Brush with Reality TV

I went to high school with this Survivor contestant. He was in my French class. I guess I'll have to start watching it. I've never seen it.

Thanks to Small Fish for the tip-off! Believe it or not he was like "do you know this guy?" because his bio says he grew up in O-town.

Breaking News

Oprah puts the hammer down.

http://www.gawker.com/news/james-frey/james-frey-on-oprah-liveblogging-the-live-feed-150872.php

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11030647/

Thanks to Dup and Momster for the heads-up!

A Poem

You are a turd
Your writing is absurd

You are a liar
Of your lame non-explanations I tire

In particular I despise
This picture of you, the look in your eyes:














I discussed your book with Ash and Small Fish at Chop Suey
What a waste of time! And what Phooey!
How embarassing! to be caught praising your book
like some sucker, a helpless fish on a hook,
and then shortly after,
Small Fish warns me of the pending PR disaster

And yet you survive! How's this?
Your lies about drugs, vomit, blood and piss
Still resonate with readers? And Oprah too?
Does not your fraudulent book literally smell of rotty poo?

Well I for one send psychic daggers your way!
For your literary crimes I believe you will pay

If only you'd admit you lied
If only one day in the news I read "He apologized!"

"He's sorry to have given serious writers a bad name!
And he forfeits his money and fame!"

Then, and only then,

I'd still think you're an asshole.

Mad

I'm pretty steamed about this whole James Frey thing. I don't think there's anything I could write that wouldn't just be a repeat of what others have reported, but here's a quick recap from my POV.

1. I read the non-fiction book A Million Little Pieces and liked it a lot. Like many readers I stayed up late reading to see what would happen next. I asked for his next book, My Friend Leonard for Christmas and my sweet husband got it for me.

2. The Smoking Gun investigated the author's claims of truth in the book. In dispute were several things that I'm not going to detail here except for one: in the book he says he was wanted in 3 states and then did 3 months in jail after rehab. According to the Smoking Gun's research, THIS IS NOT TRUE. Why does this make me so mad? Dup and I had a good email exchange about this which got me thinking. Here's why, in a nutshell:

a. I feel like I've been had. Reading such crazy dramatic things that really happened is very powerful. Now that I know he made some (how much?!) of it up, I feel I can't believe any of it.

b. The whole 3-months-in-jail thing is part of a pivotal moment in the book. I'm not going to give it away except to say if he had gotten out of jail say 2 days earlier, he possibly could've prevented a tragedy. However he was never in jail. Does this also mean the tragedy did not occur?

c. Nothing can be confirmed because two of the main characters are dead and the rest are under rehab oath or whatever it's called when you can't say stuff because of privacy.

d. Frey first shopped the book around as fiction and it was rejected 17 times. Then accepted as non-fiction.

And finally, e. Fry doesn't deny that he fabricated parts of the book. He claims that's not important, however, because the main nuggets of the story, the rehab parts, are true and that's what really matters.

This leads me to the latest news, which is feedback from the world of addicts (from the point of view of being an addict and/or going through recovery) and rehab workers (from the POV of what a rehab center is like, in particular the one he claims he went to). And they say that that part of the book is BULLSHIT as well.

Here's the latest articles. The NY Times requires free subscription for those of you who haven't been there before.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/technology/23link.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/books/24frey.html

The gist is that the guy is a big poophead. Shortly I will post a poem about James Frey.

Spicy Toast

When we go skiing, we stay in a condo, and my mom and dad buy tons of groceries and stock up the kitchen. We eat breakfast and dinner at home, and lunch on the slopes. This year there was lots of bread. French bread and sourdough for dinner time, wheat and white sandwich bread for toast in the morning, cinnamon bread for French toast, etc.

One morning we were having scrambled eggs, hash browns and toast. I bit into my white toast and it tasted kind of spicy. I just thought I was crazy so I didn't say anything. But then JJS was like "this toast is spicy" and I was like "I know!"

And it turns out that the evening before, one of my young nieces was not feeling well so she was eating dry toast and she kept saying "this toast is spicy" and everyone was like "oh, 'Lokayun', you're crazy!" Can you imagine being 6 years old, with a queasy stomach, and the adults are like "eat this dry toast" and you're like "it's spicy!" and they're like "no it's not".

Why was the white toast spicy? All we could think is that they mixed the dough in a bowl that had had spicy things in it. Weird.

Mac & cheese 3x / day

Pete and I spent a few days with my family on a ski adventure in Colorado. On our way to Snowmass we had a layover in Denver and we ate lunch at Wolfgang Puck Express. We got a BBQ chicken pizza and macaroni and cheese and split them.

On Wednesday we flew home and we had another long layover at DIA so we went to Wolfgang Puck Express again. But this time we didn't want to have pizza because we wanted to order some in when we got home and eat it while watching Wedding Crashers. I got the macaroni and cheese and Pete got a turkey sandwich.

Our plane got delayed because the mechanics "couldn't figure out how to manually fuel the plane". So now we had an extra 4 hours to fill. Blech. We went to the bar to have a drink (Heineken for me, coffee for Pete) and noticed a dish on the menu called "Pot O' Gold". Or maybe it was called "Fools' Gold".

Guess what it was? DEEP-FRIED MACARONI AND CHEESE! So of course we had to order it. I thought it would be totally awesome but it was actually mostly just weird. It was like Kraft dinner inside a little battered triangle. I would have to say that the two tastes (mac & cheese and fried batter) contradicted each other so you couldn't really taste either one that well.

Well by the time we got back to Seattle we were starving and it was 10 PM and we didn't want to wait 45 minutes for a pizza so Pete made us - guess - Annie's Peace Pasta and Parmesan.

And that's the story of my big day of macaroni and cheese. We got home at 10pm instead of 4pm. Six hours at DIA, no Wedding Crashers, no pizza but a whole darn lot of macaroni and cheese. Which was good since the following day marked the beginning of my new year during which I can't eat tons of macaroni and cheese.

Rockin the Go-Go's

Bladio Blogio is on vacation.

I will be back online at the end of the week.

Cha-cha,
Blade

Dramatic Car Maneuvers

Omaha, Monday Dec. 26, 2005 - Today two sisters acheived a marvelous feat of automobile maneuvering in an attempt to get to the Hy-Vee Supermarket on 108th & Fort in order to provide dinner for their families.

The two women, Blade and Momster, had planned to make a Mexican feast: chicken enchiladas, black beans, guacamole, green salad, an appetizer of 6-layer dip and mojitos.

"I love 6-layer dip," said Blade.

Their husbands and Momster / JJS's children went to Borders book store to spend the gift cards they'd received from Santa the previous day. The sisters were happy to go to the grocery store instead of Borders.

"I was excited because if my daughters are at Borders instead of Hy-Vee, I can get a regular cart instead of one of those car carts," Momster said. "I mean I'm just saying. It's a little bit easier, you know?"

After the boys and girls left, the sisters went to get in the car Blade was borrowing from her (and Momster's) parents.

"Every Christmas my parents loan me their second car so I can drive around Omaha," said Blade. "Their car is awesome because it has heated seats."

Blade's parents' car was parked in Momster's driveway in the spot behind Momster's car, which was parked in their 2-car garage. The husbands had taken the minivan, which had been parked in the other side of the 2-car garage.

Alas! Blade reached into her coat pocket to get the car keys, and in a sudden flash she remembered that Pete had driven home last night and he still had the car keys.

"Crap!" the sisters said.

Blade eyeballed the space between her parents' car and the garage door.

"I bet we can get the other car out of the garage by going around this car. Let's open the garage and check it out," she said.

They opened the garage door and studied the situation, which was like this:

"It will totally be like getting out of a tight parallel parking space," Blade told Momster. And Momster was convinced.

Momster hopped into her car in the garage and soon was working on a back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, trying to get the car out of the garage without hitting the other car in the driveway or scraping along the garage wall. Blade stayed outside to offer directions.

Soon the sisters were faced with this situation:


Momster rolled down the window. "Am I stuck?" she yelled. When Blade realized that yes, Momster was stuck, she laughed the hardest she's ever laughed in her life, and she bent over in stomach pain from the laughter.

"Yes you are stuck!" Blade said. She envisioned the boys and girls returning from Borders to find the car diagonally stuck, half in, half out of the garage.

