I haven't been so offended in weeks - or, "Tell me what you want, what you really really want"

Which Spice Girl Are You?
	You are Baby Spice. The world sees a shy, yet confident person when they look at you. You are empathetic and know how to comfort a friend instantly. You are sometimes given the reputation of being prim and proper, but your best friends know what a crazyfun person you are!
Find Your Character @ BrainFall.com

By acclaim

And why not?

• I wouldn't have to move far
• I wouldn't spend my entire first term campaigning for the second, because I'm smart enough to know that this next one is a one-term presidency if ever there was one
• I would take a page from Carla Bruni-Sarkozy's book and promote the American fashion industry while in office, because GOD knows I don't have the clothes for it, and I'll need Todd Oldham to step in and dress me up
  
• I would apply basic parenting rules when making governance decisions: i.e. clean it up yourself, tell a grownup when you've fucked up, no hitting, etc.
• Truly arbitrary decisions would be made via rock-paper-scissors. And the FIRST round would decide it - none of this best-two-out-of-three BS
• Any combat would be modelled on Jedi fighting - slow motion, with sound effects, winner to be determined via style points
  
• I would restore the country's reputation abroad, mainly by having bitchin' parties and inviting everyone
  

No, no, I'm kidding. Vote for Obama.

Yo Gabba Gabba just blew my mind

Do this for like 2 minutes and you will feel like Brian Eno. Multi-colored parsnips growing Peter Max hair and making Kraftwerk sounds.

I really do need to get a job.

This is not for you

I'm reading House of Leaves. Whew. Experimental horror novel. I don't think I'm going to be able to do anything else til I'm done.

Lucky for you, W00t found these fun children's books for you to occupy yourself with.

William S. Burroughs’ The Little Engine That Shot Its Wife

Justine And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by the Marquis De Sade

How The Grinch Stole The Best Minds of My Generation by Allen Ginsberg

Read about these and others on the W00t blog.

Also, you can amuse yourself, as the Toddfather and I just did, thinking up things that Complete Idiots shouldn't attempt. We came up with:

souffles
homeschooling
brain surgery
and tantric sex

Meemy-meme

That picture yesterday looks like the fruits of a weekend spent castrating clowns. Don't you think? Really they're juggling balls I made for the elementary school's juggling club. Balloons filled with millet. Anyway. Here's a meme that MotherReader tagged me with. I would do it on Pink Me, but then I couldn't talk about drugs and multicolored scrotums. Scrota?

What were you doing five years ago?
2003? That's easy. Unpacking boxes while WAITING for Zhou to be born. He was born June 3 - two weeks late and induced. We moved into this house May 7. I was large and psychotic. I mowed the entire lawn with the weedwhacker because we didn't have a lawnmower yet.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

1. Roast a chicken
2. Start taking pictures with my brand new long-awaited Nikon D40 as soon as the battery charges
3. Pick up Mao and Small Batch from school
4. Shower*
5. Score*

What are five snacks you enjoy?
Flaming Hot Cheetos
Pickled okra
Real licorice
Gummy bears
The other half the bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
Buy the school a science teacher
Buy every school a science teacher
Live in Africa half the year
Not clean
Pitch in with George Soros

What are five of your bad habits?

Too much time on the computer
Being the last to get up in the morning
Getting all OCD on the dishwasher
Gossip
Driving with my eyes crossed just to see how long I can do it without crashing into something*

What are five places where you have lived?
Baltimore
Cleveland
New York City
Provincetown
Soledad*

What are five jobs you have had?
Dishwasher
Director of marketing at an insurance finance company
Artist's model
Assistant editor at a medical publishing company
Special Collections Manager at the American Museum of Natural History

What five people do you want to tag?
AH, who doesn't do these things
Heidi, who might
Lori, payback for those 106 books (which was actually pretty interesting)
mb, because I'm curious
and ACW, because I haven't had enough profanity in my day yet*

*that is a lie

Mini-meme

Courtesy Compu-Diva, here's a little free-association meme:

1. Track ::
2. Snake ::
3. Assignment ::
4. Blockbuster ::
5. Bombastic ::
6. Adventure ::
7. First time ::
8. Aged ::
9. Grip ::
10. Shortcut::

1. Track :: shoe
2. Snake :: skin
3. Assignment :: desk
4. Blockbuster :: video
5. Bombastic :: Erma
6. Adventure :: Indiana Jones
7. First time :: out
8. Aged :: hippie
9. Grip :: death
10. Shortcut:: keyboard

Play along here.

