50 posts tagged “vox hunt”
Play us a song you simply HAVE to sing along with whenever you hear it.
Submitted by Jan.
This is the Cigar Store Indians ripping up the stage with Ring of Fire. I love this song in its many iterations, but this version...well, it rocks. You have to sing along, especially with the Ramones break in the middle.
Show us your favorite landmark in your current hometown.
It's called the Eldridge Hotel now, but it stands on the site of what was called the Free State Hotel. On May 21, 1856, pro-slavery Missouri militiamen, riding under a red flag inscribed with the words "Southern Rights" sacked Lawrence. Using a cannon, kegs of gunpowder, and eventually an incendiary device they finally reduced the Free State Hotel to a pile of smoking rubble. They also looted the downtown and ransacked the two publishing houses in Lawrence, destroying the presses and throwing the type into the river*.
Technically speaking, the raid was perfectly legal. At least as legal as the raid on David Koresh's compound in Waco, TX in this century. Federal Marshal J.B. Donaldson issued an order that declared the abolitionist citizens of Lawrence to be engaged in what we would now call an "insurgency" against the pro-slavery state legislature that Washington, D.C., officially recognized as the legal government in the territory. (Remember that, the government isn't always on the side of good.)
It wasn't the first or last scuffle Lawrence would be involved in. The previous November, the Wakarusa War broke out, following a series of tit-for-tat killings between pro- and anti-slavery camps. The siege on Lawrence that followed ended peacefully, but Lawrence and the most famous participant in the Wakarusa War--abolitionist John Brown--went on to bigger and bloodier things.
Seven years later, William Quantrill would lead more than 300 bushwhackers on a raid into Lawrence. They killed nearly 200 men and boys, many of them unarmed, and burned almost every building in town to the ground, including the Free State Hotel, now known as the Eldridge Hotel.
As for John Brown, well, he went on to start the Civil War. He was a radical, a dangerous man, a brave man, a religious man. An extremist. A terrorist. A visionary. He died just before noon on December 2, 1859, with a noose around his neck. His last wish--denied--was that his wife be allowed to spend a last night with him.
*Legend has it that this ruined press type was later melted down and turned into shot and cannonballs, which were used to fight the Civil War.
Show us a book you started reading, but never finished.
I used to have something of an affliction. If I started reading a book, I would finish it. I would finish it. Part of that was my native stubbornness, but there was also something about starting a book and never finding out what happened that was untenable to me. Perhaps there was also some anxiety about disrespect. Here was this writer, who had worked so hard to produce this book, and I was just going to stop 48 pages in and never finish it? So every book I started, I finished, whether I liked it or not. The literary equivalent of cleaning your plate.
(It's true, I never finished Moby Dick. Hell, I barely started Moby Dick. I don't count that as my answer to today's VoxHunt, though, for two reasons.
1.) Herman Melville is dead, so I wasn't worried about disrespecting him. I didn't think I would ever run into him at an academic conference cocktail party and inadvertently let slip out that I had never finished his masterwork.
2.) I already knew what happened, courtesy of Cliff Notes. So I went into my MA exam and was lucky enough that I was able to pass it without answering any questions on Moby Dick.)
It was several years after Moby Dick that I met the book that would change my life. Change my world. Change my reading habits.
Hubbicula and I were living in Tampa, and it was our first Christmas, which we don't celebrate. A friend of Hub's, however, insisted that we should spend Christmas with his family. The friend in question was a beat poet/philosopher-type named Stone. (This nickname was a bit of a misnomer. He should have been named Stoned.) Christmas involved dinner with Stone, his girlfriend, his son, and the son's fiancée.
Much to my horror, there was a gift exchange involved. I don't even remember what random assortment of gifts I picked out to give to these strangers, but I remember quite vividly the gifts Stone gave to Hubbicula and me. "Books, I like books," I thought as I unwrapped a package that obviously contained a book. Specifically, it contained the first book in the Left Behind series.
As surprising as it seems, this is not the book that I stopped reading. I read the whole thing, with that morbid, kinky fascination you read something that is simultaneously laughable and appalling. I would go so far as to say that I enjoyed the Left Behind book. I'm still trying to sort out what the purpose of the gift was, as I am very much an out-of-the-closet atheist. Did he give it to me as a joke? Or in a sincere attempt to educate me? Or did he simply forget that I was an unbeliever?
Still, it wasn't Armageddon that did me in. It was the book Stone gave Hubbicula that stopped me dead in my tracks.
The truth is, Hubbicula didn't become a reader until a little later in life, so whatever books he had, I was the one who read them, including this little gem: Justice of the Mountain Man.
