You Suck: A Love Story by Christopher Moore

Title:  You Suck:  A Love Story

Author:  Christopher Moore

Hardback:  328 pages

Date Published:  2007

Publisher:  HarperCollins

ISBN:  9780060590291

Miscellaneous:  You Suck is a sequel to Moore’s book Bloodsucking Fiends.

It turned out that superhuman vampire strength came in handy when shaving a thirty-five-pound cat.  After a couple of false starts, which had them chasing Chet the huge shaving-cream-covered cat around the loft, they discovered the value of duct tape as a grooming tool.  Because of the tape, they weren’t able to shave his feet.  When they were finished, Chet looked like a big-eyed, potbellied, protohuman in fur-lined, duct-tape space boots — the feline love child of Gollum and Dobby the house-elf.

I’m not sure we needed to shave all of him,” Tommy said, sitting on the bed next to Jody as they considered the bound and shaven Chet on the floor before them.  “He looks creepy.”

“Pretty creepy,” Jody said.  “You’d better drink.  Your wounds aren’t healing.”  All her scratches, bruises, and love bites were completely healed, and except for a fleck of shaving cream here and there in her hair, she was as good as new.

“How?” Tommy asked.  “How do I know where to bite him?”

“Try the neck,” Jody said.

–You Suck:  A Love Story by Christopher Moore, pages 29-30

You Suck by Christopher Moore is a fun, light read about two young vampires in love who must face the difficult tasks of being UNDEAD in a day-slave world.  They face the HUNGER and must feed, they must deal with vampire killers, they have to find an apartment, and… for the LOVE of ALL things UNholy!  They have GOT to figure out a way to drink a cup of joe without the coffee making a forceful return trip to spooge on their shoes!

While, technically, this book is a sequel to Moore’s Bloodsucking Fiends, it is more than capable of standing alone.  The past events are mentioned in a very natural way, so that you don’t have that sense of being late to the party. 

Some of the best qualities of You Suck is the unusual characters and the way they all mix together.  Take Blue for instance:  An aging Vegas hooker whose career-prolonging gimmick is that she’s painted blue from head to toe, inspiring the reoccurring line, “Didn’t you want to bone a smurf when you were a kid?”  And then there’s Abby Normal (day slave name, Allison Green) who is the  emo/goth/vamp-wannabe minion of Jody and Tommy, our romantic heroes.  And one of my favorite characters of the book is William, the dirty, fat, drinking/stinking bum with the 35-pound cat.  William makes his money sitting in high-pedestrian areas, holding a sign that says “I’m poor and I have a huge cat” and charging passersby to touch his huge cat. 

Another quality of You Suck that I enjoyed is Moore’s sense of humor, his sarcasm and his ease-of-reading writing style.  He doesn’t take himself too serious as a writer, and mixes up the story telling from omniscient 3rd person and “Diary of a Put Upon Goth (closet perkie) Girl,” the subjective point-of-view of Abby Normal, which provides the outsider-wanting-in view.  And Abby’s journal entries are so funny, complete with self-abasement and bunny-trails and updates on her sister’s head lice problem.

You Suck:  A Love Story by Christopher Moore was my first experience with the author, but it won’t be my last 🙂  In some ways, he reminds me of Janet Evanovich, who is one of my favorite “fun authors.”  I give You Suck 4 out of 5 stars 🙂  It’s a fun book you can sink your teeth into ^,…,^

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The following video just really makes me chuckle.  The guy in the vid could SoOOooOoo play Jared if they ever make a movie version.

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Friday Fill-Ins ~ The Jeffersons Sing-Along at the Indy 500!

And…here we go!

1.  Well, we’re moving on up!  To the East-side to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky-i-i. come on, sing it with me! 

2.  If a hotel needs to post the following sign:  We guarantee all our rooms are BED BUG free!  I don’t recommend staying there 😉

3. My best quality is my sense of humor.

4. The devil is in the  details.And he goes to church every Sunday, GUARANTEE he’s in Congress, and I think he works in the kitchen at Wendy’s… which is probably why I get sick every time I eat there.

