LaughAtlantis

While Rod and I were in California, we got a call on our answering machine from someone saying that they had found our dog, Bacon. In that our dogs were staying with my mother, I was concerned and… well, pissed. My mom has a fenced-in yard and my dog is not Houdini. I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that Bacon could have gotten out on his own. My mom made excuses about gaps in the door and the fact that the bungee cords that were supposed to hold it shut were not in place properly, but I sort of figured it was all bullshit. The last time we were at her house I sat outside the fence waving a chicken drumstick and calling Bacon’s name but he couldn’t get more than his nose through that gap in the door.

So imagine my surprise today when Bacon escaped our backyard. I came home, let the dogs out, and went upstairs to change my clothes. I was upstairs for perhaps ten minutes. Gah, that sounds like something a parent says when their child gets kidnapped: “I just turned my head for a minute!” but seriously, I was not gone that long. I came downstairs to let the dogs back in and Clyde (a.k.a. Canine 2.0) was whining and doing a little dance on the back porch. He came in and went racing around in a decidedly un-Clyde-like way. (He’s an 11-year-old dog; he’s not much of a racer-arounder.) I called for Bacon to no avail. I left the door open and waited for him to come in. No sign of him.

Finally, after a lot of calling for him, I went outside and discovered that there was a door open in our backyard - which is decidedly odd. See, our backyard has chainlink fences on all sides, and then an additional fence on the other side of each fence. But on one side, there is a weird double-fenced gate that goes into someone else’s driveway… and apparently, someone decided to peer into our backyard and not shut the door.

Which meant, in essence, bye-bye Bacon.

I didn’t think he’d go far. But he was no longer on the same street where he’d left yard. He was nowhere to be seen. I yelled; I clapped; I ran around… no puppy. Finally I located him (after someone else leashed him) around the corner and seven houses up from where he started. He didn’t seem overwhelmingly thrilled to have to go back home.

I must say, wandering the streets asking people if they have seen a basset hound makes you feel like an idiot.

Posted by Joy Begbie at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m typing this post on my brand-spankin’ new MacBook. I’m all laptopped up, yo.

Posted by Joy Begbie at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I really wanted to go to the Police concert at Fenway Park, but there was no way I was going to spend $95 on a ticket - not to mention, how much fun is a concert when you go alone, anyway? Rod knew how much I wanted to go though, so when the Weekly Dig sent out an email offering up a free pair of tickets, he fired back immediately with an email stating, “Did I win? My life would me me forever.” The Dig was happy to give him the tickets, on the condition that I provide email testimonial that I would indeed love him forever. Here is my reply…

_______
My husband would like me to attest to the fact that Police tickets would make me love him forever. The truth is this:

Rod and I have been married for three and a half years. He has not done a single load of laundry in that time. Despite the fact that we have an old, slightly infirm basset hound, Rod has only managed to pick up dog poop off our back porch twice. His hairline has receded, his waistline has expanded, he has stopped wearing his contacts, and his beard is more scruff than anything else. On top of that, I can’t drive, I’m asthmatic, and I only have one lung, yet as you can see by his email below, Rod would rather have me walk to your offices than be inconvenienced on his comfy drive to work, the rat bastard.

But if he could get us free tickets to see The Police… wow. That would not just make me love him forever, it would actually make me forgive him for a lot of that stuff I just revealed. (Except the dog poop. There’s just no forgiving that.)

So please, consider our request for Police tickets. You could indeed cause eternal bliss… and make make me blind to baldness. Quite impressive, really.
_______

The Dig apparently really liked my response because they now want to use it in their marketing stuff, as a “we’ll give stuff away free but you may have to jump through hoops to get it” fun ploy.

I like being funny.

Posted by Joy Begbie at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On my not-particularly-crowded bus home today, no fewer than four people were reading ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly What-Whats.’ Wow.

I realized something recently. For whatever reason, I don’t do the ‘light summer reading’ thing. For the past three years I have set a goal for myself of how many books I want to read in a given year, and inevitably I’m going along just fine until about mid-May, when it all goes out the window. I can read light fluffy crap all winter and then late spring hits, the books get thicker, the content gets heavier, the prose gets denser, and the time it takes to complete a tome triples.

Examples:
In the past two months or so I have read (among other things) ‘Middlesex’ (Jeffrey Eugenides), ‘Devil in the White City’ (Erik Larsen), ‘Nineteen Minutes’ (Jodi Picoult), ‘The Historian’ (Elizabeth Kostova), ‘Everything Is Illuminated’ (Jonathan Safran Foer), and ‘Lake of Dead Languages’ (Carol Goodman). These are big and heavy and I read most of them in hardcover, dragging them with me to and from on the bus each day.

