Len Goodman, I am ashamed of you. Cuban needs to go.

Sabrina and Mark: Sizzling paso. Even if it was to technopop. Deserving of every ten. Wow. Hey, don’t Sabrina and Mark look more than a little smitten with one another?

Jane and Tony: Didn’t Samantha say they’d never done the “Viennese waltz” before? As opposed to what must be a different kind of waltz that they do every season. It’s not hard to see why they’ve not done the Viennese before. It’s frickin hard to fit in those three steps every time and on the beat. It is not a slow dance. They seem off the beat. Hell, I’ve tried to waltz to “Piano Man” myself. Uhoh: Lift rule. Wow–who is adulterating Len’s coffee this year? Len brushing off the rule? It was a very minor infraction if at all. It was an exquisite waltz.

Floyd and Karina: Ugly paso. I knew whoever said last week that this would be his dance was wrong–the floating and bouncing that are intrinsic to boxing are anathema to the paso. Nice leap, though. No, Bruno, it is not his dance. Okay, people, let’s get this damn lift rule straight, because if it’s really about “something you can’t do on your own,” then it gets broken every week and is a dumb rule. If it’s about feet off the floor … figure it out.

Commercial: A farmer shilling for Oregon’s Measure 49. God forbid other people be allowed to build houses around your farm. Where “water’s already hard to come by.” Are they serious with this garbage? The voters already spoke with Measure 37. Good luck taking that away. (I love being able to just throw in state politics on the side–I have so many new Oregon readers thanks to Rachel Lucas! Woot!)

Mel B and Maks: Too much dancing before the music starts! Not attractive! Silly! I still cannot settle into the Viennese thing. They keep looking like they’re off the beat. Like the marching band at the football game last Friday–if you try to do halftime to 3/4 music, you’re off step every other measure. It looks ugly. Not the same problem here–the music is 3/4 and so is the dance, but they need to keep the step on the beat.

Len continues to pick on Maks, which cracks me up. Len and his heel leads. Heh.

Cameron and Edyta: Superman paso. Not a bad concept … She’s far more Princess Leia than Lois Lane. That’s a good thing. See, okay, the woman can’t drag herself, yet that could hardly qualify as a lift and it’s a standard paso move. Let’s get that rule clarified before next week. Wow, judges are happy.

Marie and Jonathan: Ouch. Doubletiming. That’s got to be even harder than the Piano Man thing, which is probably why they’re not doing too many actual waltz steps. That may hurt them with the judges … or not. Len’s infatuated. Bruno misses the character acting. I think I’m depressed at seeing Marie Osmond getting old, even though she looks good.

Jennie and Derek: Wow, she can bring the power when she needs to. Good for her. I can’t decide about the technopop: Hot or Not? It’s annoying, yet it seems to work. Again with the lift. How can you do a paso without one, is what I want to know. Ten from Len!

Helio and Julianne: They need to be building chemistry. It’s not working for me so far.

Welp, I didn’t intend to blog this so detailed-ly, but the eight for Cuban sent me into a typing frenzy. And, I watched it on the air night, for a change, and blogs are for blogging.

Cuban Must Go! On all counts, including Tom’s “think about who you want to see half-naked next week, and vote accordingly” criterium. Shudder.

This is the second recall of Thomas the Train wooden railway toys we’ve participated in this year. Our recalled items this time are “Toad” car with brake lever, the green maple tree top, and the green signal base. I’m not too fussed about it since The Bean is too old to chew toys, but might as well be safe. Plus, they send you an extra train unit for your trouble in packing stuff up and sending them back. Guess which unit they sent us as a gift for participating in the first recall, earlier this summer?

“Toad” car with brake lever. Can’t wait to see how soon the next gift is recalled.

Your opinion first, then mine. Tell me what you think of this line of prose, taken from the book All Together in One Place by Jane Kirkpatrick:

“Mazy Bacon embraced her life inside a pause that lacked premonition.”

Not much context necessary; it comes very near the beginning of the book. Mazy Bacon is the protagonist, an 1800s Midwestern farm wife, 19 years old.

Give your interpretation and your opinion of the line. I’ll update this post later after a few comments.

Update: Overwhelming majority in the comments says: Pretentious BS. Also the overwhelming majority made this judgment without going ahead and saying what they think the author is actually trying to say. And thus my point, in a nutshell: Be pretentious and you not only look pretentious but you drive people off of trying to figure out what you want to say. Anne and I were on the same wavelength–she said she’d stop reading right there. And I almost did, although since I already bought the book the fact that I might have stopped reading wouldn’t have affected the publisher’s bottom line–but it would affect the author’s exposure.

“Editors are ghouls and cannibals” was said by Harriet Vane in Dorothy Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon. I’m accustomed to taking the general drift of Harriet’s remarks as author’s voice, and if you surveyed a random sampling of authors on the question of “agree or disagree,” I’d lay money that the majority would come back “agree.” But the editor’s only job is to make the author look better. Whether it’s by correcting actual mistakes of grammar, spelling, punctuation, or usage or by adjusting wording for readability or by telling the author, “Look, this is pretentious BS, go back and fix it,” our only job is to make the author look good for publication. Of course there are officious editors who would like nothing better than to swap their own words in and the author’s out, but good editors use their BS detectors on the author’s behalf. Yet so many authors resist changes with everything they’ve got. I don’t blame them; I’ve been on the other side of the coin myself. It is an emotional battle. But if authors kept the basic tenet in mind–that our only job is to make them look better–both authors and editors would ultimately have an easier go of it.

Here’s the kicker: This is not a bad book. It’s not the Great American Novel, of course, but it’s not bad. It’s got a good basic story line, some interesting characters, and some good language … but stunners like this crop up from time to time and divert the flow of reader’s enjoyment right into an anger bucket. It’s not good. The kindest thing a good editor could have done for Ms. Kirkpatrick would be to have stopped her cold at lines like this and made her understand that if the reader has to wade through even one line of meaningless dreck to try to hazard what the author could possibly have meant by it, it takes away so much from the story that readers will even quit reading.

wg’s interpretation: That Mazy Bacon does not think about the consequences of her actions.
Anne’s interpretation: That Mazy Bacon is stupid and doesn’t see even what’s happening right in front of her.
My interpretation, with advantage of having read the back-cover blurb before beginning reading: That Mazy Bacon loves her life and doesn’t know it is about to change.

I believe mine is the correct interpretation (and, of course, I know the other two are incorrect because of what I already know about Mazy Bacon), but it took me a few tries even though I knew what was going on in the story, and the other two folks who hazarded guesses came up with two different ones. If a line is open to so many different interpretations, it doesn’t convey many facts about your protagonist, now does it?

I don’t know whether the problem here was an editor who embraces the pretentiousness a little too much, a dim or timid editor, or a mulish author who resisted whatever the editor might have tried to tell her about this kind of language, but the result was a book that is a lot worse than it needed to be. Sad.