Book Review: Gentlemen of the Road

My review of Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon has been published on Curled Up with a Good Book.

Bugs Bunny's Wee Wee

Does this look like Bugs Bunny's penis to you?






I just want to know if I'm the only idiot. So I watched this cartoon (or at least the same 5 seconds of it) over and over, and it was clearly a lump of some kind, I had to have it pointed out to me that it's not his penis, but the bathtub behind him, between his legs...DUH!

Here's the whole cartoon if you really want to see it (the shower scene is at about 2:50):

The Thing about Comments

OK, my dumb ass just realized that when you comment on this blog, you have the option to mark the little box that says "email me with follow-up comments."

DOH!

If you read my previous super happy life affirming blog post about comments, you know what I'm talking about.

Bug Month: The Good Days

See, this would be an example of a good bug day:








SOMEbuddy (I won't mention his name but it rhymes with Sister SludFuppy) dropped this Bag O Bees in my lap today.

Bug Month

To those of you who have been pestering me for the next installment of the soap opera lovingly referred by cult fans as "General Waspital", I heartily say: "Alright already! Keep your pants on."

After four weeks of watching paint dry, I mean, the wasps cling to the wall of my L.A. condo, unmoving, hibernating, mating, whatever, I made the call to our exterminator to remove the offending squatters. Now, our building has some sort of coverage with them, since we have an ongoing monthly service, where they will come inside and spray at no cost if we find things like silverfish, spiders, etc. And that's right...wasps aren't covered.

"You know," the exterminator drawled to me over the phone, "they're probably just dying, you could just smack them with a broom and save yourself some money."

Yeah, and I could probably do the same thing to a cop after a high speed chase that resulted in my running out of gas and slamming into a pole after accumulating 20 police units and a couple of helicopters: just get out of my car and smack him with a broom. WAS HE KIDDING????

Why should I trust some guy who isn't there to see these menacing insects positioned over me in my living room, taunting me, probably making fun of my eating habits in front of the television (Netflix, anyone?) What about all those societal influences that do nothing but teach us that wasps are mean and stinging and nasty and swarming and stinging and never NEVER NEVER swat at them? What the hell was wrong with this guy? He was clearly high on bug spray vapors and stung to the point of immunity, because I didn't care if it cost $95.00 for him to come over with his own broom. I just wanted somebody else to take the risk of getting stung while I hid in the bathroom. I wanted a guarantee that in February when those little suckers woke up from their dreams, they wouldn't be in my house ready to party.

So this guy comes over with a Webster in his hand (you know that thing with a long pole and a spherical fluff of bristles on the end that is used to get spider webs out of corners, hence the name Webster?) and a white can of stuff hanging from his holster. I will call him Pedro, at the risk of racial profiling, but also for expediency. Pedro expands the purple dandelion of the Webster and reaches up the 20 or so feet to the window where Stuart and Stan (the Sting brothers) are hanging out.

Pedro tries to mush them with no success, but they fall gently from the wall into the lair of the mighty Webster. As he lowers the end of the Webster, the wasps seem to slowly flounder in and around the bristles as if to say, "Oh I'm soooo sleepy, I just can't be bothered with all this", and I run over there (at this point, I figure if they were going to attack, it would have happened already) and open the sliding glass door. Pedro moves the Webster outside where Stuart slips out of it, hits the balcony floor, and rolls off the edge, falling to his death for all I know. It's like Pedro is the Pied Piper of wasps. Meanwhile, Stan lazily falls into the door track where Pedro sprays the crap out of him. Ninety-five dollars later, Pedro sends me out of the house and comes out 5 minutes later having fogged the 2nd level of my condo and tells me not to return for 4 hours.

Tune in next episode entitled 'Bug Year', when we learn about the trials and tribulations of fumigating your abode with a tent and some termite spray. Scenes will be shot sometime in January with post production and a release date to follow, writer's strike be damned.

Oh yeah, did I mention we have termites?

Where's My Porsche Already?

Are women allowed to have mid-life crises? And what is the plural from of crisis? Or is there a different word for it altogether for female types? I don't want a fancy sports car, or plastic surgery, or a new younger wife or anything, but something's going on in my little pea brain where lately, daily, (I know, too many adverbs, but I'm not submitting this to a lit mag or anything so shut up, and who asked you, anyway?) I contemplate what the hell I've been doing with my life, how I'm pissing it away on selfish hedonistic endeavors that result in nothing of consequence (e.g., Netflix, anyone?)

