The artist formerly known as Kenney: a contest
After School Special, by Kenney Mencher
Click to see larger image
My friend Kenney Mencher, formerly known as Kenney Mencher, has a big show opening on January 12 at 826 Valencia in San Francisco. I have my fingers crossed that some of you Bay Area folks might make it to the show. I’d love to go, but I have fresh tonsils bouncing around (I like to stay in town for at least 10 days following a tonsillectomy, in case there’s delayed post-op bleeding).
Here’s the contest. Kenney’s paintings are all about narrative; in that sense, he has a writer’s heart. Guess that’s why I like him and his work so much. Anyway, take a look at Big Red and, in the comments below, tell me the story behind the painting. Note that there are no right or wrong answers, but whoever’s story tickles me the most will win my copy of Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? Maybe I’ll even autograph it (because even though I didn’t write it, I should have written it).
I’ll let the contest run for the next couple of days. I’ll announce a winner on Sunday, how’s that?
Warning: Kenney has been known to take work inspired by these crackpot contests of mine and put them on his website (see this poetry page). If you object to that, or if you prefer to remain anonymous, let us know in the comments.
D.
Thirteen college memories: sophomore year
Mind-boggling, isn’t it, that I haven’t written a Thirteen for my year in the dorms? Well, not really that mind-boggling. Sophomore year was one of my worst years ever, so I don’t go there without some trepidation.By the way, I’ve added a new category for my Thirteen fans: Thirteen Candles. All Thirteen, All the Time. Revel in it.
Below the cut: thirteen dormie memories. (Here’s a photo of the cast of characters; and if you’re jumping into this out of sequence, here’s the freshman year thirteen.)
While standing on one foot
In the OR today, one of my nurses asked me if I’d celebrated Christmas this year.
“No,” I said, a bit confused, since she knew the next part: “I’m Jewish.”
“Well, some people celebrate Christmas even if they’re not Christian.”
This is true, and I said as much. My wife’s family (Buddhist) always celebrated Christmas, and their Buddhist temple puts up a humongous tree every year. Considering Christmas’s pagan/druidic roots, why not celebrate Christmas? It’s fun. Those trees smell nice, too.
At this point, one of my other OR staff people asked, “So you don’t believe . . . I mean, you must believe in something.”
Walnut, licensed sex therapist
Well, not quite, but closer than you might think.
Recently, I learned (but have not been able to confirm) that in 2007, the American Board of Sleep Medicine will allow physicians to sit for the Boards exam without first doing a 12-month fellowship in sleep medicine. In other words, pass the test and you’re in. If this is the case, and assuming I pass the test, I could do a few things I can’t presently do.
ENT docs have a share in this turf since we treat snoring and obstructive sleep apnea. Sleep medicine also includes treatment of insomnia, a subject near and dear to my heart, and parasomnia, which is the subject of today’s post.
Parasomnia is a catch-all term which includes a variety of inappropriate sleep behaviors: restless leg syndrome, sleepwalking, sleep-talking, sleep-eating, and yes, sleep-screwing, also known as sexsomnia. We’re not talking about porking the mattress in the middle of the night. Every guy does that. (Don’t bother to deny it. You were asleep — how would you know?) No, we’re talking about behavior that can break up families and land you in jail.
Here’s one of the seminal papers (*cough*) in sexsomnia. The linked page includes eleven case reports of sexsomniacs. Yeah, I thought the whole thing was a laugh, too, until I read the reports. It’s one thing to make unwanted advances on your spouse, quite another thing entirely if one of your kids is sleeping in your bed. This is scary stuff.
I have to wonder about the 16-year-old whose mom found him downloading male porn off the internet while asleep, but if you can fix yourself a ham and cheese sandwich while asleep, googling is a piece of cake.
You’ll be glad to hear this is a treatable condition which does not require a full body condom. Some of these folks were treated with clonazepam, some with CPAP (the mask device we use to treat obstructive sleep apnea).
Somehow, I always knew I had a future in sex.
D.
Oh, you who are wise in the ways of spam . . .
As some of you know (those of you who snoop the bottom of the page), I use Spam Karma 2 to gobble my spam. And it does a damned fine job of it, too, with one exception: Nokia Ringtones.
I hate these bastards. Somehow, they’ve outwitted my every attempt at blocking them. Daily, I get anywhere from 1 to 30 trackbacks (trackbacks, not comments) from “Super Blog” expressing insightful sentiments like, “Hey nice site” or “Free mosquito ringtone.” Incidentally, I can’t imagine anything more heinous than a mosquito ringtone.
These trackbacks come in from multiple IP addresses, but they’re all from one URL, “Super Blog.” Since they’re trackbacks and not comments, blocking the URL does nothing. I suppose I could block all trackbacks, but then I wouldn’t have anyway of knowing what y’all are saying about me!
Any bright ideas?
D.
Hopes for the New Year
No resolutions, my friends. I know what I need to do. But there are innumerable things I have no control over, things I would like to see happen in 2007. Here are a few.
1. Please, for the love of God, no more ugly crotch shots from the likes of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears; nor do I want to watch Nicole Richey descend further into her heroin-chic fashion world of anorexic glam.
2. All war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against humanity should be given the Saddam treatment: they should stand trial and be summarily hung by the neck until dead. Gentlemen, you know who you are. The world will breathe a sigh of relief when you’re gone.
3. Katie Holmes should find a loophole in her prenup with Tom Cruise and stick it to him for every penny. Tom should then sink into the obscurity his talentlessness and all-around psychopathology so richly deserves.
4. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should begin demonstrating some true leadership skills — hmm, how about championing the impeachment of Bush and Cheney? — or, failing that, they should clear the field for candidates who will show some backbone. On that same note, I’m hoping Al Gore will announce his candidacy this year. Until he does, my vote is for Edwards.
5. Needless to say, I’d like to see all the troops come home from the Middle East. Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule ignores the fact that when glass shatters, you can’t put it back together. You can pay for a new one. When a government emerges from the mess in Iraq, we can (and should) pay reparations.
6. Can we please have one single, solitary year without another Law & Order spinoff? This weekend of CSI/SVU marathons has left me with a vaguely guilty feeling, as if I should expect a call from Vincent D’Onofrio and his goons at any moment. Note to Hollywood: drama can happen outside of New York. Drama can happen outside of a courtroom. Drama does not require murders or gruesome sex crimes. Jeez.
7. I would like to see a new book from Martin Cruz Smith (it’s been two years since Wolves Eat Dogs), and a new movie from Alan Rickman other than the latest Harry Potter flick.
8. And oh, am I ever looking forward to the release of Spore, the PC game event of the decade!
So what are you hoping for?
D.
New Year’s gift
Some of you may recall that I had wanted to use my short story “Heaven on Earth” for PBW’s eBook challenge, but it got published instead! Well, the requisite six months have passed, so I’m now able to post the story.
I won’t try to classify it. SF? Spec fiction? Magical realism? Who knows. I wrote it to honor the memory of my grandfather, on whom the character of Papa Nate is loosely based. My grandfather never hung with the zoot suit crowd but he was a terror in any grocery store’s produce section. The speech patterns are entirely my Papa’s.
He died with dementia, which I believe was indeed multi-infarct dementia, a complication of untreated hypertension. The man would not take his blood pressure meds. “I feel fine without them,” he would say. “What do doctors know?” But it was a horrible way to go for a man whose personality drew so much from story and memory.
It’s fitting, I think, to “fix” his terrible end with a story, and to leave him in an eternity built on memory.
You may use this post as a comment thread on the story, if you like. And don’t forget: I’m going to do my best to live blog tonight, 7 PST at the latest. If I don’t see you, drive safe, everyone, and enjoy your New Year’s Eve.
D.
We’re back!
The eats were good and the weather balmy, so we spent an extra night in Eureka (our nearest “big” city). Thursday night we ate at Cin Cin, an upscale Italian place, where the most memorable dish was a platter of five cheeses, walnuts, grapes, and honey. Mmm, walnuts dipped in honey. Jake, the Salt Monster, discovered he could dip grapes in honey and sprinkle them with cracked salt. Don’t knock it ’til you try it.
Biggest dessert hit was the panna cotta, which I had never had before. Karen says they did an unusually good job of it, so I’m tempted to see if I can make one at least as fine. As for main courses, Jake had gnocchi, I had about the most perfect scallops imaginable (seared/caramelized on one side, quick-seared on the other), and I think Karen had a salad.
Family photo below the cut . . .
Thirteen culinary abominations
Today, I shall prove to you that my foodie arrogance knows no bounds.
Image shamelessly scanned from The Gallery of Regrettable Food by James Lileks, a gift I received from La Voluptuous & Demented Michelle.
We may be going to Eureka today, in which case I won’t be able to disseminate (oh how I love that word — Disseminate! Watch out, people, I’m disseminating!) my linky lurve. But feel free to leave links in the comments. Shout out your most recent cool posts in the comments, if you like, or give me your own nominations for worst culinary abominations.
For folks who are clumsy with HTML, here’s how to make a link. Substitute brackets <> for parentheses in the syntax below:
(a xhref=”link URL”)Here’s the link(/a)
Cut and paste the page’s URL into the quotes “link URL”. Yes, you need the quotes, and don’t go adding any spaces around that equals sign!
Thirteen marginally edible horrors below the fold.
Nostalgia for Gerald Ford, etc.
The other night, when Karen and I were watching Chevy Chase’s impersonation of Gerald Ford on the old SNL, I said, “Those were the good old days, you know? When the only thing about our president you could make fun of was his clumsiness.”
For a long time now, I’ve wished we had a president whom I could respect. Here’s the Wiki on Jimmy Carter, the last president I liked, a guy my dad still says “was too nice to be president.”
Some heavy-duty insomnia last night, so I may or may not chime in later with something more substantial. I’ll close with two links:
Thanks to Dean* remembering Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, I have tracked down the elusive theme music: Sarah Dash, “Sinner Man.” Amazing that I should have warm thoughts about a disco song, but there you have it.
And here is an interesting link to excerpts from Adam Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, wherein Hochschild speculates on the historic basis for Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz. Here’s a snip:
”The ‘Inner Station’ of Heart of Darkness, the place Marlow looks at through his binoculars only to find Kurtz’s collection of the shrunken heads of African ‘rebels,’ is loosely based on Stanley Falls. In 1895, five years after Conrad visited this post, Leon Rom was station chief there. A British explorer-journalist who passed through Stanley Falls that year described the aftermath of a punitive military expedition against some African rebels: ‘Many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house!’ If Conrad missed this account, which appeared in the widely read Century Magazine, he almost certainly noticed when The Saturday Review, a magazine he admired and read faithfully, repeated the story in its issue of December 17, 1898. That date was within a few days of when Conrad began writing Heart of Darkness.
Oh how I love the holiday season, tra la la . . .
D.
*Read Dean’s Global Orgasm Day story. Read it now! Much better than anything I have to offer.