Reading Poirot in French speaking English with a French accent

I decided to learn French, so I got some Agatha Christie books in French translations because I figured they'd be more fun to study than lists of imperfect verbs. And, as far as her books go, once you learn the words for "murder", "kill", and "little gray cells", you're basically fluent.

(What stinks is that you still have to look up those imperfect verbs; I was so sure I had outsmarted them.)

It was only after reading two Poirot mysteries in French that I remembered that one of his signature quirks, along with his enormous ego and his flourishing mustache, is his charmingly-phrased Franglish. He's Belgian, of course, and speaks English with a French accent. So I'd been reading his Franglish in French as translated from English.

Way to learn a language, Me!

I read Temoin Muet, then not long after I finished it I stayed in a bed and breakfast that had an old Christie paperback on the bedside table in my room, and lo and behold: it was Dumb Witness. In English! Bon chance! I told my vacation to screw off and sat there and read the book to see what I'd missed. It turns out: not much. If you want to feel a false sense of fluency really quickly, learn French the Christie way.

But I did miss the accents. Agatha is not shy about the Upstairs/Downstairs mental gap -- she's always going on about how dumb the maids are, and in English they speak in broad slang-filled accents. I didn't notice that in French, but I was pretty busy congratulating myself in my head like this: "Tuer -- to kill! That means to kill! I AM SO FRENCH!"

One thing about Dumb Witness made no sense in Temoin Muet (Clue Spoiler!): the victim leaves a pre-tuer clue by mumbling on about a "dessin vaste". Drawing vast? Big drawing? Wide design? Lady, I know you're dying, but that makes no sense. It turns out to be a misunderstood word; vase instead of vaste. She's referring to a design on a vase that sort of proves that she knew that someone was trying to kill her. Wicked clever wordplay, right?

Not in French, it isn't. That was the translator's way of dealing with the English word "ajar". The victim babbles about something being "ajar", so there's all this speculation about her door being ajar while her killer skulked around. But it turns out that she's talking about the fricking vase again in our English alterna-verse, her vase or her urn, or her JAR. So look at the drawing on the jar, dummies! Someone tuer-ed me!

And that's what got lost in translation. That and the fact that everyone says things "dryly" in her books, which sounds a lot dumber as "un ton sec".

If someday you and I have a conversation in French and I sound like a Belgian detective, you'll know why.

I will break your "bio break" over your head while you urinate

Some companies are announcing during meetings that they will be taking a "bio break". That means you are invited to use the break time to urinate and/or defecate and/or menstruate. And/or masticate.

These are companies created by adults that employ adults, although it's possible that there are some gigantism-suffering preschoolers in these meetings, maybe working in Nap Development.

Let's take a break, my fellow adults. Do whatever you want with your grown up break. Please don't tell me what you're going to do during this break, not even using cute words and especially not if it involves your tummy or your rude tube.

I blame Oprah.

"Thanks to the smartness of my intellect, I'm rich."

Thanks to anonymous commenting on the internet, I'm rich in quotes.

Please feel free to use this scavenged sentence in your daily life, preferably at the height of a self-righteous tirade.

That monkey sure did kill a lot of people

Yesterday I finally watched the movie "Monkey Shines". I've been meaning to see that movie for 20 years. One night twenty years ago, I thought I was actually watching it, but I wasn't, and then I threw up in the sink a little bit after begging myself not to vomit.

College is stupid.

[SPOILERS!] The movie was pretty good, with good actors. The best part was watching the paralyzed guy being terrorized by the cute little monkey, like when she kept shoving food in his mouth. The best villain is a darned cute one, which explains the enduring malevolence of the Ewoks.

I don't think it was scientifically accurate, though, so if you want to inject human brain material into a monkey's ass, go ahead (ask the monkey for permission, first). I really don't think it will make you telepathically bond with her brain and cause her to go on killing sprees of your enemies.

Also, I didn't think it was fair that the paralyzed guy was cured at the end, but the monkey was killed. It wasn't her fault she was injected with bad human cells or whatever.

And like it couldn't be a happy ending if he was still paralyzed and getting on with his life with the added benefit of not being stalked by a demonic monkey? That seemed like a weird message to me, given that accidents do happen and life does have to go on, with or without your monkey.

Sometimes killing your monkey doesn't solve all of your problems, but it does make things better overall -- cut off the dumb ending where he could walk, and that's what I took from this movie.

Deep!

