You know, I always put the outgoing mail in the mailbox with the stamp to the left. It’s not a conscious thing, but it just seems right to have the addresses rotated counterclockwise. Isn’t that weird?
Life in the OC
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Author: Brian J. Noggle
Close Call For The Athletic
I saw this headline, Sports Authority cuts budget after complaints, I worried because I confused it with the Sporting Authority, our preferred retail outlet for non-bicycling athletic gear.
Fortunately, though, the retail establishment will remain open, and the St. Louis Regional Convention & Sports Complex Authority will continue spending private/public tax largesse with only the normal amount of annual abashment:
Board members of the St. Louis Regional Convention & Sports Complex Authority made the move after learning last month that the authority’s employees had gone over budget last year in nearly every expense category and had not notified the board.
The authority overspent last year even after Mayor Francis Slay and others publicly accused it of wasteful spending.
One of the cuts:
One new cost savings for this year: The board declined to renew the contract of the authority’s public relations firm.
Executive Director Kent Underwood had asked for $72,000 to be budgeted this year to pay the Vandiver Group, the PR firm.
Last year, the authority paid $98,000 to Vandiver – more than four times the $24,000 that had been approved by the board.
Good idea, since the PR firm certainly hasn’t convinced we the people of the purpose or necessity of this entity.
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Harry, Harry, Harry (I)
By now, most of you know, Prince Harry of England recently attended a costume party dressed in a Nazi uniform, and the for-public-consumption outrage uproared and stamped its hoof threateningly in the dirt. Mark Steyn writes a column about the big Hollywood premieresque indignation.
As a service to our readers, I include a handy table of costumes of both evil people and not evil people as whom Harry could have dressed and the uproar those costumes would have provoked:
| Costume | Reaction: |
| Nazi | Because certain segments of the punditocracy continue to harp the x=Hitler equation, they must continue to reinforce the public’s opinion that Nazism and Hitler are the worst evils ever produced in the world, even though by twentieth century standards, they were a pretty standard lot of totalitarian killers of innocent people (see also Stalin, Tse-Tung, Amin, et al.) |
| Commisar | Red chic is so fashionable and retro ironic. Pass. |
| Mongol Horde Member | Sure, they raped, pillaged, and razed villages in the manner of Ghengis Khan, but that was so long ago it’s a worthless analogy to use on Bush or Blair, so Harry gets a pass. Unless he’s savaged, so to speak, for mocking a barbarian of color. |
| The Devil | As an icon of evil used by one or more major religions, the Devil has no more meaning than kitsch to the intelligentsia, many of whom the plebes could argue are already in the Devil’s pocket. |
| Jesus Christ | The professional shriekers only respond to the outrage of a select few Christian moonbats who would express outrage over this continuing example that Christians and Christ are the only thing you can dress up as for Halloween without outrage except for theirs. Those silly people, getting so upset for nothing, the intelligentsia would cluck. |
| Pontius Pilate | Who are you supposed to be? ask the chatterers. Who’s that? they ask when told. |
| Mohammed | After someone at the fanatic edge of Islam cuts Harry’s head off, the shrieking classes say he asked for it by offending the sort of people who would cut your head off. |
So the outrage sort of fits into the total program of presentation, where Nazis are bad bad bad not so much because they’re totalitarians who tried to take over Europe and who killed a lot of people (which differs from the European bureaucracy only in body count, but not so much in intent), but because Nazis are bad, bad, bad. Because the Nazis have to be bad so that creatively-challenged dissenters can compare current world leaders to them thoughtlessly.
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Harry, Harry, Harry (II)
Does anyone else find this quote (also in Mark Steyn’s column) too earnestly Orwellian?
“In a Europe grounded in peace and freedom there should be no place for Nazi symbols,” declared Markus Soeder, general secretary of the Christian Socialist Union party. “They should be banned throughout Europe, as they are with good reason in Germany.“
Prohibition=freedom, citizen.
