A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Happy holiday of your choice! That includes Yuletide and "day off from work."

I am very unexpectedly anticipating an extra-fun Christmas. I come from a multi-holiday family with step-branches, so I do generally celebrate it. But this year neither I nor my parents could find anyone to watch our cats, and we live seven hours away. I can't just leave food because one is diabetic and needs insulin shots twice a day. So I had nowhere to go for Christmas. So I decided to throw myself on the holiday grenade to make up for my paperwork being perpetually late and/or wrong and offered to be on call for emergencies on Christmas.

And then! While halfway to Arizona I got this email from a friend, headlined CHRISTMAS FOR THE JEWS. I excerpt the relevant portions:

Mike: For the past couple years I've been cooking a massive meal on Christmas day -- roasting a goose, tons of sides, lots of wine...pretty much your typical exercise in gluttony.

Me: Is there a goose this year? Very excited about the goose.

Mike: Yes, there is already a large-ass goose cooling in my freezer.... :)

Back to me: Cross your fingers that there are no emergencies. Nothing must keep me from the goose! I've often read of it in British novels but have never had it.

In celebration of the best part of all holidays, by which of course I mean food, please comment to lusciously describe your culture or your personal traditional food of this time, whether that relates to a specific holiday or just the time of year. Or what you look forward to this year!

I am dog-sitting at the moment and, incidentally, also parakeet-sitting. The parakeets, however, already had their food and water filled up so I basically just ignore them.

A few minutes ago I saw a blue streak flutter past, low to the floor. Simultaneously the dogs (mellow chihuahua, hysterical mini dachshund currently in Elizabethan collar) went berserk, yapping and pursuing the escaped blue parakeet.

Once when I pet-sat for these same people their lizard (which they had forgotten to tell me had seemed lethargic) dropped dead on the first night. How much worse would it be to inform them that their dogs ate their parakeet?

I pursued the dogs, which pursued the parakeet, around and around the living room. Finally I hustled the dogs into their crate (very much against their will) and pursued the parakeet by myself. It bit me. Hard. Twice. And would not let go, even when I put it back into its cage. I had to pry its beak open. OW.

I then saw that the cage door had not been left open, and there was no obvious escape route. Odd!

Upon releasing the hounds, I quickly saw what must have happened, as the fiendish dachshund, which has a back injury and is not supposed to jump, leaped up to the bird cage, popping the lever and snapping the door open! Irritatingly, the cage is too big to move to another room.

I have now constructed a giant barricade around the cage (two chairs, six pillows, one giant bean bag. The mini dachshund has been hurling herself against it and whining for the entire time it took to write this entry.

I think I may stick the dogs back in the crate and go to Starbucks.

ETA: Forgot to mention: the cage door isn't the only problem. The parakeets get hysterical if she jumps against it, and I'm worried that even if she can't release them, they'll have heart attacks. The cage, unfortunately, is in the living room.

ETA II: Decided cage wasn't too big to move and crammed it into another room. Dachshund now hurling herself against closed door and howling.

...that dog has lived with these same birds for four years but NOW they're interesting.

A friend tipped me off that some crazed Baba-lover (ID'd only as Pippa17) edited the entry on my home town of Ahmednagar, where I had a brief mention as a notable person from there, to read as follows:

Rachel Manija Brown has written a book All the Fishes Come Home to Roost in which she recounts her harrowing experiences (as a child between the ages of 7 and 12) in Ahmednagar in which she was tortured by the cruel Hindu children and chased by chickens. Miraculously she survived and made a vanity website.

Mostly this is mildly amusing malice, but I was not happy with the implication that my book was a slam on Hindus. The majority of the mean kids probably were Hindus, but that was due to the demographics of the town as a whole. I was also harassed by Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, and Baba-lovers, no doubt in proportions relative to their own percentage of the population.

Also, I note for the record that there is nothing in my book about being chased by chickens. Pippa17 is either misremembering my account of being chased by humans, monkeys, and a swarm of bees, or else is mixing me up with Terry Goodkind's Kahlan, who is indeed menaced by an evil chicken.

