One Negative Summer or Why Zoloft is a Bad Vacation Idea

For those of you just awakening from a big pharm sponsored Zoloft coma, things are fucked. Not just kinda fucked, but really in a big way, let’s-all-move-quickly-toward-the-lifeboats fucked. So forgive me if I’m hesitant to post anything sweet about your kid’s recent birthday party photos or offer you solace on your latest breeder relationship hiccup out there in sunny suburban land. In the immortal words of Christian Aguilera, I think we got a problem here.

Bitter, bitter Bierce

I should back up and provide a little personal and historical perspective. In 1868 while Mark Twain was rolling around barely civilized San Francisco working as a freelance reporter, a journalist named Ambrose Bierce became a coworker and occasional friend. Bierce was legendary for his biting sarcasm, the teeth of which he often planted in the ass of the American robber barons of the day, namely the railroad industry. Both Bierce and Twain also wrote eloquently about the treatment of Chinese immigrants in S.F. and the general abhorrent way employers on the frontier often treated their employees. Twain often referred teasingly to Ambrose as Bitter Bierce because he saw Bierce as a pessimist who favored trucking in doom-n-gloom stories and essays. Ironically, both of these men's writing – especially their doom-n-gloom exposes – ended up fostering some significant social changes when people read their articles.

On a more personally front, I’ve been unemployed for nearly two years. Yup, two … fucking … years. And in the midst of my unemployedness, I’ve been in a legal fist fight for nearly the same amount of time. (There were court dates and hearings this spring, the stakes are very fucking high.) Think you can remain upbeat and as happy as a warm bowl of puppies after two years of getting doors figuratively slammed in your face? Please try, by all means SHOW ME HOW YOU DO THIS. Does Jesus help you comb your hair every morning? Or do you just swallow copious amounts of prescription drugs so you can view your mini-van, your kids and your life through a drugged fog and then feign surprise when the drugs don't make the problems go away?

Do your parents console you with love, fresh brownies and unlimited cable TV as you park yourself in their basement indefinitely while the winds of the worst economic crises ever perpetrated by Wall Street/Ayn Randian shitheads howl outside? Does your spouse high-five you every time you drag yourself home from another painfully depressing job interview in which some lobotomized twit sits across a conference table from you and spends five minutes trying to deal your resume out of a thick pile of others?

Because both my parents are long dead, I have no spouse (last boyfriend didn’t make it to the three-month mark because he had to MOVE out of state for a JOB) and I can’t afford cable TV. And neither Jesus nor any other celestial being helps me comb my hair or make life decisions. Yep, my life decisions are my own and I will neither apologize for them or shovel them off on any vague metaphysical belief as a way of placating any judgmental friends (internet friends included).

Recently someone posted a link to an article that, as my UK friends would say, left me gobsmacked. Not gobsmacked by insight or summation but by sheer, unblinking stupidity. The very idea that a “human potential expert” can shovel that much shit electronically and (Gawd forbid) get paid has left me gobsmacked.

I knew the Fourth Estate was dead. I’ve known this for several years but do we really need the likes of this dancing in its entrails while the old horse finally dies? Factoid: 80% of the “writers” and “reporters” of the Huffington Post, AlterNet News and the conservitard Noise Machine are un-paid. Most of what you read on the internet is not news, it’s not researched, no experts were consulted, and NOBODY fact checks like a real editor would in the olden days. At least half of what’s floating like turds at the top of the Infobaun’s septic tank are not “news articles," they’re op/ed pieces just like this one. Wanna read about President Obama, the predatory mortgage foreclosure crisis or the giant multi-disaster that is the BP oil spill? Rest assured when you Google any of those subjects at least half of what pops up is a link to someone’s O-P-I-N-I-O-N. Some where in there you might find a link to the Associated Press’s website and an actual story punched out on a keyboard by an actual reporter but those are getting rarer and rarer. And that’s just one of the reasons I’m so pessimistic and pissed off.

The gist of the “human potential expert’s” piece was: if women face their fears, their lives will improve. STOP THE PRESSES! This just in: THE SKY IS BLUE! It’s interesting because I had a discussion about this very subject with my mother. When I was eight. We talked about me getting up in the night (when the closet monsters were most lively), turning on my bedroom light and opening the closet door to confirm that, in fact, their were no closet monsters. It was just my wildly energetic imagination.

My first thought upon skimming the “human potential expert’s” essay was Jay Leno and Madonna. Several years ago, Jay was doing his monologue and he swiped at Madonna for a totally uber-celebrity stupid comment. Madonna said “human urine can stop the spread of Athlete’s foot”. Jay nearly fell out of his chair giggling and recounting this comment. He then very astutely said: “Listen, if you’re peeing on your own feet, while you’re in the shower, you got a lot bigger things to worry about than Athlete’s foot.”

Folks, we got a lot bigger things to worry about than Athlete’s foot.

Californigation

Oh boy, this is funny. Jon skewers the 'tards at CNN.

Raymond Chandler, Margaret Atwood & David Foster Wallace

According to this goofy website, I write like the three authors above. Wow, I'm flattered.

What's interesting is the sample from the first short story I entered pegged Chandler and I thought the narrative voice in that one was very sardonic, very Atwood. But nooo, the second sample I entered (from 'Those Little Deaths') was deemed Atwood-ish. And the third sample I entered, from one of my newer short stories 'Love You Long Time' was David Foster Wallace-ish.

I've never read Chandler, have read almost all of Atwood's stuff and only a tiny smidgen of David Foster Wallace (who was a literal genius, batshit crazy and had his own weird brand of misogyny).

According to a news blurb, Margaret Atwood tried the website and it said she 'wrote like Stephen King.' Now that's funny.

Pooblished vs. Published

I started to read a summer novel I snagged at a retail chain (coupons!). I was hoping for a repeat of the pulp fiction extravaganza I went through last year with Charlaine Harris and her fun, not-too-deep Sookie Stackhouse series. Harris' books are like popcorn, you can't read just one. Those silly paperbacks got me through some rough shit last year, not the least of which was nearly bleeding to death in Harborview's ER.

(Leg humper).

Anyhoo, I plowed 350 laborious pages through Justin Cronin's "The Passage" and, sorry www.io9.com, it sucked giant sweaty ass. This novel is like a schematic for How To Sell Your Novel to Hollywood.

Step 1: Get Stephen King to blather on about it on the dust jacket
Step 2: Thank CAA on the Thanks Page
Step 3: Mention Ridley Scott on the Thanks Page
Step 4: Write a 800+ page rough draft

Yes, in that order. Because I think that's how it went down. Cronin humped King's leg at some book signing or publishing convention, got him to read a 10-page excerpt of his tome and then went and did the rest.

Allegedly Cronin won a PEN and a couple of other awards for a short story analogy called "Mary and O'Neil". Sadly, I don't think he even bothered to edit "The Passage" and I'm pretty sure no one at Random House did either.

