Bite Me, Tony

Tales From the Bookcase: 10 Favorites Read in 2021 (Part 1) I'll try and keep this short since it's my list of the best books I read in 2021, and was meant to be posted by New Years Day. What with one thing and another that, obviously, did not happen so here they are, along with a recommendation on why I think you should spend your valuable time reading each one. In no particular order: 1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This noirish classic melodrama, set amongst the glitterati of 1920's suburban New York, takes place over a single summer in 1922, when several lives collide rather messily amidst a background of lavish parties, spectacular mansions, dirty deals and doomed romance. Jay Gatsby is the fabulously wealthy title character with a murky past, although the tale is told through the first-person narrative of next-door-neighbor, Nick Carraway, an idealistic young man-on-the-move who is cousins with Gatsby's beloved, Daisy Buchanan. The story was inspired ...

Dear god, the things that happen to our bodies as we move from mid-life to, well, shall we say, later mid-life. No matter how good a shape we're in (or think we're in), there's always some devious reminder--call it the i mp of the perverse (see Poe's short story), if you will--lying in wait to deliver a painful jolt of reality. During my seemingly endless convalescence from the self-inflicted misadventure of the broken rib, I have found myself reading more than my usual book a week, no small feat, given that the nasty spill seems also to have dislodged a retina, unhinged a cataract or else spawned some other catastrophe in my left eye. If you wear glasses, imagine someone smearing a vaseline-drenched finger across one lens and you'll get the general idea. I'd have been howling about this sooner but the broken rib was of sufficient torture that I figured my eyesight would clear up once the pain (and the blur of the pain meds) lifted.  But, no.  It looks like the...

  And just like that....I nearly killed my damn self, and completely missed the changing of the Old Guard (2021--good-fucking-bye and good-fucking-riddance) to the New (2022, not looking too good, so far). We'd gone to Tampa on Wednesday, the 29th of December, in order to spend the New Years holidays with C's cousin and her family. Immediately upon arrival, I deduced that it would be a good idea to play tag football with the cousin's 9 year old son, a 5'4", 135 lb. ox. of muscle and motion. Even given the noted Wells coordination (or lack thereof), it was an astonishingly brief interstice from the start of the game to me hitting the edge of the backyard patio at top speed, briefly becoming airborne, and then  taking a spectacular nosedive into the cold, hard embrace of solid concrete. My descent was dreamy slo-mo, like a playback on Monday Night Football; the crash-landing, on the other hand, was catastrophic real time, my outstretched hands failing to prevent the ...

Okay, so let me just get this out of the way right here and now. All my friends, both in the real world and on Facebook, are insisting that I absolutely must see Steven Spielberg's remake of West Side Story . And the critics seem to like it, too, with some calling it "masterful" and "charismatic".  Well, then. I get it, I do. You guys all love the movie, and you want others to share in the love. It's the same way I feel about most of Quentin Tarantino's movies, Fellini, all the incarnations of Twin Peaks , and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman .  A lot of my friends and fellow moviegoers don't care for the movies (and TV shows) that I love, and probably haven't even seen most of them. These films simply don't appeal to them. See what I'm saying? I just really don't have any interest in seeing West Side Story . I didn't love the first version when I saw it at age 12 (or whenever it was reissued for the big screen) and I didn't love i...

Well, as is sometimes the case, I was almost finished doing something (in this case, writing a rather lengthy book review on amazon) when an unexpected event occurred (a sudden power outage), causing several hours worth of work to be lost in space, if not to the ages. It was a good review, if I do say so myself, but amazon does not allow reviewers to save their material as they write and, while I had a premonition that it would be just my luck for a power outage to occur at just the wrong time today, I still didn't bother to save my work in Word. My misfortune, but that's the way it goes. The world will have to wait to read my brilliant and incisive review of the very late James Robert Baker's posthumously-published, transgressively savage, darkly comic, AIDS-era noir, Testosterone. My brilliance and incisiveness occurs in fits and starts and doesn't, as a rule, translate well to the page, so well, now you know. It could be awhile before the Muse pays a return visit.  A...

  I'm not sure why but I'm feeling much less bah-and-humbugish than I did at this time last year. Perhaps it's because I did all my Christmas shopping early for a change, or maybe it's because COVID has abated enough to allow us to get out of town a few times, most recently to visit some of C's family in North Carolina. One thing that definitely makes this Christmas season a thousand million trillion times better than last year is the fact that that ludicrous, lying, gobsmackingly awful, wonky-haired orange ogre no longer occupies the Oval Office of The People's House (aka The White House) in Washington D.C. True, he's just up the road a ways at Smarm-a-Lago and if the wind is coming out of the north-northeast, you can catch the distinctly Trumpian stench of bloat and corruption. However, all things considered, better he spend his down time in Palm Beach, scheming and bloviating, than in any official capacity in the U.S. capitol, wherein a perceived lack of ...

Adentalventure So, today's dental visit went pretty much as expected. And then some. We go to the dental school to have our teeth worked on and a couple of weeks ago I was informed that I needed 3 (count'em) new fillings! However, when I went in today I thought I was going in to get my teeth cleaned. I was quickly disabused of that notion by the dental student who whisked me back to her lair and strapped a bib around my neck. The hot dental student I'd had last time popped by to say that he was still with his 9:00 patient so Banshee.....he was wearing a mask so I mayn't have heard correctly, but it sounded like..... "Banshee is just great and she'll be doing your filling today." Okay. Damn. Banshee immediately got to work stretching my mouth open with an object roughly the size and shape of a life preserver. By the time she got it all stuffed in my mouth, she really needed an assistant mopping her brow. My mouth, in agony, and of sufficient proportions to ...