Hi Sars,
I have seen how wonderful the readers are with hunting down elusive shoes, and the time has come where I must throw myself upon the mercy of the readership to see if they can help me find The Shoe.
You know the one. You had it, you wore it almost every day, and you didn't realize how perfect it was until it was gone. It's like a breakup, but worse, because men come and go, but your feet are with you forever.
Dear Sars,
I have fruit trees in my yard. Most of them are in the back behind a tall locked gate, but I have a tangerine tree in my front yard behind an unlocked (but gated) 3-foot-tall picket fence. When the fruit is ripe I pick it 2-3 times a week, but I don't have time to pick fruit every day.
Fruit tends to disappear from this tree in between pickings, and when I see the neighborhood kids taking fruit (by either reaching over the fence, or opening the gate and coming uninvited into my yard), I try to stay casual and say things like "Hey, you can have what you already picked, but please stop taking my fruit in the future," and leave it at that.
Brothers & Sisters. Did y'all bail out on it weeks ago? Just wondering if I'm the last one out the door on B&S, which at very long last I have kicked to the curb. The reason is a casting spoiler, which is after the jump in case anyone still cares.
After reading the Twilight saga I am hooked on the "offbeat romance" angle! I am currently reading A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb and hoping your readers can recommend some additional books that fit into this genre.
Also, I feel like I must tell you that while both of the above mentioned books are considered Young Adult…I am a full-fledged adult so don't feel like you have to limit your recommendations to this category.
Jody
I don't know if I'm writing this more as a question or for therapy. All I know is life does not seem right and I'm not sure what right is anymore.
I've had three cats — my oldest is 11 years old, I have a four-year-old, and just recently lost a five-year-old. For most of my time with them I lived in an apartment, so they were indoor cats because they had nowhere they could go outside. I did always dream, though, of someday owning a house with a yard for my older cat to go outside in. I love my pets, they are like my family, and have always fed and cared for them very well. And damn, life was good.
Ask The Readers moves to Wednesday this week; I've bought a house (yay), but have to move again on Friday (boo), so TN will likely go dark for a few days.
*****
Hi Sars,
So, I have a question for you and your readers. I have been trying to figure out this movie for ages and I can't seem to find it anywhere on the net. In the 1980s, a movie was shown on St. Patrick's Day on a local Seattle channel after the St. Patrick's Day Parade. It was a part of "Movie Matinee" sort of programming. It was only shown that one day every year.
Here is what I know:
This is not what I wanted to hear.
I don't mean Mark McGwire's admission that he used PEDs itself. I did in fact want to hear that, no matter how belated, because the discussion needs to move on from side-by-side pictures of Barry Bonds's head in 1990 and 2000 — move on, specifically, to how we can put the statistics of the steroid era properly into context. The denial and the denials have gone on long enough. It happened. Players took performance-enhancing drugs. I don't like it any better than the next fan, but it's time to stop clutching our pearls and start running realistic numbers that will help us understand the performances we saw, enhanced or not.
The confession itself, then, the fact that it was made at last, I welcome, because air-quoting the word "allegedly" and shoehorning it into every conversation about McGwire had become absurd.
But I did not want to hear excuses about McGwire's injuries. I did not want to hear a recitative of the many McGwire home runs dating back to Legion ball, of which people still speak in awed tones. I did not want to hear about his maturation as an educated hitter. I did not want to hear an unprovable assertion that McGwire wanted to come clean five years ago, but let his attorneys talk him out of it.
"I took steroids. I had my reasons for doing so, but these reasons are not excuses, and in retrospect, they do not seem worthwhile. If I had it to do again, I'd make different choices. I apologize to [insert laundry list here], and I take full responsibility for my actions, including the decision not to tell the truth until now."
That is what I wanted to hear.
– by Todd K
Often when an autobiography makes pre-release headlines for its "shocking revelations" (in the case of Open, the big ones were Andre Agassi's early-1990s mullet wig, late-1990s meth use, and lifelong hatred of tennis), the question the reader may ask is, now that I know those things, is there any point in reading the book?
In this case, the answer is yes, even if — like me — your interest in tennis is such that you recognize the big names and can put faces to most of them, but rarely sit through a match and would fail any quiz on the outcome of specific tournaments. (Or on the equipment. Skimming through this at the bookstore, I saw the sentence, "Nick, I tell him — I love my Prince," and briefly thought Agassi was revealing something about his musical taste.)
Agassi's collaborator, former Pulitzer recipient J.R. Moehringer, is said in the acknowledgements section to have graciously declined an authorship credit, but he surely is responsible for the actual prose. He gives Agassi an improbably rich and quirky vocabulary, but the basic tone usually feels right: frank, rueful, and tart. It would be impossible to write nearly 400 pages about a tennis pro's 20-year career without occasional lapses into "and then I played" repetitiveness — a tennis player's annual progression through tournaments is repetitious even by pro-athlete standards.
Hi, Sars –
In light of "Keeping It Clean," I direct this question not to you, but to the readers.
My kitchen is kind of a nightmare from a cleaning perspective — it has matte paint, virtually no closed storage, and no range hood, so that a layer of nasty sticky greasy food dust adheres to almost everything in the room. Thank goodness I've got a couple of steel-topped carts that serve as my food-prep area, because those I can keep clean (along with my most commonly-used dishes), but I cannot figure out how to remove the sticky dust from the rest of the kitchen.
The affected surfaces include lots of wooden shelves, some painted and some just polyurethaned, the top of the fridge (plastic? enamel? something white and textured, anyway), the back of the stove, the covers of cookbooks, chrome kitchen items, painted knick-knacks, and the linoleum floor tiles.
Hot water on a rag plus elbow grease doesn't cut it. Simple Green cleaner doesn't cut it. Windex doesn't cut it. Despite my mom's insistence that it would work, vinegar has no effect on the dust. Hot soapy water works a little bit, Goo-Gone works a little bit, but I do not have the endless arm strength, twenty zillion hours, and (in the case of Goo-Gone) enough money to afford all the bottles of cleaner I think it would take to rely just on those.
If anyone who has conquered his or her own nasty sticky kitchen dust can recommend any product(s), technique(s), or combination thereof that would increase my chances of reclaiming my kitchen, I would be most grateful!
Dirty girl
Dear Dirty,
I know just the substance you mean, and I've had some luck with a cheap, scrapey paper towel barely dampened with either Windex or hot water. For the non-book surfaces, upgrade to a Brillo pad (test it on a hidden corner of the fridge first to make sure it doesn't take the surface off). You might also try the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.
And if you own your home, it's probably time to invest in a range hood (or, if you're renting, make the landlord do it) and save yourself the time and effort on the front end.
Readers?
Which baseball player do you despise above (or perhaps "below") all others? Which name, upon its mention, sends your heart rate up into a hate gyre?
Do you hate the same players now that you did when you were a kid — or have other players replaced the Rich Gedmans and Von Hayeses in the blackest precincts of your heart?
Who wins a dickfest: Dick Allen, or Barry Bonds? What if it's a douchefest? Who wins that?
Do you hate any players that you used to love because of comments they've made (or assy behavior they've engaged in) after their careers ended?
Have any of your hatreds mellowed into grudging respect?
Talk to me. Talk to me about baseball players you hate, baseball players your friends hate, baseball players your grandpa hated. Used to hate? Tell me. Want to hate, but can't? Let it out. I want to hear about the cherished loathings of baseball fandom, even if it's just you who hates the guy.
I also want to hear the ways, if any, in which the sharing of these abhorrences contributes to your experience of watching/consuming baseball. When you invite, say, Jonathan Papelbon to eat a handful of bees at the top of your lungs in the bleachers, does it make you feel a part of things? Does the ritual telling of Dave Kingman stories on the porch or at the bar contribute to your sense of being a baseball fan?
Or do you just want Dave Kingman to go very far away and take his iron glove with him?
No player too old or insignificant; no grievance too random or inconsequential. It's over a month 'til pitchers and catchers report, I've got a discussion session to plan, and I HATE KEVIN BROWN. HATE HIM. STILL. PUNCH A BEE WITH YOUR NON-PITCHING HAND, BITCHFACE. Haaaaate!
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