The Racket Moves Into Springfield

Ah, gentle reader. If you’ve been here a while, you know I spit frown upon the convention center arms race racket, where “consultants” come up with projections about how, if only municipalities spent millions of dollars now (and every few years from now), a Periclean golden age would befall their cities. Or, at least, consultants would be paid and municipal managers/elected officials could fail upwards.

Seriously. search the blog and see how I feel.

Welp, it’s that time again New Springfield convention and event center could be ‘community icon’ after study released

Which includes this made up number:

The President and CEO of Visit Springfield shared the findings of the Hunden report with members of the council. It showed Springfield is losing out on more than $125,114 a day by not having an event center with at least 125,000 square feet of space.

Another made-up number:

The study said that over 30 years, it is projected to generate $1.3 billion and a tax revenue of $68.7 million.

Because those of us not in the industry who are over ten years old know that should this thing be built for $175 million dollars, it will require updates and expansion every decade or so “to keep it competitive.”

I’m not sure whether the city ever coughed up the $40 million dollars that the consultants wanted for the existing expo center twelve years ago.

But I do know that $175 million is a hell of a lot to spend for a cavernous empty building that will be underused.

I mean, I have been to some conventions and conferences recently, and the buildings are very pretty, but the conferences and conventions I’ve gone to do not fill them up. Maybe if those cities spent $200 million. As their consultants will surely recommend.

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Book Report: Tales from the Green Bay Packers Sideline by Chuck Carlson (2011) / Green Bay Packers Stadium Stories by Gary D’Amato (2004)

Book coverI bought these books at the end of June, and I guess I could not wait to delve into them. It helps that I have an omnibus edition of the C.S. Lewis Space trilogy and, although I have finished Out of the Silent Planet, I’m less than enthusiastic about the second. So I picked up these two books to tide me over until my enthusiasm returns. Or to tide me over until I pick up another book in the middle of the Space Trilogy.

This book is more of an oral history-style book, with short, couple-paragraph anecdotes chained together. Because it relies on this oral history feel and interviews with then-contemporary Packers employees and players, it nods a bit to the Packers early years but then gets a little more detailed in the 1980s and 1990s.

It does have Aaron Rodgers on the front cover, fresh from the Super Bowl victory (the cover says so), but the actual stories don’t advance much beyond the “Will Favre retire this year?” speculation that really held us fans hostage in the latter part of the George W. Bush administration and the beginning of the McCain (who thought that candidacy was a good idea?) Obama administration.


Book coverThe second of the two books, the first to be published, is more interesting, actually. Because instead of a stream of out-of-timeline-order memories, we have a number of essays that go into some detail. The first two are about the fans and about the stadium (expanded in that year with the help of a sales tax, and both books are in favor of it). Then we get essays about Fuzzy Thurston, the longtime Packers photographer (Vernon Biever, not Fuzzy Thurston), a couple of early role players who got together and talked about their time with the Packers and being fans, a kicker who went off the rails but turned his life around, a redemption for Tony Mandarich, and then an essay about LeRoy Butler, the longtime safety who did the first Lambeau Leap (and who still does Packers commentary).


Both were pretty quick reads, engaging, and kind of made me excited for the season that’s starting. But we’ll see if sports betting impacts the league as much as I fear it will.

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See Also

My gosh, it has been ten years since the last time I had a poem published (“Canny” in There Will Be War Volume X circa 2015).

I would say I’ve resumed writing them in earnest, but apparently in earnest means a couple a year in the last five six years (apparently, I completed a long-delayed poem in 2019).

I’ve completed, what, a dozen since then? Not a prodigious output, but for the most part I’m happy with the quality of the content. I’ve had them in rotation submitting them to various places since then, now with the ability to submit four or five poems to several places simultaneously. Which is good: The turnaround time (time to rejection) sometimes runs to eight months, which means any poem I write, I can submit to a new market maybe three times every two years. You know, when I was one-and-twenty, I was writing a bunch and submitting a bunch, but now that I’m writing slower, it’s getting a bit daunting that I might run out of time before amassing a great number of credits.

At any rate, I’m posting this because two of my poems appeared on Green Hills Literary Lantern XXXVI. I say on instead of in because the Truman State (formerly Northeast Missouri State or simply “Kirksville” until, what, 1996? That long ago?) literary journal has been online-only since 2005. But it’s a university publication, with real professors liking my poetry and everything.

