50BC09: Book Number 16

~ lobablanca

resistance

Yeah, I was trying to set up a clue or just a really bad pun at the end of my last 50BC09 post regarding the next book that I was going to read…but then I got side-tracked by my latest purchase, J.M. Dillard’s TNG novel, Resistance. I wasn’t really feeling all that well on Friday afternoon when I got home, so I had no plans to exercise. And there this little book sat, waving at at me from atop one of the many piles of unread novels I have strategically positioned throughout the house. So I thought, what the hell. I might as well see what it’s all about.

Let’s start with the most blindingly, glaringly, irritatingly obvious fallacy of this book (to me, at least): Beverly Crusher does not have green eyes.

You want to write a TNG novel and you can’t even get this very basic fact correct? You’re already in the red zone with me. Besides this fact, there are just so many things wrong with the newer TNG novels. This one, just like its predecessor, Michael Jan Friedman’s Death in Winter, takes place after Nemesis. So Data’s dead, Riker and Troi are on the Titan, and all is not right in the TNG world. You don’t want them to be this scattered or this scarred by such a dud of a Trek movie as Nemesis.

I will say this about the post-Nemesis TNG books I’ve read so far: Beverly Crusher gets far more attention now, even if it is by authors who can’t be bothered to invest the two seconds it would take to look at a photo of Gates McFadden and her very blue eyes. Death In Winter, in fact, was all about Dr. Crusher, and Captain Picard’s efforts to save her. In Resistance, Crusher and Picard are now lovers. Sadly, I must confess to a tiny sliver of puerile joy over this fact. I very rarely give a razzy rat’s romp about “shippers” or “shipping” or whatever the hell they call it. But this…this makes me happy.

Ick. I feel dirty making that confession.

As for this book’s main story? It gets a full-blown meh. The Enterprise must battle the Borg. Again. Picard must defeat the Borg Queen. Again. It was tired and trite, with smatterings of sad reminders that this is not the crew I love so dearly. Riker? Replaced by Worf. Troi? Replaced by a Vulcan counselor who hates Worf. Worf now owns Spot and the biggest scene in the book to feature Geordi LaForge is the one right at the beginning of Chapter One in which he deactivates and disassembles B-4 for shipment to the Daystrom Institute.

Am I giving too much away? Nah. I’m saving you from wasting your time on this lame Trek novel. True, it’s not a time-consuming read; I started Friday afternoon and finished yesterday evening. Is it worth it, though? I don’t know. If you’re really jonesin’ for some TNG reading, sure, give this a try. Or Death In Winter, which was better than this one, but still not that spectacular. Or go back to the early TNG novels, hunt down something by Peter David, and settle in for a really good journey with a still-intact crew of the NCC-1701-D.

Final score: 1.5/5.

I’ve already started my next book. It’s still not the one I was setting up the last time. I will say only this: His is the House of Pain.

Flashback Friday: Mickey Mouse Bar

~ lobablanca

mmbar

Here I sit, in the first week of June in the D.C. metropolitan area, staring out my office window at the murky gray mottle of sky that’s been dribbling down in spurts and deluges for the past two days. It hasn’t gotten above the mid-60s most of the week, and to top it all off, I’m fighting a low-grade cold with sandpapery throat and sniffles. And while summer is technically still slightly more than 2 weeks away, we all know that Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of what should be summer. Too bad no one informed Mother Nature of this so that she could switch to the summer playlist on her iClimate.

What better way, then, to combat these meteorological blues and blahs then to tap into one of the happiest of my childhood summertime memories: Behold, the Mickey Mouse ice cream bar. Not only is this an integral piece to my summertime puzzle, it’s as representative to me of summer vacations to North Carolina as Cheerwine is.

