It is not easy owning a Cairn terrier.
It’s not that Cairns are vicious, or stupid, or particularly destructive. They like to dig — they’re terriers, after all — but they don’t chew up carpets, destroy glassware, or shred the curtains. Originally bred by Scottish clansmen to live at the hearthside when they were weren’t clearing vermin out of the fields, Cairns are intelligent, fiercely loyal, and will defend their chosen family with fang and claw. They’re wonderful fun in many ways, and the dark brindle type’s resemblance to Terry, the original Toto from The Wizard of Oz, makes Halloween costumes a snap.
The problem is that Cairns are so smart that they consider the tricks humans usually attempt to teach them beneath their dignity, which means so much for the usual “shake paws” or “roll over and play dead.” They’re also incredibly stubborn — just try to get one to do something it doesn’t want to, I dare you — terribly strong, and have that peculiar ability to increase their relative mass that any cat owner will recognize instantly. “Immovable object” is the best way to describe a Cairn that doesn’t want to move, as both my parents found out whenever they’d try to get Toto Barbarossa to go for a walk on a rainy night and found themselves losing a tug of war to a twelve pound dog.
And there was the time Toto got himself and my mother so badly drenched that drowned rats looked better.
It was during what should have been a pleasant vacation to Niagara Falls during the summer of 1969. My parents had been there during the early years of their marriage and wanted to show me the lovely falls and the quaint, pleasant town that had so delighted them when they were young. So sometime during what the peak tourist season we loaded up the Buick, Dad got in the driver’s seat while Mum rode shotgun with a AAA map, and Toto and I took over the back seat.
And off we went, into the single worst vacation we ever had a family, and quite possibly the worst vacation I’ve ever had in my entire life. Everything, and I do mean everything went wrong, and if you think I’m exaggerating, well, not really:
- The American side of the falls had been dammed off while the Army Corps of Engineers worked to stabilize the cliff face to prevent erosion all the way back to populated areas. The resulting pile of rock was not only unlovely in the extreme, two corpses had been found in the heap of talus at the base of the falls, though fortunately not while we were there.
- The American side, far from being quaint and pleasant, was now wall to wall tourist traps, including a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, a wax museum, and an aquarium that advertised electric eels with a huge, lurid neon light that could be seen at least a block away.
- Rain. Lots and lots and lots of rain.
- So much pollution in the Niagara River that the seagulls we saw on the Maid of the Mist boat tour could, and did, stand calmly on the sludge while the tour guide spoke of the alleged natural beauty around us.
- A set of replica Crown Jewels on the Canadian side that were not nearly as sparkly and pretty as the originals, to my great disappointment.
- So much rain that the nightly son et lumière show was cancelled.
- Finding out that the alleged “reciprocal arrangement” between AAA and its Canadian equivalent entailed several hours’ delay when Dad locked his keys in the trunk of the Buick and we couldn’t get in. Worse, Mum’s purse, which held most of our supply of cash, traveler’s checks, and credit cards, was also in the Buick. The sole exception, a $100 bill, was useless because a) we were in Canada, not the United States, and b) no one would break it because a $100 bill was an even larger sum fifty years ago than it is today.
- Did I mention that it rained? And rained? A lot?
Then there was the night that Mum and Toto nearly drowned thanks to the inherent stubbornness of the Cairn terrier.
We’d heard a rumor that it was going to stop raining enough for the son et lumière show at Horseshoe Falls, and so we drove to a nearby parking lot and ventured forth into the night in hopes of seeing something that would salvage our summer vacation. Of course the heavens opened within about thirty seconds of us getting situated, and what felt like all the water in Ontario that wasn’t roaring over the falls came thundering down right on our unprotected heads.
Dad and I immediately set off at a dead run for the car, me yelling, him making sure that yes, this time he had the car keys in his pocket. Fortunately the Buick was only a couple of minutes away, so we jumped inside and Dad started the engine to warm up the interior because of course neither of us was wearing a sweater and the temperature had dropped about ten degrees. We were wet, yes, but not catastrophically so, and as soon as Mum and the dog arrived we’d head straight to our hotel so we could warm up and dry off.
Except that there was no sign of Mum, Toto, or anything that remotely resembled them for a good five minutes.
Dad glanced back over his shoulder, frowning. I was wet enough that I was starting to shiver, and the last thing he wanted was for me to catch a chill while we were in a foreign country. Mum wasn’t an especially fast runner but it wasn’t like we were in a howling wilderness. What was going on?
Then the passenger door burst open and Mum, soaked to the bone, her dripping hair plastered to her skull and neck, all but threw herself into her seat. She looked like she’d just attempted to go over the Falls sans barrel even though she couldn’t swim, and there was so much water in her wool sweater that she smelled distinctly of wet sheep.
That wasn’t all. In her arms, struggling and squirming and yapping, was a stinking ball of wiry dark hair that we normally called our dog. He was just as wet as Mum, smelled far worse, and before she could shove him into the back seat and slam the door against the downpour, he managed to give himself a good, hearty shake all over the three of us.
“What the hell, Martha?” Dad cried, turning to Mum as Toto wriggled free and lept into the back seat, where he proceeded to shake all over me. “Where were you?”
“Trying to get the dog out from under a bush!” Mum snarled. “I finally had to pick him up and run for it! He wouldn’t move!”
Dad started at her, then at the dog, then back at Mum. Then he spat out a curse that I fortunately was unable to understand because it was raining too hard, lit a cigarette, and wrenched the car out into traffic in the direction of our hotel.
Fortunately the rain had let up enough for us to make a dash for it once we’d parked, and even more fortunately the desk clerk took one look at us, blanched, and sent extra towels up to our room almost before Dad could ask. He and I dried ourselves off enough to avoid getting pneumonia, then headed to the quiet, deserted, blessedly warm pool while Mum did her best to dry off the dog, then took a nice hot bath to warm herself up.
I’m pretty sure we headed home the next day. The way our luck was going, the electric eels at the nasty little aquarium were going to slide out of their tank nd slither into our engine if we tried to stay much longer.
I don’t know if our vacation included a Friday the 13th, although it’s possible since June 13th did indeed fall on a Friday in 1969. However, it certainly seemed like the entire week was about as lucky as the 13th Annual Jacques de Molay Memorial Barbecue and Wienie Roast after it was invaded by a squadron of black cats wielding broken mirrors and very tall ladders. About the only thing that didn’t go wrong was that the return trip went smooth as silk, even if Mum’s sweater never quite recovered.
In honor of that disastrous vacation, tonight I bring you a baker’s dozen of Books So Bad I Wish I’d Never Heard of Them. None of them are quite as infuriating as a stubborn Cairn terrier huddling under a shrub in a soaking thunderstorm, or as memorable as being unable to buy so much as a single lemonade despite having plenty of cash to spend, but together they make up a true Unlucky (or at least Unpleasant) Thirteen:
Podkayne of Mars, by Robert A. Heinlein — possibly the single worst book Heinlein wrote that does not involve Lazarus Long, and I do not say this lightly. Podkayne has been controversial from day one, for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost it has one of the worst portrayals of a teenage girl I have ever read in my life, bar none, cross my heart and hope to vote for Nikki Haley in 2020. Beginning with her name (“Podkayne Fries,” which sounds like an exotic fusion molecular gastronomy dish involving foam and infusions and essences, etc.), continuing with her behavior, and culminating in two equally bad and unbelievable endings, Poddy is such a travesty that one wonders if Heinlein had ever even seen a teenage girl, let alone spent give minutes talking to one.
And that’s not all. The book also has, in no particular order, a suitcase nuke smuggled aboard a spaceship by Poddy’s appalling baby brother, some bonus racism because Poddy and her family are part-Maori, a generous helping of political chicanery, several gratuitous slaps at working mothers, the aforesaid baby brother (who is either a sociopath or autistic, but either way you want to slap him repeatedly with a very large dead fish), and Poddy’s inept parents getting ready to welcome test tube triplets even though they have done an astonishingly poor job of raising their existing children.
I have yet to meet a single female, of any age, whose reaction to the book is anything beyond a hearty “YUCK” and the urge to hurl it out the nearest window and/or Robert Heinlein’s headstone. It’s not quite as annoying as To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Heinlein’s novel about Lazarus Long’s mother Maureen, but Podkayne of Mars is right down there with a couple of short stories Heinlein wrote about a teenage girl with weight issues he decided to name “Puddin’.” Either way, it’s proof positive that Heinlein may have been able to write a decent teenage boy, but teenage girls might have been another species as far as he was concerned.
God Emperor of Dune, by Frank Herbert — one would think that Frank Herbert would have cut his losses and stopped writing about Paul Muad’Dib and his friends, associates, lovers, descendants, sandworms, planets, etc., after the debacle that was Children of Dune, but noooooo, he had to go and write whatever this is. And right from the start, when Leto Atreides (now a 3,500 year old sandworm with arms thanks to whatever he did to himself in Children of Dune) surveys a cluster of yet MORE Duncan Idaho clones playing in the tiny scrap of desert that’s left on Arrakis, things go rapidly down the Shai Hulud hole.
An all female army called the Dora Milaje “Fish Speakers,” Leto keeping the entire universe under control thanks to his monopoly on spice, yet MORE breeding to produce a superior human who will lead humanity along the Golden Path, and a climax where Leto literally dissolves into sand trout and starts the whole #!@#$@$!@$@!$#@ cycle again, God Emperor of Dune is one of those big, sprawling, plot and theme-crammed books that sells well and is little read. The one thing it did do was lead to Jane Yolen, who’s about as much like an Atreides as Gil the Wonder Cat, calling herself the God Empress of SFWA when she was president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. That’s funny enough to be almost worth all the clones, Golden Paths, spice, Fish Speakers, and assorted Atreides to justify this book, but then again Jane could have just as easily called herself the Gray Lenswoman of SFWA and gotten an equally big laugh. Either way, I guarantee that you will never think of sand, or trouts, or Duncan Idaho, in quite the same way.
Vulcan! by Stephen Goldin and Kathleen Sky — this professionally published Star Trek novel starts with the premise that there’s a small cadre of anti-Vulcan bigots on the Enterprise and goes downhill from there. The plot makes no sense, the female lead (an anti-Vulcan bigot) is described as having “am ample bosom,” and the whole thing collapses when readers learn that the anti-Vulcan bigot hates Vulcans because she was in love with a Vulcan and it ended badly.
Worse? The book was based on a spec script Kathleen Sky pitched to Gene Roddenberry for a possible fourth season episode. Just how this would have played out on-screen is not clear (it would have needed extensive changes, to say the least), but the published book is such a mess that it’s almost enough to make me glad that Star Trek never had a fourth season if this is what it would have looked like. The only good thing about Vulcan! is the cover art, which at least has a nice painting of Spock looking dramatic, or at least the first edition did.
Killing Patton, by Bill O’Reilly’s badly underpaid ghostwriter — Bill O’Reilly’s been making quite a bit of cash slapping his name on bad books about the “mysterious deaths” of famous world leaders. Unfortunately for Bill-O, most of these leaders (who include Lincoln, Jesus, and the Empire of Japan, and please don’t tell me Japan is a country, I know that even if America’s creepiest falafel lover doesn’t) suffered deaths that are anything but mysterious. They’re still not mysterious, too, even after O’Reilly flings literally everything but the loofah at the reader to convince zir otherwise.
This particularly applies to George Patton, who died thanks to injuries suffered in a car crash a few months after the end of World war II. There is nothing to indicate that the accident was planned, or that Patton was expected to die; he suffered a broken neck thanks to hitting his head on a glass partition, which is the sort of injury one gets if one doesn’t wear a seatbelt (which weren’t available at the time), then died of congestive heart failure after throwing a blood clot. It was tragic, yes, but assassination, nopity-nope.
This doesn’t prevent O’Reilly (or his ghostwriter, take your pick) from bringing up every single rumor, crazy assertion, or bit of silly gossip about Patton’s death and presenting it as documented fact. Not only that, there is not one single solitary word about how Patton, who was a great general but a less than admirable human being, made nicey-nice with Nazis during his brief stint as a military governor in Bavaria, or that he was, to be blunt, something of a bigot. Then again, we are talking about Bill O’Reilly (or people desperate enough to take money from him), so that shouldn’t be a surprise.
