NaJuReMoNoMo Winners And Supporters

If you pay any attention to my sidebar you will see that I have declared myself a 2008 National Just Read More Novels Month winner. I finished Nick Hornby's Slam earlier this week and I thank him for writing a short youth-oriented (but by no means juvenile) novel for me to cut my teeth on. We are barely a third of the way into January and we already have some other NaJuReMoNoMo winners. Lets give some accolades to the early finishers here.

LabCat is a threepeat (sorry, I refuse to pay Pat Riley royalties for his trademarked phrase) participant who polished off The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath earlier this week. Kudos for tackling a more famous work and surviving the residual depression.

Achenblog Boodlers have jumped in the game and Sue, aka mosltlylurking, a great knitter has already declared herself a winner.

Leah finished The Game by Laurie King. Leah runs her own reading challenge for people that want some tougher year-round action if you already have NaJuReMoNoMo polished off. In the 888 challenge you read eight books in eight categories of your own choosing (or invention) for a total of 56 in one year. Yeah, I don’t get the math either, but I think you are allowed to overlap.

I also want to shout out to the many readers either new to me or hitherto lurkers that have helped spread the word. It’s embarrassing when you aren’t even the number one Google hit on your own invention. That honor belongs to Charlottesville Words which was good, game, and giving for my blatant self-promotion.

Among the CW readers that jumped in were Melissa Wiley of Here In The Bonnie Glen and Clifford Garstang of Perpetual Folly.

I don't know how DShep of ~ shep nachas ~ found me but I'm glad he did. The Deb-Log is another in-depth litblog that was nice enough to pass on a link.

Other people that have chimed in that I’m look forward to include lostcherrio aka The Harpoonist who is a writer herself. Maybe one day we'll get to read her novel.

And I would be nowhere without the support of my regular readers like Sue Trowbridge of The Conical Glass and HRH Courtney Queen of the Universe of the MSGAA (I link to her so much my wife may be getting suspicious).

Be sure to pick up your prize badges and keep reading as many novels as you can this month. This is clearly shaping up to be the best NaJuReMoNoMo ever!

BlatantForgivenessBegging™: If I haven't linked to you and you have done anything at all for me, leave a comment and I will get an update out.

Pregnant Pause

I noticed an alarming trend in my choices of entertainment lately. I seem to be drawn to works involving unplanned pregnancies. A week or so ago, we rented Waitress with Keri Russell playing the titular small town diner waitress that gets knocked up by her abusive husband. Then, based on critical acclaim, we went to see Juno, which is also about an unplanned pregnancy, this time to a smart-mouthed tom-boyish high school kid. And just the other night I finished Nick Hornby’s foray into Young Adult fiction, Slam, which is also about teenage out-of-wedlock pregnancy, this time from the point of view of the unlucky dad.

Of the three, as the parent of a seventeen-year-old, I found Waitress the least distressing because at least Keri Russell was playing a married woman as opposed to real life where she married the father of her kid a scant four months before the due date. The other two works feature characters my son’s age or younger and that is more frightening than Saw IV followed by a power outage.

Kids have been having sex in books since at least 1975 when Judy Blume published the forever-banned Forever. And teenage sexual exploits on the silver screen were old hat when I saw Porky’s back in my own teen years. These newer works are different in that they deal with the consequences of all that hormonally charged activity. And they confront the issues in a non-hysterical un-“Afterschool Special”-ish way.

Some of the concerns these kids having kids face are an inability to express emotions, trouble dealing with parents, and difficulty navigating social scenes. In other words, being knocked-up is just like regular high school except in maternity clothes. Also, in a contemporary twist, both works have the girl being the initiator of the ultimately unwise act. I think that is a smart narrative angle because it peels away the guy-bashing that would otherwise over shadow the other points of the story. Also, the actual procreative act is dealt with perfunctorily and with a minimum of prurient appeal. Neither of these is going to appeal to the Girls Gone Wild fans out there.

What they do emphasize is the absolute and total embarrassment this condition results in. In Slam, Sam and his preggers ex-girlfriend go to a birthing class only to run into one of his teachers. Similarly, Juno has to awkwardly cross an abortion clinic picket line that consists of one of her classmates. The take-away message is that having a baby is an incredibly humiliating hassle. Juno refers to her inflated self as a “cautionary whale.”

