Man Martin's Blog, page 163

Snails! A Slow-Paced Action Thriller Based on Actual Events

Potentially disease carrying Giant African Snails have been spotted in Houston, Texas.  - News Reports

Slim Hardman (Matthew McConaughey) is out riding the range, shirtless, when he notices the cattle are "acting funny over yonder."  He begins to form suspicions, and two days later investigates where he discovers snails!  He immediately spurs his horse and races back to the ranch, but then decides, what the heck, and slows to a walk.  He contacts his neighbor Trisha (Jennifer Lawrence) who just happens to be swimming laps in a revealing bikini, and asks her to take a look, "when she has a chance."  A few days later they ride out to check on the situation, and she says yes, they are definitely snails and possibly Giant African Snails.  (Cue dramatic music.)  She suggests he write a letter to the county extension office.  On the way back, they're caught in a sudden rainstorm and Trisha's sheer cotton blouse is soaked to her skin.  Tension continues to mount as Trisha asks Slim each day about the letter; first he's forgotten to write it, then he hasn't "gotten around to mail it," etcetera, as the deadly snails creep ever closer, ever closer...

UPDATE ON NEWS STORY: The Giant African Snails were misidentified.  They were actually Rosy Wolf Snails, a harmless indigenous species.

Home "Alone"

As much as I love my wife, I must confess I do enjoy the times she's gone and I have the house to myself.  I miss her, of course, but I've always enjoyed my own company, so I don't mind being alone.

And, to make sure I don't get too lonely, Nancy always leaves me with one or two little reminders before she goes.

"Do you mind picking up the  dry cleaning?"

"No problem."

"Oh, and return the library books.  They're in a bag by the door."

"Got it."

"And we're out of dish detergent and we need some bleach cleaner."

"I'll pick some up."

"And do you think you could plant those knock-out roses?"

"Check."

"And don't forget Zoe's ear-drops."

"I won't."

"And the check for the plumber and the cleaner."

"I'll take care of that, too."

"And there's a bag of compost in the carport, could you bury it?"

"Okey-doke."

So now I have a little list: dry cleaning, library books, dish detergent, bleach cleaner, ear drops, plumber and cleaner, compost.

It's almost like having her here.

Where You Can Find Me

Researching My Next NovelI'm reading a book of the same title by my friend and former teacher, Sheri Joseph.  It is a wonderful book, I really think her best yet, and draws you in all unaware into the lives of these believable but distinct characters.

The reason I write this particular blog, however, is not to praise Sheri's writing, as much as it deserves it.  The book is primarily set in Costa Rica where, my understanding is, Sheri finagled a paid sabbatical to visit for the purpose of "research."  Now this is genius.

My first novel was set in Georgia, my second in central Florida, and my third - currently being shopped around by my agent - in Georgia again.  Do you see the problem here?  I mean, Georgia and Florida are nice, but...  And the one set in Florida wasn't even the glamorous part of Florida, like, say Panama City Beach with all those cool water-slides and miniature golf and that restaurant, The Captain's Table, where you can get the all-u-can-eat fried platter.  No, it was central Florida.  Picture Gainesville, but without the hustle and bustle.

So I'm pretty sure my next novel is going to be about some guy struggling to return captive kangaroos to the wild, very eco-conscious stuff - that's the first chapter - but then he's in this Italian villa and there's lots of comic mix-ups and funny colorful characters - but then!  The discovery of a long-forgotten treasure map takes him to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt where he must uncover...  I won't give away the ending, but I'm pretty sure he'll be in London for the theater season, and maybe sample the night-life at Cannes.  It'll be a wonderful book, full of tears, laughter, and the sort of folksy humility for which I am so wide-spreadedly beloved.

Any backers?

Ray Harryhausen

The first time I saw a Ray Harryhausen movie, it was Jason and the Argonauts on Saturday afternoon TV living in Sandersville, Georgia with my sister Chris and mother, Mur.  Mur must've read something about the movie and that it was "educational" because I don't remember her watching much Saturday television with us.  Or maybe she was just drawn in when Jason started battling Harryhausen's winged harpies.  Throughout the movie, Mur provided somewhat disdainful commentary - she was well versed in mythology - but when Jason sews the dragon's teeth and an army of skeletons leaps up to fight him the three of us just watched in jaw-dropped silence.  Later, none of us could figure out how it was done.

There were only two other Harryhausen movies I "officially" watched, that is watched in the company of other people.  The others I saw by myself at one time or another on television - the cheesey scripts and cheesier acting redeemed by Harryhausen's marvelous animation.  No one ever watched a Harryhausen film to see the movie.  For example, 20 Million Miles to Earth is perhaps the most pointless story ever filmed.  A spaceship brings back a tiny critter - humanoid and reptilian, you get the idea - and it begins to grow.  That's it.  That's the whole story.  It starts small and gets bigger.  It looks pretty menacing, but it doesn't hurt a fly until the very last scene where it wrestles an elephant before being killed by sharpshooters or something.  I don't even think it even kills the elephant.  But no matter: you watch the whole movie enraptured waiting for the next appearance of the creature.

