Books, Badguys, and BISI

First off, I've just finished a book on CD that I feel took great strength of character to get through. It was ostensibly a thriller about a serial killer, his lawyer, and a woman the lawyer meets whose sister may or may not have been taken by the killer.

In the book's defense, it was a little bit about those things, but it was mostly about the enduring strength of love and the power of family. There were many moments where the level of schlock made me shout "oh dear god I have to switch to Forum." The author wrote of children with bright eyes shining so brightly Cate's* heart felt like it would burst with love, and of Cate's river-stone eyes that stirred something deep within John's chest like a nervous butterfly with wings of velvet and blechablugerflug...

I can't even make it up as bad as that lady can write. Even her action scenes were lifted from b movie scripts. At the end, John, one of the main characters, is talking to the guy who turns out to be the head psycho. The psycho is saying that his psycho protégé never had the patience to torture somebody satisfactorily, and John takes a swing at the guy saying, "patience this!"

If you get hired to record a book on tape, I wonder if you get to read the book first. I'd have trouble getting that line out in a studio environment without wasting many a take. (This is not to say that I'm picky about the books on CD I check out. Next up in my front seat is a book about the history of coal.)

Anyhow, finishing that book was the last bright point of my day. The first bright point was discovering that the cause of the traffic on my way to work was 2 police motorcycles and a police car surrounding a black bmw which had run into the embankment on the right side of 101N. The police had the driver of the car handcuffed and seated on his mangled hood.

Normally, if everyone seems okay in an accident, I'm angry with them for holding up traffic. But this guy got what was coming to him. 100s of people drove by and got to see him sitting, handcuffed, on his freshly wrecked car … not wearing any pants. Yep, he was pantless. He was, however, wearing shoes.

And finally here, as was requested, is my SYPBISI picture:




*Not that Cate.