And cautionary tales these are. Depending on how you read the stats, teen pregnancy rates were actually much high a half century ago. But back then they gave out wedding rings instead of condoms. Not to throw out any spoilers, but there aren’t any wedding marches in either of these stories. That is another modern touch. Nowadays, having a kid doesn’t always lead to a matrimonial union. Some of the strongest marriages I know were conducted with moonlight glinting off a shotgun barrel, but times have changed for the most part.

And from a parent’s perspective, these stories have a strong “but for the grace of God go I” ring to them. Until my son is out of college and established in a career, I have to whistle past the maternity ward. One thing both Slam and Juno make clear is that even the dorky kids get laid. And that anyone can make a baby, but not everyone is cut out to be a parent.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Shotgun weddings – a terrible idea we are glad to be rid of? Or another fine forgotten American tradition?

Update: Ellen Goodman saw Juno too and bothered to look up facts and shit.

Kristol Klear

Little Billy Kristol is getting a part-time job at the New York Times and there is a lot of teeth gnashing in the blogosphere. I say part-time because he will be writing only once a week instead of twice like most Times columnists (Frank Rich only appears on Sunday, but his drivel is super-sized). He also gets to keep his day job editing The Weakly Standard which he cofounded because existing conservative opinion mags, including The American Spectator, were insufficiently rabid.

He will be taking the empty William Safire Endowed Chair For Conservative Folly. This will be a fiasco and an embarrassment for the Times, as if the Kristol-inspired WMD reporting wasn’t humiliating enough. And I predict this not out of any liberal sense of schadenfreude because I don’t view myself as particularly partisan. I like good writing from any position. My fear is that Kristol who has never been right (as opposed to right-wing) about anything in the past decade is determined to turn the Grey Lady into a bully pulpit for his petty politics.

If Poppy Bush was born on third base thinking he hit a triple, then Billy Boy was born in the owner’s box and thinks he should be batting clean-up. He is the son of Irving Kristol who pioneered the philosophy of lying to the public for their own good. Kristol the Younger is clearly a smart guy: prestigious prep school, Harvard magna cum laude, UPenn professor, yadda, yadda, yadda. One of his first forays into public service was as chief of staff first to noted moralist and blackjack loser Bill Bennett and then Vice President Quayle. It was while working for VP Potatoe that he earned the sobriquet “Quayle’s Brain”, a notably low bar for distinction. He has since then bounced around various think tanks and neo-con welfare positions. He was a principle architect of the theory that invading Iraq would bring never-ending peace and stability to the Middle East. We see how well that is going.

I first ran into Kristol when he was a frequent fill-in during the waning days of David Brinkley’s tenure on ABC's This Week. Streaming a river of flop sweat, he made Albert Brooks in Broadcast News seem as cool and collected as Peter Jennings. Since then Kristol has bounced around the Sunday morning screamer circuit until finding a home on Fox News Sunday where he can pass as a moderate somewhere between Brit Hume and Juan Williams.

Party apparatchiks like Kristol love to ridicule the Liberal Mainstream Media until it’s time to find a safe harbor when the rats start deserting the sinking ships of state. Karl Rove is taking his brand of crazy to Newsweek. Look for other disgraced conservative mouthpieces, lackeys, and fellow travelers to find refuge in the print media, the only industry falling faster than the Dubya Administration approval ratings. According to Radar Magazine, Kristol’s sweetheart deal was negotiated by fellow neocon scion Andy Rosenthal.

My point, and I do have one, is that Bill Kristol has never uttered a word that wasn’t complete horseshit in service of a political talking point. He has no legitimate journalistic experience and the concept of unbiased assessment is completely foreign to him. I’m sure he goes to bed every night with his smarmy grin, chuckling over the coup of infiltrating the paper of record as a Bilderberger fifth columnist. For at least the next fifty-two weeks you can judge for yourself whether he is still a front man for the “we will be welcomed with roses” crowd or whether he will eventually develop a spine or an independent thought.

His laconic and lazy first article is online and it is tepid material indeed. He mostly damns Mike Huckabee with faint praise. Here is pretty much the thesis:

Now it’s true that many conservatives have serious doubts about Huckabee’s positions, especially on foreign policy, and his record, particularly on taxes. [That pretty much sums up what usually concerns conservatives. - yellojkt] The conservative establishment is strikingly hostile to Huckabee — for both good and bad reasons. But voters seem to be enjoying making up their own minds this year. And Huckabee is a talented politician.

As a card carrying member of the conservative establishment, it’s hard to tell if his praise is genuine or if he is polishing apples for when he can influence policy again instead of just policing it from the sidelines.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do you like your pundits fair and balanced, or from Fox News?