At this pace, I’ll have enough for another chapbook in another decade or so. I can’t wait.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been writing a little faster here lately. A little success has gone to my head, to my heart, and to my hand.

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Book Report: 199 Things To Do With A Politician by David Schafer, Andre Perl, and Mike Jackson (1993)

Book coverWow, the past was a different country. Especially this genre of humor.

As I said when I bought this book last month, this book is akin to 101 Uses For A Dead Cat. I mean, a direct inspiration. Both are single panel comics with a simple caption of what the use is. In this book, the captions are in alphabetical order from “10 Pin Bowling” (politicians’ heads as the pins) to “Wood chips” (politicians run through a wood chipper). The final panel is a gag that says there are really only 166 cartoons, but what do you expect except lies when dealing with politicians.

Definitely reminiscient of the underground comics photocopied and photocopied and passed around to tack or tape to workplace walls. I’m pretty sure I still have a collection of the things my mother retained from the era. This book, from 1993, was about the end of it. Soon after, Dilbert and the Internet made passing around memes a whole lot simpler. I’m not saying our modern humor or memes are funnier than what you find in these books, but it’s hard to do worse.

You know what it made me long for, though? When I was in elementary school, the funniest thing going was A Comic Book of Sports by Arnold Roth. When someone got this from the book order, we’d all crowd around it. Eventually, I got my own copy which is sadly lost in the intervening decades–and probably shortly after I thought it was the height of humor. Ah, well. Better than this book, surely.

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Book Report: Dressed Inside Out by Elizabeth Price (2006)

Book coverI got this book this May, and I guess it was atop the stack of poetry books to leaven my evening reading. Actually, it would be far too organized of me to group my unread poetry books together–they get jammed into the bookshelves or in an ever-growing stack atop the bookshelves, where they fit. But I found this book and picked it up. It had a bookmark already in it, but I think that’s because the book sale staffers jammed one in it. I don’t think I picked it up this summer and then reshelved it.

At any rate, this book is a collection of modern poetry written by a (recent?) divorcée with bipolar disorder. Some of the poems address that head-on, and others deal with the aftermath of failed relationships or the highs of new relationships (sometimes through the filter of the bipolar disorder). A couple others touch on then-contemporary political themes and support for the troops overseas.

Attention to rhythm and some bright moments, but overall only meh. Better than typical grandmother poetry, although she would have only been in her fifties when this book came out. But she was writing poetry, so good on ‘er. Not a professional nor an English major–she was a nurse by trade then a mother.

She passed away in 2024 at 71. She would have been of my mother’s generation, roughly, but clearly lived longer.

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Book Report: Dialogues with Nature: Works by Charles Salis Kaelin (1990)

Book coverI got this book in 2019 when I was still buying art monographs to watch during football games. Since then, we’ve given up DirecTV which we mostly used on Sunday afternoons through the winter, and the Sunday Ticket package has gone to YouTubeTV, and I’m loath to buy that package. But I’ve still bought art books from time-to-time since.

It took me a while to pick this book up because it’s kind of an art book, but it’s put out by a gallery doing a show of the artist. It includes a price list of works in the front, and they’re not bad, I guess; a couple thousand dollars per, but it’s for an artist whose work was shown in New York. So.

At any rate, it took me a while and a couple of attempts to get into the book because it is mostly a text book, not an art book. It has two essays in it about the significance of the artist and his role in the American Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements. Originally from Ohio, he ended up in a couple of towns / artists colonies in Massachussetts and knew a number of other regional artists.

Most of the book is given over to the text, with some black-and-white small reproductions of his work alongside the text (and a portrait of the artist done by another artist), and after the essay we get 14 color reproductions of his work which are not too greatly reduced–the fellow worked in pastels and in oils on fairly small canvases, and…. Well, Impressionist scenes of Ohio winters and seascapes with boats, docks, and shacks. The Impressionism and probably work with pastels leads to long, broad strokes piled upon one another to make the scenes, which tends to make the look very primitive and indistinct.

Too much so for my taste. But looking at the works, one can see how the primitivism of various early 20th century artists like Frido Kahlo or the country craft styles of Grandma Moses became the new hotness, and from then onto the real madness.

