And the greedy shall profit

Happy Valentine's Day, folks! Now, I know this isn't Christmas, but I made out all right this holiday season, if I do say so myself. The Wife hit me with a trio of gifts this morning before I headed off to work, and they were keepers, every one.

Firstly, she got me the Samuel French edition of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas Broadway script. If you're unfamiliar with the original musical, it differs significantly from the Burt Reynolds/Dolly Parton movie. I like the stage version better--there's more depth and nuance to the characters here, and the sheriff isn't quite so much Burt Reynolds playing Burt Reynolds. The significance of this gift is the fact that I've let this Chicken Ranch book project consume the better part of the previous two years of my life. Luckily, we're moving into the endgame phase and I should have the book wrapped up later this year.

The next gift was another book, Strobist Photo Trade Secrets, vol. 2. Whenever I get clever, photographically speaking, I'm usually attempting some sort of Strobist shoot. That is, using small camera-mount flashes off-camera and remotely triggered to create more complex lighting setups. The book has scads of tips, advice, examples and lighting diagrams to inspire lots and lots of experimentation. Actually, this is probably a gift as much for The Wife and her photography studio as it is for me.

The third and final gift I can categorically say is not equally for her. It's Joe R. Lansdale's Flaming Zeppelins. It's a collected volume of two gonzo bizarre Lansdale novels, Zeppelins West and its sequel, Flaming London. As Joe tells it, he originally started the first as a short story for an anthology, but the story "kept getting longer and longer, and dumber and dumber." So he made it into a novel, in which Buffalo Bill's head is kept alive in a jar atop a steam-powered robot body, his Wild West Show flies around in zeppelins, and they encounter all manner of historical literary figures, such as the Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, Captain Nemo and a host of others. All of whom die in horribly funny and offensive ways. Except for Ned the Seal, who apparently survives to make his way to London just as the Martians attack in their great tripod war machines. I haven't actually read Flaming London yet, so I don't know if that's canon or not. Either way, somewhere Alan Moore is weeping.

So, that was my Valentine's Day haul. It's okay to be a little jealous.

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