I am grateful, now fuck off.

Mama Said

It was some time between midnight and 3am. I was dead asleep. I’d fed the littliest at midnight so it was after that, and it was before he woke up for a feed at 3am. This hardly matters, because that time of night is Hell unless you’re pashing, happy drunk, smoking in a bar, dancing, or on drugs – y’know, generally having a fulfilling life that doesn’t involve milk dripping out of your breasts or playing the fart or shit game.

So, I’m asleep and I feel this tiny hand on my face and then there’s a kiss on my forehead. And for a second I’m confused like – did the tiny one do that? He’s only four-weeks-old? Is he a mutant? That would be amazing.

And then I realise it’s my big baby and I pull him into my arms while still asleep and think “oh he’s delicious”. But…

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Star Wars: The Legand Continues In Little China PART FIVE: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Years ago, when I first started drinking gin and keeping this blog, two things that aren’t related except insofar as they pertain to this particular post, I made a list of topics that I might write about, and taped the post-it to the dining room wall. I crossed off some of them long ago, and others I started but never got round to. The list is as follows:

COMPLETED:

1. The story of Dalek Tom Tom (last week)
2. Book Meme (done and done!)
3. Christmas in Pics (yawn)

UNFINISHED:

1. Viola’s camera (this is a camera I gave her when she was 4, and the pictures she took are surreal, but as she is 8 now, this is hardly interesting)
2. What I know about Merlin summed up in Post It Notes (I have done several of these about other shows, but Merlin was a request, and I just never got round to it. What I know about Merlin and can be summed up as “It’s very gay. Maybe. I dunno. My friends seem to think so.”)
3. Drunk Star Wars Art.

BINGO.

Let me explain. My mother buys used books from the library for me all the time. Library book sales are pretty great places, and if you need to get a bunch of books you have never heard of and will probably never read for at least 25 cents apiece, the local library is your best bet.

What my mother gave me years ago was this:

I am the world’s worst artist. I try to fight it, but I suck at this kind of stuff. All my friends are of varying degrees of good. For years, I went to the art store with them and bought expensive paper, and charcoal, and pencils, and those erasers that look like balls of gum, and vials of virgin unicorn blood. But the fact remains that my ability to draw is down there with my ability to hold my breath underwater: sure I might be able to get minutely better, but I’d have to work very hard, and at the end of the day anyone looking at my carefully rendered portrait of a turkey would just squint and say, “Is that James Caan?”

So, when I get books like this I am filled with two emotions:

1. Gratitude for the person who bought it for me.

No wait, that’s three emotions. Lemme start over.

So, when I get books like this I am filled with three emotions:

1. Gratitude: thanks mom, person who birthed and raised me!
2. Excitement: Imma draw me some fucking tie fighters!
3. Anger: Who are you kidding? You couldn’t draw a Sarlacc pit from the inside. (I realize that’s not a very good comparison, as it’s dark inside the Sarlacc pit, but just believe me when I couldn’t find a good Star Wars permutation of what I was trying to say. Just go with it and get off my back.)

I thought about actually trying to draw Star Wars characters, but that seemed like a pretty boring idea. Plus, there was no way this was going to end well.

There was only one way to do this.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

So two years ago, my mother took my kid overnight, and I sat down with a boatload of alcohol, paper, pencils, erasers that look like chewed up gum, and set about schooling myself in the ways of the drunken force. There was no try. There was only get shitfaced and see what falls out of the tree when I slam my x-Wing into it.

That night was apparently magical. Took a lot of pictures of certain pages that I seemed to think were very funny:

Yes, I need several.

And I think I might have set up some mood music.

I was so hard core.

And so on and so on. Who knows if I regretted anything in the morning. I am particularly resistive to hangovers these days, so I am sure that any post-Death Star malaise was probably the fault of those pizza rolls.

But I never wrote it up, because as we all know, I am a lazy sod. So when I restarted this blog and was thinking about entries, I thought about this one. But it was so long ago! I don’t even KNOW what I was thinking when I drew Jar Jar! HOW TO RECAPTURE THE MAGIC.

There was only one way: get drunk and write the blog post, WHILE WATCHING STAR WARS.

So, one night when my kid was asleep, I poured my first gin and tonic of 2015, queued A New Hope, and pre-coded this entry so that I couldn’t mess up the HTML. I am sure I did anyway. What follows is uncorrected and non-spellchecked, to properly preserve the pickled flavor of my brain as I watched a movie and tried to remember the time when I and Eddie Murphy were in ancient Egypt and being harassed by Michael Jackson. Drawing Star Wars.

Again, this section was recorded in real time drinking Star Wars Viewing action. It was very hard to drink and type, because I just wanted to watch the movie.

A LONG TIME AGO, IN A LIVING ROOM FAR FAR AWAY…

We used to have this drinking game, that we would take a shot whenever you could reasonably tack, “and then I cut off his arms and legs and set him on fire” to any of Alec Guinness’ dialogue from the first movie. (And you know it’s the first one, so shut up).

Obi-wan: Come here little one, don’t be afraid.
ME: UNTIL I CUT OFF YOUR ARMS AND LEGS AND SET YOU ON FIRE.
Obi-wan: (at luke) Oh him? He’ll be all right.
ME: UNTIL I CUT OFF HIS ARMS AND LEGS AND SET HIM ON FIRE.

Oh no, 3po, don’t wave at the Jawa transport.

On the other hand, this is the time to confess my great love of Mark Hamill. Like I am not even joking. I am in deep crush on Mark Hamill. I think this is my second gin and tonic. Sry.

OMG STAND IN FRONT OF THE TWIN MOONS WITH THAT MUSIC I WILL SOOTHE YOU, LUKE. I HAVE RED AHIR, LIKE MARA JADE.

So, back when I tried to draw star wars, there were lots of instructions and things that make you giggle when you’re drunk.

I got nothing.

But when you try to incorporate this move into your yoga routine,
you jyst end up killing yoursekf by accident.

Two more emotions than Padme displayed in three films. Too soon?

*sporfle*

TK-421, WHY AREN’T YOU AT YOUR POST?

LOL.

Ermagerd this is boring, look at my drawing, people. I am fucking Picasso.

LOOK AT THAT STRUCTURE.

WANNA SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I TRY TO LIKE DRAW LINeS LIK THEY TEACH?

Okay.

Looking good…

Okay, that was good. Let’s try some other things, like step by step shading.

How hard could tis be?

THIS. THIS HARD.

DRAW ME LIKE ONE OF YOUR TWI’LEK GIRLS, BOBA.

Now it’s just silly.

NAILED IT.

No, Warwick Davis, don’t lick that wire!

STOP THE PRESS. THAT IS IN SERIOUSLY POOR TASTE.

Newsflash: when you stop trying to be funny, things actually get less funny.

Omg I should look up the guy who played Boba Fett. I remember that dude. It was so disappointing seeing who played him. You want Boba to be badass, but he was like…Ron Jeremy. Boba where are you?

Oh, man.

“We counted thirty rebel ships milord, but they’re so amll they’re evading our turbolasers.”

Well then, deploy the quad lasers!

Okay, this is a solid start.

You would think I wasn’t even trying. BUT I WAS. LOOK AT HOW HARD I WAS TRYING.

THIS IS SOME DRAMATIC SHIT UP IN HERE.
Spoilers for a movie that’s probably older than like, ugh.

Oh my god, dod they name the chubby x-wing guy Porkins? No seriously, how did I miss that?

