Books I like for $1000, Alex

As I’ve mentioned before, what someone enjoys reading is subjective. There’s lots of authors who I recognize as being talented and very good at their craft, but I don’t enjoy their work. There are also my favorites, such as Barbara Hambly/Hamilton, who are reasonably successful but not enjoyed as much by everyone.  Then there are also some authors whom I know personally, whose work I enjoy, and I would like to give them a moment.

(To authors I know whose books are not in this blog, the odds are good that I have not read yet them … my life is a wee bit hectic and I don’t get to buy/read as much as I would like. Mea culpa. If I read them and they are not for ME as a reader, I am too honest to pretend differently but that does not mean that your work is not EXCELLENT and won’t have a huge following. After all, I am not “into” Sue Grafton, and she wins awards and sell like hotcakes. I’m not into Anne Rivers Siddons, and she is both successful and the recipient of much critical acclaim. I don’t read Stephen King, because he is TOO good … it scares the shit outta me. See? Whether or not I am into a book/writer is not axiomatically associated with the quality of the writing.)

Although there are many good writers whose books are not for me, if I DO like someone’s work, it is always because it is well-written. Good prose may not be enough to turn my crank, but bad prose is anathema to me. As such, I can tell you if a book is “good”, but not if you will like it too.

Sorcha, who is implementing plans right now and can use some well wishes, has found some of my author-friend’s works and fallen madly in love. I like mysteries … but she is an avid junkie of the who-done-it. She bought some Kate George on my recommendation and was well pleased. She also fell in love, madly in love, with Sophie Kelly’s magical cat series.  So much so that she has stolen my ARC (advanced readers copy) of the third book and won’t give it back until she can buy the book herself. When I told Sophie of Sorcha’s adoration, she sent her a signed copy of the first book. There was a happy dance involved when she got it. Sophie Kelly gets Karma Points in the Syncretic Church of Non-asshats.

I recently read my friend Nan Reinhardt’s debut book, a “category romance” which is a genre deserving of more respect, and I liked it. I was also very impressed. First books (they tell me) are the hardest, and her work had very few “rough” spots. Speaking of debuts, I also found Hanna Brooks Olsen (via her mother) and really liked her first, self-published, book.

Even though I only started reading Judy Mays erotica to support her (she was under attack as a teacher because of her published work, which is bullshit), I turned into a fan 1) because I am a big ol’ pervert and 2) she can write the shit out of a story. Seriously, who knew werewolf sex was so hot?

I can also recommend Kiersten Hallie Krum, who just won an Emily Award, and Robena Grant, who is also starting to make her mark as a author.

Happy reading, y’all … no matter what kind of book rocks your personal boat!

Amazon has pissed me off

Sweet Babou and I decided back in January to get Amazon Prime. This meant that, in addition to our Netflix, we had even more selection of movies and whatnot streaming into our TV. Also, there was the wonderful “free” two day shipping … and I get enough stuff off Amazon that we would ship more than $80 worth, so it made good economic sense. Did it mean that we were aiding and abetting a very nasty monster? Yes. However, the ability to get electronic books and to receive goods that I didn’t have to drive to Indianapolis to buy outweighed my shame. There was also the perk of a lending library. Nice to borrow books from your couch, no?

No.

Turns out the lending library, and some other benefits, are restricted to ONLY the “main” account holder. There is no option for spouses or domestic partners who want to be Prime members as a household. I can get “free” shipping (which has economic benefits for Amazon as well) but I’ll borrow nary a book on my filthy “invitee” kindle.

This pissed me off.

I shared my vexation with Amazon:

“I have just discovered that my husband, as the primary account holder on Prime, is the only one eligible to borrow books from the lending library, among other things.  This is an asinine decision by Amazon. For one thing, I can read his kindle and will borrow books on it … but I have to deal with the inconvenience and insult that it won’t work on my own kindle. The whole point of paying $80 a year for prime was to save money, in the long term, with the benefits. However, since we feel we were tricked into believing it was a “family” plan, and we have no intention of paying an extra $80 a year just to have things on my kindle as well as his, we are planning on canceling our Prime membership when it comes up for renewal. Without the incentive of free two day shipping, I (as the family member who shops for 95% of the groceries and household items we use) will simply buy things here locally, for a couple of dollars extra. Considering how frequently we have shopped though Amazon in the past, this is going to cost Amazon a great deal more than the $80 a year that the company attempted to bully us into spending by withholding services. Frankly, I am willing to pay $160 a year on more expensive local items just to demonstrate my abhorrence of being nickle-and-dimed by a company worth as much as Amazon. Furthermore, I intend to spread the word, though all social media resources available to me, that Amazon Prime is not family friendly and that its benefits are very limited. There is NO reason Amazon cannot offer a way for spouses and domestic partners to share the Prime benefits as a household. Making customers feel cheated and belittled is NEVER a good marketing plan. If Amazon changes its policy and allows a joint ownership of Prime between married couples and domestic partners, then we would consider renewing Prime, but as it stands my husband and I feel that there was a bait-and-switch that leaves us deeply disgruntled.

