They aren’t even trying anymore.
You want my answer to today’s question? Read yesterday’s answer. Same thing. Two days in a row of pandering to the religious right by asking a question that will fish for the bible as a response. Yippee.
Alas, Babylon
Hot Rod
1984
Brave New World
See a trend? I do too. Both in my answer and in the question. I wonder how they will fish for the bible tomorrow. Someone at Jetpack or WordPress.com must be trying to rig a bet or something.
I ran out of bird seed. I need to add it to the grocery list for later tonight.
I can’t remember a time when I was this blah for the last two rounds of the NHL playoffs. Blah, I say!
The Conference Finals are over. It is time to review how my predictions did in round three, and to make my pick for the Stanley Cup Final. Over the first two rounds I had correctly chosen the winner in six of 12 series. 6/12 is terrible, but it is WAY better than my coin flip control group which has been correct in three out of 12 series. That is just pathetic.
So how did we do with the two series in round three?
Rangers vs Panthers. You know, this is what happens when you live in Boston and put your faith in a friggin’ team from friggin’ New York. Of course the Rangers lost. Assholes. You guys suck. That sound you hear off in the distance is me screaming in hockey related frustration. I hate the Florida Panthers so much that I cannot accurately put it into words. I hate them so much that I was rooting for New York. Argh! I picked the Rangers and was wrong. That puts me at 6/13. The coin, the prick, picked the Panthers. It is now 4/13.
Stars vs Oilers. I feel a little better about this one. I am ambivalent about the Stars and I kinda find the Oilers enjoyable. That’s why I picked the Oilers. The coin flip picked Edmonton too. That puts me back at 50% at 7/14, and moves the coin to 5/14.
I guess that means that now it’s time to make my pick for the final.
Panthers vs Oilers. As I previously stated, I hate the Panthers with the burning passion of 1000000000 suns, and I kinda like the Oilers. I am making this pick with my heart and not my head and I’m picking the Oilers. Let’s bring that Stanley Cup back to Canada, shall we? For the coin flip, heads goes to the higher seed, which is Florida. The coin flip is tails. That means the coin and I both picked Edmonton.
You heard it here first, kids. The Oilers are going to win the cup this year. Pretty please, at least. We have a long wait for game one, as the series doesn’t start until Saturday. Five days from now. Hey NHL… WTF is up with that? What is this, the NBA? Damn it!
We’re home and it’s Monday and we’re back to work. We’re both working from home, digging out from under a mountain of emails that piled up over the last week.
That also means we’re back to lots of cat photos. Everything is back to normal now.
Oh well.
This question is pandering to the religious folks, right? 95% of the responses are going to be the bible. I know it. You know it. We all know it. Insert my frustrated sigh here.
Three books… I don’t know if I can narrow it down to three. They’ve all had an effect on me to some extent or another, even the crappy books.
Okay, the first one we’ll go with came from my school days. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. I was born in the 1970’s and came of age in the 1980’s. The cold war had a big influence on who I was. I don’t think all of my friends were obsessed with imminent nuclear annihilation, but I sure as hell was. We lived close enough to a major city and, more frighteningly, a couple of air force bases and one army base that the chances of me and my family surviving a nuclear conflict was pretty much zero. When you’re 13 years old and have a vivid imagination and a bit of a dark side… well… that leads to quite a bit of near panicked fear. Alas, Babylon was written in 1959 and it tells the story of a town in Florida trying to survive the aftermath of world war iii. I was both terrified and fascinated by it. I forget what grade we were in when we had to read it for English class but I loved the book and didn’t sleep for weeks after I read it. I knew that the situation described in the book were not accurate by 1980’s nuclear capabilities (the bombs described in the book were wimpy by comparison) and it ignored the whole nuclear winter thing. Still, it made me want to read more post-nuclear fiction in some weird attempt to prepare myself for the inevitable.
On to book number two. This one also goes back to my school days. 8th grade, if I remember correctly, but it could be earlier than that. Hot Rod by Henry Gregor Felsen. This one hit me hard because there is an extremely graphic and violent twist in it. It was bloody and gory and I couldn’t believe we were asked to read it in school. At that point in my young, innocent, sheltered life I was not allowed to watch R rated movies. This type of violence was not something I was used to. The book was written in 1950 and was about teenagers driving souped up cars way too fast. You can probably guess what the graphic, violent twist entailed. This book clued me into the idea that a novel didn’t have to be PG rated. There was more to life than that, and books could give me a glimpse.
The third book I am going to go with is Weaveworld by Clive Barker. In my last year in high school I was exposed to the horror genre through a movie written and directed by Clive Barker called Hellraiser. It scared the every loving shit out of me. I was terrified, I was grossed out, and I was instantly obsessed with the genre. When I found out that Clive Barker was better known for writing short stories and novels I checked him out. I can’t remember if Weaveworld was the first of his books that I read. It might have been The Damnation Game, or one of the Books of Blood collection. I’m going with Weaveworld because it was the best of them all, by far. My new horror movie fandom morphed into a horror fiction fandom almost instantly. I tore through everything Barker had written up to that point. Weaveworld is amazing. It’s not really scary, though there’s some gore to be found. It’s actually more of a fantasy novel, I think. Really… it’s just a Barker novel. It’s a little of everything thrown into one super imaginative setting that no one else could have ever come up with. It’s very hard to explain. There’s one other item of note here. When I ran out of Barker books to read I needed to find someone else to hold me over until more books were released. That’s when I started dipping my toes into Stephen King. Yeah… we’re still drowning in that particular literary pool today. Talk about a master, right?
Okay, there’s three books. I could have mentioned 1000 others, and none of them are about a guy who is his own father.
Now that we’re home from our epic Disney World road trip adventure…
We’re starting to plan the next one…
and the one after that too.
I think we may have a problem here. Or not.
We are home.
The cats forget who we are.
2,747 miles round trip.
I’ll give you one. It’s silly and I share it with a little sarcastic flare, but for teenaged me back in the 80’s this was a big deal. I mean, the biggest deal.
When I was a kid I was pretty much terrified of girls. Specifically, I was terrified of talking to girls. The fear paralyzed me. When I needed to do it for whatever reason, school projects or dealing with a female check out clerk at a store or a waitress or something like that, I could manage but the fear would just ruin me.
I don’t know what I did to get over it. How did I overcome this fear? No clue. I did it though, and I am really thankful as without overcoming this fear I would not have just celebrated my 15th wedding anniversary. It’s kind of a big deal, you know?
