We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teacher, leave them kids alone. Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone! All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall. All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall. Sound familiar to you? It should. It was the perfect anthem for going to school and being miserable. Whether you were being bullied by the teachers, bullied by the kids, getting teenaged girls pregnant or being a pregnant teenager yourself, these separate phenomena have been and should be the subject of pretty much every educational fiction book on the library shelves. But to tell you the truth, the only educational fiction story I own is “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” and I have yet to read it. I’ve seen previews for the movie before, but I’ve yet to be properly introduced to it despite that. From what I’ve seen in the trailer, it does talk about bullying and friendship. Maybe even romance given that Emma Watson is in the movie. These may sound like inane topics when compared to world disasters, but they’re still important to talk about in some capacity. In fact, here’s a whole list of topics that all educational fiction novels should talk about:
- Bullying. It’s been going on for way too long and despite all the deaths and heartache that has resulted from it, we’ve only been doing something about it since 2010. It should have never taken that long for us to realize that we need to treat each other with dignity and respect.
- Friendship. This goes hand-in-hand with bullying since friends and family are your support network for when you’re going through those awful things. What also needs to be discussed is the idea of friends never seeing each other again after high school or college is over. Then again, that’s what Facebook is for. I guess.
- Underage sex. When I went to school in the witch-hunting, Salem-esque town of Chehalis, Washington, the sex ed teachers taught us to wait until we were married to have sex after giving us a whole list of horrible STD’s to avoid by doing so. I’ve never heard so much dishonesty in my entire life. Then again, they have to have some way of keeping minors from fucking each other. Scare tactics are not the answer, though.
- Teen pregnancy. In addition to that long list of painful-sounding diseases, another consequence of teen sex is pregnancy. Teenaged times are about having fun and being a kid. You can’t do those things whilst taking care of a baby. It’s one of the reasons I’m pro-choice. The other one being that kids can be really fucking annoying at times.
- Drugs and alcohol. Promoting a straightedge lifestyle isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Hell, I’m straightedge myself, so I agree with drug education. But the whole “drugs are bad” approach can be downright ridiculous at times. It’s not enough to just say that drugs are bad and to use scare tactics. You have to teach these kids accountability and pride in their work.
- Mental illness. This one hits close to home since I’m autistic, schizophrenic, and quite possibly depressed. High school is not a good place to start hearing voices in your head or to have a sad attitude all the time. It interferes with your social life, your work, and it may encourage bullies to pay you more visits. The earlier mental diseases are detected and accounted for, the better off the student will be.
- The prom. I never got to go to the prom since I was too shy to ask anybody to come with me. I hated being told no and I still do. You want to know how much courage it took me to congratulate MMA fighter Ronda Rousey on Twitter for retaining her championship? All of it. Each and every last morsel of courage was used to post that message. If I’m that nervous around a high-profile celebrity, imagine what I’m like around regular people. Introverts like me quickly descend into our bubbles whenever danger approaches.
I’m sure there are more topics that need to be addressed, but these are the main ones that concern me the most. If you have any further suggestions, feel free to post them on the message board. Until then, I have one thing more to say. We’ve got ears, say cheers!
***TELEVISION QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“Sexual harassment is just bullying with a boner.”
-Daniel Tosh from “Tosh.0”-
Seeing as how I’m a fan of action movies and literary thrillers, it’s always been my belief that fight scenes should be just as fast-paced and action-packed as a Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee movie. That’s why WWE is so dazzling to watch, because the fighting is reminiscent of a martial arts movie. UFC matches aren’t always like that and some of them can be pretty boring. Isn’t that right, Clay Guida and Gray Maynard? If all fight scenes should be dazzling, then how would that translate into literature? When reading Kick-Ass and Kick-Ass 2, the fight scenes in those graphic novels were extremely bloody and a lot of bones were snapped in two. That’s one way to make a fight exciting: turning the characters into Gorn Stars Dancing. Another way to make them thrill rides is by having the characters throw a lot of shots at each other and have them dodged or blocked, just like a martial arts movie as I’ve said before. But this is only for fight scenes in books that are billed as action stories. If you take a look at the fight scenes in “For the Win” by Cory Doctorow, you’ll find that they’re extremely short and are ended usually by one or two moves. Not the most exciting way to stage a fight, but it is appropriate for the genre of that book. And quite frankly, that’s alright with me. If I’m reading something from “The Cat Who…” series, it would greatly surprise me if Jim Qwilleran disposed of the prime suspect by throwing ninja stars at him and slashing his throat with a handsaw. By the same token, if a fight in “The Hunger Games” was ended by simply punching someone in the face and knocking them into unconsciousness, it wouldn’t be true to the genre. This isn’t so much a lesson in how to make a fight scene exciting. It’s about staying true to the genre in which you’re working with. I know a lot of authors out there hate being categorized into a particular genre. Some authors prefer their books to be called “dark fantasy” instead of “horror” while others choose “dystopian fiction” instead of “sci-fi”. Well, guess what! If you don’t have a genre that defines your book, chances are your fight scenes are going to be ridiculous as hell and unreadable. Can you imagine Offred from “The Handmaid’s Tale” charging through a crowd of people on a horse while wielding a jousting lance? It wouldn’t make any fucking sense! Need more examples? Yeah, I thought not. Goodbye, pachos and pachas!
***MOVIE DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***
ALPHONSE: I want him to beg for mercy.
VICTOR: I don’t think he’s going to beg for mercy.
ALPHONSE: He wouldn’t get it anyways.
-Dead Man Down-
Before I get started with the body of this blog, I just want to take a moment and read to you the synopsis for “Cody’s Army”, which I am currently 72 pages into. It goes like this…
“The sequence was familiar: Another jet hijacked to Lebannon. Once again America held hostage by fanatic rebels. And just to prove they meant business the terrorists dragged two innocent passengers out on the tarmac and shot them in cold blood. That’s when John Cody and his mone got on the scene. Their mission was to free the hostages. But Cody wasn’t going to stop there. This time he had to make sure it didn’t happen again. And there was only one way to do that. The hard way. The bloody way.”
If that doesn’t get you excited about reading a high-octane military thriller, I don’t know what does. Just from that synopsis alone, you can expect John Cody to be a literary version of Rambo. The reason I reposted that text verbatim is to make a point: it may be wrong to judge a book by its cover, but it’s nowhere near immoral to judge one by its synopsis. If you’re a potential author and you want people to be at least vaguely interested in your book, you have to hit them with something hard long before they delve into the first page. It’s called hooking them in and it’s not a new thing. Movies that don’t hook in their audience by the first five minutes are going to lose a lot of patrons. And when you write your synopsis, don’t worry about overselling your product. It’s much more practical to oversell something than to undersell it. If you’re advertising a dog turd to someone dying of hunger, you’re going to want to oversell it as tasting like a Butterfinger candy bar. Otherwise, there won’t be a sale. If you want an example that’s closer to my heart, let’s use a WWE example, particularly one starring Dolph Ziggler. When he gets thrown around the ring, he doesn’t just flop over like most guys do. He spins around and flies like a birdie just to make that hip toss look painful. Dolph Ziggler can wrestle a broomstick and make the broomstick look good. If you’re an author looking to get people excited about your book, be a literary Dolph Ziggler and oversell your product. Talk about the bloody and painful moments early on. People love blood and pain. Now if only I could take my own advice when it came to selling “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”. If you’re wondering why I keep mentioning my self-published book in my posts, it’s because I haven’t sold a single copy as of today. It’s pathetic, I know. One day, I’ll shut up about it forever. I promise.
***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“CM Punk could burn an orphanage to the ground and he would still be popular with the fans.”
-Me-
When I was a writing rookie, one of the many mistakes I would make was mixing past and present tenses without realizing it. Everybody does it at some point in their rookie years. Now that I’m older and more conscious of the way I write, I choose to write in the past tense. However, after reading “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the first “Hunger Games” book, I’m starting to realize there are other options in that department. Those books in particular are written in the present tense. There’s something about the present tense that quickens the reading pace of a novel. There’s somehow supposed to be a difference between saying, “Oleg chopped the monster’s head off.” and “Oleg chops the monster’s head off.” I’ve often been told that present tense puts the reader in the moment as it’s happening, just like a movie would. The past tense merely tells a story while the present tense takes the extra step in showing instead of telling. It made me wonder if the present tense could ever be used in period piece genres such as fantasy and sci-fi. With the fantasy genre, the best way to utilize present tense is if one of the characters is telling the story around a campfire and using arm gestures to signify the action going on. With sci-fi, since it’s normally set in the future, it would be ideal to use a future tense, right? So far, I haven’t read anything that has successfully done it, so I won’t do it myself until I’m more secure with my surroundings. If all of these things are true about using present tense in narration of a story, then how come I’m not using it when I writing my own pieces of fiction? It’s because I’ve gotten so used to using past tense all of this time that I’m not ready for a radical change in style just yet. It seems like a little thing to change the words “was” and “is”, but here’s the deal. As a writer, you actually have to be aware of what you’re doing in order to be successful at sticking to a particular tense. If you’re so used to doing one thing all the time, then doing something else might result in too many errors on that first draft. So despite the strong case made for a present tense, especially on a blog about fast-paced books, I will continue to look back at the past for the moment. Besides, who’s to say that the past can’t be powerful as well since we have diseases like PTSD and schizophrenia? That would look particularly painful through the eyes of a first person narrator. Lots of potential power-wise.
***BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY***
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
If you’re a writer and you need to pick a name for your character, what kind of impression do you want to leave? Do you want to go for ethnic flavor? How about unbridled badassery? Or maybe you’ll choose the silly-willy route. Either way, tread carefully when choosing a name. I honestly believe there aren’t very many Chinese people named Sean McDonald and not many Irish people named Ryo Zhang. There also isn’t a huge line of barbarians named Sam Winkle or Floyd Phillips. What about accountants named Scorn Flesheater or Markus Bullhammer? If you’re going to choose a name for your character, make sure it sends the right message. That’s all I’m asking. Take the book “Fifty Shades of Grey” for instance. The lead characters are named Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. The author, EL James, took a lot of flak for choosing these stereotypically sexy names. What else was she supposed to do? Would you rather their names be Arthur Klutz and Blanche Toodles? I don’t care how many blowjob scenes there are in the book, nobody will jerk off to them if those are the names of the characters. Same thing goes with the names Bella Swan, Edward Cullen, and Jacob Black. As much as I hate to admit it, those are actually reasonably good names for characters of that genre. If their respective names were Vivian Sinkhole, Lloyd Walters, and Daniel the Daffodil, Stephanie Meyer wouldn’t be worth a food stamp card, let alone millions of dollars. And what about Conan the Barbarian? Suppose his name was Wally the Barbarian. He would have gotten his ass kicked long before he had the chance to become a hero. In fact, he might have been aborted with a jagged dagger covered in snake poison. Names tell you a lot about the character, so choose wisely. I made this mistake back in 2009 when I had my second run at Lulu.com, this time under the name Ryu Bashir. I am neither Japanese nor Arab, so like Superman with kryptonite up his ass, that’s not going to fly. Though if I was that serious about maintaining my privacy, it would have thrown a lot of people off my trail. If you want to save yourself some heartache and belittlement from your critics, pick a name for your character that’s actually relevant to the time period he’s in, his ethnicity, his age, and his general likeability. Got it? Good. Thanks for listening.
***MIXED-MARTIAL ARTS JOKE OF THE DAY***
Q: What’s it called when a UFC bantamweight does a solid for another fighter?
A: Urijah Favor.
Seeing the movie “Barbara” at the Grand Cinema in Tacoma gave me the inspiration to talk about this next topic: the literary genre. While “Barbara” wasn’t a book, it could just as easily fall under this category. The purpose of the literary genre is to educate before it entertains. It’s the reason why you’ll see books like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Green Grass, Running Water” on college campuses rather than things like “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games”. Literary genre stories don’t have to be fast-paced, they don’t even have to be fun to read. But then again, people don’t go to college or high school to have fun. They go there to become educated citizens so that they can get a good job and keep it for a long, long time. That’s all well and good, up until the point where the teachers penalize you for writing genre fiction, which isn’t always known for artsy-fartsy bullshit. Encouraging students to write literary novels isn’t anywhere near true to what goes on in the real world. There’s a whole sprawl of authors who became successful doing things like fantasy, sci-fi, transgression, and horror stories. They’re so successful that I don’t even have to name them because you already know who they are. But just for the sake of argument, their names are Suzanne Collins, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and as much as I hate to admit it, Stephanie Meyer. You don’t always have to win a Pulitzer Prize in order to be a good author. If at least one person likes your work, congratulations, you’re a good author. If multiple people like your work, you’re popular to those people as well. A Pulitzer Prize isn’t a requirement for being well-fed. So why then would teachers encourage their students to write things worthy of such a feat such as literary fiction and nonfiction? If you’re wondering why I need to ask this question, it’s because I’m still peeved about a C I got in one of my multiple-genre writing classes. It’s amazing how I can remember the worst times of my life, but the best ones are so distant that I might as well have Alzheimer’s. In any event, don’t expect “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart” to win any Pulitzer Prizes anytime soon. I choose entertainment over education. If you happen to be educated by the lessons taught in genre fiction, then good for you. If you actually had fun reading it, you have a lot more of my respect. Send your money to the United Necromancer College Fund. Because genres are terrible things to waste.
***TELEVISION DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***
DEEKS: Eric, I need you to run a license plate number. S as in Slayer, M as in Metallica, A as in Anthrax, 5-2-3 and P as in…parsnip.
ERIC: Wait a minute, your lettering system is based off of heavy metal bands and all you could give me was a root vegetable?
DEEKS: Sorry, I drew a blank.
ERIC: Pantera! Hello!
DEEKS: Cowboys From Hell. What was I thinking?
-NCIS: Los Angeles-
With this huge abundance of movies based off of books, there always seems to be an active debate going on about faithfulness to the original medium. Whenever something is slightly off-key, fan boys and fan girls fly off the handle and take to Twitter for a war of words. Then again, I’ve also heard arguments about how the director should have some control over the movie seeing as how he’s just as important as the writer. It happens in theater productions all the time. Sometimes the adjustments are agreeable, other times they’re nowhere near negotiable. I remember hearing a story about how the writer for a pornographic movie called Wild Side killed himself because the director changed the script drastically from its original intentions. Suicide because a script was butchered? Well, I’ve always heard about how artists can be insane sometimes. If you ask me for my opinion, I think there should be equal cooperation between writer and director. The director should be asking the writer about the way he wants the movie done and the writer should be flexible about the changes to be made. Writing and filmmaking are two very different mediums and therefore require completely different sets of skills. Wouldn’t you feel better if your project was in the right hands? The trust between two people is ultimately what will drive them to success whether it’s in a business, personal, romantic, or other kind of relationship. But of course, the tendency to dominate the project is ever present in today’s world. Wild Side is an extreme example of what could go wrong with domination. It typically doesn’t result in a suicide, but it can be struggled over in the court systems. If one thing goes wrong, a lawsuit will be ignited. It doesn’t matter who wins the lawsuit or even if it’s thrown out. Even if there’s no settlement to be gained, the money spent on lawyer’s fees and the delaying of the project will grind and wear on the people involved. Is it really worth suing over? We all know it’s not worth killing over as evidenced with Wild Side. If somebody wanted to make a movie out of “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart”, I wouldn’t be heartbroken over the choices the director made. I would just be fucking thrilled to know that people care enough about my book to make it into a more relatable medium. Reading is fun, but then again, so are movies. When these schools of thought come together, it should always be a beautiful thing. Nothing more, nothing less.
***COMEDIC QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“People got mad because Barack Obama thought mind-melding was from Star Wars instead of Star Trek. And I say to them, ‘Congratulations, you’re experts in every world except the real one.’”
-Bill Maher-
Discrimination is wrong, bottom line. But is it so wrong to discriminate against a book based on its size? Books that are so huge that you could beat someone to death with them are ever so affectionately known as “doorstoppers”. Not only are they five-hundred or so pages long, but they’re also printed on gigantic sheets of paper. Shit man, you could probably use the pages as window curtains if you so desired. Or if you wanted to give somebody a blanket party, you could rip out one page and beat the guy with the rest of the book. For books that are less than 200 pages and printed on smaller pieces of paper, the same kind of discrimination is true. People automatically assume that shorter reads are going to be literary flops. Not just flip-flops, not just belly flops, but big fucking flops when it comes to sales and popularity. The point of all these size jokes is not simply for a cheap segue into penis length. Those kinds of jokes are way too easy to tell and I will not sink below to that level. Ah, to hell with it, the bigger the book, the smaller the author’s penis! Authors with shorter books are growers, not showers. There, are you happy? The real reason for discussing the topic of doorstoppers is to decide whether or not judging a book by its size is unfair to the author. I say yes, it is unfair, because doorstoppers are still capable of having a quick reading speed. A lot of celebrity memoirs are written with a quick style and they’re big enough to give the faces on Mt. Rushmore reading material. In fact, there’s a book on my blog that could very well qualify as a doorstopper despite it only being less than 300 pages long. That book would be “Once Upon a Nightwish” by Mape Ollila. It’s a biography of a heavy metal band and it doesn’t use an overwhelming number of slick descriptions. The same thing is true about “Hitman” by Bret Hart when it comes to descriptive language. The difference is, “Hitman” reads so slowly that it takes god knows how many minutes to get through one single page. You won’t see that book on my blog anytime soon. The point of this blog is to send the message of not judging a book by its size. In other words, don’t have page envy. My self-published book “Red Blood, White Knuckles, Blue Heart” is only 176 pages long and it’s printed on six-by-nine paper. It’s a grower, not a shower. Thanks for listening to this very sexualized blog entry about a topic that never gets discussed in the classroom. Usually whenever book size is brought up in an educational setting, the response is akin to something like, “Too bad!” It’s even worse when reading pace is mentioned.
***WRESTLING QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“I’m not the goddamn weak link!”
-Daniel Bryan-
I hate to break it to you, Tea-Baggers, but Sarah Palin didn’t actually write “Going Rogue”. She can barely write talking points on her hand. She did what every other celebrity has done when they wanted to put out a book: she hired a ghostwriter. As much as I hate to admit it, there are pro-wrestlers out there as well who’ve used ghostwriters as well from Lesnar to Jericho. Unless the celebrity is already an established author like Tobias Wolff or Sarah Vowell, you can be pretty sure some ghostwriter out there wrote the damn book without being touted or paid very well. It’s the curse of being a ghostwriter, but it’s like my sister-in-law Susan says: “You have to start somewhere.” But if all of this celebrity-endorsed work is really a product of qualified writers, then why do bookworms toss them aside like they’re beneath the works of Stephen King and Suzanne Collins? I’ll tell you why: because the ghostwriters dictate a style in which their boss speaks. If you read a celebrity memoir and it suddenly sounded like a Pulitzer magnet, there’s something seriously wrong here. Do you honestly believe that Snooki is capable of talking like a literature student? I hope to God you don’t. Truth is, we don’t buy celebrity memoirs because they’re intelligently written. We buy them because we want to get intimate with the private lives of the person we’re reading about. I will say this: celebrity books dictate a very quick pace because they don’t overdo heavy descriptive language. The descriptions found in these books will most likely be a pop culture reference of some kind. Take for instance “Undisputed” by Chris Jericho. There’s a scene where he’s playing a Fozzy gig and he slides off the stage in what appears to be a goofy accident. You want to know what he compared it to? The toboggan scene from Christmas Vacation. Remember that scene? I do, but that doesn’t mean everybody else does. Not everybody has seen that movie before. But that’s okay, because celebrities can get away with pop culture references. Why is that? Because they’re famous and people will buy their books whether the writing is good or not. If you have no fame, don’t even try for a pop culture reference. It won’t work. People who don’t listen to Nightwish won’t know what you’re talking about if you all of the sudden compare the beauty of your girlfriend to that of Tarja Turunen. Celebrities can get away with pretty much anything they want. They’re famous, they’re rich, and people will love them no matter what. That’s not to say that celebrity memoirs can’t be entertaining. On the contrary, “Undisputed” was VERY entertaining. Just don’t expect to see these books in a college classroom. Ever.
***WRESTLING DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***
DANIEL BRYAN: I feel naked without the tag team titles!
KANE: That’s because you’re not wearing a shirt. Or pants.
From six years old to my mid-teens, Legos were a huge part of my life. I would mix and match Lego mini-figure parts to create various characters to play with. I’ve had barbarians, knights, time travelers, wizards with knives, and an entire squadron of space warriors called The Faces of Death. Guess where that name came from. And then when my mid-teens were over, so was the magic. I literally lost my ability to play with toys amidst suffering from PTSD due to bullying in high school. Thanks, jerks. Now that I’m in adulthood, I still collect Lego sets and figures, but I never really get them out and play with them ever. I’m a struggling author who needs as many storylines as possible, preferably ones that aren’t “wasted” on Lego playing sessions. It’s not a total loss, however. While I don’t play with Legos anymore, I do write stories about the various sets I put together. Back in late 2009, I wrote tons of short stories involving my toys known as “Lego Wars”. They were slightly off-color and extremely violent, just like any other story I would write. Two years later, I wrote a full-length novel called Toy Story Extreme, where a Lego fan boy named Darius Oliver was holding a destructive tournament for his toys. It had the potential to be something amazing, except for the fact that it was my first attempt at an all-dialogue story complete with spoken décor. If I’m going to publish it on Lulu.com, then I’ll need to do a LOT of work to fix it up. It’s a year and a half later and now I’ve got an idea for a Lego story called Toy Story Extreme 2: Casey’s Army. In the case of this idea (which won’t be written until after I get done with Hardcore Hate 2), Casey Brooks is a juvenile delinquent who is sent to an all-girls school after getting in trouble with the law so many times. She brings her violent toys with her and brings them to life via witchcraft in order to take revenge on the people who wronged her. Seeing as how Legos had such a huge influence on my life, I think it’s only natural that I would want to see a Lego-based novel at Barnes & Noble or on Amazon.com. It probably wouldn’t be intended for adults, but I’d still read it if there was one, preferably set within the world of the Time Cruisers and Time Twisters. I may be playing with fire when I write my own Lego stories because of copyright issues, just like I’ve discussed in my blog entry about videogames adapted into books. So if there’s someone out there who actually likes playing with fire, please, by all means, write a Lego book for adults who loved them as kids. Thanks, and have a great goddamn day!
***LYRICS OF THE DAY***
“When we grew up and went to school, there were certain teachers who would hurt the children anyway they could. By pouring their derision upon anything we did, exposing every weakness no matter how carefully hidden by the kids. But in the town it was well known when they got home at night their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.”
-Pink Floyd singing “The Happiest Days of Our Lives”-
It’s 2001/2002 and you’re a member of Playbyweb.com, a post-to-post RPG website. You try to establish an RPG based on a popular videogame only to be met with comments like, “Why don’t you just play the videogame?” Are you sick of those comments yet? Get used to them, because in 2009 when you officially solidify your status as a bookworm, you take an interest in books that were adapted from videogames. A few weeks ago, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought something that I look forward to reading someday: “Diablo III: The Order”. I’ve never played Diablo III, just the second one and the first one. Judging from how memorable Diablo II was, I figured that the third one in the series should be just as exciting and fast-paced. I expect the book will be just as action-packed as the videogames themselves. This will be the attitude I take with me whenever I go shopping for books at Barnes & Noble. There’s a whole sprawl of books and graphic novels based on videogames. I’ve seen ones based on Halo, Diablo (as I’ve said earlier), Sonic, and…those are the only ones my shitty memory will allow me to say. I’m sure there are others. Shit, just the other day, I was surfing Amazon and I purchased a copy of “Super Mario: How Nintendo Ruled America” by Jeff Ryan. It’s nonfiction of course since it’s in the style of a biography. I’ll look good on my shelf once it gets here. In the meantime, all this talk about books committed to videogames makes me want to see some novels based on other games as well. A Mario biography is nice, but how about a novel based in the Mario universe? Wouldn’t you like to see a story told through the creepily curled eyes of Phanto? I would, that’s for damn sure. Or how about a Final Fantasy IV novel told in a Calcobrena Puppet’s point of view? I’m sure that would sell. Hell, I’ll even settle for a Pac-Man book if it’s at all possible. I’m sure someone out there with a wild imagination could do it. Or if you’re into something a little more action-packed, let’s try some Street Fighter and Tekken books. There’s a whole universe of videogames out there that hasn’t been exploited yet. The only thing stopping authors like me from exploiting them is the anal-retentive copyright laws where corporations will literally sue over nothing. That’s part of the ongoing debate over fan fiction these days: internet postings and personal sharing is fine, but no official publication lest you be taken to court. If there are any authors out there who are more capable of getting a license to write videogame books than I am, I implore you, make these novels a reality. And no, I won’t just “play the videogame”, because I’ll get frustrated by the immense difficulty level. The last time I actually played a game was in 2010 when I kept getting my ass kicked by a lava dragon in Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS. It seems hypocritical that I would want videogame based novels after not having played one in three years. Maybe I’m just nostalgic since they were a huge part of my childhood. So how about it? Will we have that Donkey Kong novel or not? Anybody? Hello!