Comparatively, in February I read (among others) ‘California Demon’ (Julie Kenner), ‘With Red Hands’ (Stephen Woodworth), ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ (Brendan Halpin), ‘Picking Up’ (Kate Fenton), and shame of shames, ‘His Wicked Ways (Samantha James). Two day reads, tops, all of them. And one of them is a freakin’ romance novel. Kill me now. ( I read it based on a friend’s recommendation. I will no longer be taking her advice on literary matters.)

So now I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. I want to read the new Harry Potter, all 784 pages of it. But I read the last two right when they came out, so that’s a while back, and I have read easily two hundred books in between now and HP5. So I am faced with re-reading two HP 5 & 6, two giganto-books, before I move on to Deathly Hallows - by which point everyone in the world will probably have spilled some vital spoiler to me.

Sigh. Damn my parents for making me love reading so much.

Posted by Joy Begbie at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My friend Kirsten posted this meme in her journal and I liked it an awful lot - and I am sick in bed at home - so I am stealing it to pass the time and share with the world.

10 FAVORITES
Favorite Color: Purple? It varies
Favorite Food: Cheese
Favorite Month: October
Favorite Song at the moment: ‘The Internet is for Porn’ from Avenue Q
Favorite Movie: The Princess Bride
Favorite Sport: Baseball
Favorite Season: Autumn
Favorite Day of the week: Saturday
Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate Chip
Favorite Time of Day: The moment I arrive home from work each day to find 2 excited basset hounds greeting me as if I was the best thing in the world

9 CURRENTS
Current Mood: Achy, if that’s a mood
Current Taste: Phlegm. Nasty, I know.
Current Clothes: Grey pajama top, plaid bottoms, striped undies
Current Desktop: Fenway Park
Current Toenail Color: Natural
Current Time: 4:13pm
Current Surroundings: Bedroom
Current Thoughts: I wish my nose wasn’t so stuffed up.

8 FIRSTS
First Best Friend: Nicia Travers
First Kiss: Dave Brown
First Screen Name: TiptonBlue
First Pet: Freckles, a Springer spaniel/beagle mix that my parents claimed “ran away” after it became evident that he was much too rambunctious a dog for our family
First Piercing: Ears
First Crush: According to my father, it was Donny Osmond
First CD: No idea. I got a subscription to Columbia House during my freshman year in college but I don’t think I’d actually owned a CD before then.

7 LASTS
Last Cigarette: 1990? I think I only ever smoked two.
Last Drink: Multiple White Russians at my friend Katie’s birthday party two weeks ago
Last Car Ride: Yesterday afternoon
Last Kiss: Yesterday, I think, though I got got good hugs today.
Last Movie Seen: On TV - Secret Window. In the theater - The Departed
Last Phone Call: My boss
Last CD Played: Soundtrack to ‘Into the Woods’

6 HAVE YOU EVERS
Have You Ever Dated One Of Your Best Guy Friends: Sort of?
Have You Ever Broken the Law: Yes
Have You Ever Been Arrested: No
Have You Ever Skinny Dipped: No
Have You Ever Been on TV: Yes
Have You Ever Kissed Someone You Didn’t Know: In college, probably.

5 THINGS
Thing You’re Wearing: Grey tank top, plaid pajama bottoms, stripey undies. Didn’t I say that before?
Thing You’ve Done Today: Read a monumentally cheesy romance novel
Thing You Can Hear Right Now: Random construction noises from the house next door
Thing You Can’t Live Without: Laughter
Thing You Do When You’re Bored: Read

4 PLACES YOU’VE BEEN TODAY
1. My bedroom
2. My bathroom
3. My kitchen
4. um… my stairs? I’m home sick Today is not a representative sample.

3 PEOPLE YOU CAN TELL ANYTHING TO
1. Rod
2. Jen
3. Cheryl
(That’s a really hard one, actually.)

2 CHOICES
1. Black or White: Black
2. Hot or Cold: Cold

1 THING YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE: Ride in a hot air balloon

Posted by Joy Begbie at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You can read all 48 of Joy’s Blogathon entries on her Blogathon archive page. Right now, however, she is sleeping.

Posted by Rod Begbie at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

And so I bid adieu to my 24 hour blog-fest. I am exhausted and I don’t anticipate having a coherent thought anytime today at all, but I had a great time and I raised just over $300 for Reach Out and Read, counting my non-verified dollars. I can’t wait for next year!

No, wait, I can’t wait to go to bed. Then we’ll talk about next year.

