Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 


If you know your Naked Gun 2 1/2, then you know exactly where that line shows up. Not only is it a brilliant joke, but the sheer wording of the sexual euphemism is hilarious. It's strange though how sometimes life imitates a Zucker/Abrams/Zucker gag:

Iain Hollingshead wins bad Sex prize

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer Wed Nov 29, 2:38 PM ET

LONDON - First-time author Iain Hollingshead scooped a dubious literary honor Wednesday, winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel, "Twenty Something."

Hollingshead beat established writers including Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell, best seller Mark Haddon and literary maverick Thomas Pynchon to the prize, which aims to skewer "the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel."

Judges were moved by Hollingshead's evocation of "a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles." His description of "bulging trousers" sealed the win, the judges said.

"Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts," the judges — editors of Literary Review magazine — said in a statement. "Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point."

Hollingshead, 25, who received his award from rocker Courtney Love at a London ceremony, said he was delighted to become the prize's youngest winner. "I hope to win it every year," said Hollingshead, who receives a statuette and a bottle of champagne.

Now in its 14th year, the award was established by the Literary Review to celebrate truly cringe-worthy erotic writing. "It's mixed metaphors, embarrassing fumbling. It's the redundancy of the scene in an otherwise good novel," said assistant editor Philip Womack.

This year's runner-up was Tim Willcocks' medieval action novel, "The Religion," for a scene in which characters grapple passionately in a forge "across the cold steel face of the anvil."

"In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil's Fire," Willcocks writes.

Willcocks praised the Bad Sex prize as "a much better guide to a good read than those purveyors of powerful sleeping drugs, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Goncourt et. al."

Other finalists included Mitchell's 1980s coming-of-age story, "Black Swan Green," for a passage in which one character's breasts are compared to "a pair of Danishes" and another's to "two Space Hoppers." Pynchon's long-awaited, 1,000-page novel, "Against the Day," was nominated for a scene involving a spaniel that ends: "Reader, she bit him."

Haddon, the best-selling author of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time," was shortlisted for his description of rapture in his latest novel, "A Spot of Bother": "Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs."

The other finalists were Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's "Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs"; Julia Glass' "The Whole World Over"; Michael Cannon's "Lachlan's War"; "Tourism" by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal; and Self's "The Book of Dave."

Last year's winner was food critic and novelist Giles Coren for a memorable passage comparing a male character's genitalia to a shower hose. In 2004, the prize went to Tom Wolfe's novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," for sex scenes the judges called "ghastly ... inept ... (and) unrealistic."

The article can be found here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061129/ap_en_ot/books_bad_sex

And ultimately this award begs the question: if the judges found these professionally published sexual references ghastly, how many seconds would it take if they tried to read most of the lemon fanfics out there before their heads exploded? It frightens me to say that, as far as perspectives go, having to contend with seeing a woman's bosom and immediately thinking breakfast pastries isn't quite so bad when stacked against such epic hits as "Artemis' Lover" or a Harry Potter lemon involving Buckbeak and the Ford Angelia.

Today's Lesson: hooray for danishes! (That and, apparently orgasms smell like coconut.)

posted by Phillip at 9:49 PM

 

The Lizard King. The Walrus. The Shiznit.

I am all of these things. Forget the fact that the walrus might eat the lizard, and the digestive result is a word that amusingly resembles 'shiznit', but I am all of these.

Today's little bit of nowhere features an inflated ego of epic proportions, brought about by sadism and grandiose accomplishments. And exhaustion. It's probably the exhaustion talking more than anything else, and when the euphoria passes I'll marvel at how silly I sounded and wonder how on earth the cat ended up wearing my pants.

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of working a full 12 hour shift at the store, due to a very sick employee. With a little help from Mel, and more than a handful of Tylenol, I survived. Sunday was spent helping Mel with a research essay wherein one of her group partners made a contribution that ultimately sounded like what might happen if you heard the bagpipes being played by a deaf, leperous giraffe.

(Mel has just informed me that perhaps I've given that team member a little too much credit, so we may have to revert to the old stalwart "a contribution as impressive as a dead mouse performing Shakespeare.")

Monday was another 12 hour day, capped off by a first for me. I got to fire someone. In fact, I was sanctioned by Head Office to spread the doom. Doom, doom, doom! What was her crime? Well, said now-defunct-employee spent most of her shifts being perfectly useless, and seemed to think it criminal that she must perform customer service in a retail job. (The nerve of company policy! I mean, really! What are they going to expect us to do next: work?!)

Head Office went so far as to send an auditor in to observe her, and by all accounts gave the command to my district manager to have this employee axed. So far, I think a grand total of no tears have been shed by anyone else over her sudden and swift boot-to-the-ass dismissal. Mel even took up to singing, "Ding dong, the witch is dead!" at the kiosk when she arrived for her shift later that afternoon.

Granted, in firing the girl, I was forced to take up her shift for the day, and then cover the remainder of my evening shift at the store. But meh, what can you do in a case like that?

But the Monday didn't end there. Upon returning home, Mel & I were up until 3am working from scratch on an English paper about the use of the supernatural in Oedipus (the guy who killed his father & slept with his mother) and Hamlet (the guy who killed his step-father after his step-father tried to kill him but accidentally killed his mother instead. Oops.) We were going to work on it Sunday, but the bagpipe/giraffe project ended up taking the entire day to unravel, tweak and rework into something that didn't look like it had been copied word for word from a university textbook.

While today was a mere 8-hour shift by comparison, tomorrow's got another 12 hour gig in store for me. And if I'm really lucky, the next day I have off will be Sunday. Somehow I still have most of my mental faculties despite all the long hours. All in all, I'm impressed at how well I'm faring, but then again, we've only reached the midweek. I've already conquered two 12-hour shifts, giving me an inflated sense of accomplishment as I face the third one. Plus, there's that whole getting to fire an employee who was really starting to piss even me off. I'm floating high on a managerial God Complex.

Damn, but I'm good!

I am the Lizard King! I am the Walrus! I bring you tidings of my inherent awesomeness, and DOOM!!


Today's Lesson: sometimes, metal dollies can spontaneously manifest themselves in the middle of your store. Oh, and poodles can also be guide dogs for the blind.
posted by Phillip at 9:16 PM

 

It's Sunday.

I am doing very little of anything this Sunday.

I am happy about doing very little of anything this Sunday.

And before I start sounding like a Dr. Seuss book (only without rhyming couplets and doodlefluzits), I'll explain by simply saying that when I woke up yesterday, the last thing on my mind was, "Gee, I think today I'll work a 12 hour shift at the store!"

Twelve hours later, I was somehow and oddly sane. Well...as arguably sane as I get, anyways. The short of it was the only available person to work the Saturday evening shift spent all of her Saturday either throwing up, or dry heaving when there was nothing left for her to throw up. So while I can't exactly fault her for needing to call in sick, 12 hours later and I have never been so grateful for having a Sunday off. Though for the most part I was really lucky that the mall traffic almost died entirely by the time 6pm rolled around, so I was able to conserve my energy for those last three hours. (Not to mention, Mel & I commiserated the day's end with pizza and alcohol, which is always a plus in my book.)

You know, the last time I wrote about anything like this, it was...well, damn, it was one year ago, almost to the week. Except that was a 13-hour shift (thank you, Midnight Sadism--er, Madness) due primarily to an annoying nit of an employee.

Speaking of...Monday is going to be another long day courtesy of this year's annoying nit of an employee. Funny how at this current moment, I'm the only person at the store or kiosk who knows how long a day I'm about to have.

Just pause for a second and reflect upon the ominousness behind that paragraph.


In other news, I have a hankering to go and bake some cookies. This could potentially end in disaster. Then again, Shady will adore it if anything explodes, since it means more bits of food falling to the floor for her to snack on.

Today's Lesson: if it's your day off, and you are pretty darned syre you're not going to want to wake up when the alarm goes off, don't set the alarm.
posted by Phillip at 11:22 AM