And then I had to stop the film and go to bed, because I am old.

***

So, there you have it. My drunken post about me drunkenly trying to draw Star Wars characters, typed while watching the first movie (you know, the good one).

Post drunk, bright and early in the morning, sober!me notes a few follow up things.

At some point in time, apparently, I started to write an essay about Tarkin, and then about Alderaan, but ended up drawing this instead:

I am sure that this, like all high school poetry, was going to save the world when I wrote it.

By the way, this is what I am drinking out of this morning:

I think that my original hypothesis was correct: I am a horrible artist, because 1. I lack the gift, and b. I lack the interest, aside from the kind of fleeting fancy that strikes one at times of observing others’ talent, not unlike watching the Winter Games and saying, “I bet if I tried really hard I could do a triple lutz. No. No you can’t. At least drawing stick figures is safer and less spiral fracture-inducing than pretending to be Michelle Kwan. Also, drunk ice skating sounds like something that would be the first line of my obituary.

And here to take us out, the best one I did. Imma put it on the fridge, next to my kid’s drawings of how she traps all her people inside caves in Minecraft “because they run away” (that disturbing thought is a story for another day).

FIN

People Who Talk About Social Media the Most

Lol times 1000. Accurate!

Peas and Cougars

I don’t know if this chart exists yet, but I just realized it and it needs to exist.

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The Story of Dalek Tom-Tom

So back in 2011, I and Vstroyer drove to Kansas from our home in Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving, a trip that we now make every year BECAUSE IT IS ACTUALLY CHEAPER TO DRIVE TWO DAYS ACROSS THE COUNTRY THAN TAKING A PLANE. I guess I could have made it in one long ass day, but I am one of those people who stops at every dumbass place (OZARKLAND? HOME MADE FUDGE! BIGGEST BALL OF TWINE? FAMILY DONKEY SHOW?!), so I decided to take it easy on me and Vstroyer and take two days.

It was a howl. I had directions from google that were spot on, and just so I didn’t get lonely, I took the Tom Tom which was bequeathed to me by The French Girls who trekked down south in a rental IN 2010 (Thanks, Laure!). I have loaded a special voice in, one of those free fan-made ones, which is supposed to sound like a Dalek voice . Mine is a little lower than this one. Also it has a glitch so that whenever you get where you are going it says the following:

SCANNERS INDICATE YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION. YOU WILL PARK YOUR TRANSPORT. YOU WILL EXIT THE VEHICLE. OBEY OBEY OR YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED.

Which is fine in and of itself, if it didn’t then follow up with:

YOU WILL TAKE THE MOTORWAY. TAKE THE SECOND LEFT. TAKE THE SECOND RIGHT. TURN LEFT.

Oh Dalek Tom-Tom, you are lol.

The thing is, when it comes to actual directions, Dalek Tom-Tom MIGHT be evil, or he might just be a victim of the false Supreme Dalek god, otherwise known as user-updated maps. I’m not an idiot. I understand the urge to troll user-updated maps by adding Starbucks where there aren’t any, and the like. One time, whilst following directions to a rather large mall that I rarely frequent, Dalek Tom-Tom took me to the middle of a rather dodgy residential area of town and told me to EXIT THE VEHICLE. It wasn’t his fault. The Crucible Punk’d him.

SO, back to the heart of the matter—whilst the google map I had got me to and from Kansas, any unscheduled stops had to be dictated by Dalek Tom-Tom.

All was well, until on the way home I was passing through Sweet Springs, Missouri, and I saw a sign on the side of the road that read:

THE CHEESE SHOP

Me: CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE, GROMIT.

Usually, when there’s a big ass honking sign on the side of the road for a place to stop, when you get off the highway (I-70, in this case), it’s either RIGHT THE FUCK THERE, or there is a giant sign pointing to the direction one should go. In this case, neither was true. There was a big ass gas station/casino/convenience store/all-night hooker stand. So I pulled up to that, compulsively gassed up, and searched for the cheese shop on the phone. I plugged the addy into Dalek Tom-Tom, who said that it was .2 miles away. So far, so good. I bought coffee and asked the lady behind the counter where I might find SOME CHEESY COMESTIBLES. FETCH HITHER THE FROMAGE DE LA BELLE FRANCE.

″Oh, just go out to the blacktop and turn left.″

See, the thing about Dalek Tom Tom is that sometimes he doesn’t get a signal right away. I have found that he will stall FOREVER unless I get moving, so as I waited for the sulky Dalek to warm up, I turned out on the black top and surveyed two left turns in two different directions. Hrm. Eventually, I took the one that seemed like it was a more decent road and less of an alley, and set off.

Dalek Tom-Tom: TURN AROUND.
Me: Sonofabitch.
Vstroyer: Don’t say that word.

Good point. As I was looking for a place to turn around, Dalek Tom-Tom recalculated and told me that if I kept going forward, I could make a series of left turns that would take me back around and I could get to the cheese shop in 2 miles. Well, sure, I’ll just do that. ADVENTUR!

So far, so good. The road was running parallel to I-70. The first left turn took me onto gravel. Well, this was farm country. La la la, gravel. Little pings on the car.

Vstroyer: ARE THOSE ROCKS?

The second left turn took me to more gravel. There were fallow fields all over the place. A lone farmhouse in the distance. I am setting the scene.

The last left turn took me to a dirt road. Not just any dirt road, but one of those roads that is only made because two tire tracks have worn down the grass. Have I mentioned it’d been raining for three days? I hesitated, and then drove bravely on. I HAD COME TOO FAR NOW.

Me: This better be some incredible fucking cheese.
Vstroyer: Don’t say that word.

The going was perilous, because the tire ruts were deep in places and the ground was muddy. The fields had ended, and we were entering wooded area. I continued slaloming forward, hands glued to ten and two, looking for a place to turn around and every once in a while glancing at Dalek Tom-Tom for salvation. In a few places I worried that I might get stuck in the mud, and then I figured that I didn’t want to turn around because then I’d have to go through all those mud wells again. We hit the puddles with such force that the muddy water was sloshing against the windows.

Finally, we were about .4 miles from our destination, and I saw trees ahead of me; the road must veer to the right or left a little. Dalek Tom-Tom’s little road map was straight as an arrow. I came to a stop in a thicket, with nothing but what might be an ATV trail off to the left, overgrown with branches.

Me: What the–

Obviously, Dalek Tom-Tom was a FILTHY LIAR. I did a billionty point turn and headed back the way I came. At least it was easy to get back where I started.

Dalek Tom-Tom: TURN AROUND. TURN AROUND
Me: Oh hell no.
Dalek Tom-Tom: TURN AROUND OR YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED.
Me: Fine, exterminate me.
Vstroyer: OBEY. OBEY.

Eventually we got back to the big ass gas station/casino/convenience store/all night hooker stand. I took the OTHER left turn that looked suspicious before and go .2 miles to the Cheese Shop. My car looked like it’d been catapulted with dirt bombs.

But there was cheese, so I suppose it was all okay. There’s not a lot that cheese can’t cure. Except maybe like, cancer or something.

Dalek Tom-Tom, I shall never trust you again, you marvelous bastard.

THE TRAGIC AND HEROIC PROGRESSION OF KEVIN COSTNER’S ILLNESS AND RECOVERY.