The other two movies I "officially" saw were Valley of Gwangi and Clash of the Titans.  From the title, you might think Valley of Gwangi was about marijuana growers but actually it was about these cowboys who find a whole valley of dinosaurs.  I must've been eleven or so when I saw that; I loved that movie.  At the time, though, although I loved watching the dinosaurs, I just thought it was the kind of special effects they "did out in Hollywood."  That the director just went to the art department and said, "Can you boys whip me up some dinosaurs?  I'm making a cowboy movie."  I didn't realize that all those films, Sinbad and Gwangi and Jason and Mysterious Island were all the same guy working endlessly on little wire-armature and foam rubber models - a tiny shift in a pterodactyl's wing, the half-blink of a roc's eye, then click with the camera and another tiny shift.  Of all the great stop-action animation films, only one, the original King Kong was not Harryhausen's work.

The last Harryhausen movie I officially watched was Clash of the Titans with Laurence Olivier as Zeus.  Sir Laurence must've been cussing his agent: an Oscar-winning, classically trained, Shakespearean actor upstaged by giant scorpions.  The reason I always specify I only officially watched three movies is that Harryhausen films are typically not the sort of thing you'd boast about seeing except - dang - they're impossible not to watch.

So anyway, the Great Harryhausen died yesterday, and instead of my usual drawing, I append a You-Tube compilation of his work.  (Sorry, but it'll begin with an ad.)  It's four minutes long and sort of exhausting, but if you find it exhausting watching this, think of the work that went into making it.  I wish I could say there was a special place in heaven for geniuses like Harryhausen, but I can't.  If there were a place just for people like him, he'd be all by himself.

How to Be "Ironic"

People often ask me, "Are you ever going to mow your grass?" and "What's that smell?"  Another thing they ask me is, how to be ironic.  The answer I give them depends on the mood I'm in.  Sometimes I say, "You want to be 'ironic?'"  Other times I say "'You' want to be ironic?"  I might even say, "You
'want' to be ironic?"  Mostly I just say, "What?"

The great thing about being ironic as opposed to being clever, witty, or even just plain funny, is that irony doesn't take any real effort; all you need is a set of quotation marks you can throw in at selected intervals during your conversation.

Consider this handwritten note pinned to a basset hound.

To Whom This May Concern: I am sorry about your dog.  I ran over it with my Prius.

How dull, how lifeless and joyless!  The person who gets this note will barely be able to stifle a yawn at the humdrum tone and lackluster prose.  "Ho-hum," he will mutter to himself, "This boob is as inept at crafting a note as he is at steering a Prius.  I shouldn't be surprised if poor old Sparky died of boredom."

Now take the same note with a pair of strategically-placed quotation marks:

To Whom This May Concern: I am sorry about your "dog."  I ran over it with my Prius.

Now you've given Sparky's owner something worth reading!  "What ho," will think the owner, "this callous rapscallion has the temerity to cast aspersions upon the very beast he has mowed down with his automobile.  Well, come to think of it, perhaps he does have a point.  Sparky wasn't much of a 'dog' at that, heh-heh."

See how it works?  Now instead of being simultaneously piqued and bored by your haphazard driving and dishwater prose, he's at first miffed but then won over by your swaggering charm.  Let's look at the same note one last time in the hands of a real master:

To Whom This May "Concern:" I am "sorry" about your "dog."  I "ran over" it with my Prius.

Now there's a letter worth reading!  The "concern" is calculated to prick the owner's conscience; how "concerned" could he be after all, if he lets his animals roam the streets untended to be picked off by any passing Prius?  And see how nicely "sorry" works with "dog;" can anybody be truly sorry over the demise of such a dubious specimen.  And lastly, "ran over."  Here is the masterstroke because it really causes the reader to ponder.  What is meant to be ironic in "ran over?"  Is it because cars do not "run" but "roll?"  Is it because the driver did not run over Sparky at all but got out and bludgeoned him to death?  Sparky's owner will be so bemused and intrigued grappling with all this, he may scarcely recall to give the dog a decent burial.

And there you have it.  How to be "ironic."  I hope you "learned" something.

The Coming Crisis in Personal Anecdotes

The other night I told the following story to Catherine and Drew; "I grew strawberries when Catherine was little, but she wouldn't touch them because she said they weren't fit to eat.  I said, 'Of course they're fit to eat, just look at the size of the snails on them!'"  Drew laughed, and Catherine said, "Good story.  You haven't told that one in a while."

This points out what I call the Anecdote Crisis, a situation more and more of us face as we enter middle age.  (I'm about fifty-four, so if I'm middle-aged, I should live to be one hundred and eight.)  Essentially, the problem is this, during our twenties and thirties is our peak anecdote-generation period, a time when interesting, comical, and ironic things occur at the greatest frequency.  Around age forty, as we establish routines and our lives become predictable and dull, the production of worthy anecdote material drops off sharply.  The pinch comes because it is precisely at this age we need anecdotes the most, to prove in effect, that though we may be stale and uninteresting now, our lives were once, if not fascinating, at least of passing interest to someone.

By the time we reach fifty, our store of anecdotes has been entirely depleted, and we are reduced to repeating stories to people who have already heard them or telling pointless and uninteresting events as if anyone gave a damn - such as telling a slack-jawed audience that you sometimes have oatmeal with raisins, and sometimes blueberries, if you have any blueberries on hand, but sometimes just with sweetener and butter, but a lot of times you don't bother with oatmeal at all, because it just takes too much time, so you just eat yogurt.

Fortunately, however, there is a third way, which spares you from either recounting banal experiences in excruciating detail or telling for the umpteenth time your favorite anecdote from your paltry store of personal experience: that is to just make stuff up.  Imagine the look of amazement on the faces of your friends and family when you reveal you and Paul McCartney shared a doobie in Cancun or the never-before-told revelation that aliens abducted you and took you to the planet Kloon where they needed your help programming their DVRs and where you mated with several of their females.

Making stuff up will ensure that your conversation remains lively and unpredictable, and that people will no longer shun you because you've told the same story two thousand times.  They will shun you for other reasons entirely.

Things I Was Promised that I Never Got

What with everyone going around all the time talking about how great technology is, what with these super-fast computers and automatic drip-coffee makers, no one ever stops to think about how disappointed I've been about all the stuff technology hasn't done.  I'll be fifty-four thirty-nine in a few more weeks, and those so-called scientists with their so-called ingenuity and all their so-called particle accelerators still haven't gotten around to getting some basic stuff accomplished, like for example jet packs.  By this time, everybody was supposed to have a personal jet pack you could just strap on and fly everywhere.  That would have been so cool, but where are they?  No where.

And how about space aliens?  Sure, we've got little alien skeletons and somewhere in Roswell, there's a whole alien corpse in a chest freezer, but on Star Trek, there'd be a new alien every week.  Lucky, most of them looked sort of like us and all of them spoke English.  Even if they were really strong or covered with scales or something, you can bet a human could beat them in a fair fight, if they had to put down their phasers to settle a bet for the Klonkin overlords.  And some of the alien women were really hot, too.  And they were wild for humans.  Whenever Captain Kirk ran across some kittenish little alien babe, pretty soon she'd be all over him asking him to teach her about this mysterious earth custom called, "kissing."

And how about talking dogs?  For heaven's sake, that ought to be easy!  Even Shaggy had a talking dog! Dick Dastardly had a talking dog - and he was one of the bad guys!  I mean, the dog wouldn't have to all the way talk, he's still just a dog after all, but he could talk a little.  Like, he'd have to start every word with an "r."  "Rerro," would be "hello," for example.  This is something that is way overdue and scientists ought to be working on instead of wasting all their time on malaria and stuff.

I'm starting to worry that these lazy no-good scientists are going to wait to the very last minute to come up with a way so when I'm dead they can saw off my head and keep it in a jar filled with chemicals and stuff and keep me alive until they can sew it back onto the hydroponically-grown body of a weight-lifter.  They've come up with all these new ways to boost testosterone, which I guess is a first step, but they better dang take care of that one, because at the rate they're going I'm never going to get a jet pack or a talking dog in this lifetime.  Actually, if they do that one thing, I guess I can wait for everything else if I have to.  Besides, alien babes would probably be more turned on if I had a better build and came from way back in the twenty-first century.  "Tell me about this strange earth custom called... smooching."

Amnesty International Decries New Zealand Ban on Baby Names

New Zealand... has banned the most outlandish baby names, CNN reports. So those looking to name their child "Lucifer," "Majesty" or "4Real" will just have to find other options.  Other banned names include: Christ, Mafia No Fear, H-Q, Rogue, Eminence.  - Sara Gates, Huffington Post
Frank McClellen, George Beatty, Ray Thurmond, Clarisse Chilsom
Dora Phelps, Tony Bowles, His Highness Pterodactyl Wallander Higgins, Molly Weaver, Polly Weaver
Sara Teasedale, Brad Dorsey, Tiffany Stewart, Doug Burdette, Victoria Price, Louis Merriwether
"The right to name a child is the most sacrosanct of parental duties," claims AI spokesperson, Eugene Thornwakker Oh Baby What You Do To Me Smith, in a public announcement decrying New Zealand's ban on unusual baby names.  "A society that takes this away, is a sick, sick society.  No government has the right to tell its citizens they can't name a child 'Monkey Face,' or 'Pop Tart,' or 'You Ruined My Figure You Little Bastard,' or even 'Percy' if they want to."

