Oh come on. It’s been at least 3 months since I’ve posted this.

Never fails to crack me up.

Be yourself. Quit trying to be “one of the cool kids.” It never works out.

Oh, was that out loud?

You can tell this because I: drive a Toyota Camry, Nissan Maxima, or cheap SUV (i.e., Honda CRV or some such).

And because: I insist on driving like a total fucking asshole on the freeway after the sun has gone down.

Well, know what? You go right ahead! Me love you looooooooong time, in fact! You’ll be the one getting pulled over while I’m going “five over” in the cool sports car.

Thanks!

Fi-dollah!!

I stole this. So sue me.

Take the below list of books, bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. (If you read it for school, do you bold and underline? I’m not clear on this. I’m just going with underdline.) This list is purportly the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. (I have no idea what LibraryThing is nor who its users are.) These are the books that sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

I’m not sure I can recall exactly what I read in school. I’m old and that was a long time ago.

Oh well. Here’s my best shot:

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Never heard of.
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22 - Tried to read this 3 times.  I got less far each time.
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion - Never heard of.
8. Life of Pi: a novel - Never heard of.  But have you ever seen the movie Pi?  Really whacked shit!
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote - Had to read parts in college.
11. Moby Dick - Nope, never got around to.
12. Ulysses - One page.  Not enough booze to make this understandable.
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey - Parts in college
15. Pride and Prejudice - in high school.  Later read all Austen on my own. (And I still can’t find a husband!)
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities - I think but am not positive I had to read this in school.
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies - Never heard of.
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler’s Wife - No clue.
23. The Iliad - Some in school.
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assassin - Oh, liked this one!
26. The Kite Runner - stupid, predictable, sorta like John Grisham but Afghanistan.  Whatever!
27. Mrs. Dalloway - Think I saw the movie.
28. Great Expectations - Forced to read in high school.  Hated.
29. American Gods - What?
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - ?
31. Atlas Shrugged - Couldn’t get past the first chapter although I had no problem with The Fountainhead.
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books - Haven’t gotten around to it yet.
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex - I always get Middlesex and Middlemarch mixed up!
35. Quicksilver - Never heard of.
36. Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - No interest.
37. The Canterbury Tales - I don’t think so.
38. The Historian: a novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo - For school, I think.
47. Dracula - I don’t think I’ve ever read this.
48. A Clockwork Orange - Couldn’t deal with constantly having to flip to the back to figure out what the fuck they were talking about!  Liked the movie, though.
49. Anansi Boys - Never heard of.
50. The Once and Future King - A book about Elvis?
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible : a novel - Never got around to it.
53. 1984
54. Angels & Demons - Why would anyone want to read this?
55. The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) - College.  (Dante’s 52nd circle of hell: all the shoes I want yet I have no feet!)
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Nope.
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les Misérables - Don’t think so.
66. The Corrections - Disfunctional!
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - No interest.
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Loved!
69. Dune - Couldn’t get past the first few pages.  Hate flipping to the back of any book to look up the made up words!
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela’s Ashes: a memoir - Oh please!
73. The God of Small Things - sibling’s have sex - EW!
74. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present - Nope.
75. Cryptonomicon - Never heard of.
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners - Not after Ulysses!
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved - For school and before Oprah had that fucking list.
82. Slaughterhouse-Five - Has anyone NOT read this??
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Never heard of.
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake: a novel - Never heard of.
87. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita - 3 times
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything - Oh, I LOVE this!
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values - No interest.
98. The Aeneid - Perhaps in school.  Not sure.
99. Watership Down - Don’t bunnies die?  Don’t think I’ve read.
100. Gravity’s Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
103. White Teeth - White Fang…yes. White Teeth…no.
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

Read on my own and finished: 30
Read in school: 18
Started but didn’t finish: 5
Never read: 53 (half)

Is that good?

Now that I have your attention: Ever since reading some of the comments to my last post, I’ve been doing a lot of musing on food.

RW wrote: “As much as I like it I’d still like to see the first person who looked at the original pig wallowing around in the scum and the muck and went “Mmmmm, THAT’ll taste good!” Who the hell WAS that guy??”

And Earl said: “Who was the first person to figure out that oysters or lobsters tasted good?”

