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Literary Chicks

This week: signs.

Link | 27 May 2007 at 04:27 PM |

A Saturday Night Well Spent

My great success of the day: I finally – finally – tracked down a song that was featured in a Target holiday commercial about nine years ago:

Come on-a my house my house,
I'm gonna give you candy
Come on-a my house, my house,
I'm gonna give a you
Apple a plum and apricot-a too eh

Nine years. That's how long I've wanted to find that song. And the name of it is . . . *drumroll please* . . . Come On-a My House, made famous by the late, great Rosemary Clooney.

Okay, sure, the title looks obvious right after you see the lyrics written down, but I couldn’t actually figure out what the hell the singer on the commercial was saying, other than apple a plum and apricot-a for the longest time.

I don’t even want to tell you how much time I just wasted on that little project tonight. Oh, well. It should make Jennifer Belle happy that I didn’t spend my evening as I’d planned, which – according to her, at least – was to continue my work undermining the women’s movement by writing books that feature legs on the cover art.

So tell me this: if chick lit writers are truly so evil, why don’t we have funky costumes and silly-but-slightly-insidious nicknames? The bad guys in the comic strips always have costumes and nicknames. Instead of being the Goblin or the Riddler, we could pick names like the Chicklitter, and then leave behind trails of sparkling pink heart confetti at our crime scenes. Frankly, I think we’re getting gypped.

Link | 26 May 2007 at 11:08 PM |

Literary Chicks

This week: on wedded bliss.

Link | 20 May 2007 at 09:19 AM |

The Great Vodka Experiment

In the middle of the unpleasantness that was my Mother’s Day, I took time out to conduct a science experiment.

Many moons ago, I heard (via George, via one of his co-workers, via a television show on the subject), that if you filter cheap vodka through a standard Brita filter pitcher many times, the cheap vodka is miraculously transformed into excellent, top-shelf vodka. On the television show that George’s co-worker watched, a vodka expert could not distinguish the Brita filtered cheap vodka from the highest of high end vodkas.

This has intrigued me for some time, so when I found a Brita filter pitcher at a thrift store, I snapped it up. Luckily, I happened to have a bottle of truly awful Skol vodka, purchased last year for Bloody Marys, and which has been languishing in the freezer ever since.

I filtered and refiltered the vodka ten times over the course of the day, and then George and I had a taste test. I didn’t have any premium vodka on hand, only a bottle of Skye, a mid-range vodka, so we had to use that as a bench mark. And, in the end, the nasty Skol was much, much better than the Skye.

I was thrilled! My experiment was a success!

Of course, I didn’t get any writing done yesterday. But we all have to make sacrifices in the name of science, right?

Link | 14 May 2007 at 07:46 AM |

Literary Chicks

This week: Potter mania.

Link | 06 May 2007 at 10:11 PM |

Heard Around The House, Part 35

At breakfast this morning, I mentioned that we were out of milk.

"I thought I saw a half-gallon in the fridge," George said.

"I don’t think so, but check if you want," I said.

George got up, rummaged through the fridge, and triumphantly pulled out a milk carton. Whistling "Hail to the Chief," he set it before me.

"'Hail to the Chief'?" I asked.

"For finding the milk," he explained.

I folded my arms, and gave George a piercing look. "Let me get this straight: I wrote up the shopping list, drove to the grocery store, bought the milk, drove back home, put the groceries up, and you get 'Hail to the Chief' just for pulling the milk out of the fridge?"

"I think there’s a blog in there somewhere," George remarked.

Link | 05 May 2007 at 01:45 PM |