Who knew?

Who knew he's a black guy?

Holy Moly!

The Internet is good for something after all! Check out what I came across on the web, a photograph that actually appeared in an old issue of National Geographic:

One dog goes one way, the other dog goes the other way, and this guy's saying, "What do you want from me?"

He looks like someone we know.

Oh-ho! Without the beard...

In Non-Sequitur Question News...

Will the new Terminator movie answer the question of what happened to Sarah Connor's iguana?

Whoopsie...

So...I've been sick for the last few days. Like, as sick as I've been in years. Sore throat, deep and painful cough, nose both crusty and runny, and even my eyes got into the mix---Kaiser's physician's assistant told me it was viral conjunctivitis.

At least it wasn't bacterial? Whatever---it's still goopy and gross.

The cough has been worse at night, as this compounds the difficulties breathing: my throat gets worse because my mouth opens when my nose closes, and then the cough convulses me awake, covered in drool. Awesome picture.

Last night I picked up some dextromethorphan-only cough syrup. I filled the cup and gulped it down.

Nothing.

I knew it would take upwards of forty minutes to kick in, to when I would get a little dopey, chest relaxed, and then head to bed. So when I mentioned 'Nothing' a second ago, I mean that it was doing nothing an hour after having swigged it.

Every time I coughed it was one of those deep, nearly never-ending types. Now it was really late and I needed to get my ass in bed, so I chugged back another shot of the syrup, brushed my teeth, and slinked off to bed as Corrie watched episodes of "Bones" on Netflix.

Whenever it was she came to bed I had a coughing fit. Had I been asleep? As I convulsed in the dark, a colorful lattice shimmered in my field of version. With each cough it intensified, and it was when I noticed that one of the lattice structures was a pot-leaf that I learned I'd inadvertently dosed myself.

Whoops.

From that point on I would go through patterns of 90 minutes "asleep" and 40 minutes "awake", with those quotes being necessary because I'm not sure there was a whole lot difference between those two states last night.

For a lengthy time I was a member of the investigative team at the fictional Jeffersonian from Corrie's "Bones" show. Half the time I was a trainer of the young whelps, showing them how to read the breaths from the recently deceased. The other half the time I was the conduit through which the dead breathed. If only the young interns could record my breathing. Each breath was from a different person.

I moved out to the couch at some point, probably because I was self-conscious about my routine: breathe, breathe, breathe, coughing spasm, snoring fit, loud fart, turn over, repeat. I remember Tux looking comfortable on the couch and not wanting to move him, and since the blanket that's out front is small-ish, I figured I could curl up on the big half between him and the edge.

Legs curled up, barely covered under a lap blanket, I got back to my whacked out training routine. Tux never budged.

Lucky for me, today was a conference.

"Sorry. He's got stink-d---."

"I smell guacamole. You gotta smell this and tell me what you smell!"

So we finally watched The Interview. I didn't think it was bad as the critics who dismissed it after the whole hacking-debacle. It had it's moments.

What I'm really trying to say is: you need to check out "Freaks and Geeks" like I need to check out "Breaking Bad"---in the words of Barry the Baptist: "SHARPISH!"

Something I Missed that Could Have Meaning

I saw a fantastic bumper sticker that I hunted down on the interwebs and am going to purchase in the next six months, one for each of us, but not necessarily for our cars (you may do whatever you wish with yours, but I go easy with the stickers for Goldie...). During the interwebs hunting I came across a wild article from 1966 titled A Journey into the Mind of Watts.

With such a title and time period---less than a year after the race riots---it seems reasonable that it could have been written by our late (for a decade soon enough) pal Hunter S Thompson. Turns out, if you've already followed that link, you'll see: that's our boy Pynchon.

Pynchon's life has been a little less publicized, you might say, than Hunter's, but it is established that he lived in the Los Angeles area and in Mexico during that time period, and when you read that article you can tell that he's been to the neighborhoods he mentions. Hell, shit hasn't changed that much in the 'Hood, and the availability of LSD in Hollywood is probably less widespread now than when Pynchon wrote his piece, but hen mentioned it with an air of authority on the matter.

Reading the piece itself is certainly reminiscent of Hunter's prose: the anti-brutality point-of-view; the knowledgeable drug references; the unblinking first person voice of a brave whack-job person who's spent time on the street in the neighborhood talking to folks.

That got me thinking. Both guys could have been in LA at the same time, surely, but during that specific time, Hunter was in San Francisco rolling with the Hell's Angels. Moreover, Hunter went to East LA to write a piece about the police gunning down a Latino reporter at the request of an acquaintance he befriended in Colorado, Oscar Acosta, the fiery Chicano lawyer and activist from East LA. (That piece is very good and serious, without the Gonzo panache: "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan".)

Anyway, I got kinda off the tracks there for a second. Birthdates. That's what I wanted to look up. That what I was interested in---how two of my writer heroes stack up in the cosmic birthday scheme.

May 8th is Thomas Pynchon Day---it's his birthday. Makes sense. The year was 1937. So, 5/8/37 for TP.

July 18th is the day that Hunter joined the air-breathers. What year? 1937. So 7/18/37 for HST.

Seventy-one days separate the birthdays of Thomas Pynchon and Hunter Thompson.

Done with Tsukuru, Starting with Ximen Nao

So...

We've all been busy. That's life. I've been getting holiday newsletters and had a crazy idea about making a newsletter that would be entertaining and fictitious, but I've been too busy to get around to doing anything with the idea, barely even breaching the topic with Corrie, who thought it more amusing than practical.

Anyway, because Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... is relatively slim, I was able to finish it in random moments here and there (giving a test; sitting on the can; etc) whereas, had I been riding the train everyday like last year, it would have taken a week. Maybe two.

I couldn't get the picture I wanted last time to show the relative size differences of Murakami's last two books, so I tried again:

That one is not so bad, but it is kinda weird. 1Q84 tops 900 pages if I remember, and while CTTaHYoP is just over a third of that, it feels like had it been produced at the dimensions of 1Q84, it would be maybe 150.

I tried one more picture with my hand:

What I really wanted to do with these pictures is relay the weird sense I had holding both of these books. That's mostly unrealistic.

Colorless Tsukuru... starts out more sexually charged than it finishes, seems like it has three entwined time spans spiraling to a conclusion when it's really more like one-and-a-half, and leaves more loose ends than Pynchon on a bad day. It's good and more emotional than Murakami usually attempts, and the Haida's father's anecdote about the "death-coin" is a nice red-herring. You find yourself trying to piece how the Ruke-man will connect it all, only to find there to be two millimeters left of pages, and that's way not enough for a wrap-up effect to be slapped on. Maybe Murakami's getting a little more comfortable letting somethings remain unsettled.

Moving on...

A while back I ordered the Mo Yan book I'd wanted from the first time I learned about him, back before I discovered The Garlic Ballads:

I got a chance to read the first few pages today...

In the first TWO PAGES the main character, Ximen Nao, is in hell being tortured by frying in huge vat of oil like a tempura landlord. He refuses to confess to dastardly deeds. He's pulled out, all crispy and brittle, and begins to defend himself and his honor and has half his face blasted off by a large musket full of grape-sized shot. Fried in oil until brittle and shot in the face by a shotgun.

In the first two pages.

He convinces the judges of hell that he has honor and should be allowed to confront his still-living accusers, and the story follows his repeated reincarnations: first a donkey, then an ox, then a pig, then a dog, then monkey, and finally, as "Big Head Baby Lan", a progression seen on the cover in that makeshift zodiac.

Good stuff. Vacation is coming up fast...