Update: For the Maureen Dowd/Bill Kristol connection, read this post by Mo MoDo.

Body Hair and Zits

One of my favorite comics strips is the teen-angst documentary that is Zits. Today they seem to be stealing my last blogpost and raising the "EEWWWW!" level to 11.


I hope you all finished breakfast before reading the funnies this morning.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

or
Wax On, Wax Off

I am not a hirsute man. I will never make the centerfold of Bear Magazine (btw, possibly NSFW, ymmv), but as I grow older, past the point where the phrase “middle-aged” is unavoidable, issues with hair seem to be growing. Or not growing, as the case may be. For the better part of a decade I had been in plausible denial about the widening bald spot on the back of my head. My hairdresser knew better than to show me the trim in the back and I just avoided looking into parallel mirrors. Unfortunately, I recently changed to a less discrete stylist and a recent rash of candid group photos with me facing away from the lens have made the scales fall from eyes. That salad bowl sized display of cranial skin will never get smaller. I can live with that. I wear ball caps in the summer and hoodies in cold weather. I refuse to go the combover route and just take comfort knowing that I still have more hair than my celebrity doppelganger, Ron Howard.

It’s hair in other areas that is my concern. Years ago I was in a meeting next to a goblinesque-looking man with ear hair so long that it could have been braided into a pony tail. I vowed never to become That Guy. After a few painful lessons in the difficulty of plucking nasal hair, I learned that personal hair trimmers are reasonably priced and can be purchased discretely at most BigBoxOfChineseCrap stores. I even find the soft buzz of the spinning blades relaxing.

Unlike Stephen Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, I’m actually fairly proud of my soft dewy mane of chest hair that took several decades to fill in. But a few weeks ago my wife questioned if I would be interested in going to her nail salon to have my back waxed. An inquiry like that is similar to being offered a breath mint. You really shouldn’t refuse even if you don’t think you need it. I made some vague affirmative answer and let it go.

I attributed at least part of her interest in having my back shorn to the marketing skills of the nail tech industry. A decade ago, nobody went to a separate nail salon, but a generation of industrious semi-skilled Vietnamese immigrants have made the stand-alone nail salon as ubiquitous in strip malls as the dry cleaner and the tanning booth place. My wife has latched onto these places as a weekly social activity where she can be pampered and discretely brush up her rusty Vietnamese. As an aside, when the techs at these salons speak in their native tongue and start tittering, they are laughing AT you, not with you, so tip well and don’t be too annoying.

New Years Eve afternoon I was in my man-cave watching the alma mater getting thrashed on the Blue Field of Boise, writing my year end Best Of blogpost, and engaging in other nominally masculine behavior when the phone rang. My wife was at her latest salon (she skips around every few months) and said that there was no waiting for the waxing room. I put my testicles in escrow and went down to join her. Sure enough, the place was nearly empty. My wife was sitting in some sort enormous captains chair that looked it had been lifted from the Hello Kitty themed cockpit of an H. R. Giger spaceship. She had her toes up on blocks getting pedicured and was holding court with the bored techs.

I was led back to the closet sized waxing room by a woman who was a matronly cross between Linda Hunt and Dr. Ruth. She had me take off my shirt and sit in a rolling office chair backwards. The wax was heated nearly to point of scalding and the actually ripping of the wax was done quickly and relatively painlessly. The Velcro separating sound got louder the further down my back she went. I got briefly nervous just how far south she was expected to get me smooth, but to my relief she stopped at the small of my back.

The whole process took just a few minutes. My wife invited me to stick around for more girl talk, but I begged off explaining that I had the second half of an ass-kicking on DVR to get through at home. Truthfully, in my newly denuded state I was just a little self-conscious about hanging around and getting asked to show it off.

My only concern with crossing the hair removal Rubicon is just how quickly and uncomfortably the back fuzz is going to grow back in. I’m hoping to limit the procedure to a semi-annual event like a good dental cleaning. However, I must confess that I find the thought of sitting in a giant barcalounger while young women caress and fondle my feet slightly exciting. Maybe in the spring I’ll go in for a much needed pedicure and get my toes painted a nice manly shade of black or dark green.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Share your personal grooming tale. Go ahead, it’s just us.

Update 1/6/08: The comic strip Zits takes this topic to another level.

