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True False

Ok, I promised I'd let you know the answers to that True/False quiz I posted last Friday, so here they are:

1. My elementary school teachers nicknamed (and called) me "Motormouth".

True.  I think it was well-deserved too.  I recall the only time I ever shut up was during lunch (and sometimes, not even then!)

2. I cried in high school when I got a grade of 'B' in Phys. Ed.

False.  I didn't quite cry, but I was very upset.  It seems that those who couldn't do ALL the tumbling moves (I couldn't do a back handspring) got a B that quarter.  I had a perfect 4.0 going for my first two years of high school and wasn't about to let some weaselly little P.E. teacher ruin it.  Luckily, only the semester grades were applied towards your GPA, so I managed to boost it back up to an 'A' to keep my streak going…(yeah, I was a nerd in high school, I know, I know).

3. I once nearly severed my middle finger when I fell while carrying firewood while wearing roller-skates.

Fortunately, this one is False.  Unfortunately, that's because it happened to my brother.  The same one who got his teeth broken by a sailboat boom on the 4th of July.  He seems to have all the "serious" injuries from when we were kids.

Sadly, I cannot say that I would NEVER have had this happen to me…I just happened to not be wearing roller skates at the time, or else I might be telling you a different story.

4. My brother's best friend once hit me in the head with a heavy steel chain.

True.  Long story short – he was, for some odd reason, "dribbling" a basketball by whipping it with this big bike-chain.  When the ball went awry, I reached out to grab it and toss it back his way…unfortunately, he decided if he swung the chain extra-far, he'd be able to hook the ball back without any problems…when chain hit head, it left a scar that is still present today, but only visible when I shave my head.

5. When I was in elementary school, a girl told me I "sung like a frog" and it scarred me to the point of choosing to refrain from singing until halfway through high school.

All too True.  I avoided school musicals and choirs like the plague until high school, and then I found out what fun I was missing.  I ended up having a passing-good voice, too, so I grimace a little that one little girl caused such a hiccup in my vocal development.

6. I once won a mini-triathlon at a summer camp where the prize was a chance to eat McDonald's with the hot female camp counselor.

True.  And the Big Mac was DELICIOUS!  (As was the company.)

7. I wore bright red pants to my middle-school graduation.  Nobody probably would have noticed, except I was Valedictorian and had to give a speech.

Sad to say, but True.  I have to blame this one on my Grandmother though – she was always buying me crazy clothes and I had no better sense but then to wear them.  She bought me bright yellow shorts the next year – I stopped wearing them after someone asked if they came with batteries or if I had to buy them and hook them up myself.  (The following year, I got over the frog comment (#5 above) and realized I didn't care if I was teased, and started wearing them again).

8. My two best friends in high school were a Taiwanese boy nicknamed "Grasshopper" and a Somalian boy nicknamed "Jackrabbit".

False.  Or, at least the jackrabbit part of it was.  We were the top 3 runners on the cross-country squad, and were really close.  The kid from Taiwan really was nicknamed "Grasshopper" though – he was about 5'8" but had a vertical that could rival a lot of college basketball superstars.

9. I once hit someone upside the head with a copy of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein.

True. (As Budd said, haven't we all?)  I had my nose in a book about half the time in middle school, and one day when I was sitting at lunch, reading The Hobbit, I started to get teased by one of the school bullies in my grade.  I was pretty tired of it, and just closed the book, reached up, and *whapped* him with it.  He was too shocked to fight back.

I got sent to the principal's office – she thought it was pretty funny that the book was mightier than the sword.  She told me that she couldn't very well take books away from me, but didn't want to see me hitting anyone with them again.

10. I once got a ticket from a police officer while riding my bike home from the neighborhood swimming pool.

True.  I had biked down this road with some friends of mine a few days before, and decided to go down it again by myself on the way home, as it was a bit of a shortcut over the regular route.  An unmarked police car "pulled me over" and explained that I was trespassing on a private property road.  He wrote me a "warning ticket" and I was in tears as I turned around and pedaled the half-mile back the way I had come.  I hid the ticket in my closet and worried over it for about 3 days before I decided to come clean with my parents.  At the time, I had no idea what a "warning ticket" was (being ~11) and wasn't sure if I was going to go to jail if my parents didn't pay a fine or take care of it somehow.

Needless to say, my parents were greatly amused and figured I had learned my lesson between the policeman incident and the self-imposed guilt trip I had been suffering from for the previous 3 days.

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Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions

Neil Gaiman

It's fitting that I started reading this book on the flight over to the UK, and will be finishing it here.  Or rather, it just fits.

Neil Gaiman, known best for his graphic novels (Sandman, etc) and full-length novels like American Gods and Stardust, can really tell a story.  And in this book, he tells not one, but 30 'short' tales (including one hidden in the introduction!) that range from a 100-word story about a fictional figure we all know (and most of us love) to an account of Mrs. Whitaker, who finds the Holy Grail underneath a fur coat at a secondhand-goods store.

I say that the book fits, because almost all of the settings take place in England.  The few that haven't so far have instead involved British folks visiting the US.  Either way, Neil Gaiman is able to imbue his characters with lives of their own, complete with joys, worries, trials and tribulations. 

Not all of the stories end happily; as Neil puts it, "sometimes the only way I would know that a story had finished was when there weren't any more words to be written down".  But the stories (in some cases, masquerading as poems or fictional excerpts of the work of a famous historical writer) all have the power of a great storyteller behind them.  I have yet to read one that does not invoke a strong emotion in me, be it the whimsical fancy of a man who "cures" cancer but provides some interesting side effects with his solution, or the despair and determination of the man who spends most of his life searching for a girl he once saw in a Penthouse magazine when he was nineteen.

I picked this book up from the bookstore on a whim, to round out the balance on a gift certificate.  I am a fan of short stories, but had no knowledge of Gaiman's short-fiction writing abilities prior to just digging in to the book.  I'm glad I chose it, and will gladly purchase any future compilation of short stories he chooses to publish, without question.

Just to give you a small feel for Gaiman's style in these stories, I'll point out a small excerpt from the story "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", wherein our protagonist has his first alcoholic drink ever, and does some gazing into the depths of H.P. Lovecraft's soul:

Ben shook his head.  He seemed to be discussing literature with two strangers in an English pub while drinking beer.  He wondered for a moment if he had become someone else, while he wasn't looking.[...]

Ben was mildly surprised to find that he seemed to be drinking another full-bodied pint of Shoggoth's Old Peculiar.  Somehow the taste of rank goat was less offensive on the second pint.  He was also delighted to notice that he was no longer hungry, that his blistered feet had stopped hurting, and that his companions were charming, intelligent men whose names he was having difficulty in keeping apart.  He did not have enough experience with alcohol to know that this was one of the symptoms of being on your second pint of Shoggoth's Old Peculiar.

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