• A 2 fluid ounce bottle of Plaid acrylic paint, Raspberry color. Back when I first started beading in 2009 or whatever it was, one of the first thoughts I had was to make a peppermint bracelet with red and white seed beads wrapped around each other but joined by peppermint disks. I bought white disk beads and a peppermint color paint (Raspberry, actually), but I never painted those disks. I keep meaning to take this bottle up to the garage and put it in with the other acrylic paints, but it falls behind another pile or something and remains on my desk.
   
• A gallon-sized bag filled with spoons. These spoons were once my mother’s spoon collection. I’m not sure when they last graced her walls, but I inherited them when she passed away almost three years ago already. For a while, I’ve been moving around the display rack in which these spoons hung on the wall in our apartment in the projects, and I recently uncovered the spoons when I was cleaning my garage. So, of course, I can’t lay my hands on the display rack right now. When I find it, I’ll polish the spoons and hang them on my dining room wall.
   
• A Monroe Monro-matic CAA-10 calculator from 1954. I bought this at a garage sale or estate sale some nine or ten years ago, and I’ve had it in my storeroom for some time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit in the narrow cabinets I have in there, so when I last reorganized my storeroom last autumn, I brought it into my office and it’s sat upon my desk or under my desk for a couple months while I try to decide what to do with it. Maybe I’ll learn how to use it. More likely, I’ll shuffle it around my office until I return it to the storeroom or the garage.
   
• A re-elect Mickey Owen memo pad.
   
  
   
  I don’t know who Mickey Owen was, nor how old this memo pad is, but I paid a dime for it at a church garage sale here in Springfield. I haven’t yet written any memos in it, and I’m not sure if I will. It will ruin the collectible value.
   
• One Hohner Golden Note harmonica in C. I got a toy harmonica as a high school graduation present from Tim and Pixie. When I got to Milwaukee, I bought a Hohner C harmonica and tried to teach myself to play. I learned a couple short songs, but never became really adept at it. After graduating from college and after having not really practiced in a couple years, I bought two new Hohner Cs at Nottlemann Music and haven’t really practiced with them much at all. But this one is on my desk, reminding me of my failings.

By naming these things on the blog, I do tend to handle them in short order, which is why I’m bothering you with them.

Police say a man wearing a bandana and dirty white gloves robbed a bank in south St. Louis County this afternoon.

Why, oh why, in the 21st century are we remarking upon the gender of this alleged assailant? Just because males make up the vast majority of bank robbers in this country, why should gender be mentioned in the description other than to perpetuate the stereotype that only men rob banks?

(Satire aside, FBI statistics from 2010 show that blacks and whites commit very similar numbers of bank crimes. But what would a descriptor like race do in aiding the police in looking for a bank robber?).

I’m tired of walking across the lot to beep my ID and walk in the building and see the sign that asks me to stomp my feet to remove the snow. It comes out every year, along with a brush for scraping your boots. It has the company logo. It’s got to be more than half a century old.

I AM TIRED OF THE SHOE THING

Well, maybe in the big city, they only bring the bootscrapes out in the winter, but one of the first things I noticed when I moved to the Springfield area is that you’ll find bootscrapes outside many local businesses and whatnot.

Like outside the Republic branch of the Springfield-Greene County Library:

You’ll have to squint to see it in that picture.

Note that that esoteric branch of the library opened in 2009.

We have bootscrapes out here because we have ranchers out here. Not city slickers with their exotic footcoverings for the snow.

You know what? This is a pretty good book for such as it is.

I’ve read books based on hourlong dramas before (Adam-12 here and here, Murder, She Wrote here), but this might be the first book I’ve read based on a half hour sitcom. And it was pretty witty and true to the characters. While I didn’t laugh out loud at any of it, I was amused enough to want to watch some of the old programs and maybe come up with other books in the series.

As with any 70s paperback, the order forms in the back are always a treat. The books available in paperback immediately preceding this book include several in the Get Smart book series and other pulp. I’ve never, to my recollection, seen a book where the order forms are clipped, indicating someone has actually used them to order books. I wonder if the sort of people who did that were the sort of people to throw books out when they were done, or whether there never really was that sort of people.

UPDATE: How soon they forget. While cataloging this book, I learned I’d already read something by this author. That would be a Happy Days book, Ready to Go Steady, which I read in 2009. This book is far better than that Happy Days book.

Books mentioned in this review:

Click for full size

Let’s pull them out:

Being this is the Internet, I could spot the imagined slight and somehow think this reflects some myopia in the liberal in charge of putting this together, but, really, it’s probably that the person or group behind this figured that the Bushes were recent enough history that they didn’t have to differentiate between them. If they thought of it at all.

Of course, the audience of the History Channel, particularly the History Channel club, is expected to be older than 19 years old (that is, old enough to have been born before Clinton became president) or however much older than that one needs to be to remember who was president. For me, that would have been six or seven or nine.

Yeah! Let’s beat child abuse like a red-haired stepchild!

And you know what? The film is better than the book.

The latter 2/3 of Parker’s books were heavily influenced by his years in Hollywood in the 1980s, so they translate very well to the screen. But Parker didn’t write the screenplay–Ed Harris, who plays Cole, did along with a co-writer. As such, he takes the ideal Parkerian hero, the fast draw dead shot who loves a fallen woman character and diminishes him compared to Hitch, the sidekick and narrator. Harris emphasizes that Cole is not book-learned like Hitch when he (Cole) struggles with words. The screenplay also contrasts Cole with Bragg, the bad guy, as being undereducated. He’s not so much an ideal man as a fast man who is simple.

Maybe that’s the way that Parker intended it. Maybe too much interior thinking on Hitch’s park shaped the narrative wrong for it to carry off. Maybe I too much read Parker’s biography into all of his books. But it’s a good enough Western film, and I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the recent Hitch and Cole books.

DVDs mentioned in this review:

Go check it out if you’re so inclined.

After a little under a year in our rental, we moved to Casinoport, which had no garage. But that didn’t stop me from acquiring the occasional piece or holding onto the ones I already had. So I acquired this bookshelf at a garage sale of of Pheasant Run. I remember distinctly the woman saying she would love to see what I did with it.

The bookshelf was nothing special. A three shelf unit, finished in a light blonde color, with the interior back painted a light peach and with some almost housing-project-leftover-paint beige on the left wall of it. No problem. I’d sand that paint off, finish it a little darker, and BAM! Bookshelves.

Well, we lived in Casinoport for seven years; this bookshelf sat in the small utility room in the lower level for most of that time, acting as a bookshelf. Then we moved to Old Trees, which also had no garage and a small utility room, where this bookshelf got pressed into service as is in the semidarkness.

We lived in Old Trees for three years, and when we moved to the Springfield area, we had a garage and plenty of shelving, so the bookshelf got to sit at the far side of the garage for our first two years here.

But one Sunday morning this autumn, I had a couple spare moments and nothing was stacked in front of the shelves, so I put on some gloves, slapped on some stripper, and when I started scraping to remove the beige paint, I learned it was wood filler. Finely crafted wood filler, but woodfiller nevertheless.

So the bookshelf went back into the corner of the garage until the Great DeRooneyfication of 2012.

Given the solid color of the woodfiller, I could not stain the wood (the solid color would show, as I am sure you know). Instead, I was going to paint it, and that’s an easier proposition indeed. So over the course of a week, amid other small projects, I sanded the remainder of the finish off, put in some woodfiller of my own to fix where the shelf had been dinged in the move and cloven by a zealous stripper, and applied a couple coats of black paint. And, voilà!

As you can see, I’ve already started loading it with not books, but records, since the shelf now sits in the parlor with our turntable. Given how long the records have been in boxes, perhaps I should count this as a DeRooneyfication twofer.

Total time to complete: probably four hours or less spread over a week of days. Total time it sat incomplete: a decade, easily: I am pretty sure I bought the bookshelf in my early garage sale days, before I was selling the pickings on Ebay and before I spent my Saturday mornings scouring the region for bargains with my friend Pixie. So it’s probably my oldest project yet.

But it’s not the last.

While they’re defending a saloon, Cole kills the son of a local rancher (who has taken up residence in the homestead of the last Appaloosa bad guy Cole dispatched), who then hires a killer to dispatch Cole. When a raiding native threatens the town, Cole brings it to the attention of the marshal, who walks right into the native’s trap as Cole and Hitch join forces with the rancher and the killer to save the town from the natives.

It’s a quick read–quicker than The Virginian or Wild Horse Mesa– but it’s a modern book, and it probably sacrifices some depth for pageturning. Which is opposite of what I usually complain about, I know.

Books mentioned in this review: