Nom de Plume

I was on the Seattle Pugs rescue site last night, and was so upset by what’s on the home page that I hauled Harry out from under the desk to snuggle with him.

In their words:

How could a person in their right mind let this happen? The owner of a puppy mill did this to this pug and many other helpless dogs in her care.

SEATTLE PUG RESCUE HELPS DOGS LIKE THIS AND MANY OTHERS.

This is our newest foster pug, Petunia. This 4-5 year-old female was just rescued from a puppy mill. She was on her last legs! Used extensively as a brood bitch for numerous litters, her injuries included a broken jaw that remained untreated for at least 9 months, mange, malnutrition, and open sores. She was left in a chicken cage with her fossilized puppies.

Since being picked up by a good samaritan and delivered to Seattle Pug Rescue, this sweet darling pug’s tail has not stopped wagging. She knows she is safe now, and will be taken care of.

Her recovery will be long and costly. Please donate to help pay for her care, and other pugs that need your help as well.

Thank you
Cathy Moore
Chairman, Seattle Pug Rescue

Update 7/27/05: Petunia is at Norton’s Ark Clinic being nursed gently back to health. She is already much happier, and eating better.

If you’d like to donate to the cause, more details are available here.

Seattle Pugs Rescue

Chick is a company that publishes comic books about how you’re going to burn in hell if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour. Elizabeth sent me a link to a sample comic this morning and I think I disappointed her. Instead of being offended, I was pretty amused. Actually, I laughed really hard. Now you can too. Happy Monday night.

Is it just me or does little Susy look like a sullen crack whore in the making?

Chick Tracts

Comparisons between Charlie Bone and Harry Potter are inevitable. They can both do magic. They both go to magical schools. They both fight on the side against good against evil. They both have the same titling convention. And the publishers have even designed book covers that evoke Harry Potter, with a similar font and cover art.

It’s an unfortunate comparison. Side-by-side, Charlie Bone seems a little flat, its characters less complex. But Charlie Bone is obviously for younger readers and the series really is imaginative and fun. The fourth book in the series, Charlie Bone and the Castle of Mirrors is the best yet.

Charlie Bone is Endowed, meaning he is one of the descendents of the Red King, who was a powerful magician a thousand years ago. Today, the Endowed are evenly split between good and evil. His aunts are evil and the people who run his school are evil. Each of the Endowed has a unique gift. For example, Charlie can enter photos and pictures, one of his friends can make it storm, one of his enemies can hypnotize people just by looking at them.

This story centers around the heritage of Billy Raven. Billy Raven (who can talk to animals) is an orphan who lives at the school. More than anything, he wants ot be adopted–and the Bloors, the evil family that runs the school has capitalized on this. If he spies on Charlie Bone, they’ve told him, they’ll find him a family. If he helps them, they’ll get him a mom and dad who will love him. They never have–and Billy’s wising up. Until they actually do get him adopted.

But his adopted parents are evil to the nth degree. Meanwhile, it transpires that Billy is really the heir to the Castle of Mirrors. With the help of the trustworthy Flames, cats who belonged to the Red King, he escapes. And the battle is on.

My one complaint about the Charlie Bone series is that the plots seem to center around liberating one of the good Endowed children rather than against evil itself. I never exactly know what they’re fighting against and why the evil people are evil.

We were totally prepared.

Lamb and Italian sausages, check.
Hot dog buns, check.
Corn wrapped in tin foil with butter, salt and pepper, check.
Plates, napkins, check.
Firewood, check.
Beer, oh heavens yes, check.

We piled in the outlaws’ rental car and headed up to Shilshole Beach for a Sunday evening cookout.

The weather was slightly cool and overcast. The water glistened as darkly as black oil under the gray sky, while the mountains gleamed in the distance. The air was perfectly, beautifully clear. Pam and I settled down with our books while Steve booted up the fire and started cooking. After the first course–the corn–we waited for the sausages. “I’m waiting for the sun to peek out,” said Pam, looking up at the sky.

So naturally, the sky obliged by pelting fat raindrops.