Which reminded me that I’ve wondered for years about the egg. Who decided that we should eat this thing that shoots out of a chicken’s butt?? And not only eat it in it’s pure-egg form (scrambled, fried, hard boiled, whatever) but also that we should put it in stuff. I mean there would be no quiche nor frittata nor miracle hang over cure without the egg! (OK, I realize that eggs don’t really come out of the butt. So do they have vaginas???)

And what about cake? How can there be cake without aborted chickens? And then you need butter for the cake. And butter comes from milk that comes from um like the inside of a cow! Who decided to try milk? Who decided to turn it into so many wonderful products such as butter and the god of all foods: CHEESE?

I think perhaps I’d like to write a book on the history of cake. I don’t usually read non-fiction because most of it is a major snooze fest (with the exceptions of Freakanomics and The Tipping Point both of which I loved because they are entertaining) but I think perhaps I could pull this off. I mean, I already have the snappy title: “Does a Chicken Have a Vagina?” I could have gone with “The History of Cake” (very dry, and no one wants a dry book about cake), “Let Them Eat Cake” (been done before), “My Chapeau for Your Gateau” (too French).

Do you think I could deduct my cake bills as work-related expenses?? (Or perhaps my Weight Watchers bills?)

Do you ever have one of those evenings you enjoy so much that you can’t wait to do it again but inevitably the second time is a disappointment? Were your expectations too high because of the initial experience? Or if the first experience had been more like the second, would you not have been dying to repeat it?

Saturday Felony Joyride and I decided to go back to Perbacco. We died and went to pig heaven after our first Perbacco experience. I couldn’t wait to go back. As FJ said, he never wanted to leave. We used going to see Sam Shepard’s “Curse of the Starving Class” at A.C.T. as our excuse to go back. It was really just an excuse. I declared in the car that if Perbacco were open during the day, we would drive straight there and skip the play. FJ concurred.

It turned out to be a play not to be skipped. Talk about dysfunctional family.

But back to the pig. We arrived at Perbacco promptly when the door opened and immediately ordered martinis with these fabulous olives that the restaurant makes in-house. I don’t know what they’re called, but they’re a very vibrant green color and aren’t briney. Instead they’re buttery. A perfect compliment to Tanqueray 10. (I usually have a twist rather than olives because your standard olives just ruin the taste of good gin.)

We were ecstatic to see Pig Boy still doing his salumi magic behind the bar but a bit disappointed that our bartender from last time no longer works there. The new bartender was nice enough (he gave me extra olives for my ‘tini) but the service was less than stellar. Inattentive is more like it.

We started with the salumi sampler platter which was just as fabulous as we’d remembered. And the always-awesome Pig Boy had some “face meat” waiting for us. We didn’t even have to ask. He remembered! We were also given a very generous ahi appetizer on-the-house. Next we did a squid salad. It was OK. Squid is always, well, chewy, and this was no exception. Then we had a wonderful agnolotti filled with roasted veal.

Then it was time for entrees. The quail that we went crazy over last time was no longer on the menu which we thought was a good thing because we wanted to try new dishes. Boy was that a mistake. Both of our entrees were supremely disappointing. In fact, if I was basing my opinion of the restaurant solely on those two dishes, I would never go back. I had lamb chops with braised chard and some sort of large beans. I asked for the lamb medium-rare. It was overcooked. There were only about 5 beans on my plate. Granted they were large beans, but come on, I love beans! And then there was a giant pile of chard. Chard is good but shouldn’t be the focal point of a dish which this clearly became since a) there was so much of it and b) the lamb was overcooked and disappointing.

FJ’s entree was not any better - big-eyed tuna. Granted I have zero experience with big-eyed tuna but isn’t all tuna supposed to be rare? Perhaps I’m just used to seared ahi. This was more like medium-well big-eye. It was also seriously lacking in salt. I honestly cannot even remember what else came with the dish.

The great thing about San Francisco being a city of restaurants is that if you are having a bad experience at one, you can get up and go to another. This is exactly what we did. We left Perbacco and went over to Cafe Majestic (scene of the dinner for the most recent anniversary of my 27th birthday) and had the cheese course followed by foie gras ice cream! Oh, and plenty of wine. As we sat down, they were just starting to play “All About Eve.” (They always show old movies in the bar.) FJ declared that we wouldn’t be there until the end of the movie. Next thing we knew, Phoebe was taking a bow in front of Eve’s bedroom mirror.

Moral of the story: go to Perbacco for martinis, salumi, and pasta. Skip the entrees. (Oh, and don’t let a bad experience ruin your night. Get up and go somewhere else!)

Easy: email his father.

Yep, that’s right: tell his daddy on him. Send his father all the details and then say, “I’m calling the Police.” Don’t threaten to ruin his career or get him deported. Simply state, “I’m calling the Police.” Daddy is smart enough to figure it out.

Thank god Al Gore invented the internet. You can find all sorts of information utilizing that wonderful series of tubes!

A note to all you would-be psychos out there: it is particularly easy to find information if you have an uncommon name and if you diviluge certain details about yourself. Case in point: you told me that your mother is a science professor at XYZ college. Now, I happen to know that XYZ is a very small school. I also happen to know that your mother is Russian, so even though she does not use the same name as your father, I found her on the second hit on gawgle. She’s one of only two Russian science professors at XYZ. According to her online bio, she received her PhD at Vanderbilt. Hmmm….I seem to recall you telling me that you spent some time in Tennessee… Oh, and guess what: there was a picture of her and you look just like her!

I elected not to send Mommy the same email. This time.

Peace at last.

And I’ll say it again. You really really shouldn’t mess with me. Unless you are prepared for me to email your father (yeah, that’s a good one!) and then call the police.

I’ll be more specific when the smoke has cleared.

Let’s just hope their aren’t any old KGB ties. (Yikes, didn’t they like poison that guy and shit??? OK, if you haven’t heard from me by Tuesday, please contact the proper authorities. But don’t fuck with me.)

Earl recently turned me onto one of the funniest things I’ve seen in quite some time: Eddie Izzard bits set to lego “animation.”

Here is “Cake or Death:”

What can I say? I’m easily amused.

The thing about death is that I just can’t reconcile it in my mind.

I mean I just can’t reconcile that the rest of the world goes on.

I will give an example.

Around this time of year, three (2 years? I’m not positive) ago, my grandfather passed away. He was 89? 90? (OK, something like that.) He died in his sleep. My father found him. That was unfortunate but compared to watching my 60-yr-old mother dying a very ugly death from cancer, WE ALL WANT TO DIE IN OUR SLEEP!

So Grandpa lived his entire life in the small town I grew up in. He had been wanting to die (if you can call it that) for a few years. Most of his friends had passed on. He wasn’t “dying” but still had the problems that really plague the old.

Grandpa had been a volunteer fireman as well as active in a number of organizations - Shriners (I snagged his Shriners hat and all I can say is that it is SUPER SUPER cool!), Jesters (sadly, I cannot find a website for this organization but I know they have done a lot of good), whatever. Mostly it was the Fire Dept. So when my dad found him, he of course immediately called the paramedics who all knew the family. So then when it was time to arrange the funeral, the Fire Dept pulled out the circa (OK, I’m not sure the exact year but it was REALLY FUCKING OLD) like 1915 fire engine. Yeah, I’m not really exaggerating.

So we all lined up at the funeral home. 1915 fire engine (with Grandpa’s casket in back) in front of the procession (how fucking cool is that??). Me in my Lexus with Mom, Dad, and Sis behind. Cousin with his wife and kids, then Aunt and Uncle, then the Ambulance (yeah, the town’s ambulance with lights flashing) multiple other “official” vehicles with lights going. It was not more than a mile to the cemetery (grave-side service only) but when people that we passed on the street saw us, they just stopped and waved. It was incredible.

Then we pulled into the cemetery. And there must have been a hundred people there. I didn’t know but five. It was weird. Yeah, just weird. Of course we had front row seats or whatever. There was some sort of “preacher.” I zoned out. Small town cemetery. Flat as a fucking pancake and not a goddamn tree in site. I distinctly remember that I could see the road from my seat. People were going by. Just driving by going about their business. This person’s death had no effect on their lives and frankly, little on mine.

It was there and then that I truly got it. Or got something. You died. Your loved one died. The love of your life died. EVERYONE ELSE JUST GOES ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS.

I haven’t slept well sense. I shouldn’t say I haven’t slept well. I haven’t wanted to go to sleep. The world goes on while I’m sleeping. I’m missing it. Even if it’s on the other side of the world that the world is going on, I can’t quite wrap my mind around it that it’s still going on.

And it will go on and on and on when I’m dead.

And how am I fucking going to deal with anesthesia???