Seriously, America? Operation brand fruit flavored snacks?

Who doesn't want a "fruit flavored" (as proven by the pictures of actual fruit in the lower right corner; very convincing, Kellogg's) snacks based on a board game that itself is based on that yummiest of experiences: surgery?

I'm not saying it doesn't make perfect sense to make a snack based on a board game; I mean, duh, I'm eating Trivial Pursweets right now. No, the true stroke of genius here is in choosing Operation, because with that choice comes your cover boy; the face that launched a thousand fruit flavored snacks. Which makes you hungrier: the red nose, the crossed eyes, the mercury thermometer, or the Ronald Reagan haircut? I can't choose!

The "fruit" flavored "snacks" seem to be shaped like a bell, a dog?, maybe a turtle?, a bird, a red thing, and is that a lemon wedge? I don't know about you, but when I go in for laparoscopic surgery, I always bring my turtle and my red thing. I suppose the alternative choices were treats shaped like a blue bedpan, a green syringe, and a purple insurance claim. So, good choices, Kellogg's.

If Michael Pollan sees these, he's going to need a doctor.

Advice for if you have coma

This is valuable advice from a site called emedicinehealth:

Seek immediate attention at a hospital's emergency department if you have these signs and symptoms associated with thyroid problems.

Shortness of breath

Abdominal pain

Vomiting

Confusion

Coma

Seriously, people; if you have coma, go to the ER without delay. I don't know how you're going to get there, but get there.

Someone pooped in our yard

There, I said it. It happened, and I acknowledged it.

I think it was an act of desperation, not of revenge. I don't think there was someone saying, "I really hate those guys. I mean really. How can I best say, 'I hate you'? An anonymous letter just seems so...non-disgusting. Hmmm, that burrito I just ate is really acting up....I've got it!"

No, I think someone got really desperate and found themselves stuck in a neighborhood and faced a terrible choice. This is the price we as a society pay for not having enough public toilets.

How do I know it wasn't a really large dog? Well, in my experience, a) dogs don't open gates, and b) dogs don't use napkins as toilet paper.

I disposed of the evidence with one of those long-handled grabber things you use to pick up trash. Some trash that was.

Do I have any suspects? Yes. I think it was Mexico.

I was supposed to go to Cancun on vacation this past weekend and had to cancel due to swine flu aka H1N1.

In retaliation, Mexico pooped in my yard.

Mighty uncalled-for response to a pandemic, Mexico. Próxima vez que escriba una carta anónima!

You mustn't lie about one of the most famous drunken writers of our time

These are excerpts from the bio in the back of the current Vintage Crime edition of Raymond Chander's The Simple Art of Murder:

Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago..,but spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a free-lance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator.... In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his business career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing....

I've read too much about Chandler lately, so that I've become as woozy from his difficult life as I was by Katherine Mansfield's that time I endured D.H. Lawrence's love/hate insults, her family's coldness, her husband's what's-his-deal-ness, her lost pregnancy in a German pension, Ida's mule-like devotion, and fatal TB with her. It's too much, is what I'm saying.

With Chandler, it's too much booze and too many moves from house to house and too many years between him and his wife and too many worries and too few friends and too much of his beloved elderly wife fading away. And then more alcohol. And some shots to round it off. How could a man who loved his cat so much have such a rough time of it?

So this bio struck me as odd because it made him sound too normal and his transitions in life too smooth, when in fact it was all a fucking mess. By his own admission he worked as a "free-lance journalist" in England for about a week. I'm sorry to admit that I've exited jobs after a week or two, and I wouldn't want my bio to read "worked as a free-lance contractor at the Mustang Ranch." Look, I was barely there long enough to get herpes!

And though he was a director of oil companies, at the end of his time there he was skipping work to have sex vacations with secretaries, and when he did show up, he was drunk. So you could argue that a depression "put an end to his business career", but not The Depression.

Why sugar-coat it, Vintage? We love dissolute geniuses!

I just wanted a definition, but I got a dysfunctional family

I looked up the word "travesty" using my Mac's built-in dictionary widget, and got this definition-cum-tale of family resentments:

noun
a false, absurd, or distorted representation of something

verb [trans.]
represent in such a way: Michael has betrayed the family by travestying them in his plays.

Geez, Michael, why you gotta be writing mean little plays about your momma, huh? You hurt her so much that she couldn't get it out of her mind even when sitting at the office working on computer dictionary definitions. Way to go, Eugene O'Neill.

