Stormy Nights, Foggy Mornings & Musings On Curse Words

/ Ally Bean / 26 Comments
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Butterfly in the sun.

IT’S RAINING HERE AGAIN this morning.

We had a few days of blue skies and sunshine last week, but late yesterday afternoon the thunder and rain rolled in again.  It was just about the time we were getting ready to have a cookout.  Natch.

I’m beyond caring about the weather.  What more is there to say about it?

Well, what more is there to say about it without resorting to swearing?  And you know, gentle readers, that this is not that kind of blog.

Oh no, we keep it polite here at The Spectacled Bean.  Or, at least, polite enough to not offend the delicate sensibilities of any reader over 40 years old.

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OCCASIONALLY I WONDER IF I wrote in a more, shall we say, direct way using curse words, then readers would perceive me as being more authentic and edgy, therefore interesting.

If I’d done that kind of writing, which I easily could have, I wonder if I’d have been more popular as a blogger, than I am now.

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Cherry tomatoes in the rain.

I’ve no moral objections to curse words, I say them irl.  However when it comes to writing I hesitate to use them.

I’m content as things are on the blog, but observing the language used by revered bloggers, I do [sometimes] question my decision to keep it clean here.

I’ve Read 23 Out Of 35, But I Don’t Know About This Book List

/ Ally Bean / 45 Comments

Earlier this week Time magazine published 35 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime.  I’ve added the list to the bottom of this post.  The list, compiled from responses by Reddit users, attempts to answer the question:

“what is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?” 

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dalmatian-sideeye

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WHAT IMMEDIATELY STRUCK ME about the list is that out of the 33 authors, only 3 are women: L.M. Montgomery [Anne of Green Gables];  Harper Lee [To Kill A Mockingbird];  and Margaret Atwood [The Handmaid’s Tale].

Considering that the first two books are about children for children, and that the last one is about a society in which women are slaves, this list doesn’t lend credence to the idea that in 2015 we are living in a post-feminist society.

You with me here?

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I THINK THAT WE can all agree, to use the article’s words, that: “Books have the profound capacity to stay with us for the rest of our lives.”

This is good + positive.

But by accepting this premise I think that it becomes even more important to turn a critical eye toward all the possible books that one can put on a list such as this.  If one is going to have these books with him or herself forever, one must be discerning.

N’est-ce pas?

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TO MAKE THE LIST more balanced, I’d suggest that we include &/or replace on it, at a minimum, the following books written by women:

  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  • House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
  • My Antonia by Willa Cather
  • The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
  • Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

There must be more.  Suggestions?

# # #

Time’s List of 35 Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime

{ bolded ones I’ve read – asterisked ones I’ve never heard of before }

  1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
  2. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  3. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow
  4. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  5. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  6. The Forever War* by Joe Haldeman
  7. Cosmos by Carl Sagan
  8. Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville
  9. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman
  10. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  11. Kafka on the Shore* by Haruki Murakami
  12. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  13. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  14. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  15. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
  16. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
  17. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  18. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  19. The Stranger by Albert Camus
  20. Dune by Frank Herbert
  21. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  22. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
  23. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  24. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
  25. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  26. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  27. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
  28. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  29. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?* by Philip K. Dick
  30. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  31. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  32. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  33. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  34. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  35. 1984 by George Orwell

# # #

A Glimpse Into Life With The Beans, Mid-Summer Edition

/ Ally Bean / 24 Comments
The Good

Zen-Den went to the grocery and bought everything on the list, including cornstarch.  This, as he pointed out to me, was a big deal because, as he said: “even five years ago I wouldn’t have known what cornstarch was– and would have bought corn meal instead.” 

Congratulations, darling.  You’ve passed GROCERY SHOPPING 201, an intermediate level course in advanced shopping techniques wherein husbands learn to buy exactly that which is written on the list.

Isn’t he something? Let’s give it up for the Z-D.

~ • ~

The Bad

Influenced by Mad Men [and a bit of nostalgia for my parents], I had a hankering for an Old Fashioned.  So I got out the bourbon and the sugar bowl in which I keep sugar cubes and the Angostura Bitters.  Then I made myself an Old Fashioned using the last of the bourbon.

While my drink sat on the counter below, as I attempted to put the sugar bowl back onto the cupboard shelf above, in a horrible moment of miscalculation, I knocked the lid off the sugar bowl.  It fell onto the counter, shattering into 3 gazillion + 1 pieces, many of which landed in my drink.

Leaving me distraught and drinkless.

~ • ~

The Ugly

Because of the excessive rain, we’ve not used our screened-in porch as much as we usually do in the summer.  However, the other evening there was no rain, so we decided to go out there to sit.

Almost immediately we both noticed that there were ants walking around on the rug in the screened-in porch.  This is amazing because the porch is up a story from the ground below, but those miserable, icky, sneaky, destructive ants were on. my. porch.

I took off one of my Birks, grabbed it with my hand and started hitting the ants until they stopped moving.  I put the sandal back on when I thought that I’d killed all the ants, but I hadn’t.  So when I saw one last ant moving, in a fit of anger, I stomped down really hard with my sandaled foot on the last ant… and twisted my left ankle in the process.

I hate ants.

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WordPress Reader: So This Is What It Has Come To?

/ Ally Bean / 25 Comments
Screen Shot 2015-07-20 at 6.23.34 PM

Opus the Penguin reacts.

LIKE SO MANY OTHER WP BLOGGERS, for the last week or so I’ve fussed around with my Reader* account.  WordPress changed the thing and now it’s pretty whacked.

I’ve blogged hither and yon forever, so while I understand why people are upset about the change to Reader, I’ve shrugged it off. There are other ways to follow blogs.

For instance, now I’m using feedly.com to keep track of everyone until WordPress gets this latest kerfuffle under control.

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Bill the Cat opines.

BUT GETTING TO MY POINT HERE, as the above screen shot shows you, what I’ve found to be curious + hilarious about my current Reader account is that it tells me that I’m now following -11 blogs.

This, I’m sure, is a first for me.

Apparently Reader has taken it upon itself to carry out peremptory measures to make sure that I will not read the next 11 blogs that I think that I want to follow here in WordPress.

I’m becoming concerned about Reader.  It’s getting uppity.

Truthfully, I have to wonder if when the computers rise up and take over the world, we’ll all look back on this moment and realize that Reader was a leader in the revolution against the human race.

Be forewarned, people.  😉

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*  For those of you outside of the WP system, Reader is a way to follow WP blogs. It’s a free feature that involves minimal effort on my part to have access to a current feed of all the WP blogs that I choose to follow.  In theory, it’s useful. However, in practice… 

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{ It’s back! Images from Bloom County. More here. }