I love hearing from authors and publicists who’d like me to read and review their books. If you have a title you think I’d be interested in, please feel free to contact me at ibetnoonehasthisdamnid@yahoo.com .
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I look forward to hearing from you!
I’ve forever done the three same memes (four, counting VVW, but can that count since hardly anyone ever plays?), and I love them, don’t get me wrong, but I thought maybe I’d branch out and see what else is out there.
I came across The Daily Meme, a site that lists a large variety of memes, from dailies and weeklies, to one-time-onlies. After Perusing what’s available for Monday, I’ve decided to do two.
Monday Moive Meme
This week’s movie topic is all about Concessions…
See our happy logo for the Monday Movie Meme? It is a shot of the “Dancing Concessions” that used to play before every movie for one of the big theaters that has probably since gone out of business. It was their way of reminding everyone to get up and go spend money on snacks and drinks before the movie started – as if we hadn’t already remembered to do this on our way in. The allure of buttered popcorn is pretty strong after all. Movies and snacks go hand in hand – whether you watch from home or out on the big screen. Here are our favorite movie snacks. What are yours?
Okay, y’all know I’m weird, and this will show you one of the oh-so-many ways I am NOT right in the head. My fav movie snack is this:
BOTH in my mouth at the SAME time.
You know what it tastes like when you eat popcorn and Dots together?
Usually, we stop at the Family Dollar a couple blocks down from the theater and get our sweets. It just chafes my buns that the exact SAME box of Dots I bought at the dollar stor for a buck is $2.63 at the theater. Times that by my three kids, and their friends sometimes, even, and movie snacks can get EX-PEN-SIVE!
A theme will be given each Monday. Share a funny video, funny joke, funny picture, funny poem, funny comic, funny animation or funny story that represents the theme for the week. Share anything that can make us laugh.
Being evil is more than a job, it’s a lifestyle. By embracing the dark forces, otherwise ordinary men, women, and even children and pets can gain power and wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Perhaps the single greatest benefit of a career in evil is equal access to executive level positions. Black, white, or green; male, female, or alien life form; spikes, scales, or brain in a jar – nothing prevents a devotee of darkness from rising to the top of the quagmire of destruction.
– “The Benefits of Being Evil” from How to Be a Villain by Neil Zawacki, page 10
In these troubling times, jobless rates on the rise, paychecks dwindling into microscopic amounts, and a general malaise about the economy, you might be considering a career change. If so, might I suggest a career in EVIL?
The field of Evil-Doer is wide open, and you have a delicious variety of career paths that include:
Becoming a criminal mastermind! Whether you choose to rob banks or send out emails asking for help to move your multi-million dollar wealth out of your impoverished, third-world country, crime is the tried-and-true classic medium for a villain to flex his wicked muscles.
Try your hand as a necromancer! If graveyards and funeral parlors are your favorite places to hang out, and you can get your mitts on ancient books of the occult, why not take possession of your true purpose and give Ol’ Scratch a run for the “Most Evil” award this year.
Take that corner office with the wall of windows and become a corporate bastard! You can even mix career advancement and the pleasure of revenge by taking over and destroying the very company that let you go. Make sure to funnel off all the executive pension fund before it’s demise, though, or you’ll be back to square one, JOBLESS and BROKE.
Have a knack for mixing ingredients? Give mad scientista try! Build up your army of mutant eight-legged simians, actual spider-monkeys, and take over the world. Then you can set about re-create MAN in your OWN image.
If you like horseback riding and wearing metal clothing, black knight might be the path for you! You will derive endless pleasure from making peasants your neighbors bow before you, quaking in terror, wondering if today will finally be the day you make good on your threat to “gut them like the pigs they are.”
If you own a lonely motel on a lonely stretch of never-used highway AND have conversations with your long-since deceased mother, horror-movie villain may have your name written all over it! Rub elbows with A-list actors and slay sexy starlets, not to mention peeping on the co-eds getting busy in the next room, are all in a days work!
Take dominion of the spirit world as an avatar for a god/demon/supernatural creature beyond all comprehension! While allowing the forces of evil to use your body, you’ll be enjoying all the perks of your new-found godhood.
Not quite up to all-out evil? Try a career as a marketing executive! Shape the way future generations think by creating advertisements that mesh their favorite, beloved underwater hero and a sexually-depraved rapper.
You may even try your hand at an evil-lite career as a villain and become a telemarketer! Endless pleasure can be derived from interrupting dinners, sleep, and the recipients physical fun with their significant other. This career as an evil-doer, however, has been in a steady decline since the invention of caller ID.
How to Be a Villainby Neil Zawacki is a fun, light read full of tongue-in-cheek, dead-pan humor that feels like an actual tutorial how-to guide. The quirky and fun illustrations, however, let assure you the book does not take itself seriously. Get in touch with your inner villain by picking up a copy today 😀 I give this book 3 1/2 out of 5 black hats.
This video is cheesy (on purpose) and is an example of the information found in How to Be a Villain by Neil Zawacki. They do not credit the book, so I don’t know if it’s where they got their ideas, but it’s great 😀 (seriously, though, cheese factor is off the charts!)
Miscellaneous: Empire Falls won the 2002 Pulitizer Prize for Fiction
“Has it ever occurred to you that life is a river, dear boy?” Mrs. Whiting said when Miles sat down opposite her in the gazebo. In asking this question the old woman managed to convey, as with all such queries, that she was not anticipating a response that would enlighten her. Whereas some people’s attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn’t, Mrs. Whiting’s implied that she knew everything you didn’t. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her duty to bring you at least partially up to speed.