Years ago, I don’t remember who started this idea that actors could get actor’s diseases. This is for purely humorous purposes, so don’t try to see rationality in this. It started with either Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise, but they were definitely diagnosed. Tom Cruise’s Tom Cruise Disease is a pretty simple progression that begins to gestate around “Born on the Fourth of July”, and I think Mel Gibson Disease is fully actualized in Braveheart. Tom Hanks might have Tom Hanks disease, but if he does it is FABULOUS, so I am okay with it.

It is Kevin Costner who not only contracted his disease, but recovered from it as well, as much as one can recover from a disease named solely for them and whose Patient 0 is also the only patient. I have been asked many many times to explain it, but the fact is that it defies explanation. But the chart (also known as a filmography from Wikipedia) is a pretty simple explanation. Also, I got to make a table.

So.

1987	The Untouchables	Eliot Ness	IT BEGINS.
	No Way Out	Lt. Cmdr. Tom Farrell
1988	Bull Durham	Crash Davis	GETS TO HAVE SEX WITH SUSAN SARANDON.
1989	Field of Dreams	Ray Kinsella	FIRST ALIGNMENT WITH MYSTICAL AWESOME.
	Revenge	Michael ‘Jay’ Cochran
1990	Dances with Wolves	Lieutenant John J. Dunbar	SENSE OF A MAVERICK FIGHTING THE MAN/ALIGNED WITH MORE “MYSTICAL FORCES”/WARS ANIMAL SKINS
1991	Madonna: Truth or Dare	Himself	PROBABLY A FREE BLOWJOB
	Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves	Robin Hood	SHUT UP. I LIKED THIS MOVIE. EXISTENCE VALIDATED BY WORKING WITH FREEMAN/RICKMAN/CONNERY.
	JFK	Jim Garrison	EXPOSURE TO OLIVER STONE POURS GAS ON THE FIRE
1992	Amazing Stories: Book One	Captain	WHAT.
	Oliver Stone: Inside Out	Himself	YOU KNOW IT’S BAD WHEN YOU DO A DOCUMENTARY.
	The Bodyguard	Frank Farmer	AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE…YOUUUUUUUUUUUUU
1993	A Perfect World	Robert ‘Butch’ Haynes	CONVICT WITH A HEART OF GOLD/MALLEABLE TO CHILDREN.   BONUS POINTS FOR EASTWOOD EXPOSURE.
1994	A Century of Cinema	Himself	OH MAN, THIS IS ALWAYS A BAD SIGN.
	Wyatt Earp	Wyatt Earp	WE’RE ALMOST THERE. GUNS/ANGST/ONLY I CAN SAVE THE UNIVERSE.
	The War	Stephen Simmons	WAR AAAAAAAANGST
1995	Waterworld	Mariner	SAAAAAAVE THE WORRRRRRLD
1996	Tin Cup	Roy ‘Tin Cup’ McAvoy	I GUESS HE JUST NEEDED TO WORK ON HIS GAME AND WONDERED WHY A FILM CREW FOLLOWED HIM EVERYWHERE.
1997	Sean Connery, An Intimate Portrait	Himself	LOLOLOLOL. NOTICE THAT DESPITE CHEESINESS AND QUESTIONABLE FILM CHOICES, CONNERY DOES NOT HAVE CONNERY DISEASE.
	The Postman	The Postman	GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM, WE HAVE KEVIN COSTNER DISEASE.
1999	Message in a Bottle	Garret Blake	NOTICE THAT WE TAKE A BREAK HERE FOR 2 YEARS AND THEN FOLLOW IT WITH A TEN YEAR MORATORIUM.
	For Love of the Game	Billy Chapel
	Play It to the Bone	Ringside Fan	I KNOW THESE FILMS CAME OUT, BUT WTF.
2000	Thirteen Days	Kenny O’Donnell
2001	3000 Miles to Graceland	Thomas J. Murphy
	Road to Graceland	Murphy (voice)	DID ANY OF YOU WATCH THESE?
2002	Dragonfly	Joe Darrow
2003	Open Range	Charley Waite
2005	The Upside of Anger	Denny Davies
	Rumor Has It…	Beau Burroughs
2006	The Guardian	Ben Randall
2007	Mr. Brooks	Mr. Earl Brooks	BAM! THERAPEUTIC CHEMO DELIVERED IN THE ROLE OF A SERIAL KILLER WHO TRIES FOR REDEMPTION AND THEN SAYS “FUCK IT”.   (SERIOUSLY, YOU REALLY THOUGHT HE WAS GONNA CHANGE HIS WAYS BECAUSE HE’S KEVIN FUCKING COSTNER, BUT NOOOOOOOO.)
2008	Swing Vote	Bud Johnson	LOOK, I AM SURE THE MAN HAS A MORTGAGE.
2009	The New Daughter	John James
2010	The Company Men	Jack Dolan
2012	Hatfields & McCoys	William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield	FUCK IT, EVEN I’D DO THIS FILM, IF I HAD ANY TALENT.
2013	Man of Steel	Jonathan Kent	NOW TOO OLD TO BE SUPERMAN, KEVIN IS ALLOWED TO BE IN WISE SUPPORTING ROLES, SAFE IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT IT WILL NOT MAKE THE BEAST REAR ITS UGLY HEAD.
	Jack Ryan	William Harper	SEE ABOVE BOX. ALSO, GETS TO HANG OUT WITH BRANAUGH, WHO SUFFERED FROM A SIMILAR AILMENT—KENNETH BRANAUGH DISEASE. WHILE KEVIN HAS KILLED HIS DISEASE, KENNETH HAS CHOSEN AN EXPERIMENTAL METHOD OF TREATMENT KNOWN AS DIRECTING, AND WHOSE ONLY OTHER KNOWN TRIAL RUN WAS A FAILED ATTEMPT ON MEL GIBSON’S MEL GIBSON DISEASE.

So there you have it—Kevin Costner disease. I stopped bothering to chart it after 2013, but it looks like he’s okay. He’s gonna be fine. Just fine.

 

In Which I Read Other People’s Work.

Short blog post this week, because I am not feeling wizard. Also, I am Le Tired.

A few years (years?) ago, and old school buddy of mine reached out to me from the nefarious depths of the internet and asked me if I’d like to do some audio narration for Escapepod, the Scifi podcast. (You can find their main page here.)

(Strangely enough, years before that I had subbed to their sister podcast, the horror genre Pseudopod, and been rejected. But that is neither here nor there. I say it because you know, I did these things. AND I AM STILL RAW. Naw, it was a shitty story, about a funeral director who eats tiny parts of his clients as a way to absorb their power out of respect for the dead. Think Six Feet Under meets Dexter. Or something. Anyway.)

Having no experience in audio narration, but LOVING to read out loud, I began with a short story by Merrie Haskell. I have a shitload more to learn, and I don’t have ANY of the editing skills to make my own narrations, but I do love me some reading. I can’t listen to myself, though. I hate hearing myself in the background of home movies, let alone a whole track dedicated to my voice.

NEW: Sarah’s Child by Susan Jane Bigelow

Plural by Lia Swope Mitchell

A Day Without Sunshine by Esther Saxey

Sounding the Fall by Jei D. Marcade (features gender neutral pronouns)

The Evening, The Morning and the Night by Octavia Butler

Selkie Stories are for Losers by Sofia Samatar

Made of Cats by Judith Tarr

Zebulon Vance Sings the Alphabet Songs of Love by Merrie Haskell

Incidentally, should you be in the mood for a great male narrator, try Mat Weller, who got me started, and who is in general a great reader. Thanks for the opportunity, Mat.