I don’t know why, but we only ever got these ice cream bars when we went to North Carolina. Perhaps my parents wanted them to remain a treat associated with visiting my grandparents. Whatever the reason, this gleeful little Mickey face has become synonymous in my mind with everything else wonderful from those trips to North Carolina: listening to my grandfather’s scanners chatter away like white noise; watching him work in his shed on whatever his latest hobby was, whether it was building grandfather clocks or ship models; the lingering smell of fresh laundry that burbled up from the drain hose in the backyard whenever my grandmother would wash clothes; helping her hang sheets out to dry in the steady breeze coming off the waterway; fishing with my uncle on my grandparents’ pier for so long that I looked like a little cooked lobster by the time we came back inside.

I can still remember the soft-serve consistency of the ice cream and how quickly it melted in the sultry summer air. I remember sticky little hands held up like stars at twilight, showing that I had finished my ice cream and was now in desperate need of a napkin.

I’d love one of these Mickey bars right now. Even more, I’d love to be back in those memories, if only just for a moment

You Really Bug Me

~ lobablanca

I just passed a cockroach on my way to the office kitchen. I’ve had encounters with roaches here before, including a particularly traumatizing incident that I previously documented on 06.13.05 in my Angry BloggerTM days. Ever since that morning, I have tried to stay as clear of the buggers as I possibly can, especially when I’ve yet to have my morning coffee. Of all the things I don’t want to do before caffeine, hearing the crunch of a chitinous exoskeleton against the sole of my favorite Docs is pretty close to the top of the list. Besides, this roach wasn’t moving, even as I side-stepped it. I figured it must have come in contact with whatever chemical that building maintenance uses whenever the roach problem becomes too pronounced. I figured it was dead.

I figured wrong. After I finished getting my coffee and making my morning oatmeal (all the while trying to suppress any images that so desperately wanted to pop into my mind of roaches licking the water spigots), I returned to my office…to get my camera. Yes, I was going to snap a photo of the dead roach to post here as a wonderful Friday treat. Yes, I know. I’m just too kind. And of course I was then going to scoop it up and toss it before any of my coworkers arrived and freaked out over it.

It wasn’t there. I know no one else picked it up, because at the time I was the only person on the floor. Just me and roaches. I looked around for it, but in a squeamishly half-assed way. Dead roaches I can contend with. Live ones? I’d much rather deal with house centipedes than roaches any day. So now there is a roach roaming near the kitchen. I should clock how long it takes before I hear the inevitable high-pitched panic that will ensue when it reappears.

Give Me Liberty…Or Give Me Free Will

~ lobablanca

It is the duty of every student to respect Liberty’s Statement of Doctrine and Purpose. They may not engage in any activity on or off campus that would compromise the testimony or reputation of the University or cause disruption to Liberty’s Christian learning environment.

Guess what Liberty University now considers to be compromising to their testimony. Nope, it’s not the evangelical porn club. It’s not even the Jews for Jesus pig roast.

It’s the LU College Democrats Club. You can read the entire e-mail sent to the head of the Democrats Club at theWashington Post. Or, if you’d rather read the news from a more fundamentally approved paper, you can read the article at the Washington Times.

Am I surprised by this move? Not one bit. After all, Liberty was Jerry Falwell’s baby. And as we all know, Jerry Falwell was many things in this life…but a good Christian was not one of them. Good hypocrite, yes. Good manipulator, of course. But I refuse to believe that he correctly represented Christianity with the hatred and castigation that he spewed throughout his lifetime. Let’s just review some of his “greatest hits” in his honor:

  • AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
  • It appears that America’s anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men’s movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening.
  • The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews.
  • There is no separation of church and state. Modern U.S. Supreme Courts have raped the Constitution and raped the Christian faith and raped the churches by misinterpreting what the Founders had in mind in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
  • Good Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.

That last one I added just because it represents to me the keystone of why people like Jerry Falwell get away with peddling their hate and ignorance to misguided masses: Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you exactly what I want you to believe. And since his death, his like-minded son has been running his legacy, including Liberty University.

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster I didn’t go to this Offred Reprogramming Center like I was supposed to. I’ve changed many of my opinions since I last blogged regularly. I’ve even changed many of my opinions regarding religion. But one thing that has not changed is my absolute intolerance for this kind of manipulative mind fucking. Jerry Falwell represented everything I saw wrong with organized religion, everything that I still find vile and reprehensible. I’m so very glad that I have met others beyond the scope of Falwell’s narrow and bigoted religious views who have helped me see hope for the future of the religious finding its right path in this country.