–Empire Falls by Richard Russo, page 161
Empire Falls by Richard Russois the multi-faceted and complex tale of the Central Maine town of Empire Falls. Woven together like a rich tapestry, it tells of the cross-generational intersections of the lives of its denizens, with the life of Miles Roby the central focus.
Miles has spent most of his life going with the flow. A devout Catholic, he’s predisposed to motivation-by-guilt and a nagging sensation that everything bad that’s ever happened can somehow, if one looked hard enough, back to him and is his fault. His desire to always do the right thing gives him the unintended air of moral superiority that can be repellent, and the fact that he attended 3 1/2 years of college before returning to Empire Falls when his mother was on her death bed gives him an added perception of intellectual superiority. All of this is not a truth about Miles, only what others sometime perceive about him.
Opposite Miles are Jimmy Minty and Mrs. Whiting. Jimmy Minty, Mr. Empire Falls as he referred to himself, is a police officer and possibly the next Chief of Police. Whereas Miles can seem morally and intellectually superior to the town even though it’s everything he is NOT, Minty is the “everyman”. People may not like him, but at least he’s one of them and knows it. What the town does NOT know is that this “everyman” has keys to each and every lock in Dexter County, a houseful of stolen electronics and no tangible income to explain his ownership of a shiny, new, red Camaro.
Minty’s off-the-book work as Mrs. Whiting’s muscle is, of course, how he affords the car. Think of a Bedford Falls in which George Baily just went along, obligingly, with what Old Man Potter said, and you’d have Empire Falls. Mrs. Whiting is Russo’s answer to Mr. Potter. Incapable of feeling love herself, she has an incredible knack of uncovering that affliction in others and does her best to eradicate it. “Power and Control” are the words by which she lives, and tells Miles that people often confuse will with power, and that the “power” they perceive the lucky few as having is simply that they know what they want in life and go after it.
“You appear to have been visited by some sort of revelation, dear boy,” Mrs. Whiting observed. “Here’s my suggestion, though. Why not think things over? Passionate decisions are seldom very sound.”
“When did you ever feel passion?”
“Well, it’s true I’m seldom swept away like those with more romantic temperaments,” she conceded. “But we are what we are, and what can’t be cured must be endured.”
“What can’t be cured mus be avenged,” Miles said. “Isn’t that what you mean?”
She smiled appreciatively. “Payback is how we endure, dear boy…”
–Empire Falls by Richard Russo, pages 434-435
Another of Miles nemeses, Timmy the Cat, is one of my favorite characters in this book. Timmy, found and adopted by Mrs. Whiting’s daughter Cindy, had, as a small kitten, been placed in a sack with her litter-mates and tossed into the Knox, the river that runs through Empire Falls. She was the lone survivor and never right in the head ever after. Described by Miles in such loving terms as “psychotic” or “homicidal”, Timmy is whispered by the townspeople (usually in the bar and after a few drinks) to be Mrs. Whiting’s familiar. Appearing as if from thin air whenever Mrs. Whiting’s name is spoken, as if the uttering of her mistress’s name was the spell to summon the demon cat. In a way, Timmy is representative of Mrs. Whiting’s nature and how she relates to people, as if she were a cat and they the wounded prey she toyed with until they bored her and she finally ended their lives.
It took me a while to finish Empire Falls, and a bit longer than that to write this review. It is a dense and complex novel, with several sub-plots and sub-stories. There’s Tick, Miles’s daughter, and her steady march to adulthood. Will she become passive and resigned to whatever the fate’s bring like her dad? David Roby, Miles (maybe half) brother, and his life of sobriety after an accident caused by his own drunk driving, rendered his left hand useless. And, of course, there’s the incorrigible Max Roby, Miles father, who’s life philosophy can be condensed into two words, “So What!” Max is always on the look out for the hand out and badgers his son for money, promising him if he’d just give him $500 then he’d take off for the Florida Keys, and he’d be out of Miles’s hair for a whole New England winter. Tempting, Miles thinks, before realizing the old man would just call for more money once he got there.
After considering and weighing Empire Falls by Richard Russo, I came to the understanding that the best way to describe it is that it’s a “grown up book”. Not necessarily for language, though it does have plenty of that, nor for sexual content, ditto, or for violence, though there is animal cruelty and a shooting in it, but rather that it’s the kind of book that rings several emotional and experiential bells that one needs to have lived a little to even begin to catch the nuances and appreciate the full sensations found in the book.
For its intimate and tangible moving portrayal of life in a small town, I give Empire Falls by Richard Russo4 1/2 out of 5 stars. I cannot, for the life of me, explain why I’m holding that last 1/2 back… perhaps because it’s not a WOW book, but rather, like water slowly flowing along, eroding the rocks and banks slowly and imperceptively over time, until, all at once and a long way down river, it’ll suddenly hit me.
I’ve been watching the HBO mini-series Empire Falls, based on this book. It’s a really good show, and does a good job of staying close to the book, in spirit if not literally. The screenplay was also written by Richard Russo. As for the casting, I wasn’t entirely stoked about Ed Harris as Miles, but I did like Paul Newman’s Max Roby, and thought William Fichtner as Jimmy Minty was SPOT ON. 🙂
and a twofer, this one is a brief “making of” but gives a great feel for the book itself.
Tainted by Brooke Morgan
The Triumph of Deborah by Eva Etzioni-Halevy
Strange But True America: Weird Tales from All 50 States by John Hafnor
Red Letters by Tom Davis
Dragon House by John Shors
Book reviews, entertaining and humorous posts, as well as memes and giveaways, In the Shadow of Mt. TBR is a fun and informative place to relax in the shade!
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