So I won’t be spending the $6,000 for Rocky Coast. Well, that’s what it went for thirty-five years ago. I’m almost afraid to see what it would go for today.

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Movie Report: Who Am I? (1998)

Book coverAs my evening contract’s project is moving into abeyance, I had time for a double feature one night last week. So after watching Thin Ice, I popped in this recently acquired Jackie Chan film. I’d tell you what a great Jackie Chan fan I am, but I guess I’ve only watched a handful of his films since I started writing down my thoughts on them. I watched Shanghai Noon last November; Legend of the Drunken Master in January 2023; Jackie Chan’s First Strike! in November 2022; Shanghai Nights in March 2023 (I know, I saw this series backwards, but I also acquired them out-of-order); Kung Fu Yoga in May 2021; and Rush Hour in January 2021. However, I did watch several of them this century (Supercop? Operation Condor? Rumble in the Bronx for sure), and I did actually see several of them circa 1996 when one of the members of our D&D group screened a couple on VHS. So I’ve known who he was even before or as he was breaking big in the American market. Martial art movie hipster, moi? Maybe.

At any rate: In this film, Jackie Chan plays some sort of commando (named Jackie, which is why I like writing movie reports for his films–the actor and the character names are the same, so I don’t worry about where to cut over in the movie report) on a mission to kidnap/rescue some scientists. After the rescue succeeds, his cross-national (mercenary?) team is double-crossed, and only Jackie survives, although with amnesia. Some natives find him and help him recuperate, although they think his name is WhoAmI. When he is better, he visits the helicopter wreckage containing the bodies of his team members (people dressed like you, the natives told him). He spots a rally race in the distance and departs his native friends. He finds and helps a brother-and-sister driving team and leads them to victory in the race, amazing everyone–he is dressed in native garb, and the herbs he used to help with a snack bite have numbed his mouth so he cannot talk to humorous effect.

The race ends in J-berg, Seffrica, and he is spotted by a reporter who wants to interview him in depth. And by shady psuedo-military operatives and a CIA leader. They’re on his tail, and he works to recover his memory and to find out what the operatives want with the scientists and the material they are studying–a part of a meteorite with great destructive power. Action takes place in South Africa and then shifts to Rotterdam as presumably both locations kicked in funding for the privilege.

Wikipedia tells me this is the second film that Chan scripted and shot in English, and to be honest, early in it, I was wondering if it was dubbed–I guess the audio syncing is just off a bit, or I’m just a knob. The film has a lot of Jackie Chan humor in it, but it is only about halfway through that we get the trademark Chan comic fighting stunts.

Still, amusing. Probably in the middle of his work both temporally and quality wise.

Being the Internet was in its infancy at this time, we do not have any Christine vs. Yuki arguments in the Wayback machine, but we could.

Michelle Ferre played Christine, the reporter who turns out to be a good ally. Mirai Yamamoto played Yuki, the rally driver who accompanies Jackie in Africa.

Hard to say, but I favor Christine slightly.

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Spot The Twilight Zone Episode

Well, it’s not hard to spot because William F. Vallicella names it in his title Philosophy from the Twilight Zone “The Lonely”.

I have seen it relatively recently because I started running through the first season on DVD a couple years ago, but petered out after a while as is my general wont with television series on DVD. As “The Lonely” was the seventh episode, I made it at least that far. Jack Warden plays the incarcerated man, by the way.

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Movie Report: Thin Ice (2009)

Book coverSince I just bought a Jesse Stone book (Colorblind), I popped in this film which I bought on DVD in May. It doesn’t look like it’s based on a novel nor has been made into a novel. So there’s parts of the Spenserverse that are not in print. Well, aside from Spenser: For Hire and A Man Called Hawk. But I really have moved on from Parkerania collecting since Stranger in Paradise, a Parker Jesse Stone book, inverted the whole idea of a moral code amongst the characters.

However, I guess I still dabble based on what Parker once meant to me.

But I digress: In this film, Stone (played by Tom Selleck) is on thin ice with the town council because he’s acting as a lawman and not just a source of revenue writing tickets for the town’s coffers. And because his busts are sometimes violent (see also the preceding television movies). The film starts with Stone and Healy on not-a-stakeout in Boston where Healy is being coy about what they’re doing. An unknown gunman shoots them in their car, leaving Healy near death but only grazing Stone. So Stone makes it a priority to discover why Healy was watching that address. Healy eventually claims that it was to watch a nephew who was having a tryst with his saxophone teacher, but Stone eventually uncovers a pimp running a string of underage prostitutes. In Boston, which is not Paradise, which does not please the town council.

