On April 23, the Save the Blogs Campaign turned a new corner. It decided to jump the shark and then jump it again. It decided that there were no limits to the number of times that a shark could be jumped over. Because, quite frankly, in Terre Haute, sharks were hard to find, while maggots were in plentiful supply.
Here is a list of notable developments over the past few weeks:
*I’m in Terre Haute, Motherfucker posted a disturbing JPEG of Richard Schickel in the nude. Geeks are currently attempting to confirm whether the dick in question matches up with Schickel’s.
*Maggot, Proud Maggot cut its staff of contributors to the bone. The one man contributing to the blog has been sacked and has been replaced with a logarithm fond of scratching its belly. There are no longer any human contributors at MPM.
*The Save the Blogs campaign has discovered YouTube five years after everybody else has. Great plans are afoot.
*Fan fiction involving Shannon Byrne, maggots and a naughty episode involving thermal underwear has been uploaded to Usenet.
*The Indiana State University has initiated a special journalism class concerning car parts. Dan Wickett is scheduled to guest lecture in November.
We will report more pedantic episodes as they come in. We never leave the house.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
I wish I was a logarithm sometimes. (They don’t have autistic kids, do they?) Thanks for a good, cheap, quick laugh, Ed.
Some might say that you are running the Terre Haute thing into the ground, but one of those some would not be me. Keep going, dude!