Stop, Spot! The Alligator Is Not Your Friend!

What kind of messages are our children’s books sending with pages like these?

Spot and Friend

I mean, come on, green or not, the alligator is not the puppy’s friend. The alligator is a carnivore known to come out of Floridian canals to take puppies for a little death roll and snack. They do not sit on the sides of the canals and make garlands like a shepherd and his love.

So you’ll pardon me if I censor my offspring’s literature to provide common sense adages like The grass is green. Oh, crap, it’s an alligator. I knew we shouldn’t have come to Florida for vacation. Cover your ears, Spot, Daddy has to shoot the primordial enemy of man.

Call me insensitive and, yea, prejudiced for not liking things of other colors which would eat me if given the opportunity.

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Book Report: Small Felonies by Bill Pronzini (1988)

As you might remember, gentle reader, I read Bill Pronzini’s Blowback in May. I thought well enough of it that when I found this particular book at the Carondolet YMCA book fair this month, I picked it up for a dollar. I’d already broken through the buy/not buy barrier and the bottom of a stroller makes it easy to forget how much you’ve already selected. Not that there was a baby in the stroller, mind you; babies take up room better left to books.

This book collects fifty short short stories in the mystery genre. These stories run under 2000 words for the most part–three or four book pages. They don’t offer a great deal of character development, layered nuance, or other such hallmarks of immortal literary fiction that won’t survive the decade. They do, however, have plots, crimes, and sometimes a twist of an ending. Sure, they’re obvious sometimes and are fairly simple in structure, but they’re all good short shorts.

And they’re easy and not very intimidating to start reading because they’re so short, but it’s hard to stop because the next one won’t take long, either.

I enjoyed the book, and I’ll have to start watching out for short short collections. Also, this book doesn’t diminish my view of Pronzini; I think I’ll move him a little higher in my unofficial pantheon and start looking for more of his works. For when I start buying books again, which hopefully will be sometime after I’ve run through my backlog of thousands.

Books mentioned in this review:


 

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At Least Some Good Came Of It

Bears’ Shutout Means Free Furniture:

Kendall County furniture store owner and “huge Bears fan” Randy Gonigam got tired of players bragging about their defense, so he decided to put his money where their mouths are. Over Labor Day weekend, Gonigam’s World Furniture Mall in Plano offered customers free furniture – up to $10,000 – if the Bears shut out the Green Bay Packers in their season opener. Four quarters, 206 customers and about $300,000 later, Gonigam is still a little shell-shocked.

Let the conspiracy rumors begin: Mike McCarthy threw the game for a nice bedroom set.

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Kevin’s Notes

St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Kevin Horrigan, former sports columnist and now Editorial Page staff reporting to former television columnist and now Editorial Page Editor Eric Mink, proves that not only can you get promoted if you try hard enough and if ownership roils enough on your paper that you’re the only guy left, but also writes an attempted satirical column depicting a Bush book report on Camus’ The Stranger:

Some lessons in this book: One, if this is a French masterpiece, then I don’t want to hear the French whine about anything any more. Two, don’t go sleeping around. Three, what’d I tell you about the Arabs? Four, capital punishment is a good thing, because it not only put this guy, Meursault, out of his misery but it put the rest of us out of our misery, too.

Now, that’s hardly satire; as a matter of fact, that and the preceding paragraphs pretty accurately sum up the book. But Horrigan loves his own wit, and has to turn an enlightening summation of the book into an imagined indictment of Bush:

Five, the war in Iraq made us all safer. Six, keep your expectations low. And finally, anyone who believes I actually read this book probably still believes Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

Well, now. Honestly, I think Bush probably read the book–it’s skinny enough and it’s not Entangled Existentialism like Being and Nothingness. Also, I think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and may or may not still have undiscovered caches thereof, but I wouldn’t expect the newly reconstituted Iraq defense forces to have a WMD program already.