***CODY’S ARMY***
Whenever I’m not posting blog entries like the one I just did or writing chapters of Hardcore Hate 2: It‘s a Real War, I’ll be reading “Cody’s Army” by Jim Case. I’m 20 pages into it and it’s already an exciting thrill ride.
***JOKE OF THE DAY***
Mickey Mouse is in Walt Disney’s office and Walt says, “I can’t just fire Minnie for being stupid.” Mickey says, “I didn’t say she was stupid. I said she was fucking Goofy.”
Something else you can expect from a Lilian Jackson Braun book is nonlinear progression. In the case of “The Cat Who Went Bananas”, there are a whole bunch of different things going on as the story advances. Koko and Yum-Yum getting fed, petted, and loved is always a staple of these cozy mysteries, otherwise it wouldn’t be called “The Cat Who…”. And then you have Jim Qwilleran’s orders from his doctor to eat more bananas. The slipping on a banana peel gag becomes very important midway through the story, so pay attention. And then you have Polly Duncan, Qwill’s best friend, becoming emotionally distant ever since turning her library into a bookstore. There’s also an Oscar Wilde play being performed at the Theater Arts auditorium, which attracts the attention of a lady-killer named Alden Wade. Of course, this story would be incomplete if it wasn’t for Qwill being asked to write a story about the Hibbard House, a beat up old mansion that survived many generations despite burning to the ground several times. With all of these things being mixed into one nonlinear story, you’re probably asking yourself when the actual mystery begins. It all starts when Ronnie, an actor for the Oscar Wilde play, gets into a car accident on his way to town. When the medical examiner did the autopsy on him, they found that he was on drugs and alcohol. It wasn’t in Ronnie’s nature to do those kinds of things to his own body, so the plot definitely thickens here. If you need somebody to suspect, try Alden Wade. When he visits Qwill’s house, Koko immediately dislikes him and expresses his hatred with hisses and death howls. Remember when I said that the slipping on a banana peel gag would become important? Well, it turns out that Koko planted that banana peel in the right place at the right time so that Alden Wade would slip and tumble. I won’t tell you why you should be suspicious of him. You’ll just have to buy a copy of this cute and cuddly book to find out. With Koko, Yum-Yum, a marmalade kitty with “magical eyes” named Dundee, a precious pile of fluff named Jet Stream, and a saggy jowled puppy-duppy named Tasso, even the most brutal mystery can be a warm, fuzzy, snuggly read. Not that this one is brutal, but you get the picture. I hope.
***FACEBOOK MEME OF THE DAY***
Twenty years ago, we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, and Steve Jobs. Now we have no cash, no hope, and no jobs. Please don’t let Kevin Bacon die!
It’s never been a huge secret that what went on in Nazi Europe during World War II was disgusting on Hitler’s part. With “Maus I” by Art Spiegelman, you get a closer look as to how brutal the dictatorship really was, as told by Art’s father Vladek Spiegelman. Getting a hold of this information didn’t come without verbal sparring between the father and son, not to mention with Mala as well, Vladek’s new wife. Vladek lived his life appreciative of what little he had since that’s how he was forced to live during his time in Nazi Europe. He pinched his pennies and stashed his food, because he knew that any moment, he could be shoved into a concentration camp or killed on the spot like a lot of his relatives and close friends were. All of this senseless violence simply because he was Jewish. Art Spiegelman could have told his father’s story anyway he wanted to. He could have written it in novel form if he so desired, but instead, he chose the route of a graphic novelist. He chose to represent the Jewish people as mice and the Nazi soldiers as cats. I probably don’t have to tell you what that kind of symbolism is supposed to represent. It would be like contrasting dragons to people or spiders to flies. It could be that the reason Art Spiegelman chose to draw Jewish people as mice is because of the harsh way in which they were depicted by Nazi propaganda films. Art would never suggest that his own people were comparable to rats or mice, but he drew them that way to depict a deadly reality that took place in those desolate times. The few happy moments this graphic novel has are far between each other. There is no happiness in a place like Nazi Europe. Just death, destruction, starvation, and hard labor. You know that Vladek Spiegelman survived this ordeal because there are frames of him telling his story to his son Art. You wouldn’t believe that this was a survivor’s tale otherwise. It was that torturous. If this doesn’t depress the hell out of you, you’re probably being poked in the belly like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Buy a copy for yourself and see why Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for his hard work.
***LYRICS OF THE DAY***
“She sees him laying in the bed alone tonight. The only thing touching him is a crack of light. Pieces of her hair are wrapped around and ‘round his fingers. And he reaches for her side for any sign of her that lingers. And she says, ‘You are not alone laying in the light. Put out the fire in your head and lay with me tonight.’”
-Patty Griffin singing “Not Alone”-
To give you an idea of what you can expect from this teeny tiny 50-page book, I’ve decided to treat you all to an actual speech Dana White gave as it relates to EliteXC, a rival promotion that was trying to run UFC into the ground. It goes like this:
“The idiot Gary Shaw actually does an interview with the LA Times where he says, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong. There’s nothing wrong with paying people to stand up. We’ve got no problem doing that.’ Yes, you scumbag! There is a problem with that! Think about this: Mandalay Bay and the Venetian both had betting on this. You, the consumer, the mixed-martial arts fan, can go in and bet on these fights. You’re probably thinking, ‘Well, if Seth Petruzelli can get Kimbo Slice to the ground, this fight’s over. I’m going to bet my money that Seth Petruzelli is going to win by submission.’ But you don’t know the scumbag promoters behind the scenes went in and paid Seth Petruzelli to not go to the ground. They paid him to stand up, you know why? They thought Kimbo Slice was going to viciously knock him out. But Kimbo Slice sucks, like I’ve been saying for a couple of months now. This fucking guy can’t fight and he got knocked out in 13 seconds by a guy who didn’t win the Ultimate Fighter, who didn’t win fights in the UFC. They actually brought him up from the undercard to fight the main event guy and he knocks Kimbo Slice out in 13 seconds. It would be like if there’s a game between the Browns and the Patriots and the NFL goes backstage and says to the Browns, ‘We know you guys have a great running game, so we’re to pay you money to just pass the ball, because the Patriots pull higher ratings than you do and we need them to make it to the playoffs.’ That’s fucking illegal! So Gary Shaw, rapper, whatever the fuck your name is, Shaw Jr., and Jeremy Lappen, if you think going to the ground is boring, that’s mixed-martial arts. You scumbags need to be in the kickboxing business if that’s what you’re selling, if you need to pay guys to stand up. These fucking jerk-offs don’t care about mixed-martial arts. They’re just in it for the money. Me and my crew have been busting our asses trying to promote this sport and show how incredible these athletes are, and now you’ve got these boxing scumbags trying to fix fights. It’s unbelievable!”
Believe it or not, that was just the appetizer. The main course comes when you actually purchase the book! Happy reading!
***MIXED-MARTIAL ARTS QUOTE OF THE DAY***
“Gunnar Nelson is so calm, he looks like he’s getting ready to go to bed.”
-Joe Rogan-
If you’re a Simpsons fan and you especially love their Treehouse of Horror episodes, then you’ll have to wait an entire year for the next installment. If on the other hand you don’t have that kind of patience, I recommend buying “Bart Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror: Heebie-Jeebie Hullabaloo”. Goddamn, that’s a long title, but with a short page count. This graphic novel has everything you could ever want in a Treehouse of Horror episode: comedy, fright, and a few intermissions in between. By intermissions, I mean things other than lame-ass, tame-ass auto insurance commercials on TV. Those things would include a mad lib done by different members of the Simpson clan, a spider web of Springfield citizens “cursing” each other, ramblings of the sea captain telling weird-ass stories, those kinds of things. But those are just the intermissions in between chapters. For the actual chapters, you’ve got things that bring chills to your spine more often than a Gracie Films logo with a screaming woman in the background. But while your spine is tingling worse than a spider bite, you might also get a few chuckles to ease the nervous feeling in your tummy. You’ve got Sideshow Bob turning into Sideshow Blob, Springfield citizens being replaced with boring versions of themselves, Bart chasing a naked Homer with a fisherman’s pike, and the very remote possibility that Homer, if he was replaced with a dull version of himself, might not care about professional wrestling anymore. That’s right, Homer! Run those stubby little legs to freedom! We must have pro-wrestling! Actually, he can’t run far without being caught by insane asylum orderlies who try to convince him he’s nuts. Ah hell, it has to be said at some point, so we might as well take advantage of the segue. This whole graphic novel is nuts. And if you need more proof, take a look at the couch gag at the back of the book: the Simpsons laying on the couch with pieces of their bodies falling off and their skeletons visible. It’s a shame that couch gag wasn’t used on TV with the creepy music playing in the background. That would make for some nerve-wracking shit! But since you have to wait a whole year for another Treehouse of Horror episode, just buy this book.
