Like Ambien, but Smuttier

In order to tell this story, I need to first make three points: 

1.  A while back I read the most fascinating article on two co-eds who make a very nice living writing amorous novels featuring dinosaurs ravishing helpless women.  Seriously.  Apparently, if something can insert into an orifice, there is a market for this kind of novel on Amazon. This was just about the greatest little bit of knowledge I learned in ALL of 2013.  I am absolutely FASCINATED by this phenomenon.

2.  I have started getting emails from one of those daily "Book Deals" sites.  It is pretty hit-or-miss, but every now and then they tell me something like American Gods is on sale for $.99, or a book is free and what can I lose? So it pays off, occasionally.  The rest of the time it is full of really crappy self-published stuff.  

3.  One of the awesome things about me is my ability to sleep for hours on end at any given time of the day.  I get this genetically from both sides.  I have inherited the McGill Cow Eyes, the Francis Bazooms, and BOTH the Johnson and Stone Nap All Dang Day Abilities.  But sometimes, especially when the medicine for Crazy Brain is being adjusted, I just can't fall asleep at night.  I am generally too tired to get up and DO anything, so I don't want to go clean or something stupid like that, I just need my brain to turn off.  I need to tire it out.


The other night I was exhausted, but my mind wouldn't stop racing.  I knew I was too tired to focus on a book I wanted to read, and hadn't unpacked all of the other books on my list, so I pulled up the email from the book deals people.  And there was nothing good on it.  It was all crap.  But then, I thought, maybe I can just find something myself!  So I went to Amazon on my phone, made the list start from lowest to highest, and started scrolling.

OH MY HOLY GRAVY.

Apparently anyone can publish a dirty book and sell it for free on Amazon. 

I was laughing so hard I woke up W and started reading him the descriptions and genres.  Did you know that there is a "Shapeshifter Erotic Werewolf Pack Animal" genre?  YOU ARE WELCOME.

"OMG That's in public."

He (in typical W fashion) told me to stop reading these descriptions because it was making him hate humanity and he wanted to go to sleep. 

I did not.

Did you know there is a "Held Hostage by Arabic Sheik" genre?  YOU ARE WELCOME.

SHANELLE and Malik.  I have no words.

 Did you know that there is a "Being Tied Up By A Billionaire While You Pretend To Be Someone Else" genre?  YOU ARE WELCOME.

"She can't help but confess her crime."

Did you know that there is a Dolphins For Men genre?  YOU ARE WELCOME!

There are so many dolphin books.  SO many.

 THIS ONE OH MY GOSH YOU GUYS I CAN'T.

FOR REALS, called "Her Tom, Her Lover."  It has four stars.

 I kept scrolling and scrolling and time passed and it was three AM and my brain started to quiet down.  I felt like I could finally go to sleep, just after a few more pages because these descriptions were GOLD.

And then I fell asleep.

And that's how, in Sunday School, when I went to pull up my scriptures, I learned I had downloaded a four-star self-published how-to-be-a-call-girl guide.  And a Jackie Collins story.

And W made me delete them both.

Double-Spaced and With Headers.

One of my favorite blogs to read is Snide Remarks. I like it because it is satire. And funny. And funny satire. Sometimes it is not satirical, but it is always funny.

Satire is great. Did you know that not everyone appreciates satire? True. Some people don't even realize that it exists. This is something that has happened since the beginning of time. One example comes from WAY back in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift wrote this treatise on how to solve the hunger crisis in Ireland. He called it "A Modest Proposal." It was about eating babies.
"A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."

The reason it was satire was because that proposal is not modest, but AWESOME. Swift, as many of you will know, was the founder of the understatement. Irish babies, before the famine, were totally living on potatoes and beer. Have you ever had grain-fed cattle? Delish.

Even earlier, though, the Latins had a whole format for satire. They frequently used straight-out humor to get the reader over the hump that occurs when the reader is subjected to a lot of preaching and dogma at one time. Sometimes it makes a better point to just use satire instead of saying something like "Man. I wish people would shut their pie holes about how awesome something (SOMEONE) is. " Those crazy Latins. You may also see some of their satire on Univision. Especially on Sabado Gigante.

More recently, satire has become a real tool in exposing real tools. Or tool-like situations. Have you read Catch-22? It is filled with satire and tools. My favorite part is that there is a character who is dead. His name is "The Dead Man in Yossarian's Tent." He is completely dead throughout the entire book. But Army still keeps him around. Because he is not dead on their rosters. It's funny because it's true! Except Army would not be that way today, because they are not bogged down in mindless bureaucracy and paperwork.

Some people don't like to read satire. It makes them feel uncomfortable. Some of these people are also the ones that take offense for people that are not them. Like when I say I want to canonize someone and, maybe, attend CourtneyCon that W is starting at the Provo Marriott. They get all "You are just hero worshiping and trying to make her love you."

For those people, I would suggest Lolcats.

(But not Rolcats. Because that is Satire.)

Why on Earth did I go to Grad School?

So, I made Jooj a dress. I have never made a dress before. It is quite unfortunate (the dress, not the fact that it has never been made)

During the dress debacle I thought about the whole "serious scholarly people who blog" vs. "me." And I think that there are a few reasons why my blog is neither profound nor intelligent nor free from references to poop:

1. Days of Our Lives. I am pretty sure Ayn Rand didn't watch the soaps. She was too busy being smart and philosophical. But wouldn't Anthem be better if it had a villian who wore an eye patch or a heroine who always had on just too much lipgloss? Yes it would have been.

2. I don't know that many words.

The end.

Dear Tiffany: Brits are Stupid.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I put an X by the ones I have read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X (Under Protest.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X (I would name a kid Scout if I were allowed)
6 The Bible (the WHOLE Bible)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X (LOVE.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X (12th grade. What up, public school!)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Not all of the sonnets, and not Cressida and whoever.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X (12th grade again. I liked that it had cursing)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X (12th grade. I did a lot of reading)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X (Man, between making out and reading, I had a full senior year!)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy X (So lame. That is how you know I am not a natural geek.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X (12th grade. Top five favorite books of all time.)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X (5th grade. So intelligent.)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X (She dies in the end.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X (Not about the magician.)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X (The lion is Jesus.)
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X (Ashamed.)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X (At least once a year)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X (Four Legs Good! Two Legs bad!)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X (LOVE.)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ( I think I actually read this one. Not sure.)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X (Every Year.)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X (Read in high school. Too young to grasp.)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X (9th grade. Still reference the conch.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X (Fig and I disagree on the surrealism.)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X (Top five favorites.)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X (SO recommend it.)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X (Poor Lenny.)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Actually on my list to read.)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X (Scary.)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Saw the movie. Enough.)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (Ew, no.)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (Tried about three jillion times.)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X (Ashamed.)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X (Hated it all thirty times I had to read it.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X (Better as a musical.)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I've tried so many times. Page five is a record for me.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Ew, no.)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X (LOVE)
80 Possession - AS Byatt X (Top five)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X (Lesbians!)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( I know I read this in High school, but can't remember if I finished it)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X (12th grade.)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X (LOVE)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (Isn't this the one with the bunnies?)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo