries, they let a few other fragments pass, too.) I figured the third line would be certain suicide, given not only the high squick factor but also the overall weirdness of the sentence. Flan? Coffee? WTF?
When line 3 passed muster, I figured I was home free, and I was so excited to get to sentence 5 (God himself would weep to see such a beautiful vulva — which cracks me up, every time I read it) that I didn’t apply full scrutiny to sentence 4.
I see two potential problems, but perhaps you folks can find others. First, there’s a bothersome echo centered on the word “seen” (“he had ever seen,” “he had never seen”). Second, the sentence is somewhat agrammatical. Might a dash have worked better than a comma after “coffee”?
And now I see a third problem, one which was present in sentence 3 but became more obvious in sentence 4: the distance changes between the first and second paragraphs. Para 1 is remote, but with para 2, we’re fully inside Brad’s fevered brain.
Yeah, yeah — I know a guy can go nuts over-analyzing such things. But if you can trust Noah Lukeman’s book, editors look for reasons to reject long before they look for reasons to accept. If I can edit out those surefire rejection problems, so much the better for the fate of my book.
Of course, if I never write the ending, I’ll never get to submit it.
Last things first.
D.