The Current 106 Most Pretendy Books

Via Lori at Holy Buck, Fatman!, I give you the 106 Most Pretentious Books of all time. That should really read "The 106 Books People Most Frequently Pretend They're Going To Read... Or Mean To Read Because They're Supposed To... Or Just Keep in Mind For Next Time They're Really Bored - As of Now", because it's actually a list of the 106 books most frequently tagged as "unread" on LibraryThing.

Books I've finished are italicized. Books I started and then put down because life is too motherfucking short are struck-out. Books I myself mean to read are bolded.


* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

* Anna Karenina

* Crime and Punishment


* Catch-22

* One Hundred Years of Solitude

* Wuthering Heights

* The Silmarillion

* Life of Pi

* The Name of the Rose

* Don Quixote. Maybe. Cannot remember. I saw Man of La Mancha in dinner theater, though, and I'm pretty sure that counts. "To dream... the imposs... ible dreammm!"

* Moby-Dick

* Ulysses. I haven't read it, although Cousin A Prime thinks I would like it. One of these days I'll tune in for Bloomsday, when leading lights read it on the radio. I think it's on WBAI.

* Madame Bovary. It's something about gloves, right? Or was that Mary Todd Lincoln?

* The Odyssey. In GREEK, motherfuckers!

* Pride and Prejudice


* Jane Eyre

* A Tale of Two Cities

* The Brothers Karamazov. No, I haven't read it, although I've seen The Flying Karamazov Brothers juggle a bowling ball, a chainsaw, and a squid, all the while making jokes about socialism, so, again, I think we should count that.

* Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Despite the fact that the subject is right up my alley, and despite the fact that the author, Jared Diamond, did much of his research in MY library, I have never gotten past Chapter Three of this book.

* War and Peace

* Vanity Fair. I swear half this list is titles people remember from playing Authors.

* The Time Traveler's Wife. No, I ain't read it. But somebody gave me a copy... if anyone wants one.

* The Iliad. ALSO in Greek, bitches.

* Emma


* The Blind Assassin. Love Margaret Atwood, except that one about the woman who had an abortion and consequently thought she was a bear. So maybe I'll read this.

* The Kite Runner

* Mrs. Dalloway

* Great Expectations

* American Gods: A Novel

* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

* Atlas Shrugged. Lori agrees with me that this book is a piece of shit, but I am semi-engaged in a war of words with a commenter over my characterization of The Fountainhead as "pretty close to evil," so I will decline to disparage this one. Er, any more than I just have. Fuck it. Your Neighborhood Librarian shrugged.

* Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

* Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel

* Middlesex: A Novel

* Quicksilver and The Confusion. Love the crap out of Neal Stephenson, from Zodiac through Snow Crash, but the Baroque Cycle just wasn't snappy enough for me.


* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West. Good politics, but the same cannot be said for his most recent book, What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy, reviewed over on Pink Me. Awful.

* The Canterbury Tales

* The Historian

* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

* Love in the Time of Cholera


* Brave New world

* The Fountainhead. Gave me the creeps but Christina Ricci totally recommends it.

* Foucault's Pendulum. Just couldn't make it through.

* Middlemarch

* Frankenstein

* The Count of Monte Cristo

* Dracula

* A Clockwork Orange. And everything else Anthony Burgess wrote.

* Anansi Boys. This list sure is loaded up with Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson, isn't it? You can tell that it's culled from the libraries of online social networkers.

