“Mission accomplished!” said Frank, over dinner tonight. We all looked at him. “It just doesn’t mean what it used to mean now, does it?” he said.
“Neither does ‘Heckuva job,’” pointed out someone else.
There should be a word, maybe something based on “oxymoron,” for expressions that used to mean “[something]” but now mean “[ha-ha-ha-NOT-something].” Heckuva job on creating so many, Team Bush!
Since I’m suggesting it, maybe I should make up said word, but since nothing suggests itself I won’t.
One of my Dortmunder favorites, Don’t Ask, starts with Dortmunder in a traffic-stuck frozen fish truck but lurches him forward into the theft (more than once) of an 800 year-old femur disputed by two angry countries.
More Westlake wonders, all of them suitable to keep you happy on airplanes, even when jostled by turbulent weather or children…
Newswoman Sara Joslyn goes to work at notorious tabloid and runs afoul of murder mystery while working on stories of century-old twins, a star’s honeymoon, and a “body in a box”; romance as a bonus with great police intervention which I’m restraining myself from describing.
Sara Joslyn again, now working for cute boss Jack at a trendy New York magazine called Trend, re-meets some of her tabloid pals in Branson country-western land and gets tangled up in an even more tricky mystery.
Begun in 1986 and/or 1990, according to its preface, this book recounts a struggle carried out by one angel and one demon against God’s plan for the end of the universe. Remarkably similar in its premise to Gaiman and Pratchett’s Good Omens (1990), which I also love, this book takes a different pathway, both darker and funnier, to — but of course I don’t want to spoil the ending.
I am now regretting I never wrote Westlake any fan mail — this blog post must now suffice. He was a true craftsman whose work made the world better, not least by making us laugh.
The civilized veneer of chess is deservedly rrrrrripped away in this fine video, which I found via Improbable.com. I shed some of my bitterest bad-sportsmanship tears over a chess game, and although I was less than ten years old when I shed them, I remember that near-defeat agony clearly today. It was only a near-defeat because my Aunt Harriet unaccountably failed to capture my undefended queen, and instead moved her own queen into a spot where I could take it.
If chess savagery featured on BoingBoing, somebody would be crying out for a unicorn chaser. Would the savage unicorn in this video suffice? It certainly seems to be chasing the other chess pieces.
We saw Punkin Chunkin on Thanksgiving night, on the HD Science channel–wow!
You all did a great job turning that fun but chaotic event into real narrative, squeezing some of the chaos out but keeping the fun — and Brad was so funny! The sky was so blue; the pumpkins so orange, and so many. Frank kept saying, they made it all look so good! And I totally agreed. Animations showing the science were a nice extra touch I hadn’t expected.
Watching the show entailed a bit more expense than you might realize, since I went out and bought a TV and got our Comcast cable upgraded from internet to include HDTV with HBO. Our new Nintendo Wii, however, I can’t really blame on JonHotchkiss.com.
All of it, worth every penny.
And getting my first-ever IMDB-able film credit? With the job title “Prop Ninja”?
… I should blow my full budget on superbowl ads for my cooking — and beg for a taxpayer bailout to buy me some turkey?
…I should take a holiday bonus of half the gravy and cranberry sauce?
…I should tell people I long ago asked to share dinner with us that times are tough so I have had to “downsize” them?
No thanks, New York Times, but how about telling those high-flying CEOs to be more like … us moms out here making Thanksgivings? Because when tomorrow night comes, we will have given a whole lot of people a whole lot of what they really, really wanted. Can you say the same?
Really, honest to Pete, can you believe that the deep-thinking economists and high-flying MBAs — who just landed our planet in its current pickle — truly imagine that they have good advice for others?
On a kindlier note, here’s a link to one of my alltime favorite posts ever including the national Thanksgiving prayer: “O Lord, you know I don’t know how to cook this ugly bird…”
Whew, we just got home from scary Halloween fun, with huge noisy machines that hurl or blast ginormous pumpkins across farmers’ fields!