Top Ten Tourism "Honor" For Bawlmer

There’s a guy out there named Chuck Thompson flogging a new travel book and his twist is that he tells you how it REALLY is as opposed to the usual puffery travel writers shovel at you. To prove that he is all candid and unvarnished and shit he puts on his book promo web-page a list of the Top Ten Most Overrrated U.S. Tourist Attractions and my adopted Bawlmer makes the cut. Here is what he has to say:

BALTIMORE’S WATERFRONT

Or any derelict city center’s $65 million outlet mall, er, “downtown renovation project.”

What he is trying to say is that all these tacky fake waterfront or historic district tourist areas are Teh Lame. What is great is that he singles out Baltimore’s HarborPlace as the archetypal example. Yes, HarborPlace is a couple of pavilions filled with overpriced gift shops and chain restaurants. Any tourist spot with both a Hooters and a Cheesecake Factory is not “authentic.” And the ticky-tackiness of the dining and retail extends beyond Harborplace itself. The huge gorgeous brick Power Plant has a Hard Rock Café guitar on the smokestack. What other town so proudly wears its middlebrow taste on its sleeve.



What the Baltimore waterfront has is a great view of an open sewer with lots of other attractions within nominal walking distance. The science museum just added a big dino expansion. The world famous aquarium now lets you walk through an ersatz Australia and you can ride paddle boats through the Jones Falls flotsam anytime you want. Baltimore even has the prettiest building full of tacky tourist brochures I have ever seen. It only took dozens of years and bazillions of dollars to build a map dispenser on the last piece of open land left at the Inner Harbor. But we did it.



What we can take pride in is that we are the best of the fake tourist destinations. I get suckered into these areas all the time. The ones that give Baltimore a run for the money are Riverwalk in San Antonio (the granddaddy of the sow’s ear revival trend), the genuinely historic Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market in Boston and the Gaslight District in San Diego. And I have been through some clunkers. Laclede Landing near the St Louis Arch just stunk of Tacky Tourist Drinking District™ flopsweat.

And until some clever entrepreneur decides that there is a market to tour the REAL Bodymore, Murderland and starts offering double decker bus drive-bys (literally) of The Corner/Wire/Homicide highlights, we better stick with our title as the tackiest of them all.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: How tacky is your town's tourist district?

BooksFirst - December 2007

Books Bought
none

Books Read
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller
Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd
Mushroom by John Aristotle Phillips and David Michaelis
I’m With The Band by Pamela Des Barres

Comments
In clearing the nightstand for NaJuReMoNo, I ran across several non-fiction books that I wanted to get out of the way as well as one graphic novel I just stumbled on.

I borrowed the box set of Sin City from my brother-in-law and made it a father-son movie night. The box set comes with a bound copy of “The Hard Goodbye”, the first volume of collected stories. I think the point was to prove the faithfulness of the movie to the source material. Indeed, most of the dialog is lifted directly from graphic novel. A few lines are cut (and may be restored in the longer cut which I didn’t watch), but image for image, the screen captures the style of Frank Miller’s monochromatic style.

While the Sin City milieu tries to be noir and edgy, the anti-heroes are as superhuman as any hero in spandex pajamas. The dark tone evokes the pre-comics code morality plays. While the stories are gritty and over-the-top, I don’t think I’ll be heading down to Old Town in Basin City any time soon.

Since my sock puppet Mo Modo writes the leading internet Maureen Dowd fansite blog, the Dowd Report, I felt it incumbent on me to read Dowd's book Are Men Necessary? when it came out in paperback. This is as not as big an omission as it would seem. When the book first came out it was heavily excerpted in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Furthermore, I had already read significant portions while lounging around BigBoxOfBooks. Still it was good to get a good stiff slug of Her Dowdness all in one helping. Finding the book was tougher than it should have been. Rather than following the helpful categories the publisher had supplied, BBoB files it under Psychology-Self Help. If you are looking for Maureen Dowd for advice, you are in trouble.

The book is all about relationships from the evolving roles of the sexes biologically to the nature of women in the political arena. The chapters each loosely tackle a different subject and are written as a series of short 800 word essays, many of which look and sound like her New York Times columns. She takes on “The Rules” and the rulers. She peppers the narrative with anecdotes nearly to the point of too much information. In the section on Anita Hill, she relates how she was hit on between jobs and how she ignored it and carried on with her career. She chronicles the lecherous behavior of elected leaders up to and including Bill Clinton. In her trademarked phrase twisting, she observes that “The Bushes feel the entitlements of the aristocracy. The Clintons feel the entitlement of the meritocracy.” And adds “What is Hillary owed?” That is a theme she is still exploring twice a week until November.

