My Question Is This...

...If Killer Asian Flying Carp are the most dreaded menace since the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918, and they're ALREADY in America's waterways RIGHT THIS MINUTE, and ALL OUR LIVES DEPEND on keeping them out of the Great Lakes, why are we not getting constant bulletins about the destruction wrought by the moustachioed marauders?

Could it be that some town selectman or banker's wife lost a filling in one of those flying fish attacks and got hot under the collar?

Could it be that someone who went fishing and got an unexpected shiner the day before Missy's wedding wants to get his or her name in the paper?

Could this all be one of those personal vendetta things that have to be solved, Naked Ape fashion, on the talk-show circuit?

I'm just asking.

Why I Love National Public Radio

It just seems to me that every time I turn on the radio, NPR is delivering another terrifying news flash about the

KILLER CARP!

Seriously, they're broadcasting ALL THE LIVELONG DAY about the Killer Carp DNA found in Lake Michigan, the push to CLOSE THE LOCKS AGAINST THE MENACE, an upcoming EMERGENCY CARP SUMMIT between the Great Lakes States (and for all I know Canada), and of course that one delicious report I've already blogged about here at Cliffie's Notes, describing the killer fish as reaching

FORTY FEET LONG!

CLICK HERE to taste the insanity!

And Just One More Thing About Holder's Book...

This is a quote from Nancy Holder's Dead In The Water, from page 373 of my copy, and I think it should serve as A MESSAGE OF HOPE FOR EVERY STRUGGLING HUMAN SEEKING A BETTER DESTINY:

" And he lay in the yacht and cursed all men and all gods...On the sixth day, he tore a piece of the canvas, bit by bit, all day; his fingers bleeding, his teeth ripped out, and he wrote in his own blood for help. He threw the bottle over the side and fell back, marvelling that he wasn't yet dead.

"And on the seventh day, the reply, the answer, in the green glass; it rose, it came to him, singing, with fish, and it spewed water into him, and it promised, it promised --

"And he promised.

"They became one."

That passage always CHOKES ME RIGHT UP.

DEAD IN THE WATER

GOOD COD, DO I LOVE THIS ONE!

I know -- I recommend this book to EVERYONE who has an audience with me, here in the secret sub-sub-sub-basement underneath the Manoogian Mansion. YOU ARE ALL SICK UNTO DEATH OF HEARING ABOUT IT. At least that's true for the more experienced recruiters.

BUT SOME OF YOU ARE BRAND NEW RECRUITS AND HAVE NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT. So here is the full, complete review of this novel, written by Nancy Holder and published by Dell Horror in 1994.

PLOT SUMMARY: A group of holiday-makers on a dreadful little cut-rate cruise find that their filthy, rat-infested vessel is sinking. They pile into a lifeboat and -- after a fairly anxious wait in the blinding fog -- are saved by an incredibly plush cruise liner, where the captain escorts each one of them into a luxurious stateroom and sees to their every need.

BUT SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG. The survivors keeping seeing something nasty out of the corners of their eyes...something hard to describe...and it has pincers. And what's with the surviving crewman who came with them into the lifeboat? Why does he keep talking to an invisible figure he calls "King Neptune"? Howcum the ship keeps kind of, you know, giving a hitch and suddenly turning into a rotten wreck hung with stinking seaweed before snapping back into focus as a stunningly-appointed modern passenger liner? And the captain seems, shall we say...troubled? haunted? weird? Are they in more danger than they realize? WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS HAUNTING, AND HAUNTED, NOVEL OF PISCATORIAL LOVE:

>> I know, I know, every book a human publishes on this subject gets classified as a horror story. I DON'T GET IT IT EITHER.

>> The relationship between FISH and DESTINY is crystal clear in this book. The closer you get to your happy ending, the more fish you see around you. Impossible to miss the message.

>>The captain of the liner proves to be in collusion with the pincered creature glimpsed all over the ship by the survivors. And wait'll you find out who SHE is. It's a fairly obvious reference to our recruiting methods, but well within tolerances because the story is also obviously fanciful, phantasmal and...fictional. (Or is it?)

>>I won't spoil the ending for you, but they try to make it horrifying. If you're taking it from the point of view of a fully human reader, it's not a pretty picture. Taken from OUR point of view, it's almost funny. Because only humans feel oogy when they think of being...DEAD IN THE WATER. Here's a tip for those antsy readers: Once you're DEAD IN THE WATER, you get to join us in Dagon's Roiling Intestine, where you will dwell in wonder and glory forever...

LIVES OF THE MONSTER DOGS

OK, OK, this book is just about Dogs -- nothing to do with US.

OR IS IT? This story is all about the first meeting between two species, one of whom revolted against its slavemongering creators, hauled stakes and started over in New York City. They're Dogs considerably modified to stand on two legs, speak German, and wage war for the hairless bipeds who created them. Except they proved to be less biddable than their creators expected -- THAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU'RE CRUEL TO THEM, YOU IDJITS. So the slaveholders went bye-bye and behold, the Monster Dogs became the new toasts of The Big Apple.

And get a load of this quote from page 89:

"The soul is very like a fish..."

OK, I agree THIS IS NOTHING LIKE OUR OWN TECHNIQUE. We are FAR more subtle and are living among them secretly while actively making the hairless bipeds into Fish -- far kinder than they deserve, I think sometimes. But this story, perhaps inevitably, skids into the territory of INTERSPECIES ROMANCE, and that is a subject of great concern to us all.

It's also a really good, absorbing read. It has some thought-provoking things to say about being human, non-human, and -- as many uf us, me for instance, are experiencing now -- SOMETHING IN BETWEEN THE TWO.

I recommend it. This is not an order, but I really recommend it.