Notorious, by Janet Daily with a healthy and unwitting assist from Nora Roberts — Janet Dailey seemed to have it all in 1997. After breaking into category romances in 1975, she’d switched to writing single title romances in 1979 and achieved success beyond her wildest dreams. Her 57 Harlequin titles sold over 80 million copies and were praised for introducing American heroines, themes, and settings to the venerable British/Canadian Harlequin line. She also wrote 12 romances for rival publisher Silhouette, dozens of single titles, and eventually sold over 300 million books in 19 separate languages. She even began sponsoring an annual award for a romance novel that addressed a social issue, complete with a $5,000 cash prize.
So why would she plagiarize another writer? Especially one who rivaled her in terms of sales, clout, and public prominence? Like, say, Nora Roberts?
That’s right: Janet Dailey spent seven full years ripping off Nora Roberts, most notably in Notorious and another book, Aspen Gold. Roberts had long suspected that something was amiss, but it wasn’t until a fan read her book Sweet Revenge and Dailey’s Notorious back to back and posted similar passages online that Roberts realized she was right. She sued, Dailey admitted her guilt, and the two giants of their field agreed to settle in 1998, with Roberts donating her cash award to the Literacy Volunteers of America in recompense.
Dailey laid low for a few years but eventually did return to publishing. She died after complications from heart surgery in 2013, having never quite regained her earlier prominence. Roberts is still writing, still at the top of the bestseller lists, and still keeping an eye out for plagiarists; she was part of the group that brought down Cassie Edwards for lifting meaty chunks straight out of old reference books and plunking them in her Native American-themed romances.
Moral the story: never take on the creator of Lieutenant Eve Dallas. It will not end well for you.
In His Image: The Cloning of a Man, by David Rorvik — David Rorvik was a respected, award-winning science and technology writer in 1978 when he published what he swore was an account of a scientific team cloning a childless billionaire. The 1%er, “Max,” supposedly decided that Rorvik had the connections and expertise to bring together a team to provide him with a bouncing baby brother/son/some type of relative whom he could hug and pet and squeeze and name “George”and raise as the heir to his business empire. The book chronicles the five year saga of Rorvik’s efforts to recruit and manage a medico-scientific team, a lot of debate about whether this was ethical or even possible, and the eventual pregnancy (by a surrogate code-named “Sparrow”) that resulted in “Max Jr.,” aka “the first human clone” a good twenty years before the debut of Dolly the Sheep in 1996.
The book sold faster than bootleg tamagotchis, but actual biologists reacted with either hysterical laughter or incoherent rage. The technique Rorvik described had been used for over a decade to clone frogs, absolutely no question, but thanks to physiological differences between mammals and amphibians, it could not possibly work on humans. Worse, the non-frog parts of the process seemed to have been cribbed from the work of British scientist J. Derek Bromhall, who was so angry at having his work misued that he sued for defamation. He won, too, which basically wrecked Rorvik’s reputation and made the very idea of cloning sound ridiculous, at least until Dolly the Sheep baa’d her way onto magazine covers twenty years later.
That would seem to be that...except that Rorvik, who’s kept his head above water thanks to royalties from a manual that purportedly teaches a couple how to determine their baby’s sex before conception, swears to this day that In His Image was a factual account of an attempt to clone a human, not a weird little potboiler. He’s so convincing that it’s tempting to check the ranks of forty year billionaires, see which ones most resemble their fathers, and demand a DNA test….
Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, by Herr Professor Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Würzburg University, Chief Physician to the Prince Bishop of Würzburg and Duke of Franconia, etc., etc., etc., — the learned Herr Professor Beringer was at the pinnacle of his career in 1725. Highly educated, devoutly Christian, he had a secure academic appointment and a post as a physician to one of the wealthy, powerful prince-bishops scattered about the Holy Roman Empire. He even had proof of his pet theory, that those mysterious stones known as “fossils” were proof of the Great Flood of Noah, at least if the rocks local boys kept bringing him were to be believed. And what rocks they were! Animals, insects, stars, comets, even the Name of God in multiple languages — all were there on the stones, plain as day. That the “fossil” spiders and snakes and frogs and letters fit suspiciously neatly on each rock, or that some bore what looked like chisel marks, were mere proof that the Lord worked in mysterious ways.
