My Bookshelf
We were promised the “foggiest and windiest point” of the U.S., and sorely disappointed! (To be fair, everything was covered in thick fog about 15 minutes before I took this picture. We were quite lucky.)
The beach.
Gray Whale migration is typically from December to May. There was one gray whale today, which I didn’t see because I looked the other way for a second…
England! What have you come to – your leader is supposed to rape and pillage the globe, including their own little island, and be thanked for it with colourful parades, and young men guarding their house, wearing skirts with nothing underneath and funny bear hats on their heads, and children singing that they, their victorious leader, should be saved and their enemies scattered etc pp. That’s how it works!
Instead, the Queen has to defend herself against a vicious attack of the press because she tried to use a state poverty fund to heat Buckingham Palace. What’s the woman supposed to do? OK – she could cuddle up in her coronation gown,
“A six yard train in best quality handmade purple silk velvet, trimmed with best quality Canadian ermine 5″ on top and underside and fully lined with pure silk English Satin, complete with ermine cape and all being tailed ermine in the traditional manner, and including embroidery by the Royal School of Needlework.” (Eve & Ravenscroft)
…but that won’t really help because the English still haven’t discovered window insulation and London winters can be draughty.
Everyone loves to hate Eat Pray Love. The New Yorker did a looong review of the movie version which basically consisted of many paraphrases of “AVOID THIS CRAP”. They already slammed the book version when it came out, as far as I remember, so why did they even bother discussing the movie? Did they think a Hollywood adaptation with Julia Roberts would give the material more intellectual depth? The Slate Audio Book Club devoted a show to Gilbert’s book, too, and again, they hated it to varying degrees.
I read the book, found it a bit vapid and disappointing (in the sense that I felt Gilbert could not really convey her own psychological and/or spiritual breakthroughs). The woman seemed nice enough, though, and isn’t it the point of a memoir – a book about yourself, after all! – to be egocentric, that is, centered on yourself, your own problems, however irrelevant to the world at large they may be?
Yes, it’s about a white upper middle class woman who has a midlife crisis. She gets over it by taking time off, traveling, and doing some “spiritual” stuff somewhere in Asia. Then she meets a guy, he proposes, The End. It didn’t contain big philosophical revelations (most books don’t.) Yet some of the criticism was just completely over the top. How dare this woman, who is, after all, just a white upper middle class woman from America, talk about herself at that length? Everyone knows white upper middle class women from America are the epitome of BORING and IRRELEVANT!!!1!1 And how dare people find her interesting and buy her book and turn it into a bestseller!??
People, ignore the superficial writings of these People Who Cannot Know The World Because They Have Ovaries. Listen to the neurotic, egocentric, self-absorbed rants of white upper middle class men, instead – the sages and savants of our age. Read whyJonathan Safran Foer worries about sausage, ponder Jonathan Franzens take on dysfunctional families (My parents forced me to finish the rutabaga and that’s why I like sniffing furniture!), or let yourself be enlightened by the philosophical insights of Lester Burnham: “I have lost something. I’m not exactly sure what it is but I know I didn’t always feel this… sedated. But you know what? It’s never too late to get it back.” – That’s some real, deep wisdom right there, man.
They don’t really taste of anything, probably because they are 99% water. You can stuff and bake them. If you forgot to harvest them in their cute stage and they have managed to (within hours!) swell to gigantic proportions, you can still shred them and make mücver or bread. But is it worth it? I say: Just keep them lying around on your kitchen counter, they will come in handy at some point!
…it’s gone now: Liberace Museum Is Closing.
You’ve never heard of Liberace? Well… there’s this:
There’s also the heartbreaking story of Wladziu Valentino Liberace, born to immigrant parents in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1919, who was so obviously, flamboyantly gay in a time and society that punished homosexuals with everything from social stigma to crimilization, and yet celebrated his on-stage personality as “…the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love” – a double bind if there ever was one. Liberace would take his “secret” to the grave at the age of 67, and even from his death bed, he fought newspaper allegations that he was dying of AIDS.
And then – this may come as a surprise – there’s this guy who really (really!) knew how to play the piano:
The State of California is broke. If you think you might have an idea how to fix this, you can try your hand at the LA Times’ “State budget balancer” game. Just move the red bar – the “Deficit Meter” – as far down as possible! Try balancing the budget without increasing taxes though, because otherwise you might as well get “I DO NOT WANT YOUR VOTE AND BTW I AM A PEDOPHILE” tattooed on your forehead. Good luck.
Click on the picture to see my own suggestion in detail. (I hope nobody actually follows it though, because my plan depends heavily on raising the gasoline tax and we just bought this).
But let’s focus on good news instead! California still had a generous $853,000 to spare for a new, state-of-the-art execution chamber in San Quentin prison that will probably never be used because of the moratorium on executions that has been in effect here since 2006. How unfortunate, since the new execution experience sounds so much more dignified than the old one:
“One major improvement in the new facility is that it has been wired with speakers. The condemned prisoner will be able to broadcast his last words by a wireless microphone held to his lips by one of the executioners.” (sfgate.com)
…you’ll probably like this.
Lyrics, more on Kinky Friedman.
In my neighborhood’s elementary school yard, a little boy surrounded by other kids shouts excitedly: “OK and now, everyone yell – I AM A LEADER!” – Only one little girl yells back: “I AM NOT A LEADER!”
Well, not really, but the sun does seem a bit tired when it gets here. After illuminating the western hemisphere for a day, does it take a little nap when crossing over the Pacific Ocean? It’s not as if anybody would notice. (That’s our new sofa, btw)
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