Unfortunately, however, schools like Liberty University (or worse…let’s not forget that Bob Jones University is still pumping out its own Baptist sock puppets) continue to mold young minds into the shape of religious perversion that these fundamentalists have decided is God’s will and God’s message.

Too bad Reverend Falwell can’t give us a little sign as to what that message should really be…

Accidental Malling

~ lobablanca

I think someone keeps stealing time from me. I always think I have more time to do things during the day…and then I keep coming up short. What’s up with that?

So this past weekend I ended up at the mall. It was a “necessary evil” trip…unfortunately, it didn’t include Kira Nerys or Odo (and if you get that geek reference, I’m imaginary high-fiving you right now). My part of the necessary evil was that I needed to take one of my watches to the jeweler for a new battery.

I hate malls. HATE them. It’s not just the overwhelming sense of so many people crammed like cattle inside one building (although that has a huge role in the enmity, since I do hate people). No, this hatred springs from the well of teen angst that drilled into my soul many, many moons ago.

Remember when everyone who was anyone in the teen safari was a mall rat? It was the cool place to be seen, the replacement hangout when skating rinks began to slowly fade into the ephemera of former awesomeness.

I remember when we finally got our own mall. I remember going there with my parents when it first opened. It was the summer before I started high school. I was a fat, fashionless introvert with acne and no self esteem. I was the hippopotamus to the mall rat lions. Teenagers can smell internalized inferiority like dogs can smell fear.

Going with high school friends made the mall slightly less traumatic. So did losing a lot of weight and no longer dressing like I was a lost member of the Von Trapp family. In fact, I dropped all color from my wardrobe minus black and purple. Lots of leather. Lots of silver jewelry. Lots of black nail polish. And, of course, this was the period of my life that gave birth to the aforementioned “sideways rooster comb.”

conan-comb

[Okay, this is a sad tangential moment for me: I saw a photo the other day of a famous person who styles their hair in a way similar to the sideways rooster comb. The famous person was Conan O’Brien. Whathafu?!? Seriously, see the front of his hair in this photo? Imagine this slightly higher, with bangs down to his eyes, teased out on the sides, and long in the back, but pretty much the same color. I don’t know who to feel worse for: my teenaged self or Conan O’Brien.]

Still, I knew I was a poseur. I was a private school honor society nerd to whom the public school life was as alien as Q’onoS would be to a Bajoran (it also didn’t help that I made jokes like this back then, too). I was less cool than public school band members (at least they went to a school big enough to actually have a band).

It wasn’t all bad. I had my little school clique. I had my Smurfy blue Chevette. I had Suncoast and Waldenbooks, both places wherein I would sequester myself for hours of uninterrupted geekery. But to this day the mall represents all those worries and fears that only seem important when you’re a teenager, but continue to haunt you well into your dotage (I am, after all, now untrustworthy according to Bob Dylan). It’s silly, I know, but these are all the things that flood over me the instant I near a mall. Apparently, I still carry around a kernel of internalized inferiority.

Want to know the real kick in the pants? I ended up forgetting my watch at home. So I hid out in the Borders Express for a while (this is what all Waldenbooks have become in this area), bought a Star Trek novel, and scurried out into the fresh air and sun before the mall rat pheromones even had a chance to permeate my clothing. Strangely enough, these pheromones smell exactly like Sbarro pizza…

Tigerific Service

~ lobablanca

I come to sing the rarest of songs here in America: praise for customer service.

This time the company in question is TigerDirect. If you’re a techno-geek of any magnitude, you simply must know about TigerDirect. They’re awesome. I’ve been ordering parts from them for more than a decade, and I’ve yet to be disappointed.

However, the time comes in every geek’s life when a return must be made, even to the best of stores. This return, though, was of my own bungling variety and not their fault at all. And so I went to their site and began the return process, fearing either retribution or incompetence (the former in response to me being a dimwit, the latter simply because that’s all I expect from customer service anymore).

