Just Bury The Crap

Finding lies and inaccuracies in Sarah Palin's book is like finding cat turds in a litter box: unpleasant but not unexpected. If you know what it's full of, why keep sifting through it?

Sarah Palin's Way Off

Tag Line: “While the rest of us were just thinking about it...Sarah borrowed a political party and did it...all in a year.”

For those of you who don’t want to read “Going Rogue”, here are the SparkNotes:

Sarah Palin wakes up one day and decides she doesn’t feel like governing Alaska right then. She convinces John McCain they should spend the campaign together going off script, break the rules and seize the day.

Palin decides she will drive the high-powered Republican conservative agenda, which makes McCain very nervous. He’s not supposed to drive that agenda but he hops on board, knowing that his moderate base will be very disappointed in him.

Sarah’s day off reaches it’s peak when she takes over the Republican National Convention and sings “Obama Shame”.

Anyone who stands in Sarah's way is made to look like a fool. Throughout the journey Sarah is pursued by McCain campaign chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, who is frustrated in his attempt to reign in Palin. He tries to do the job he was hired to do, but is thwarted by Palin and ends up as a villain in the story.

Sarah’s refusal to take responsibility for the damage she does hurts those around her. The precision-engineered right-wing agenda ends up in a ditch and McCain gets blamed for it.

Despite the fact that Sarah shows total disrespect for those trying to educate her and get her on the road to real success, she comes off as the maverick hero. She is lauded for not doing things the right way, for having decided her education was not important. Her equally ignorant classmates look up to her for “Going Rogue.”

Endlessly Infinite Coincidence

Last Summer, while on vacation, I experienced the musical/literary coincidence of hearing the title line in the song “I Was Looking For a Job When I Found This One” at the exact moment that I read that sentence in an unrelated book.

My recent Spring vacation now has its own musicliterary coincidence, though this is more of a stretch.

While we were in Carmel, we stumbled upon a quaint little restaurant (they really need to repair the sidewalk outside their front door). We went in to check it out and I was surprised to see, on the hostess stand of Carmel’s “most romantic restaurant”, CDs of the soundtrack from “The Endless Summer” for sale.

Now, the name “The Endless Summer” may sound romantic but, if so, you are confusing it with “A Summer Place”, a sappy soap opera of a film that teen girls watched while their boyfriends were fantasizing about riding waves around the world instead of their girlfriends.

I was pretty young when both of those came out – still learning about love and sex from New Yorker cartoons - but while my older sister mooned over Troy Donahue in “A Summer Place”, I developed a crush on global beaches. For a major milestone birthday I had a couple years ago, I put my “Endless Summer” DVD on repeat during the entire party.

I am not sure when we saw "A Summer Place". Our mother would not allow us to go to "Gidget" or the "Beach Blanket" films or any movies involving co-ed teens in bathing suits because Parents Magazine did not approve of them. I have digressed, but I added this in the interest of full disclosure, which is what I think Parents and my mother were afraid was happening in those bikini movies but was not.

Back to the coincidence: The Casanova restaurant was opened by Belgian, Walter Georis, who wrote the music for “The Endless Summer” along with his brother Gaston. (The surf music tradition is now carried on by Nico and Max).

Okay, we get the serendipitous music discovery, JohnnyB, where does the book part of this musicliterary coincidence referred to in your Endless Blog Post come in?

Hold on!

Upon returning from our trip, my sister put up a post about “Infinite Summer”, which challenges people to read some book called “Infinite Jest" over the Summer. Get it? “Infinite Summer” = “Endless Summer”, right? What? I told you it was a stretch.

5 Things I hate About Facebook

That would be the next 5 Facebook challenges that anyone tags me with.
My sister took one Facebook challenge and made it a blog entry, so it is sort of like a “meme”, which is another thing I hate times 5.