The second strand is a woman who comes to Paradise because she received a letter that said, “Your child is loved.” Her newborn had been reported as dead seven years earlier, but the mother maintained that the decomposing body with her baby’s hospital wristband was not actually her child. The letter had been postmarked Paradise, Massachussetts, two years earlier (her now ex-husband had not shown her the letter then), and she hopes that the Paradise police can investigate. Stone demurs, but Rose (the white Rose), takes up the investigation and eventually uncovers the who, but a tragedy will likely not lead to complete satisfaction for the real mother. Spoiler alert: The kidnapped child fell through thin ice two years ago and died. The movie ends with Stone on the bus to New Mexico to talk with the real mother about what she wants to do, I guess. Probably prosecute, but that’s not shown.

So: A decent television movie with the two-plot structure that seems to permeate a lot of series books. The movie also handles some series business with Stone and Jenn, his ex, along with working things out with his shrink (played by William Devane, last seen at Nogglestead in Payback). We also get interactions with Gino Fish (played by William Sadler, last seen at Nogglestead in Die Hard 2 last Christmas) who obliquely helps Stone. So it’s definitely written with an eye to long-standing fans of the films and/or books.

I’ll probably pick up others in the set as I come across them cheaply. As much because I like Tom Selleck as I like Parker/Stone/Brandman.

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Movie Report: Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

Book coverOf the Hanks/Ryan romantic comedies which also include Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. As I noted in the report on the former film, this is the first of their team-ups; the others were 1993 and 1998.

And this film feels like an 80s film for sure (more like The Burbs or The Money Pit than a 1990s film). It starts out with Hanks’ character, a functionary who manages the advertising catalog library for a medical device company coming to work. It’s quite a brutal little bit, trying to get a little Metropolis or Kafka feel with dim, flickering lighting and a boss on the phone repeating himself over and over. He has to take a long lunch to go to the doctor, who tells him he has six months to live, and he will be symptom free until he dies. Joe Banks, that is, Tom Hanks, is a bit of a hypochindriac who knew it. He goes to his job, quits, tells off his boss, and asks his coworker, played by Meg Ryan, out. She’s impressed by his new fire and intensity, but when he reveals he has six months to live, she cannot handle it and leaves.

The next day, an industrialist played by Lloyd Bridges approaches Joe. He knows about Joe’s lonely life and diagnosis, so he has a proposition: On a remote Pacific island, the tribe has a tradition of sacrificing a volunteer every hundred years to propitiate the god in a volcano, and he (the industrialist) needs a mineral from the island. He hopes to trade Joe to the natives as a sacrifice and convinces Joe to go along with it since he is doomed anyway. Live like a king for a month or so of his remaining time and then jump into a volcano.

So the film is a five paragraph essay with five bits or movements, essentially. The aforementioned first bit. The second bit is a shopping spree in Manhattan outfitting himself in nice clothing and apparel for the voyage, including a very high-end set of steamer trunks. During this bit, he is counseled by his driver played by Ossie Davis who asks Banks who he really is. In the third bit, he goes to L.A. and is met by the industrialist’s shallow and vapid daughter who is an artist (played by Meg Ryan) and writes poetry but mostly lives off of her father’s money. They spend the evening together, but not the night together. She takes him to the small yacht (it’s a sailboat–was that a “yacht” in 1990? We expect more from yachts in 2025) where the industrialist’s other daughter (played by Meg Ryan) is to sail with him to the island. The fourth bit is their voyage where Banks and the good daughter get to know one another and fall in love, which happens despite a typhoon that sinks the vessel and leaves them adrift on a raft made from the steamer trunks. The final act is their arrival on the island, his decision to go through with it, and the coup de grâce ex machina where Banks and Ryan3 are spit from the volcano as it erupts, destroying the island and leaving them adrift on the steamers again. And finis!

So, yeah, it feels like an 80s movie. I mean, it’s not bad, but I cannot imagine it’s on a list of personal favorites for many people, either, unless they have special memories involved with watching it, such as going on a first date with it or something. But as for me, it’s one more to lose in the library and maybe watch again if it comes up in blogversations.

