DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

It’s hard for me to not finish a book, unless it’s non-fiction, in which case I’m doomed to read the first half three or four times over as many years before I finally lose interest. Fiction, though, is cerebral candy, or maybe heroin. Even when I know the damage it’s doing, I can’t stop. This is bad for me, I think, turning pages madly into the night.

In college I got halfway through a promising SF novel when I realized the promise had not been kept… the lifeless characters remained so, and the plot flopped around on the dock of the author’s best intentions, gasping for assistance. I doggedly finished the book, hating every page, resenting every word.

I finished it, and then I sawed it in half with an Xacto knife. I left the top half of the bisected, paper-bit-shedding carcass on my shelf as a warning to other books.

I recently had an opportunity to test my patience with lousy fiction. Many years have passed since the book-butchering incident. Am I still addicted?

A houseguest left behind a promising diversion, Vince Flynn’s Memorial Day. The cover declared this to be a New York Times bestseller. Seeking distraction, I flipped to the first page:

Mitch Rapp stared through the one-way mirror into the dank, subterranean cement chamber. A man, clothed in nothing more than a pair of underwear, sat handcuffed to a small, ridiculously uncomfortable-looking chair. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, dangling only a foot or so above him. The stark glare of the light combined with his state of near total exhaustion, caused the man’s head to droop forward, leaving his chin resting on his chest.

“Ridiculously uncomfortable-looking”? It’s not just uncomfortable; it’s ridiculously uncomfortable. Looking.

The glare caused the man’s head to droop? That’s some kind of oppressive glare. By the way, can an entire scene be a cliche?

Rapp checked his watch. He was running out of time and patience. He’d just as soon shoot this piece of human refuse

The sentence continued, but I did not. I gratefully closed the book, thinking: I have the power!

I have to thank Vince Flynn for writing so badly on page 1 that I needn’t continue even past the second paragraph. I’m no literary snob, but I can detect clumsy composition and grammatically challenged prose. I mean, I went to High School.

I am aware that the story is told from the perspective of the Mitch Rapp character. In other words, the issue might not be that Flynn is a “ridiculously” bad writer, but that Mitch Rapp’s internal dialog and imagery is straight out of Freshman Comp. Either way, I’m not up for 573 more pages of it.

Just in case you’re tempted, here’s the last sentence, a spoiler offered as a part of my occasional efforts to save you some time (you’ll thank me later):

There was only one way to wage it — head-on and with brutal and overwhelming force.

Gad, does that mean there’s a sequel?

Although it’s true that I tend to be more susceptible to the promises of miracle foods than most people, it’s also true that my diet is a lot healthier than, at least, the typical American’s. Of course, I’ll probably die young when I choke on a soy nut.

Fish oil is the latest miracle-food I’ve added to my diet. I was convinced to try it by an article at Mercola.com, which said in part:

Americans consume a dangerously insufficient amount of Omega-3, a fat essential to good health but only found in fish oil and a few other foods. Meanwhile, our intake of Omega-6, another fat found in corn, soy, sunflower and other oils, is far too high. The ideal ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 should be 1:1, but the typical American’s ratio ranges from 20:1 to 50:1!

I picked up a small bottle of Carlson’s Finest Fish Oil (“Great Lemon Flavor!”) without giving a lot of thought to how I’d actually consume the stuff. The idea of tossing back a spoonful of oil makes me queasy. That this particular oil results from dumping a boatful of whole fish into a press doesn’t help matters, although I would have a hard time shooting imported Greek Kalamata oil, too. I’ll put oil on bread, vegetables, soup, just about anything, but drinking it straight is something I’m no more likely to enjoy than eating a tablespoon of Vaseline.

The bottle in the refrigerator mocked me. “I’m healthy,” it whispered. “And I have a great lemon flavor!”

So at lunch one day I toasted up some of my favorite bread and drenched it with the prescribed amount of fish oil. The result was vile. Images of that enormous fish-press haunted me. The air was thick with the aroma of slightly-off lemons. Warmed by the bread, the fish oil coated my mouth, my throat, my soul. Something spun, either the room or my stomach, and possibly both. Urgh.