The only way they could have made the return process simpler or more stress-free would have involved coming to my house and retrieving the merchandise in person. And that’s why I am here now, singing their praises. They understand that part of providing great service is making it easy to return merchandise.

So there you go: If you ever need anything computer-related for reasonable prices and reasonable shipping times, plus the added net of excellent return policies, then TigerDirect is the online store for you.

50BC09: Book Number 15

~ lobablanca

captivity

Okay, so I wasn’t completely honest when I said that I didn’t know what first drew me to Captivity by Debbie Lee Wesselmann. It was the spot varnish on the cover.

Sadly, I’m not kidding. I’m quite the sucker for well-placed spot varnish, and so I was instantly hooked by the spot-varnished chimpanzee eyes that caught the library’s fluorescent lighting so playfully as I passed by the New Release shelf.

For the most part, I’m glad that I let my soft spot for spot varnish dictate this pick. I also am a sucker for animal stories. I think I’ve already shown this by my propensity to pick up a book because it has a dog on the cover. SUCKER.

Anyway, this was a bit of an odd story, centering on the machinations of a make-believe primate sanctuary and its director. Wrapped up in the sanctuary’s mix of political and collegiate intrigue are the director’s personal issues, secrets, and wounds, all coming to surface in this perfect chimp-related storm.

I don’t necessarily think this one’s going to be for everyone. In fact, there’s only one person of whom I immediately thought in regard to recommending this book, and that’s because she works in a field similar to the one presented in this book, only with a different endangered species. The primary story is engaging enough, and there are several subplots that unfold along the way…but it really is all about chimps. Chimps at the sanctuary. Chimps from the director’s past. Chimps in laboratories. Chimps, chimps, chimps.

I’m not a big fan of chimps, so admittedly I felt my interest wane here and there. However, toward the end, I couldn’t put down the book (either because the story finally took me over or because I just wanted to be finished and moving along in my challenge). I feel a bit badly for not giving Captivity a more positive review because it’s really not a bad book. It’s just not going to be everyone’s cup of tea (not everyone likes banana-flavored tea, do they?).

Final score: 2.5/5.

I’ve got a bit of book blindness regarding my next read. Guess I’ll just have to wait to see what I’m seeing next in my scope…

Flashback Friday: Bean Bag Chairs

~ lobablanca
What other team would Loba root for?
What other team would Loba root for?

I can only hope that everyone around my age was lucky enough to experience the shear joy of shmooshing down into a bean bag chair when they were wee ones.

I adored my bean bag chair. It was cream and yellow-striped vinyl and emblazoned with a big graphic of Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I’m not really sure what message my parents were trying to pass along to me at the impressionable age of 3 with that particular choice…do you? 😉

My greatest memory of my Dopey bean bag chair is also perhaps one of the earliest memories that I can still pull up with scary clarity. It’s also the memory of one of my first really stupid moments. See, I was quite the curious pup, always poking around where I shouldn’t have been. My dad always tells me the story of how, not long after I first started walking, I kept going over and opening the drawer to one of the end tables in the living room to poke around. He and my mom would smack my hands away and close the drawer, but not long after I’d be back in that drawer. I was also a quick learner and apparently I had deduced that if I heard my parents coming down the hall, I needed to shut the drawer before they caught me. Too bad I wasn’t clever enough to also deduce that I should move my fingers out of the way before I slammed the drawer shut. D’oh! Glad I don’t remember that moment.

Back to the Dopey bean bag chair. It didn’t take me long to discover the zippers. There was one on the vinyl shell and another on the interior fabric bag that kept all the little Styrofoam beans together. I remember unzipping both and discovering the beans. I also remember then proceeding to gather up some of the beans and stick them into my ear.

Yeah, maybe giving me a Dopey bean bag chair was a prophetic moment on my parents’ part. Or maybe I’ve just been a big dumb ass for a really long time.

The weird thing is that I can remember doing this. I can remember watching my dad, who was standing in my room’s doorway but facing my mom and talking to her, which meant that he only had a peripheral idea of what I was doing. I remember watching his profile as he talked, while I sat busily sticking Styrofoam pellets into my ear.