However this one is about books and we Bs are a book-lovin’ family so SusanB and JohnnyB can not resist. However, Susan nonconformed and took it outside Facebook. Me, I defied the instructions to do 15 books in 15 minutes and not think too hard. The Bs are rebel book lovin’ people who question authority. We get that way from reading books and learning stuff. That’s why ignorant people burn books, because they fear that knowledge will change their little world. (Read more about questioning authority and burning books in “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, available in your public library.)

So here’s my list (I resisted the urge to provide a link for each book – it takes too long. Even longer than it would take to read this entry, which is way too long)

1. Little Bear and the Beautiful Kite – Painfully shy Little Bear was the first literary character I identified with. He overcame his shyness and became a hero (I won’t spoil the plot by saying how) and I knew that one day I would do that and win the affection of some girl (though at the time I had no idea why I wanted to).

2. The Cat in the Hat –I spent a lot of time playing by myself and making up imaginary characters, so I liked the Cat. That beat out the Cowboy Andy series of books I enjoyed. I had a bromance going for Cowboy Andy, but I was able to quit him early on.

3. New Yorker Cartoon Collections – You can read here about how the New Yorker cartons taught me about history, American culture and sex. Yes, I read these not long after I was reading Cat in the Hat. I was precocious.

4. Catcher in the Rye – Read here about how J.D. Salinger taught me profanity and giving an “in your face” to adulthood and my grandmother.

5. Fanny Hill – This early porn book was found in someone’s trash when I was 13 or 14. I learned more from this book than from Catcher in the Rye. Talk about "coming of age"

6. Hiroshima – okay, nothing funny here. Another good book about the horrors of WWII is Night by Elie Wiesel. Makes you wonder why we would drop The Bomb on Japan but not Germany. Because Hiroshima is far removed from our allies but Berlin isn't or because the Japanese are more "different from us”? I'm just asking.

7. And Then There Were None – Got me interested in mystery books. I read all the Agatha Christies because I had a crush on Miss Marple.

8. The Big Sleep – I then read all the Raymond Chandlers and learned that American pulp fiction was better than British drawing room whodunits (that is “who-dun-it”, not “whod-unit”, which is how I read it as a teen) and the dames that Marlowe meets are sexier than Miss Marple.

9. The Martian Chronicles – All of Bradbury is beautifully written. I read every one.

10. Breakfast of Champions – Also read all of Kurt Vonnegut, who combined the silliness of Suess with the fantasy of Bradbury and the adolescent anti-social attitude of Salinger.

11. Canterbury Tales – a book I enjoyed as opposed to the books from high school lit that “stayed with me” in a bad way (e.g. The Red and the Black – Worst. Book. Ever.) Canterbury Tales is bawdy and features farting.

12. Without Feathers – Woody Allen taught me about writing humor and more about philosophy than Nietzsche’s The Stranger or any other existential authors I enjoyed.

13. The Source – The only James Mitchner book I really, really enjoyed. I imagine that when James Mitchner was a boy and his mom asked how he got his clothes so dirty, he would start out, “Well, Mother, in the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. The Earth will be a recurring character in this narrative. So, then …”

14. The Bone Collector – by Jeffrey Deever - Or I could list Rules of Prey by John Sanford which got me interested in becoming either a twisted homocidal killer or a brilliant but flawed detective. I guess I'd go with the detective - they have more normal sex than the killers.

15. The Torah and 15 books of The Bible – More sex than even Fanny Hill and murder right in the first chapter. In fact, they have elements of every other book on my list.

The book I never read that stayed with me is the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem which we had to read and translate in my 4th year of high school Latin. I actual did read it, just not when I was supposed to. I would work on translating each day’s portion during lunch, right before Latin class. I would go to the library where I could find my Latin classmate, Lori Fuglaar, whom I had a crush on and who was smarter than I – I have always been attracted to smart women. She was a remarkably cute girl of Nordic descent who was also very religious. I know this because every time I called to ask her out, she had something to do at church that conflicted with the proposed date.