Alas, the Lord had nothing to do with it. Two fellow faculty members, J. Ignatz Roderick and Johann Georg von Eckhart, had decided to teach Beringer a lesson after one too pronunciamentos on theology. They had carved the mysterious “fossils” on the stones, planted them in the mountains, and paid the local boys to bring them Beringer. It was all jolly good fun, at least until Beringer wrote a learned book, copiously illustrated, using the faked fossils of evidence of Beringer’s theological views. Roderick and Eckhart tried to stop the publication by pointing out all the obvious flaws in the fossils — chisel marks? really? — but Beringer was so convinced he was right that it wasn’t until Lithographiae Wirceburgensis was a continent-wide laughingstock that he realized that no, he wasn’t.
The resulting scandal forced Roderick and Eckhart to leave Würzburg, their careers in ruins. Beringer somehow managed to keep his post, but nearly bankrupted himself trying to buy up the entire first edition of what he’d intended as his crowning achievement. Some of his “lying stones” (Lügensteine) are now part of museum collections, but Beringer himself is all but forgotten except as the victim of a particularly egregious hoax.
I am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe — middle aged men have a very mixed record writing about young women, and this less than glorious doorstop by Tom Wolfe is a prime example. Allegedly a hard-hitting look at colleges in the early 2000’s, this account of a scholarship student’s first year or so at UNC Chapel Hill “Dupont University” is about as realistic as one of those dishes of waxy-looking plastic fruit furniture stores plunk on dining room tables to make them look homey. Worse, there’s an underlying sense that Wolfe holds the entire cast in contempt, just like in Bonfire of the Vanities.
Not that it’s hard to dislike the characters (each and every one a cliche) and the plot (which begins with a date rape and goes on from there). By the end, when Charlotte Simmons basically decides that she doesn’t care about her schoolwork because she’s now involved with a BMOC who’s headed for an NBA career, the reader is left wondering why Wolfe bothered, since Jackie Collins, Danielle Steele, or Jacqueline Susann would have (and probably did) done a far better job with the same semi-prurient material.
Worst of all, though, is the sex, which is jaw-droppingly ridiculous. And in case you think “nah, Wolfe is too good a writer, not a chance,” feast your orbs on this gem, which wouldn’t pass muster in a fanfic written by a 16 year old virgin in Pekin, North Dakota:
"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now! She must say 'No, Hoyt' and talk to him like a dog..."
it’s not quite as bad as, say, Philip Roth describing the erotic joys of raw liver, but it’s not great.
And speaking of Philip Roth….
The Breast, by Philip Roth — yes, this is exactly what it looks like: a Philip Roth novella about a man who’s turned into a giant mammary gland. Why Roth felt compelled to write this, whether he was under the influence of one or more controlled substances, and why his publisher decided that something this blitheringly dumb deserved its very own 78-page book are questions for Roth scholars to debate, and they’re welcome to them. The only one I’ve seen that makes sense, beyond the distinct possibility that the author of Portnoy’s Complaint might have sniggering juvenile streak bigger than Nathan Zuckerman’s ego, is that Roth was doing his own version of Gregor Samsa’s ordeal, only with a body part. I’m not a Roth scholar, though, so who knows?
One oddity: this might, and I do mean might, be a weird sort of precursor to Dr. Chuck Tingle’s wilder involving sentient Hugo awards, cans of creamed corn, political treaties, and so on. The only reason I’m not convinced that history’s greatest smut-writing tae kwon do/massage therapy alumnus of DeVry University was somehow inspired by one of America’s greatest writers is that it’s about, well, a breast and not the gluteal area that features in so much of Dr. Chuck’s oeuvre. Then again we’re talking Chuck Tingle so who knows?
The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand — once again Ayn Rand writes a paean to selfishness, and once again teenage nerds from Republican families think it’s just dandy. That Howard Roark is a) a terrorist who blows up an entire housing development because he doesn’t understand that he’s been hired to perform a service, not CREATE ART, b) a rapist, and c) about as thoroughly unpleasant a character as exists in American letters doesn’t seem to matter. Throw in that his victim/lover/soulmate Dominique Francon is one of those brainwashed “strong women” who thinks being raped is SEXAY SEXAY SEXAY, and the result isn’t even worth laughing at.
