Happy new year!

Instead of hunting and wounding helpless animals, my husband brought back THIS delightful meal. The yellowish one is champagne!

Anyway, thanks for being such good readers and friends this year. Stay tuned...I'm turning 40 soon, and that will probably result in at least a couple of entries.

Have a great one!

Worst and best

A few days ago I mentioned that someone thought my book was the worst book of 2010. Well, this person thinks it was the best. Different strokes!

Quote

We did see the movie 'Easy A.' What followed:

FATHER IN 'EASY A': After we watch 'The Bucket List,' remember to cross 'watch "The Bucket List" off our bucket list.

ME: That was terrible.

HUBBY: The whole MOVIE IS TERRIBLE!!

It takes every kind of people

One reader had this to say about Carrie Pilby, in a review on the website Goodreads.com: "If the title of this book was Kevin Pilby, the book would get a rave review from literati types, a fancy arty cover, and a movie starring Michael Cera. I feel like the author is being cheated out of this ... Feminist-ish rant aside, I really enjoyed this book ... I hope it gets a wider audience that the cover is aiming for, and that it gets good press, hell and maybe even a movie deal, with Ellen Page in the starring role."

And on the other hand, this person believes Carrie Pilby was the worst book of 2010.

All valid opinions. I've loved books that others hated. Just shows how different opinions can be!

Dinner and a movie

Movies I have wanted to see in the last few years have been few and far between. But around the time I gave birth, a ton of movies came out that looked worth seeing. So now I have some good choices when hubby and I want to pay-per-view. The ones I wanna see include:

Easy A

It's Kind of a Funny Story

Social Network

The Town

And we're gonna also see Wall Street II.

I also think The Backup Plan looks good, but how much am I gonna have to pay hubby to watch this:

The movie is a story of a woman (played by Jennifer Lopez) who is worried about her biological clock ticking and thus goes in for artificial insemination, only to find the perfect man (played by Alex O’Loughlin) on the very same day. What follows is a never before relationship which starts with handling together a pregnancy, while dating and romancing side by side!

Question

Do people under 25 ever use the term "cable tv" these days or even know what it means, since pretty much ALL TV is cable TV now? If I tell my son someday that something is "on cable," will he laugh at me? (Of course, I'll be using it to mean any channel over 13, but he won't see it that way.)

click to enlarge

I can wait a little more

Many years ago, probably at least seven or eight, I cut out this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from the newspaper. I loved the last line. I kept it in my "in" box and never had a place to put it, so it's sat at the bottom of my in box for almost a decade! Here it is. Have happy holidays, everyone. Thank you for reading my humble blog.

Months

The worst three months of the year are coming up. The weather is lousy and there are no holidays to compensate. They should move Xmas to the end of January to make January more tolerable. (Yeah, yeah, I know.) Now, I bet you're saying to yourself, "But Addledwriter, I thought you love snow!" I DO! But most of what we get Jan-March isn't light, fluffy flakes falling to earth and wrapping us up in Mother Nature's wonder. It's just coldness and slush. I'll love it if we get a nice blizzard. Luckily I have a lovely family and gas heat, so we'll be toasty through the winter.

Buckley

My family moved four times as I was going through school, so I have distinct memories of four sets of kids. I used to wonder what happened to certain ones, and these days, Google and Facebook allow you to find out. So when I'm bored, I Google the more interesting kids I encountered growing up, to find out what became of them.

(As a side note -- I started reading this blog at one point, where a guy wrote down every memory he had of the kids he went to school with in Wisconsin. I remember odd things like that too, but I'd never do a blog like that -- too much chance to offend someone. Still, it just shows some of the funny things you remember from elementary school.)

Anyway, among all the kids I encountered in four school districts in Central New Jersey in the 1980s, one of the smarter ones was Buck R. I remember him because he was in the top three smartest kids in my eighth grade class, and that was a class in which almost everyone was pretty smart. It was the year we lived in snobby Holmdel, N.J.