The friend who noticed this and re-edited the page to make my mention a bit more neutral also added a sentence on my book to the highly worshipful Wikipedia page on Meher Baba, in the section that cites books and other media that mention him. But it was removed within seconds! Perhaps the evil chicken did it.

See post below for context, ie, if you guys don't entertain me, I can't guarantee I won't flee into the cold night in my jammies.

Last week lady_ganesh asked me to name and briefly describe the five worst books I'd ever read. I replied:

Oh God, SO MANY! How to choose?!

1. Robin Hobb's Forest Mage. Almost 700 pages worth of people abusing the hero for being fat. About every 150 pages some plot peeks in, gets abused for being fat, and flees in terror.

2. Spider Robinson's Star Seed. Deus ex machina via enlightenment, space hippies, Chinese people as the symbol of evil-- and it's even worse than I'm making it sound!

3. Jack C. Chalker's "Changewinds" trilogy. Stupid ungrammatical self-conscious creepy misogynist sex fantasy. Women are magically transformed into sex objects and love it. Other women are transformed into fat baby machines as punishment. A woman climbs naked through the sand wearing nothing but a diamond-studded holster and a six-gun, thinking "This is ridiculous... and yet, damned sexy!"

4. Terry Goodkind's stupid books. Unsexy S&M, terrible writing, clonk-you-over-the-head libertarianism, and the heroine is terrorized by an evil chicken.

5. Whichever was the last Xanth book I read. Lame puns and a leering preoccupation with the panties of little girls. EW.

Also books by Leo Frankowsky and S. M. Stirling -- misogynist tirades and violence-porn, respectively -- but I didn't read enough of those to really be able to put them on the worst list, though I feel that they belong there.

God, I'm sure I've traumatically repressed many, many more. You should also click my "awesomely bad books" tag.

Gentle readers, please name and describe the five worst books you have ever read.

Godchild volume 1, demented manga by Kaori Yuki. The first panel is more cracktastic than entire multi-volume runs of some series.

Narration from the first panel: "Perhaps to ease his lonely soul, Cain starts collecting dangerous poisons. While living with Riff, his manservant since childhood, half-sister Mary Weather-- daughter of his father by a maid-- and Oscar, who wants to wed Mary, Cain meets Dr. Jizabel Disraeli, an assassin of the secret organization 'Delilah.' He wants to rip out Cain's eyes to add to his collection."

Barking mad Gothic horror, made even weirder by the tone-deaf English translation (that should be Merriweather and Jezabel), full of over-the-top horror, Gothic Victoriana, Lewis Carroll allusions, mad killers who wear rabbit masks impregnated with exotic hallucinogens, and disturbing sexual undertones and overtones such as a half-naked pubescent Cain writhing in his sheets, saying to his sexy valet/butler/true love Riff, "I didn't want that guy helping me dress."

Volume 2 contains the Parrot of Doom.

ES (Eternal Sabbath) volume 3, manga by Fuyumi Soryo. Gorgeous, spooky, and smart manga about a young man who can enter the minds of others, and the woman scientist who gets entangled with him. This volume is especially creepy, with great use of white space and silence to induce a sense of paranoia and tension. I continue to be very engaged by the main characters.

The Empty Empire, volume 1, manga by Naoe Kita. From page one: "Beyond the year 2500 AD, he appeared to unite the world: the Emperor Idea."

The telekinetic amnesiac clone of the dead (or is he?!!!) Emperor Idea escapes and is found by an ass-kicking young woman and a strange scientist who looks a lot like Hakkai. There is a sexy butler/valet, and a missing body, and two missing eyes from different people. Everyone's heads are strangely bulbous, and I laughed every time someone referred to Idea, but the characters were growing on me by the end of the volume.

Thud, by Terry Pratchett. Very funny, very smart. Vimes tries to stop Ankh-Morpork from exploding via ethnic tension between the dwarves and the trolls, and also to meet the equal challenge of getting home every night at 6:00 PM to read "Where's My Cow?" to his son. I particularly liked the bits with Mr. Shine. And the Gooseberry. And the girls' night out. And the guy who's supposed to audit the Watch. And I continue to love Vimes.