But at lunch I was able to enlist her help in doing my homework. I know she felt uncomfortable helping me get away with not doing the assignment. So I was able to corrupt her morals … just not in the way I wanted to. If only I could have climbed a tree and saved her kite, I might have won her affection. Oops! Now I spoiled the Little Bear story.
Goddam!

Night of the Loving Dead

"’Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,’ … recounts the struggle of Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters to simultaneously annihilate the undead invading their idyllic community and to marry well.”

Jane Austen was a great writer and witty besides, so I would read her books without zombies, but, really. wouldn’t any story just be more fun with zombies? I liked the movie versions of Pride and Prejudice but I can see where zombies would be just the thing to turn a chick flick into a date movie, attracting more guys to share it with their girls. For example, I will never be found watching “Sex and the City”, but I would watch “Sex and the City and Zombies”, though those women have even more trouble keeping their clothes on than your average zombies draped in rotting funeral garments.

There are a lot of films considered chick flicks that I like but wouldn’t mind seeing these revisions:
“You’ve Got Mail and Zombies” (where Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly are both zombies but don’t know the other one is and so are embarrassed to meet) , “My Best Friend’s Zombie Wedding” (where the Zombie’s sing “I say a little prayer for you – we call it ‘grace’ before the meal”), “Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Zombies”, “Four Weddings, and a Funeral and the Undead”, “Sleepless and Walking Dead in Seattle” , “When Harry Met Sally and the Zombies”.

Then there are the girl movies I saw but wouldn’t see again unless there were flesh eating creatures from the grave thrown in: “Thelma and Louise and the Zombies”, “Bridget Jones’s Undead Diary”, “Fried Green Tomato Zombies”, and (adding undead and a a comma) “Dirty, Dancing Zombies” (“Nobody devours Baby in a corner!”)

Movies I have no desire to see unless the main characters are devoured by zombies: “”Waiting to Exhale and Exhume”, “Zombie Beaches” (careful with pronunciation), “The Undead English Patient”, “An Affair to Dismember”, and “Remains of the Day” (which retains its original title but is now set in a restaurant owned by flesh-eating zombies).

Put your chick zombie flick ideas in the comments.

Judgement Day

CONTEST RESULTS - click here to see contest

When the Rapture, comes, the winners will ascend in "the twinkling of an eye". The decision is easy: the winners believe, the losers don't. The Day of Atonement, an annual event for my people, is more subjective. We have a little over a week to make a case for being written in the Big Book of Life. I have a greater appreciation of God's task during that week, as I judge who shall win the book "How to Profit From the Coming Rapture." Does God consider extending the time to let us atone? Does he wish that more people tried to get saved? I know I did.
But God and I have made commitments and as it is written, so shall it be done.
I was looking for (1) the best creative writing, (2) an amusing comment about the book and a (3) choice of Rapture companion on the all-expenses-paid trip to salvation and WHY. Cali's entry was a clear winner for creative writing the moment I read it. It not only is a creative poem, it is a perfect sales pitch for the book so it combined (1) and (2). (Cali - please email me your email address for HBG to contact you at - jbunyan @ gmail.com). Oh the irony of the entrant most likely to not be left behind winning this book. Cali, will this be left out on your coffee table?
Bill created a very nice parody, but could not beat Cali's. Nevertheless, I was most amused by his comment about his own work: "(Yeah, me loves a good Apocalypso tune . . .)" and his popular description of the 16 hooves of the Apocalypse: "Eight hoof, twelve hoof, horseman four!", so he wins best comment but also combined (2) and (1).
The choice for the final category was not so much about the who as it was the WHY. Therblig realized that if Bush/Rove could go, anyone could, even Therblig himself, and he stated it so poetically that he really qualified for (3) and (1). (Therblig I also need an email address for you).
Thanks for playing everybody!