We were troopers though. Stood around in the pouring rain eating our hot dogs.

Most dogs were bred for something. Australian shepherds herd sheep, braving cold, wet weather and stampeding hooves. Labradors sniff out and retrieve birds and other game with their keen hunting instincts. Newfoundlands plunge into icy water to rescue drowning people and retrieve ropes.

And then there’s Harry.

Harry would get stepped on by a sheep. He’d last about 3 seconds in the wilderness by himself. And he can only swim if he starts paddling before he hits the water; otherwise he sinks. Yep, he was bred for one thing and one thing only.

To lounge.

Observe, if you will, my dog in his natural habitat.

Steve bought me a present on Vashon Island yesterday, and we’ve hung it in the bedroom. The picture doesn’t really do it justice, but it’s lovely.

Until I checked out Little Children, I didn’t know the movie with Reese Witherspoon was originally a book. I remember liking the movie, so I placed it on hold.

Let me just interject a note here. I’m one of those people who goes to movies based on books solely so I can say how bad it was. All the Harry Potters? The movies sucked. Any Hollywood adaptation of Jane Austen? Eeeuuww. Even Must Love Dogs? The movie REEKED and the book was pretty cute. The list goes on and on. But for Election, the story works better as a movie.

I never thought in a million years I would say that.

For those of you who encountered neither, Election is about a high school election gone awry. Overachiever Tracy Flick feels she’s assured of the election. Teacher Jim McAllister hates Tracy and urges Paul Warren to run. Then Paul’s sister decides to run because her girlfriend starts dating her brother. Tracy sleeps with a teacher. Jim cheats on his wife and fixes the election. Drama, angst, drama.

A fun read. But it makes me want to see the movie again.

I could just say this was fabulous and leave it at that–but, of course, that would leave you, Dear Reader, hanging. So before I start, let me just say again that it is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. Funnily enough, the first five pages bugged the hell out of me, with their stream of consciousness rantings on some Western novel, and I thought I wasn’t going to make it through another 341 pages.

And then all of a sudden, I was finished.

The story hinges around the illusionist David Blaine, who enters a clear box next to the Thames. His goal is to starve himself for 44 days, completely in the public eye. Television cameras monitor him 24 hours a day, while passersby and other curious folks can ogle to their hearts’ content. But what is his purpose? Why is he doing this? And what, precisely, does it mean?

Adair Graham McKenny spends the course of the novel trying to find out. Adair, to me at least, represents Every Man. He works at a nameless job in a governor’s office. He shares a Georgian townhouse with a charismatic, famous overachiever. And suddenly, Blaine’s actions both obfuscate and illuminate his own existence. He becomes obsessed not only with Blaine, but also with a mysterious woman named Aphra who is similarly obsessed. She suffers from migraines, is a “sniffer,” collects shoes. She cooks fabulous meals that she takes somewhere in tupperware containers. There are other strange characters: the homeless man who tells fortunes; the woman who warns him away from Aphra; the roommate’s intellectual girlfriend who first proposes that perhaps Kafka’s The Hunger Artist has something to do with the stunt.

He dips into Blaine’s history and motivations–a man who has the same concentration camp numbers tattooed on his arm as Primo Levi even though he’s not Jewish, a man who has the same eyes as Houdini, one of his role models. And the more Adair tries to understand the point of the self-imposed 44-day starvation, the more confused he gets.

Barker confuses us, too. Her relatively unstructured prose belies her very structured intent. As one of her character says about Blaine, “That’s his trip. And maybe — bottom line — you just don’t get the joke. Or perhaps what he’s doing is more complicated than you think. Maybe it’s the very multi-layeredness of the whole thing which is putting your back up. He’s confusing you. He’s challenging your preconceptions. You don’t like that.

Highly, highly recommend.

I’m not really sure why I checked this out from the library; the description emblazoned on the cover–”desire, memory, and murder on the bayou” in case you’re curious–should have warned me off. Two chapters in, I gave up. Maybe I’m not giving Oyster a chance, but it just bugged me. The dialect, the murkiness, the labored characterizations. I drowned.