Posted by Joy Begbie at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At one point much earlier, I said that while I had a top ten list of books, I could probably stretch that out into fifty. Done. In no particular order (except for perhaps the top five, which are genuinely top five material), here they are. I have pretty eclectic tastes, so not everything is going to appeal. Feel free to email me (joy@laughatlantis.com) and ask me why anything is on the list, why things aren’t on the list, aand why I didn’t put explanations on this list. (The answer to that, by the way, should be pretty frickin’ obvious.) I’ve been working on this list off and on for eight hours.

The Stand - Stephen King
Beach Music – Pat Conroy
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell
Battle Royale - Koushun Takami
Archangel – Sharon Shinn
The World According to Garp – John Irving
For Better, For Worse – Carole Matthews
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Danny, The Champion of the World – Roald Dahl

Last Chance Saloon – Marian Keyes
The Eyes of the Dragon – Stephen King
Genesis Code – John Case
The Westing Game – Ellen Raskin
Marley & Me – John Grogan
To Say Nothing of the Dog – Connie Willis
Midwives – Chris Bohjalian
Pope Joan – Donna Cross
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Alienist – Caleb Carr

Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
True Love (and Other Lies) – Whitney Gaskell
Moo – Jane Smiley
My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult
The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
The Lords of Discipline – Pat Conroy
Light a Penny Candle – Maeve Binchy
Misery – Stephen King
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
The Eight – Katherine Neville

Plain Truth – Jodi Picoult
The Burg-O-Rama Man – Stephen Tchudi
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
A Time to Kill – John Grisham
Light on Snow – Anita Shreve
Hominids – Robert J. Sawyer
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal – Christopher Moore
Lucky – Anna Sebold
The Source – James Michener
Zulu Heart – Steve Burns

Girl With a Pearl Earring – Tracy Chevalier
Jurassic Park – Michael Crichton
Microserfs – Douglas Coupland
High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
Broken for You – Stephanie Kallos
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Heart of Gold – Sharon Shinn
The Once and Future King – TH White
The Anatomy of Motive – John Douglas & Mark Olshaker
The Inn at Lake Devine – Elinor Lipman

Ta-da.

Posted by Joy Begbie at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know what you’re thinking. “Joy, that’s not even a word! The 24 hours of writing has turned your mind to jelly! What the hell is pornospactology supposed to be?” Well, there are answers there. No, it’s not a real word. Yes, my brain is officially jelly.

But the question of what pornospactology is - that’s an interesting one. For the past six years or so, I have been doing improv comedy. I’ve worked with a handful of troupes and found myself in front of a huge number of different audiences. And inevitably, when asked for an input, someone in any given audience will call for porn, a proctologist, or a spatula.

Now, I understand the porn and the proctology suggestions. That’s the audience member attempting to be funny. (For what it’s worth, they should realize that they have just paid us to be funny. They themselves are not required to attempt it themselves.)

But a spatula… what is so funny about a spatula? Why, when an improviser asks for a suggestion of a household object or something smaller than a breadbox or just a random word that starts with an S - why does the mind go right to a spatula?

And so we have the concept of pornospactology. Obviously il’s not a real science; it’s just a brilliant amalgamation of three supposedly amusing inputs. If it were actually science, I guess it would be the study of why people think things are funny. And I bet that no amount of study would come up with an answer for that question because really… spatulas?

Posted by Joy Begbie at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hmm.

I had some momentary difficulty dealing with TC’s suggestion of Minnesota, but that was fleeting. My co-worker Scott, however, is what is known in the Manilow world as a Fanilow. Thus, I feel some pressure to make this a good entry.

So, I went to what I considered was my best source: my iTunes collection. I have four songs in there by Barry: Ready to Take a Chance Again (meh), I Made It Through the Rain (eh), Mandy (a bit maudlin, but worth a thumbs up), and Copa Cabana, which just kicks ass.

But none of this was really giving me enough to produce a blog entry. So I resorted to the iTunes library and hit pay dirt. I Can’t Smile Without You.

I really believe that ‘I Can’t Smile Without You’ played a huge part of who I am today. Why? Because it is the first song that I can remember getting up in front of my parents and performing - not just singing, mind you, but really performing, with a little dance and jazz hands at the end. My parents were impressed and I was proud of myself and I wanted to do it for them again and again. Accolades are awesome, and I think that experiences like that brought me forward toward wanting to pursue arts here and there. Performing can be an incredibly gratifying experienc - an adrenaline rush coupled with the knowedge that you ‘re making someone else happy too. And I guess I know that in part because Barry helped me see it.

So thanks, Mr. Manilow. And I hope that satisfies my friend the Fanilow.

Posted by Joy Begbie at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)