New Zealand mother-to-be, Googly-Eyed Bobble-Head Jones, brought the law to the attention of the human rights organization, asking their support to name her daughter, Googly-Eyed Bobble-Head.  "It's a family tradition," Ms Jones claims.  "All the women in our family are named Googly-Eyed Bobble-Head."

"The whole thing is completely unjust," says Ms Jones' attorney, Yo Mamma Marduke III.  "For God's sake, the places here are named things like 'Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turipukakapiki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­kitanatahu' and 'Blackball,' and they want to tell us we can't name our kid 'Jedi Master,' if we want to?  Give me a break."

To bring international attention to the New Zealand Law, an all-celebrity concert is planned for later this year, featuring Kyd Duchovny, Sage Moonblood Stallone, Prince Michael II and Blanket Jackson, Moon Unit and Diva Thin Muffin Zappa, Moxie Crimefighter Jillette, Tu Morrow, Jermajesty Jackson, and Bronx Mowgli.

Application Denied

New London, Connecticut: A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test. Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.  - ABCWe regret to inform you that we can not offer you a position with the Transportation Security Administration at this time.  Test results reveal you have an above-average IQ, which we feel would cause job dissatisfaction in the long term as you instructed passenger after passenger to step forward and raise their arms or opened suitcase after suitcase looking for deodorant larger than 3.4 ounces, or pretending not to be at least slightly more suspicious of the Arabic gentleman with the two-day growth of beard carrying the magazine, Jihad Today!, than the octogenarian woman with the walker.Thank you for your interest in working at Bob Jones University.  Your references confirm you are bright, inquisitive, and an independent thinker who is deeply curious about the world around you.  For this reason we are unable to offer you a job at this time.The US Postal Service screens all applicants for efficiency, speed, and accuracy.  You scored proficient in all categories; therefore, we will have to reject your application.Thank you for your interest in becoming my personal assistant.  I was particularly struck in your application by your concern for the welfare of children and your abiding respect for the intelligence and capability of women.  Better luck elsewhere.  Sincerely, His Holiness, Pope Francis

Apologies All Round

Less than three hours after their dog escaped from the backyard, Allen and Alison Holmes found out their 17-year-old pet Basie had been euthanized at a local animal hospital.  Basie suffered from a variety of health problems, but the couple insisted the dog "was not ready to go," WUSA details. In addition, the animal hospital's examination report indicates the dog was "alert" and "responsive."  Cases similar to Basie's aren't as rare as one might think. In 2010, a dog once hailed as a "war hero" was put down by a local Arizona animal control. The dog had been claimed by its owners after escaping from home, but was later put down after a worker accidentally took the wrong dog to have the procedure.  A Texas family's dog was also euthanized after several mix-ups with a local animal shelter in 2009. The animal was put to sleep before the family could pick it up. - Huffington Post
We are sorry to have euthanized your valuable trained parrot.  It was brought to the shelter by a woman who believed it to be an "extremely colorful mutant pigeon."  During its examination, the bird kept repeating, "Polly want a cracker, Polly want a cracker!" in a loud screechy voice similar to rusty nails being dragged down a chalkboard.  Since we had no crackers, we decided putting the bird down was the best for all concerned.  We sincerely apologize for our error.
Please accept our sincere condolences for the loss of your white mouse "Sparky."  When Sparky arrived in our shelter, the staff immediately agreed he was a delightful rodent.  Unfortunately, owing to a clerical oversight, Sparky was housed in a cage with "Captain Kirk," a reticulated ball python.  While eating Sparky, Captain Kirk asphyxiated and died.  A separate note of condolence was sent to his owners.
We regret the accidental deaths of your Sea Monkeys, Harry, Larry, Jerry, Mary, Barry, Terri. Kerry, Derry, Sheri, Clairey, Beriberi, Non-Dairy, Dysentery, and Frank.  We mistakenly placed the tank on top of a radiator and no one suspected anything wrong until we noticed the smell.  Please accept our apologies.
We are glad to report your pet Llama, "Sidney," is in fine shape and awaiting your arrival to pick him up...  and...  uh-oh. Wait a minute.  We just killed him.  Sorry.
Your pet tortoise, "Sam," has regretfully died in a tragic accident involving a scientific among our staff members.  Sam was a good turtle, and we're sure he will be greatly missed.  He met his end bravely, and his shell was capable of supporting the weight of an impressive five cinder blocks.
We regret the loss of your pet pachyderm, "Tiny."  We have no reason to believe he is dead at this time, merely lost.  One of our staff members said he had seen him just a moment before and "then he was gone."  We have distributed posters describing the elephant so he can be found and returned to the safety of the shelter.