October 2006

How Many Dead Dogs?

3 Comments / Holidays, Pets, Questions and Answers /

There is not a day that goes by without at least one person arriving at my blog through a search for dogs eating chocolate (though the actual search phrase varies, and is often interesting like the one who said “how long do I have to wait until my dog dies from eating chocolate”). Tonight, in the last 2 hours, I’ve had five people visit in search of the answer to the dogs death by chocolate question.


While I did have folks assure me that chocolate is toxic to dogs, I stand by my belief that it’s a myth. None of my dogs has ever died from chocolate and believe me, they’ve eaten a LOT of chocolate. I wouldn’t stick the cute little orange pumpkin full of candy on the floor in place of the dog food or anything like that but I’m not going to lose any sleep over Jake grabbing a snoutful before I can stop him.


Now if anyone stumbles on some study that shows how many dogs day in the aftermath of Halloween chocolate madness, then I’d consider changing my mind.

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Daily Dose of Life – 101 Update

2 Comments / 101 Things /

Yea I know, I said I was ditching the daily dose BS but old habits are hard to break and I didn’t feel like going up there and backspacing.  I’m lazy that way.  Besides, this is a SERIES and breaking with tradition now seems wrong.  (Are you buying that?)

I managed to scratch off several items this month, a couple of which I was surprised about.

I had no idea it was so easy to read Non-fiction.  This is making me wonder if I’ve always read this much non-fic or if I’m suddenly reading more.  I knew I should have been book blogging all along.  Ah well, live and learn.

Family portrait done – now if I could get some photos hung. Ha. 

Michelle is motivated to keep her shop, purchases will do that to a girl it seems.  She sees the money accumulating, with very little work on her part, and that’s enough motivation for her.

Restaurants – check.  Should have made that number larger.  Or maybe this means we can go back to eating at Waffle House every week.  Heh.

There are some other items on the list that are CLOSE to being complete.  I’m looking forward to those. 

Only 696 days left.  A lifetime!

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Melissa Ferrick: Never Give Up

GLBT, Melissa Ferrick, Sights & Sounds /

Mfcover_front
In the Eyes of Strangers has finally arrived.  I was about to give up! Pre-ordering her CDs is rarely a great idea because they never come when they’re supposed to come.  But, really it’s ok because I would not really have had time to listen to it before now anyway.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t really been looking forward to this one like I have every other Ferrick CD.  Too much twang – I’ve mentioned that before.  Too much Natalia – I’ve also mentioned that before.  But, I might be changing my mind on the second listen.

Remember how I said I hated the song "Stuck"?  Well I have officially changed my mind with this version.  I can almost forget that we were STUCK right along with her when I listen to this one.  Really excellent mix.  I am never going to love "Never Give Up" and "Everything You Get" is better live than it is on the CD.  I love, love, LOVE Miss Liberty (not written by Melissa).  I do hope she’s playing this in her shows, has anyone seen her perform it live?????  Rest Now (the Chris Whitley song) is good, One Year appears to be pulled in part from something we heard during a sound check, very different but there are pieces of the original in there.  I think I like it.  But I’m going to have to listen to it again.  It’s unusual, not typical Melissa and not the super twangy Melissa, either. 

I could go on, but I won’t.  Just buy the CD yourself and make up your own mind.  Or, if you’re cheap (or broke) go over to her myspace and listen to a few of the songs there. 

Excuse me while I play Miss Liberty again and again and again.

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Why Lie?

News and Politics, Sights & Sounds /

So Lynne Cheney wanted to talk about her children’s book and only her children’s book. I get that but when you meet with the press, you answer what they ask you – TRUTHFULLY, particularly if you are the wife of the VP. What really bugs me though is what is wrong with Sisters or Body Politic that she has to talk around it or out and out LIE about what she wrote? Nothing. Not a single thing, whether you are liberal or conservative. She wrote fiction. Some of it sexy. Some of it not so much. Some of it straight and some of it queer. So what? You can still be a conservative “family values” republican and write fiction. You just can’t LIE and say it isn’t what it obviously IS. Well I guess you can, since Lynne Cheney did it.


The Cheney’s have never said they are for a ban of gay marriage. They have said out loud that they disagree with the amendment to “protect marriage”. So “Sisters” isn’t telling anyone anything that they should not already know. The left making a big deal of it isn’t really helpful either, except of course that it causes Mrs Cheney to lie, that part – that’s helpful, I suppose. The left trying to point out the Mrs Cheney has written steamy fiction isn’t all that helpful either. I somehow doubt any conservative is going to change his/her mind and vote liberal simply because the VPs wife wrote some steamy passages in Body Politic.


Politics, sheesh.

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Maps for Lost Lovers

2006, Books in Bed, Fiction /

Maps for Lost Lovers started really slowly. So slowly that TW gave up on it early and never finished it. I, on the otherhand, stuck with it and I did finally find myself enjoying it.

It’s a little long. The relationships are muddled. But it was interesting and I did find myself caring about many of the characters and interested in what they were thinking. The end, tying up the loose ends of the “murders” and all of the “minor characters” felt out of place and unnecessary. Sometimes it is better to leave some loose ends, this was one of those times I think.

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Soiled Doves

2006, Books in Bed, Non-Fiction /

Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West reads like a high school text book. A wee bit boring, particularly considering the subject matter. There were some interesting stories, samples from newspaper articles and obituaries and the photos were excellent.

If you’re looking for some deep and meaninful account, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for some straight forward, easy to read text then you’ll find it in Soild Doves.

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Good Grief People

5 Comments / Pet Peeves /

I understand you people just HAVE to know what’s going on with Sweetney but for goodness sakes could you just let it go.  If you know, then you know and if you don’t then it’s probably not important for you TO KNOW.  Even if you mean well and you want to be supportive, you can do that without searching all over the internet and the blogosphere for the gorey details, can’t you?

Oh maybe you can’t.  Maybe you can say you’re supportive but you don’t mean it and that’s why you have to go and find all the nasty bits you can find.  Is that it?

Just stop it.  Go back to your own blogs and play nicely.  And be nice to Sweetney too.  If she wants to share every detail with the blogosphere then she will.  If not, then leave it and respect her wishes.  Geez. Geez. Geez.

52 hits today for people looking for information about this mess.  52 and I doubt Sweetney reads my blog (and I don’t read hers, now that I think about it).   The drama.  Bah.

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Another List

2 Comments / Meme, Reading Lists /

Adrienne is blogging again and she blogged another list.  What the heck, I’ll play.


1. Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma – Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep – Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil – Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
17. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
23. The Woman in White -Wilkie Collins
24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
39. Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow – D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
45. Ulysses – James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India – E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial – Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women – Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis – Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
53. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
55. USA – John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love – Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague – Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
60. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
63. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
67. The Quiet American – Graham Greene
68 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
75. Herzog – Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont – Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River – V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians – J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark – Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
88. The BFG – Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table – Primo Levi
90. Money – Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda – Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories – Salman Rushdie
95. La Confidential – James Ellroy
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement – Ian McEwan (I tried but it made me sleepy so I quit)
98. Northern Lights – Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz – W. G. Sebald

OK I’m in at just under 60%.  Hmmmm, interesting list.

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