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Paranoia Sense Tingling
Satellite lost over the south Pacific:
Intelsat, Ltd. announced today that its IS-804 satellite experienced a sudden and unexpected electrical power system anomaly on January 14, 2005, at approximately 5:32 p.m. EST that caused the total loss of the spacecraft. In accordance with existing satellite anomaly contingency plans, Intelsat is in the process of making alternative capacity available to its IS-804 customers. The satellite, launched in 1997, furnished telecommunications and media delivery services to customers in the South Pacific.
If this were the early chapters of a Tom Clancy novel, the Chinese would be plinking.
(Link seen on /.)
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They Want Reform Now?
Story in Sunday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Missouri fee agents prepare to lose contracts after shift in power: Democrats call for change in system:
Maria Turner knows that any day now, she’ll lose her job.
Turner runs Department of Revenue fee offices in Chesterfield and Clayton. The offices sell license plates, issue drivers licenses, process applications for titles and collect sales taxes on new vehicles and boats.
Her shops are among the busiest in the state’s 171-office network of independent contractors, and Turner is proud of her lower-than-average error rate in processing applications. But she figures her days are numbered. The reason: sheer politics.
Fee offices are among the last vestiges of patronage politics in state government. The governor’s campaign contributors traditionally get the contracts, which in some cases can provide six-figure incomes to their operators. The offices charge a fee for each transaction. After expenses are covered, the rest is gravy.
Democratic contractors appointed by former Govs. Bob Holden and Mel Carnahan expect to be replaced soon because Matt Blunt, a Republican, took over the governor’s office last week.
I don’t weep for Maria Turner, the woman who’ll have to go from clearing six figures plus salary for a number of years as a Democrat appointee to the soup kitchen. I do gasp, almost, with surprise that Democrats want to act now when their contributors will lose the gravy train. As far as I know, Carnahan, Wilson, and Holden didn’t agitate for it when they were governors or when the Democrats controlled the legislature, so I think the Democrats in Missouri are demonstrating another disingenuous and yet transparent maneuver to not allow the incoming Republican administration the same amenities their boys have enjoyed for the last dozen years.
That said, I think it’s a capital idea, and I hope pro-business governor Matt Blunt actually goes through with it. I’d like to see a minimum of two fee agents per county to ensure that citizens have a choice in their driver’s license renewal options and perhaps see some customer service out of the functionaries behind the counter whose inner clocks move on four year cycles.
What, you think I have had one or more bad experiences in these little ill-furnished storefronts and could do nothing but bite my tongue and line the pocket of someone idealogically opposed to me? I have, and I had no choice in it.
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So-Called Watch
From a CNN.com film review:
In the film “In Good Company,” Dennis Quaid’s character, ad executive Dan Foreman, lives out a fear hidden inside millions of American men and women over 50 — losing their job just when they are hitting their stride professionally.
Foreman has played by the rules all his life and is living the so-called American Dream. He’s respected by peers and clients as the head of ad sales for a weekly New York-based sports magazine. He has a loving wife, Ann, played beautifully by Marg Helgenberger (“Erin Brockovich,” TV’s “CSI”) and two daughters, the oldest of which, Alex (Scarlett Johansson), is just entering New York University.
Is that a sneer towards the values of good family, working hard, living quietly? Why, I think it is! Don’t the plebes know the American dream involves a third floor walk-up in Manhattan, foreign film festivals, and endless nights of trying to score at bars and nightclubs with anemic europhile women?
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Book Report: Stalking the Angel by Robert Crais (1989)
I read the second Elvis Cole book, my second in 36 hours, so that bespeaks much of how enjoyable these particular novels are proving.
This one finds Elvis Cole looking for a a stolen Japanese manuscript, protecting a wealthy businessman’s family, looking for a kidnapped girl who might be complicit in her disappearance, and battling Japanese organized crime. Elvis Cole battles more crime in a day than some fictional private eyes see all book.
The plot is convoluted, but not confusing; as the first person narrator has to reframe events in his own mind, he takes the readers along, so it’s not confusing or overly elaborate. Heck, I figured it out sixty pages in with a guess as to how I, as a writer, would play it.
I’m eager to continue with the series as it, like John D. MacDonald’s work and some of the sixties paperbacks I’ve taken to in the last six months, entertains me and inspires me to write. As soon as I finish another book, of course.
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Sunday Night Fiction: “Shepherd: At College”
Okay, so I got nothing this weekend. Here, have a short story. This particular piece piggybacked on a piece I wrote while in high school, not that anyone knew it. "Shepherd: At College" represents the second Jim Shepherd story, which chronicles the adventures of a young man who grew up reading too many hard-boiled detective adventures. This story represents one of my many publication credits, as it appeared in the Spring 1994 Marquette Journal. Lest you forget because this is the Internet, friends, the following piece is copyright 1992 Brian J. Noggle, and it should not appear on your Web sites without my permission until, as Disney rules are in effect, 2999 AD.
Dark rolled down outside the blinds of the little coffee house I was sitting in. I was trying to stare wistfully into my drink, which was difficult because it was a flattening Cherry Coke served in a paper cup with a strange dichromatic ocean picture that became clear only after you stared at it a while. Maybe it really wasn’t an ocean scene. Maybe that’s only what I saw after staring at it a long time. I was swaying in time with the bluesy jazzy poppy music they piped in to the joint, swaying and looking wistfully into a paper cup of soda. It was not one of my better days. Then she walked in.
Her heels clicked to a stop on the fake brick floor just inside the door. She shimmered. She glistened. The room coalesced and kaleidoscoped. She did other things in the light that made my eyes hurt. And I had only been drinking Cherry Coke. She swirled a glance over the accumulated misfits and might have lingered on me for a minute. I wish. I straightened up and shoved my hat back. A macho enough gesture, but the hat was kind of tight and moving it back hurt a bit, so she would have no idea how macho it really was. I ran my fingers along my hairline and pulled my hat down. It hurt.
What would Spenser do? He’d go over and say, “Want to see me do a one-armed push-up?” and she would giggle and he would snap off ten. Spenser was a wuss. I could do one-armed push-ups two at a time. I decided against the gesture. She’d just think it was macho posturing or something. Besides, ten is an awfully high number and she might get bored in the middle of my macho posturing.
As it were, I just tipped my chair back against the pseudo-brick wall and leaned my head back. The brim of my hat hit the wall and the hat slid painfully down over my eyes. Mike Hammer never had this problem. I coolly chicked the front legs of my chair back down and shoved my hat back. Her back was to me as she paid for some coffee concoction with a crisp fiver. Good.
She looked over the room and looked at the empty table next to me. It was the only one in the place. Our eyes met and I felt the electricity. She looked around again, probably to make sure that everyone was watching as she swanked deliberately over to the table. It was hard for her to decide whether to sit across the table so she could see me or on the side nearest me, and she settled on sitting with her back to me, acting coy and indifferent but handy when I wanted to strike up a conversation.
She was doing a good job on the cool thing. She didn’t even turn half way and look out at the room so she watch me out of the corner of the eye. She was good at this game, but I was better.
“Excuse me, do you know what time it is?” I asked her.
She didn’t even glance at the little Seiko on her wrist. “No.” she said.
Hard to get, I thought. I knew the thing. The harder I chase her, the more I’ll like it when she gave in. And she could check out just how much I liked her in just how hard I chased her. An ego thing. I was one step ahead of her.
“Shepherd’s the name,” I said as she spread a New Yorker on the table in front of her. “Jim Shepherd,” I said after a dramatic pause, a pause made more dramatic when she hadn’t said anything. Or even looked at me.
“Good for you,” she said.
“And you are?”
“Getting irritated.”
A big jockish looking guy came over to her table. “Hi, Sharon,” he said. “How ya doing?”
“Great,” she said.
Great, I thought.
