Is it fat in here, or is it just me?

had to go somehere yesterday and couldn't fit into my suit pants anymore. always a great way to start the day.

in unrelated clothing news, something has come aloose in the sole of my shoe and rattles around when i walk. i think this means i have to buy a new pair of shoes.

Let's do some reviews, shall we? I did promise lots if them, after all. Not much middle ground here, some real duds and a few great efforts.

*****

Meet Joe Black

I'm a big fan of otherworldy topics when done correctly (Dogma is by far the best to pull it off in movie form), so i thought Meet Joe Black might be worth the risk, despite the obvious chick-flick perils. i finally got a chance to watch it the other day when it came on tv.

Worst movie ever.

I'm all for temporary suspension of belief (or whatever the technical phrase for "just go with it" is in the world of fiction), but even in Pretendland, 1 + 1 has to equal 2.

Spoiler Alert

Take for example, the end of the movie when the daughter is talking to brad pitt and says "wish you could have known my father," an obvious reference to the fact that she knows her father is dead. Which means that her father's body is on the other side of the hill. So what does she do? she walks off with Brad Pitt back to the party, just leaving her dead father out there.

End Spoiler

That's not even the most exasperating flaw in the movie, just the easiest to explain. Oh wait, there is another one pretty easy to explain. I'll just call it the "i don't know what peanut butter is but i am intimately familiar with the detailed workings of the IRS" theme.

Anthony Hopkins is the only redeeming part of this movie.

Score: 3 out of 10

*****

The Devil's Apocrypha by John De Vito

What Dogma is to otherworldly movies, I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan is to books . I stumbled across the De Vito book when looking for something else by Duncan. I had enjoyed another book Duncan wrote and wanted to see what else was out there.

I decided to get The Devil's Apocrypha because it was fairly cheap. It's the creation story told by the losers, so to speak.

Worst book ever.

I made it through the forward, barely, where the author misspelled "lose" as "loose" twice. And on the offchance he meant to use the word "loose," he used it incorrectly. So i stopped reading it.

I will keep this book for the rest of my life because 1)I'm opposed to throwing away books, and 2) I'm even more opposed to giving someone else an opportunity to read this literary abortion.

Score: 0 out of 10

****

Solomon vs. Lord by Paul Levine

Ah, sweet relief. A funny courtroom novel that, despite being pretty long, never gets dull.

At parts it gets a tad predictable, but i always tell myself "if things didn't work out the way they did, the story wouldn't have been worth telling."

The pace and storytelling makes up for any predictability problems, and even though how the case will be solved becomes apparent, Levine doesn't give away what the resolution actually is too early. I actually wondered if he did it on purpose, sort of "hey, let me make the reader feel smart, and he'll be happy with himself and like the book more."

Score 8.9 out of 10.

****

Torpedo Juice by Tim Dorsey

Picture the funniest person you know simultaneously being on speed yet having the self control to sit down and write a book. That's Tim Dorsey, the endlessly funny creater of Serge Storms, the serial killer with a heart.

I can't remember exactly how many of Dorsey's books i've read, but you need to grab some of his stuff if you haven't before. If you like Carl Hiassen, you'll enjoy Dorsey.

The basic premise is Storms is a mentally unbalanced lover of all things South Florida. he is prone to knee-jerk obsessions and finding creative ways to kill the bad guys. In Torpedo Juice, he catches a guy robbing an elderly couple. Serge takes the robber, makes him swallow a handful of bullets then runs him through an MRI machine.

Lots of amusing characters and Dorsey's outlandish humor is outdone only by his mastery of subtle humor.

Score: 8.7 out of 10

*****

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Got this a couple of days before Vonnegut died after a coworker recommended it.

Very good. It's sort of about two people, but then it's also more about two characters in a book, but then again, it's more about the relationship between an author and his characters.

The sort of thing that's easy to see why people would lift Vonnegut up as an icon. It didn't completely knock my socks off, but it's definitely a case where the way the story is presented adds a ton to the story itself. brilliantly done.

