Month: November 2013

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Caillou In Inappropriate Places II

Yes, I suppose this will become a semi-regular feature (here’s the first time), because, well, making fun of Caillou is an awful lot of fun! So join me as we follow Caillou into more inappropriate places!

Caillou reacts to Pepper Spray Cop!

Caillou hangs out with the boys in the trenches of World War I!

Caillou tries to help out during the Dust Bowl!
Caillou joins the cast of Showgirls!
Stay tuned for more whacky and inappropriate misadventures of everybody’s least-favorite follicly-challenged four-year-old!

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Sentential Links

Linkage!

:: So I ask again, who won World War II? Was it the Allies? The Americans? The Soviet Union?

I believe that the real victory of World War II came from the emaciated symphony of Leningrad. In a deeper sense, the real victories in life belong to those who never give up. (I followed a few links from Facebook and ended up here, a blog I’d never seen before.)

:: I read an article this weekend about this movie and how Bollywood has no history of Superheroes in their film industry or even in Indian culture. They had to build a mythology from scratch in order to sell their target audience on the idea of a hero with superpowers. (A Bollywood superhero movie? This, I gotta see.)

:: The key is that what I do is find topics to write on, and throw random thoughts in an electronic folder until the ideas start writing themselves. You ever read about a writer on a TV show or a novelist talk about dictating itself to them, rather than the other way around? It’s sort of like that. (Blogging used to be that way for me, but as I’ve made the decision that my fiction writing must be the focus, blogging has to be dug at and pried a bit. Strange.)

:: As you know by now, I have no use for books that are written according to a marketable formula, and containing no heart. Somewhere, sometime, a writer has to leave drops of blood on his or her pages.

:: A much shorter version of all the above is that I can put on $120 worth of clothes and shoes and be taken seriously almost anywhere I might want to go. So that’s what I do. Not everyone gets to do it. These facts are worth thinking about.

:: Goddman, I love comic books.

:: I am not one of those people who harp continually about how the series needs to be cancelled because it’s not as good as when it was one of the best series of all time, but how do you go forward without Edna Krabappel? (That’s the whole post, but I couldn’t agree more. Thanks for the laughs over four decades, Marcia Wallace!)

More next week!

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: I think that you can not name a single human pursuit that does not have, somewhere on this planet, a museum devoted to it. Case in point: A museum to French fries.

:: A bit of set-up here: The Wife’s car has satellite radio, which is pretty cool. We like the stations devoted to specific decades in popular music. Usually we stick the 70s and 80s, with occasional dips into the 60s. One night, I took her car to pick up some pizza, and I decided, on a lark, to listen to the 40s channel, whereupon I heard this song. I admit that my first impulse, based on my living in a more cynical time, was to laugh, but as it played and as I later listened to it at home, I had to admit a certain admiration for the music of a period when the default position in art was not “jaded irony”. There’s something to be said for such open honesty in art. Anyway, here’s a song called “The Old Master Painter”.


I’m not sure this is the version I heard that night, but it’s pretty representative. There are a bunch of them on YouTube.

More next week!

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All good things must end…even local breakfast joints

Terrific article about the closing of a beloved local restaurant in Indiana:

On the last morning, before the waffle irons went cold and the pictures came down, before the lock refused to lock, before the claw crashed through the roof, the old man paced.

Tap, tap, tap. Bud Powell’s aluminum cane led the way as he circled the floor of Bloomington’s Waffle House. His Waffle House.

That Wednesday in September, the owner didn’t know what to do with himself. The smell of frying oil, the same greasy perfume that had greeted customers for 46 years, wafted into his nose as he wandered past the vinyl booths. He sat down, then stood
up again.

Bud — everyone called him Bud — checked on the dwindling supply of breakfast sausage, peered into the nearly empty freezers, tried to explain to his regulars why it had to be this way.

“It’s time,” he said over and over.

Do read the whole thing. It’s a very good piece of writing. It seems to me that there needs to be a name for this mini-genre of writing, in which writers make you miss places you’ve never been.

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