I have NOTHING to post today. I spent yesterday watching Harry Potter 6, packing, and hauling acres of crap back home, and unpacking it when I got there. I have 190 photos to Photoshop from the weekend that I planned on posting here, but guess what, I'm nowhere NEAR done with that.

But hey, I started writing a bitchrant about a crappy book during vacation! So you get to read that today! Huzzah!

Mom is making me listen to some book in the car called "The Christmas Train." Let me tell you, I suspect it is a cross between a Dan Brown book (hint: the hero's last name is Langdon) and some of the worst chick lit that didn't involve heavy use of shoes EVER. DEAR GOD IT'S BAD. I'm not even talking about the godawful prose descriptions, even though they are amazingly awful. (Never before have I heard such delicate, elaborate, hedging descriptions of "they waved the security wand over his crotch a lot.")

Our Hero, Tom Langdon, one of those overseas investigative reporters who ran around war zones and the like, is taking the train from D.C. to L.A. to meet up with his casual actress girlfriend. To some degree he's trying to be all Mark Twain and noble and To Write A Story about it, but really it's because he threw a massive shit fit about being nabbed by security in the airport and got his ass banned from flights for 2 years.

Which, you do realize, has just SCREWED HIS CAREER FOR LIFE, except it doesn't matter because Tom is 41 and still sulking that he hasn't had a wife and children yet (BAD CHICK LIT!). And some fortuneteller guy told him once that he would and Tom wants his money back. Of course, we all know that despite girlfriend (and the "ideal" arrangement of not having to shack up with her 24-7), Tom will be happily engaged/married/impregnated with someone else by the time he arrives in L.A. and he'll never be a journalist again, so what does it matter that he just fucked his career? He'll probably move to the wife's small hometown in Nowheresville and run a pizza parlor for the rest of his life.

So anyway, Tom gets shoved around on the train, gets pushed down the stairs by an old lady (really!), finds the booze, finds some young engaged couple, pisses off a rich lawyer who actually says, "Don't you know who I am?" (Nobody cares.), blah blah.

Oh yeah, and did you know that famous movie people take the train all the time? NO REALLY, THEY DO! (Hi, I've been on Amtrak many times. I'm more likely to see people who are missing teeth.) And some Just Happen to be on This Train, Right Now! Specifically a movie director named Max Powers (way to make that name obvious!), and his favorite pet script doctor, who Just Happens To Be The One Who Got Away, or at least the woman Tom chickened out on proposing to.

Happily, I haven't had to hear the rest of this book yet, which is great because it makes me carsick with the badness.

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