Buck was handsome and looked kinda like Doogie Howser, with the scrunched nose. He talked kinda slow, which made any funny thing he said even funnier. There are two distinct funny things he said that I remember the whole class laughing at:

1. We had a substitute teacher for social studies one day. Anyone who has been in the gifted/smartypants/honors classes knows that sometimes the smart kids can be just as obnoxious as the other classes, only maybe in a less threatening way. They're wiseasses and think they're superior to the teacher. So this day, my classmates were riling up the sub about something.

The sub said, "You kids are acting retarded."

Buck responded, in his calm, slow manner, "Yeah, we're the retarded gifted and talented class..." which got several people roaring.

2. Whenever we got done early with our work in class, like say before Christmas break or on a half day, the class would clamor for Trivial Pursuit. That's usually how the teachers passed the time on one of those non-work giddy days. They'd break the class in half and one side would play the other side.

One day, we were playing Trivial Pursuit and our teacher asked this question: "What is the number one reason for divorce in the United States?"

Buck suddenly burst out, "IM-potency."

That also got a big laugh...kind of the way he said it so matter-of-factly, and just the fact that he said it to begin with.

Anyway, I Googled him years ago. He had gone to Harvard Law and then become a manager at Goldman Sachs. Maybe a dull sort of occupation, but work doesn't make the man. That was about all that showed up about dear Buck.

Until I happened to hear something funny last week. Stephen Colbert was complaining about Wall Street executives and their bonuses. He mentioned that one of his writers found the Goldman Sachs credit card of a manager there. He held it up on TV and threatened to reveal one number of it each night on the show unless the owner came on the show to defend the bonuses. Who does the card belong to? Buck R.! (Colbert also made fun of his very Yuppie sounding first and last name). Here is a rundown of the event from the Washington Post, with video.

So anyway, Buck is famous again, as he should be.

Those totally awesome '80s

This past Halloween, there was an "'80s" section in the local costume store. So the '80s have joined the '50s and '60s as iconic decades. Who would have thought that the heyday of my youth would be later celebrated and even admired by younger generations, much like the greasers were celebrated when I was growing up? That's just gnarly.

I loved the early '80s. Sure, that was the time I was picked on in junior high, but that's not what I remember most. I remember taping songs off the American Top 40 each Sunday; I remember my brother and I searching for the video arcade in any hotel my parents stayed at. (We found one in Kissimmee, Fla. that was rated one of the top 10 arcades in the country by a video game magazine at the time - I think either by Enter or Joysticks.) I recall learning BASIC. I definitely remember Jodi, Kathy, and Jen D. obsessing over Duran Duran.

Most '80s icons have been brought back and hammered into the ground thanks to VH1 and other nostalgia outlets. It's hard to find things that people forgot.

But recently I remembered three '80s songs that no one thinks about much these days.

1. Centipede

I completely forgot about this one until it was mentioned off-handedly in music writer Rob Sheffield's Book, "Talking to Girls about Duran Duran," which I read portions of recently while pumping breastmilk. (Hey, ya gotta do something.) It's by a Jackson sister.

2. I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down

This was one of those songs that dripped into the top 40 for a few weeks but didn't stay long. And yet, it hung around in my head. I don't think I've heard it since the last time it was in the top 40, but of course, it's locatable on YouTube. This guy definitely looks '80s.

3. Be Mine, Tonight

A Neil Diamond song my brother and I both liked. It actually was in a dream I had a few months ago, for some reason. I don't actually remember what the dream was about. It was not about Neil Diamond. It's a peppy little tune.

We never knew it for what it was worth; it was worth more than we understood...Be mine, tonight.

Article about young adult books

...In Publisher's Weekly. Worth reading if you are interested in the genre.

Here's a sandwich to go with it.

Rain on the fire escape

A warm winter rain on the fire escape, Sunday morning. I enjoyed it so much, I thought I'd share it with you.

2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

Some of you hopeful novelists will be happy to know that Amazon has finally announced the details of next year's Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. I wish they'd had a contest like this back in the old days, before I started writing Carrie Pilby. But it all worked out in the end! Anyway, details are here. Good luck!