And you, Momma! Put down the drink and get back to work!

I am surprised that a pimp would be manipulative

"Nightline" producers and I must read the same newspapers and magazines, because they frequently air stories about things I just read about somewhere else, like when they went to visit some of those isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle that had been pictured in Scientific American via info on Survival-International.org.

So I wasn't surprised when they did a story on how the economic crisis is affecting legal brothels in Nevada, since I had read a good article about this very thing in the LA Times at the beginning of this month.

But unlike the LA Times, "Nightline" did a crap job with the story, since it came off as more of a publicity piece for the particular brothel they profiled. The ladies are so nice! They provide a "stress relief" service! Business is fine, mostly! The Madam is a shrewd business-woman with a Suze Orman haircut and a black pantsuit who just happens to take her vicious German Shepherd with her everywhere she goes!

And Neal Karlinsky, who is usually a good correspondent, was practically giggling through the whole thing. Geez, Neal, get a room! You seemed pretty amused with the orgy room, and it is 60% off these days.

Nightline's website claims that this was a story about how "desperate woman turn to world's oldest profession during economic downturn", since job applications are up at the Mustang Ranch. But the story was really more of a PR tour of the facilities, and that's not news, that's salesmanship.

Which brings me to my pimp problem. It was a madam in this case, but a madam is just a lady pimp with better marketing. Madams need a more pimped out name, like bertha. Like "Mess with me and my Bertha will break your legs, sucker!" Tough, like that.

So Nightline followed pantsuit Bertha and dog to the airport, where she and a doppleganger colleague (matching pantsuit) greeted a new recruit, a lovely young lady who applied to the prostitute job over the internet and, good news! she got the job! The Berthas swooped in as she came down the elevator so common courtesy would keep her from ditching the whole thing, and the Berthas had a black limo waiting to take her to her exciting and glamorous new life of having sex with strangers for money. Limo = class.

Nightline also showed us how the Berthas were kind enough to supply her with her own antibacterial soap and monthly HIV and herpes tests. Glamour!

After I watched this story, I got really incensed with the airport pickup and the limo and the black pantsuit. "What'd I do?" asks the pantsuit, but really, Pantsuit, you are part of the shenanigans. Don't act all innocent. That whole charade is a psychological snare to gloss over the nature of the job. It's like being interviewed in a fancy conference room where the free coffee flows when in actuality you're going to be working two floors down in a cubicle in the basement for 50 cents a mug. Only worse, because you have to have sex with lonely truckers.

I was so mad at Bertha I and Bertha II until I realized that they are pimps, and I can't be mad at pimps or Berthas for being smooth-talking and emotionally manipulative because that is what they do. That's how you keep the ladies down on the farm (ranch, in this case).

My mistake, Bertha! But "Nightline", boo to you. You totally got teased and released.

Fun trip to the vet (for me. Maybe less so for my cat)

I went to the vet today and there was a lady there with a cat and she said the cat's name was Roscoe P. Coleslaw.

"Ross" was a white cat, but he looked gray today because yesterday she found him playing around in the chimney. He was there for a bath. His lady had an injured arm stuck out in an L shape with an ace bandage wrapped all the way from her wrist to her armpit.

There was also a lady there with two cute, yippy little dogs who were very friendly. There were just like the lady, who was a cute little lady wearing tiny shorts who kept her cell phone glued to her ear the whole time. She told the person on the phone that some third person was "an-noy-in-GUH!" and also told that person on the phone, who was apparently a co-worker, that she LOVED her and that she LOVED working with her and NEVER wanted to not work with her.

I like people like that because they are loud and talkative and energetic and think everyone wants to pet them on head, and they are so certain of it that you can't help but do it. I like dogs like that, too.

I myself am more like Roscoe P. Coleslaw, sneaking around the chimney.

Eliot Rex

According to this NY Times article Eliot Spitzer believes himself to be living a Greek tragedy.

Perhaps this means he stands in front of the bathroom mirror with the shaving razor in his hand saying, "Et tu, Joe Bruno?"

Eliot. You were not brought down by wrathful or fickle gods. You were not the victim of the cursed House of Spitzers. You seem to think running Daddy's business is some kind of exile from the kingdom, but you still have both of your eyeballs and all of your family members, and you haven't been hung upside down and flayed in even the most modest of areas, like an elbow or the top of your bald head.