Jon Hotchkiss is creating a show for Discovery Science Channel about Delaware’s annual Punkin Chunkin festival. It will air for an hour on Thanksgiving Day, hosted by improv comedian Brad Sherwood (of Whose Line is it Anyway, and he’s really funny!) with the physics explained (of course) by a Nobel laureate–who is Frank Wilczek.
And Betsy Devine is getting a credit too, I am told, as “Prop Ninja” for supplying marshmallows, rubber bands, and lots of other useful items you’ll see onscreen.
My Flickr photoset documents just a small chunk of the massive punkinology that I recommend you sit down to on Thanksgiving Day
Just when you thought this election could not get crazier, it’s… BoyBama!
Funny, warm-hearted, and charming, from the wild and crazy dudes at Portal-A Interactive, who explain:
we decided to make this parody music video in support of the Obama campaign and to show women everywhere that we can shamelessly pander with the best of them.
Hortus Haren, just south of Groningen, is the largest botanical garden in the Netherlands, but flowers were not the main attraction yesterday.
Just beyond its greenhouses is the insectarium, a small one that specializes in really big creepy things, e.g. tarantulas, a scorpion, stick insects, and cockroaches the size of dinner plates. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating on that last point. Cockroaches big enough to make Sarah Palin reach for the gun she uses when she’s hunting moose.
I learned a bit of Dutch when we lived here ten years ago, and one of the Dutch words I think is much better than its English equivalent is “kakkerlak,” which means “cockroach.” Another word where Dutch is better is “kikker,” for “frog.”
The “mystic” time tunnel, the Celtic tree horoscope, the rescued parrots, and the traditional Chinese teahouse that serves delicious traditional Dutch sandwiches are also fine features of the Hortus Haren. I recommend it! (But go with a Dutch friend or at least a Dutch dictionary–signs are all in Dutch.
Quite a few of these are from Henry James (1848 – 1913), whose books could not have been more different from her cheerful fictions. I transcribed for you, dear readers, one typed example (his penmanship is appalling) from Box 3, folder 14, labeled “James, Henry 1904 – 1905.”
I break it up here to give your eye some blessed white space, but his actual letter is one long breathless paragraph. James was on a lecture tour, and she had straightened out for him some problem about his reading at a convent school. I do not know the identity of Miss E. L. Cary, though an earlier letter from James thanks Elizabeth Jordan for introducing them. And “the whilom Parker”? Your guess is as good as mine.
95 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass., March 2, 1905
Dear Miss Jordan,
Forgive my again flying to you, in gratitude, on the wings of the great Remington. [Remington is a brand of typewriter.]
Your kind activity of yesterday, culminating in your second telegram, has given me the peace that passeth understanding. Tuesday fourteenth will beautifully do; by this I shall solemnly abide, and I am now writing to Sister M. Rita to this comfortable effect. I might have wired her directly yesterday — that came over me, to my confusion, ten minutes after I had wired you; but I lost, in my anguish and shame, all presence of mind, and just instinctively clutched at you. May the peace I just spoke of have been now completely brought to you! — with my renewed liveliest thanks.
Your letter is luminosity itself, and everything, I am sure, will go merrily forward. I don’t quite imagine what all those sequestered young souls will make of my profane lucubration; but that is their own affair, and I am fortunately not afraid of their being, as who should say, shocked or scandalized.
It interests me much to hear of your pleasant impression of the whilom Parker — so pathetic a figure as he had, these last months, appeared to the mind’s eye. If I had known you were to meet him, I would have asked you to kindly mention that I would have voted for him could I have voted for anyone — instead of being, through long absence, a poor practically disfranchised creature. But even that crumb of comfort I gather he doesn’t affect you as missing.
You must show me Mrs. Spencer Trask* on the first opportunity — for my curiosity is insatiable. Let me add, for your reassurance, that I have edged away from the “Pen and Brush” quite as gracefully, I think, as I have, with a fine discrimination, sunk into the arms (as it were) of Miss E. L. Cary — for a performance in Brooklyn, on the basis of the proper equivalent, on May tenth p.m.; so you see into what excellent “form” you have got me.
Yours most truly, Henry James.
“Mission accomplished!” said Frank, over dinner tonight. We all looked at him. “It just doesn’t mean what it used to mean now, does it?” he said.