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Federal Judge Seeks Headline

Federal judge seeks clarity on whether birthright citizenship order means babies could be deported

Clearly, the babies who crawled across the border on their own can be deported. But, really, what is this all about? The babies not granted birthright citizenship are born to a mother who is not a citizen (or subject to the United States or what have you). So one presumes deportation would include the mother and the baby and to the same place–no sending mothers home and the babies to Ghana or something. That is, the United States would not want to break up families.

I have to assume that the whole exercise seeks headlines like Trump Administration Wants To Deport Babies. I’m also getting the sense that this is less effective as it once was.

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“We Ain’t Seen You Around Burger World Lately. So Where You Been, Huh?”

Also known as “Adventures in Camping in Your Own Home.”

We had a storm come through on Sunday afternoon with straight ahead winds of up to 80 miles an hour. Wider than the derecho that took down our electric drop and toppled an apple tree which I have not yet had the heart to cut down because it’s still alive, although not thriving. We watched the winds bend the trees, and my wife said the house was shaking, although I did not feel that. She and my youngest continued to watch it, and I went back to my desk, and out went the lights.

We’re kind of used to short outages, and we had one for a couple of hours a couple years back, but this one was different.

City Utilities working to restore power to Springfield after damaging storm

(We’re not on City Utilities; we have an electric co-op.)

Earlier this year, a strong set of storms knocked out power to places in the northern reaches of the area for a week, and so I thought this time might be different. And it was. It turns out to have been 42 hours, two nights and a day and a half, without power. Of course, we did not know that then.

So our little camping-at-home adventure began.

How did we do?

Well, we had plenty of drinking water laid in (as we’re on a well, when we do not have electricity, we do not have running water, either). We had to ration flushes, which left the house smelling a bit like a gas station.

We had plenty of food, and we went out to eat a couple or three times.

We had a great opportunity to change the water filters–which is generally not a pain, but it had been a while–as we drained all water in the lines to flush toilets.

We had a great opportunity to defrost our freezer. We’ve not gotten it low enough on contents that we could put it in our other freezers for a couple of hours on a summer day. Instead, we got the chance to give the contents of our warming refrigerator to a friend with a large family who could always use extra comestibles–which includes a full gallon of milk and 24-pack of eggs fresh from Sam’s Club. And we took meat and whatnot from our warming freezer to the food bank this morning where they passed it out immediately to customers. And now we have a fresh and clean freezer. Just think that if we had defrosted it sometime in the responsible past, it might not have held until the day the food bank was open.

I read a little in the evenings by lantern light. We didn’t use candles–we have plenty of little LED lanterns that provide plenty of light for reading or writing. I carried a flashlight in my pocket because Nogglestead is dark at night; interior rooms where we live and the corridor mostly lack windows, and the nights were moonless. I remember spending the night we bought the home here, and I remember it as having been very dark indeed. We must have had the electricity turned on the next day–even on dark nights, ambient light from our security lights outside make it pretty easy to move about, but the last two days I’ve had a flashlight in my pocket.

On Monday, we went and helped a friend who had limbs of her maple tree across a driveway. After a quick bath in the pool, I went to the gym. Then, the youngest and I went to lunch and then to Relics for gift shopping. On each trip out, we hoped to return to lights beside the garage doors, but no such luck.

So, for me, it was a vacation. I work from home, and all of my work stuff is in my office. I could have schlepped to a coffee shop and plugged in a laptop and turned on my phone’s hotspot (which rapidly drains my battery, so I’d have to jack in the phone, too). But I had nothing that pressing, and I wanted to wait to see if the power would come on any minute now.

How did the rest of the family do? Well, they became a bit restive as they did on our trip to Big Cedar this year. They complained about the power being out a lot. The oldest went out several times and kept busy, but the youngest is very electronics oriented, so he would run his phone out of energy and be at a loss. My beautiful wife got restive at spots, mostly at bedtime when the household temperature was 80 degrees or so. She did get a chance to work off-site, which got her into air conditioning and allowed her to bring a bounty of power banks home.

Power came back this morning as we were on our way to the food bank, and when we came home, it took time to put things back together. I’d left the water off so that I could make sure the filter housings weren’t dripping, so I got them going, we got the washing machine and dishwasher spinning, we got the freezer out for an official defrosting (and not just leaking onto the floor behind the wet bar), and I got back to work.