You can argue that you were the victim of hubris, but it's more accurate to say you were the victim of penis. You like to rent young snatch while prosecuting others for doing the same. That's hypocrisy, fool, not poetry.

Though you'd better hope the missus never heard of Clytemnestra.

I am keeping street musicians poor

I used to live in Cambridge, MA. Cambridge, Harvard Square, the T stops -- these things are to buskers as honey is to flies with tip jars.

One day I took the escalator down to the Downtown Crossing platform. There was a busker sitting on the ground, singing and playing a battered old guitar held together with duct tape. He was probably in his late thirties, black hair spiced with gray held back in a long ponytail, bestickered black guitar case open for tips. I'd seen this guy all over town as I went on my way around Harvard Square, as I mingled with the tourists at Faneuil Hall, and as I ran the "No crazies, please!" prayer loop in my head while waiting at T-stops along the red line.

I recognized him, but there's no reason he would've recognized me. I rarely gave buskers money because I rarely had money, though there was that time I heard a country singer on the corner outside the Harvard Coop that turned me into such sentimental mush that I gave her whatever was in my pocket. It was the first and last time I ever saw her.

In contrast, I saw the regulars with a regularity. I saw Guster before they had a radio hit; in between songs they said they were going to NYC for a show, and they asked if anyone knew someone there with a spare floor they could crash on. After the next song they said, No, seriously, we need someplace free to stay there.

Aging Ponytail Duct-Taped Guitar Man rarely engaged with the audience. Sometimes I liked to stop and listen to him and other street musicians as a balm to the soul; plus I didn't have a choice. Move aside to a quiet spot and you've just moved into another busker's zone.

That day in Downtown Crossing the crowd placed me near Ponytail's guitar case. While waiting for the train, I watched him sing and play and smiled my encouragement.

He stopped playing abruptly and looked up at me and said bitterly, "Why don't I stare at you for a while?" He threw his guitar in his case and stood up and turned away.

What did I do?

There was a tall skinny guy with long hair who played guitar and sang rock songs in Harvard Square, mostly, and along the T. He had some measure of local fame, which I know because I saw him team up with other busking regulars sometimes, and because I saw him interviewed on the local cable access station once. He was practically famous!

One day in Harvard Square I was sitting on a wall outside the Discovery Store eating my lunch when Tall Skinny stopped playing and started lecturing the crowd. We were basically stealing entertainment, he told us. We were getting his work for free, and that's wrong. That's thievery. We owed it to him to drop a few bucks in his bucket.

Can I tell you what I wanted to drop in his bucket?

I get it. I understand the frustration of putting your talent out there and getting blank stares or simpering smiles (from me) in return. I understand the weight of failure that that puts on you. Believe me, I get it.

I understand the confusion you feel when you hear Courtney Love on the radio and here you'd gone and allegedly given Kurt Cobain, um, let's say "personal favors" on his tour bus and you've got all kinds of positive local press for your music and yet here you're the one out on the street in front of fucking smug-ass Harvard and there's Courtney being exactly the same except rich. ( I heard that story about a locally well-known Boston street musician from Courtney herself at a Hole concert at the Orpheum, and no, I didn't want to know, and yes, Ms. Love's a great musician but maybe not that reliable a storyteller.)

But standing in front of people and forcing them to listen to you is not the same as getting them to hear you, and no amount of whining about it is going to change that.

I wanted to tell this story to remind myself not to be Ponytail or Tall Skinny, no matter how frustrated I become, because DUDE, I DIDN'T FORCE YOU TO PERFORM AT ME WHILE I'M WAITING FOR THE T, AND NO, YOU CAN'T HAVE MY MONEY.

Take that, bloggers!

I just watched "Red Dawn" (1984) for the first time

This movie was a touching story about brotherly devotion. Also, it was a celebration of the natural beauty of the American Southwest. Finally, it was a paean to the sheer pleasure of watching teenagers massacre people.

Well done, John Milius. According to the news from the last ten years, it's like your dream has come true!

I am mortified by Dancing With the Stars

I was flipping channels a few days ago and landed on Dancing With the Stars.

Why? Why this show be like this? I no speak good after see show.

I understand the premise of this show to be that we want to watch professional dancers yell at non-professional celebrity dancers, who then dance in front of a trio of loud-talkers who give them points, and also take them points away as punishment for bad rumbas. I don't know who these judges are, but they are very animated people who seem to care deeply about dance. They are frightening.