5. In nearly 10 years, 9 years, 364 days passed.

6. The power to freeze time is what I need right now!  Oh, think of all I could get done and all the books I could read if I could stop time!  I think that’s how S. Krishna gets so many books read 😉

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to finishing Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and watching the BBC series on Netflix, tomorrow my plans include finishing The Sandman, volume 1, also by Neil Gaiman,  and watching Stargate: SG1 season 2 and Sunday, I want to listen to (and later watch… sux living within 75 miles of the Speedway!) the greatest spectacle in racing, The INDIANAPOLIS 500 (okay, I’m geeked up now 😀 ) !

VVW ~ Kids Say the Darnedest Things!

Hello and Happy Hump Day!  Woo-Hoo!  And who doesn’t like a good hump?  Today’s Viral Video Wednesday has a few new things about it.  First, we have a button!  WooT!  I’ve got a few other pics to turn into buttons, and if you’ve got one, lay it on me! 🙂  Second, if you look at the bottom of the picture header of this blog, you’ll see a Viral Video Wednesday tab.  I’ll be keeping the current week’s VVW there, and you can add your blog in the comments so I can check out your VVW posts, too 🙂  The third change to VVW is, at the end of my post and on the VVW page, I’ll let you know what the subject of next week’s VVW so you’ll have a week to hunt down some fabulous vid clips for your own VVW posts 😀

And now, on with the vids!

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The famous comedian W.C. Fields once said, “Never work with children or animals” and the reason for his sentiment is clear:  They will upstage you and steal all the laughs!  If you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with the pastor at the carry-in, only to be interrupted by your four-year-old, “Mommy, Pastor Bill does TOO have a watch… See!  It’s right there on his arm!  Pastor Bill, did you buy that at the dollar store with the $3 Mommy put in the offering last week?” then you KNOW that kids can chime in was some really hilarious stuff every now and then.  So this week’s VVW is dedicated to all those darned funny things the little whipper-snappers say!

Poor little Colin suffers from two things endemic to childhood…  Like most children, he absolutely adores being the star of the home movies, and he struggles with the correct pronunciation of some words more than others.

I first saw the following video on “The Ellen Degeneres Show”  It’s always funny to watch a child when they realize where they’ve gone wrong in a conversation… that little “A-ha” moment when they take one step closer to understanding their world.  

The next video brought back memories of my oldest daughter’s trips to the dentist.  An utter dentophobic, she had to be given the red liquid sedative (Versed) AND the piggy-nose (nitrous oxide) to get her into the chair, then she had to have a TV headset playing Powerpuff Girls to keep her mind occupied while the dentist did anything inside her mouth.  Even routine teeth cleanings could disolve into a puddle of tears on the 5 foot overstuffed Pooh Bear in the waiting room.  So I completely understand David’s behavior.

What do you get when have an adorable little boy with big brown eyes telling Knock! Knock! jokes? Well… I have girls, so maybe that’s why I never got this…

And I think I’ll end here with the following video.  Before you slip that DVD of Jackass Unlimited into the DVD player, remember that little pitcher sitting next to you is taking it all in, and will recount the whole scene to Pastor Bill at the Mother’s Day after-service dinner a couple weeks from now.

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Do you have a favorite kid vid?  share it with me in the comments, or better yet, post your own Viral Video Wednesday “Kids Say the Darnedest Things!” at your blog and leave the link in the comments so I can visit!

Next week’s Viral Video Wednesday topic:  Stalkers

The Sunday Salon ~ Do You Eat Kitty Litter for Lunch?

I am back from church, and soo hungry I could eat a whole panful of Kitty Litter! LOL… before you go all, “EwWwW, gross!” let me ‘splain.

I’ve just finished my first Read-a-Thon, and was surprised by a LOT of how everything worked out. My thought going in was this: I read every day anyway, how hard can a 24 hour Read-a-Thon be? *cue insane laughter now*

Yeah…. First off, I have kids. I have 3 kids, in fact. Three delightful and loving sisters who delight in few things more than tormenting one another and making each other squeel. Which, in turn, makes ME squeel. Second, the idea of hourly updates really made it harder for me to get much reading done because, by the time I finished the update and settled back into reading, it would be time for another update.

BUT… by far… the greatest enemy I found was that damned evil blue bird, TWITTER.

It seems I have yet to master the skill to be plastered, obsessively, to the TweetDeck AND read a book at the same time. So I ended up tweeting, totally random and slap-happy at times, to an unproductive degree.

On the upside, though, I did have the oppurtunity to offer up some Kitty Litter Cake:

A nice, big, overflowing pan of Kitty Litter Cake! YuM!