So some lessons learned: We might consider getting some rain barrels. They would help with watering plants in the dry part of summer and offer toilet flushing when the power is out. We’re not considering a generator as our need for it is yet unproven–we’ve lost power for probably fifty or sixty hours total since we’ve lived here, and that’s been almost sixteen years. But if we start to see decline in power reliability, we’ll reconsider.

Also, I recently questioned whether declining quality of public works led to street problems. Do I think that declining electrical infrastructure might be a factor in the recent outages? Perhaps. I mean, there are more lines going more places, and they can’t be arsed to bury them, but: From our drives around the area after both storms, it was clear that a lot of trees completely blew over. That is, when caught in the wind, the trees just toppled, leaving bunched root balls exposed. And in the case of our friend, it was a maple tree that split, and they are notorious for that–but they grow fast, so they’re popular with builders and subdivision developers. So I cannot help but wonder if these problems are caused by non-native trees planted in development which are not suited to break deeply into the clay soil in these parts, and now the trees are reaching an age and height where they are more prone to toppling.

But I can’t be arsed to find out.

So look forward to resumption of regular book and movie reports and other twee asides.

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Good Book Hunting, Saturday, June 28, 2025: Friends of the Christian County Library Book Sale (Clever)

I made light of Ace of Spades HQ’s Perfesser Squirrel, the new sysop of the Sunday morning book thread, for going to a library book sale and buying only 12 books.

And this weekend, I went to the Clever book sale and bought… 13.

I got:

  • Black Coffee Blues by Henry Rollins, a collection of writings from 1989-1991 by the Black Flag guy.
  • The Overton Window by Glenn Beck. Fiction.
  • The Big Black Book of Income Secrets. Heaven knows I could use some.
  • Colorblind, a Jesse Stone novel by Reed Farrel Coleman.
  • Old Black Magic, a Spenser novel by Ace Atkins. I didn’t have either of these because I’ve pretty much given up on the series, but hey, they were almost free.
  • You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty by Dave Barry who had a brief resurgence on his Substack, but I haven’t seen anyone link to him recently. But it’s still there. Maybe I should add it to my blogroll.
  • The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. I listened to The Four-Hour Body a couple years ago. Apparently, my beautiful wife already has a copy, but her relatively few books are over there, not over here.
  • Tales from the Green Bay Packers Sideline by Chuck Carlson and Green Bay Packers Stadium Stories by Gary D’Amato to prep myself for football season should I even care any more.
  • Shōgun : A Novel of Japan by James Clavell. Enjoying a resurgence because of a fairly well regarded streaming series; I’m likely to pick it up because I just watched The Last Samurai.
  • Fallout by Harry Turtledove. Because once I get through all of the historically accurate novels I have, including Shōgun (as well as the Sharpe’s series and the O’Brian novels and, I think, another Horatio Hornblower book somewhere), I might want to delve again into alt-history.
  • 199 Useful Things To Do With A Politician, a collection of cartoons probably akin to 101 Uses for a Dead Cat.

In my defense, the room looked to be a table or two shorter than last year. And as it was bag day, I paid $3 total for this collection, not a dollar each.

So we know I will read 199 Useful Things To Do With A Politician first. What do you think I will read second? Probably one of the Green Bay Packers books or the Henry Rollins book, most likely. But time and the decades (I hope) in the future will tell.

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Movie Report: Every Which Way But Loose (1978)

Book coverMan, this film (and its sequel Any Which Way You Can) loomed large in my youth. Perhaps it was on HBO, and we saw it when staying with our friends who had HBO. Maybe it had made its way freshly to network television when I was ten years old and was in heavy rotation there. But it was part of the 1970s and early 1980s ape sidekick schtick, and maybe other things along the line blurred with this film. But forty-some years later, I still say, “Right turn, Clyde” sometimes (although that’s from the sequel, not this film).