I think watching celebrities fail at something difficult in an artistic field that is not their own is supposed to make me feel good, or vindicate my non-celebrity status, or maybe, to be more charitable and glass-slipper-half-full, make me identify with the participants, who it seems are just regl'r folk like me who take adult education classes. Except that their adult education class is televised, and they are forced to sit next to Marie Osmond. (I know that was a previous season, but I saw clips of her fainting and her hair and her big face and her chipmunk cheeked demon dolls on the news at the time and I won't forget it any time soon.)

Whatever this show is supposed to make me feel, it primarily makes me feel like hiding my face under a blanket. If I can still hear the show from under the blanket, it makes me want to press my face into the blanket until I suffocate and no longer have to hear the stress and the mugging and the pleading for votes and the clinging -- god, the clinging! -- in my dreams.

And the outfits.

I am so deeply mortified by the skits that the couples do before and after and, god knows, during their dances that I can't believe the producers manage to get people -- people who have accomplished some something in life! breathing people, with souls! -- to make those faces and paw each other and act like the least talented middle school drama troupe ever formed via a sign-up sheet in the cafeteria.

Why the mugging? I've sat and watched ballroom competitions on PBS, so I know from the tyranny of dance, and I'm familiar with the kabuki theatre of the lipstick and false eyelashes and the Vegas theatre of the showgirl outfits, but I swear I've never seen those people mug. They are all business off of the dance floor. Mugging would muss their makeup. Mugging would take muscle energy away from their lines.

Yet it is required on this show, even from perfectly dignified athletes who are game enough to give it a go with the mock-sexy faces and the exaggerated pouts, but god, I wish they wouldn't. Does being a celebrity willing to go on this show mean that you are not permitted to retain any dignity at all?

The outfits. Professional dance ladies, why butt cleavage? Why cutouts to expose hip bones? Why spangles and ribbons on bathing suits? Why the entire spinal column? The men cannot button their shirts because they must let their shaven, spray-tanned chests say Hello! to the world, I understand, but why no buttons at all, ladies?

I am mortified. No wonder I can't dance.

Tech Babble Mystery Word of the Week Winner!

This week's TECH BABBLE MYSTERY WORD is: enterprise.

From an April 2nd ZDNet article:

The project is structured as a joint development agreement, and no money will change hands, Colin Parris, IBM's vice president for digital convergence, said in a phone interview.

"We see a need for an enterprise-ready solution that offers the same content creation capabilities but adds new levels of security and scalability," he said.

After an initial phase of using the private Second Life areas internally, IBM will let its own customers access the privately hosted regions.

"We're doing this internally, and we're building the right kind of enterprise-grade solution," Parris said.

Colin Parris, you're our winner!! Your prize is a fully scalable, top-down, multi-tiered B-to-C solution with VPN wireless capability and social networking Flash apps!

Congratul8tions!

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander

I have this rule that I only want to write about things I loved, so I have to write this in the dark in order to get away with it. I did not love Foreskin's Lament.

On the other hand, this: "Hello, McFly! You realize that your blog is just a way to hear yourself talk, right?" So much for rules I made up.

I listened to this book, actually, as narrated by the author in a mostly flat, deadpan-to-the-point-of-maybe-actually-dead drone. It took me what felt like a long time to get through all 63 tracks; walking around the neighborhood, ironing, vacuuming. You name a domestic chore and Mr. Auslander and I have done it together.

I wanted to love this book, and I'm frustrated because I think I could have. It's essentially about Mr. A's Orthodox Jewish upbringing and how its strict rules and mercilessly punitive conception of God screwed him up. In his confusion and anger, he fought back with pornography and hotdogs and finally broke with his family after the birth of his son.

This is a story built on a lot of pain and emotion, and the unfortunate thing for me as a reader is that Auslander chose to bury the pain and emotion under Catskills-level jokes and a sneering disregard for everyone else (except his wife, whom he describes as being very cool and witty, and his baby, who I mean seriously, like he's going to be shitty about his newborn).