Io9.com stupidly compared the first part of "The Passage" to Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". McCarthy's novel is an impressive and flawless read that will go down in sci-fi as one of the great ones.

But Cronin's book is by-the-numbers sci-fi/horror and there's few surprises. There's a pious, self-sacrificing black woman. There's a white trash 8-yr-old with vague mystical powers who gets infected with a vampire virus by evil government men. There's a long-suffering FBI agent who emotionally adopts the mystical brat ... even when she abandons him to die! Etc. This ain't King's "The Stand", it's not even a good knock off of "Different Seasons".

Vast, ruminating back story is given to every damn character. I knew what one security guard's favorite food was, I knew everything about his childhood ... SO?! His character becomes vampire snack food.

And as for Cronin's MFA and more literary-minded writing, I sure didn't see any here. The sentences were often long and clunky. He spends four paragraphs saying something that McCarthy could have said in one sentence.

My criticism (and everybody else's) are moot as Cronin has already sold the movie rights and Ridley Scott is in pre-production. In six months to a year, a smoldering turd will land on top of the box office.

In other news, I too am now a pooblished author. I'd like to thank all five of the readers of Black Matrix Publishing's periodicals. I'll post a PDF of my printed story just as soon as Black Matrix mails it to me and I get it scanned.

Hostile Horizons.

Walking Oil Spill

Way to go David Horsey ... except you left out the idling 3,000 pound SUV.

Chairman Mao Loves Me (and so does the Fresh Prince)

The remake of 1984's Karate Kid dutifully follows the original with one exception. This time Daniel-san is shan-Dre and he hasn't relocated to the outskirts of L.A., but rather Beijing. Too bad this crucial change in setting didn't inspire the writers to deviate from the same tired plot.

The lead, overly played by Will Smith's son, meets a local girl and then the schoolyard bully who will terrorize him until Jackie Chan, as Mr.Han, unsteadily comes to his rescue. Right off the bat, this is a little odd as Dre is awfully young to be gettin' with the ladies. Ralph Macchio's Daniel was a hormonal, lanky teenager. Jaden Smith is still short enough to get turned away from half the rides at Magic Mountain.


Wait a minute Jaden, how much do you pay your publicist?

There's more than a few holes in this flick and we get way more closeups of Smith's over-worked tyke rather than Chan's quietly wounded old man.

If they made a silent film starring just Jackie Chan's face, it would be a roaring success. Decades of physical comedy, broken bones and mega-stardom have created a damn interesting fellow who seems to get acting inside and out -- he's just not interested in doing something that easy.

Little Dre's love interest is a comely Chinese girl a foot taller than him who's father is one of the new elite business men of China. Irony of ironies, she's trying to become a classical violinist -- a bourgeois foreign art the Communists gleefully murdered 500,000+ people for during the Cultural Revolution.

In the course of their paint-by-numbers journey (to Dre winning the kung fu tournament) Mr. Han, takes him to a mountain village outside of Beijing; you know, the kind that only exist in movies or at Disney World. Here there's no pollution, no crowds, everyone wears gorgeous silk costumes and apparently no one is forced to work in a Chinese factory. They should have called it the Ancient Wise Asian Town or something. Shoalin priests perch on river rocks in spotless white robes while contemplating existence. A female kung fu practitioner hypnotizes a cobra while perched hundreds of feet above a cliff face. The sun shines and wind chimes rustle. It's the kind of retreat fat Americans spend thousands of dollars to go to on the weekends. Again, what the hell? Was the entire film crew under the age of 30? Does no one remember the Cultural Revolution when hundreds of Confucian and Buddhist temples were destroyed and the Revolutionary Guard took sledge hammers to historical sites all at the whim of Chairman Mao?

Classical violin music and ancient Chinese Confucian meditation are some big speed bumps in The Karate Kid 2010. Yet another hiccup the writers chose to ignore: Jaden Smith is African American. China's not the most progressive country when it comes to racial acceptance. Sure, they're better than North Korea, but that's not saying much. In real life, the rich Chinese business man wouldn't have let the cute moppet Dre within five kilometers of his upper-class daughter, especially considering how damn rare marriageable daughters are in China today.

No one's seen hide nor hair of the Chinese kids who play the bully (Zhenwei Wang), or the female love interest (Wenwen Han) at any press events for the movie. And it's a damn shame as both kids can emote with more believability than Jaden Smith, who's daddy Will Smith bought him this movie.

I think if I have to chose between the mythical Jackie Chan (The Forbidden Kingdom) promoting the cardboard Wise Asian Man versus the stilted reality of The Karate Kid 2010, I'll take the full-on myth. I prefer tinkling wind chimes, meditating Shoalin monks and cascading mountain streams over Beijing's pollution, poor unemployed and China's oppressive oligarchy any day.

Finally, the only thing more offensive than assuming Americans will buy the idea of an African American woman being relocated from Detroit to China to work for a car company (when did they get so benevolent?!), is the assumption none of us knows the difference between karate and kung fu. I guess it's too late to re-name it?

FunnnyyyyY!

Do you want fries with that?

This was pulled directly from a Craigslist ad for a barista:
A (cafe business) in Belltown is seeking P/T experienced barista and customer service rep for 20-30 hrs/wk. We are looking for someone who can work independently AND together in a team-oriented environment. Candidate should be friendly, energetic and efficient. You must be able to move quickly at all times during your shift and have great problem-solving skills and insight. Qualified candidate will have ALL of the following requisites:

*At least 2 years customer service experience
*At least 1 year recent barista experience (manual machine)
*Current WA State Food Handler's Permit
*Reliable transportation
*Available immediately
*Flexible availability
*Able to stay for 6+ months
*Positive, ready-to-work attitude
*Blah, blah, blah

If you do not have ALL of the above listed, you need not apply. We will be interviewing the afternoon of May 24th and 25th, so only apply if you are able to appear at that time. We are looking to fill 2 positions immediately, so open availability for that week is a must. Reply with relevant resume and 3 professional references.

What's wrong with this ad? Well, nothing really unless you look at it from my perspective.

• It's a (below) minimum-wage job starting at $8/hr (Washington state minimum is $8.55)
• I'm assuming zero benefits as it's only part-time
• They want you to quit your current P/T job (must be available immediately),
  
• but yet you have to have recent experience (as in employer references)
• I'm walking distance from this place yet they require "reliable transportation" which means running errands for the business in your car?
• You have to have a current food handler's license and those cost money and are generally not required by big-chain fast food like Starbuck's, McDonald's, etc.

Wow, things just went from bad to much worse right before my eyes.

Unemployed? Prepare to stay that way.

This is so well written, I just have to steal it and re-post it here.

In a Job Market Realignment, Some Left Behind
Thursday May 13, 2010
By CATHERINE RAMPELL, New York Times

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Many of the jobs lost during the recession are not coming back.

Period.

For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.

The phasing out of these positions might have been accomplished through less painful means like attrition, buyouts or more incremental layoffs. But because of the recession, winter came early.

The tough environment has been especially disorienting for older and more experienced workers like Cynthia Norton, 52, an unemployed administrative assistant in Jacksonville.



“I know I’m good at this,” says Ms. Norton. “So how the hell did I end up here?”

Administrative work has always been Ms. Norton’s “calling,” she says, ever since she started work as an assistant for her aunt at 16, back when the uniform was a light blue polyester suit and a neckerchief. In the ensuing decades she has filed, typed and answered phones for just about every breed of business, from a law firm to a strip club. As a secretary at the RAND Corporation, she once even had the honor of escorting Henry Kissinger around the building.

But since she was laid off from an insurance company two years ago, no one seems to need her well-honed office know-how.

Ms. Norton is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical and administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer working in that occupation by the end of last year. There have also been outsize job losses in other occupation categories that seem unlikely to be revived during the economic recovery. The number of printing machine operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel agents fell by 40 percent.

This “creative destruction” in the job market can benefit the economy.

Pruning relatively less-efficient employees like clerks and travel agents, whose work can be done more cheaply by computers or workers abroad, makes American businesses more efficient. Year over year, productivity growth was at its highest level in over 50 years last quarter, pushing corporate profits to record highs and helping the economy grow.

But a huge group of people are being left out of the party.

Millions of workers who have already been unemployed for months, if not years, will most likely remain that way even as the overall job market continues to improve, economists say. The occupations they worked in, and the skills they currently possess, are never coming back in style. And the demand for new types of skills moves a lot more quickly than workers — especially older and less mobile workers — are able to retrain and gain those skills.

There is no easy policy solution for helping the people left behind. The usual unemployment measures — like jobless benefits and food stamps — can serve as temporary palliatives, but they cannot make workers’ skills relevant again.

Ms. Norton has sent out hundreds of résumés without luck. Twice, the openings she interviewed for were eliminated by employers who decided, upon further reflection, that redistributing administrative tasks among existing employees made more sense than replacing the outgoing secretary.

One employer decided this shortly after Ms. Norton had already started showing up for work.

Ms. Norton is reluctant to believe that her three decades of experience and her typing talents, up to 120 words a minute, are now obsolete. So she looks for other explanations.

Employers, she thinks, fear she will be disloyal and jump ship for a higher-paying job as soon as one comes along.

Sometimes she blames the bad economy in Jacksonville. Sometimes she sees age discrimination. Sometimes she thinks the problem is that she has not been able to afford a haircut in a while. Or perhaps the paper her résumé is printed on is not nice enough.

The problem cannot be that the occupation she has devoted her life to has been largely computerized, she says.

“You can’t replace the human thought process,” she says. “I can anticipate people’s needs. Usually, I give them what they want before they even know they need it. There will never be a machine that can do that.”

And that is true, up to a point: human judgment still counts for something. That means some of the filing jobs, just like some of the manufacturing jobs, that were cut during the recession will return. But a lot of them probably will not.

Offices, not just in Jacksonville but all over the country, have found that life without a secretary or filing clerk — which they may have begun somewhat reluctantly when economic pressures demanded it — is actually pretty manageable.

After all, the office environment is more automated and digitized than ever. Bosses can handle their own calendars, travel arrangements and files through their own computers and ubiquitous BlackBerrys. In many offices, voice mail systems and doorbells — not receptionists — greet callers and visitors.

And so, even when orders pick up, many of the newly de-clerked and un-secretaried may not recall their laid-off assistants. At the very least, any assistants they do hire will probably be younger people with different skills.

Economists have seen this type of structural change, which happens over the long term but is accelerated by a downturn, many times before.

“This always happens in recessions,” says John Schmitt, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Employers see them as an opportunity to clean house and then get ready for the next big move in the labor market. Or in the product market as well.”

Economists like Erica Groshen at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have argued that bigger structural job losses help explain why the last two economic recoveries were jobless — that is, why job expansion lagged far behind overall growth.

But there is reason to think restructuring may take a bigger toll this time around. The percentage of unemployed workers who were permanently let go has hovered at a record high of over 50 percent for several months.

Additionally, the unemployment numbers show a notable split in the labor pool, with most unemployed workers finding jobs after a relatively short period of time, but a sizable chunk of the labor force unable to find new work even after months or years of searching. This group — comprising generally older workers — has pulled up the average length of time that a current worker has been unemployed to a record high of 33 weeks as of April. The percentage of unemployed people who have been looking for jobs for more than six months is at 45.9 percent, the highest in at least six decades.

And so the question is what kinds of policy responses can help workers like Ms. Norton who are falling further and further behind in the economic recovery, and are at risk of falling out of the middle class.

Ms. Norton has spent most of the last two years working part time at Wal-Mart as a cashier, bringing home about a third of what she had earned as an administrative assistant. Besides the hit to her pocketbook, she grew frustrated that the work has not tapped her full potential.

“A monkey could do what I do,” she says of her work as a cashier. “Actually, a monkey would get bored.”

Ms. Norton says she cannot find any government programs to help her strengthen the “thin bootstraps” she intends to pull herself up by. Because of the Wal-Mart job, she has been ineligible for unemployment benefits, and she says she made too much money to qualify for food stamps or Medicaid last year.

“If you’re not a minority, or not handicapped, or not a young parent, or not a veteran, or not in some other certain category, your hope of finding help and any hope of finding work out there is basically nil,” Ms. Norton says. “I know. I’ve looked.”

Of course, just as there is a structural decline in some industries, others enjoy structural growth (the “creative” part of “creative destruction”). The key is to prepare the group of workers left behind for the growing industry.

“You can bring the jobs back for some of these people, but they won’t be in the same place,” says Thomas Anton Kochan, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The White House has publicly challenged the idea that structural unemployment is a big problem, with Christina D. Romer, the Council of Economic Advisers chairwoman, instead emphasizing that stronger economic growth is what’s needed. Still, the administration has allocated dollars for retraining in both the 2009 stimulus package and other legislation, largely for clean technology jobs.

Ms. Norton, for her part, may be reluctant to acknowledge that many of her traditional administrative assistant skills are obsolete, but she has tried to retrain — or as she puts it, adapt her existing skills — to a new career in the expanding health care industry.

Even that has proved difficult.

She attended an eight-month course last year, on a $17,000 student loan, to obtain certification as a medical assistant. She was trained to do front-office work, like billing, as well as back-office work, like giving injections and drawing blood.

The school that trained her, though, neglected to inform her that local employers require at least a year’s worth of experience — generally done through volunteering at a clinic — before hiring someone for a paid job in the field.

