Will someone please tell me to get a life?
Photoshopping: an insidious addiction. Here’s another one for Blogenfreude:
Blogenfreude, if this doesn’t get Bill’s goat, nothing will.
D.
tags: bill o’reilly fox news o’reilly enemies list
Senator Joseph McFalafel
This one is for Blogenfreude at Agitprop.
D.
Rugelach
I was hoping to give this rugelach recipe from Ruby Glen an unqualified thumbs-up, but I can’t. It tweaks me when I discover that the baking time is 2 to 3 times what the recipe claims it is, and I hate having to figure out how to roll out the damned dough without it sticking to the rolling pin.
Fortunately for you, I’m here to perfect the recipe.
Those of you who boggle at bagels may not be familiar with rugelach. They are a horn-shaped pastry made from a cream cheese, butter, and flour dough. You can fill them with fruit, nuts, chocolate, you name it. They’re delicious and easy to make (or rather, they should be easy to make).
There are two important bits missing from the Ruby Glen recipe:
1. I had to bake mine 45 minutes to an hour before they were golden brown. The recipe calls for 16 to 19 minutes. Grrr.
2. Even a well chilled dough is sticky beyond belief. I sprayed two large squares of parchment paper with non-stick cooking oil spray, and I rolled out my dough between the squares. I did this on a marble pastry board, so the dough stayed cold and remained pliant.
I rolled out another ball of dough between ungreased layers of parchment, but this flopped miserably. The dough stuck to the paper. Only by freezing the paper/dough sandwich could I peel off the paper, and then my dough was too hard to roll. I made it work, but oh, what a mess.
My filling: I followed Ruby Glen’s recipe (using pecans), and I added a quarter cup of milk chocolate chips before grinding the whole thing in a blender.
Rugelach: yum.
D.
Are Men Necessary? The critical brouhaha.
Ron at Galley Cat has an interesting post on the recent hubbub over Kathryn Harrison’s review of Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary?
Snip:
. . . a colleague of mine from the book reviewing world passed along an interesting question: “Should a critic be considered ‘conflicted’ if the ‘conflict’ consists solely of the potential subject having said something unpleasant about the critic in the past?”
Back to that in a moment; first, a recap. Last month, Editor and Publisher ran a concise summary of the highlights. Chronologically:
In 1997, Dowd in a column called “Banks for the Memories†described Harrison’s book “The Kissâ€â€”-a controversial memoir of her consensual four-year sexual affair with her own father–as an example of a trendy genre: “Creepy people talking about creepy people.”
Then, this year, the New York Times Book Review allowed Harrison to review Dowd’s new book, Are Men Necessary? Harrison slammed the book, saying, among other things,
Dowd’s skill as a columnist “does not enable her to produce a book-length exploration of a topic as complex as the relations between the sexes.”
Arianna Huffington subsequently wrote an editorial accusing the NY Times of violating their own ethical bylaws, and the story exploded into the blogosphere. Now, back to the Galley Cat post. The author’s opinion seems best summarized in this sentence:
. . . it simply isn’t very charitable to suggest that an author is incapable of reviewing another author’s work without her perspective being colored by personal vendetta.
but read the whole post (linked above) and see what you think. He also raises the nasty issue of blog sniping — in other words, is a reviewer conflicted if he has been reamed in the author’s blog? The writer of the Galley Cat post thinks not.
I disagree. I suspect this is something that can only be solved on a case-by-case basis. Some critics might be able to give an unbiased review in this circumstance, but I believe it’s human nature to hold a grudge. Rising above that prejudice takes considerable effort. I doubt all reviewers are up to that challenge.
Perhaps we should give reviewers the benefit of the doubt and assume professionalism on their part, but I don’t think editors should make this assumption lightly. If the review seems a trifle too bile-laced, perhaps the editor should ask questions.
I’m curious whether any of this matters. What is worse: to get slammed by the New York Times Book Review, or to get ignored by them?
A week or two ago, Maureen Dowd appeared on The Colbert Report. She was funny, beautiful, and played well with Stephen Colbert. They hyped her book (twice, I think?) which raises another question: who gets more viewers/readers — The Colbert Report, or the New York Times Book Review?
I suspect Colbert trumps NYTBR, but that’s just a hunch.
D.
Technorati tags: maureen dowd, New York Times Book Review
To my reader in Massachusetts, who found me
by searching Yahoo for
ball squeezing sex play
You know, if you want that sort of thing, you need only ask.
But not right now. No one’s balls are getting squeezed, not even my own. My back aches, I haven’t even begun to think about what I’m going to make for dinner tonight, and I’m tired, even though all I’ve done is
- one load of laundry
- washed last night’s dishes
- cleaned the litter box — AGAIN (what is it about cats? Don’t they ever stop?)
- threw out several million bags of trash
- unpacked one of the remaining moving boxes so that Jake could play Impossible Creatures
I’ve caught up on all of your blogs, commented on many of them, and haven’t even cracked open my manuscript. Here I thought I’d be editing like crazy in my time off.
Here’s a question:
Have any of you NaNoWriMo-ers hit perma-snag with your manuscript? I can’t find the motivation to reread it, let alone finish it. I’d like to think this is because I’m so disciplined, I’d rather edit Brakan Correspondent, but see two paragraphs ago.
