Cheeky's Hideaway

The British Think I'm Stupid. Or Do They...?

There's a meme rolling around Facebook in which the BBC is accused of thinking that the average person has only read six of the one hundred books listed below.  People are responding to it with the self-righteous indignation of Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, which is a little unfair as I can't find a single reference to the BBC's original indictment of our intelligence (if it exists at all).

However, it does get me thinking.  I feel a little smug about my intelligence at times, despite having no chess champion trophies or honorary seats at Oxford to show for it.  And I like to think I'm reasonably well-read.  But in the last few years, as I spend more and more time either finger-twitching in front of the TV or cramming my thoughts into 140 characters, I've noticed my reading habits have withered as much as my stock portfolio.  I still love to read, but never seem to make time to do it.

So I decided to take the test anyway, to see if I'd officially atrophied to the point of being an amorphous blob and let my brain fall into disuse.

Here are the instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' (and bold) after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star/asterisk/Bonds (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Put a # (and italics) by those you've started but not finished.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible #
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X+
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare #
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis – X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen  (but I did like the movie)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (isn't this a repeat?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne #
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X (I thought this would only include good books...)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *  (been trying to read this for years...)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X+
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - X+
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X+
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon *
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X+
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt * (See: Atonement, above)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X+
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X+
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce *
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (barf)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle #
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams *
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X+
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total read = 37
Total started but not finished = 4
Total I still want to read = 7

A flawed list, no doubt.  There's some obvious stuff that isn't listed, and a few that have no right being on the list.  But the numbers don't lie, and it looks like there's hope for me yet.  Either that or I my pace out of the starting gate was brisk and I'm just coasting now.

And in the meantime, all you haters out there should lay off of the BBC.  They did bring us Monty Python, Dr. Who, and The Office, you know...

(P.S.  I think we should come up with an alternative list that better reflects reality.  Something that includes Middlesex, The Adventures of Cavalier and Clay and As I Lay Dying but leave out everything Mitch Albom over wrote.  Leave me something in the comments and we'll try to correct the meme.  WOLVERINES!!!)

Cute or Annoying?

I've got an idea for a new game show.  I haven't quite finalized how to execute it (although who cares as long as I find the right washed-up comedian to host) but it goes something like this:

Contestants get to witness some of Cheeky's behavior and have to guess whether it's "cute" or "annoying."  This may seem pretty straightforward, but I assure you it's not.  It's completely contextual, which is where the challenge is.  Let me give you some examples.

Listening to Cheeky sing at the top of her lungs after putting her to bed = CUTE

Listening to Cheeky sing at the top of her lungs TWO HOURS after putting her to bed = ANNOYING

Getting a big hug and kiss from Cheeky because she doesn't want you to leave for work = CUTE

Getting a big hug and kiss from Cheeky WHILE SHE REFUSES TO LET GO OF YOUR LEG because she doesn't want you to go to work = ANNOYING

Cheeky giggling after a fart = CUTE

Cheeky giggling after a fart THAT SMELLS LIKE THE DECAYING INTESTINES OF A DEAD GOAT THAT HAD FEASTED ON THE DIARRHEA OF A 40 YEAR-OLD ALCOHOLIC FOR A WEEK = ANNOYING

Cheeky running naked in the house announcing she's "Makid Girl!" = CUTE

Cheeky running naked in the house WHEN SHE'S SUPPOSED TO BE GETTING IN THE F*CKING TUB announcing she's "Makid Girl!" = ANNOYING

Complex, convoluted explanations of life's little idiosyncrasies as explained by a three year-old = CUTE

Complex, convoluted explanations of life's little idiosyncrasies as explained by a three year-old AD NAUSEUM FOR HOURS ON END WITHOUT A BREAK OF ANY KIND = ANNOYING

Cheeky climbing into our bed in the morning to snuggle - CUTE

Cheeky climbing into our bed in the morning to snuggle WHICH IS BULLSHIT BECAUSE ALL SHE REALLY WANTS IS FOR YOU TO WAKE YOUR ASS UP AND SCRATCH HER BACK UNTIL EVERY ITCH SHE WILL EVER HAVE IN HER ENTIRE LIFE IS GONE = ANNOYING

You get the basic idea. It's the type of game parents would probably be REALLY good at, and the payoff wouldn't have to be that big.  Personally, you don't need to offer $1 million to get me on the show...I'd take a weekend night of babysitting.

And Now a Word From Our Sponsor

As the hundreds of underpaid interns who e-mail me trying to get me to plug products know by now, I don't really like schilling for The Man.  I have a reputation to uphold, you see.  You don't wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I'm a loner. A rebel. 

But every once in a while I feel compelled to pimp.  Sometimes it's unsolicited.  Sometimes it's flat-out bought.  Other times I just respect the people behind it.  Regardless, I wouldn't mention it if I didn't think it was something worth checking out.

So if you have a chance to detach yourself from the latest economic news and check out IttyBits.com.  Compared to the overwhelming majority of "parenting sites" out there--which generally range somewhere from useless to annoying--I think it's great.  Simple, valuable, and in no way affiliated with a major multinational corporation dabbling in arms-trading.

Give it a look...tell 'em CroutonBoy sent you.  It's one of the few places where saying that won't get you defenestrated.

Pigskin Paradise

Remember when the Super Bowls were boring?  For like a decade it seemed like Buffalo or Denver would impersonate the Washington Generals while an NFC team armed with chainsaws and mini-guns would obliterate them.  But DAMN have we had some good ones lately, and 2009 was no exception.

Last year's game was epic, but this year?  RIDICULOUS!  Harrison's interception?  The safety?  Larry Fitzgerald?  Santonio Holmes' toes????  Incredible.  Kudos to the Cardinals, who apparently do not suck after all, and congrats to the Steelers who now have a ring for...well, let's just hope they put it on their other hand.

But no Super Bowl is complete without a healthy dose of friends, libations, and foods that virtually guarantee a triple bypass.  And my irregular heartbeat this morning tells me that we were successful on all counts.  In fact, I'd say we outdid ourselves on the last of those three.

My love-affair with bacon is well-publicized.  So when I came across this recipe last week our Super Bowl menu was a foregone comclusion.  Oodgie, to her credit, overcame her revulsion and, having confirmed that our life insurance is still in force, agreed to make it.  Behold...BACON EXPLOSION!

I suspect some of you may be rushing to the restroom or slouched over a garbage pail right now, but for those of you who describe bacon, sausage, and barbecue sauce as "yum", "yummy", and "yummolicous" then you know what I'm talkin' about.  And you know who you are ...

There's still one left, if anyone's hungry.