The Name Game
I got this from Jim's Blog (http://jimnote.blogspot.com/2008/04/name-game.html).
1. Your Rock Star name (first pet, current vehicle):
Misty Bus. (hmmm)
2. Your 'gangsta name (favorite ice cream flavor, favorite shoe):
Vanilla Chocolate Chip Sketcher? Hmmmm
3. Your Native American name(favorite color, favorite animal):
Blue Cat? Black Cat? Green Cat? Purple Cat?
4. Your Soap Opera name (middle name, city where you were born):
Vivian San Mateo (not bad)
5. Your Star Wars name (first three letters of your last name, first two letters of your first):
Olira
6. Superhero name (second favorite color, favorite drink):
Blue coffee? Black coffee? I would love to be a superhero named Black Coffee! that would be like being the Java Head cartoon!
7. NASCAR name (first names of your grandfathers):
T.H. Harry
8. Stripper name (the name of your favorite perfume, cologne/scent, favorite candy):
China Rain M&Ms? Freesia Chocolate? Rose Allsorts?
9. TV Weather Anchor name (Your 5Th grade teachers' last name, a city that starts with the same letter):
Anthon Anchorage
10. Spy name (your favorite season/holiday, and your favorite flower):
Christmas Rose
11. Cartoon name (favorite fruit, article of clothing you're wearing right now):
Blueberry Jeans
12. Hippie name (what you ate for breakfast, your favorite tree):
Cheerio Cedar
13. "Adult film" star name (first pet, first street that you lived on):
Misty Pear Lane
Okay, your turn. Go.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
May Mid-Wilshire Writer's Club
Anyone who lives in the Los Angeles area who is interested, we are having a special speaker at our May Writer's Meeting. Norman Bogner is a seasoned author who will be coming to talk about writing the novel. He has had several books on the New York Times Best Seller's list and has also written scripts for television and film.
Our meeting is May 3 at the Fairfax Library on Gardner between W. 3rd and Beverly. It will be from 3-5 pm in the community room. Parking is tight so it might be a good idea to park a couple of blocks away and walk or take public transportation.
We would love to have you. Contact me if you have any questions regarding the meeting.
Cross posted in SEVERAL different places.
Our meeting is May 3 at the Fairfax Library on Gardner between W. 3rd and Beverly. It will be from 3-5 pm in the community room. Parking is tight so it might be a good idea to park a couple of blocks away and walk or take public transportation.
We would love to have you. Contact me if you have any questions regarding the meeting.
Cross posted in SEVERAL different places.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Literary Dealbreakers
I crossposted this on Blogger. Friend of mine on Tribe found this in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
It’s Not You, It’s Your Books
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: March 30, 2008
Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”
Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)
Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”
Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”
Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”
James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”
Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”
But how much of all this agonizing is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.” Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”
Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”
Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.
For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.
***
I think, for me, what someone reads is more important in a critique partner than it would be in a date, though I have totally lost all attraction to at least two men when one said he never read, and the only book he ever finished was by Howard Stern and the other one said he liked Hemingway. And I have noticed my esteem will go down for someone with the mention of certain other authors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
It’s Not You, It’s Your Books
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: March 30, 2008
Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about ... their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”
Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)
Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”
Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”
Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”
James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”
Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”
But how much of all this agonizing is really about the books? Often, divergent literary taste is a shorthand for other problems or defenses. “I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out,” Nora Ephron said. “Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.” Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor Books and the author of “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” essays about single life in New York, put it this way: “If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”
Some people just prefer to compartmentalize. “As a writer, the last thing I want in my personal life is somebody who is overly focused on the whole literary world in general,” said Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her partner, a green-building consultant, “doesn’t like to read,” Levy said. When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group. Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”
Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.
For most people, love conquers literary taste. “Most of my friends are indeed quite shallow, but not so shallow as to break up with someone over a literary difference,” said Ben Karlin, a former executive producer of “The Daily Show” and the editor of the new anthology “Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me.” “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.’”
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.
***
I think, for me, what someone reads is more important in a critique partner than it would be in a date, though I have totally lost all attraction to at least two men when one said he never read, and the only book he ever finished was by Howard Stern and the other one said he liked Hemingway. And I have noticed my esteem will go down for someone with the mention of certain other authors.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Action Movie Persona
Got this from a friend of mine and I got a kick out of it since I recently went to a workshop on archetypes:
In the Action movie of your life, what archetype are you?