Sincerely, Betty Fokker”

Harumph.

Calvin and Hoe-bess

Lilo loves her school library. She loves to peruse the bookshelves, and since she is reading at almost a 6th grade level (Hear that? That is me bragging, people.) she wanders over into the older kids reading material. It was there that she discovered Calvin and Hobbes.

Or as she calls them, Calvin and Hoe-bess.

I’ve told her, of course, that the tiger’s name is pronounced “Hobz”, but she has decided she like Hoe-bess better.

Anyway, she loves the comic, and is now tearing though my entire collection (OF COURSE I have an entire collection of Calvin and Hobbes). She reads them allowed to her sisters, although only Stitch is old enough to get the humor … some of the time, at any rate. The only “downside” is that Lilo’s vocabulary is progressing faster than her ability to pronounce the new words she is learning.

Yesterday my Sweet Babou stood up in such a way that the top of his butt crack made a brief appearance. Lilo cackled, and mischievously said, “Daddy! I can see your dell-clate heinie!”

This stopped Sweet Babou and myself in our tracks. WTF? However, it did not take me long to guess what she was trying to say. I have re-read Calvin and Hobbes many, many times and my memory quickly sent one strip up for my edification (thank you, Asperger’s syndrome, for that which thou hast given me).

Thus, I asked Lilo if she meant a “delicate” heinie, like Susie Derkin’s heinie? Lilo pondered a moment and asked, “Is that how you say it, then?”

After I could breathe again from debilitating guffaws, I replied that, “Yes, del-ah-cut is the correct pronunciation.” Lilo filed this in her memory banks for future reference, so she’ll probably say it the “normal” way from now on.

But I can promise it will be dell-clate for Sweet Babou and I, even if we are only saying it in our hearts, for the rest of our lives.

The Weight of a National Prejudice

There has been much to-do lately about an HBO documentary, “The Weight of the Nation”. It’s an ‘exploration’ of the American ‘obesity crisis’. It’s title, whether intentional or not, is an homage to the technically groundbreaking silent film “Birth of a Nation”, which presented the KKK as the solution to the American ‘crisis’ of autonomous (and thus dangerous) black people. In the HBO production, fat has become the enemy that is endangering/destroying the social body of American … and I don’t see how this can possibly do anything but cast fat people as walking symbols of poor health and representatives of the ‘epidemic’ infecting the country. 

Some people liked the documentary, seeing the film  not as an unknowing attack on the fat body, but as a warning that “this epidemic of preventable disease won’t be solved by invoking the mantra of personal responsibility and waiting for the food industry to put healthy people before healthy profits. It would take a public/private partnership of unprecedented proportions to get us back on track” as a result of the fact that “We’ve tolerated–even cultivated–a food culture that’s literally toxic. And we’ve engineered exercise right out of our lives.”

While I agree that making it so hard for schools to offer physical education and time to play (thank you funding cuts and testing-not-teaching mandates) and subsidizing grain, but not organic vegetables, adds to an American HEALTH issue, I cannot escape the irritation that fat is portrayed as an undisputed marker of ill health and is, all by itself, deadly. Because that is bullshit.

For one thing, being “fat” is NOT dangerous just by itself. As I have pointed out before, people are considered ‘obese’, and thus at serious health risk, when they hit 30 BMI, even though the correlation between health and weight doesn’t look bad until you hit 40 BMI; the diet industry, not the American Medical Association, came up with 30 BMI as the marker for naughty fat. The real culprit undermining health is a sedentary lifestyle. Fat people who exercise are as healthy as thin people who exercise, and thin sedentary people are as sick as any sedentary lard ass.

Furthermore, just eating veggies and running around make make you lose weight in the short term, but there is a REASON 95-98% of dieters have regained their lost weight (plus some) by five years. Your body is genetically prone to storing extra weight, or it is not. Obesity researcher Dr. Rudy Leibel noted one study which  showed, “ the average weight gain in the cohort (all slim people) after eating 5000 calories a day and not exercising, was only 6-11 lbs! After the experiment, they all easily went back to their normal weight without “doing anything”. This tended to suggest that the affinity to gain weight as well as the affinity to eat when no longer “hungry” may be genetic also.”