That's when Jeannie, the master of car maneuvering, appeared. Jeannie cleans Momster's house once a week. She had heard the laughter and came outside to investigate.

"I love this kind of shit," Jeanie said. "We're going to get you out of here."

And Jeanie did. She and Blade had to move an old freezer and some bags of gravel that were in the way and finally after about 20 minutes of back and forth, sometimes only 2 inches at a time, Momster and the car were free to go to Hy-Vee.

The sisters spent several minutes laughing their asses off at the thought of being stuck, and then at the thought of the husbands coming home and being so baffled at how they had gotten the car out of the garage?!

"We pictured them pulling into the garage in the minivan, and seeing the other side of the garage was empty, but that my parents' car was behind that spot," Blade said. "We knew they would go insane wondering about it!"

However the boys did not notice at all. They and the children went in the house without noticing anything was amiss. The sisters told them the story when they got home, but the husbands didn't seem too impressed.

"We thought JJS [pictured at left] and Pete would freak out or at least laugh hard when we told them about it," said Momster. "But they were kind of just like, whatever."

The sisters didn't care though. They knew how farkin' funny it really was and that evening they drank mojitos to celebrate their spectacular feat.

Oh and the Mexican feast was SO FREAKIN' GOOD too.

-- Momster contributed to this report. Blade provided her drawings from the scene.

Boxing v. Coal Mining

T-Rod and I watched Cinderella Man the other night. Pete wasn't home so this is how my review for him went the next day (paraphrased a bit).

Blade: I didn't like Cinderella Man at all.
Pete: I never had any interest in seeing that.
B: Well I didn't like it. Boxing is dumb. He claimed to be boxing for his family but every time you go out boxing you could be killed and with every punch to the head you might get brain damage, and that is not good for your family!
P: Probably he didn't have much choice.
B: I think he did!
P: Coal miners don't have much choice, and that's dangerous, but it's for their family.
B: Well I like coal miners! Besides they're going down there to bring up coal to share with us and heat houses!
P: Well boxers are providing entertainment.
B: I don't care, it's dumb!

However at one point during this exchange I did say I liked Rocky and we had fun reminiscing about Rocky III with the snowy Siberian scenes, and I sang bits of James Brown's "Living in America" which Pete seemed to enjoy.

Happy Farkin New Year

Do you ever spend time reminding yourself of all the things you should be grateful for, trying to cheer yourself up when really all you want to do is lie on the couch and feel sorry for yourself?

I've been feeling pretty blue all week. I had a fun Christmas vacation – 2 whole weeks – 9 days of which were spent at Momster's house where we laughed our asses off every day. And now I miss her 8 billion tons, I can't even say how much I miss her. I wish she and her family would move to Seattle.

At one point last week Momster and I got her car stuck in the garage. That story warrants its own post and I will also provide diagrams.

Last weekend Pete & I saw Brokeback Mountain and Walk the Line. I loved them both. Add those flicks to my list of things to be grateful for.

You really can spend a lot of time and energy being grateful because you can break down items into several items. For example -

Grateful for Walk the Line Itemized Breakdown. Thank goodness for:

a) Johnny Cash being born and making music
b) June Carter being born and making music
c) Both of them pushing on through all the crap to get married and all that stuff and as far as I know (I don't know a lot about them) ultimately being happy
d) The movie getting made
e) The movie getting made with good actors
f) The movie being good
g) Me having a day off to see the movie
h) Me having a job from which I can have a day off
i) The audience being quiet
j) Reeses Pieces
k) Knowing that after the movie we will be eating a homemade Indian feast
l) An empty seat next to me on which to put my coat
m) Pete in the other seat next to me
n) Pete having the day off
o) Being married to Pete
p) Having found him at all
q) On top of having found him in general, him liking me too, etc. etc.

See, if you break it down in such a precise, granular way soon you have forgotten your troubles. You can even get down to the level of like thank goodness the earth's plates shifted in such a way as to allow the creation of our continent, because if North America didn't exist would we all have met each other / had our respective families / live in the towns we live / etc. etc. ??

Give it a try. It can be dizzying. Or dazzling!

I'm going to go have some fun now. Thank goodness for that.