“I’m headed over to Duffy’s. Want to come along?” Jock Boy said. Sure, if he didn’t have those muscles and all that where would he be?
“Thank God,” she said, closing her New Yorker slipping it into her bag. She turned and they walked out. She started talking as they were out of earshot. I watched them leave, and I have to say I enjoyed it.
Sharon. I liked the name Sharon. I liked Sharon. At least it wouldn’t be one of those lingering, clinging things. She and Jocko turned the corner and were gone. But not forgotten. I wondered if she were a freshperson. That would give me four years. Plenty of time. It was going to be a good four years. Oh, those blue eyes, I thought and I would have sighed except I’m a tough guy.
I looked at my soda. It was almost empty. I could use another pretty soon, but the tap was so far away. A little red bird was flying across the sky on the cup, and it wasn’t getting anywhere. Tough luck. I was sympathizing with that bird when she walked in.
She seemed to seep into the room like a fog. A mist of perfume, hair that rolled from her head like a dark warmth, and a presence that crept before her and lingered after she left. She glanced over the room and her big brown eyes flowed over me like molasses. They might have syrupped on me for a moment, but it might have been just me. She looked at the table next to me, the only empty one in the joint, and she cascaded over. I took a healthy slug of my Cherry Coke. What would Philip Marlowe do? I wondered.
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Book Report: The Monkey’s Raincoat by Robert Crais (1987)
I got this book, and all of Robert Crais’ novels to date, for Christmas, so I started with this book as it’s the first Elvis Cole novel.
The book features a private investigator in California who follows well the footsteps of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, better than that Moses Wine guy. Elvis has to investigate the a husband who has disappeared with the couple’s son. The husband, a down on his luck agent, has been cheating on his wife with the sordid lot of starlets and seems to have gotten himself in over his head with drug dealers, organized crime, and femme fatales.
The writing is denser than Robert B. Parker’s work, from whose early this work seems slightly derivative. This book does draw its attention to a common modern writing foible, though; the shortcut use of the brand name as an adjective. You don’t find it in the older stuff that remains fresh to this day; Chandler didn’t tell you who made the high-quality merchandise, he described how the merchandise was high quality. A lot of authors these days just drop the brand name in and let us make the appropriate judgments on how well the character is dressed–or not. Unfortunately, I don’t know a lot of California brand names, so I can’t get the full flavor of the scene. So I’ve learned something to avoid in my writing. Sure, the brand names will draw contemporary readers in, but over time, their use will stale quickly.
Still, The Monkey’s Raincoat is a good read, even if I don’t understand the title or its allusion. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series anyway.
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Best Headline of the Day
TechDirt’s Bezos Innnnnn Spaaaaaaaaace!
I laughed because I got the allusion. And I’m not explaining it to you damn kids.
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Hint for Poets
Abu Ghraib rhymes with astrolabe.
Just in case you need it for your next sonnet.
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Does That Mean What I Think It Means?
From an article entitled “Police: Coroner Confesses To Stealing From Dead – El Paso County Deputy Coroner Says He Sold Stolen Drugs“:
Deputy coroners’ jobs include removing bodies from homes, hospitals and other locations and collecting prescriptions of those who died.
Coroners use the medicine to make sure the victim was taking the prescribed dosage and didn’t die because of an overdose.
The journalist could have phrased that better, ainna?
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Good Column by Steinberg
I spend a lot of time and blog inches disagreeing with him, but Neil Steinberg’s column today contains nothing with which I disagree and several things with which I agree.
Just thought I would mention it.
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The Problem with Preventing Crime
Does anyone see the paradox in this? Pilot arrested in cockpit after screener smells alcohol:
The charge:
An armed AirTran Airways pilot was charged with operating an aircraft under the influence after a federal screener at McCarran International Airport smelled alcohol, authorities said Thursday.
The problem:
“The captain neither took command of the aircraft nor was the aircraft operated in any manner,” the airline said.