Let us not forget that non-genetic factors, like stress, poverty, ethnicity, sleep deprivation, and being a sexual/physical/emotional abuse survivor all increase your chances of being overweight of obese.  Shall we eradicate these people to restore national health, then?

Ignorance of these basic facts is why you read heartbreaking articles about people who, AS HAS BEEN PROVEN WILL HAPPEN MORE THAN 95% OF THE TIME, lose weight and then gain more back, blame themselves, shame themselves, then quotes a few doctors about how common this is, trumpets one study that shows exercise keeps lost weight off for a year (but no word on 5 years, huh?), and ends with the by saying, “With so many drawbacks, you might wonder if you’d be better off just accepting your belly rolls. But the perils of being overweight still outweigh the risks of yo-yoing. So how do you quit the cycle for good? Despite what you read in the tabloids, it is possible”, which is completely counter to the facts given about weight gain an the dangers of yo-yo dieting by physicians who were interviewed in the article itself! Multiple studies have shown yo-yo dieting wrecks your health. The few studies saying yo-yo diets weren’t dangerous were done on ANIMALS in lab conditions, not people. ARGH!!

I’m not the only one to have noticed that “The Weight of the Nation” is more likely to inspire fear and loathing of fat people, than anything else. Fat people already have plenty of people who despise them, so adding to that dogpile of hate with incomplete facts was really not something HBO really needed to do … because it is NEVER a good idea when one group of people are portrayed in popular culture as being a diseased blight on the larger social body.

The truth is out there?

I recently ran into a story about a mother of three who was innocently taking pictures of helicopters when she was detained by the police and harassed and had things stolen and falsely imprisoned and other horrific things.  I will admit, the tale did not ring true to me. I was skeptical because the story was retold by her lawyers, who are suing the city/police for $70 million. Then there is the fact that cops tend not to pester white middle class women taking pictures of landmarks, so that seemed strange. Moreover, she claimed they mocked her as a “tea bagger” and made fun of her right wing political beliefs. Curiouser and curiouser. Police officers are more conservative and more likely to vote Republican than the average. Police, in general, want to maintain social structures and see things as a either “right” or “wrong” and not so much with the shades of grey. Conservatives, as a whole, dislike abstract reasoning and prefer concrete simple answers. (warning: the link is to a critique of a study correlating low IQ with conservatism & prejudice. The critique is written by a conservative scientist so it was not gleeful about the results, and I am not advocating that all Republicans are stupid. My Dad is Very Conservative and his IQ is 180. However, he does think all things have  simple, concrete, right-for-everyone answer. He thinks if Welfare is eliminated and unemployment assistance curtailed then everyone will all get a job … brought by the Job Fairy, I suppose. He also embraces the “flat tax” idea which as been repeatedly debunked by economists. Again, he has a 180 IQ.) The reason most police lean right is not some conspiracy, it is because the job appeals to people who have an ideology of enforcing laws and social codes. Thus, I was suspicious of a story that portrayed them as left-wing wackadoodles.

Then I wondered to myself, “Would I be more willing to take it at face value if it were the claims of a black Muslim lesbian single mother being accosted by coppers for trying to vote?” Sadly, the answer is “yes”. That is shitty of me. Mea Culpa.

So what was the most plausible truth? Left-leaning websites were portraying her as a tea bagger would-be-terrorist, but what about the conservative media? So I sidled over to the seriously right wing New York Post despised by liberals for their conservative slant. Cops oppressing tea baggers would be manna from heaven for them. What did they have to say on this matter?

‘GUN NUT’ BUSTED AT BASE is what they had to say about it.

The New York Post left out her affiliation with the Tea Party and her worship of Glenn Beck, of course. Nevertheless, they did fill in the facts that she had been trespassing at the base more than once, and that Homeland Security had been alerted. Considering that domestic terrorist attacks primarily come from the right (even though the incidents are then dismissed as the random work of one insane individual by the popular presses, instead of being shown as the outcome of hate propaganda), police are justifiably suspicious of a woman in possession of assault rifles gathering intel on military instillations.

Do I think the cops were polite to her and handed her a lollipop? No.  I am sure they did not speak to her in a respectful tone of voice. I am sure they treated her like she was a “criminal”, because that is how most suspects are treated. Everybody lies to cops, and cops are leery of everybody. Since cops are not composed of angelic forces, I am sure than a couple of people who got their badges in spite of the fact they were bullies at heart took the opportunity to bullied her. And when she lost her shit in the courtroom and was remanded for psychiatric observation, I am SURE she did not like being restrained and sedated against her will. The body politic can punish and control the individual body, and it would no doubt be a nightmarish experience. I, personally, am sacred of that kind of authority and like all liberals I weep for the steady erosion of out civil liberties. But I am a loony lefty, and the conservative justices of the Supreme Court have ruled the police can strip search you and other happy stuff whenever the fuck they feel like it.

