Fish Who Answer the Telephone

 Want to get the heebie-jeebies? Next time you hear somebody say:

"John McCain is a maverick !" 

Substitute:

"John McCain has electrolytes !"

(Note: Only works if you've seen the movie "Idiocracy."  If you haven't, you should, although it will scare the bejeebus out of you if you have a brain.)

"He's such a maverick!"
"How can he be a maverick when he votes with Bush 90% of the time?"
"Well, everybody knows he's a maverick!  Duh!"

It gets said so often, it must be true!  Why bother to think it out when someone already did it for you? And he's the Thirst Mutilator who's got what plants crave, too!

My sister copied this book meme from someone, so now I'm going to copy it from her, because honestly, I love to talk books.  Like she did, I'm also going to expand it to include changing the color of books I actually liked.

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What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote - I haven't finished it yet, but I really enjoy it!
Moby Dick
Ulysses - Actually, I'm currently working on this one. I loves me some Joyce.
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife - People keep telling me to read this, but it looks maudlin to me.
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - See above, re: "maudlin".
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha - In fact, I was just thinking of reading it again.
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - And I read (and liked) the sequel, too.
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Also currently working on it. I live in a part-time Joyce frenzy.
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange - I've read this so many times I can quote chunks of it, in nadsat.
Love in the Time of Cholera
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath  - Incredibly awesome.
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune - Hated it, twice.
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces - My husband isn't really Ignatius J. Reilly, but they're certainly soulmates in some ways.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse Five - I remember liking it, but I don't remember why.
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Rocks.
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aenid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Goddamn, my life is dull.  Seriously.  I'm getting to the point where I just get up each day with a Sartrean sense of nausea about facing one more day in my stupid apartment, doing pointless things on the computer, finding boring things to eat, worrying after the dogs, for ever and ever, world without end.  I realize I could and probably should do something about this, but I really can't figure out anything that doesn't seem just as pointless and ridiculous.

It's probably about time for me to take another art class.   That was the last time I remember being really happy.

Yes, the minute I break down and use a meme, I come across some things I'd actually like to blog about.

These guys, The Typo Eradication Advancement League, are my heroes today. Thrill to their cross-country mission to fix typos wherever they may be found!



Also, please enjoy this strikingly beautiful and contemporary bridge near Oslo, that was actually designed by Leonardo da Vinci (whose birthday is today) in 1502. The Leonardo Bridge Project, headed by Norwegian painter and public art creator Vebjørn Sand, seeks to build more of these bridges in locations on every continent, as a symbol of connecting people and bridging the past with the future.

OK, I've thought it was kind of lame to do blog posts based on blog memes, but at least it motivates me to write something. So I got this from my pal ashti25:

"ACHTUNG!

wingedelephant may actually be a spider-human hybrid

Username:

From Go-Quiz.com

Aside from cracking me up, I had to say I was slightly startled about the spider reference. I take this kind of lame quiz all the time, since I have no life. Around the time the movie of The Golden Compass came out, I took a little quiz at the movie site to find out what kind of daemon I would supposedly have, the animal companion that expresses some aspect of my inner self. Mine was a spider, which was a little disappointing - not very cuddly for a pet - but intriguing. Still pondering it, and here's spiders again.

The bad punctuation on my sign, however, is most definitely not expressive of me.

Really? Dang.

Not like there's a whole lot in my life to discuss, really.  Very little happens to me; maybe that's how everyone feels.  Mostly my life is full of my sick dog right now, and honestly, who wants to hear about that endlessly?  Even I don't.  I certainly wish there were something on my mind today rather than the futility of controlling the bleeding in an ulcerated tumor, and whether her new medicaction is likely to poison my other dog.  It seems everything else I think about is also so cyclic: frustrations with my spouse and friends, frustration with keeping house, things I read about or watch on TV...it seems pretty dull.  Maybe, though, it would be good for me to think about it more.

They need a Mood tag for "overwhelming futile ennui with soupcons of rage and melancholia".

I'm cribbing this from Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/), which is almost invariably fascinating for a reader and history lover:

"On this day in 1912, President Taft's wife and the wife of the ambassador from Japan planted the first of Washington D.C.'s cherry trees. The cuttings were scions from the most famous trees in Tokyo, the ones that grow along the banks of the Arakawa River. Workers took over, and thousands of cherry trees - all gifts from the Japanese government - were planted around the Tidal Basin. During the Second World War, Tokyo lost scores of cherry trees in the allied bombing raids; after the surrender, horticulturists took cuttings from the trees in Washington and sent them back to Tokyo. Years later, some of the Washington trees died, and Tokyo sent cuttings back across the Pacific."

There's something breathtakingly lovely about this. The thought has a sweet essence of time clinging to it, the gentle combination of ephemerality and eternity that characterizes the trees themselves as well. I'm utterly charmed by it.

Here's something I'm always trying to get across to people, especially people who say things like, "Oh, X worked for me, you should try it, I'm sure it would help you," and "It's simple, all you have to do is X to lose weight."