January Book Round-up

Keeping a running review list of all the books that I am reading this year, I present: January, which was very effing slow, because I am reading about 8 at once, and also because omg GRRM is not capable of making a book whose audio is less than 5000 years long.

A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5), George R.R. Martin

Everyone told me to read these books, and I resisted, because I don’t like high fantasy. With the exception of Lord of the Rings, much of which I skip through, I am not a fan of the stuff—magic, anyone in armour, castles, magic, wizards of any sort, MAGIC, old timey amenities, magic, and anything to do with dragons. If there are elves or dwarfs in there, it’s even worse. I don’t mind Dragonlance, in small quantities, because I have a soft spot for Kender.

Ugh. Dragons.

But I liked these books. I liked how NOT magical they are. I liked some of the intrigue. To get a few things out of the way:

1. I subscribe to the theory that the three headed dragon is Daenerys, Tyrion (son of Aerys and Joanna), and Jon Snow (Son of Rhaegar and Lyanna)
2. Jamie and Brienne are BFFs forever and should retire to Tarth to spend the rest of their days just kicking it. They come out of retirement whenever Things Need To Be Done. Sex is optional.
3. I didn’t really care about Catelyn or Robb, so when they died (which you know is coming because internet), I was like, whatevs.

Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War, James Risen and Judy L. Thomas

Disclaimer: If you didn’t already know, I disdain the anti-choice movement with pretty much all of my being, so they don’t get any sympathy from me.

I admit that I grew up in the Assemblies of God, who are covered in this book a little bit, so by the time I came along, the evangelicals were just getting sucked into the abortion protest machine. I was rather illuminated that the whole thing sprang out of Catholic Vietnam protesters, and the way they tried to focus the resistance as non-violent sit ins etc. I’d like to blame evangelicals for the escalation of dickishness, but I can’t—it was mainly a few insane-o Catholics, like Joseph Scheidler, Michael Bray and Joan Andrews, a woman who served time in jail for storming clinics and doing things like injecting chemicals in the walls so that the building had to be evacuated.

After hearing that an eleven-year-old Chicago girl was scheduled for an abortion, Scheidler and his followers formed a picket line at the hospital specifically to put pressure on the girl and he mother. He later shrugged off criticism that he was heartless: “Everybody had this image of this skinny little girl. She was a big girl. It wasn’t like it was going to kill her to have a baby.” [emphasis mine]

But even the non-violent protesters had nothing symbolic in mind, really. John O’Keefe. The founder of the abortion non-violent protest movement, or at least, one of the most important knew that he wasn’t just expressing his first amendment rights:

O’Keefe has always told volunteers that, unlike those used in the civil rights movement, anti-abortion sit-ins were not symbolic; by blocking clinic doors they could actually save lives. When a woman went home rather than run the protest gauntlet, O’Keefe felt victorious. That woman might ultimately keep the child. “A sit-in is a great deal more than a protest: it is an attempt to save lives right there, that day,” O’Keefe write in A Peaceful Presence.

The book is pretty unbiased. It’s clear that Risen is just chronicling how the anti-choice movement turned from sit-ins to bombings and finally, the murder of doctors across the country. Even this book, written in 1998, is outdated, because while they cover the first shooting of Tiller, they obviously miss his death.

More than anything, what the book showed me for the first time was an explanation for the disparity that I sense when I talk to people whose religious exposure is other denominations: real evangelicals read the bible. And I mean they READ THE BIBLE, in a way that Catholics and other denominations don’t seem to grok. You can drop whole allegories and biblical textual references in conversation with other evangelicals, and they understand completely what you are talking about.

[Randall] Terry was fluent in that language. When he told pastors that Proverbs 42:11 trumps Romans 13 and that they should thus feel scripturally free to join Operation Rescue, the pastors knew exactly what he was talking about. When he said his vision of Operation rescue had come “as men as trees, walking,” they knew Terry was drawing on Mark 8:24 to argue subtly that he was not a dangerous freelancer but was sublimated to God’s plan, a plan that had only slowly revealed to him. His speeches and writings were almost indecipherable t anyone unfamiliar with the way fundamentalists parse the bible. But Terry knew the Evangelical shorthand: “Those who still debate the morality of doing so-called illegal things will have to do a lot of explaining when it comes to Acts 5:29.” Catholics are not trained to deconstruct the Bible in the same way, so that early leaders like O’Keefe, Lee, and Ryan had no way of reaching Evangelicals the way Terry could.

Anyway, it’s interesting that when the Evangelicals decided to leave their predeterministic apocalyptical ideas and then embraced the idea of affecting change in the “present” world, they took movements like abortion and dialed them up to eleven. They marched on Atlanta. They had that insane days of prayer thing in Wichita. They know how to draw a crowd. And it was this kind of pressing and protest and involvement in the political that created the Religious Right, right here. If you want to know what the fuck is wrong with these people, just look at how they came to be, out of Terry Randall’s Ringling Brothers rhetoric, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson, encouraging their people that they were soldiers on a battlefield, and every clinic they shut down stopped the senseless killing of babies that god meant to be born. Also, you know, Auschwitz and all that crap.

These people dumpster dive behind medical facilities for “aborted fetuses”, which are usually partial births of dead babies in utero, and then display them proudly as what You Are Doing when you go to a clinic. They don’t care about facts. They don’t care about non-violent protest, because they are saving babies.

Foreman once described a revealing incident that took place in Washington in 1989, after he and Jeff White monitored a large abortion-rights rally on the Mall outside the Lincoln Memorial. As Foreman and White were leaving in white’s pickup, White “accelerated towards a mob of satisfied feminists crossing the street, and slammed on his brakes—screeching to a halt within inches of the scattering crowd,” Foreman later wrote. “Sticking his head out the window, he bellowed, ‘If I were pro-choice, you’d be dead now!’”

The book doesn’t get into the whole pre-marital sex issue, which is woven into the whole issue, and that’s because it’s not relevant to the chronicle of the book, but don’t forget that at its heart, it’s an essential part of the anti-choice problem (because if they really wanted to “stop” abortion, or at least slow it, they’d be for free effective birth control and sex-ed classes.). Instead, they’ll send handcuffs to abortion providers on the anniversary of RvW, because they’re “just trying to talk”.

Things that struck me:

[What became of Randall Terry?] Cut adrift from the traditional Charismatic theology that preached noninvolvement in the world, Terry was searching for a new theology that interpreted the Bible as he did, as a book filled with “action verbs.” He was intrigued by Reconstructionism, whose adherents claimed that Christians were called by God to exercise “dominion” on earth; it was a strange kind of theocracy.

On the final day of the week long event, [Shelley] Shannon took the stand. Although her public defender tried to convince the jury that Shannon did not intend to kill [Dr. George] Tiller, Shannon told the district attorney, “I think it’s irrelevant whether or not I was trying to kill him…because it would have been right either way, to try to stop what he’s doing.” Shannon was found guilty after the jury deliberated for just one hour and twenty-two minutes

“The Scopes Monkey Trial was a great public relations disaster for us,” observes Randall Terry. Fundamentalists retreated to their churches for fifty years. The became outcasts, believing the world was evil, while privately reveling in the self-assurance that the Second Coming was imminent and they were the only ones who would be saved. “We became so heavenly minded,” notes Flip Benham, a colorful Dallas preacher and Operation Rescue Leader, “that we were no earthly good.”

And ya still aren’t, buddy.