To be exact, I read 17 pages. It was so bad. So terribly awfully cruelly unashamedly bad. Poorly written with flat characters and ludicrous dialog. A nasty, cheap knock-off of Louis L'Amour. The funniest part is that I tried. I tried to read on, but I couldn't. It sat on the corner of my desk for weeks, with me eyeing it, trying to make myself pick it up. I even put off reading other books, trying to force that down my literary gullet.
Then I had an epiphany. I didn't have to read the book, if it wasn't good enough to deserve my reading efforts. It was so patently unworthy of both my time and energy that I finally put it back on the bookshelf and went on to other books. After that, it got easier. I found myself a hundred pages into some book, thinking, "I'm really not that interested in this." Lo and behold! I could put it down. I did put it down. I took it back to the library and never looked back.
It's still a new feeling for me. I am still reveling in the fact that I don't have to finish every book I start. Sometimes I go overboard. I go to the library and get five books and finish none of them, as though to prove to myself that I don't have to waste my time unless I'm really really really enjoying the book. It's a work in progress, learning to quit.
In honor of Canada Day, show us your favourite Canadian.
Wow, where to start? There are so many great Canadians. I guess I'll start with the obvious, my peeps who are Canadian:
Laurie
Bobavey
Arbed
Brown Amazon
Toe-Knee
Morgat
Did I miss anyone in my hood who's Canadian?
And then there are the Canadians I don't know, but admire:
Sue Johansen-great sex educator
Elizabeth Bagshaw--all about the birth control
Alexander Graham Bell--duh!
Ryan Gosling
Wolverine--snerk!
James Naismith--after whom a street in Lawrence is named. We love our basketball.
Tecumseh
Atom Egoyan, Deepa Mehta & Paul Haggis--so many great Canadian film directors)
Till & McCullough--discovered the stem cell
Will Arnett & Michael Cera (Arrested Canadian Development)
And I'll round out the list with some familiar Canadian eye candy:
Show us the URLs in your browser’s pull-down address bar.
Submitted by Jack Yan.
http://www.allsteeloffice.com (End of the fiscal year. I got money to spend on office furniture.)
http://www.dell.com (End of the fiscal year. I got money to spend on computers.)
http://www.facets.org (End of the fiscal year. I got money to spend on foreign films.)
http://www.vox.com (Duh.)
http://news.bbc.co.uk (Better news.)
http://herzeleid.com/en/lyrics (How else am I going to learn all the lyrics to Rammstein's songs?)
http://www.hotbitcheswithpowertools.com (Man, you really want there to be a website like this, don't you?)
http://www.whatthefuckbusinessisitofyours.com (Nosy Vox, always stalking me.)
I got nothing to blog about. Suggestions?
Failure is inevitable... Show us some failure.
Submitted by Connie.
The funny thing about failure: it's usually indistinguishable from success until the last possible moment. All those sports success stories--just a heartbeat away from failure. It's the cruel thing about failure, too. You're ready to succeed, right up until the moment you're staring failure in the face. Writing is no different. There's every chance someone will want to publish your story/buy your book/offer you representation/give you an award, right up until they don't. As proof, I offer my current submission roster, as tracked on Duotrope.com.
Some days it's hard to stare that list down, and not necessarily because of the "Rejection, Form" entries. Often the "Pending Response" listings are harder to take. Success or failure waiting to happen.
Show us something that hurts.
Look, police in Tibet "pursuing" nuns. To hit them with batons.
Show us a discontinued food or product you wish would return.
Submitted by Shawn.
This is a delicious Pacific Northwest Chinook salmon.
You may recognize him a little better in this photo.
We're going to be seeing a lot less of him. Chinook salmon numbers have dropped so far that even salmon fisherman are asking the government to institute a ban on fishing. That's where we've got to, you hungry bastards. Various right wing types have often poo-poo'd the possibility of such a situation, but we're finally seeing the real likelihood that some of our favorite seafood is going to be unavailable for many years, and maybe forever if we don't reign in our consumption levels.
Same goes for this big guy: the blue fin tuna.
Or, as you may know him: Mr. Tuna Roll.
What's for lunch?
Show us a great April Fools' Day joke.
I hate April Fool's Day, because it's too obvious. You can't get a good joke off, because everybody's expecting it. So the best pranks happen the rest of the year, when no one sees it coming. My last prank I played on my sister L, she of the Purple Twins, Red and Blue.
Show us a tattoo.
Let's see, I've already shown you my toe-too:
You've seen the sperm donor's tattoos:
