Of Lame 1920s Ex-pat Authors, Secret Oil Baron Plotting, Pioneer Day Concerts, Futuristic Streamer Mazes, Horseback Shenanigans, and Cow Day at Chick Fil-A

Happy Ernest Hemingway's birthday. To celebrate, let's all write stories with virtually no description and dialogue that sounds like it was written by third graders and then somehow pass them off as "literature" to be forced on miserable English majors for centuries to come. And then commit suicide in Idaho. Yay! But, to Hemingway's credit, at least you can sort of understand what he's trying to say some of the time. I can't quite say the same for his lifelong chum Gertrude Stein. Here is a verbatim sample of Gertrude Stein's writing: 

"A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey." 

Oh my gosh! She writes gobbledygook! Give her a Nobel Prize for Literature and include her in the required English major curriculum!

Anyway, not much going on at the moment. I just finished reading a rather lamish book about an oil baron's secret plot to blow up every Islamic city in the world, and it would have been a lot more fun (and about a quarter of the size) if the author didn't feel the need to go into gut-wrenching detail about all of the protagonist's various hotel check-ins, gas station visits, private skinny-dipping sessions, etc., and if he didn't lay out the entire evil plot within the first 150 pages (with one break in between where we get to hear about that oh-so-important skinny-dipping scene), killing any suspense for the entire rest of the book. But as I told by mom just now, I like reading books like this. Gives me confidence. If Nelson Demille can churn out treacle and make gazillions of dollars, then surely I can write something slightly less treacly and make slightly more.

Last night we went with my mom, Julie, and my cousin Charlene to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Pioneer Day Concert featuring singer Katherine Jenkins, who apparently was on Dancing with the Stars recently, which I unfortunately have never seen because I'm not quite 70 years old yet. But she sang lovelily, and the choir and orchestra were lovely as well.

Alyssa had a birthday recently, for which various children decorated our house, and when I say "decorated," I mean "made a futuristic maze in our family room out of party streamers, which they stuck to the wall using whatever means were available, including staples." They also taped streamers to pine cones and threw them on our roof. Yeah. But t`was all in good fun, although I still haven't been able to remove all of the staples at the time of this writing. Also for Alyssa's birthday we went horseback riding somewhere in the mountains that wasn't on fire yet, and that was fun, even though I kept falling behind because my horse had to stop and eat everything in sight.  

The Fourth of July wasn't terribly exciting. Alyssa had to work during the day, but I went to the West Jordan parade with Becca and the gang. It might have been a decent parade if they had spaced the various entries less than, like, five minutes apart, and if they had had guys dressed like Arab terrorists giving out Snickers bars, like at that parade we went to in Grand Junction. But alas, such was not the case. No, the high point of our Fourth was going to KFC later. True story. Speaking of chicken, we also went to Chick Fil-A last week dressed as cows. Anything for free grub, that's the Green family motto. If only Tingting knew what kind of wackos she was getting involved with here. She would probably embrace Socialism in a hurry.