I give it 8.5 *'s out of 10 *'s

*****

A note on the scoring.

You might notice that I've scored two books higher than another novel considered an all-time classic. This does not necessarily mean that the other books are better than Breakfast of Champions.

In an intellectual environment (which i tend to avoid) i would tell you that Breakfast of Champions is easily the best of the books i reviewed. Think of it like this, I know that Tom Brady is a better quarterback than Michael Vick, but i enjoy watching Vick more.

Capische?

One of my favorite love poems

Read this in The Big Book of Limericks close to 20 years ago at Pierre Bossier Mall and it's stuck in my head ever since. I'm sure it violates all sorts of limerick rules, but here goes:

THere was a man whose love interests were gingery
He tore a hole in his sister's best lingerie
He touched her behind
and made up his mind
to add incest to insult and injury.

I'm here because they're paying me to do my thing

I've become enamored with nit-picking other people's writing. I even considered nit-picking my own writing, but remembered that it would be considered giving an opinion on material published by my employer and that is not allowed (most people would say 'verboten' right there, but i won't).

This jumped out at me from a story I read this morning about a firefighter rescuing a person who had driven his car into some water.

The writer tells the reader that the firefighter "stripped to his pants and T-shirt" before getting in the water. There are a couple of things that i find interesting about the use of that phrase, and I'll be surprised if i can present this in any sort of way that makes sense.

So to help keep things moving along as best I can, I'll break it down into two separate but parallel but also intersecting points: A. The use of the verb stripped and B. Relevance of the verb stripped relative to its location in the story.

I hate to ruin the ending and all, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up being OK with how the writer uses the phrase.

A. The use of the verb "stripped."

Let's look at the phrase "stripped to his pants and t-shirt." I wouldn't be writing about it if it didn't initially strike me as odd.

To me, that could be reworded to mean "the firefighter took off his shoes, socks and possibly an outer-layer shirt." That to me, is not an act that would qualify as "stripping."

Then I thought about it for a second -- the writer did exactly what every journalism student is taught to do: use strong verbs.

"stripped" clearly moves the action along better than "took off his shoes..."

And how many people besides me are going to be anal retentive enough to actually catch something like that?

So i started to congratulate the writer for doing a pretty good job and i congratulated myself for being able to admit i was wrong.

But then I thought about it further.

Maybe the writer meant that the firefighter had gear on when he reached the scene, so he had an additional layer of clothing to take off, which would amount to stripping.

That, in turn, created another question in mind. How come when I read the article I assumed that the guy who made the rescue just happened to be a firefighter and not that he had been called to the scene as part of his job?

B. Relevance of the word stripped relative to its location in the story
While the rescuer is referred to in the headline and first paragraph as a firefighter, it's not until the third paragraph ('stripped' appears in the second graph) that it becomes evident (but not completely obvious) that the firefighter was called to the scene and was not a convenient witness to the accident.

So why didn't i immediately make the connection that "stripped" indicated him taking off his fire suit?

I was taught by Dee Dee Thurston (who stressed this to me until her eye balls bled) that "real people" go early in the story, officials go later.

My default mechanism told me that since the firefighter was mentioned early, that he must be a "real person." Had he been acting in the scope of his job, he would have been a firefighter first and, thus, the person who drove the car into the water should lead the action of the story with those acting in the scope of their profession being secondary to the story. Ergo (what?), since he was in the lead, he was not acting as a firefighter in an official capacity, and wouldn't have been wearing anything additional that would have necessitated "stripping."

But upon further reading, it is noted that the water temperature was in the mid-40s and that the firefighter was without feeling in legs for some time following the rescue.

That meant that the rescue was made under extraordinary circumstances and thus justified both 1)using the firefighter in the lead and 2) the verb stripped.

nice job by the writer (although a bit more explanation would have saved us all from the headache of this post).

Incidentally, I think this will inspire me to begin a second blog to write about stuff like this, while saving you from having to read it.