Report!

Last week, the book was in the mail. Actually, several books were in the mail, which seemed a little wasteful, but is what happens when you redeem a Half Price Books gift card online. This particular gift card was a birthday present from last year. I'll give those of you who know my birthday a minute to do the math (or check Facebook). Yep. I had an 11-month-old unredeemed birthday present.

Presumably what the IT department at Half Price Books
looks like, given that every website known to man
has been accepting gift cards since the Internet Stone Age,
or approximately 2008. 

How does that happen, you ask? A really sad case of stubbornness paired with a teensy weensy little attention span. I didn't want to go to a physical Half Price Books because you never know what you're going to find, which can be lovely and spontaneous, but I had a list I wanted to plow through. So I went to their website and it said that they were in the process of reconfiguring checkout so that one could pay with a gift card. Being stubborn about the precise list of books I wanted, I figured I'd wait. So I put the gift card in a drawer and checked in on the website every month or two until, finally, there was a gift card option, and then my gift card didn't have the right kind of magnetic strip and I had to go exchange it for a different one at a retail store. A less determined stubborn person would have attempted to use the gift card at the physical store, but this was a mission.

A fair representation of my brain, only the squirrel is
significantly more focused. I usually tell people I have
the attention span of a crack-addled squirrel. 

I got the new gift card, went home, put the gift card back in the drawer and got distracted for another few months. But, eventually, I remembered I had a working gift card, and the website was accepting gift cards, and, with all of the planetary forces now in proper alignment, I went onto the Half Price Books website and ordered an almost completely different set of books because I couldn't find the original list. Being Half Price Books, each individual book was shipped from a different store, so our mailbox proceeded to regurgitate books every day for a week. It was fun, while it lasted, and made the joy of the gift card linger for a full 11 months.

The first book to arrive was a book I'd checked out of the Round Rock Library a couple of years ago and had been wanting to reread, the fabulously hilarious Blonde Bombshell, by Tom Holt, and I'm happy to say that it was as funny today as it was two years ago, if not more so. If you've never read his many books, Holt is fascinated with the multiverse, time travel, and all those sci-fi conventions, except that rather than visualizing earnest time lords or heroes righting the wrongs of history, he accepts that we as human beings have a pretty much limitless ability to screw things up and finds the humor in that.

The bombshell in question is (of course) an actual bombshell, a sentient weapon of mass destruction sent by a planet of dogs to destroy Earth. The cast of characters include a brilliant drunk of a Russian scientist, a couple of undercover dogs having a hard time acting human, several Creatures of Pure Text, Barbie, several dead octopuses, and an extremely pissed off unicorn. The unicorn, who appears in the most incongruous of places, glares angrily at the protagonists, and speaks the single command: "Report!"

I highly recommend Tom Holt and his many books. Here's one of the passages I can share without giving away plot. Remember, the aliens come from a planet ruled by dogs. The name "Earth" becomes a little lost in translation and comes out "Dirt." Same thing, really.

"Sign here, please," the man was saying.

Sign. He'd heard the expression several times over the last few days. Apparently, it was what Dirters did to confirm their identity. He hadn't paid much attention, and he realised, rather awkwardly, that he wasn't quite sure how it was done. A brief search of his cultural database came up blank; lots of instances of when signing was necessary, but no actual how-to instructions. That wasn't good, because it was bound to be one of those species-specific things that you either know or you don't. Figuring it out from first principles wouldn't be easy. 

"Um," he said. "Do I have to?"

The man looked at him. "Yes, sir."

"Can't I just--" He remembered another phrase he'd heard. "Can't I just charge it to the room?"

"Yes sir, of course."

"I'll do that, then."

"Certainly, sir. Just sign here."

On the other hand, how different could it be? Ostar or Dirter, some things are always the same, because there's no other way of doing them. Eat with your mouth. Walk with your feet. Establish your identity with a readily dispensed sample of your unique scent and DNA, just like they do it on the Homeworld.

"Where do I sign?"

The man handed him a piece of printed paper. "Right here, sir."

"Fine," he said, and unzipped his fly.  

That, friends, is the sort of craziness that is normal in a Tom Holt book. Now, in addition to having no discernible attention span, I also do not have the best memory for books and movies. I immerse myself in them, but then I can forget the whole plot, usually within a few months. Books that I love, Harry Potter, Anne McCaffrey's Pern books (sexy dragons!), the Shannara books, Jenny Lawson's memoirs, Dave Barry's comic novels, and Tom Holt's zany brainy romps: I buy them so I can re-read and re-discover them, over and over. I'm happy to say that Blonde Bombshell was as funny this weekend as it was two years ago. Now that it has a home on my bookshelf, I'm sure I'll enjoy it again in another two years.

However, that's not all. The angry unicorn said to "Report!" after all, and it's always a good idea to obey angry unicorns. It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, what with kids and work and trips from one end of the state to the other (well, okay, from Dallas to Corpus, so maybe more like from one upper middle part of the state to a lower middle part of the state, but you get the idea). So here's a bonus, a zany not-so-brainy short story I've been working on. Enjoy!

Earth Girls Actually Aren't That Easy