which_chick | (no subject)

We're in the dead zone of the year, the space after xmas and before NYE. In a spate of entirely too masturbatory enjoyment, I present to all ya'll my favorite phrases from the year's postings.

I was thinking more of a highlight reel, but yeah. Reruns.

On Librivox's mp3 History of the Peloponnesian War: People will think you're listening to that Scooby Dogg person or perhaps Mr. Half-A-Dollar or possibly even Unbelieveably Silly And Unable To Spell, but really, you will be getting your groove thang on to the Spartans and the Athens and their relative six-pack-a-licious fighting styles.

The works of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester: Since I was reading for smut-based purposes, I skipped the political and dramatic satires and went for the low-hanging fruit which beckoned me like ripe plums warm from the sun. Those. Take them. Use both hands. Careful, now. They bruise easily.

And again: In this offering, I present for you his poetic efforts on impotence and premature ejaculation, which are a departure from the more usual run of pastoral poetry about droplets of dew on morning's just-opened flowers and the busy bees that slip twixt those lushly moistened petals... or perhaps not. At any rate, let's take a look at the rather less industrious bee, the slacker bee, the bee where you will and it won't.

A third: Cunt, as I'm sure you know from your study of mammalian reproduction, never goes out of season.

I really enjoyed the Rochester thing. Man, that was fun. And I thought that the above was just entirely funny. It was *levels* of funny. Quality craftsmanship, here.

Romance novels as a satiric research paper: I think we can all agree that romance novels are a mass-market, LCD sort of lowbrow literature. They're formulaic. But... a lot of women buy them. A lot. They take up huge swaths of shelf space at yer average bookstore. I think they have something to tell us and I rather expect that *what* they're going to tell us is that, these days, expliciticity is through the roof and the variance in practices has spread more than Moll Flanders. (Not married to Ned Flanders, people. That was *Maude* Flanders.)

Everyone got the Moll Flanders joke, right?

More with Rochester: It's pretty reasonable to assume that this St. James's Park poem is a riff on the previous but instead of saying nice things about the park and the king and instead of saying unkind things about the park and the king (which would be the obvious choice), the poem goes on at length about the right and wrong ways to be an indiscriminate cumslut. (Bet you weren't expecting that, were you?)

On Jane Austen: six novels, one plot.

Caramels for my cousin Heather: To resolve the entire thing, I have made Mk. II caramels, burned sugar candies of atonement wrapped in wee wax paper shrouds.

On our economy:

Ben sez: I CAN HAZ BAILOWT?
Markets say: NO CAN HAZ!

Ben sez: I CAN HAZ LIKWIDITTY?
Markets say: NO CAN HAZ!

Ben sez: I CAN MAYK FIX0R3D EKONOMEE?
Markets say: NO CAN MAYK!

Ben sez: WE IZ ST1L BETTR DEN ZIMBOBWAY!!
Markets say: FUR NAO, BEN, FUR NAO.

Heather's cat got stuck under the concrete porch slab: I pulled Sasha out by yanking on her tail until I could hook a finger around each hock (the big joint on the back leg) and pull the back feet, one-by-one, so that they were stretching out straight backwards from the cat. With both back feet and the tail in hand, I pulled Sasha out of the hole, backwards, a breech birth from her wee mud and concrete womb. Sasha was *not* amused about the ignominy, but Heather made me rice krispie treats immediately thereafter as a tangible, warm, and marshmallowy expression of her gratitude. Yay!

On vintage porn: porn without photoshop is just pictures of naked people

Community Sponsored Agriculture: If anyone had asked me, prior to my CSA pickup this evening, if I thought that anyone in Fulton County would be standing barefoot on a porch, facing east, praying in foreign to Mecca, I would have said no. No, I would have said. My first guess (and my second guess and even my third, which is impressive durability for what is, in all, a binary choice) would have been no. I would have been dead wrong.

Elf porn books, metatext: Further souring my mood is the fact that I have located (and read) three of the four elf porn books I have at my disposal. (They are not, as a rule, particularly deep or boundary-pushing reads. The general thrust of them is somewhere on the pretending-to-have-plot porn spectrum and, as such, they're light reading that I can slurp down at a rate of three or four of them in a day.) This is a problem because the missing one is in the middle of what we would be calling the story arc, if there were plot. Since there isn't really plot to break up all the fucking, the missing book is in the middle of the book issuing sequence. This is annoying because in book 4 there are now characters that I can't accurately imagine due to them not having been appropriately described with the degree of loving and enthusiastic detail that I usually only ever see in fanfic.

Costumes in YBP: The costumes, such as they are, employ enough studded patent leather strappy bits to hitch up the Budweiser Clydesdales.

What sorts of things happen in the YBP: There are a lot of naked or partially-naked men engaging in assorted graphically-rendered sexual acts with General Enthusiasm and also Corporal Punishment.

(Looking back, I should probably have worked a Major in there, as well. Hindsight is ever perfect.)

The bailout rescue plan: A shit sandwich is still a shit sandwich even if you add a layer of BLT and mayo to the thing, hold it all together with those cute cellophane toothpicks, lay a couple of sprigs of parsley alongside, and call it a Club Shit Sandwich. I'm still not going to eat it.

Emergency turkey thawing: Remember, nothing says Thanksgiving Eve like having your hand up a dead bird's ass trying to assist same in birthing a partially frozen neck and some giblets.

I should make more of an effort on the funny front. It's so rewarding when I go back to read it later.