More titles

http://www.cracked.com/article_16818_13-most-baffling-book-titles.html

(hattip: Bookforum: http://www.bookforum.com/)

Jambalaya 2008 Literary Award #1

Best Juxtaposition of Titles on the Jambalaya 2008 Reading List:

Born Standing Up, Christine Falls.

From "Liberation" (Slattery)

After the financial apocalypse, a NY lawyer looks at the NY Public Library from afar:

She walks down to the brass telescope mounted on a table, angles it and gazes down the row of derelict office buildings on Madison Avenue, fastens onto the corner of the public library, the outside of which is being cleaned by volunteers. The building and all of its books are still intact, she knows; the employees of the library made a spontaneous pact to defend it as soon as the police force stopped working, and now they just live in the building. They hauled beds into offices and corners of the huge reading rooms, put plaid couches against the marble walls. An army of cats patrols the halls, has litters on the stairs. She imagines that some of the librarians are fulfilling a long-cherished fantasy. Its just them and the books now, the stamped serifs, the margins smudged with fingerprints. You can still go to the library, to the yards of windows casting long stripes of light across the stone floor, the long tables, the wood paneling, the paintings on the walls. You can still go and read the books. Except for the large firearms that the librarians carry, it is like nothing happened, as if every noon, businessmen are still eating their lunches under the lions.

Recommendation

Remarkable piece of autobiography, in McSweeney's 29: "My Crush on Hilary Duff." By Blaze Ginsberg, from a forthcoming book, "Episodes." Ginsberg has been diagnosed with high-functioning autism (among, apparently other floating diagnoses) and he describes his life in the form a a tv guide to a series of tv shows.

Useful Advice

Inject considerable spicery to your aliveness!


[Culled from, if I remember correctly, a piece of spam offering to enlarge my penis. But the advice is applicable to so much more.
-- Found by reading through old e-mails, in this case e-mails I sent to myself.]

Gender Play #3

More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia. Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.

The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.

A spokeswoman for Ralph said the container left docks in Beijing two weeks ago but turned up empty in Sydney this week.

The magazine has put out an alert to shipping authorities to see if they have the container, but if they don't turn up in the next 48 hours it will be too late for the next issue, she said.
Ralph editor Santi Pintado urged anyone who has any information to contact the magazine.

"Unless Somali pirates have stolen them its difficult to explain where they are,'' Pintado said. "If anyone finds any washed up on a beach, please let us know.''

http://www.watoday.com.au/national/storm-in-a-ccup--130000-boobs-lost-at-sea-20081202-6pa5.html

Gender Play #2

This site http://regender.com/index.html switches the gender in a given piece of text or website. Here is this website, regendered: http://regender.com/swap/http://wipsmart23.blogspot.com/ (It works on earlier pages too.)

The list of books and authors to the left is nice, regendered. But what is nicest is once you are on a regendered page, each link you click on leads to a regendered version of the linked site. With enough clicking, the whole world will switch genders. Awesome. I think there must be someway to combine this with a web translation service to turn myself into, say, a French woman.

Gender Play #1

According to the site GenderAnalyzer, there is a 64% chance that the author of this website is a female. Or perhaps it asserts that the author is 64% female. Not sure how that 64% works.

http://www.genderanalyzer.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwipsmart23.blogspot.com%2F

Song of the Day

"Drank all that I can swallow
Now the moon's going to follow me home."

Moon Song: written by Patty Griffin, but in my head sung by Emmylou Harris.

Just want to add: Emmylou, if you google yourself and are reading this, I'd be happy to be you a drink next time you are in L.A.

Cutter and Bone

From "Cutter and Bone," an early passage which helps introduce us to Bone and, in passing, a theme of the book.

"As he crossed the street and entered the parking lot, he could almost feel the woman's eyes on his back, their cloying outrage following him every step of the way. He halfway expected her to call out his name again, but gratefully all he heard was the surf breaking lightly on the beach, that and a kind of chant rising from a group of hippies sitting in lotus position around a driftwood fire. Why couldn't they be singing? he wondered. Why couldn't it be laughter and hot dogs instead of prayer beads and theological posturing, weird amalgams of fire worship and Zen? Christ, he hated California, or at least this coastal strip of it, this crowded stage where America kept trying out the future and promptly closing it, never letting it open for long on Main Street. And yet Bone could not bring himself to leave. It was like loving the meanest, gaudiest whore in the house. You got what you deserved."

The passage illustrates somewhat less subtly than usual the social judgments at work in the book, and the compromised position from which the judgments are made. It also states the subject of the story: just desserts.

A Father's Advice On How His Children Can Distinguish Themselves From Terrorists

Good children take showers. Terrorists shake towers.

Hollywood

Sunset in Beverly Hills

Third dream in a row

I was driving down a major street when I saw someone I hadn't seen in years waiting at a bus stop. Sam. I called out to him and he recognized me. I quickly pulled over and jumped out of the car and ran over to talk with him.

He looked good. He was wearing scrubs under a coat, but that was only slightly strange. I asked him how he had, what he had been doing. He said "I've made a lot of good choices lately." He wouldn't get anymore specific than that.

I told him he didn't need to get on the bus, that I'd give him a ride. But I looked down the street and couldn't see my car. I looked up and down both sides, checked my pocket -- I had my keys so I hadn't left them in the ignition for someone to take. There was no obvious empty space for the acar to have been taken from, but I couldn't see the car anyway, even as I went a bit up and down the street.

Sam seemed like he really wanted to get on the bus.

The Next Night's Dream

At a large house at which I was staying, but in which I did not normally live. Situation vague. But the house was in a normal American urban/suburban setting.

As I was looking around the backyard, a young tiger came prowling through the yard and started stalking me. As I inched away, unsure of how to handle the situation she attacked me. I got bloodied up a bit.

Then -- it was later -- driving back to the house down sort of an alleyway to the garage, there were maybe 20 tigers, about 7 or so of them adult tigers, some very young ones (cubs) and some adolescent tigers, like the one that attacked me. Back in the house looking out the large second story window, we could see the tigers walking around the back yard as well as beyond. People remarked that it was an unusual feature of the house.

Later in the backyard there was a gigantic sea turtle in the swimming pool, maybe 12 feet long. It suddenly surged up and leapt out of the pool and landed with a thud in the yard, casting a shadow over the yard and almost landing on me, which would have been fatal. Apparently though this was standard behavior and not dangerous to the turtle.

That was the end of the dream.

Yes. NO. [ ]

My dream just before waking this morning:

I had a number of e-mails in my in-box. Actually, three e-mails in the inbox of one account, and maybe a couple more in the inbox of a different account. But in the dream I didn't get to the point of looking at the e-mails in the second account.

All of these e-mails were in response to e-mails I had sent the night before, all from the same person. This was a dream that lingered as I awoke, and I was confused as to what was real. I believed that I had in real life sent e-mails the night before. Both in the dream and then into the real morning I felt the dread of having made a terrible mistake, and that the person to whom I'd sent the emails would be angry or offended, with unhappy consequences for the future.

I couldn't remember what I'd said in the emails. I tried.

I could see a part of the text of each of the three e-mails without opening the full e-mail. None of the emails had a subject heading.

The first said: Yes.

The second said: NO.

The third was blank.