Get 6 (a silly man joke)

A wife asks her husband, "Could you please go shopping for me and
buy one carton of milk, and if they have eggs, get 6."

A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk.

...The wife asks him, "Why did you buy 6 cartons of milk?"

He replied, "They had eggs."

Start Phasing Insects Into Your Diet

I took to the internet in an attempt to find something to write about. My search led me a June 2011 article about an ice cream store in Columbia, Missouri that sold out of Cicada ice cream. If you were in the Midwest earlier this summer then you know that we were under attack by these 2-inch long noisemakers.  While not particularly harmful to humans, they can be pretty darn annoying, especially when its time for them to emerge in great numbers like they did this year. We humans are pretty resilient though, we won't let a swarm of three-eyed alien-looking bugs stop us from mowing our lawns or going out for coffee. We mow the lawn with a tennis racket and duck, dodge and roll to the coffeehouse while these pesky skin-shedders mistake our arms for tree branches.

Boiled Cicada ice cream anyone? Apparently so. Seems the employees of the ice cream store captured these tasty treats right in their own backyards, removed most of the critter's wings and the boiled the poor things. My question is just how old is the legal working age in Columbia, Missouri because finding playing with bugs fun was over for me at about age 5 or 6.

At least the bugs were boiled before they basted the pests in brown sugar and chocolate and mixed with brown sugar and butter flavored ice cream. This apparently wasn't a plus, however for the public health officials in Central Missouri who kindly asked the store to stop selling the treat.

Did the health official not know that in China, Malaysia, Latin America, and Burma among other places these giant bugs are skewered, deep-fried and served as a delicacy? It turns out that the public health agencies code book doesn't specifically address Cicada's as food so it was more of a nudge to get them to stop rather than an order.

Would you or did you eat any Cicada ice cream during the invasion this year? Here is an interesting idea: we Americans should start phasing insects into our diets. Every seven or thirteen years when the Cicada's emerge in great numbers we would would rely much less on other countries for our food. Think about it!

Thanks for letting me borrow your books, by the way!

I received the first 17 books in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series written by Laurell K. Hamilton. Hamilton is a St. Louis native and the only reason that I can think I may continue reading. I have managed to skim my way about halfway through the first book and I'm dieing here people. I know that I am not one to speak as I have never finished a writing project, removed my previous blog for lack of entries, never been published aside from a few websites linking to my previous blog... but Hamilton... to quote my old Jewish boss, "Oy Vay Izmir!". Actually, she may be a great writer, but I can't understand what she is writing, at least not in the first book of 20 that she copyrighted back in the 1900's (1993). She has a habit of ending lengthy detail-filled paragraphs with "Right." What does that mean? I try "ya right, that's bologna" but that doesn't make sense most of the time. Is she confirming that the over descriptive previous 3 paragraphs I just suffered through are indeed correct? I can't figure it out. Last night in particular she was making me crazy with the word "cig". Why couldn't she just say cigarette? Cig... like it makes the fact that the guy is smoking sound cool. I've determined that Hamilton's style of writing pretty much annoys me.

I enjoy reading work by Louie L'Amour and recently found a couple books by local St. Louisian Terry Dean (Letters to My Wife & If a Turtle Had Wheels) to be pleasurable reads. After trying to choke down the book by Hamilton, I have to say the biggest reason is that L'Amour and Dean don't bog down their writing with great detail. It is sufficient for them to say, "The man entered the kitchen. He could smell dinner baking in the oven." That's a fine amount of detail. It sets the stage for me, I understand what is happening because I've entered a kitchen and smelled dinner baking in the oven, got it, move on. Hamilton on the other hand, takes a page and a half to describe everything from the entrance to the kitchen, to the fact that last week the family ate chicken for dinner three times. By the end of her drawn out description of the room, even the man with his cig is drumming his fingers on the countertop waiting for the story to move on. The action stalls, the scene gets old and boring before anything begins and more than half of what she talks about is completely irrelevant to the actual story. Maybe she had a great story, visited an editor who told her she needed more detail or a longer book and poof, we are fed this piece of crap story that takes up double the space in our life because someone thought they knew better.

I was stuck with a critique like that once. I have a Paranormal-Romance book in the works. Well, I say that. What it actually has stalled as is Chapter One and a really awesome outline for the rest of the book. I can make up excuse after excuse as to why I haven't written more, but the truth is I put so much effort and love into Chapter One that now I don't know how to get from there to the end of the book. So, it sits and haunts, as any good paranormal story should! (ba-dum-ching!) I did have someone tell me I missed many windows of opportunity to use great detail and really put the person in the moment. So, like a good little writing student, I went back and added detail and more detail, tripling the size of my first chapter. The teacher loved it, she said she could really understand where my character was and put herself there. Gee, that's great, but to me if I say the character is in a library you would pretty much know she was in a building surrounded by books and quiet people.

To each their own, I say. Do not judge, I say. Do as I say and not as I do, I say. Buwahaha! I visited Hamilton's website and apparently, someone somewhere likes her work because from what I can tell she's successful for an author stuck in the Midwest. She does have an agent in New York, which is super cool for any writer, and I noticed she has a film agent in California. I want a film agent, it just sounds cool. You can visit her site at http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/