She says she cannot afford to spend a year volunteering, especially with her student loan coming due soon. She has one prospect for part-time administrative work in Los Angeles — where she once had her own administrative support and secretarial services business, SilverKeys — but she does not have the money to relocate.

“If I had $3,000 in my pocket right now, I would pack up my S.U.V., grab my dog and go straight back,” she says. “That’s my only answer.”

With so few local job prospects and most of her possessions of value already liquidated she has considered selling her blood to help pay for the move. But she says she cannot find a market for that, either; blood collection agencies, she said, told her they do not buy her blood type.

“Sometimes I think I’d be better off in jail,” she says, only half joking. “I’d have three meals a day and structure in my life. I’d be able to go to school. I’d have more opportunities if I were an inmate than I do here trying to be a contributing member of society.”

Car Crash

I canNOT stop listening to this song:



Ms. Courtney still ROCKS. She's my generation's Keith Richards.

Bang 'Atlas Shrugged' against your forehead instead of the Bible

Awesome awesomeness from Matt Taibbi. Had no idea that Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand's wacky shit. Gordon Gecko was right. Greed is a religion. And it's full of fanatics.

Craving Rejection

I lobbed another one at the Bridport Prize yesterday. I cut Those Little Deaths (one of the stories in my anthology, Trailer Trash Confessional) down from about 6,000 words to 4,700 so I could meet the guidelines.


I WISH this was my writer's study

It's amazing how many extraneous words you can squeeze out of a short story. Though, in the case of Those Little Deaths it was more about culling entire descriptive sentences. I'm sure there are still LOTS of words to cut. (I kept a lot of the back story too, not sure how T. will feel about that.) And there are characters that are introduced once, briefly described/summarized and then bow off after one or two paragraphs.

I'm running into the same problem with minor characters in my latest (and still very rough) short story, Brave Sucker. I've got a lot of characters that make an entrance, are briefly sketched out by the narrative voice and then leave the stage. I'm not Charles Dickens, I don't know how to make every damn character important and thread them back into the story later on to underscore the climatic moral duel between the protagonist and the antagonist.

I also got my rejection from Missouri Review which has something like a 99.8% rejection rate according Duotrope.com. It was a form rejection and those tend to be real unhelpful as you don't even get the vaguest critique.

I do not understand why Duotrope is allergic to blind-submission contests that require an entry/reading fee. P. told me blind submissions were THE way to go and, judging from all the famous authors F&SF rejected, I think he's totally right.

ROTFLMAO

And after this week of depositions, stressful court hearings and awful, debilitating flu colds (complete with diarrhea, fever and non-stop nights of coughing) I sooo needed a good laugh.


How to Defeat Someone Made Furious by "How to Defeat a Pit Bull with Your Bare Hands"

Spay and Neuter Your Neighbors

The Stranger just ran a tongue-in-cheek article advising Seattleites how to avoid being mauled to death by pit bulls. Of course, it's fired up the usual rabble on the blogosphere.

Weirdly, this tiresome debate is made up of both extremes of the political spectrum. First there's the wigger/gangsta wannabes out in the slummier 'burbs who think it's their god-given right to own uncontrollable animals (see: gun fetishists). And on the other side of the kennel, there's the weepy PETA vegans who think ALL dogs on earth must be saved from horrible humans (including horrible 3-yr-old humans) who are "accidentally" mauled by this "misunderstood" breed.


I covered this topic over 10 years ago when I was a newspaper reporter. My article was about the importance of basic obedience training and socialization for all breeds. Socialization means regularly walking your dog, getting him used to meeting strangers and making him feel relaxed in new environments -- a concept that escapes the mental grasp of 90% of dog owners.

Being white trash, I grew up around pit bulls. Thanks to pit bulls, I had to bury two pet cats before I was 13. They were used in rural Nevada, primarily by ranchers, to hunt and kill coyotes. Unfortunately most of the pit bulls couldn't tell the difference between coyotes and house cats. Pit bulls were also hazy about differentiating between potential burglars and frolicking pre-schoolers. I've lived with pit bull mixes and had boyfriends, roommates, etc. who kept pit bulls. I've known some sweet pit bull mixes, but the pure breds are not my cup of tea. Fighting breeds -- including Chows, akitas and mastiffs -- were bred with the idea that the best defense is a good offense.

Pitbulls have a strong stalking instinct and in the offense department, the pit bull is king. Think about it. The name alone is appalling. They're not called pointers or lurchers. They're pit bulls. You put the dog in a pit. Then you put something (a badger, a lynx, a lion, another dog or even an actual bull) in the pit with the dog. Then you place bets on which animal will survive. Pit bull terriers are the genetic descendants of dogs that survived hundreds of years of this systematic brutality in England, Spain and most of Europe.

Perfect for your five year old!
The thing that chills me is a comment by an animal behaviorist and director of the ASPCA on Dogsbite.org:

According to expert Randall Lockwood, pit bulls are also liars. In a 2004 law enforcement training video, taped when Lockwood was vice president for research and educational outreach for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), he shares the following story:

"Fighting dogs lie all the time. I experienced it first hand when I was investigating three pit bulls that killed a little boy in Georgia. When I went up to do an initial evaluation of the dog's behavior, the dog came up to the front of the fence, gave me a nice little tail wag and a "play bow" -- a little solicitation, a little greeting. As I got closer, he lunged for my face."

Fighting breeds like pit bulls can lie? That is chilling. Shades of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake where in a dystopian future corporations use "puppies" as military weapons.

But then this debate is not new. A 1999 essay from a New York freelance writer, brings the problem home.

Unlimited Asshatery

Pretty much everything John (old engineer I used to rent from) told me about HR people has been true. So's everything a hippie told me back in Dec. 2003. Their impressions about how Seattle (and the crazy/stupids who live here) works has been dead on. I just got off the phone with an HR headhunter (we call 'em vendors). Here's the gist of it (with witty embellishments):

"Um, are you a technical writer?"
"Yes."
"Does it say that on your resume?"
"Did you read it?"
"Oh, no. Wait. Oh, I'm looking at it now. But do you have any samples?"
"My online portfolio is listed on my resume. At the top. There's a hyperlink. Just click on it."
"Oh! Okay. But do you have Microsoft experience?"
"Are you looking at my resume?"
"Wait. There it is. Yes, that's at the top."
"How long have you been out of work?"
"Over a year."
"Wow! Are you on leave or a vacation?"
"Ever heard of the Great Recession?"
"Oh yeah, right."
"Well, there's a lot of tech writer positions out there right now."
"Really?! Awesome, where should I look for them? Because I've been staring at the same job postings on the state Worksource site since December. And some of the postings on Craigslist are starting to grow moss."
"So you are looking for work?"
"No, I thought I'd just laboriously post my resume (after re-writing it six times) on Monster and endure endless moronic phone conversations FOR FUN."
"Do you want to work as a permanent at Microsoft or just as a contractor?"
"They ACTUALLY HAVE permanent positions for tech writers AVAILABLE? Great, sign me up."
"Wait, oh yeah, my boss is saying 68% of their jobs are contract only."
"Ya don't say?"


And this was one of the smarter ones I've dealt with. HR twits are kinda like mosquitoes and wharf rats. We don't really need them. Human existence would trundle along just fine without them.

All this over health care?

Anybody who thinks the faux protests going on in this country are over health care is asleep.

The last time we heard the phrase 'state's rights' was right before the South seceded from the Union and started the Civil War.

Sorry, teabaggers, states don't have sovereignty, only nations do. Where would Arkansas be without all those FEDERAL farm subsidies? Where would Texas be without endless FEDERAL corporate subsidies to its oil refineries? Where would North Carolina be without all those FEDERAL military bases? How about Florida without FEDERAL GOVERNMENT subsidies to its massive corporate orange growers?

George Carlin was right. Let's put all the Right-wing wackos in a big fenced-in lot and once a month we'll toss a few tons of raw meat and more gun ammo over the fence.

You can't secede from the American government, you dumb asses. You don't have the money and you clearly don't have the brains.

I miss chickens

In the past, I've had occasion to live in a rural setting with farm critters roaming about. Last time I was down on the farm, was in Australia in 2003. I stayed with an earthworm entrepreneur (I'm so not making this up) at his drafty, sprawling, ranch house 17 miles outside of Perth. He owned chickens (which he neglected), six sheep, a spoiled ugly pitbull and a lovely cat named Bella. There were also emus -- we called them Emu Raiders -- who lumbered into the yard late at night and destroyed clothes lines and trampled laundry. Occasionally they devastated the passionfruit vines and devoured the tomatoes.

But the chickens were the best. They began making that weird groaning noise every morning at 5 a.m. They provided eggs and were diligent bug killers. When I was working in the garden, (which was pretty extensive), they would follow me and if I came across a huntsman spider or a Madagascar cockroach, they would run over and dutifully kill and eat it. One of the chooks as they say in Oz, used to follow me around the neighborhood when I went for walks. She would trail behind me clucking worriedly. It was cute.

I really miss the eggs. And the poultry companionship.

Joined the Pity Party

My rejection is vaguely famous.

I guess I have some idea what the dolts on American Idol feel like when Simon tells them they're too ugly to sing.

Random beauty

I just couldn't let the week slip by without showing some of the art this pro did for the cover of the latest Stranger. If you live outside the Seattle area and don't get the Stranger, that's a bummer. Because Jon McNair is super cool.

It's like Maurice Sendak meets Carl Jung meets Robert Smith when he's extra depressed. It's just screaming cool.

Rapture time?

I always wondered if one of Roland Emmerich's over-the-top disaster flicks was gonna come true in real life.



Personally, I was a bigger fan of "The Day After Tomorrow". I liked the idea of tornadoes eating Los Angeles in revenge for the billions of tons of air pollution that city has dumped on us all.



But lately, I'm starting to wonder: what if the end of the world is a double-feature?

Chilean earthquake photos.

No thank you, really.

The hits just keep on coming over at AlterNet News:

Many women are happy without kids. They'd be even happier if they weren’t reminded all the time how unhappy they should be.



Ummm, didn't Ally (I-Never-Eat) McBeal ... adopt???

Gee, why doesn't this suprise me?

Pancreatic Cancer Linked to Sodas
Study Says 2 Sodas Per Week Raises Pancreatic Cancer Risk
By Kathleen Doheny, WebMD Health News

Feb. 8, 2010 -- Drinking as little as two soft drinks a week appears to nearly double the risk of getting pancreatic cancer, according to a new study.

"People who drank two or more soft drinks a week had an 87% increased risk -- or nearly twice the risk -- of pancreatic cancer compared to individuals consuming no soft drinks," says study lead author Noel T. Mueller, MPH, a research associate at the Cancer Control Program at Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, D.C. The study is published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers& Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Cancer of the pancreas was diagnosed in about 42,000 people in the U.S. in 2009, according to American Cancer Society estimates, and about 35,240 deaths from the disease were expected. The pancreas lies behind the stomach. It makes hormones such as insulin to balance sugar in the blood and produces juices with enzymes to help break down fats and protein in foods.


Whole story here


* * *

Let's see what did my vegetarian friend, Richard, tell me way back in 1991? "HFCS fries your pancreas."

And what'd my holistic doctor tell me in the same year? "Eating a lot of sugar causes your pancreas to 'mis-fire' which causes the liver to dump too much insulin into the blood which creates hypoglycemic symptoms, which then leads to eating more sugar."

And soda pop containing HFCS is THE biggest culprit because HFCS is in liquid form so it reaches your stomach lining and then your blood stream in a fraction of the time it takes, say a cookie, to reach your blood stream. And HFCS inhibits the body's ability to produce leptin, a hormone that 'tells' your brain you are full. Essentially, your body can't tell the difference between consuming a half can of Coke, Pepsi or 7-Up and drinking an entire 6-pack. It feels the same.

I have been a lobbyist

Where's my expensive car, paid dinners, etc? Oh yeah, that'd be the pharm/gun/oil/death lobby in Washington, D.C.



But we did get free sandwiches. And buttons! And I now know who at least one of my state legislators are. And his office was really, really small.

Little Anderson

I've always been a little behind the curve on social trends and gadgets which is why I am just now (pregnant pause) discovering the marvel that is Anderson Cooper!

If you haven't read this guy's Wikipedia profile, please drop everything and go immediately to that site and look him up. I'm 90% sure Danielle Steele herself wrote the first five paragraphs of this silver-spooned queer's bio. It's To Die For!!!


Anderson and "friend"

Mum was THE Gloria Vanderbilt. Daddy died when Lil' Andy was a pup. And his older brother jumped off the terrace of the Vanderbilt penthouse apartment due to ... a drug allergy?! In an early attempt to "deal" with the losses in his life, Lil' Andy went to Africa and caught malaria. OMFG, this guy is the DEFINITION of drama.

Andy wandered woefully between the dizzying world of being a male model (gay) and going to Yale where he joined a secret society ala George Bush (SCREAMING GAY). Later he once again hit the rock bottom of despair and self-doubt (or was it loathing) when he took pictures of dead people in Rwanda during the genocide for his "own personal album."

If John Waters and Ed Wood mated and produced a genius drama-writer child? That child could not have dreamed up this super freak. Cooper's celebrity freakiness crushes all other celebrity freaks COMBINED. Couch-jumping Tom Cruise has NOTHING on this queen. All the former-child-star-turned-liquor-store robbers combined can't touch this freak's freakiness.

And what's a closeted, uber-rich gay boy's life without, yes, a stint in the Company aka the CIA.

AND, (there's always an AND with Anderson) while visiting Vietnam in the 1990s, he claims he learned Vietnamese and snuck into Myanmar/Burma to film interviews with locals.

I have to pause now because I'm having a celebrity freak-out orgasm.

(PAUSE)

I'm just wondering: when will the alien abduction stories emerge?

Fun with flea abatement

Greetings fans (all three of you),

So the wonderful, needy, overly affectionate kitty went back the Seattle Humane Society today looking a hell of a lot better than he did when I picked him up. They were about to foist another kitty-in-need on me for another 14-day "fostering" session but I begged off saying I had to do something about the fleas which were now happily residing in the shabby old carpet in my tiny apartment.

I mentioned that I'd been using baking soda and diatomaceous earth and that the fleas just sorta laughed that stuff off and I asked if there was something between baking soda and a RAID flea bomb which I didn't want to do as you have to like go check into a motel for a few days until the Sarin gas wears off. Somebody said something about 'boric acid' which you can get in powder form some where and it's only mildly toxic to people-n-pets but apparently way more irritating to fleas, the Star Trek Borg of the parasite world ('resistance is futile!').



So off I went to the vast, depressingly empty Factoria mall and at Petco I let a cashier talk me into "Zodiac Carpet and Upholstery Flea Powder". Remember that name, folks, because it should have had A GIANT BLACK SKULL on the front of the can and they should have called it "Ode 'de Love Canal" or "Essence of Linfen" (Linfen is supposedly the most toxic city in China).

The truly witty part in this purchase? The effing can said something like "may treat a 200-400sq ft area". Fuck me running. It should have said: "To kill everyone at Safeco Field during a game, open can, and run away very fast."

This shit was so bad, I'm pretty sure if Keith Richards snorted a line, he really would die ... or at least have a bad cold for a week.

I put a small half-circle of the crap around the bottom of my bed frame as that was Valencio's favorite napping//lurking area. I then began the 4-hr task of washing every piece of linen I own including all the towels the cat had bedded down on and all my sheets, duvet, etc.

I came back upstairs and about then I noticed the paint-peeling vapors from this small line of powder in the carpet. I had already opened all my bay windows, cranked the fan, etc. The directions said "allow to sit for 60 minutes or over night". If I had actually let it sit over night, I'd be dead right now and the powder would have burned a crescent-shaped hole thru my floor!

Instead, I immediately vacuumed the shit up and desperately started sprinkling baking soda everywhere the nuclear waste had been. There were multiple sessions downstairs cleaning my vacuum, knocking crap out of the now pretty trashed HEPA filter, wiping every part of the vacuum down with Orange Clean and water, etc.

Finally, after five hours of living inside a freezing wind tunnel, the vapors seem to have eased off. I took a long shower and will have to wash the Agent Orange out of my clothes tomorrow and dust every single freaking surface in my apartment.

A quick look at the can, which is bagged up and going in the trash tomorrow says:

Linalool 2.5%
piperonyl butoxide .5%
pyrethrins .075%
Nylar pyradine .020%
"other" 96.9%

Yummy!

I'm sure this stuff wouldn't fly with the cocaine crowd but if you like a good gas huffing or glue sniffing high, this stuff will do the trick. I'm still dizzy and confused.

And if even one flea egg hatches and I get one more bite after this AND I grow gills or a hand-shaped tumor in the middle of my forehead, I am so suing "Zodiac".

Year of the Turd

I nominate 2009 the year of the turd. For me personally, this year has been fecal from start to finish.

• Really blew out my back in January and had to fight to get an MRI,


• nearly bled to death in June right before my birthday,


• got a stress fracture in my foot apparently from just walking down the street,


• had a second (or fifth?) bad back episode in May,


• a surreal heatwave partially melted my building's roof,


• had a creepy, damaging visit from an un-welcome relative,


• had scary (albeit successful) surgery in October,


• and then worked for these Conservitards on a seasonal Xmas job,


• and through it all I was chronically un- or under-employed all the way.

Now if I just had some cat litter sprinkles to go on top. Bon voyage 2009, it's time to flush the toilet on this crap year.

Dances with Smurfs!

Best psychedelic-CGI flick EEEVER. And Lindy did a far, far better job writing a hilarious review than I ever could.



And Cameron's latest entertainment juggernaut has all the right-wing nuts snarling about the 'overt pro-environment message'. Let's hear it for decadent Hollyweird!

Days like these ...

... I especially miss being in Oz. Why right now it's probably 87 F in Sydney and I could be engaging in croc dangling.

Cage of Death designed to thrill, not kill

The Cage of Death at Crocosaurus Cove is a popular tourist attraction / AAP

(And fuck you, Rupert Murdock, I'm pinching one of your slave's pics.)

Smug Marrieds?

The above is from Bridget Jone's Diary where the author Helen Fielding called her married friends Smug Marrieds because, ummm, well they are. Or they tend to be.

I ran into this phenom yesterday at my final writing class meeting at Hugo House. We read a short, short story by S.L. Wisenberg called Brunch. It was humorous and sardonic and originally ran in the New Yorker.

Anyhoo, afterward, everybody (all the Smug Marrieds in the room) were moaning about how 'bitter sweet' and 'lonely' the story was. Hello? I'm sorry. Was your day of Sesame Street-promoted sunshine canceled? Or as the hipster druggie across my hallway would say: "Welcome to America."

Yup, some of us go through life experiencing multiple relationships at different times that start and end for all sorts of reasons, not all of them logical or even our fault. Woe unto us the risque, the (dangerously?) adventurous, the sexually experienced. What un-ending horrors our lives must be! (or is it whores?)

I loved what cynical old Hanif Kureishi said about this: "... people marry when they're at their most desperate, that the need for a certificate is a sure sign of an attenuated affection."

Chance of Frogs

Just remembering what a mind-blowing film this was when I first saw it. And now, 10 years later, I'm lucky enough to own it on DVD.



On the 'Making of', Paul Thomas Anderson looks like he's about 18 years old.

On my All-Time, Top 10 Movies List.

The membrane of perpetual stupidity

I'm okay with fundamentalist Muslims that want to live in the 7th Century. Really, it's okay. It's a free planet -- issue fatwas, kill school teachers, beat women for walking unattended down the street -- you Muslims party like it's 780 A.D.!

But when modern American males starts believing a ridiculous myth (thanks, abstinence education!), I must don my feminist cape and do something.

Listen up, boys and girls. The hymen. The so-called proof of a young girl's virginity? It doesn't really exist. Yup, there is no penis-proof membrane of pink tissue guarding the entrance to a teenager's vagina. Isolating and pointing out a hymen at the entrance to an organ that is a mass of folds, lips and membranes is like pointing out one damn pedal on a big clunky flower. And technically, that's not her vagina, it's just her vulva. The vagina is an internal canal, like the colon, and can only be seen with a speculum and a light.



And if a girl is in the unlucky, tiny minority and has a complete hymen, guess what happens when she's 11 to 14 years old and Aunt Flo starts visiting? She will have to have that pesky hymen lanced by an MD or she will suffer a build up of menstrual fluid, become very sick and probably DIE.

Why the fuck would anyone wish this deformity on their girl child?

I had a hippie neighbor when I was a teen growing up in Nevada. Said hippie neighbor loaned me an awesome book. It was called Our Bodies, Our Selves and it calmly explained there are different kinds of hymens and about a third of girls don't have a hymen at all. (We can only wonder how many dead teens there are in fundamentalist Muslim countries thanks to complete ignorance of this simple medical fact.)

As a teenager, my experience with this little flap of tissue was pure annoyance. The first time, I had no pain, barely bled and was super bored because the dude was a lousy lay. The second time, I bled again and was anything but bored. I was happy my hymen had receded never to be heard from again. Amen and pass the condoms.

The hippie neighbor told me she went through years of uncomfortable sex with her troll of a husband until she finally had her first kid. Then the pain was gone and she finally got to half-way enjoy herself. Again, why in the entire fucking world would anyone want to go through painful sex?

For the odd caveman out there (I'm assuming they read) who's scratching his brow and wondering about his pleasure via tightness, may I suggest a sex doll with a permanent hymen or a Fleshlight. Because if/when you're fucking an actual virgin, she likely will be as stiff as a board -- possibly from mild pain -- but mostly scared thanks to all the mental baggage attached to the mythical First Time. You know, as stiff and lifeless as a sex doll.

Here's a few FAQs:

1. Can using tampons remove or destroy a girl's hymen? Yes and no. Depends on whether or not she has one. See the above.

2. Will using a vibrator or dildo break a girl's hymen? An external vibrator? No. A dildo? Yeah, probably. And good riddance if you ask me. The person best suited to popping a girl's cherry is the owner.

3. Can falling on the top bar of a bicycle or riding a horse cause a girl to lose her hymen? I've seen this myth perpetuated on TV shows and I've yet to meet a OB/GYN who will say 'yes' to this one, so I'm saying 'no'. Unless the bike or the horse's saddle is fitted with an upright dildo, I don't see HOW this could happen. More likely, if a girl falls onto the top bar of a bike, it will cause bruising and bleeding of the vulva, the lips that form the outer most part of the vagina.

4. Can an MD or gynecologist tell whether a girl is a virgin just by examining her and looking for a hymen? No!!! In fact, when female children are molested or raped, doctors look for other signs of penetration such as scraping or bruising along the vaginal canal. The absence of a hymen is not conclusive proof of sexual assault in court.

Now, everyone please follow me, the 21st century is right up here on our left.

Uh, you have to actually leave The Past to see it. It's the up-coming part of human history that comes with space ships, genetic research, drastically improved public health, a shocking lack of superstition and little or no interest in useless flaps of genital tissue.

Cry for the rapist?

When I was in elementary school, the Manson Family was always in the news in California.

A few years after Sharon Tate was murdered, insult was added to injury of the collective California psyche when Roman Polanski was charged with rape.

In true southern California style, Polanski was viewed as this flamboyant, big shot Hollywood director and the judge who tried his case was seen as a 'square' (Conservative) who clearly had an ax to grind with the decadent Hollywood scene.

Polanski's lawyers, and apparently the man himself, had no qualms about playing the Jew card. Polanski, like many European immigrants of his generation, is a survivor of the Holocaust. Apparently a year in hell absolves one of later devilish behavior. Too bad nobody explained this to Khmer Rouge survivor and Oscar winner, Haing Ngor, so he could run out and rob some banks or liquor stores before his murder in 1996.

Of course, everything surrounding the Polanski case -- including the (now deceased) judge's very unprofessional bias -- is yesterday's news. Even the rape victim, Samantha Geimer, now a woman my age, wants the whole thing to go away. (She's been paid shut-up money and was given a 'formal' apology by Polanski years ago).

There's been a lot of talk about preferential treatment of celebrities like Polanski. But what about preferential treatment because of race and the class status incurred by fame, not just celebrity?

Imagine if Polanski were an African immigrant from Rwanda, a Tutsi man who survived the genocide of 1994. Now imagine this African rising to some prominence for his inventive, yet mainstream films in Hollywood. Now imagine this black filmmaker one night lounging in the hot tub of his mansion overlooking Sunset Blvd. Imagine this black filmmaker drugging and sodomizing a 13-year-old child. Now imagine the child is a boy.

Still want to dismiss Polanski's criminal charges?

Dick Lit

I've been in a sci-fi writer's group for over a year and garnered some awesome friends who are eagle-eyed readers, thoughtful critics and open-minded ... normal folk.

Awhile back, I had to temporarily run the writer's group by myself. It was fun at first but after a couple of less-than-great meetings, I started to feel psychically drained.

There's something about the genre of science fiction, aka speculative fiction, which seems to bring a specific type of crazy out enforce. They're almost always white and male and anywhere from Baby Boomer old to Millennial twentysomething.



At the meetings, a predictable scene plays out. A guy (usually wearing mis-matched fleece and khakis) shows up with a slightly creepy smile on his face clutching some tome he has self-published. He'll eagerly tell everyone he spent $5,000 getting it published (an amount equal to a nice used car).

I've yet to see one of these self-published novels that looked good enough that I'd actually pick it up in a bookstore. Usually the cover is glossy, the paperback is over sized and there's some lurid color scheme surrounding a title that over uses all the words they tell you to never use like: space, death, god, stars, love or alien.

Mr. Self Published has brought it to show everybody he's serious about this writing thing, it's not just a hobby! Depending upon his level of crazy, the guy will either tell us the basic plot ("it's about a guy who travels thru time with the help of aliens to rescue the space program from mind-reading CIA agents disguised as runway models"). Or if he's really nuts, he'll smile coyly and tell you it can't be summed up, you must read the entire 750-page doorstop.

During the meetings, we bounce around the room doing an impromptu meet-n-greet where everybody will give their first name, mention what they're reading and what they're working on. Usually Mr. Self Published will interrupt with snarky remarks so the whole process takes twice as long as normal.

About 30 minutes in, maybe while we're talking about "World War Z", Harry Harrison or the next comicon, Mr. Self Published will pick a fight. He'll snicker loudly at the meek college girl who says she loves Terry Brooks and is writing her own fantasy story. Or someone will say something about Ursula LeGuin and he'll pipe in with "Oh, the feminazi ... I mean feminist writer".

