Fun With Keywords: Eternal Pixie Edition

I suppose I should provide a belated ABNA (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award) update: After two trips to the semifinals in previous years (Charlotte Dent in 2008, Bias Cut in 2012), I crashed and burned out of the quarterfinals this year with Lonely Satellite, thanks to an unrelentingly, mortifyingly, hilariously scathing Publishers Weekly review. The reviewer made it very clear he/she despised my protagonist, Laurie Sparks, which… I mean, obviously I have a knee-jerk distrust of anyone who dislikes Laurie, because Laurie is a delightful young nitwit, but it’s a valid opinion. Fair enough. Not my year to win ABNA. Best wishes and congratulations to the twenty-five extremely talented semi-finalists, five of whom will be receiving publishing contracts.

Ergh. Moving on. I’m in the middle of writing a new book, which pretty much owns my soul right now. I find nothing more insufferable than authors talking about their creative processes, so I’ll spare the details; suffice it to say I am eating/breathing/sleeping this book right now, and it’s turning me into a grouchy, monosyllabic slab of protoplasm during my non-writing hours. Thus, inevitably, site updates have fallen behind. I’ll continue to aim for weekly posts, but I will almost certainly come up short. In the meantime, I’m going to do another of my semi-regular examinations of some of the Google phrases people have used to locate this website over the past few months:

nick rhodes pixie
nick rhodes eternal pixie
Oh, yeah, you’re totally in the right place. Here’s a partial list of things to which I have compared Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes on this site: an eternal pixie, a magical pixie, a “moody little thing”, a supervillain in a Bond movie, a Muppet, a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, a long-running performance art exhibit, a goblin king, a corpse bride, a malevolent gremlin, a baby ocelot, a glamorous show pony, and a pampered housecat. Nick is, as always, my guiding star and my role model in life.

picture of nick rhoades hair style in a view to a kill
It’s a good one. His magnificent “View To a Kill” coiffure is probably in my top three all-time favorite Nick Rhodes hairstyles.


1980 mtv vjs
Let me point you in the direction of VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave, which is a pretty good oral history of the early years of MTV, featuring comprehensive input from original VJs Martha Quinn, Nina Blackwood, Alan Hunter, and Mark Goodman. Also, follow Martha Quinn on Twitter. She’s delightful.

teen wolf jackson best scene
I can’t possibly pick just one. The splendidly despicable and unfathomably messed-up Jackson was Teen Wolf’s most magnificent creation. I could—and, indeed, someday probably will—write thousands of words on the subject of Jackson’s finest moments, but for now, I’ll just quickly touch on a few of his dizzying high points:
1. “I’m everyone’s type!” Jackson hisses at Danny in “Abomination”, unable to believe his best friend has zero interest in watching a video of Jackson writhing around in bed in his underwear.
2. Drunken, angry lacrosse drills! He does this first in “The Tell” and again in “Ice Pick”, whipping himself up into a snarling, sobbing, scenery-chewing solo frenzy.
3. Jackson’s gloriously cold, bitchy, epic speech to Scott in “Co-Captains” about how Scott is a miserable excuse for a werewolf: “It’s like you’ve turned sixteen and someone started you out with a Porsche when they should have bought you a nice little Honda. Me? I drive a Porsche.”
4. His barely-clothed no-holds-barred locker room brawl with Scott in “Restraint”: “I have a restraining order!” he snarls, as he smashes a sink into bits by throwing Scott at it. 
5. “Co-Captains” again: I love that whole end sequence, in which Jackson accompanies Derek at night to the scary burned-out ruin of Derek’s house in the desperate hope that Derek will make him a werewolf, even though he knows it’s far more likely that Derek just wants to kill him. And, sure enough, Derek just wants to kill him. Even though Jackson is a vicious, nightmarish prick, it’s a weirdly poignant moment when he collapses in frustrated, terrified sobs while Derek makes mean comments about his perfect hair.


anime about a lonely guy with a cruel life
anime about an only child with a lonely life
sad emo lonely boy anime pics
Y’all have vastly different tastes in anime than I do. I have a limited tolerance for sad emo lonely boys, which is why Trowa will never be my favorite Gundam Wing pilot. Can’t help you out here.