***TELEVISION DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***
GRANDPA: Quick! We have to kill the boy!
MARGE: How did you know he’s a vampire?
GRANDPA: He’s a vampire?! AAHH!!
-Simpsons Treehouse of Horror IV-
As you can guess from the title of this book, you won’t be expecting a happy ending…or middle…or beginning. What this 90-page summary implies is that it actually took tragedies in order for the wrestling business to change. These changes should have taken place a long time ago, but it’s an ugly side of life we all have to live with at some point. Take for instance the first person this book talks about, Owen Hart. He was a fun guy to be around and a great performer in the ring. The fact that he’s never won a world title before is a sacrilege. He would have had a lifetime to do it, but in order for that to happen, he couldn’t have performed a stunt from the top of the rafters and fallen to his death. Unfortunately, that’s how Owen’s life came to an end: the harness he was wearing broke and he plummeted to the ground below. It actually took that accident for the writers to realize that dangerous stunts like those should be kept to a minimum and closely monitored. Or not even done at all, that would be even better. You know who else could have used close monitoring? Eddie Guerrero. For a while, he was heavily into drugs and alcohol and it got so bad that he had to be released from WWE. Upon completing rehab and getting himself clean, he came back to the company and ended up winning the WWE Championship from Brock Lesnar. That would end up being his only world title reign as a year later, he had a heart attack from all the drug abuse he put himself through. Because of that horrifying death, WWE put into place the Wellness Program, where superstars can be suspended for testing positive for drugs of any kind. It seems good on paper until you consider the case of Chris Benoit, who passed several drug tests despite having a high ratio of testosterone in his body. Because of his own problems with performance-enhancing drugs and several blows to the head, he went into a rage and murdered his wife and child before hanging himself on exercise equipment. I’ve said it before and it bears to be repeated: it shouldn’t take a tragedy for regulations to be in effect, let alone three. And the sad part about all of this? These three wrestlers, Owen Hart, Eddie Guerrero, and Chris Benoit, are not the only ones who died under such circumstances. If you look near the back of the book, you’ll see an entire list of people who died prematurely. It’s depressing to see your heroes go so soon. It really is.
***LYRICS OF THE DAY***
“These wounds won’t seem to heal. This pain is just too real. There’s just too much that time cannot erase. When you cried, I’d wipe away all of your tears. When you screamed, I’d fight away all of your fears. And I held your hand through all of these years. But you still have all of me. I’ve tried so hard to tell myself that you’re gone. But though you’re still with me, I’ve been alone all along.”
-Evanescence singing “My Immortal”-
You don’t really need any confirmation as to how creepy The Joker can be. Just buy a copy of this graphic novel and look at the cover. That is not a mouth anybody would want to kiss, unless of course they were bulimic and needed a reason to throw up. Looking at the cover by itself, do you think that The Joker is someone you want to hang around with? Jonny Frost seems to think so, but even he has his pants-pissing moments when trying to figure him out. The Joker will step on graves, slash throats, pump people full of lead, and any other form of hideous torture that will earn him the control of Gotham City he once had. These underworld kingpins made the mistake of taking over the criminal activity while Joker was locked up in Arkham Asylum. Not very smart! Dead bodies are piling up everywhere and it all happens under the naïve Jonny Frost’s watch, who once said himself that The Joker is like a disease spread around Gotham City to which there is no cure. Sure, Batman can come in at the most inopportune time and save the day, but you know what? His nemesis will keep coming back for as long as he needs to. That’s how on edge the citizens of Gotham need to be, as well as Jonny Frost. It’s that level of creepiness that brings out the gruesome nature this graphic novel has to offer. You never know when The Joker is going to strike or why he does it in the first place, but you know it will happen eventually. Combine this frightening aura with a neo-noir backdrop and you’ve got a formula for a successful graphic novel. Noir is supposed to be a dark genre to begin with. Shadows cover the characters in order to retain their element of surprise for when they eventually come back into the light and scare the living crap out of whoever’s in front of them. If you need a reference, think of “Batman: The Animated Series” and turn the rating up to somewhere between TV-14 and TV-MA. If you’re not shitting your pants just from reading this graphic novel, you need to eat more vegetables.
***LYRICS OF THE DAY***
“On your own admission, you raised up the knife. And you brought it down ending another man’s life. When it was done, you just threw down the blade while the red blood spread wider like the anger you made. I don’t want this anger burning in me. It’s something from which it’s so hard to be free. And none of the tears that we cried in sorrow or rage can make any difference or turn back the page.”
-David Gilmour singing “Murder”-