* The Once and Future King


* The Grapes of Wrath

* The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel

* Nineteen Eighty-Four

* Angels & Demons. GOD. I forced myself to listen to The DaVinci Code just so I could help patrons who wanted something just like it. I decided that I'd rather force the citizenry to read Marina Warner than force myself to read anything else by Dan Brown.

* The Inferno. I'm assuming this refers to the Divine Comedy, and in that case, I'd say I've probably read it. I must have, right?

* The Satanic Verses: A Novel

* Sense and Sensibility

* The Picture of Dorian Gray

* Mansfield Park

* One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

* To the Lighthouse. I was going to say the only Virginia Woolf I've ever read was Orlando, and that about 10 times, but I think we had to read To The Lighthouse in my one and only college English class. I AP'ed out of English, and it wasn't until I needed a stray 6 credits to graduate that I opted for a class called "From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf". It was summer. It was reading.

* Tess of the D'Urbervilles

* Oliver Twist. And I was in the musical at the St. Mark's CYO. "Never before has a boy wanted more."

* Gulliver's Travels

* Les Miserables

* The Corrections. Got a copy of this one laying around too.



* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Here you go. THIS book I actually intend to read.

* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time


* Dune

* The Prince

* The Sound and the Fury. Never have read any Faulkner. Kind of strange, because I like a) Southern fiction, b) alcohol, and c) strong titles.

* Angela's Ashes

* The God of Small Things

* People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present. The graphic novel version (A People's History of American Empire) is sitting on my bed right this minute.

* Cryptonomicon. SO good.

* Neverwhere: A Novel

* A Confederacy of Dunces. HATED this book.

* A Short History of Nearly Everything

* Dubliners

* The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel

* Beloved. I am going to get this on audio one of these days.

* Slaughterhouse-Five

* The Scarlet Letter

* Eats, Shoots & Leaves

* The Mists of Avalon


* Oryx and Crake : a novel. On audio, read by Campbell Scott. Oooooh.

* Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. See above RE: Guns, Germs & Steel.

* Cloud Atlas: A Novel

* Lolita

* Persuasion

* Northanger Abbey

* The Catcher in the Rye



* On the Road. I always smile when a young person comes in looking for this book. I love the thought of reading it for the first time.

* The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

* Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. But god, it was laying on my college boyfriend's desk the entire time we lived together.

* The Aeneid. In English. Uh, pals. My Latin always sucked.

* Watership Down: A Novel

* Gravity's Rainbow. No, but Bob read it, and that should count. I read The Crying of Lot 49, and I loved it, but I never could get through anything else Pynchon wrote. Hm. Although it looks like there may be a graphic novel version of Gravity's Rainbow, with Frank Miller on board. I could read that.


* The Hobbit. My dad had a nice slipcased edition of this book, with the runes all around the title and the maps on the endpapers. I figured out how to read the runes, and for a while I wrote in my diary in those runes. Prefigured the punishing Greek translations I had to do for my undergrad Classics major by, oh, ten, twelve years.

* In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

* White Teeth: A Novel


* Treasure Island. Listening to it on audio right now! Alfred Molina reads it, and his amazingly various pirate voices make me think that Gore Verbinsky could have saved a lotta money, just hired Molina to play Barbossa AND Davy Jones AND Bootstrap Bill AND possibly even Chow-Yun Fat. Gonna review it soon on Pink Me.

* David Copperfield

* The Three Musketeers


Unlike Lori, I did NOT take a Jane Austen class, ever ever ever. And I have never seen what people see in her. I can't even remember which ones I've started. I tried one a few years ago again. There was a carriage ride, and a ha-ha, and it was really important who rode in which carriage, and I just could not deal. In fact, I briefly considered naming this blog The Librarian Who Doesn't Like Jane Austen - I figured I would be the only one who fit that description.

Just not a classic literature type, really. All the classics on this list that I've read I read as a really young girl - like 8 or 9. After I finished all the Judy Blumes and Nancy Drews, I started in on my parents' bookshelves. Many other books that I read at the time for some reason DON'T make this list: Fear of Flying, for example. Tropic of Capricorn. The Complete Saki.

It's no wonder, is it.