1. Tragic Hero - Strong enough and smart enough to save the world but not yourself.
2. Reluctant Hero - Able to save the world but has to be convinced.
3. Side Kick - Instrumental in saving the world but not in the hero's spot light.
4. Extra - Not in a position to save or to help save the world and ok with it.
5. Comic Relief - Wise crackin, good natured, always cutting the tension.
6. Victim - Part of the world that needs saving.
7. Scapegoat - Blamed for problems of the world but not the real problem.
8. Anarchist - Not part of the plan but would love to see the world in chaos.
9. Henchman - Instrumental in destroying the world but not the mastermind.
10. Face of Evil - The one that strikes fear in the heart of men, the target (think Vader).
11. Mastermind - The real villain, the puppet master pulling the strings behind the scenes.
I'm pretty sure I'm the Comic Relief.
In the Action movie of your life, what archetype are you?
1. Tragic Hero - Strong enough and smart enough to save the world but not yourself.
2. Reluctant Hero - Able to save the world but has to be convinced.
3. Side Kick - Instrumental in saving the world but not in the hero's spot light.
4. Extra - Not in a position to save or to help save the world and ok with it.
5. Comic Relief - Wise crackin, good natured, always cutting the tension.
6. Victim - Part of the world that needs saving.
7. Scapegoat - Blamed for problems of the world but not the real problem.
8. Anarchist - Not part of the plan but would love to see the world in chaos.
9. Henchman - Instrumental in destroying the world but not the mastermind.
10. Face of Evil - The one that strikes fear in the heart of men, the target (think Vader).
11. Mastermind - The real villain, the puppet master pulling the strings behind the scenes.
I'm pretty sure I'm the Comic Relief.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Birth Date Stats
Got this from Sherri:
This is what you do:
1. Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday.
2. Find 3 events that happened on that day.
3. Find 2 other people who were born that day.
4. Find 1 holiday that is celebrated on that day.
I'm going to add a bit.
5. Find 2 other people who died on that day.
Because I'm morbid like that. <---- Yay, Sherri!
Here's mine.
1962 - NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
1994 - Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle.
1865 - American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina.
1564 - William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright (d. 1616)
1933 - Carol Burnett, American comedian
World Intellectual Property Day (since 2001)
1989 - Lucille Ball, American actress and comedian (b. 1911)
1984 - Count Basie, American musician and composer (b. 1904)
This is what you do:
1. Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday.
2. Find 3 events that happened on that day.
3. Find 2 other people who were born that day.
4. Find 1 holiday that is celebrated on that day.
I'm going to add a bit.
5. Find 2 other people who died on that day.
Because I'm morbid like that. <---- Yay, Sherri!
Here's mine.
1962 - NASA's Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
1994 - Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle.
1865 - American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina.
1564 - William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright (d. 1616)
1933 - Carol Burnett, American comedian
World Intellectual Property Day (since 2001)
1989 - Lucille Ball, American actress and comedian (b. 1911)
1984 - Count Basie, American musician and composer (b. 1904)
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
April Illuminata Out Today!
Get your copy! Red hot! Out today! Tyrannosaurus Press, a producer and supporter of all things science fiction and fantasy, has just sent out their April Issue of Illuminata. If you're interested in checking out this quarter's issue then go to the archives and click on the April 2008 issue (down at the very bottom). You might even see a couple of things in there by me.
;-)
Yes, this is crossposted everywhere.....
;-)
Yes, this is crossposted everywhere.....
Lemon Meringue Martini
So, I read about this drink in a magazine article from last fall/winter. It sounded yummy. It's basically vanilla vodka with limoncello and then roast a marshmallow to put in the drink as a garnish. Sounded great to me! So I Google the recipe online to see what else is online there are a lot of similar recipes under the same name. They're all a bit more complicated than the one I read about so I think I'll stick with the simple one. But thought I would post the others here. I love limoncello:
http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/main/cocktails/lemon-meringue-martini-recipe.asp
http://extratasty.com/recipe/2144/lemon_meringue_martini
http://www.drinkswap.com/drinks/detail.asp?recipe_id=4707
http://www.swankmartini.com/martini_recipes/lemon_meringue_martini.htm
Crossposted in a couple different places.
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