His main joke to hide behind is that he gives God the finger, quite literally, whenever he breaks one of the many laws of his religion. The extension of the joke is that God is out to get people, but particularly Mr. Auslander. There is a long section near the end of the book about the convoluted attempts of Mr. A and his wife to both honor the Sabbath and watch the Rangers vie for the Stanley Cup. The lengths that they go to are quite funny, an actual caper, even, but make no sense in the midst of Mr. A's insistence that he doesn't honor the Sabbath (so his mother is hurtful to him for reminding him of it) and that God will punish him personally by making the Rangers lose. When the Rangers win, it is still God punishing him. The tortured logic Mr. A employs to make himself God's victim regardless could've been amusing if done self-deprecatingly or with some kind of self-awareness (after all, Richard Lewis has made a career off of this idea), but it isn't, so it isn't.

God never does get the credit for the good things that happen to Mr. A -- his lovely wife, his son, his friends, who are mentioned in a tantalizing but brief bit at the very end of the book as being "foreskins" like himself. The people he admires and loves do merit mention, I suppose due to Mr. A's thesis that God will punish him and take away the things he loves.

This then is a failure on his part and a mark of the fact that he wasn't ready to tell his story. No amount of bitter attacks on his family or on practitioners of his (former?) religion will signal that he is fighting back against the damage instilled by his upbringing. It simply indicates that he's still fearful and still running away.

I think his editors did Auslander a disservice by not pushing him to tell the more meaningful story. It's as if they settled for the cheap jokes, betting that people wanted to hear a guy ridicule convoluted Orthodox Jewish traditions (though why this means he also has to ridicule and stereotype the inhabitants of his chosen home in Woodstock and the other places he's lived in Israel and New York is beyond me).

I think Mr. Auslander and his editors fell into the David Sedaris trap, whereby they think that it's easy to be as funny as Sedaris -- all you have to do is write about your crazy family. Give it the detachment of Running With Scissors, and you've got a winner on the bookshelves.

But note that Running With Scissors was followed by Dry -- there was a price to pay for that first book's insistence that you can triumph over a bizarre and neglectful upbringing without a scratch. And note that Sedaris is a write of extraordinary gifts and care for the people he writes about. He doesn't ridicule, though he does tease. He doesn't hide from pain; he puts it in context.

And context is lacking from Foreskin's Lament -- Auslander rattles off the prayers required over various types of food and the many and layered activities that are forbidden on the Sabbath, but he doesn't bother to wonder or explain why they exist and why some people are okay with them and why he's not. He's content to nudge us and say, "Isn't that ridiculous? Isn't it stupid?", so we'll say, "Yeah, it is stupid. High five!" That's fine talk for a barbecue, but you need to expose yourself more in your writing. You need to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

I'm guessing that Mr. Auslander felt all too vulnerable in going as far as he did here: in talking about his drug use and trafe indulgences and his encounters with porn and with a prostitute. And especially about his family, and about how his father used to beat his brother with his mother's passive consent.

But he stops just when the writing would've become meaningful. He resorts to arguments with his personal guardian God and the resultant tired anti-Auslander's-God jokes rather than putting his feelings and his anger and sorrow into context. He never wonders how others view God, how others deal with the same thing he's going through, how his mother and father may have seen things. He's so tied up in his own head that he can't see anything else, which ultimately makes his writing tiresome and thin.

I wish he had been pushed to tell the whole story. I wish he'd written openly about his anger and his fear instead of wrapping them up in deflective humor. He didn't admit that he's still struggling with terrible fears, all the more terrible because he knows they aren't logical. He didn't admit that he lost something by breaking with his parents, and that they must've lost something, too. He didn't talk about how therapy helped (or hurt) him; he falls back on (of course) a repated deadpan joke about how much the therapy cost.

He didn't go on a quest to address his problem, he just folded up more into himself. And that's a shame not only for him, but for his readers.

List of the Worst of Human Society (General)

I brainstormed a list of the worst of society, the lowest of the low, the degenerates, the people you would send to populate Australia. This was my list:

Mercenaries
Criminals
Murderers/Assassins
Child Abusers
Wife Beaters
Slave Traders
Sex Slavers
Terrorists
Pirates
Torturers/Inquisitors
Animal Abusers
Rapists

As we can see, the first Worst that came to mind was "mercenaries", because I in my mind apparently live in 1600s Europe. I think I was also thinking of Haliburton and other defense contractors and weapons makers, as they are the modern mercenary, available to any combatant with money. Plus it just sounds like a villainous word.

"Criminals" is too all-encompassing, as everyone on the list would fall under the criminal banner, but it was brainstorming after all.

