Last night, while ensconced in my car, I caught the last twenty minutes of an NPR interview with Amy Tan from this last December. Friends, I thought I knew Amy Tan. I knew Amy Tan, beloved and bestselling novelist. I knew Amy Tan, prominent sufferer of Lyme disease. But I did not know Amy Tan like I know Amy Tan now: as a misandrist hero. It came up casually -- how easily I might…
"You thought I loved Rebecca? You thought I killed her, loving her? I hated her, I tell you. Our marriage was a farce from the very first. She was vicious, damnable, rotten through and through. We never loved each other, never had one moment of happiness together. Rebecca was incapable of love, of tenderness, of decency. On a certain warm day in summer Rebecca's thirst exceeded the bounds of propriety. When she asked a third time…
Previously in this series: How To Tell If You Are In A Noel Streatfield Novel. 1. You have one dream, and it is very small, and everyone around you wants to crush it. 2. Your grandest ambition is to open a small school with four chairs and three well-behaved students, and to someday own a vase with a flower in it, and perhaps to have a second dress. 3. You take that part about…
1. Why would someone say "Frankenstein. The rumors are true" about a Frankenstein monster? There are no Frankenstein rumors; it was a book. Frankenstein isn't like vampires; there aren't old Central European legends about errant Frankensteins living in the woods and hating gargoyles. There aren't any Frankenstein rumors. There is a Frankenstein novel. The character saying "The rumors are true" does as as he literally pulls a copy of Frankenstein off of a bookshelf. 2. Why is…
"Three mountain lion kittens born last month in the Santa Monica Mountains were inbred, a wildlife expert said, marking a troubling sign for a population penned in by the urban sprawl of metropolitan Los Angeles. Preliminary DNA tests indicate that the male and two females born in the Malibu Springs area were sired by an adult male and his daughter, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area announced Thursday...Two other kittens born in 2012…
There is a fervent -- yet, to my mind, deeply misguided -- young man at Ars Technica who has written an op-ed rejoicing at the news that Disney will be axing the majority of the Star Wars EU continuity titled, accurately enough, "Op-ed: Disney takes a chainsaw to the Star Wars expanded universe: And good riddance, because almost all of it is crap." I could not let this stand.
Oh God, oh God, Nicole let me do this week's Kids in the Hall Monday and I have SEVERE performance anxiety. We haven't done Ham of Truth or 30 Helens or These Are The Daves I Know or Hotel La Rut or any of the Buddy Cole monologues or even Mr. Stevenson (Mr. Stevenson!). I am hot and cold with indecision. But decide I must; I choose the secretaries. It agonizes me to have to pit "Is…
Thanks to "pure serendipity", Crook had chanced upon the largest collection of unpublished letters by the author of Frankenstein to be discovered in decades. The letters date between 1831, nine years after the death of her poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and 1849, when Mary Shelley was already unwell with the brain tumour that would kill her two years later, and show a woman who was skilled in…
A true gentleman sets himself on fire immediately upon a lady entering the room. A true gentleman never impregnates a kitchenmaid while there are fertile chambermaids in the house. A true gentleman never speaks to wolves, only foxes and bears. A real gentleman will always allow himself to be immured in his mother's tomb as soon as she dies. A real gentleman will lift a bus when anyone more feminine than himself wishes to cross the…
The Creation of the Human Neck "...And to finish, let's just put this hollow, damp, easily-infected tube right there, in the middle of the neck. That should do it." "Just one?" "Just the one." "For breathing and for eating, both?" "Yep. Two functions for the price of one." "Isn't that dangerous?" "Oh, almost certainly." "What if you accidentally used it for one function when you meant to use it for the other?" "Oh, something terrible…
If you give a mouse a cookie, your life will no longer be your own. You will never again know peace; you have already given in. He's going to ask for a glass of milk and you will give it to him, because you are incapable of acting in your own best interests. When you give him the milk (just say no, no is a perfectly reasonable response; why won't you say it?) he'll probably…
Some beasts were meant to have eyes; some were not. Starfish, which already operate in that terrifying and nebulous shadow world of animals who behave like plants (oddly enough, these are more frightening than plants that behave like animals), were not meant to. A starfish is a mouth wrapped in a hand. A starfish is a waking nightmare that moves by hydraulics. They are already sentient, living hands with a mouth at the center that spend their…
English teachers get all the glory. Ask a representative sample of people what teacher they remember the most fondly from their school days, who encouraged them to pursue a particular dream or a career, and I'm willing to bet a disproportionate amount name an old English teacher. And it is true that the majority of them are wonderful! (My seventh-grade literature teacher was a Buffetthead who read The Hobbit aloud to us and told us stories…
In a striking departure from convention, a local woman professes to dislike going to hospitals, whether for her own health or to visit an ailing friend. "Oh, I hate hospitals," she confessed to a group of relatives planning to look in on a cousin recovering from surgery as if they were going recreationally and wanted to know if she thought it would be fun. "There's just something about them that creeps me out," she added, as…