This is the End - A NEW CONTEST GIVEAWAY

Click here for contest results
Three (count 'em) ways to win a copy of this book:
“How to Profit From The Coming Rapture” (“Getting Ahead When You’re left Behind”) by Steve and Evie Levy (I’m assuming that’s “lee-vee”) (as told to Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman) is “The investment guide the Antichrist doesn’t want you to read”. I imagine the Prochrist doesn’t really want you to either, but they had me at the title.
I am not going to ascend when the Rapture comes. I have been assured of this by experts (I am chosen, not saved). I have read “Rapture Ready” and learned that I am not. So I need this new book.
As explained on the back cover, “about 1.5 billion people will join (Jesus) in Heaven. Five billion of the rest of us…will still be here, with questions…Including…What real estate to unload when the sun turns black and the mountains start shifting.”
Inside the book is a “Rapture-Tribulation Timeline” followed by a careful, chronological explanation of what will be happening on Earth and how you can be prepared and make some bucks along the way.
For example, when the Third Temple is built, if you have stocked up on kippot, and tallit, you can set up a little concession stand or gift shop and make a nice profit.
Now, that’s actually getting ahead of the story. You need to read the book from the beginning to understand the progression of events and do all the necessary things, in the proper order, to make the most out of your opportunities prior to Armageddon. (Knock, knock. Who’s there? Armageddon. Armageddon who? Armageddon married in the morning. These types of jokes are just one reason I will not see you in Heaven)
Odds are that some of you don’t need the book because you are saved. I still think you will find it funny, imagining the rest of us trying to cash in on famine and pestilence while you are strumming harps and eating ambrosia. I don’t think you will be punished for reading it, like you would for reading, say, Harry Potter, which promotes witchcraft and for which royalties go to the Devil. This book does not encourage people to hang around for the Tribulation and hook up with the Antichrist ("you'll come for the hail of fire but stay for the river of blood!"); it is a survival book in the event you don’t get called up to the majors. (Caution: I am clearly not well stocked with grace or faith, so don’t take my word for any of this).
Anyway, how can you win a copy of this book?
1) You can write a short, creative item (song, haiku, couplet, whatever) about the End Times (e.g. “On the First Seal of End Times, the Rapture brought to me, the Antichrist and a blasphemy.”)
2) If you will or would just like to ascend during the Rapture, tell me what celebrity would you want to travel with and WHY (don’t forget the why). The celebrity must be alive as of the date and time of your comment but need not be saved or even morally upstanding.
3) Write some other amusing comment about the book, the Rapture, the End Times, a related topic or about this review.
That’s right – three books will be given away. The contest ends, Wednesday, Nov. 26 or when the Rapture begins, whichever comes first. Click on comments and begin.

Annoying Contest Results

(ORIGINALLY POSTED 11/12)
Thanks to everyone who entered this book contest - I enjoyed all the suggestions of new things I can get irritated by.
Let's all link to the contest now and read the last part, where the actual challenge is posed: "identify some modern thing that is truly annoying and write a brief description of why." Some of you may be annoyed to realize that you overlooked the last part of that. They are all fine things to rant about, but I was looking for the rant itself.
Susan's attack on punctuated but uncapitalized titles explained that the inconsistency makes it annoying. bill the annoyer amused me by explaining that "meta-annoyance is really annoying" which provided a solipismic "why" and he probably annoyed Susan by not capitalizing his name. Scarletvirago also stated why her annoyance was annoying in a humorous, self-reflective way.
Cali made me laugh by getting enraged because people "waste" a left turn availability and leave Cali stuck for another light cycle, and then she remarked that that road rage is annoying. A lot of meta-annoyance going on.
But no one was able to surpass my favorite entry that made me laugh the most even though it might have been unintentional. Jenny wrote, "Here's what's really annoying*: When someone leaves an asterisk without explaining below that it means."
That it means ...what? I am pretty sure she meant to write "..what it means." but the way she typed it made it perfectly illustrate the annoyance of being left hanging (along with the unexplained asterisk she included).
So Jenny is the winner. Jenny, I'll send the publisher your email and they can contact you for the address to send the book to.
Watch this space for another contest coming soon.

A Book Review and a Contest

ANNOYING UPDATE: The contest is over. Click here for results.

