Watching any award show except the Oscars has become tedious. Especially music award telecasts. Too much shrieking from the audience. Too many drunken or unprepared "presenters." (Tip: there are cue cards, genius. You have to be able to read 'em. Wear contacts, glasses, or binoculars. Lay off the martinis. Do your job.)
So I hardly give the Academy of Country Music awards a second thought. But I scanned the list of nominees, just to be sure George Strait made the cut. (He did, so there really is a god.)
And then I saw, way at the bottom, the following categories:
Nightclub of the Year
Casino of the Year
Excuse me? Casino of the Year? Isn't that a place that does its best to separate oxygen-bottle-toting people from their money? What does a casino have to do with advancing the art of country music? Who wrote a song called, "I Left my Chips in Your Heart?"
Strictly my opinion: nightclubs and bars are entitled to awards from the hospitality, restaurant, and loan shark industries. No whiskey mill or gambling joint deserves an award from a country music association -- at least, not an association that still refers to women musicians as "cuties" on its website.
For some people, the very thought of a "pencil" is an anachronism.
I disagree. But in the all-web, all-the-time workplace, the question you should think about is:
What's in your pencil drawer?
Sanitized for your protection. The film canister dates me as an anachronism.
I promised to read mostly books by women in 2009. I don't do "resolutions," but there are books I wanted to spend time with.
Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck reminded me of what Sally from "When Harry Met Sally" might sound like as a 60-year-old woman. Kvetchy. I like Nora's writing, but when my son heard a clip from the audiobook version, he said: "Why are you listening to this? It sounds like one of your aunts."
Current Read: Girls Like Us, by Sheila Weller. I spent most of the 1970s with a crush on Carly Simon. Weller's book recounts the interwoven lives of Ms. Simon, Carole King, and Joni Mitchell, and how the their fame and excesses, along with those of their lovers, exacted a painful toll on all of them.
It's not gossipy, like People (pronounced "peep hole") magazine. On the other hand, Ms. Weller seems unable to write a paragraph without an aside, as indicated by an "em dash" (--) or parentheses. Magazine writers often do this, the result of writing or editing for bathroom reading. Her sentences are absurdly Faulkner-esque in length.
No reader should have to work this hard.
Memo to Sheila: take a breath, use a period, or find that lost box of commas. Please.
Next up: Alice Munro, assuming I survive the avalanche of em-dashes.
Where have I been?
- Editing the last few chapters of my novel. The storytelling's pretty much completed. It's mostly punctuation and proofreading now. Although there may be a hidden message when I see where I've written: "She turned his head."
- Quick visit to Olean, NY, where I get a re-charge from a non-fishing trip with my Sunday NY Times-reading friends. Now I need a recipe for yosenabe.
- Back to saying "no" to requests for charitable support. Especially from whiners who accuse my employer of dissing a diversity segment, when we've given more than $1 million to support that constituency over the years. "We don't find value in underwriting your online knitting festival, but we support knitters in general."
Spent the weekend raking accumulated snow off my roof. There's speculation that the weight of the snow is damaging the cinder block foundation of our house. I'm dubious, but the snow came a-tumbling down, anyway.
