she wants to recover from sedation like Uma Thurman (again)

Yesterday and the day before the BB, who has chronic kidney disease, did not eat anything except the junkfood they get fed at bedtime as a treat (about 3 tsp) and did not play by turning the house into an obstacle course to be completed 10 times in a row very fast while yodeling. Obviously something was wrong with her, so today I got the joy of taking her to a new, never-before-seen vet that's closer to our new house for the first time. She had an ultrasound and some fluids and she turned out to not have an intestinal blockage, so she has been sent home still high from her sedation.

This particular sedative apparently causes the munchies, and she's been extremely funny since she arrived home, slowly but determinedly stomping around, swaying slightly, wolfing every last molecule of food from Snookums's bowl. It is our hope that she will feel better after the sedative wears off because she also got some anti-emetics, but otherwise she might have to go have some blood tests tomorrow morning.

Nero Wolfe: Plot It Yourself

• I rang Lon Cohen at the Gazette and learned that the National Association of Authors and Dramatists was it. All the dramatists anyone had ever heard of were members, and most of the authors, the chief exceptions being some scattered specimens who hadn’t decided if they cared to associate with the human race—or had decided that they didn’t.


• “Archie, if I could lie with your aplomb I would be an ambassador."


• On the stretch of blacktop a man with a bunch of wild columbine in his hand was following a herd of forty-seven cows (actual count; a detective is supposed to observe) who all had the same idea, that they would rather get hit by a Heron sedan than get milked, and it took me five minutes to get through.
  


• They held a committee meeting. What made it a meeting was that when more than three of them talked at once Harvey yelled that he couldn’t hear anybody. After a quarter of an hour the consensus seemed to be that they were in a pickle, and I was thinking that if I were chairman I would ask for a motion to that effect.


• It isn’t that he doesn’t believe in fingerprints; it’s just that they are only routine and therefore a genius can’t be expected to bother about them.


• It’s fine to have a conscience, but you can’t just let it run wild.


• "I gather that she is daft, and therefore unpredictable."


• Being found in a man’s castle which you have entered illegally can be embarrassing, but if he is there with you with a knife in his chest, even if he has started to decompose, it can be really ticklish.
  

—Plot It Yourself

This is the second Nero Wolfe mystery dealing with the publishing world. This one, though, is all about a fake plagiarism scam, and it was incredible to read simply because the scam was so unsophisticated and it was so hard to believe it would work. The culprit would write a derivative copy of a successful published work, borrowing all the main ideas, forge a date before publication, and then break in and plant it with a cover letter or whatever as required in the author's home, the publishing house, or the author's agent's place, and then write them a letter threatening to sue for plagiarism, and the authors and publishers would instantly cough up huge settlements. It was truly fascinating.

I can't help feeling there is a truly brilliant and hilarious parody of this novel set in the fanfic world out there somewhere, floating about in the universe of ideas, and I wish someone who has not had writer's block for the past 4 years would grab it.