I bitch and moan about how I'm getting nowhere with lightning speed, I'm behind on any writing, be it book reviews, short stories, critique groups, and worst of all, my 60,000+ word tome I've grown to despise: my novel. Every day, I have the best of intentions to spend just one lousy hour working on that unpublishable piece of crap, trying to turn it into a publishable piece of crap. But I can't see the forest through the trees, or I suppose, I can't see each tree because I'm too overwhelmed at the thought of the forest, and as a result, nothing gets done. And how many people have you already heard complain about (and here's my unoriginal version of it) how time flies when you get older? And don't let me get started on all the other things I've got going on that my brain cannot keep up with, primarily because it would generate no sympathy. I don't have kids, so how could I possibly complain about how busy my life is? I mean how hard could it be to live in two cities, right?

Here's the thing, if time is flying by as fast as I claim, then if I did spend a small amount of time chipping away at pursuing another career, I would have it by now. Grrrrr!!!! Here's me, trying not to indulge in THAT self-destructive thought.

I know everybody's got problems, and some people have problems so dire, I wouldn't trade lives with them, but this isn't about everyone else. It's about me, so I don't want to hear you whine about your pathetic little lives, unless you want to put it in the comments section, which would be nice. And that's another thing, why do we bloggers NEED people to comment? If we really wanted people to talk to us, we'd call them on the phone, right? But no, I suppose the whole point of the comment is so that all your friends see who is commenting and think that you are popular. But the sad thing is, I'm lucky to get 1 comment every 8 posts, so instead, everybody sees that nobody comments (actually, if I weren't so self-absorbed, I'd realize that you probably don't even check the comment count because you don't really care who else comments) and who is everybody? Why, all three of you that read my blog. My readership is so bad and I'm so desperate that I have to cut and paste it from this site (Nanny Goats In Panties) and paste it on MySpace, so that perhaps two more people will read it.

What I find irritating about the whole "comments" thing, is that you can't really carry on a conversation. If I ever leave a comment on someone's blog, I never go back to it to see if someone else has responded, because I can't remember where I've left comments and where I haven't, so if any of you out there, know of a solution to this outrage, some tool waiting to be plucked from the blogosphere that I'm unaware of that notifies you every time someone adds a comment to a blog post that you've already commented on, do tell.

And now, I've lost my train of thought, and in spite of this having gone nowhere, I dub this post "published".

Maybe in my next post, I'll tell you what the hell happened to those two wasps.

Tony Blair Cut Up

I may be late to the game, but perhaps so are you. Have you seen Tony Blair's rendition of "Should I Stay or Should I go"?

They're Back with a Vengeance

Have you ever answered the phone, gotten no response, or heard a beep, but nobody talks to you and you wonder what insidious thing some alien or spy is doing to you and you hang up in anger because someone made you get up off you ass to answer the phone for nothing?

Let's get to the bottom of this, shall we?

Today, I notice my phone ring and it's a phone number that has been popping up on my Caller ID frequently. So I decide to type the following into Google: area code 801-623-4621.

And to make a long story short, it is a survey company called Western Wats located in Utah. They do customer research on contract for many companies, notably for Kaiser medical, Time Warner Cable, and various banks. Western Wats is not required to respect the National Do-Not-Call List, because they are conducting legitimate customer research surveys on behalf of their contractees.

Supposedly (SUPPOSEDLY), you can opt out specifically with WW and their internal Do Not Call list -- according to their website -- by either emailing them or calling them:

E-mail: optout@westernwats.com
Phone: 801-373-7735

Here's the thing: They would make the post-telemarketer-saturated world a much happier place if they identified themselves on your phone as "Consumer Survey", so that you could answer the phone knowing what you're going to get and making that choice. Instead we answer the phone (actually, I don't answer the phone for unfamiliar phone numbers, but maybe you do) because it could be somebody important and wind up feeling manipulated, so our hackles raise and we take it out on some college student who is merely trying to make a living who, in turn, becomes rude and aggressive because they are paid not to care about the fact that you are eating dinner or that it is 9:45pm.

But enough about me, here is a list of 20 suggestions for responding to telemarketers.

True Love on Halloween

At long last, the Freak's dreams of becoming a punk rock star have come true. On Halloween, Freak (aka Larissa) took the stage with the Ghoulie Family, a Groovie Ghoulies Tribute band. A picture of Garagezilla, the warm-up act, is pictured at right and should be seen in full video, which will be provided soon (as soon as my lazy ass puts it up here.

The same goes for the Ghoulie Family below.