The Iris Fan (Sano Ichiro #18), Laura Joh Rowland

I was glad that this was the ending of her series, because lately I have been questioning series that seem to go on forever. This is a good series, though and while the last few were stretching a little, everything comes full circle, and the conflicts that span the whole series are tied up. Also, she does one of the things I like about definite ending volumes: brings in minor recurring characters for one final appearance: Touda, the old leader of the secret service; Doctor Ito, the old doctor caught doing Western Medicine and banished to work in the Edo morgue, and his untouchable assistant, Mura; Lady Yanagisawa and her simple minded daughter, Kikuko.

Rowland addresses all the issues I wanted to see dealt with: the next Shogun, Hirata’s bizarre mystical companions, the ghost of General Uoeda, Reiko and Sano’s estrangement and most of all, the final end of the conflict between Sano and Yanagisawa. Even Ienobu is a great villain in this.

In the end, one of the things I loved about these books, aside from the setting, which is pretty fun, is the way Rowling treats gender in these books it’s too easy to write revisionist gender roles in a historical series, but she doesn’t do that. Reiko is independent and headstrong, and often disagrees with her husband, but she knows where to stop in the society. Women, as well as men, are murderers and villains. Men are sexist and pigheaded, even the hero, some of the time. It’s refreshing, kind of like reading a Judith Merkle Riley novel.

ONE REREAD: Blood and Gold, Anne Rice. Man, is Marius a sexist asshole. Also possibly might benefit from some anger management classes.

So that’s it: 3 books for January. I better get the molasses out mah ass.

So yeah, I have sh**ty habits.

It is obvious that we have reached the point of no shame.

 

I am an instant gratification person. I have tried not to be over the years, but like my experiences with exercise and running, that’s like trying to swim upstream whilst riding a seahorse—fun to think about, impossible to do.

I am afraid that ever since I saw Aquaman ride a seahorse, I have been embittered by the fact that there ain’t no seahorse out there even remotely big enough to carry me. Also, from what I understand, their steering power is pretty nil, so we’d just sort of bob and drift about. There’s a metaphor in there. Every MRA in the world would also point out that I fantasize about enslaving and riding on of the only male creatures in the world that gets pregnant, so I’mma beat them to the punch and lay that out there.

I just thought this juxtaposition was lulsy.

So the fact is that I love those effing Facebook games. Farm Rescue Paratroopers Hidden Mystery-O-Rama Crush, or whatever they are called. There is nothing better after an hour of mind numbing staring at a word document than to kick back for about 5 minutes and play a swap-three game with those little noises whenever you make a match. OR WHEN YOU MAKE ONE MATCH AND THEN SIT THERE AS THE TILES CASCADE DOWN OVER AND OVER WITH MATCHES, AND ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS CLOSE YOUR EYES AND LISTEN TO THE HAPPY LITTLE NOISES OF SURPRISED BEETS AND CARROTS.

HDU JUDGE ME, JACKANAPES.

Or one of those hidden object games. I like those, too. I like to see how fast I can go.

I play about five games, and when I run out of lives on one, then it’s time to go back to work. That’s how it is with me.

That said, sometimes I wonder about the people who do the art of these games. Aside from the fact that they to this manipulative crap when you lose:

Look at this fucking panda side eye.

The greatest challenge with all these is to NOT buy shit. They wind you up with the free stuff because they want you to buy crap. I have a rule: I only buy “gold bars” if I want to get to the next levels asap, or if I am bored/drunk and I have run out of lives and OH MY GOD I HAVE TO KEEP GOING LIKE RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. I liken it to buying myself a crappuccino or a five dollar blow job, because you know, what the heck.

But sometimes when the things open up and you see a new board, you know they’re fucking with you.

Seriously? WTF am I supposed to do with this?

For the record, this CAN BE DONE. WITHOUT ANY BOOSTERS. I DID IT THIS MORNING. THEN I HAD A CUP OF FREEDOM COFFEE.

Did you know that if you are stuck on one of these games, there are websites with strategies? Seriously, I made fun of them until I needed them. How dumb is that.

So, the big issue with Facebook games is that they of course want you to invite people to play the games too. I will never invite anyone on purpose. I X-out of the windows every time they come up. It gets to be reflexive, which is a pain in the ass when the game decides to change up the order, BECAUSE THAT IS HOW THEY GET YA. If you ever get an invite from me, it WAS A TOTAL ACCIDENT. Also, if you see any of my game activity, just block notifications from the game. I do that all the time from games I don’t play but my friends do. FB games are part of the site, and complaining about them is bullshit. I am on level 822 of this thing, and I am not stopping because you can’t click a “Turn off Notifications” button.

SIDEBAR: I routinely click “I don’t want to see this” on posts. I bet I did it to something you posted, if you’re on my feed. It’s not personal. It has a lot to do with my mood at the time, my mental state, etc. I don’t defriend people, though I might block them from my feed. Life is too short to have to look at your acquaintances post crap about how asparagus cures cancer.

Anyway, this is one of the most pointless entries I have ever blogged, and I wrote all of this to explain why I play these dumbass things, and mostly so that I can post a few pictures that are really bothering me. Look at this shit:

Farm Heroes Saga has some fucked up art.

What the fuck is wrong with this dog?

And this tiger.

Let’s see that again, shall we?

SOON.

Next time on Amanda’s Test Blog, gin, Star Wars, and a set of charcoal pencils. Which stupidity reigns supreme?

A Sluggard’s Tale of Exercise

So last night I had the fastest run of my life, a 5K in 29:55, which breaks down to 9.5 minutes per mile.

Years ago…possibly 2011, my doctor told me that I had to find a way to get exercise. He’s a conservative guy, thinks that you can manage diet and exercise without gyms and Whole Foods, and I like that about him, but my brain is sneakier than he is. “Just walk outside for 30 minutes” goes in my ear canal and is quickly translated into “Plan to walk outside for thirty minutes, decide that your exercise clothes are unsuitable for whatever minute reason, resolve to do an hour tomorrow, and watch another episode of Community whilst secretly knowing that you won’t do it tomorrow either.”

So I went to Sears and bought a treadmill. A big ass treadmill. One of those ones that you have to promise your first born for (I offered, but when she told them she wanted to be a police officer when she grew up, they declined), because I have this thing about equipment shaking. Things being loose.

SIDEBAR: When you go to the park and use the swings, can you swing next to an empty one? I can’t. I have to tie it to a pole. It gives me the gee willikers. And if I start swinging and one of the base poles slides in and out of the cement as it is wont to do when a gigantic hippo such as myself is using a piece of child’s equipment to push past the limits of how high the swing was meant to go? Forget it. I have to dismount immediately, often in mid-flight. The East German judge, aka my kid, always gives me a “you so cray cray” which is probably a 4.

UNSIDEBAR (which should be a thing): So I bought a bigass treadmill, which I opted not to have delivered, and as this is getting a little long, I shan’t expound upon the agony and the stupidity that is myself and my father trying to push it up the lawn in the box and then lowering it into the basement, but needless to say that we managed to get it down there, and there it shall stay until I move, and then I will hire three strong dudes, all preferably brothers named “Darryl” who will hoist it out of the bowels of my house.

It’s an amazing thing, the treadmill. It has some sort of function that tracks shit, and it has a port for memory cards so I could feasibly go to iFit (if that even exists anymore) and program a workout. But that sounds so fucking tedious that I just use it to run. It has killer inclines and a bunch of preset workouts labeled by calorie count or distance, and let me tell you those suckers hurt, because they machine doesn’t care if I am having a bad day or those green peppers are repeating on me. It just keeps going, like the Terminator. And the Terminator franchise.