One last thought before I brave the supermarket. Go over to Atrios and take the “Does President Bush deserve to be impeached” MSNBC opinion poll. 89% say yes! Too bad the poll is unscientific.
D.
Fun stuff over at Kate’s place
I have to give this one a shout:
Kate, you may have my babies any time you want. You too, Maureen.
D.
The Saugeen Stripper was good for me. Was she good for you, too?
The sight of double-vision Elmos bouncing off the Saugeen Stripper’s breasts sent my blog counter through the roof this last weekend. I must have tapped into something special: that quintessential sadness of innocence encountering carnality, or perhaps the joy of using nubile breasts as trampolines. Or maybe there really are that many horny guys out there hoping I would provide a link to the video.
Breasts, though: are they ever mesmerizing. My regulars have already read The Sociobiology of Boobage, but you trespassers would do well to follow that link. (Fine cleavage there. You won’t be disappointed, and you might even learn something.)
I saw my first up-close-and-personal, bare nekkid boobies at Yellowstone National Park, at the concession stand near Old Faithful. A girl in line to buy hot dogs wore something that sort of fell open at the sides. Honestly, I have no idea what she had on. I wasn’t looking at what she wore, for heaven’s sake.
Sure, I’d seen ’em in the movies, and I’d glimpsed a few Playboys over the years. I’d even copped more than a few feels. At recess and lunch in 5th and 6th grade, we played co-ed touch football, and I’m afraid I took the touch part literally. Nowadays, when kindergarteners are counseled on sexual harassment, I suspect I’d be locked up. Back then, I escaped with an angry, “Hoffman, you pervert!”
Back to the Saugeen Stripper. If you haven’t seen the photos, the most remarkable thing is the blasé expression on the guys’ faces. This young, beautiful woman is giving them lap dances, and they look like they’re posing for high school football pictures. Unbelievable.
But, back to me.
I’m not a kiss-and-tell kinda guy, so let’s skip over high school. The nicest-looking breasts I saw in college were in my Psych 101 textbook, a black-and-white photo of a woman nursing her infant. I don’t think I ever made it past that chapter.
Close runner-up for best collegiate boobage: my pack of Asian Beauty playing cards, purchased at a schlocky Chinatown gift shop.
And what do I get nowadays?
Patient (typically a woman in her sixties or older, someone who has for many decades baked herself medium-well in the Southern California sun — remember Magda in There’s Something About Mary?) : Dr. Hoffman, I have this rash.
Then, so fast I have no chance to object, she lifts her sweater and gloop, there they are.
I’m an ENT. Ear, nose, and throat. If I was breast, ear, nose, and throat, I’d be BENT. And you all know I’m not BENT.
D.
T Lady Down
I wonder if anyone will catch the allusion in this post’s title. Answer below.
Before I get rolling: I’ve emailed my legislators. Have you? Or do you like living in a fascist dictatorship under Emperor Bush? (Non-Americans exempted . . . unless, of course, you are living in a fascist dictatorship, in which case you should write your ombudsmen, or jaegermeisters, or whatever you call ’em.)
In case y’all need an explanation why I’m so upset, check out this handy dandy video. (Kudos to Agitprop — and Blue Gal for pointing me to Agitprop.)
It’s an American staple to put down fatties, but I’m telling you, you zaftigs (Gabriele, help! How do I turn zaftig into a noun and make it plural?) are lucky. If you fall on your ass, you have padding. Not so my 80-something pound wife. She fell last Thursday, and she’s still in bed.
Ultimately, it’s all the fault of her multiple sclerosis. MS led to chemo, which killed her ovaries, which nuked her estrogen, which leached all the calcium from her bones, etc. Evil MS.
She thought she’d pulled a muscle, but her recovery over the weekend left a lot to be desired. When I called her this morning, she told me she really didn’t feel any better, so I rushed home (after first getting anxious as hell, which meant I had to eat several Almond Rochas), brought her to the orthopedic surgeon, and got her leg and hip X-rayed.
Tarantula Lady has a pelvic fracture. The ‘pod assures me it’s a good fracture. Yes, of course there are good and bad fractures. It’s a stable fracture, so it will heal without surgery and without any sort of weird English Patient-style full-body cast, or whatever the hell Ralph Fiennes wore in that silly uber-British movie. (My gawd, I thought I was watching The Mummy.) The ‘pod even wants her to start weight-bearing ASAP. Otherwise, the osteoporosis will only get worse.
Our Las Vegas trip is on perma-hold, so if you were hoping for some acid-tongued snark on the bar girls at Caesar’s Palace, I’ll have to go to our tribal casino instead.
Karen’s holding up okay. The pain meds nauseate her (thank heavens for Zofran), and it’s hard for her to do just about anything. I have only one more day to work, though, and then I’m taking eleven or twelve days off. I hope she’ll be back on her feet by January 2.
Trivia answer:
This entry’s title is a reference to the 1978 submarine movie Gray Lady Down, which starred a Chuck Heston and David Carradine. Truly Le Bad Cinema. I’m shocked IMDB has it at 5.8 out of 10 stars.
Yes, I agree. Karen deserves better than this.
D.