Turns out right wing extremists do not like it when authorities use right wing ideologies to restrain THEM instead of liberals, hippies, and leftist protesters. “Counterterrorism” measures makes them all crankypants when not used against Muslims, and it makes them wish to seek legal address for the alleged infringement of their civil liberties.

Who would have thunk it?

A cowpat pedicure

My friend Sorcha came up this weekend. Because she capitulated calmly to all Priss-Pot’s demands, he appears to have decided she must not be having an affair. Also, her acquiescence to his petulance has somehow convinced him that she must still love HIM. So he’s in the classic “honeymoon” phase of abuse.

She sees right through the bullshit, of course, but it allows her some temporary peace and quiet to apply for jobs and to continue to do everything she needs to do before she files for divorce. Her first husband dragged out their divorce for 4 years and $35,000 in legal fees, trying to keep her from escaping him. Hubby One was also a narcissist. She is beautiful and tries to please people, so she is the perfect co-narcissist (both a trophy for the narcissist’s ego and someone willing to take the blame for his unhappiness)… until she realizes what’s going on and how bad it’s gotten; then she leaves. A narcissist gets really, really crankypants when their victim is leaving and makes the separation a bitter hell.  I think that is why she was in denial about needing to leave Priss-Pot for the last five years – she dreaded another ugly divorce more than she hated him. But then Priss-Pot started being snarky to her oldest daughter, and his marriage was OVER that day — even if the dipshit doesn’t know it yet.

You do not fuck with her kids, sunshine. She will eviscerate you. It make take some planning and a veneer of chilly calm, but it’s coming. 

So the delay is not because she is reluctant to leave, the delay is because she wants to be smart about it. She has no intention of being bullied, tricked, or pushed around in this divorce, like she was in the first one. She is more than happy to start on the high ground but won’t stay up there by herself taking shrapnel from his lies, like she did with Hubby One.

Anyway, she told Priss-Pot she was going to visit me, and after a few days of whining about how anxious and sad it made him that she would be away from him voluntarily, he realized she was still coming up here so he decided to be sorrowful but resigned about it. He does an GREAT imitation of a martyr, y’all. However, since she no longer takes all the blame for his mental and emotional instability, it didn’t bother her in the least.

We had a great time. Sweet Babou made pulled-pork BBQ and was, in general, the model of the Best Husband Ever.  Sorcha and I played Scrabble and talked and laughed. Her youngest daughter, Gaia, was happy as a clam playing with Lilo, Stitch & Spock. All was good.

Sorcha and I even went for a walk. Well, it started out as a walk, but we wandered into a forest and it became a we-are-lost-where-the-hell-is-civilization hike. The only bad patch was when she threatened to beat me to death with a branch if I quoted Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” one more time. We even found a creek and went wading, which was good because I had cow shit on my feet. Eventually, we found a human habitation, and used her GPS on her phone to figure out the way home. We were gone a little over 2 hours. Today, my feet hurt, but I have no regrets (except for stepping in that one pile of cow shit).

She said being away from Priss-Pot was like being able to breathe again. She really needed that break, before she girded her loins, put on her poker face, and went back “home” to get things in order.

Good luck, Sorcha. I hope it is all good ASAP!

Bully for you

Mitt Romney was a bully in high school. His bullying is recounted by no less than 5 witnesses, some who have worked for Republican offices, and they all express remorse and shame that they either participated in the bullying or abetted it with their silent complicity. Mitt, however, laughs it off and says he can’t remember doing any such thing, but  “If there’s anything I said that was offensive to someone I certainly am sorry about that, very deeply sorry about that but there was no harm intended.” He also maintains he didn’t know his victim was gay. Yeah. There was no homophobic bullying in 1960 because no one knew what “gay” was. I buy that.

One of the witnesses openly called shenanigans on the idea that Mitt didn’t remember this  boyish prank. The witness went on to describe the incident as anything but funny: “I’m a lawyer. I know what an assault is. This kid was scared. He was terrified. That’s an assault,”.

Romney retained the bully’s heartless disregard of others well into adulthood. He was a looter in that blot on humanity, Bain Capital, and bragged that he likes being able to fire people.

I don’t like bullies.

They are asshats.