20-Word Fiction (8 of 10): The Extroverted Novelist

Greetings to our blog readers in Latvia, Greece and New Zealand.........

Here is tonight's 20-Word Fiction Entry:

"If you were Mark Twain, you'd stay home and write a novel tonight. Wouldn't you? Maybe? Perhaps? Just stating the obvious."

You can visit the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut (not where we are) either in person or on the web at this link (we gather Ira Glass the host of "This American Life" was there recently):

 https://www.marktwainhouse.org/ 

His boyhood home of the "Tom Sawyer" author in Hannibal, Missouri http://www.marktwainmuseum.org/ is also a museum.

Celebrating International Literacy Day with Stephen King

Greetings to our blog readers in Italy, Ukraine, and Sweden.

We are thrilled to see that someone from the coastal African nation of Gabon has checked out our blog!

Today is International Literacy Day, so we thought we'd post a random list of ten novels we need to read again as we listen to Depeche Mode:

1) Misery. Stephen King. 1987 (pict. top)

2) Choke. Chuck Palahniuk. 2001 (pict. center)

3) Bright Lights, Big City. Jay McInerney (pict. bottom)

4) The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1925.

5) The Chosen. Chaim Potok. 1967.

6) The Hours. Michael Cunnigham. 1998.

7) The Breakfast of Champions. Kurt Vonnegut. 1973.

8) Netherland. Joseph O'Neill. 2008. (The author is half-Irish, and half-Turkish)

9) Deliverance. James Dickey. 1970. 

10) Chilly Scenes of Winter. Anne Beattie. 1976.

http://www.lonelyplanet.com

http://www.internationalliteracyday.com

http://www.jaymcinerney.com

http://www.hplct.org (Hartford Public Library; McInerney was born in the Connecticut capital)/

Survey of the Best Comic Strips from the Sunday Washington Post (Oct. 19th edition)

Greetings to those of you reading this blog in Germany, Ukraine and Cyprus, and special greetings to those of you have just joined us after watching the Florida gubernatorial race debate between incumbent Rick Scott (R) and his challenger Charlie Crist (D) or for those of you who are already bored with the World Series, which is starting tonight.

This week, we really liked the "Pearls Before Swine" take on the old Abbott and Costello skit "Who's on First," but it was a week full of great comic strips in the Sunday Washington Post. The Danish import WuMo had Yoda, Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh meeting in the children's section of a public library, perhaps they were in Hartford, Conn. (we have a gag about how we are posting from the Hartford Public Library even though we've never been in that building). "WuMo" got second place in our survey.

The bronze medal went to Turkish weightlifter Naim Suleymanoglu, no, we just said that to keep you from daydreaming; it actually went to "Rhymes with Orange" which features selfies from the whole family. We're sure our friends at the Urban Dictionary who have coined terms like 'shoefie' and 'brofie' got a hoot out of the Hilary B. Price strip (http://www.urbandictionary.com) The selfie gag is the reason why Kim Kardashian is in our top image slot.

We also enjoyed the educational comic strip "Mark Trail" which focused on various spiders like tarantulas (pictured center) and scorpions; the strip revealed that some spiders actually dine on fish?! Perhaps, they would like Red Lobster.

The cutting edge comic strip "Candorville" had a take on man seeing a shrink, and for that we are featuring an image of Lucy from "Peanuts," a nice comic strip that will probably be in newspapers until the year 2073, when Lucy will be 116 years old.

Here is our top ten:

1. Pearls Before Swine

2. WuMo

3. Rhymes with Orange

4. Speed Bump

5. Sherman's Lagoon

6, Dustin

7. Lio

8. Big Nate

9. Mark Trail

10. Candorville

http://www.hplct.org/ (The actual web site of the Hartford Public Library)

http://www.slcpl.lib.ut.us/ (The actual web site of the Salt Lake City Library in Utah; they have 12,711 followers on Twitter)

http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine

http://www.gocomics.com/wumo

http://marktrail.com/

http://rhymeswithorange.com/

http://www.candorville.com

Quotes from Famous Authors (3 of 5): Mark Twain

"The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug."