Well This Is Irritating
For some reason, I’ve been asked to review a book called “is it just me or is everything shit?” subtitled, “insanely annoying modern things,” by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur with Brandon Hay.
I wouldn’t be irritated about being chosen to review a compilation of annoyances except that my sister once gave me a book called, “The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation.” Am I so curmudgeonly that people think I am constantly jonesing for an annoyance fix? Or am I so laid back that people think I need a whole book of aggravating things to get me worked up to a mild lather?
“is it just me or is everything shit?” is an alphabetic list of those “insanely annoying modern things”. Some are longer pieces, such as “Xenu”, about what a scam Scientology is, or “Hitler, People Calling Each Other”, mainly about Bush calling people Hitler when perhaps he should be looking inward; these seem like a collection of essays the authors thought might go into some kind of book. Others are rather short such as “Toast, Overpriced”, which, in its entirety says, “There’s a lot of overpriced toast out there”, which are just there to fill out that book they wanted.
As you read it, you will recall Andy Rooney and “Didja ever notice….” Or Earl Pitts intoning, “You know what makes me sick? You know what makes me so angry…” except this is a whole book instead of one short bit.
Putting a bunch of annoying items together invites the reviewer to find the book itself annoying. I mean, if you read it for a while, you start to pick up on their vibe and think, “You know what’s insanely annoying: essays on insanely annoying stuff!” The list does not include “Blogs” specifically but does include “Self Examination columns”: any kind of writing in which the author observes him or herself doing something and writes about it as if everyone shared that interest. Yet that is the basis of this book, “Hey, we thought of some stuff we find annoying and you should too.”
If you are going to be out some evening with friends and you need something to pontificate about with a sense of superiority, read a few of these items and them bring them up over drinks. “Hey, what’s up with this people calling each other Hitler? And why is toast so pricey?”
In the end, though, these guys have identified a bunch of contemporary shit that does need to be called out (James Blunt, Botox, Dubai, Energy Drinks, among others) and they write about them in a humorous way that will make readers say, “Yeah, that’s what I would have written, if I was literate!” But you are not and you did not, so buy this book.
Or win a copy from me. In the comments, identify some modern thing that is truly annoying and write a brief description of why. The winner, as determine by the annoying panel of judges (me), gets a free copy of the book. The contest ends, not Sunday, November 9, but when I say it does. Then I will post the winner, who will need to send a mailing address to the publisher. Only residents of the US or Canada are eligible to win. You might find that annoying.

Born in Arizona, Moved to Babylonia

In 1963, when I was 8, we moved to Inglewood, where I attended nearby Highland Elementary School. I remember my first day of 4th grade; I met a guy who became one of my best friends for over a decade, though I haven't been in touch with him for the past 30 some years. The first thing I remember about him is playing "robots" during recess. Everything we knew about robots came from "Robby the Robot". My friend lived in a small bungalow on Venice Way, directly across the street from Highland school, so it was easy to hang out with him in the afternoons. We both got paper routes and would sit on his front porch folding papers and waiting for the Helms Bakery truck so we could get doughnuts, cream puffs and miniature pies for nourishment.
My friend's family and my family both moved away from that neighborhood a few years later. Then some other stuff happened and then, a few days a go, I received a copy of "Born Standing Up", by Steve Martin as a gift. Steve Martin was never as much an influence on my comedy as, say, Bill Cosby, but I really liked him when he first started and I saw him on the Steve Allen show. His "let's get small", balloon animals, and nose-on-the-microphone parody's of stand-up were so innovative at the time, I've never forgotten them. On page 16 of his book, Steve Martin is writing about his childhood: "A few months later, we moved from Hollywood to Inglewood, California, and lived in a small bungalow on Venice Way, directly across from Highland Elementary School." So if you've been paying attention, you now know that Steve Martin was my best friend in elementary school.
No, actually, Steve Martin is about ten years older than I am and his family lived there only a couple years, before I was born, then moved to the Oak Street School area. But maybe, just maybe, my friend's family moved into that house directly across from Highland School right after Steve Martin's moved out. And then, I spent time in that house. Is that an amazing brush with fame or what?