how old is isaac lahey
Like all the rest of our favorite teen wolves, I imagine he’s somewhere in the 16-18 range. The actor who plays him, the exquisite Daniel Sharman, is 28. Bless Teen Wolf for having most of its teen characters be played by extremely fit twentysomethings. It makes me feel far less creepy while watching all those shirtless locker room scenes.

colton haynes underwear
Speaking of those extremely fit twentysomethings on Teen Wolf… A quick Google Image search for “Colton Haynes underwear” brings up a whole slew of fascinating pictures. The kid's never been shy in front of a camera, bless him.

preppies of the apocalypse veronica mars
I have never recapped Veronica Mars here, which is a shame—that first season is some mighty good television.


frank stallone in criminal minds
Hmm. No, I don’t think Frank ever put in a Criminal Minds appearance. It’s possible you’re getting your near-doppelganger celebrity siblings mixed up and are instead thinking of Don Swayze, who appeared in the second-season two-parter “Revelations” and “The Big Game.”

jackson and allison kiss in the locker room
Nope. Allison and Jackson only kissed twice on Teen Wolf, and both instances (in the front seat of Jackson’s car in Season One’s “Lunatic” and at Lydia’s party in Season Two’s “Party Guessed”) were only the hallucinated products of Scott’s jealous little werewolf brain. Jackson did get scary and aggressive (and, ah, buck naked) with Allison in the locker room in the second-season episode “Restraint”, back when he was being controlled by creepy stalker Matt, but there was no kissing involved. Just a lot of nasty hissed insults, mostly.


manu bennett sex
Sure!

new stylies image only for lonely boy in summer season
…sure?

emily bett rickards in tight short dress
Arrow’s Felicity has worn a few (wildly out-of-character!) tight short dresses over the most recent season of the show, but you’re probably thinking of her tomato red one, the one with the prominent boob window, right? Rickards is a knockout, but she looked glum and tense in all her scenes in that outfit—less “sexy, brainy, confident MIT graduate rocking a great dress”, more “actress feeling out of her element on a chilly set due to a bad wardrobe choice.”


oliver say felicity you always be my girl
Ugh. Yes. In the terrible Season Two Arrow episode “Time of Death”, Felicity gets all pointlessly teary and mopey because she’s worried Sara is replacing her on Oliver’s team (even though she and Sara have completely different and equally necessary skills sets), so Oliver strokes her cheek and tells her she’ll always be his girl, even though: a) she is not his girl, and b) she can do much, much better than Oliver, who spent too much of last season being a dick to her. At least sixty percent of the time, I sort of despise Arrow, due in large part to its thoroughly effed-up gender dynamics.

miami vice little miss dangerous
Excellent episode. Watch the end sequence here. I love how Miami Vice episodes almost always end on an abrupt freeze-frame post-climax, with no denouement or tag. It’s jarring, but it works.

pw reviewers for abna
I imagine there’ve been some tweaks in the process since this blistering and spiteful June 2009 n+1 article about ABNA was published, as pretty much all aspects of the competition have significantly changed since ABNA’s debut in 2008, but this an interesting, if thoroughly ego-deflating, read. Here’s what the writer had to say about those pesky PW reviews I mentioned at the top of this post: “Now seems the right time for full disclosure: I am a member of the National Book Critics Circle. I penned several of the much contested Publishers Weekly reviews, for a $40 per manuscript honorarium. Am I a “professional” reviewer? I am a poet and a human being—and I review books, too. But for the purposes of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (the discussion boards insisted) I was the bloodless professional, the executioner. Over a period of six weeks, some twenty manuscripts arrived at my apartment. The deliveries thumped at the doorstep like children on Halloween, wanting treats. I dispatched them with 250-word critiques—tricks.”

shemar moore no eyebrows
Gorgeous Shemar Moore typically sports a pair of thick, aggressively-sculpted, Muppet-ish eyebrows. They wouldn’t work on everybody, but they’re perfect on him. This is a good thing, as he’d look very strange without them.

Everyone looks better with eyebrows.
the hardy boys nancy drew hollywood phantom cast
The Hollywood Phantom” is a brilliant two-part episode, with guest stars ranging from Jaclyn Smith to Robert Wagner. In tribute to the late Casey Kasem, everybody should sit down and watch it, if only for Kasem’s hilariously weird turn as a Peter Falk impersonator.

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