La Costa Novelist Finds Time for a Pig, French Horn, Hats, TV Game Shows

Of pigs and prose.

What are we to say of an actress and stand-up comic turned novelist who lives in La Costa, can play the theme song from “The Munsters” on her French horn (“My mother thinks it’s Chopin.”), and keeps a pet pig named Sporky?

Among other things: That she also has a blue belt in jujitsu and lots of hats, has been on seven television game shows (including “Love Connection” twice) and says of human discourse:

“Why have a conversation if it doesn’t touch any emotion or reveal anything sordid?”

And yes that her name is Jennifer Ball and she’s 33 and her first-novel “Higher Math” is a funny-naughty-semi-autobiographical-picaresque tale of the life and loves of one Marissa (Moose) Minnion.

“I tell the truth until it gets boring,” Ball said. “Then I just make it up.”

Here’s the bit, what they call the donnee in Eng Lit graduate school:

Moose Minnion is in a coma after an allergic reaction to Brazil nuts and has left behind a manuscript of disjointed scenes and adventures and home-brewed aphorisms, and quotes that only she remembers: like Ibsen’s famous, “There has to be more to life than L.A.”

Feminist heroine aside, don’t expect a tract. “I write out of emotion,” Ball said, “not ideology.”

Ball is already 200 pages into her second novel, about graduate students in chemistry falsifying data. She’s also two years into analysis: “I think therapy has definitely made me a better writer.”

She’s part of a rock band called the Free-Range Chickens and does readings from “Higher Math,” accompanied by French horn selections. The next is at 8 p.m., Jan. 14 at the DG Wills Book Annex in La Jolla.

She sees material for novels everywhere, like when she went to the Sushi gallery in San Diego and saw a man dressed in woman’s underwear using a flour sifter to outline a map of the United States and Mexico.

She transferred that scene to New York, because she thought it would be more believable there.

She also took Sporky to her husband’s office party (he’s a research chemist), but that’s another story.

Life in the Big City

It takes all kinds.

* Modern life.

The environmental impact report for redevelopment plans for City Heights takes care to list all the things that contribute to neighborhood noise levels.

And so, listed (on page 56) are police helicopters and gunfire.

* Insight, the magazine of the Washington Times, puts San Diego County in its “Hall of Shame” for spending $5 million a year on medical care for prisoners.

Prisoners sometimes delay their trials so they can soak up the medical care, the magazine says. It cites a case where an accused wife-beater got $100,000 in care.

County officials say state law leaves them no choice but to provide all care necessary for prisoners (at a minimum $1,400 a day for a hospital stay).

“I know of cases where we’ve provided double heart-bypasses at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Jim Decker.

* San Diego bumper sticker: “My Child Would Be The Best at Whatever School She Attended.”

* One way Scripps Clinic & Research Foundation kept Mother Teresa’s presence a secret for four days: Her name was never entered in the main computer, where many eyes have access.

Honesty in Politics?

Ron Thurlow, 48, a county mental health counselor in Oceanside, has decided not to run for Congress.

A pity that.

His chances of victory would have been slim, but a Thurlow candidacy might at least have injected a new element in local campaigning: straight talk.

Thurlow had already devised a self-directed hit piece: a campaign brochure telling voters about his “checkered past,” including his divorces and money problems.

He figured his opponents would dig the stuff up anyway, so why not get in the first strike, albeit at himself. “Innoculation” against mud throwing opponents, he called it.

But candor alone does not a candidacy make. Thurlow decided he lacked the money or name recognition to run.