Too bad I can’t remember exactly why I decided this would be a good idea. Needless to say, when my dad finally did look into my room, he was less than thrilled with what he saw. I also remember my mom holding my head to one side while my dad looked into my ear with a flashlight. I had stuffed so many beans into my ear that I ended up having to go to the doctor to have my ear canal washed out. At least I didn’t stick them in both ears.

My parents let me keep my Dopey bean bag chair. I have a vague memory of silver duct tape being added to the zipper though. I had that chair for years after that, well into my fat phase when I’m sure I smashed all those beans flat. Sadly, however, my final memory of this chair was of it resting on top of the trash cans in our back yard, waiting to be dragged out front for the Monday morning trash pickup.

Ah well. I’m sure somewhere in the extensive slide collection at my parents’ house there is a photo of me sitting in my Dopey chair. Should I ever get around to scanning my parents’ slides, I will be sure to post said photo here. No, the photo won’t be of me with beans stuck in my ear…

Lame Fox

~ lobablanca
She'd get my vote...
She'd get my vote...

Wonder Woman is a lame superhero. She flies around in her invisible jet and her weaponry is a lasso that makes you tell the truth. I just don

GenX-cessive: Man v. Food

~ lobablanca

You make me sick. Your entire havoc-inducing, thieving, whoring generation disgusts me.

Thank you, Principal Himbry, for that rousing diatribe against my beloved Generation X. Yes, this is my generation. And, no, I don’t think we’re an entirely bad generation. In fact, we’ve done some pretty cool things during our time on this planet.

But I come not to praise Gen-X, but to bury it…in my personal seething frustration. And I’m dragging you all down with me. What’s got me all in a frothy lather now? The Travel Channel’s show Man v. Food.

Hey, you've got a little something on your...oh, never mind.
Hey, you've got a little something on your...oh, never mind.

The “Man” in question is Adam Richman. His modus operandi is to travel to different regions of the country, highlighting their culinary delights and downfalls as he goes. Then he accepts whatever ridiculously indulgent “food challenge” that said region has to offer. Past challenges have included attempting to consume in one (sometimes timed) sitting:

  • One 72-ounce steak.
  • One 7-1/2-pound hamburger.
  • Five 24-ounce milkshakes.
  • One 7-pound breakfast burrito.
  • One meter-long bratwurst.

Now I’m not ever going to be mistaken for a highly religious wolf…but I do believe that gluttony is a sin. Especially when all around the world there are people starving to death who would be happy with a sliver of the food that Richman gorges on during each show. Hell, there are people right in our own freedom fry-loving U.S. of A. who are starving (oh, but don’t even get me on the topic of these waify little glamor girl tumbleweeds starving themselves on purpose and looking so frail that you just want to scream at them to eat a freakin’ pie, but you’re afraid the impact of the scream would snap them in two). Meanwhile, Mr. Richman is paid to regularly glut himself to the point of vomiting.

This show disgusts me in ways that I didn’t think were possible anymore. We’re so fat in this country that they have to make special extra-wide coffins for us. Do we really need shows like this? And is this the only way we can remain competitive with the rest of the world? Yeah, you might be home to more Nobel Prize winners, world-renowned scientists, and brainiac children, but we’ve got this dude who can eat a plateful of food that weighs more than a baby seal! USA! USA!

Give me a break. And people are defending this show, saying things like it’s our right as Americans to eat this way. Yes, for those of you unfamiliar with our Constitution, nestled between our right to trial by jury in civil cases and our right not to be cruelly or unusually punished is clearly stated our right to be obnoxious, fat nationalists. In your face, Queen Lizzy!

Sigh. Will this become another regular feature here at the lair: a semi-regular evisceration of all the things that bring down the overall cool factor of being a member of Gen-X? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve just been in a particularly snarky mood the past couple of days, for no particular reason. And this post has been stewing for a few days. Feels good to finally get it out of my system. See? Blog of Dorian Gray, Redux!