What the Lady Wants, by Jennifer Crusie. Early romantic comedy, slight but funny. My favorites of her earlier books are still Getting Rid of Bradley (the green hair!) and Manhunting (the terrible fates that befall every man the heroine meets).

Niccolo Rising, by Dorothy Dunnett. I only just started this, but it already makes more sense than A Game of Kings.

oyceter has kindly offered to make me a much-needed "Manga fowl of DOOM" icon, starring the giant robot chicken from Planet Ladder, the floating research chickens from Yami no Matsuei, the garuda/giant chicken from Genju no Seiza, and the parakeet cockatiel from Bleach.

Can you suggest to me any significant chickens in manga or anime that I missed or have forgotten?

Also, I can only find images for the research chickens and the parakeet. Can anyone supply me with an image of the giant robot chicken and the garuda/giant chicken? Thanks!

the_red_shoes attempts to make chicken stock:

"Putting it v, v charitably. I tried to make REAL chicken stock once in our first apt here from the leftover carcass of a (boughten) roast chicken, bones fat scraps and all. It looked like Hannibal Lecter's apprentice had been carefully preparing for a life of extremely unappetizing crime in our kitchen, practicing on pullets while Working His Way Up. I wound up with this horrible watery-yet-gluey mess with a visible inch-thick scum of frothing fat on top with horrible bobbing mangled things occasionally poking through it only to be drowned again in the percolating ooze. The cats hid from the smell. (The landlady upstairs said "What is that?" I said maybe her cat had left a dead bird in the hedge, or something.) T wanted to decontaminate the pot by leaving it in the back yard to get rained in. You remember when Meg's jelly won't jel in Little Women? It was like that, only extremely gross."

This reminds me of the biology class assignment I got in tenth grade, which was to boil a whole chicken, until the flesh fell off the bones, then dry the bones and reconstruct the skeleton. We were given a month and a diagram of a chicken skeleton to do this. I put it off till the night before because I was so terrified of the assignment, then made shamefacedly confessed and made my Dad drive me to the grocery store to buy a whole chicken.

Several hours of boiling (the chicken), yelling (Dad's), and weeping (mine) later, the meat was not off some bones, while others had turned to jelly or even dissolved. Dad, having refused to go to bed and leave me alone with the chicken, suggested that I put the bones in the oven to try to dry them out. Several hours later, we had a pile of bones that were more-or-less dry enough to glue together. That was when we discovered that the bones did not match the anatomy diagram. It was like a jigsaw puzzle... FROM HELL.

By 3:00 am, we were pretty much randomly gluing bones that looked sort of right to other bones that were sort of in the right place. Eventually we achieved a chicken-like object, although there was still a pile of bones that we didn't know what the hell they were or where they should have gone, and went to bed.

The next morning we awoke to see the Frankenchicken lurking there atop the tabletop, lopsided, mutant, malevolent. I burst into tears and said I wouldn't turn it in at all, because I'd done such a bad job and I was embarassed to be seen with it. Dad, who is a very wise man in some ways, said that on the contrary, he had no doubt that everyone else also left it to the night before and probably gave up well before we did. Not only did he drag me and the Frankenchicken to school, he accompanied me into the classroom because he was so curious to see what the rest of the kids had come up with.

Some kids had their very own Frankenchickens, which much like ours were lopsided, wet, smelly, only vaguely chicken-like, and sometimes with extra vestigial limbs. Some kids had partial chickens. A few despondent folk carried plastic bags of bones, with maybe a leg or a wing glued together. One boy had taken all the bones and glued them into a solid ball, like Darth Vader's prototype Chicken Star.

And then there was Elizabeth Sugar. Elizabeth Sugar was clearly the only person in the class who had actually bought a chicken and boiled it the day the project was announced. I suspect that she went through several chickens before getting the hang of the project. Her bones were polished and gleaming and wired together. Her anatomically perfect chicken skeleton was mounted handsomely on a polished wood base, and was posed as if poised for flight.

Elizabeth Sugar was chosen as valedictorian, to no one's surprise, and went to Harvard to study genetics. I believe that even as we speak, she is mapping the chicken human genome.

Me? I became a writer.