At any rate: Eastwood plays Philo, a truck driver who does underground bare-knuckle boxing for extra cash, and he’s pretty good at it. He falls for a blonde country singer (Sondra Locke, whose character is not raped in this film) named Lynn with whom he thinks he has something going. But she disappears, presumably on her way back to Denver where she hopes to open a club of her own. But she’s traveling with her boyfriend; they have an open relationship of some sort, but he blasts Philo’s truck with a shotgun before they leave. Philo also runs afoul of a local biker gang after beating two of its members and then embarrassing others. Or the opposite order. And he beats up a police detective in the honky tonk who also plots revenge. So when Philo decides to follow Lynn east from L.A., his best friend Clint and Clyde come along, and the other parties have to find out who he is and where he’s going which lead to some humorous encounters with a trailer park manager and Ma, whose subplot is that she’s foul-mouthed and keeps failing to get a driver’s license.

When he gets to Colorado, he discovers that the woman and her “boyfriend” pick up men in bars and bowling alleys all the time for some sort of hustle, and she’s not really into Philo (is she?). He leaves her in Colorado. And Clint sets up a fight with Tank Murdock, a legendary bare-knuckle brawler who has lost a step or three. Clint starts making short work of him, but he hears how the Tank fans turn on the older, more portly fellow, so he takes a dive to keep the man’s reputation alive and so that he does not have to start carrying the burden of being the man who beat Tank Murdock.

So, that’s it. The protagonist does not win the fight at the end, and he does not get the girl–who might not be worth getting anyway (although I guess, from reading the synopsis, the sequel reverses this a bit). But it’s an ending of a nominal comedy that has a lot of pathos if you look at it in a certain light. As the group makes their way back to L.A., though, they pass the pathetic remnants of the biker gang and the defeated police detective, so I guess Philo overcomes some adversity. Perhaps the only thing that has changed is his perspective on women he meets in honky tonks and the glory and profitability of winning.

So as the film was moving into its dénouement, my beautiful wife passed through the room and said “Clint Eastwood and a chimpanzee.” I corrected her, of course, but she later said she was familiar with pair from her childhood even though she had not seen the films. They were really, really big at the end of the Jimmy Carter presidency, and they’re almost forgotten now. Perhaps overshadowed by what Clint Eastwood has done or a shift in the zeitgeist. But if I see Any Which Way You Can for fifty cents or a buck, I’m picking it up.

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Speaks More To Modern Street Repair Than To The Heat

It’s been so hot in St. Louis even the streets are buckling:

Temperatures over the past week have gotten so hot even the streets are buckling from the heat.

As a heat wave gripped the region, at least four streets across St. Louis, St. Charles and St. Louis counties curled, arched or cracked and created spots where roads jutted up into the air like ramps.

It has been hotter in the modern era–I remember in the middle 1980s when the temperature topped 100 degrees for, what, two weeks? We were visiting my aunt’s flat-top roofed brick house with no air conditioning at the time.

I don’t remember stories about streets buckling.

So is it the heat that has changed? Or the streets?

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Video Report: Bill Cosby :49 (1987)

Book coverI picked this video up recently and was in the mood to watch something but not a full movie, so I popped it in. I’ve made no secret that I’ve been a fan of Cosby–see my book reports for his books (Love and Marriage twice, once in and once in ; Cosbyology in 2010; and Fatherhood in 2011). I might have one or more of his records around here, but, if I do, I don’t recall listening to them (although I do buy and listen to comedy records, I don’t spin them a bunch as they, like poetry records, require attention). And I see I also have his video Bill Cosby, Himself, an earlier special which I also bought earlier (2024) but have not watched yet (although the book report for Cosbyology indicates that I watched it in 2010 somehow.

So, with all that background and additional self-linkage out of the way….

All of the aforementioned books and videos come from the great Cosby burst of the 1980s, when he was the king of television with The Cosby Show. Thematically, it overlaps with some of the books. Cosby riffs on growing older, his body making different noises, and how his body responds to running these days (personified pain). He does a number on marriage and defense mechanisms therein, and how his marriage evolved over time so his wife has a bit more co-equal role in it, at least as far as winning arguments goes.

The video is just over an hour long, and I guess I’d rather read Cosby than watch him in any long form. I’m kind of that way with videos, too, and I really don’t like podcasts for information intake. But books on tape are all right if I’m driving; I don’t want to listen to them in my spare time at home.

At any rate, it’s all right. And a videocassette with the Kodak logo on it? You cannot be any more 1987 than that.

But you don’t need to find a copy of your own as it’s presently on YouTube in its entirety. For now.

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