You Kiss Like a Thirsty Gerbil

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss - a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

That's this year's winner of the annual bad writing contest known as the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

The content is absurd, but the syntax is elegant. So this is "bad writing" but it isn't amateurish or incompetent writing. I untangle worse sentences every day -- sentences that seem to have been written by gerbils.

The T&T List

Bang on a Can
tempalias
CustardGate
Sarbanes-Oxley
AquAdvantage Salmon
Kim Clijsters
batPhone 4
steganography
bechamel
Kabak Valley
The Panic of 1873
Voice of Russia

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Way I Feel

Got the house's A.C. repaired last week just before the current sweat-wave hit. Feel prescient.... Edited an obituary recently that ended up in the Los Angeles Times, then re-edited it, adding more details, yesterday for the memorial-service booklet. No charge, since it was for a member of the extended family. Felt a little nostalgic.... Keep seeing a commercial for a woman who was the CEO of a professional-wrestling circus/soap opera and is now running for the U.S. Senate. "Okay, so it wasn’t a regular job," she says. Struck by the absurdity at first, but then by the oddly appropriate nature of her work experience.... I like waking up early on a Sunday morning...except for the part about being awake.... You gave me something. I understand....

Brain Dump

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Photo of the Week

This is not my face.

This is part of a sculpture that we have mounted in the backyard. It looks like stone here, but it's actually resin, I think. It was originally part of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade float. We know an artist who used to design all sorts of doo-dads for the floats, and he gave it to us when he was cleaning out his studio -- apparently not realizing it would be priceless someday. It's supposed to be one of those thingees (figureheads?) on the front of an old-fashioned sailing ship.

Some day, thousands of years hence, when some futuristic archaeologist is digging up bottlecaps and chicken bones in what used to be New Jersey, he or she will find this and put it on display in a museum, I imagine. Maybe they'll call it a goddess. Click it for a closer view if you wish to genuflect.

Word of the Day: invidious

invidious (adj)

Offensive, causing ill will or resentment.

"It takes -- that is, different abilities are required. You're making the invidious comparison, not I."
"Doctor, you have admitted Commander Queeg is sick, which is more than Dr. Lundeen did. The only remaining question is, how sick."
--Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

Invidious? Me? Perhaps. The jukebox in my head is playing "Jealous Guy".

(Invidious, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)

Much Ado about...Something

"Ye shall know them by their fruits."

The ancient, gnarled apple tree in our backyard is at it again -- dropping little green apples all over the lawn. By fall, it will be shedding red macintoshes -- lumpy, cancerous looking machitoshes with suspicious little holes. So I don't think I'm ready to go into the orchard business. They're ugly things, only appetizing to squirrels and ants. I don't really mind, though. Someone once asked me why we don't cut down the apple tree. It would make our smallish urban backyard more spacious, and the neighbors' huge evergreen would still supply some shade. But I said no. I like the idea of living with an apple tree. Apples are such loaded symbols: sin and temptation, but also love and life. Immortality. Health, luck, generosity. Desire and corruption. Cool computers. The Beatles. Sourness and sweetness. Rotten apples. Golden apples of the sun. Perfection and imperfection. Contradictions. They're a lot like people...like every person I know, including myself. So I'm determined to keep that tree.

8 Myths About Twists and Turns that Hollywood Wants You to Believe

The LinkBait generator creates headlines designed to attract googlers to your website. How does it work? "We have a cloud-based neural network algorithm that scans the internet to discover what people want to read about" they say. Whatever. Some of the resulting topics are a bit amusing:

7 things sororities have in common with unicorns
8 reasons to fear white people
8 ways marijuana can help you survive a plane crash
How to act like Sarah Palin
9 ways liberals can help a total sissy survive in prison
5 reasons MTV is the new Afghanistan
6 shockingly evil things about the solar system
8 reasons to fear hipsters
Why Avatar should scare you more than Osama Bin Laden
5 of the most horrible Tiger Woods quotes of all time
8 outrageous frauds involving Twists and Turns

Random Acts of Poetry

Journal Square

My tired feet circle the dry fountain.
Christopher Columbus, his back to me,
points forever at a doughnut shop.
Nothing to do here but sweat.

People sit expressionless,
like plants on the cool barriers,
staring, hording shade
on this radioactive plaza.

Shops have collapsed at the corner.
The Square is waiting,
its theaters looking back, back
even as a colossus is stirring.

Traffic idles, expectant at the lights.
The walk sign counts to zero.
Hurry, hurry -- a train is coming,
pulling time like a prisoner's chain.

Mental Map

Get L O S T again with this high-res map of the island. (Keep clicking it.) It reminds me a little of the Treasure Island map, except upside down.

Word of the Day: gravid

gravid (adj)

Pregnant, or full of eggs.

"The gravest problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a country stile lest, by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature."
--James Joyce, Ulysses

"The minute she'd settled into the seat next to him, her billowing widow's rig had got redisposed to reveal her neatly gravid waistline, at which, now, he nodded."
--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

"One slender hand was raised in a graceful gesture, gravid with meaning."
--David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

I don't have a beer belly (yet), but if I did, I think I'd call it my grain-grown gavidity gut.

(Gravid, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)

Photo of the Week

This is the portrait of me that was recently installed at the Metropolitan Museum.

Right.

Click it for the large-scale masterpiece effect. If you would like to be thus immortalized, hasten here, and you too can find eternal frame...I mean fame.