God, I Love This Country

Where else in the world can you find a Kiss Cover Band Made Up Entirely of Midgets?

Quote of the Day

From Otis Twelve, guestblogging at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind: : "I am supposed to be a writer, and unless I do a little writing everyday it’s hard to tell that’s what I am."

My Son, the Wiseacre: Part One

I went to Lowe's today to get various home improvement items. While I was there, I indulged a long-standing whimsy and picked up some wrought iron torches that attach to the edge of the deck and burn citronella oil. The gently guttering flame gives the backyard a nice barbaric feel, I think. And the citronella, so I hear, keeps the bugs away.

So...the sun goes down. I light the torches. I take the laptop out on the deck to do a little net surfing, a little blogging, etc.

My 13 year old son comes out, sees me typing away, and says with a perfectly straight face, "Ah. Blogging by torchlight. As our forefathers did."

Then he went back inside.

I love that kid.

Quote of the Day

The Huffington Post | The Blog: "Seeing that approval for his overhaul plan has been steadily going down in the polls as he roams our country looking for pre-selected audiences to which he can stump, I fear he's becoming a bit of an obsessed stalker, desperately trying to get us to agree to go out with him. The only problem is that when the President's the one stalking you, it's like having a stalker who keeps sending you bills to reimburse all his travel, lodging, and expenses, as well as all charges incurred by his enormous staff and security detail."

The Pistol Poets, Victor Gischler

Victor Gischler's second novel reminds me in some ways of the work of Carl Hiaasen. It's the same kind of darkly humorous tale, with a wickedly sharpened satirical point to it. The target that Gischler skewers--small-college academia and the scruffy intellectual losers and posers that inhabit it--is a smaller target than Hiaasen's Florida land-rape culture, but it's still a fat and juicy one.
Harold Jenks, small-time urban drug dealer on the way up, decides to ditch the life of crime and make off with the identity of Sherman Ellis, a young, hopeful inner-city kid with a scholarship to Eastern Oklahoma University. Sherman won't be missing said identity, because he's just been killed in a robbery by Jenks' dimwitted associate Spoon. Unfortunately for Jenks (and Spoon), he also decides to make off with a bag full of cocaine belonging to their boss, Red Zach. After all, a college student's gotta make ends meet somehow.
Meanwhile, visiting EOU perfesser Jay Morgan has problems of his own, namely a coed dead of a drug overdose in his bedroom. He'd like to keep it quiet, but this bizarre old man with a mysterious past and a notebook full of gritty (and really good) poetry has suddenly appeared in his living room, along with his loyal henchman and another coed who may actually be batshit crazy. Throw in a sleazy PI looking for the dead girl, a pair of feuding professors, two students in way over their heads, and a small town redneck drug pusher hoping to score big. Mix with Harold Jenks and his troubles. Sit back and watch the fun.
It's not a perfect book; the PI character goes from Sleazy Loser to Evil Bastard a little too quickly for me to buy, and Gischler himself slyly acknowledges a bit of deus ex machina near the end. But the book's huge fun to read, and I'm really looking forward to getting Suicide Squeeze, the next Gischler book...which, from the excerpt at the end of the paperback Pistol Poets, appears to target yet another entirely different and absurd world, that of big time sports memorabilia. The man do be versatile.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

from Daily Kos: "The U.S. Army has a new program that will allow soldiers to leave the service a couple years before their full four year contract is up. They can leave early. This is based on a plan developed by President Bush when he was in the National Guard."
-- Jay Leno