Anyway, back to the part where I am funny and tell you about things you may or may not care about: when I started running, it was called “walking” and I did it in increments of 40 minutes. Walking is one of the most boring things in the world, aside from being forced to sit through that 1:17 minutes FBI/Interpol warning thing at the beginning of DVDs that the player won’t let you skip or FFd through. And before you tell me that you walk in the park and it’s relaxing and blah blah blah, may I remind you of paragraph one.

Debbie from Queer as Folk: Know thyself.  Some famous Greek person said that.
Michael: Zorba?

So. It’s on a treadmill. You aren’t going nowhere. You can add playlists, or maybe a television, but the scenery still looks like this: basement steps, bare light bulb, eau de catshit.

SIDEBAR: Once I ran 2 miles while holding a hardback book, because I wanted to run, but I wanted to finish the book and it was too thick to fit in the stand. I do not recommend this. PS it was Helter Skelter. /SIDEBAR

I began to have this conversation:

Me: I could do this in a shorter amount of time if I ran.
Brain: Disaster, my son.
Me: Shut up, Gabrielle, you’re not the boss of me.
Brain: Gabrielle is like, the worst character in The Vampire Chronicles.
Me: Oh I don’t know, what about Santino?
Brain: Oh man, don’t even get me STARTED on Santino.
Me: I know, right?

The thing about running, if you don’t do it very often, if ever, like, say only when you’re chasing a two year old or being chased by zombies, is that it’s fucking hard to do. Your legs protest doing something as simple as walking in super-fast mode, and your lungs, which normally are happy to provide you with oxygen, suddenly form a picket line and declare any working alveoli to be horrible corporate scabs. For the first few months, I picked the shortest songs on my workout lists and told myself to run through them at pathetic speeds like 5.0 or even 4.8. The more upbeat the song they were, the better. Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and Lady Gaga got a lot of time in my ears, and what that did to my emotional psyche is a completely different story.

Humperdinck: Skip to the end, please.
Me: You have no sense of timing.
Humperdinck: I have a wedding to plan, a wife to murder, and Guilder to blame for it. I a swamped.
Me: Good point.

Over the past 4 years I managed to get my run time longer and faster, and every year I try to do a few races. I’ve tried to track myself on daily mile, but posting my run every day online makes me feel strange. I keep it in this book:

Daleks also don’t like running very much.

I only decided to mark my runs in the book starting in July, but it’s been incredibly helpful. At one point, I realized that while a 5K was a great distance, there was no reason I couldn’t go further. The best way to improve your 5K time, all the articles said, was to get used to running a further distance. So I started adding 4 mile sessions to my routine, then 5, and finally 10Ks, which, in my brain, cross the one hour blood brain barrier and therefore are horrible horrible things, and every time you run one, that last .20 miles is a special gift Satan tacked on to the distance as a present to remind you of what an idiot you are.

I am sure marathoners are laughing at me. Bite me, you toenail-less freaks.

I run five days a week, six if I am feeling awesome. I treadmill for an hour, most of it spent running, but depending on the distance, longer or shorter. No matter how short the run, I spend an hour on the treadmill. This past year I have abandoned soundtracks for audiobooks, which I can hook up directly to the speakers and run without a headset, which is a blessed thing. When I got the new computer, I was able to bring it down into the basement, set it on a box, and run while watching an episode of a show with the captions on (the things about treadmills is that they’re loud).

In 2012 I gave myself plantar fasciitis from nocking my feet on bar stools at a Doctor Who convention, not running, but it was a painful break. I also developed exercise-induced asthma, but only when I run outside, which is why I don’t do a lot of it. Thursdays I try to run in the morning with a partner, but that’s only 2.45 miles, and it’s a nice visit. Also, as it gets cold, and as kids get sick or whatever, it’s intermittent. So it’s me and the treadmill.

I have a gym membership, but their treadmills suck, and while I like their circuit machines, and that might be good for me to add to my training, I run when my kid is asleep, and the po-po frowns on leaving your kids alone while you go get pumped. I have tried working it into my day, but time has taught me that at this stage in my life, I have patterns, and it’s best not to fight the grain of your mental wood. If you want to free the swan from the marble, you have to put water into the teacup and let Bruce Lee make your comparisons for you, because obviously I am not good at it. I think Gandhi said that.

My goal is a respectable time for a 5K for a woman my age, which is probably way less than what I currently do, but someday I might get there. And since yesterday was the first time in my life that I crossed under 30 minutes (split—10.03/9:42/10:10), I figured I’d talk about it a little, and chart a sum up of the year.

In numbers:

FIRSTS——————————————-LASTS (Dec)

5K: 35:31 (July) ———————————33:51
4M: 47:52 (July) ——————————–44:17
5M: 57:49 (August) —————————–57:49
10K: 1:10:41 ————————————–1:10:15

As for the fastest times I recorded:

5K: 31:59 (11/2)
4M: 44:17 (12/22)
5M: 54:44 (11/6)
10K: 1:05:02 (11/18—I must have been on drugs here)

I ran three races this year:

AUG: The Run Around the Square, AKA That Race That Kills You and Then You Get Beer and Brats: 40:47
NOV: Ward Parkway Thanksgiving Run (Kansas City): 32:57
DEC: Jingle Bell Run, AKA G-dammit, It’s Fucking Cold: 36:55

It’s a nice tidy sum. I wish I could say that I’ve lost a shitton of weight, but I haven’t really, because I enjoy beer and chips and pork belly, and horrible things like McDonalds. I have lost weight in my face and gone down a size (two sizes? From 14 to 12. I don’t understand lay-day sizes), and I can wear shirts that used to be tight around my chest before, and not because of lovely boobage. Sadly, I have lost some boobage, and when you’re a C-cup, that’s not saying a lot. A lot of my friends would be happy to lose boob weight. I say: send it over here. I love boobs, and I would like more of them.

Like the Oatmeal, I like to say I run so that I can eat crap, and it’s true. There’s nothing like running five miles and then going upstairs and eating two cold hotdogs while standing in front of the open refrigerator and thinking about drinking a beer and chasing it with a stick of butter.

Anyway, the sum up of all this is a small blurb that I prepared as if this was available on Smashwords or Amazon Marketplace:

Amanda is an out-of-shape thirty something with low energy and a doctor who has the mystical ability to instill guilt with a well raised eyebrow and a passive aggressive attitude. Her basement is a lonely place inhabited by spiders and stray desiccated cat turds. Her credit card is a risk-taking free spirit with no cares about things like “credit rating” or “responsible fiscal spending”.

Together, Amanda, her basement, and her credit card will join forces to create a slightly less out-of-shape thirty something, but only if they can cross the Mountains of Laziness, the chasm of “I’d rather drink tonight” and the deadly valley of “There’s only three more episodes on this disk”. Along the way they will discover smugness, quinoa (pronounced KWIN OH AAAAAH), a coded language only understood by the ancient tribe known as The Runners, and a strange crappy substance that does what The Runners call “wicking”, but which actually sucks and will make Amanda’s cats huff her dirty laundry.

So remember kids, only you can prevent forest fires.

$4.99 at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Order how and get one for the price of two. Find a way to transport gin through the USB port to the author and get an autographed copy with “wicking” action.

The End.

2014 Year in Books, Chinghaus

It’s been a long time since I have blogged, BUT I WANT TO CHANGE THAT, and since this is the perfect time to embrace one’s OCD by tweaking behavioral shifts to the start of a new year, I am kicking back with a drink called the Bloody Carrie:

From Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist, by Tim Federle.