Secondly, I was going to apologize for my ad homenim funning above about Kevin Horrigan’s pedigree. But, on the other hand, that sort of rhetorical goofballery is the kind of thing that can get you on the editorial page of the Post-Dispatch, and I just want them to know I am available, and fond of my own biting wit.

(In a bit of Brian lore, when I checked The Stranger out from the Marquette University library, I also checked out another slender volume called The Outsider by Camus. As soon as I polished off the 120 pages of The Stranger, I opened The Outsider and found it to be a strangely familiar, yet laden with Existential meaning, experience. As you probably know, well-educated reader, The Outsider is the British translation of L’Etranger. Imagine my chagrin.)

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Wealthy Owners, Profitable Ball Club Cannot Fulfill Promises Made to Get Public Money Without More Public Money

The St. Louis Cardinals want the taxpayers to throw more good money after bad–for the Cardinals owners to catch, of course:

As the new Busch Stadium continues to attract sellout crowds, the crater next door that was once the old stadium continues to do what it has done since the season’s first pitch: gather dust.

Team officials have promised that the site one day will be Ballpark Village, a bustling collection of shops, restaurants and condominiums that will transform downtown St. Louis. To get a tax break from the city, Cardinals executives three years ago committed to spending at least $60 million to develop two of Ballpark Village’s planned six blocks.

Now they are back, pushing for a $650 million project on all six blocks. But with that renewed ambition, comes an outstretched hand – more public financing. A look at similar projects shows that the taxpayers’ burden could well exceed $100 million.

I would be almost be happy if this proved to be an expensive lesson to governments who would spend their constituents’ money to pamper sports teams. However, like all other boondoggles before it, I expect this will ultimately only prove to be expensive.

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Which We Is That?

Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy today attended an immigration rally, which means an amnesty for illegal immigrants rally in Washington to show his support for the cause. However, his speech proffers a possibly ill-interpreted turn of phrase:

And if we can’t get this Congress to pass fair immigration reform now, we’ll elect a new Congress in November that will pass it.

No doubt the we means the naturalized citizens and I, but given that he’s speaking before a crowd that could, quite possibly contain some non-naturalized gente, doesn’t it sound almost as though Edward Kennedy is exhorting illegal aliens to vote Democratic in November?

One could easily make that mistake, couldn’t one?

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Metaphor Failure! Metaphor Failure!

In a story about how Macy’s will revitalize downtown when its preceding Famous-Barr gave up and lie curled in a fetal position at the corner of 6th and Olive, we have a gusher:

“This is exactly the punch in the arm downtown needed,” she said. “I think this is just the beginning. Famous-Barr had been here for years. Then Macy’s took it over and, boom, they brought it back.”

There you have it. Macy’s is giving downtown a punch in the arm. Sorta like the bigger kids in gym class. No word on when Macy’s will demand the lunch money of downtown, but all corporations do, sooner or later.

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Book Report: Executive Blues: Down and Out in Corporate America by G.J. Meyer (1995)

I have been waiting almost a decade to read this book, ever since its excerpt appeared in Harpers when I still read that rag. I remember recognizing that Meyer was a St. Louisian, as was I. I read the hints of his heartbreak of losing his cush executive job and thought the excerpt was interesting enough to warrant further attention. Unfortunately, I waited a decade until I found a used copy at the JCC book fair for a buck (autographed, too!) before I could delve into it.

What a bunch of sour grapes.

The book spans 1991 and 1992 after Meyer is laid off from a vice presidency at J.I. Case as their communications leader. He’d been laid off previously from McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis from a similar position. The book purports to delve into the new uncertainty in the marketplace for super-executives of billion dollar companies and how hard their lives are when they discover that sometimes at-will means at-won’t-anymore.

I mean, the guy’s laid off, but he’s shocked at the prospect for starters and lacks any imagination for anything other than landing another equal position at another billion dollar company. Atop that little bit of hubris, he attempts to indict corporate America for being what it is. That is, he resents (he actually uses that word) corporate America for not feeding his addiction to power and a big salary. Which corporate America somehow corrupted him into.

