Who are these women, and why do they want to be my friends?
A little over a year ago, I listened to Daisy Dexter Dobbs and set up a MySpace page. Daisy suggested it would drive more traffic to Balls and Walnuts, but I don’t know. I haven’t seen much action coming my way from MySpace. I guess I should be adding content over there, but it would be yet another daily chore. I can’t be bothered.
See, here’s what I don’t understand: who the hell are all these beautiful young women who want to be my friends? If they’re real, then my “Men” post the other day is complete and utter bullshit.
But I don’t think they’re real. I think they’re trying to sell me shit.
Faturday Flickr Babe!
Faturday Flickr Babe explained.
(By the way: the “fat” in “Faturday” is a coincidence of requisite alliteration and Roman Empire theology. It has nothing to do with the lipid content of the buttocks above. I happen to think these are perfect buttocks, and in fact, there’s a huge range of buttock perfection.)
My favorite part? The itty bitty downy area above the crack. Mmm.
Come ’round tonight at 7 – 7:30 PM PST for Live Blogging. See ya soon.
D.
P.S. For your reading pleasure: Fun at the Creation Museum!!!!
Men
In the June 11/18 issue of The New Yorker, Jeffrey Eugenides writes of his reaction to Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout:
Soon the Aborigine and the girl are cavorting naked in an oasis. Later, as they near civilization, the Aborigine performs a mating dance, to which the girl doesn’t respond, and the next morning she finds that he has hanged himself in a tree.
Two suicides. A lengthy montage of Edenic, but full frontal, nudity. And all without my mother putting her hand over my eyes. Beyond the wondrous excitement of all this was the message the film conveyed, and for which there existed no better recipient than a twelve-year-old growing up in the wake of the sixties: civilization was evil, technology deracinating, and the only solution a return to nature.
Through this whole piece, I was so with Eugenides . . . right up until that last sentence; because, at that point, I became convinced that during our most impressionable years, he and I had watched a different movie. He thought the message of Walkabout was that “civilization was evil, technology deracinating.” (Precocious twelve-year-old, eh?) For me, Walkabout confirmed something my nine-year-old brain had known for several years.
Girls will drive you fooking nuts.
Gray matter fatigue
I thought about writing a post, “Top Ten Items Encountered at Paris Hilton’s Cavity Search,” but after my #10 (From Room 209 of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the missing Gideon’s Bible), I came up with nothin’. Nicole Richie’s ________. Donald Trump’s _______.
Like I said. Nothin’. The Muse is underwhelmed by Paris, so perhaps it’s a good thing I decided not to write my own version of Paris’s Prison Diaries.
If you’ll allow me to kvetch, I’m still coughing (have I mentioned that yet?), had a full OR schedule today (7:30 – 5:00 without a break), got home late thanks to a hospital committee meeting, and right now I can think of nothing better but to crawl into bed and watch the end of Mythbusters. Tomorrow looks similarly grueling, including a Board of Trustees meeting. So unless someone can suggest an extremely easy Thirteen, we might be looking at a Friday Fourteen. Or a Saturday Sixteen.
Anyway. Here’s Jake, age five, clambering around at our local park.
D.
Ich möchte gern Jazzmusik.
Not my German teacher.
With regard to Karen & me: lots of big things bind us together, but lots of little things do, too. For example, the fact we both suffered through two quarters of German at Berkeley.
The College of Chemistry required us to learn things like Ich möchte gern Jazzmusik and Bringen Sie mir bitte Rotkohl dazu! I’ll never understand how red cabbage related to Germany’s domination of the 19th and early 20th Century organic chemistry literature; but in the minds of our profs, two quarters of German girded us for the Beilstein Handbuch, Zeitschriften, and Naturwissenschaften.
Yeah, I pulled those names outa my ass. Or outa my deepest darkest memory, which is much the same place.
I haven’t retained a hell of a lot of German — little more than a handful of inane lines. One (the title of this post) burst forth this evening when some silly commercial came on TV. Another tends to erupt at the most inopportune of moments.
Mid-sex, for example:
Das macht Grossmutter besonders freude!
I suppose That makes Grandmother especially happy beats screaming out the name of an old boyfriend or girlfriend, but it’s a buzz kill just the same.
What a weird, warped textbook. The one chapter Karen and I talk about more than any other concerned the Gastarbeiter, the guestworkers brought in from Southern and Eastern European countries to fuel Germany’s burgeoning industrial sector. This chapter fairly dripped with racism, and included the memorable line*
Die Gastarbeiter haben vielen Krankheiten.
The guestworkers have many illnesses.
Many illnesses, dirty, uneducated, don’t blend in well with others — it appalled us, reading crap like this here in the bastion of Liberal America. The book was written by the Departmental Chair, a guy we never saw nor heard from. I wonder how many years they used that textbook before someone squawked?
I like the fact that Karen and I have 25 years of common memories. I like the fact I can blurt Ich möchte gern Jazzmusik and the woman doesn’t look at me like I’m a freak.
No, that’s my son’s job.
D.
*My memory is not necessarily grammatically accurate.
Your morning meme
This is an “eight random facts about me” meme. I’m tagging everyone who, right this instant, can’t figure out what they’re going to blog about today. Now you have a topic.
Thorne stuck me with this one. (Sorry. Punny mood this AM, apparently.)
1. Breakfast this morning: coffee and Nilla wafers.
2. I’m a glass half-empty kinda guy who would prefer to be a glass half-full kinda guy.
3. My home is full of tiny flies. I can get rid of them using the vacuum, but by the time I’ve finished, more flies are back where I started.
4. Arguably our strangest pet, ever: a Cuban Knight Anole. We named him Ike. He would turn jet black whenever he was pissed, which was often; he would gape and hiss at you, like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and he had one hell of a bite.
5. I think I’m trapped somewhere between the Oral Phase and the Anal Phase. Is there a Gastric Phase? (Incidentally: we’ve all heard the phrase “anal retentive,” but did you know there’s such a thing as “anal expulsive”? Ew.)
6. My favorite shirts are from Eddie Bauer’s Wrinkle Resistant line. However, the ones I buy are far less fugly.
7. Last night, we had to explain “soap operas” to my 11-year-old son. By his age, I was already onto my second addiction (first: Dark Shadows; second: Ryan’s Hope). In med school, most of the class watched All My Children in the med student lounge on our lunch hour. I would spend that time eating my sandwich and working the crossword puzzle. Not that I was above All My Children (or All My Chickies, as we used to call it), but it wasn’t Ryan’s Hope.
8. I think this post by O’Brien is sexy. It made me sad, too, but I’m not saying why.
It’s getting increasingly difficult, finding new stuff to reveal. Sometimes I think that one day, this blog will heave itself out of e-space and lurch through the streets, passing itself off as me. And no one will know the difference.
D.
Too much fun!
Samhain’s contest is up and running. My entry is #29 #28 #26 (how did that happen?), and I must say, it’s the best so far. But then, I’m partial.
My second favorite is Christine D’Abo’s #23, but that’s only because she’s playing into one of my treasured fantasies.
Lots of dead people in these opening lines, and at least one werewolf. What is it with supernaturals? Are they hot right now?
Speaking of fantasies, check out the short story I wrote for Tiggr’s blog, A Spanking Good Time:
It’s erotica. Historical BDSM erotica, no less. And if it’s too perverse for you, blame Suisan. No, really. It’s all her fault.
D.
Monday Morning Flickr Follies
Some lighter-than-air entertainment for you on this blue, blue Monday.
Steve Gilliard, RIP
Only a few of my readers follow the progressive blogs, and I don’t know how many of you read The News Blog with any regularity. I know (from searching my blog posts just a moment ago) that I have shouted out Steve on more than a few occasions.
Well, it’s been a sad weekend for the progressive blogosphere, since we’ve lost one of our most incisive voices. Karen and I were regular readers of The News Blog. Steve could move us to write, to act, to donate to his blog (which is a bigger deal than you might imagine — we usually reserve our donations for ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, and progressive political campaigns). He could also infuriate us from time to time, which is why I took him off my blogroll at one point. But I kept sneaking looks by way of others’ blogrolls.
Others have highlighted their favorite Gilly posts, like this one from Meteor Blades. This one from September 3, 2005, remains one of my favorite Steve Gilliard rants. He’s writing about the way New Yorkers were ahead of the ball with regard to Bush — it took Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath to wake up the rest of the country. What follows is an excerpt. Read the whole thing here.
Instead of hearing what we had to say about Bush, you called John Kerry a coward, mocked Max Cleland, blamed everything but herpes on Bill Clinton. You enabled Bush into this mess and now you’re shocked?
Now, Fox can be outraged, now, Wash Times and Union Leader call Bush weak? Well, his coward ass disappeared in 2001. But you rather blame Michael Moore for that.
He can’t even explain the Iraq war to a grieving mother.
So what did you do?
Write the most vile things about her and her dead son. Attacked her patriotism and her honesty.
Well, motherfuckers, and that means you, fat ass Goldberg and your master, Rich Lowry, PNAC Bitch Beinart, the racist wannabe white Malkin and the little fucktards at LGF, Bareback Andy and “Diversity” Instacracker, all you backstabbing, fag hating uncle tom ministers, you can see Dear Leader in action. America’s largest port is gone, maybe forever, gas is $5+ a gallon and FEMA is coming. Whores come faster with old men than FEMA is getting to NOLA.
How did your wartime President react? Like Chiang Kai-Shek when the Yellow River flooded in 1944, with corrupt indifference.
Meteor Blades’ pick highlights Steve at his thoughtful best; this post, however, catches his incandescent rage. What a voice. We’ll miss you, Steve.
D.
P.S.: At DailyKos, pastordan has the perfect prayer.
Labyrinthine errors
I came to Pan’s Labyrinth ready to be entranced. Or, at the very least, entertained. Writer/director Guillermo del Toro is a favorite of mine, has been ever since his creepy 1993 vampire flick, Cronos. Cronos took vampirism to new places. Forget repressed and awakened sexuality; Cronos was all about obsession and addiction.
Del Toro followed Cronos with a string of successes, most notably Hellboy, but also Blade II and the less commercial ghost story, The Devil’s Backbone. The man consistently delivers cinematic eye candy, material so interesting, disturbing, and beautiful that you could ignore the story and still come away satisfied. Pan’s Labyrinth is no exception, and in fact, you might do well to do just that. This film falls down on story.
The time is 1944, the setting, the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Franco’s Nationalists have control of the country, but they find themselves fighting Communist guerrillas. Our protagonist is an 11- or 12-year-old girl, Ofelia, the sensitive daughter of a tailor’s widow. The widow has remarried the cartoonishly evil Captain Vidal, commandant of a Nationalist base charged with rooting out the local Communists.