Aw yeah.

This is my year-end review in books! I read 150 books this year, not counting rereads. I did include some books I did for editing jobs, mostly because I have to read edits twice, so that pretty much counts as a read. I did a quick google for “book memes” and came up with an amalgam meme that I think I like and is actually useful. For me. I mean, really, who reads these? Insert educational self-important masturbation here.

Without further ado, I present, a giant ass thing about books I done read.

Number of books read 150

Male/Female authors ratio: Male: 43 F: 18 😦

Fiction and non-fiction ratio: Fiction—135 Nonfiction—15 Really? It felt like so many more than that.

Number of Graphic Novels/TPBs: 29

Number of re-reads: Too many to count, mostly because they were series.. I reread Harry Potter, the Vampire Chronicles selectively, all of Harry Dresden.

Number of Series Read: 10.

Shortest book title: Snatched, edited by Egnis Jones. Though if we aren’t counting subtitles, then Sum, by David Eagleman

Oldest book read: Both Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and God Bless the Child by Robert B. Parker were both published in 1974.

Newest book read: Prince Lestat, Anne Rice’s newest offering in the Vampire Chronicles was pubbed late this year, in the fall. It was certainly my most anticipated book of 2014, and to tell you the truth, it didn’t disappoint. I listened to it, so I couldn’t skip her text, as I am wont to do, and while I kind of rolled my eyes a lot, there was a lot of rational closure as well. I don’t know if she plans to continue, but I’d like to read it. She finally takes vampires into a scientific area, and even has two vampire scientists who manage to cull sperm from Lestat to make a son. That’s pretty cool. It has the whole cast of the previous books (though not nearly enough Louis for me, I am afraid), including a really great twist for Maharet and Mekare. Winner of the most annoying vampire of the world is: Benji Mahmoud. Benji forever.

Books in translation: Only 4, all from the Japanese. But at least only 2 are manga.

Most books read by a single author: 42. This year I read the whole Spenser series by Robert B. Parker, and though the last 4 or so are by Ace Atkins, it counts still as the longest series of the year. Also probably the best, if I had to consider it as a whole work.

Most unexpectedly good book: The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie. I went into this expecting the astuteness of Wooster and Jeeves and the humor of Frye and Laurie. I was not disappointed. The end of the book gets a little over-complicated, but the writing is dry and quite literal, with a lot of in-jokes about the bizarre of language.

Most unexpectedly bad book: Eleven Doctors, Eleven Stories, Eoin Colfer, editor. It was just. I dunno what I expected. I guess better. But no, not so much. Kind of boring.

Title nearest the beginning of the alphabet: Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman. The best thing about this book was the narrator. And the ending. Somehow Gaiman books always seem to have such satisfying endings, but the middles are kind of…meh. I am convinced that because the endings are so good, they get better reviews than they deserve as a whole.

Title nearest the end of the alphabet: Wire in the Blood, Val McDermid. My god, by the way, this was a great series that fizzled out sadly. 😦

Best book of 2014? A Place of Execution by Val McDermid. I know I just said the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan Series was less than stellar, but that’s only because the plots got kind of strained as they wore on. Maybe if I hadn’t mainlined them I 2 weeks I might have a different view. Binging on a series is much like marathoning a TV series—you get a different view of it if you don’t have to wait and mull each ep over in your noggin for 6 days.

A Place of Execution isn’t in the series, though. It’s a one-off set in the early sixties in the city of Scarsdale, somewhere I the Yorkshire Dales. A fourteen-year-old girl disappears, and the scramble to find her is intriguing, a great deal more complicated than anticipated. It’s heartbreaking and satisfying all in one, with an ending ethical dilemma that everyone will take a side on.

RUNNER UP: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. It’s…I skipped parts of it, because Jesus, there’s only so much I can take of reading people’s stream of consciousness, but there was something about the exploration of drugs and enlightenment that rang interesting to me. The book doesn’t hold up as groundbreaking when viewed from the current lens, in fact, there were some things the character said and “realized” that made me roll my eyes. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t feel that way if this book hadn’t been written. So, kudos, Ken Kesey.

Worst book of 2014? Desperate Housewives of Olympus by Saranna DeWylde. I think I was seduced by the title. I knew it was a romance novel, well, porn, blah blah, so, sad to say, I wasn’t going in with high expectations. I wish we had better writing in this genre, but in my best Jeffrey-Jones-pre-pedo-scandal voice, (handwave) “Well. There it is.”

The plot is interesting to some extent—the sexual antics of the Greek gods on Mount Olympus in the modern day. But there was too much stereotyping of gender roles for me to even take it seriously. There was even a new goddess that moved in, which was interesting, as she was some sort of manifestation of modern worship (hunger/denial/starvation, etc), but it wasn’t worth plowing through the book to get to that. So I had to drop it. And that’s saying a lot because it’s an audiobook. I will forgive a lot in an audiobook. But as Tianyu once said after watching a video of the Misfits in a Jem episode, “That’s thirty seconds of my life I will never get back.”

RUNNER UP: Nothing was as bad as this book.

Most disappointing book of 2014? The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber. This book was about the “Angel of Death” Charlie Cullen. Not that I was expecting something more sensational, but if you write a whole fricking book about it, maybe it should be more interesting than “he fooled the Pixis machine”. Just saying.

RUNNER UP: The Office and Philosophy, Jeremy Wisnewski, editor. A whole fucking book wondering if Michael Scott is a good person.

Best Audio Narrator: Jacqueline Eyre’s narration of The Palace Job and The Prophecy Con, both by Patrick Weekes. I wish I could explain why she’s so fantastic, but you just have to listen to her. As for the books, someone else described it as “Leverage meets Firefly meets The Wizard of Oz” or “Oceans Eleven with a horny unicorn”, which is also accurate. But Eyre’s accents and delivery make sure that all the voices are distinct and the humor is dead-on.

RUNNER UP: Roy Dotrice’s narration of A Song of Ice and Fire. He has a massive range of voices. His Tyrion is great, and though I don’t quite get why he’s decided to make Arya an old woman in book 4, I can only assume it’s because it was a rush job and he didn’t have time to go back to the original narration. He changes pronunciations too, but I think it might be because that narration was done after Game of Thrones started to air, and I think some of the names are said differently. EX: He used to say “Bry-EEN”, but now he says “Bree-ENNE”.

SECOND RUNNER UP: I listen to a lot of books, and while I liked the plot, the narrator is what makes the book amazing: Nightwoods by Charles Frazier, narrated by Will Patton. Will has that southern drawl that this book requires. It’s a very physical descriptive narrative, and Patton never hurries. He never seems impatient with the speed (or lack thereof). The book’s plot of pretty as well, so I’d rec it.

Book you recommended to people most in 2014? Probably The Palace Job, by Patrick Weekes. Because “Oceans Eleven with a horny unicorn”, guys. Also, her name is Ululenia. Also a talking Warhammer that says three things in another language.

Honestly, if you can, LISTEN to this one. It’s genius.

Favorite new authors you discovered in 2014? SO MANY. SERIOUSLY GUYS SO MANY: Val McDermid, Kevin Hearne, Diana Wynne Jones, and Patrick Weekes, for sure.