Being fat is a symptom or trait, not an illness or problem in itself. I am absolutely certain high weight is caused by many possible factors, so I do not believe that there is a perfect fix for everyone. If you have a sore foot, you try to figure out what's wrong to cause the symptom. It might be a bruised toe, a splinter in the sole, or a broken bone. If your bone is broken, no amount of trying to take out a splinter is going to help. It may also be that your shoes are too tight, in which case you need new shoes, or you simply have something shaped differently in your foot that you were born with, and you may just have to do your best and cope with it.

Being fat is the same way. Some people may be fat because they eat the wrong food, some may have imbalanced hormones, some may need more exercise, and some have genes that cause a bigger body, and there are probably reasons we don't understand yet. But for some reason people can't get their heads around the idea that it's like the sore foot - treating a particular cause for the symptom won't help someone who has a different cause, and there are some people we don't have a treatment for yet who just have to do their best and cope.

To me, this is really obvious, but lots of people have weird ideas about fatness that makes them see it as an It, some monolithic monster that must be conquered with a magic silver bullet. So they keep trying to give diets to people with imbalanced hormones, with as much success as you'd get curing a meningitis headache with an antihistamine.

It only seems fitting that I should report here the results of this year's Diagram Award from Bookseller Magazine for the oddest book title. This is the award's 28th year, so it's no passing fad; readers, librarians, and booksellers worldwide submit titles for consideration, then a public vote is taken after Bookseller staff compose the short list.

Out of 50+ entries this year, the short list included Rhino Horn Stockpile Management, Soil Nailing: Best Practices Guidance, Bullying and Sexual Harrassment: A Practical Handbook, Nessus, Snort and Ethereal Powertools, and Ancient Starch Research.

And the winner is:

People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What To Do About It.

Last year's winner was Bombproof Your Horse. Previous winners include Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, How to Avoid Huge Ships, Reusing Old Graves, The Joy of Chickens, and Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. And also Living with Crazy Buttocks.

Two more thoughts from traffic jams:

1) A word I saw on a sign: "escentuals". Yes, check that out, someone thought they were being clever to combine three words (essentials, scent, and sensual) to create one horrific Frankenword, lurching around clumsily, expressing nothing clearly and frightening onlookers who had to avert their faces from the tragedy. (OK, maybe only one onlooker, but still.) No wonder nobody in America can spell. People, I beg you to stop the madness, for the sake of.......the children.

2) You know those signs by the road that say "Please don't drink and drive" attached to one or more names of (presumably) victims of drunk driver accidents? Does anyone think for a moment that those have actually ever stopped anyone from driving drunk? Really?

On my way home from futzing with my computer in Bellevue, I encountered one of these:



In case you don't really see it, this is a big truck that has backlit billboards on all sides, and they scroll as it goes along. I'm trying to drive on a crowded highway at rush hour, and *this* gets in my way. Could this be any more dangerous??? I would instantly form a personal vendetta against buying ANYTHING advertised on this public nuisance. Fortunately, as I recall, I didn't see anything on there I would buy anyway...but I can't remember exactly what was being advertised, because I was so dumbstruck by the thing itself that my indignation forced any impression of the product out of my memory. So as well as being a menace, it wasn't even effective.

Pretty soon I'm going to expect to see flashing ads on my soap in the shower, specially tailored to suit the interests of large damp naked ladies: "You're not ready to dry off yet...but you will be. Shouldn't you think about your future? When the time comes, reach for Towel International, 'The Dry Towel(sm)'". And I will be appalled. Especially if the ads aren't even entertaining or featuring a product that I actually like.

Working at home is kinda good and kinda hard. The main problem is organization; I feel totally scattered all the time since I started. In that general spirit, here are a few things on my mind:

Fuck South Dakota. Seriously. I'm sure there are some cool people there, and they can be exempted from the fucking, but everyone else, bend over. Between the legislators who cooked up this bill, the people who are worried that the governor just might not be a big enough fascist to sign, and the people who are already contributing millions of dollars to force this case through the Supreme Court. Fuck. All. Y'all. I'm sure your state and the rest of the world will be enhanced by the generation of children you'll soon be raising who were born of incest and rape and raised by victims of same.

There is pretty much nothing better than dogs. No, nothing.

Squirrels are pretty good too.

It may be different for some people, but to me, writing is way harder than editing. At least with editing you have something to start on. Frankly, I'd much rather be making crafts, but unfortunately nobody has hired me to do that full-time yet.

I love my crockpot. You put a big mess in it, and it comes out delicious. It's like magic.

On one of my mailing lists, a fellow member had the unfortunate experience of being around some artist friends who spent time drawing her (poorly), and then told her that it wasn't their fault the drawings didn't look good, because she was too fat to be pretty. This, of course, made her feel like crap, so she came to the list in search of art featuring fat women, to help prove to herself that they were just being jackasses. (Which they were.) Since I spent a little time tracking down the relevant links, I thought I'd share them more widely....