Or if he's like the winner I dealt with, he'll take the discussion of post-apocalyptic sci-fi (something both Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy have dabbled in) to interject his theory on human extinction and why using nuclear weapons in the Middle East is a cool idea! The fur will start to fly and then Mr. Self Published will gloat, safe in his delusion of superiority, 'cos ya know, he already wrote a book predicting all this.

These freaks like to attack women authors, even roaring successes like Joanne Rowling.

I have yet to meet one of these trolls who did not use the slur chick lit; which is applied to any novel, play, script or short story ever published by a writer with a vagina. Don't expect Mr. Self Published to actually have read anything by a female author. He's way too busy and women authors just don't interest him! (This includes everyone from Joan Didion to Virginia Woolf). Mr. Self Published and his ilk are the reason why women's literature programs were invented.

I've coined a new phrase for this group of socially stunted bigots. (DISCLAIMER: as usual this applies only to some men, not all 4 billion of you.)

Dick Lit.

I define it as sci-fi or speculative fiction that has several specific elements.

Dick lit must adhere to the uber-geek norms for science fiction already set down by their favorite homophobic, misogynistic authors. It must have a machine, it must involve the hard sciences and it must involve space in some way like the launching of a futuristic space ship (think: erection).

Dick lit must have an average-looking male protagonist who is deeply misunderstood by everyone around him. A hero who everyone has failed to recognize as a genius (every cardboard character Michael Crichton ever invented).

Dick lit must have a female character (nothing but dudes would be gay), possibly extra terrestrial or part cat, who is overtly feminine and exotically beautiful in a sort of dominatrix way but who, weirdly, recognizes the genius in the story's hero and either strives to help him in an appropriately subservient fashion or, works against him since all girls are duplicitous.

At some point in the story, the female character, despite her extraterrestrial-ness or over-powering wiles, will get stuck, lost, arrested, kidnapped, gagged, brain sucked, encased in dry ice or put into a chemically-induced coma. Then, surprise, the misunderstood genius hero will come to her rescue. This will happen because from birth, we are all read stories and taught that women are people whom things happen to and men are people who do things.

Dick lit has to have action because stories where people just sit around and talk are lame, like most books women authors write. Those are just people sitting around and talking, right?

Dick lit can have sex scenes as long as they’re non-sentimental and brief, because damn it, the hero has work to do! He can’t be bangin’ intergalactic babes all day like Capt. Kirk. And there should be some weird distancing aspect to these sex scenes like sex with zombies or sex with She-Rah the raging lesbian from planet nine so if the hero has to break things off with her, it’s okay because he’s not emotionally attached, it was just random humping like on that video game, Grand Theft Auto.

Finally, the hero has either some sort of special power or a special machine for kicking ass (think: getting back at anyone who picked on the author in school).

I strongly urge every female reader and author out there to start using this cool new pop culture term at any given opportunity. Like if your boyfriend starts rambling about Peter Parker’s special powers in Spiderman, interrupt him by saying “Oh, you mean like dick lit!” Or if he begins to rant about how they got the warp drive configuration in the new Star Trek flick wrong, say: “Dude, that’s such a dick lit thing to say!”

Dodgy London

I went to the UK for the first time in December 2003. I spent my first week "abroad" holed up in Friend One's house down in Somerset; rural, southwest England. He graciously drove me and a couple of others to see the sites -- Glastonbury, Bath, Dorset.

In the second week of January, Friend One drove me (and another holiday visitor) up to London. I then stayed with Friend Two at his tiny flat in east London, in one of poorer parts of Essex.

Ilford's main features were a giant 12-story heroin rehab facility two blocks from the "town centre" overlooking the rail station and a sea of curry shops and convenience stores predominately owned by Pakistani or Indian first-generation immigrants.

A day after I got to Ilford, the Ricin Scare happened. I perched on Friend Two's sofa, watched Sky News, cleaned his apartment and nursed an appallingly bad flu cold before I started venturing into central London via the train. (I kept a death grip on Friend Two's digital camera the whole time I walked miles in the artic weather taking pictures of everything because I didn't really have any money to do anything else.) I heard stories about the crime rate in the UK having increased 300% in the last decade and saw some crazy take downs of perps by meaty, humorless Met officers ... and they do carry guns.

Now the criminal hazards of life in London have popped up again, in a very glamorous way with a jewelry heist. Just so happens one of the suspects was apprehended at a house in Ilford.



And the jewelry robbery itself happened not too far from where I had to go to get my plane ticket changed at a BA office on Oxford Street.

Weird.

I see your un-read novels list, and I raise you!

Supposedly, the BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this. Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - (saw the flick)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - X
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - No
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - No
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6. The Bible - X (NAS)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - No
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - No
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - X (read in 2002 and remember almost nothing)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - No
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - No
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - No
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - X (the high school standards: Julius Cesar, Hamlet, Romeo-n-Juliet (the censored version)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - No
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X (junior high)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - No
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X (multiple times, was on Elko County H.S.'s banned list)
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - No
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot - No
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - No
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X (but I don't remember much)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens - No, but read parts of Oliver Twist and Christmas Carol
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - No
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - No, started to, lost interest
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X (again, don't remember much)
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - No
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X (loved this when I was 12)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - No
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - parts of it
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X (over and over again from age 11 to 16)
34. Emma - Jane Austen - No
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen - No
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X (yes, yes!)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - No
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - No
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - No (dominant paradigm sexual fantasies put me to sleep)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell - X (another one I barely remember)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - No
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - No, but I read "The World According to Garp" and started "A Widow for One Year"
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - No
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - No, but I remember my mom reading me this
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X, yes, YES!
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X, Golding was one of my favorite, also read two other books of his
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan - No
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel - No
52. Dune - Frank Herbert - X, two or three times
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - No
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - No
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - No
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - No
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - No
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X, another I barely remember
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon - No
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - No, but I saw the more recent movie and really liked it
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt - No
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - No
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - No
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X, YES!
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - No
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X, and I read "Edge of Reason" and laughed till I peed
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - X, yes, love Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville - No
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker - No, but I've read like every other single vamp story out there
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - No
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - X, YES! And his other books
75. Ulysses - James Joyce - No
76. The Inferno - Dante - No, but parts of it
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - No
78. Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No
80. Possession - AS Byatt - No, but I own the DVD and have read one of her other books
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker - No, but I read FIVE of her other books
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - No
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - No
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X, but don't remember it
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - No
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - No
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - No
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - No, but have read parts/excerpts
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint - Exupery - X, but I don't remember it
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No but I've read one of this others
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams - X, in fact just re-read it for the sixth time this Xmas
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - No, but I really should
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - No
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - No
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - No

Actually read: 29 ... I'm gonna say 28 1/2 just because

On my list and in the house: Hardly any of them. I'm a creative minimalist ... plus I took a painful trip to the used book store in May and unloaded almost two full boxes of paperback and hard bounds I'd been hauling around since before college.