Jeez, the one thing I learned from the excerpt was to always downplay your current/recent positions so you don’t overqualify yourself for lower positions in that time of desperation. I could have stuck with the excerpt and had all I could learn.

On one hand, I come from another generation and another industry, raised in a turbulent world of dot-coms and tech companies where your expertise matters more than your pedigree and where it’s expected or okay to work as a contractor or to bounce around. Also, I’ve not worked for many of the big companies, particularly at the highest echelons, but that makes it easier to project a future that’s no more turbulent than the past. As I work in a “fluff” job myself–QA, like communications, is a nicety and not a necessity when it comes down to struggling for a profit–I accept my tenuous position. But someone of the boomer era in the late 1980s, no doubt this would have been terrifying.

But the resentment and the indictment on every page, interspersed with the longing for the irrationally exuberant perks of that upper echelon, really ground on me so much that I didn’t enjoy the book as much as endure it. Do I recommend it to you, gentle reader? Perhaps, if as a historical document whose advice and situations are anachronisms to study, yes; or perhaps as a moral fable of how not to grow to accustomed to the current gravy train in your life and to have something upon which you can fall back, yes. Maybe even as an indictment of hiring English majors for anything, anytime. But this book is hardly a serious study engendering serious attention. It’s like Nickel and Dimed (by Barbara Ehrenreich, which was also excerpted by Harpers in the same era); it’s an indictment of capitalism by people who purposefully refuse to understand it.

Books mentioned in this review:


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Mac Attack!

Well, the Kansas City Star has once again snipped yours truly for its editorial page.

They excerpt this post as follows:

Roger that, good buddy
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it until I’m proven otherwise: Blogs are CB radio with permalinks. And we know how much CB changed the face of citizen media in the 1970s. It spawned a number of books, three “Smokey and the Bandit” movies and “Convoy.” Some of its slang lives on, but you don’t see many cars with the antennae on their roofs anymore, do you?

I’d like to think I was pointing out that bloggers can, and sometimes do, find themselves more important than they are in mass culture.

Perry Mays takes it seriously.

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I Feel Secure

I don’t know which makes me feel better in this story.

That the pilot locked himself out of the cockpit:

An Air Canada Jazz pilot who left the cockpit of his passenger jet to use a back washroom moments before landing found himself locked out upon his return, an airline official told AFP.

Or that he could get back into the locked cockpit:

The pilot eventually busted into the cockpit and safely landed the Bombardier CRJ-100, but not before alarming some 50 passengers who watched him bang on the door and talk frantically with the cockpit through an onboard telephone for several minutes, according to local reports.

I think Big Oil set this all up to make people drive more.

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Spot the Straw Man

Sylvester Brown, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, writes in a cites a couple of things in the column entitled Blaming blacks is popular with some, but it’s perilously naive:

A few weeks ago, an NPR “Morning Edition” segment featured interviews with Emmy Award-winning correspondent and author Juan Williams and writer John McWhorter. Black leaders “excuse crime and poverty,” said McWhorter, while Williams chided leaders who embrace the “notion of victimhood.”

And:

In his commentary last week, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert described the “indications of a culture of failure . . . boys saying it’s a ‘rite of passage’ to go to jail . . . or kids telling other kids that if they’re trying to do well in school, they’re trying to ‘act better than me’ or ‘trying to act white.'”

But watch the subtle shift to the straw man:

This diatribe – that the black man is inherently flawed, violent and savage – is older than the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Heck, a twisted interpretation of Noah’s curse on the dark-skinned descendants of his son, Ham, offered biblical rationale for dark servitude.

Brown cites his opponents who chastise individuals (leaders and boys) and a man-made, man-maintained, and (to some extent) man-chosen construct (culture) and then promptly attributes to them to an unchosen and uncontrollable factor (race). In doing so, Brown not only mischaracterizes his opponents’ views, but also strips the people whom his opponents criticize for the behavior the opponents criticize.

Well-played, sir! Illogical and, if intentional, duplicitous.

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