When I was in high school I went through a radical libertarian phase and was fascinated by, among other things, the threat of backpack nukes. My paranoia was justified by two books, The Curve Of Binding Energy by John McPhee and Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid by John Aristotle Phillips and David Michaelis. In a fit of nostalgia, I bought both of these books used off the internet a few years back. John Phillips was a Princeton student during the late 70s in danger of flunking out when he wrote a junior year project on how to build a kiloton-range nuclear device for a few thousand dollars (assuming you had the plutonium). The only sources were public domain government documents. His project was partially inspired by The Curve of Binding Energy that predicted a small nuclear device could destroy the World Trade Center and wreak havoc on downtown Manhattan. It turns out that the terrorists didn’t need a nuke, but the effect was similar.

I thought of Mushroom when all the current turmoil in Pakistan cropped up recently. One of the central set pieces in the book is when a clumsy Pakistani diplomat tires to get a copy of the project to aid in Pakistan’s “peaceful” nuclear program. This set off a round of hand-wringing over the wisdom of selling breeder reactors to third world countries, but clearly Pakistan got what they wanted in the long term. The rest of the book is much more light hearted as it chronicles the years Phillips spent at Princeton. The book was written by him and his best friend while they were both in their early twenties and it shows a certain lack of polish. Despite this, it is breezy and funny and just a bit prescient.

I also went through a phase where I read a lot of rock biographies. One book that was always mentioned was I’m With The Band by super-groupie Pamela Des Barres. For years I scoured used bookstores for a copy of this underground classic to no avail. The closest I got was Powell’s in Portland that had a first edition for more money than I wanted to spend. Another book dealer tipped me off that books like that go in and out of print fairly regularly. Sure enough, a new edition came out in 2005. I started it but found the early chapters tough slogging and it has been languishing on my nightstand waiting for me to finish it off.

There is no doubt that Pamela was in the right place at the right time if your goal was to sleep with as many rock stars as possible. The notches on her bedpost include Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman, Jim Morrison (heavy necking only), Waylon Jennings, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, and Mick Jagger. And these were not one night stands. Whether they amounted to real relationships is a different question, but they definitely occupied some middle ground. Rock stars that knew her recognize her today and the ones that shouldn’t (like Paul McCartney) still act nervous. One of her more permanent flings was with an aspiring actor named Don Johnson long before he quit wearing socks and started wearing pastels. Her descriptions of his clearly abusive behavior and the eyewitness accounts of his courting the fourteen-year-old Melanie Griffith are downright creepy. She also spent time as the nanny to Dweezil and Moon after having a professional relationship with Frank Zappa while she was in the no-hit wonder band The GTOs.

The book is borderline stream-of-consciousness incoherent with frequent passages from her contemporaneous journals that are even more disjointed. They say that if you remember the 60s or 70s you weren’t there. Well, she was there and has the memories to prove it. This edition has a new afterword catching up the narrative a little. Many of her associates from that era, famous and otherwise, did not survive to the 21st century. While Des Barres has no regrets over her rather chemical and hormone fueled youth, she was one of the lucky ones, in many ways.

Blog365 - More Madness

You would think that after the death march that was National Blog Posting Month, I would have sworn off silly self-aggrandizing blog challenges. You’d be wrong. When I first got the bulk e-mail notice that a NaBloPoMo somebody was proposing going for a full year, I thought it was madness. It still is, but when I read the fine print, I found that the definition of a daily post is pretty elastic.

The biggest loophole is that it doesn’t have to be all one blog. Since I keep two and a half blogs already, that only comes to three posts a week each. I think I’m already hitting that. I just need to pace myself better.

My biggest hurdle will be vacations. I have at least one trip planned this year that will make daily posting challenges. I’m going to have to resort to pre-writing or post-dating a few entries to keep the bookkeeping straight, but trips tend to be great blog fodder, so the net effect will be a plus.

Here is my page there if you want "friend" me or toss me sheep or whatever silly WebSocial-2.0.A.(b) thing they do. I'd like to know I'm not the only sucker falling for this.

I post this on New Years Day where people traditionally make all sorts of silly rash promises to themselves. For a blogger, this Blog365 has got to fit right in there with eating better, exercising more, and spending wiser. All good ideas. We’ll just see how it goes.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: How soon until I regret this?