It took weeks to work up the courage to try the oil again. I decided to do exactly the thing I couldn’t imagine: drink it straight. The less time it spent in my mouth, the better.

To my happy surprise, it went down easily. And stayed down. I was so pleased with myself, I had seconds. My whole family has now made this an evening ritual.

In retrospect, letting the oil heat up that first time was a bad idea. The colder it is, the less, erm, “flavorful” it is. Heed my advice: drink it cold, and swallow it fast.

If you’re thinking about buying some fish oil, the most important question you should be asking right now is What about mercury? The answer is, Carlson’s claims its Finest Fish Oil contains no detectable amount of mercury, and Environmental Defense’s mercury survey ranked it as a “best choice.”

To date I’ve been buying fish oil at iHerb.com, but I just realized that Amazon’s price is $6 lower for the 500ml bottle. (The Mercola site sells it too, but the prices are very high.)

See also Dr. Mercola’s Fish Oil FAQ.

We went to dinner at Stella’s Cafe tonight, with friends who know most everybody in town, including Stella’s chef/owner Gregory Hallihan. (In contrast, I only know the people who bring packages to my door.) Stella’s is arguably the best upscale bistro in West County, given the shrinking portions, deteriorating service, and inflating prices at another place I could mention whose $8 spinach salad fits comfortably onto a fork.

Tonight’s special appetizer was a tomato-peanut soup. I love Thai food, or more to the point, I used to have a serious thing for peanut butter, but this sounded a little too inventive for my pedestrian palette; I didn’t order it until I learned that the clam and rock shrimp chowder was out of stock. (Sort of a soup/inventory pun for the foodies in the audience.)

Anyway, the tomato-peanut soup kicked my ass — it was vegan, and hot with cayenne, two easy ways to get me to admire anything. Later, when the chef brought our entrees, I told him “we’re about ready to break legs to get that soup recipe.” He gave me the sort of look I often get in restaurants, something between “For 15% I’ll endure this” and “we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”

Nonetheless, as we finished our desserts — which were rich as Atilla and twice as fat — I noticed the chef scribbling something on a legal pad, and wouldn’t you know it, a minute later he not only hand-delivered the soup recipe but he walked us through it too, giving additional preparation tips.

Too many chefs treat recipes like trade secrets, I think. Kudos to Chef Hallihan for sharing a little of his magic. For the price of a simple recipe, he picked up a couple new loyal customers.

More food images from Stella’s Cafe

This is my admission that my writing is in remission. I’m not catching up and can no longer pretend to be… depite the fact that I’ve backdated this entry by two days.

Let’s see, I went to Hawaii, then suffered the holiday time-crunch (shopping, decorations, secular Christmas cards, fancy meals, assembly of kid toys), then had houseguests, then migrated this website and too many others to a new server when the old one died, then celebrated a birthday which required shopping for a laptop and spending a couple late nights designing a custom database application. Meanwhile, my job appears to have performed some sort of asexual reproduction, leaving me with not quite two, but certainly 1.5 complete jobs, one of which I should probably outsource to India.

Also I went to Mac World Expo, but it was so small it didn’t actually take any time.

Despite an internal pledge to have a little more presence around here over the coming days than previously, I’ve removed the “Flake Rate” statistics from the sidebar. There’s an unexpected inertia to not writing; the longer the break, the harder it is to start back up. Maybe this will help. (Tune back in in six weeks to see.)

With apologies to all my friends who bought SUVs because they thought their kids would be safer inside… Here’s a revealing study from the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Children are no safer in a hefty sport utility vehicle (SUV) during a crash than they would be in a standard sedan, researchers here reported.

Any potential safety advantage of the SUV’s greater size and weight is offset by their increased tendency to roll over in a crash compared with sedans cars, said Lauren Daly, M.D., of the A.I. Dupont Hospital for Children here.

… Rollover crashes increased the risk of injury in both vehicle types … and occurred more than twice as frequently with SUVs…

Thanks to Bim (who is also not any safer in an SUV in a crash) for the tip. Keep ‘em coming.