Authorities, operating under the assertion of the precogs, have charged this fellow with a crime he was about to commit but had not yet committed. He’s not charged with conspiracy. He is being charged with the actus reus, friends, and if it sticks, it’s precedent.
Keep that in mind the next time you’ve had a couple of beers and go to get something out of the cabin of your car.
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Wince
Surprisingly, a commentary columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch doesn’t like Fox News or conservatives in the media:
“A PBS Mind in a Fox News World.”
I saw that slogan on a bumper sticker, and it resonated with me. I consider many news programs on the Fox network unabashedly partisan and ultraconservative. The idea that millions rely on it for news and information makes me wince.
You know, the thought that anyone gets news or insight from the Post-Dispatch would make me grimace, but I just can’t make that leap of disbelief. The funny pages, yes, because for the Post-Dispatch, they start on page one.
But by unleashing this common broadside of a normal newspaper commentariat who thinks airborne conservative communitariat are vain and whiny, I have to wonder what point the columnist is trying to make, and to whom he has targeted the piece. Does he want to draw the publicity ire of conservatives who will drive readers to him if only to mock him? Is he having a bit of fun with his small circle of readers who are reality-based in a real world?
Also, why do I care? But that’s enough questions for now.
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Elite Gamer Report
Amid an evening spent installing the latest in strategy and first person shooter games, well, if you extend “latest” to include Unreal Tournament 2003, I would like to announce that I have won my first game of Minesweeper in almost a decade.
Not because I suck, mind you, but more because for the first time in ten years I have bought a computer instead of a sack of parts, which means also for the first time in ten years I have had Minesweeper installed.
But I take some small pride in winning nevertheless.
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Some of the Best Bloggers Are, and Then There’s Sullivan
Contrary to what Google might imply and some Google user might suspect, I have never had sex with Chris Pronger.
Thank you, that is all.
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But I Don’t Have a MUPP
Since I don’t have a Masters in Urban Planning and Policy, of course it strikes me as senseless and tragically humorous that portions of St. Louis County are using eminent domain to turn residential area into retail area, and that portions of the City of St. Louis are turning retail area into residential area.
I will think it equally amusing in twenty or thirty years when the roles reverse, because St. Louis County municipalities’ sales tax diminishes because there are no citizens left to shop in the retail areas and the city determines it can get more in sales tax revenue than in income tax and other revenues from actual citizens.
Had I that precious degree, I would think it very serious indeed.
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Thinking Inside the Box
Randy Knight set a new record at his Union Station kiosk, and it wasn’t a good one. He had a day, earlier this month, when the crystal figurine and tchotchke stand where he works made just one sale: $15.
At the rental rate of $1,600 a month, it may not be long before his brother-in-law, who owns the kiosk, becomes another failed businessman at the converted train station.
Business is slow at Union Station and seems to be getting slower, shopkeepers say. It doesn’t help that the St. Louis Blues aren’t playing this winter at the nearby Savvis Center. Krieger’s Sports Grill, which opened just a year ago, shut its operation after New Year’s Eve.
Union Station, beautifully restored 20 years ago with a soaring, glass-enclosed shopping area adjoining the former train depot, recently was taken over by a new management company, Jones Lang LaSalle, one of the nation’s largest managers of shopping centers. General Manager Byron Marshall and Marketing Manager Frances Percich have been on the job for less than two months.
“We’re going to come up with a plan,” Marshall said. “We’re very optimistic we can come up with change, some positive change.”
Meanwhile, even though train tracks continue to butt up against the mall so that people who can afford it can ride a to eat and drink well while enjoying the vistas of the junkyards of East St. Louis, rail travellers in St. Louis will visit a new temporary rail station since Amtrak is replacing the previous 25-year-old temporary structure (the Amshack).
So when faced with no shopper traffic in a “revitalized” former train station chock full of shops and kiosks that sell t-shirts and St. Louis souvenirs but very few necessities of life (unless you subsist on coffee and fudge), undoubtedly the obvious answer demands that you turn some of the empty shop space into condominiums.
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