It seems to have been a popular post :-D, and I’ll be taking some of this revolting-to-the-eyes-but-delicious-on-the-tongue dessert to the Mother’s Day carry-in 😀

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Oh my… I’ll never get anything done now!

The Sunday Salon ~ Finding a New Home

Spring is here 😀 and it’s a time for new growth, changes, cleaning, and new beginnings. Today is Easter, as well. one of those two or three days a year the less-than-faithful drag their butts out of bed and into the church to do their duty, please their parents or as part pf their holiday visits with friends and family.

For me, today was the first time I’ve been to a church service in about a year. For five years we went to a church that was within walking distance. We loved everyone there, worked in the children’s church as a teacher, and it was our family and home. Then they moved to the mall and we couldn’t walk their anymore, so they picked us up (I have no car) and we rarely missed a service. Though we had a ride, the move cut us down to in and out on Sundays (only) on someone else’s schedule, and no more mid-weeks or other activities, and we kind of started to feel disconnected from them. Then one day they stopped coming. No phone call, no card, just nothing.

It’s hard, or at least it’s hard for me, to change churches. I want to find one and stay. I don’t like to try this one, then that, and go everywhere… I used to as a kid, though. I don’t want to tell my life story to all new people every other week or month or year. And this particular one hit me hard, as I did nothing to cause them to dump us. And for the last year, I’ve felt as if they abandoned us, and to pick a new church would somehow be disloyal, to say I’ve given up hope on returning there.

But a year is long enough, I guess. It’s time to accept that we’re no longer part of that family. Yesterday, I took Maggie to an Easter party at the Assembly of God church. It was very warm and friendly, and there were several faces I recognized. Also, a very good friend of mine goes to church there, and they have a great youth group, children’s church, and bus ministry. It’s a bigger church than what we’ve been used to, a LOT bigger, but it’s not the first time I’ve been a member of a big church (when I lived in Kokomo, the church we went to was a 500-700 member church, a lot of them were my cousins).

So today, Easter Sunday, was my first day back into a church. The kids are excited and happy, they’ve always loved church. Maggie even wants to be baptized, and, as she’s now 10, I think she’s old enough now.

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I picked up a lot of books this week (like I need some more!). Maggie’s school had a book fair, and I grabbed a few there:
The Name of This Book Is a Secret
Skeleton Creek
How to Steal a Dog, and more.

Then, we stopped into the library yesterday to pick up a movie on hold for us there, and left with:
Marked: House of Night book 1
Just Ella and its sequel Palace of Mirrors.

Also, I’ll be participating in a few blog tours, among them:
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and SweetMay 11th
They Plotted Revenge Against AmericaMay 20th
The 19th WifeJune 19th
and for The 19th Wife, I’ll be having a give away for a book 😀

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I had my first experience with a a weird show called Happy Tree Friendsthis week. Netflix suggester thought I’d like it, so it arrived on Thursday. Maggie hates it, she hates anything in which animals are hurt… even cartoon ones. Sam, having a weak stomach, also hated it. Gwen, however, found them to be completely hilarious and was the only one to watch them with me. Here’s an episode for ya 😀

Friday Fill-Ins ~ Freud Easter Bunny for the Jung!

Last week, Anonymous left this comment: “*sighs* The last two of these have sucked royally…I love this thing, but now I’m having to go back in the archives and find ones that aren’t totally ridiculous and moronic…”. This week, I’m dedicating #1 to Anonymous 🙂

And…here we go!

1. Anonymous…was the nom de plume my best friend in high school used for note-passing (it was actually Anon A. Mouse, complete with a little masked mouse drawing), and mine was Edward R. Moon-ye (my signature artwork was of a man bent over, trouser’s down) .

2. Happy Tree Friends is a sick and twisted web-show cartoon.  (and that’s why I love it! 😉 )

3. Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, but I’d prefer to suck a sour gummy worm.

4. Seeing all the baby leaves and new flowers and planting my garden with Maggie are some of what I look forward to most about Spring.

5. Who needs therapy when one of the voices is Sigmund Freud and another is Carl Jung. (If only the committee would stop repressing my creativity, I might be able to slip into unconsciousness 😀 )

6. Fried and fricasseed rabbit MUST go into the Easter Basket! (If you can’t find a rabbit, the neighbor’s cat will do 😉  )

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to finishing up A Wrinkle in Time… finally… I’ve only been trying to finish it since fifth grade!, tomorrow my plans include taking the kids to a friend’s church Easter party and egg hunt and Sunday, I want to wish everyone a Happy Easter!

Happy Easter to those that celebrate it!

Happy Easter to all my PeePs!

Viral Video Wednesday ~ The Two Talking Cats

Okay, so it’s been a while since I’ve done a VVW post. I’ve gone to where I do a vid clip with each book review, and that’s kind of soothed the video-sharing need in me. I was planning to make today’s VVW my fav Monty Python sketches, but then I came across this while cleaning out my bookmarks, aren’t they adorable?

According to the videographer, TheCatsPyjaaaamas, “Stina [on the right] and Mossy [left] usually fight instead of communicate, so this was an odd moment. They kept “talking” for about 1 hour, constantly.”

Actually, though, I have to admit I find their chatter a bit creepy, like The Kittens of the Corn, or something. Perhaps if I understood what they were saying to each other, I wouldn’t be so creeped out by them… Hmmm….

mcjansen seems to think Mossy’s accusing Stina of having a problem with her body odor:

Jurobei, on the other hand, says, “I have spent the last 14 years of my life living in and around cats, and have learned their secret language.”

However, samyb1234 seems to see a more sinister conversation going on here.

klaatu42 offers this suggestion, “here’s what it sounds like if you have your babel fish in your ear translating for you.”

Well, I dunno… maybe the babelfish wasn’t needed after all, because digifish seems to have figured out what Stina and Mossy are saying:

I guess I just had to open my ears and listen to them! 😉

Well, lookie here… I never knew he spoke Cat…. Do you think he’s trying to sell them car insurance?

So, what’s your favorite talking animal vid? leave a comment, or better yet, post you vids and link back here 😀

Bad Kitty Gets a Bath by Nick Bruel

Title:  Bad Kitty Gets a Bath

Author:  Nick Bruel

Illustrator:  Nick Bruel

Paperback:  128 pages

Publisher:  Roaring Brook Press

Publish Date:  August 2008

ISBN:  9781596435209

BE PREPARED.

The first lesson that all cat owners must learn is that …

 For your own safety, please repeat this to yourself four thousand eight hundred ninety-three times.

CATS

HATE

BATHS

 

–Bad Kitty Gets a Bathby Nick Bruel, pages 29, 32, 33

Bad Kitty Gets a Bathby Nick Bruel is a funny manual-esque book about – What else? – giving a cat a bath.  Most of us who have or have had a cat knows the mortal danger of this proposition, and yet we still attempt such folly.  As Bruel points out in this second book about Bad Kitty, there are times when it is necessary to baptize our feline family members for their health and our scented pleasure.

When these times occur, you must be prepared.  Be aware you put your life in peril, risking the chance of suffering extreme blood loss and soiled underwear. 

–Bad Kitty Gets a Bathby Nick Bruel, pages 38-39

After using bribery, begging and reverse psychology in a failed attempt to get Kitty into the tub, tell Kitty that you’ll be giving the dog a long, icy cold bath AFTER her.  Her desire to watch Puppy suffer may help her to overcome her hatred of baths.

Without being mean-spirited or cruel, Bruel slides in facts about cats, such as their tongues are covered in papillae made from the same material as finger nails and facts about other cat species, making Bad Kitty Gets a Bath both entertaining and educational.  It’s humorous pictures and funny content hides the fact it is a chapter book… the dreaded CHAPTER BOOK… and Maggie happily read it through.  Her favorite part being the picture of Puff-Ball Kitty after she was dried.

Any time an author can teach while delighting young readers, especially those who balk at the bigger books, then the book is a success.  And few things are funnier than the whole concept of bathing a cat, an animal with 20 daggers on its feet as well as needles in its mouth and toxic saliva that abhors the very mention of submersion and will shred you for thinking it let alone trying it.

I give Bad Kitty Gets a Bath by Nick Bruel 4 out of 5 stars.  You don’t have to be a child to enjoy it, either.  I’ve had it on my wishlist since it came out last year.  Maggie told me that the book fair her school’s having this week was selling it, so I sent her with money this morning and read it (out loud to the kids, lest I look silly) immediately 🙂

I couldn’t decide between the last video or this one. Enjoy!

few things in this world are more pathetic looking than a wet cat. Poor kitties!