September 2006 Archives
Anyone who is a fan of Tony Millionaire's gruesomely funny comic strip Maakies will love this anthology of his early work. Millionaire's take on the hard facts of life and the absurdity of humanity is simultaneously uplifting and depressing -- it's the heroin and cocaine speedball of the comic book world. It also has the greatest width-to-height ratio of any book I've ever come across. $16.47 on Amazon
I love redneck sayings, because they're funny and (often, painfully) true. This book, Redneck Words of Wisdom: Real-life Expressions, Advice, Commentary, and Observations from Some of the Smartest People Around... Rednecks, is a compilation of hundreds of colorful, politically incorrect, and downright filthy expressions that sum up just about every imaginable plausible scenario of the human condition.
Here are a few:
- I was as mad as a three-legged dog trying to bury a turd on an icy pond.
- It's harder than trying to stick a wet noodle in a wildcat's ass.
- It's kinda like puttin' gas in a car you've already wrecked.
- It's tougher than a two-dollar steak.
- Noisier than two skeletons screwing on a tin roof.
- That guy's harder to catch than my wife's boyfriend.
- Busier than a set of jumper cables at a Mexican funeral.
My wife Carla recently read Hilary Carlip's Queen of the Oddballs: And Other True Stories from a Life Unaccording to Plan. We met Hilary about ten years ago in Los Angeles and run in to her from time to time. She's a very pleasant, funny person, but we had no idea that her life was and is so interesting!
Carla says: "Queen of the Oddballs is a fun, fast read and that Hillary's life is like a baby boomer version of Lucy Ricardo's. Hillary is always involved in some kind of scheme to get on stage, or under the spotlight. Her schemes can be pretty outrageous (like stalking Carole King all summer with a detective-like methodology until she finally ended up in her home - and became friends with her.) $11.16 on Amazon
We have a fig tree on our property that produces dozens and dozens of sweet, fat figs every year. They're delicious, but the problem is they all get ripe around the same time and I can't possible eat all of them before they start to spoil. I suppose I could give some of the figs to friends and neighbors, or allow the creepy fig thief lady to sneak over and steal them, as she is wont to do, but I am greedy when it comes to figs. I want them all to myself.
I thought about canning them, but that takes too much effort and I also don't want to add extra sugar to them, because they're plenty sweet already. So I decided to dry them. I paid $30 for the Ronco Food Dehydrator, which has five round shelves that stack on a heating coil. It takes about two days to dry a big batch of figs, and now I can store my figs for a long time, eating them whenever I want. Sometimes, when my wife and children are very nice to me and I'm feeling especially jolly, I'll give them a dried fig, but I usually regret doing so afterwards. $30 on Amazon
Jim Carroll was a child-prodigy heroin addict who wrote a fascinating account of his life called The Basketball Diaries (later made into a pretty good movie). In 1980, he released his first and only music album, called Catholic Boy, and it is one of my favorite albums of all time. Every song is filled with scarily infectious hooks, and the street-wise lyrics are unforgettable. $9.98 on Amazon
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Drew Friedman is a supremely talented caricaturist whose work is reminiscent of Mad's Will Elder. His black and white portaits of celebrities -- most often B-listers well past their prime -- are always funny and dead-on. Like all great caricaturists, Friedman's portraits look more like the people he's drawing than the people themselves do.
Old Jewish Comedians, published by Fantagraphics under Monte Beauchamps Blab! imprint, is a large hardbound book with portraits of a couple of dozen -- what else? -- old Jewish comedians, such as Milton Berle, Groucho Marx, Jerry Lewis, and Larry Fine. I only know about half of the comedians depicted in the book, but I even enjoyed (perhaps moreso) the ones I'd never heard of (like Menasha Skulnik), because Friedman's portraits of liver-spotted old guys performing schtick mugs they've been perfecting in the Catskills for 50 years are stories in themselves. $10.17 on Amazon
