Show yourselves, guest compadres!

Here at Casa BondGirl we are under attack from little brown birds (small but there a lot of them, see) with striped white wings. They have some sort of vendetta against our elderly golden retriever George Rowe the Dog, Poster Boy for American Values, My Attorney. Throwing rocks at the branches under where the beaked menaces wait to perform their swooping does not seem to sway their hateful mission at all.

Especially when you’re reenacting The Birds, it’s never a bad idea to come into someone else’s house bearing Eduardo Galeano. From his Book of Embraces.

THE FUNCTION OF ART/2

The preacher Miguel Brun told me that a few years ago he had visited the Indians of the Parguayan Chaco. He was part of an evangelizing mission. The missionaries visited a chief who was considered very wise. The chief, a quiet, fat man, listened without blinking to the religious propaganda that they read to him in his own language. When they finished, the missionaries awaited a reaction.

The chief took his time, then said:

“That scratches. It scratches hard and it scratches very well.”

And then he added:

“But it scratches where there isn’t any itch.”

I’ll try not to scratch where there isn’t any itch.

UPDATE: Since George Rowe the Dog, Poster Boy for American Values, My Attorney, has been accused of trying to pass as a golden retriever, I feel the need to settle this matter. Yes, in the photo above, George has his short hair cut for summer and looks kind of like a lab. But this is what George looks like on a normal day. Except these days he’s usually running from brownish mockingbirds.

That’s right, muthaz! Now that Mabuse is gone, the real fucking party can begin. I want to coat babies in barbeque sauce and throw them into volcanoes! I want to kick a few grannies in the shins and call it spontaneous therapy! That Mabuse guy was too nice. And this place was getting too fucking comfortable. Let it be known that Tony “I will use your skull to open my brew” Clifton is in the house.

How could an asshole like me get on here? Well, let’s just say that I have some photographs. So I made Mabuse my bitch cause I could. Plus, I beat that lazy bastard at arm wrestling. How you like me now? But don’t get your panties caught in Dick Cheney’s crack, sweetheart. I’ll wax literary in a bit.

The deal is this: Nearly all of our time is accounted for; thus, updates will be scanter than a pair of transparent panties. If anyone would like to step in and pick up the slack, drop us a line.

[UPDATE: We now have some surprise guest stars lined up for the next week or two, whose capable and mischevious hands should make this place very interesting. Thanks go out to these kindred souls.]

Sarah‘s unleashed a new edition of Plots With Guns. Among some of the highlights: an excerpt from Ian Rankin’s next Rebus novel, Sarah’s interview with John Williams, and several stories. Joe Bob says check it out.

Lately, I’ve been reading Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride — as usual, a gloriously devious book. This column suggests that Zenia is a grotesque version of Canadian journalist Barbara Amiel, who went to the University of Toronto with Atwood. Amiel, of course, was fired by the Telegraph this year after she was implicated in a lawsuit against her husband (the lawsuit having been launched by Hollinger International, which owns the telegraph). Before that, Amiel built a career writing free market tirades.

Of course, Atwood’s novel (published in 1993) came long before the Telegraph scandal, but since Atwood’s novel is content to play with the reader’s head (leading the reader to become just as curious about Zenia’s salacious details as the three protagonists), does anybody have any dirt on anything that might have gone down between the two? If Zenia is indeed based off of Amiel and there was a contretemps, then this could lend credence to the theory that vengeance promotes lively writing (much as Get Shorty‘s Martin Weir was based on Elmore Leonard’s scuffles with Dustin Hoffman).