Free at last, free at last, oh lord I'm free at last!

With the completion of Carolyn See's Making History, I have hit the 50 mark with The List, which is now officially retired. I don't have much to say about the book--it's about Southern California yuppies and the women who pulled themselves out of lower middle class life by marrying them (and who may actually love them), and their kids, step-kids, and the people who raise them. Oh, and lots and lots of car accidents. I will say this: if you're narrating part of a book from beyond the grave, your retarded son had better think you're a fish. If you ain't Addie Bundren, I ain't interested. But it's over! Yay!

Two quick classic country music stories:
1. Tim and I share a love of story songs, and I played a new one for him while he was visiting. I had been intrigued by the 5-second clip of "Saginaw, Michigan" on the Time-Life Classic Country Story Songs commercial, so when I saw a Lefty Frizzell's greatest hits collection at the library, I had to check it out. (Literally.) I enjoyed it, so when I saw it again, I got it out to play Tim. Collectively, we enjoyed it way too much and are probably the two biggest 20-something Lefty Frizzell fans in America right now. Or at least, certainly, among those living within 25 miles of a non-gulf coast.
2. I was playing a compilation at work the other day when Tammy Wynette's D-I-V-O-R-C-E came on. For those of you who don't know, the concept is that this splitting-up couple always spell out words that they don't want their precocious 4-year-old to understand. There's a part where she gives some examples, and as I was listening I got really confused; after listening 5 times, the closest I could come to figuring out the examples were "D-O-I" and "S-U-R-A-R-I-S-A". Neither of these, as far as I could tell, is a word to hide from your toddler--or, for that matter, a word. But luckily the public library again came to my rescue: at lunchtime I checked out (again, literally) the best of Tammy Wynette, and when I popped it into the computer, this toned-down-twang version showed that Wynette and hubby actually wanted their son not to understand "T-O-Y" or "S-U-R-P-R-I-S-E". That makes a lot more sense.

Finally, I saw Wonderland last night. It turns out that if you do enough drugs, you can actually screw up a life of having sex with lots and lots and lots of hot women as a career, and being synonymous with the phrase "enormous penis". Who knew?