Things I Do Not Want

An ass shelf

This is simply unhygienic...

"all the other chicks that are married to my husband have their hair just like this" by natalie dee

nataliedee.com

Maybe it's wrong to laugh at this, but I just read two memoirs by ex-FLDS women (Carolyn Jessop and Elissa Wall), and even with all the horrors that FLDS women and girls face, I still had to wonder - what is with that hair? Who in the hell decided, "Hey, this looks good. Every FLDS female over the age of 12 should do her hair exactly like this from now until the end of time!"? I don't know of any other cult that has its own hairstyle, unless you want to count 1970s Hari Krishnas. And what a godawful, bizarre hairstyle it is. How much Aquanet do you suppose these ladies go through in a year? I think we've found the sole cause of global warming, folks.

The Worst Books I've Ever Read Part III

No, this is not a character from Shutter Island. This is someone who was forced to read Shutter Island. First he lost his hair, then he lost his mind.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

As I mentioned a few months ago, this has been made into a movie by Martin Scorsese. But not even that fact could alter my opinion of Shutter Island.
Frankly, nothing could alter my opinion of Shutter Island. If I was subjected to aversive conditioning so that every book other than Shutter Island made me vomit on sight, I still wouldn't reread it. And if someone forced me to watch the movie with those Clockwork Orange eye clamps, I would try my hardest to astrally project myself out of the theatre.

It's not that this starts out as a bad book. Not at all, in fact. It begins as a very gripping noir thriller, part psychological drama and part classic detective story. Two U.S. Marshals set out to a remote island that houses the criminally insane, in search of an inmate who mysteriously vanished from her cell. The story delves into the roots of violence, the individual and collective trauma caused by WWII, and barbaric aspects of the U.S. penal system. But twenty pages from the end, I started to wonder how on earth Lehane was going to wrap up all the disparate threads he'd been tossing out. "Is this actually going anywhere?" I wondered.

Then it went somewhere. Somewhere retarded.

Beware.

The Worst Books I've Ever Read Part II

9 out of 10 cows hate this book.

Under the Dog Star by Joseph Caldwell

I can't recall the specifics of this novel (character names, setting, etc.), which I read when I was maybe 16 or 17, but I can remember that it was awful. AWFUL. Not one memorable - or even vaguely interesting - character graced the entire book, and it was basically just a cringe-fest from beginning to end. A sad but abrasive widow lives in an isolated farmhouse with her two teenage kids, a boy and a girl. To make ends meet, she invites a teenage drifter to live with them and do some farm chores. Despite his lack of charm, this urchin proceeds to seduce the entire family, including the cows. How could anyone resist him? The aroma of manure and hay, the grubby fingernails, the way words like "hyuck" trip off his tongue?

I can't remember how Under the Dog Star ends. Not that it really matters. The coolest ending in the history of fiction couldn't redeem this creepy mess.

The Worst Books I've Ever Read Part I

Nightmare Flower and When Darkness Loves Us (short stories) by Elizabeth Engstrom

I read these when I was about 12 or 13 years old. Being a fan of Joan Aiken's gothic short fiction for young adults, I thought Engstrom's might be the next step. Wrong-o. Instead of the sustained eeriness I'd already come to expect from artfully crafted horror fiction, I found:

• a story about a woman trapped for years in a cave system very close to her farm. She gave birth to her daughter alone and raised her in the caves because no one thought to look for her down there. She finally got sick of eating blind fish, so she made a backpack out of lichen and strapped her baby into it. Then she crawled up a well-like tunnel to daylight, inch by inch. It took her a month, and she had to survive by eating slugs and sucking the water out of moss. Srsly.
• a story about a mentally handicapped woman without a nose. By the end of the story she has a nose, but you really don't want to know where she got it.
  
• a story about an experimental community in which every resident's heart and breathing rates are in synch with an electromagnetic pulse that sounds somewhat like the Taos Hum.

I don't recall many details of the title story in Nightmare Flower (thank God), but it involved a carnivorous plant, a new house, and a pregnant woman. I think you can piece it together.

These premises could maybe be worked into something magical by more gifted writers (imagine if J.G. Ballard had written the cave story!). But poor Ms. Engstrom just didn't have the goods. The characters were stiff and soulless, the plots so absurd that they could only be appreciated on a camp level. "Lichen backpack! Ha!"
At least, that's what I thought. Nightmare Flower was actually nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in '92, and When Darkness Loves Us has recently been reissued (Engstrom is even doing a book tour to promote it). More evidence that someone up there hates us.

"Give me a failure pile in a sadness bowl."

To enjoy this bit even more, check out "The Fast Food Industry's 7 Most Heinous Concoctions". The sadness bowl is #4.

This public service announcment has been brought to you by people who pee on their feet

Brazilian environmental group SOS Mata Altantica is encouraging people to pee in the shower to help conserve water, and they've put together this thoroughly adorable and thoroughly gross ad to spread the word. Sorry, but I've got a line in the sand - and this would be it.

LoL Ew Part Deux

Please forgive me for this, but I have to elaborate on the WTF Canned Goods in my last post. Like Paul Lukas of Beer Frame fame, I just couldn't let it go - I had to know more about foods like "Pork Brains in Milk Gravy".

Here's what I found...

Pork Brains in Milk Gravy is made by Armour and Company, which despite the British/Canadian spelling was actually a Chicago company until quite recently. In fact, it was the largest slaughterhouse in Chicago around the time Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle (and as you may know, that means their products were roughly as safe and uncontaminated as an open sewer in Chernobyl). Armour has the distinction of poisoning more soldiers than any American food company of the past three centuries. Armour also produced Dial soap with byproducts of its meatpacking business, which I guess is better than doing the Tyler Durden thing, and added a mild disinfectant to make it one of the most sanitary soaps on the market. Oh, the irony.

Who eats canned pork brains in gravy? Well, these guys do, but I don't think they enjoy it. Other than that, canned pork brains appear to be intended solely for entertainment purposes. Could have something to do with the fact that each can contains about the same amount of cholesterol as half a ton of fried jumbo shrimps battered with egg yolks and pure lard.

Canned pork brains may also function as a muse: Someone has written a pretty good poem about them.

The Armour website has a page devoted to disaster preparedness, because the folks at Armour are saavy enough to realize that people will probably not consume large quantities of their products unless every other foood source on the planet has been utterly destroyed.

Hollywood Creepiness

Tom Cruise once said to Matt Lauer,"The thing is, Matt, I know the history of psychology. You don't."

In a Toronto TV interview this week, Cruise said that when he first read the script for Valkyrie, he thought, "Wow. Is this true?"

Better drop the psychology and work on your other history for a while, guy.

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I mentioned in my review of Synecdoche, New York, that the movie begins with the death of Harold Pinter. Pinter died this week.

Granted, he was sick for a long time, but it's still kinda spooky.

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I watched a gameshow tonight that made me wonder, WTF is WRONG with people?!?! It's G4 Tech's Hurl!, in which college girls engage in competitive eating rounds interspersed with rides on mechanical bulls. The first to puke loses. I have a lot of problems with this.
First of all, competitive eating pisses me off. We live in a world in which the majority of people don't have enough nutritious food to eat, so wasting it on spectator eating is a grossly wasteful thing to do.
Second, college girls already have purging issues. This does not need to be reinforced in any way.
Third, it's just disgusting. I don't see the entertainment value in slow-mo replays of girls vomiting. Is this show aimed at some fetish market that I (thankfully) don't know about?!

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Movie Review: "Seven Pounds"

What is it?: A holiday feelgood movie that doesn't make you feel good.
What's with the title?: Dunno. Possibly the cumulative weight of various internal organs.
Summary: Will Smith, Rosario Dawson, schmaltzy music, yadda yadda yadda. It's Magnificent Obsession crossed with Pay it Forward. Pretty awful.

This movie suffers from many things. Poor script, derivative plot, nondescript characters, a few implausiblities. But what killed it is a device that I have despised for many years: The Dead Wife. Everytime I see it used, I imagine something like this exchange between the screenwriters:

Writer 1: "Y'know, I just don't have time to give this script justice. The characters are undeveloped, the plot is full of holes. This guy...he's a self-absorbed douche. I mean, how could any moviegoer possibly relate to him in any way?"
Writer 2: "Just throw in a Dead Wife. Works every time. People will be so busy crying, they won't notice the dodgy ending we've got for this thing."
Writer 3: "Done. Let's play some golf."

Other movies that have fallen prey to Dead Wife Syndrome: Photographing Fairies, The Mothman Prophecies, Good Will Hunting.

The Dead Wife worked in The Prestige for a very special reason: A Dead Wife was not the character's primary motivation. Any need to avenge his wife's death was quickly overtaken by ego, stubborness, and greed. That's how you do it.

This is by Natalie Dee, but it basically sums up my own experience...