Best Series You Discovered in 2014: Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles. Atticus O’Sullivan is a great hero, and while sometimes the pop culture references get a little precious, the whole long saga is great. I especially like the ongoing thread in which every deity in the world acknowledges that Thor is a major douchebag, to the point that one whole book is about traveling to Asgard to kill his douchey ass. Also black Jesus. This is another series that really gains from being listened to.

Most hilarious read of 2014? Texts from Jane Eyre, Mallory Ortberg. Read an excerpt.

Most thrilling, unputdownable book in 2014? Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman. I read a lot of Scientology books, because I think this shit is cray. It’s like a passion for me. This is the best and most comprehensive history of Hubbard, from childhood to death, and it’s an even better chronicle of the rise and fall of Dianetics in the fifties, and then the evolution of Scientology. It covers Miscavige’s ascension, and a lot of scandals that are pretty well known in the press. The only thing it doesn’t really address in detail is the mass shitfest that is the Freewinds. But some the detail of Hubbard’s days at sea with the early Sea Org are INSANE. (The Commodore’s Men, for example)

Most memorable character in 2014? Howl, from Diana Wynne Jones’ series, starting with Howl’s Moving Castle. Actually, pretty much all the main characters from that book are pretty fricking amazing: Calcifer, Sophie, and Michael, especially. I read it with Viola, and we had a good time rewatching the film to spot differences.

Most beautifully written book in 2014? The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. A short book in which a young single mother becomes the housekeeper for a retired math professor who suffered an accident years before and now has no memory older than 90 minutes. They end up using math as a main communicator. The whole thing is just beautiful.

Book that had the greatest impact on you in 2014? David Simon’s books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, both of which made me re-examine the way I look at drugs and addiction especially.

Book you can’t believe you waited UNTIL 2014 to finally read? Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. Seriously, how had a true crime junkie managed to know NOTHING about Helter Skelter?

Best oh-I-didn’t-realise-you-wrote-other-good-books moment: Back in April, A colleague convinced me that I would like Jim Butcher’s other work because I still enjoy Dresden, no matter how many nay-sayers it has these days. So I checked out the Furies of Calderon ad gave it a listen. OH MY GOODNESS. There were times that I wished that it would GO FASTER, and of course the main character has a bit of a Gary Stu thing going on (That….that thing we see a lot of these days in which the main character get more and more powerful as the books go on? What’s that called? If it doesn’t have a name, we should call it “Unrealisti-levelling-up”.), and I can see how Kitai is kind of…exoticized in that “Foreign fetish” way, BUT IT HAS A BIG ASS WOLF PEOPLE CALLED THE CANEM WHO LIVE IN…BASICALLY EGYPT. This book is Roman culture tossback like Star Wars was. Emperor PALPATINE? Really?

Worst oh-I-wish-I’d-stopped-with-the-previous-book moment: It takes a lot for me to admit that I have no interest in knowing what happens to Merry Gentry after Laurell K Hamilton’s shoddy A Shiver of Light, given that I still follow Anita Blake, but oh my god you had three kids and they each have three dads. COULD THIS BE ANY MORE LIKE A BAD FANFIC?

Considering the lack of editing in this book that is actually a PUBLISHED THING, no, not it could not get any worse. Laurell, look at Anne. Anne said no more editing, but obviously someone is doing it, because her latest didn’t suck. Please learn from Anne. Please.

The book which looked like it would be brilliant, but ended up having too many twists: After all the verbal fellatio (wait, all fellatio is oral. Uhm, the whatever. I said a lot of good things, that’s what this means.) that I gave The Palace Job by Patrick Weekes, you would think that I would have just as much excitement for The Prophecy Con the second book. Aside from an ending that made me go WTF, It’s just too twisty. It starts out with a simple goal—get a book, and then it just goes into crazy town. People get split up, the come together, there’s a flying elven ship with a poker game, and a dragon. A lusty Dragon. Plus a big fight in which I am not sure what happened in the end. It might be that I don’t understand because we were deliberately kept in the dark, but I can’t escape the feeling that it was just too…overly complicated this time. The Palace Job was good because it had a huge cast, but it never got confusing. This time….just a little too much is trying to happen in every characters arc. I hope this is a set up for the third book.

I will say that there’s a character who fangirls several other characters throughout the book, even squeezing about how she had the action figure of them when she was a child, and that whole thread is amusing.

I had no clue what was going on: Now, I have only read the first two TPBs of Locke & Key, by Joe Hill, but I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Do I need to know more about Lovecraft to understand this? Jesus, am I going to have to read Lovecraft? Or can I just read the Wikipedia page, like I did to get out of reading the Twilight series? There are keys that open doors, and then keys that open skulls, and I imagine that there are gonna be keys that do many more horrible things as I go on.

Favourite character encountered this year: Spenser. That we don’t even know his first name is a testament to the kill that Parker has, since the series is in its 44th book. Spenser goes from an ex-boxing college graduate gumshoe to…an ex-boxing college graduate gumshoe. He gets things along th way (notable more and more friends, and the lovely Susan, and of course, Pearl, the trusty shorthaired German pointer who is afraid of guns), but he never surpasses reality in a way. The books started when he was in his mid-thirties back in 1969, and they have that meandering freetime flow so that Spenser has been with Susan for 20 years (he says), and it’s been close to fifty since the first book, and so it’s easy to believe that Spenser is in his early fifties. His friends come back again and again, but not so frequently that you hate them. You get excited when Chollo shows up after a ten book absence. But Spenser, the man, is a great guy who makes mistakes, but still manages to do the right thing. The Godwulf Manuscript, published in 1969, is notable for its liberal attitudes towards women, especially in the detective novel genre. And later books tackle race and gender relations in other introspective ways.

In other words, I love Spenser. May you never stop eating donuts secretly behind Susan’s back, and may Susan never stop cutting her meals in half before she eats them.

Misnomer of the year: Helter Skelter: Fashion Unfriendly by Kyoko Okazaki. Confession time: I wanted to see the movie Helter Skelter after I read the book, but Netflix didn’t have it. SO. I looked around the interwebs and acquired a copy. But when I went to watch it, it was an UNSUBBED Japanese movie called Helter Skelter. Research led me to wiki, which told me it was a manga from the nineties that was made into a live action movie. It’s about the fashion industry and the societal push to look younger and younger. And while the manga, which I then bought and read, does reference the Beatles song towards the end, I’m still not quite sure how that works completely with the theme of the book in general. So serious misnomer all around.

Title where I learnt a new word: One word: Sherlockian, (The Sherlockians are people fond of Sherlock Holmes and his universe. They are playing The Game called the Sherlockiana. They like to think that Sherlock Holmes was a real person and do some serious studies like he was an historic personality). Phrase: Judas goat (A Judas goat is a trained goat used in general animal herding. The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination. In stockyards, a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared.)

Other assorted supernatural/fantastic things which happened in novels this year (ask if you want to know the books!) in no order:

1. There’s this dude, and he apparently knows nothing. Also WARGS.
2. DEMONIC TRANSFER OF ESSENCE FOR THE PRESERVATION OF A SPECIAL. Yeah. That was a thing.
3. KEYS THAT OPEN SKULLS.
4. Quor’toth
5. Arrogant apple, babbling brook.
6. He comes back in his kid body! SCORE!
7. So hey, that’s what a St. Andrews Cross is.
8. It has been revealed that nothing actually gets done honestly in Washington. I know we joke about it, but it was proven this year.
9. Tara Chase retired. Sort of. Not really. AND I AM SAD TO SEE HER GO. ::CERYS::

So to 2015, I say, BRING IT.