Worse, The Fountainhead was made into an absolutely terrible movie with Patricia Neal as a wild-eyed Dominique and a horribly miscast Gary Cooper as Howard Roark. They have zero chemistry, which is something of a surprise because they had an affair during the filming, but given how hateful both characters are, small loss. Or maybe it’s because Neal devotes a couple of crucial scenes either to whacking or attempting to whack Cooper with a riding crop. Either way, by the end of the film the viewer is tempted to whack everyone involved with a 2 x 4. Ayn Rand just hated the film, too, even though she wrote the script and insisted that not one word of her golden dialogue be cut.
One saving grace: Michael “Heaven’s Gate” Cimino wanted to remake this as his original follow up to The Deer Hunter. Can you even imagine what a mess that would be?
Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs, by Julie Jackson — it’s sometimes hard to tell just what a book is from the title, but not this one. It’s exactly what it claims to be: a photographic portfolio of otherwise blameless rescue cats wearing miniature multi-colored wigs, accompanied by allegedly witty captions.
Why anyone would do this as a hobby is not clear — all the wigs had to be custom-made, which is a lot of work for what’s essentially a joke that wears thin very, very quickly — even though the cats themselves are quite lovely and the pictures frequently cute. Nor it is clear how the author got the cats to sit still long enough to “pose,” let alone get the wigs on their heads in the first place. Unlike dogs, cats do not normally enjoy wearing things on their heads, especially brightly colored curls, wisps, page boys, and so on, and I’m surprised the author wasn’t bandaged all the way up to the elbows.
Then again, cats are popular, so are silly pictures, and a book that website Cuteoverload.com called “redonkculous” is a perfect mashup of two dumb trends that taste dumb together. I still wouldn’t try this at home, at least without making sure that my pets were thoroughly stoned on catnip, but don’t let me stop you from wigging down with your pooties if that’s what floats your felinoid.
Love and Marriage, by Bill Cosby — I was never a huge fan of Bill Cosby’s sitcoms, which struck me as So Bland They Put Me To Sleep. I did like some of his standup, though, and like most of America thought his books on family life were mildly interesting. My attitude toward him has changed dramatically, as one might imagine; a half-century career of roofying women and a criminal conviction tends to do that. I also no longer find much amusing in passages like this:
The happiness of these four daughters has been of supreme importance to me, but the problem is that this happiness may depend on their avoiding the kind of person their father was in his drugstore days, a mad hunter of j-o-n-e-s. Every time a young man comes to my house for one of my daughters, I have wanted to take them aside and say:
You’re not like me, are you? If you are, then I know what you want and I hope you have the same terrible luck. …I hope you’re on a mission impossible. And one more thing: I may have to kill you, but it will be nothing personal.
which is creepy, creepy, creepy, or this:
It was in those basements that I tried to squeeze girls as if they were melons to see which ones might be ripe for going steady with me. Sometimes I managed to lure one of them outside to sit with me in a car for a little kissing and rubbing; most of the other girls I managed to lure away from the crowd just sat there like statues, hoping that this moment would pass and they could get on with their lives.
which is just plain gross. One hopes that girls he attempted to treat like ripe cantaloupes have recovered by now, but I have to wonder how many privately died a little every time this wretched man appeared on their TV screens as “America’s Dad.”
Hathor’s Simply Delicious Book of Breast Milk Comics, by Heather Cushman-Dowdee — this collection based on the now-departed web comic Hathor the Cow Goddess promotes a couple of very worthwhile causes. The author is a strong advocate of breastfeeding and attachment parenting, and it’s clear she loves her children dearly. This doesn’t make up for scripts that show the titular character crying when her daughter is old enough to be weaned because she won’t get to breastfeed her anymore, horrifically bad art (the panel where a hungry baby looks like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon run amok will give you nightmares for weeks), scripts that portray six year olds asking to breastfeed as normal, and attempts to recast women staying home with their kids pretty much indefinitely as “The Evolution Revolution” instead of thinly disguised 1950’s housewifery.
Worst of all, though, is the cow mask the title character wears throughout the comic to show her goddess-hood or cowness that actually makes her look like Jar Jar Binks in a kitty wig. “Hideous” doesn’t come close to describing it, and seriously, please do not drink anything if you do a Google search on this mask, or the Macy’s balloon baby, or pretty much anything connected to this webcomic.
Yes. Really.
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Did you ever have a vacation that went south regardless of which direction you went? Have you read any of these books? Is there a Lügensteine in your garden? A kitty wig in your makeup kit? Come to the firepit and share….
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