There are lots of places to find fat art online, but when I need a self-image boost, I visit the sassy and lovely pin-up girls of Les Toil: http://www.toilgirls.com

I'm saving my pennies to be a Toil Girl someday! :->

Also try:

Isabella & Friends sculpture by Dari Walker: http://www.bbwgifts.com/

Landmark nude photography of Women En Large: http://www.laurietobyedison.com/galleryWEL.asp

Amazing nude fat women photographed by Leonard Nimoy (really!): http://www.leonardnimoyphotography.com/7body.htm

More photography (non-nude) by Frederic Neema: http://www.gamma.fnphoto.com/stories/2124/index.htm

The lovely pencil drawings of Ianardo: http://www.ianardo.com/

Nigel Morgan's happy fat women: http://www.nigelmorganart.com/home.html

So train your eye, peoples - beauty comes in all kinds of shapes.

I think this is vital information to disseminate to women everywhere, given the current political climate.

Not-2-Late.com provides *extensive* information about emergency contraception, including an extensive database of physicians who have agreed to be listed because they will prescribe emergency contraception. You can locate EC providers by ZIP code, area code, city/state, or clickable map. Currently most listings are in the US and Canada, but they also maintain a provider list for many other countries. It's operated by the Office of Population Research at Princeton University and the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, and is peer-reviewed for medical accuracy.

http://www.not-2-late.com

In a country where abortion is "legal" (although who knows how long, given the Supreme Court's current actions) but unavailable in 80% of the counties in the US, I'm extremely grateful there are people around like the ones who run this site.

Mark Morford, a generally intelligent columnist for SFGate.com, wrote a column today about seeing fat Americans on his vacation in Mexico, and how this symbolizes the downfall of America:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/02/22/notes022206.DTL&nl=fix

Those of you who know me know that I need to take exception to this. I've sent him the response below.

Hi, Mark -

Just read your column about your "unfortunate" observations in Mexico regarding Americans, their weight, and what you think it means.

There are many things here I could choose to argue with you about, but I'm going to select the one that I find most disturbing. There's a long, sad history to doing what you've done here, which is taking a group of people, observing something physical about them, and using that to project your own ideas about what the group is like, express and justify your personal fears, and make cultural judgments based on it. The Nazis did it to the Jews, making extensive measurements of their physical characteristics and explaining how their "inferior" looks, "shifty" eyes, and so on expressed their genetic inferiority and degraded culture....and thus why humanity would be better off if they were removed. In the 19th century, many books were written about black people and why their skin tone indicated God's disfavor, their "small" heads indicated a smaller brain, and their hair texture, so like wool, indicated their animal natures....which justified their being dominated by white people and treated like livestock.

Of course, in those two famous cases, we know better now and realize that they were flimsy attempts to support social attitudes that weren't based on good science or objective thinking. Your decision to believe that the fat Americans you saw express what's wrong with modern American culture is a similar act.

You are connecting your visceral (trained by the media) reaction to the way those people look with your fear and anger about parts of American culture that are different from the one you live in. You don't know those people, for the most part; in fact, you even said that many of them seemed to be good people. Yet you're still willing to make extensive judgments about what they do and believe, and make them into scapegoats, to distance yourself and hang mental signs on them to make them symbols of things you feel are wrong with the world. (Especially ironic since you accused them of doing something similar, or maybe it's not - it certainly makes it easier for you to objectify them if you make them complicit with the act in your own mind.)

This is bigotry, pure and simple, and it's wrong.

You can't ascribe broad attitudes and meaning to a physical characteristics that a group of people share, at least not in any reasonable way. There are fat people and thin people everywhere - yes, even in San Francisco, which is actually a hotbed of size-acceptance activism. (Thanks to the efforts of the SF size-acceptance community, SF is one of the few places in America where it's actually illegal to discriminate on the basis of size.) There are also fat people and thin people who are both conservative and liberal, health-conscious and slovenly, quick-thinking and slow-moving and everything else.

Of course, it's always your choice to remain a bigot; it certainly makes dealing with the world simpler. But I urge you to think harder about your internal thought processes and prejudices, and how they combine to produce your attitudes. It not only makes it easier for you to engage the world on a more interesting level, but it makes the world a better place.

Best regards,

Marty Hale-Evans

I guess I really should explain the name "Fish Who Answer the Telephone." This is the title of a real book, published in 1937; I encountered it while reading the wonderful "Bizarre Books" by Russell Ash and Bryan Lake. ("Bizarre Books" also contains the favorite titles "The History and Romance of Elastic Webbing Since the Dawn of Time" and "On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers." I've actually started my own collection of books I keep just for the titles, such as "Psychiatry For the Curious" and "Small Mammals Are Where You Find Them.")

In any case, I have been pondering those fish for nearly 20 years. In idle moments, I've often pondered how fish *could* possibly answer the telephone; when I get tired of trying to figure out how, I move on to trying to figure out *why* they would, or why anyone might want them to. It's like my own personal koan, so it seemed a fitting title for a collection of my idiosyncratic musings. That's what it's like in my brain. You'll see.

I'm trying to think of something to say to test out this new journal, but I can't think of a thing that passes muster with my internal critic. Perhaps this will be a blogging handicap.