If one is in the Hartford, Connecticut, area, we highly recommend visiting the Mark Twain House where Ghost Walk tours are being offered on Friday nights this month in honor of Halloween.

http://www.marktwainhouse.org

Top 10 Roanoke Times Comics...........yeah, we are just not getting around to posting this.....

Greetings to those of you in the Netherlands, Australia, and Israel.......even though we aren't fans of Benjamin Netanyahu here........domestically, we want to send greetings to those of you in Hartford, Baltimore and Dallas.

What do The Three Bears, King Midas and the late Rodney Dangerfield (all pictured above) have in common you might ask? Well, our favorite Sunday "Roanoke Times" comic strips (the newspaper serves Roanoke, Va., and surrounding areas) touched upon the three bears (Non-Sequitur), royalty (Speed Bump) and stand-up comedians (Doonesbury)............here is the list:

1) Non-Sequitur (a first time number one)

2) Speed Bump

3) Doonesbury

4) Funky Winkerbean

5) Pearls Before Swine

6) Zits

7) Garfield

8) Agnes

9) Dilbert

10) Get Fuzzy

http://www.roanoke.com

Highlights from Our Top 50 Things To Do List: Don't Forget to Call Bob

1. Call Bob (that's the reason we have an image of Bob Hope; yes, we know Bob Hope is dead)

2. Research for Novel (It takes place in South Carolina)

3. Work-out (but, I'm not sure we'll do pilates)

4. Go to local art museum (Our residence is Hartford, Conn., well, not really)

5. Put comics and records in antique shop

6. Read "Interview with a Vampire" by Anne Rice

7. Make a social events calendar

8. Wash car

9. Laundry

10. Recycle (lots of Zevia cola cans!)

NOTE: It's odd how American copyright laws work. One may assume the folks at Zevia in Culver City, Calif., would happy with us for promoting their product with an image of one of their sodas, but they are perhaps more likely to say we have violated their copyright and ask us to remove the image. Ya' just can't win! 

http://www.zevia.com

In Honor of Banned Book Week: Passages from Six Books (not all of them were banned)

There is always a thin line between knowing which books or films were outright banned, or if some were just banned in certain parts of the world or country. I am virtually 100-percent that the film version of the Gunter Grass novel "The Tin Drum" was banned in Oklahoma, but perhaps now one can find a copy at the Tulsa Public Library: http://www.tulsalibrary.org/

My friend Tommy Trull, a playwright in Greensboro, NC, made a suggestion on Facebook this week, that everyone should take a book (I suppose it can be either fiction of nonfiction) and go to page 52 of that book and write down the fifth sentence from that book.

Well, here this evening, we are going to do that with 12 books: Six of them will be here, the other six will be on our sister blog: http://www.politcscultureandotherwastesoft.blogspot.com

The answers will be at the very end of the entry

1) When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffered but not broken."

2) You learn to stay away from fat citizens in python suits, any swelling or protuberance is something to avoid and pregnant women have the streets to themselves.

3) "He knows," Jody said.

4) "W-who did it, Lou?"

5) The container had been packed half full of steel cylinders of some sort, each with a protective wooden box with a lid.

6) 'Well, said Georgie, 'if you must have it, have it then.'




Answers:

1) "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides

2) "The Wild Boys" by William S. Burroughs

3) "You Suck: A Love Story" by Christopher Moore (pictured bottom)

4) "The Killer Inside Me" by Jim Thompson (pictured center)

5) "The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared" by Jonas Jonasson

6) "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess (pictured top)


 http://www.malaprops.com/ (Bookstore in Asheville, NC)

http://www.boulderbookstore.net/ (Bookstore in Boulder, Colo.)

http://www.politics-prose.com/ (Bookstore in Washington, DC)


http://www.hplct.org/ (Hartford Public Library in Hartford, Conn.)

http://www.slcpl.lib.ut.us/ (Salt Lake City Public Library in Salt Lake City, Utah)

http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/

Happy Hannukah from The Partridge Family

And, you can check out the blog for "The Partridge Family" on our link. Even though I have not put the series from the 1970s on my Netflix que, it is one of my favorite guilty pleasures.

I did not actually watch it until I saw a rerun on a local station out of Hartford, Conn., when we were visiting some family friends in the Nutmeg State.