Don't Ever Tell Anybody Anything

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was when I first heard about Catcher in the Rye, and what my lousy childhood was like and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap.

When I was about 13, Susan and I flew by ourselves from LA to visit our grandparents in Lexington, KY. Our cousin, Karen V, who was about Susan’s age (16 or so) was there also, visiting from Evansville, IN. One day Karen happened to mention that she had read “Catcher in the Rye” as a school assignment. She described it as being an engrossing story about a boy who was having a breakdown while trying to deal with adolescence.

My Grandmother looked as if all her saliva had just turned to lemon juice. She told us that she had picked up that book at her daughter’s apartment one day. “I counted 12 ‘goddam's on one page,” she reported, “and I decided I didn’t care to read the book.”

For whatever reason, I left before Susan did, flying back to LA with a stopover in Pittsburgh. Upon arival in Pittsburgh I went directly to a book stand and bought “Catcher in the Rye”. Not only did it contain a plenitude of 'goddam's, it had a couple 'fuck you's too. If you had a million years to do it, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world.

Being a 13-year-old, fairly-well-adjusted, LA boy in 1969, I naturally identified with Holden Caulfield, the 16-year-old, depressed, NY kid from 1949. I guess it was that universal desire to avoid becoming an adult. What I had to do, I had to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.

Maybe it was just that he was a rebel that said bad words. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it.
Goddam.

New Yorker State of Mind

For Hanukkah, Karen gave me The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker. Complete? Is that possible? Sure, the book is large and weighs only slightly less than a middle-schooler’s backpack, but it would have to be 5 times larger to include all the cartoons from the 80 year history of the magazine. However, inside the book is a set of two CD’s containing all 68,647 cartoons! I trust that the number is accurate, but I haven’t counted yet.

In fact, reading through the book was easy, but the concept of browsing through the entire CD is a bit overwhelming. If I read 20 cartoons every single day, I can finish in just under nine and a half years. Meanwhile, the New Yorker goes on, so Karen will have to buy me the 10 year supplement when I’m 60.And by then my failing eyesight and feeble mind will make it slower going.

For now, while I’m still spry, the CD’s are great because you can search by date, artist’s name or any of several key words that relate to a cartoon’s theme. They are in pdf format, though, so copying them and using them in a blog entry or Board of Directors report at work is not a simple task, which is as the New Yorker intended it. They are possessive about their intellectual property.

I’ve always been fond of the New Yorker cartoons. My mother had several cartoon collections, either “the best of” the New Yorker type or books of specific artists such as Peter Arno, who drew society people at cocktail parties, or Whitney Darrow, who drew all sorts of people. She had several book of Charles Addams cartoons, populated by odd characters, the most famous of which became the Addams Family. I guess I don’t really know if the books were bought by my mother or my father or by both together.

In any event, I ended up with them. I have read them all a few times each over the years. I learned a lot from them when I was young. They give some added context to the times the cartoons were drawn, revealing things about culture and history. They revealed a few other things too. New Yorker cartoons often contain cartoon nudity and sex. Since sources of visual information about such things were limited when I was a child (what with the scarcity of internet porn), those types of cartoons were of great interest to me then.

They became somewhat embarrassing a few years ago when my young daughter decided that New Yorker cartoon books were good bedtime entertainment. We had a lot of fun reading them together, especially the Addams books. In some of the others, though, I had to skip some pages or try to explain why that man was imagining that lady was naked.

The quality of the humor in the vast majority of the cartoons amazes me. There is so much wit there. A friend of mine at work also enjoys these cartoons and insists that we collaborate and submit some cartoons to the magazine. I’ll let you know if we come up with any that are worthy. Perhaps we’ll have some in the 10 year supplement edition when I’m 60 and can’t read them anymore.

Maybe when I get to that point, Allie will visit and read the cartoons to me at bedtime.