The next thing of note is that I thought of "pirates" before "rapists". PIRATES. It seems that I am marginally more afraid of PIRATES than I am of RAPISTS or TORTURERS. Pirates arguably are rapists/torturers, but the opposite is not true, so I am still more afraid of everything that pirates embody than I am of being a victim of a sequel to the Spanish Inquisition. (At least pirates are not "animal abusers", as everyone knows they love their parrots.)

Where did I acquire my ever-loving fear of pirates? Maybe blame Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe blame Daphne DuMaurier, whose novel Jamaica Inn I read recently -- the whole danged village feared the innkeeper for being a...well, I don't want to spoil it for you.

First fear the Terrorists, then fear the Pirates. They will swashbuckle you all over the ding dong plank.

Do not write these things down

Why would you tell me this is what you've written and expect me to read it?

1. Musings -- Best exemplified by the inexplicable Larry King and his bizarro, ellipsis-happy, stream of nonsensical consciousness newspaper column, full of Angie Dickinson shout-outs and endorsements of things like "rain" and "holidays". Musings are what kill first dates. Your musings are as fascinating to other people as your dreams are, which is to say, tell it to the mirror.

2. Random Thoughts -- Can't be bothered with a specific thought, I see. Let me help you. From now on, you can only write about death.

3. Rants -- Have you ever known a schizophrenic, or an elderly person who has slipped into dementia, or a weird boyfriend who lied about being employed? These are people who rant. Their rants are loud and make no sense and are best listened to from the other side of a locked door. Same goes for Dennis Miller, the unfunny, pseudo-intellectual, former joke-teller who's about as funny as Tiny Tim at the Council of Trent -- next up, my good friend and fellow cutup, George W Bush! When you feel the urge to rant, push your face into your pillow and rant away. Pull your head away from the pillow before you suffocate (I know how ranters lose track of time when they're really steamed about lady drivers who can't see over the steering wheel, or brussel sprouts).

4. Ruminations -- Musings that have been to college.

I hope we've all looked deep inside ourselves and realized that we should put the keyboard away before we embarrass ourselves.

And that reminds me -- brussel sprouts are disgusting! They smell like a wet towel that's been crumpled in the corner for three days, and they taste kind of like nothing, and it's like watching Lance Armstrong pedal a cotton gin for Scarlett O'Hara as Tara burns...Bats fly, but they don't have feathers. I wonder what would happen if we measured time in stones?

"The Bishop's Wife" (1947), starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young, and David Niven

I just watched this ostensibly charming little Christmas movie in which Cary Grant plays an angel who counsels an uptight bishop on how to be a better husband and religious leader. The bishop, played by David Niven with a face stuck on worried, is so preoccupied with raising funds to build a giant new cathedral that he can't see how love-starved his hot wife has become. She's ripe for the picking, if you know what I mean.

The angel Dudley is supposedly so suave that he instantly charms everyone he meets, mostly by knowing their first names without being told and by being exceptionally tan in the middle of winter. The ostensibly charming little Dudley uses his magic angel powers to delay the bishop while he blatantly hits on the bishop's wife. This struck me as less "suave" and more "stalker/future rapist". I kept thinking he'd turn out to be a demon instead, but that would've taken away from the stupefyingly creepy dullness of this ostensibly charming little Christmas movie.

At least there are some patented magical moments to brighten up this OCLCM, right? Suave stalker Dudley's magical heaven-sent angel powers consist of: opening locked doors, refilling Sherry glasses, filing, not answering direct questions, knowing trivia about ancient coins, ice skating, bewitching cab drivers into giving him free rides, decorating Christmas trees, and taking gaudy hats from chubby ladies to give them to skinny Loretta.

He also induces choir boys to sing. Aren't choir boys supposed to sing? Yes, but most of these boys were late for their recital, you see, so Dudley summoned the Almighty's powers in order to wave the boys slowly into the room WHILE SINGING, such that their chirpy little voices gradually blended together into a heavenly choir. I suppose this was supposed to be a silvery moment of convergence, but Dudley was really just hurrying up some tardy little eunuchs while staring at them with inappropriate intensity. Christmas magic!

The one bright spot is mischievous cherub Elsa Lanchester as the bishop's maid. I wish the whole movie had been about her; alas, she was reduced to twittering about and staring hungrily at dumb old pathologically lustful Dudley.

Dudley doesn't ravish the bishop's pillow-lipped wife, but he essentially admits that he wants to. If only he had! At least then the bishop may have been forced to change his expression.

I give it one chestnut roasting over an open fire FROM HELL.