It was all the way to January 4th before they started explaining how stupid Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were:
It’s going to be a long election year.
The Stupid History Calendar Didn’t Wait Too Long
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Magazine Report: Image Magazine 1978
I bought a couple of these at a book fair in the St. Louis area; I reported on the first in March 2009, right after my mother died and before I moved to the Springfield area. Strange that it’s been so long, but not long at all. Sort of.
This one precedes the first one I read by 3 years. This one, from 1978, was published when I was 6 years old. It doesn’t have a volume or issue number in it, but given that the magazine from three years later was volume 9, one would assume that the magazine itself had been published since the year I was born. Weird.
At any rate, like the other one, this one includes work by Lyn Lifshin and a host of other poets of some caliber or another. Nothing that I’ll remember discretely, unfortunately, but I could say that about most poetry anthologies, too, including the greatest works of Shakespeare and probably most of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s books.
The magazine also has an essay about the history of literary magazines in the St. Louis area. Plucky little guys. Sixteen years later, I ran my own little literary magazine in St. Louis, the St. Louis Artesian. It didn’t last as long as Image, and we never published Lyn Lifshin. So there you go.
At any rate, it’s interesting to me, so I felt the need to tell you all about it.
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Holdup Time Again Already?
As some of us predicted as early as fifteen years ago, the Rams are going to need more public funding to stay in St. Louis:
The St. Louis Rams’ future here could be in question because of two words that many fans don’t usually associate with the Edward Jones Dome: first tier.
Those words give the Rams a door to walk away from the team’s lease at the Dome — the building has to be a “first-tier” stadium by 2015, or among the top 25 percent of National Football League venues.
The lease itself, however, doesn’t offer much clarity on what constitutes first tier. It identifies several components that need to meet that bar, but also includes vague factors, such as “the physical structure of the facilities.” Another says simply ‘stadium seating.”
The lease includes enough broad language that negotiators could argue just about every inch of the Dome is subject to the standard.
Winning over Rams owner Stan Kroenke could involve millions in publicly funded improvements. The key may be not necessarily to offer enough to make the Dome one of football’s first-tier shrines, but perhaps enough to get the Rams to look the other way or renegotiate the agreement.
You might say to yourself, “It doesn’t seem that long ago.” But you might be thinking about the St. Louis Cardinals demanding a large share of scarce public resources or they would move to Highland, Illinois, or something. That holdup was only seven years ago.
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Book Report: The Absolute Beginners Guide to Stitching Beaded Jewelry by Lesley Weiss (2010)
I paid almost full price (40% of with coupon, so “almost full price” means “more than a dollar”) for this book at the Hobby Lobby because I wanted to make sure I had something to read one warm January day when I was to take my children to the park. However, I didn’t end up reading it at the park–I can’t remember if we didn’t make it to the park or if I didn’t want the Springfield-area mommies to beat me up for being a beading sissy.
So I browsed it while watching football instead.
It’s a collection of stitched bead jewelry projects that shows one how to make the stitches and whatnot. I haven’t done any beading in a year or so, preferring to mix up my cheapskate self-made crafting Christmas giving this year. But when beading, I do like to do stitches which is more complicated and creative than simply stringing some beads and a pendant together. Although I have other reference books that show me the stitches, I’m glad to have picked up this one to freshen and inspire me and to give me some other ideas on how to use different bead sizes in my patterns.
Whether I put those patterns to use any time in the near term, though, is another question entirely.
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Home Improvement Chain Understands Risks of Community Improvement Districts
Springfield has recently become as district-crazy as the larger cities in the state, creating improvement districts to benefit Hy-Vee and other retail developments. Through the improvement districts, the city pays for improvements to make an area hospitable to a private development and then levies an additional sales tax on purchases made at the development to recapture those outlays.
Personally, I’m against helping some developers out at the expense of other development types. The government should not pay favorites in this way. If a private citizen is to build a house or whatnot, he has to pay to hook it up to the infrastructure. But if the private citizen is a development corporation with enough clout and promises of jobs and sales–regardless of whether those sales are merely moving sales from another retailer in the area to the new one with the additional sales tax levy–then the districts happen.
But a Wisconsin-based home improvement center wants no part of the CID where it wants to open:
Menards, however, does not want to be included in a 1 percent sales tax Community Improvement District the council previously approved for the Hickory Hills Marketplace.
The CID tax would pay for certain infrastructure improvements as tax revenues roll in over time.
According to a council bill explanation, “One of the conditions of Menards locating at the development is that their site not be included in the CID.”
Having a CID tax in place potentially could make Menards products more expensive.
“They do a lot of business on a large scale, like prefabricated home kits,” said Mayor Jim O’Neal. “That extra percent is probably not something they really want. I think the necessary improvements can be made without them.”
It’s quite obvious when you’re a contractor spending thousands of dollars per purchase the difference between buying it at Menards or buying it at Meeks.
On smaller purchases, like groceries and department store items, it’s easier to lose sight of that 1% extra you’re paying. It’s only an extra dollar per $100 trip, but if you’re cumulatively spending thousands of dollars a year, you’re cheating yourself of those dollars if you shop at a store in a CID.
Good for Menards for opting out, although they’re doing it for the principle of being competitive and making profit, not the principle that special favors for esteemed land developers are morally wrong.
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Note To Self (I)
One finds the strangest things on notepads in one’s own handwriting. Or at least I do.
Chariot
Yes
Apparently, I’m in favor of horse-drawn war carts.
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Book Report: The Sword of Bedwyr by R.A. Salvatore (1994)
You know, I haven’t read a bit of pulp fantasy in a while (the previous Salvatore I read was five years ago, and that review was fun to re-read because it touched on my old gaming memories). I read The Lord of the Rings last year, I know, but this book is pulp fantasy regardless of its hard cover and dust jacket.
Within it, the son of a duke chafes under his father’s accommodation of a wizard who rules the land through his Cyclops army and subwizard governors. After he slays one of the one-eyed centurions, he flees his home and his birthright and takes up with a halfling thief. They meet a good, or at least not as bad as the baddest, wizard who tricks them into invading a dragon’s lair but gives them magic items for their trouble, including a cloak of invisibility. The duo move onto a town and live the lives of successful thieves until the cloak of invisibility reanimates the legend of its previous owner, the Crimson Shadow, and reanimates the town residents’ hopes for freedom.
As always, this is but one book in a trilogy, so it sets some things in motion that I won’t see conclude. It’s a decent enough read, but the climax and the denouement, such as they are, come rather suddenly. So, like I said in 2006, I won’t shy away from Salvatore’s other works, but I’m not running out to get them right now.
I had another thought while reading it: In modern suspense and thriller pulp, it’s pretty common to knock authors who make mistakes with guns. Is it only our lack of true familiarity as a culture with ancient weapons–aside from some real hardcore SCA geeks and the like–that keeps us from nitpicking the use of a sword? As I read this book, I noticed that the army of the Cyclopses used a variety of weapons straight out of the Dungeons and Dragons equipment charts. Thrown spears and bows for missile weapons, and then swords, battle axes, and polearms for bladed weapons. Wouldn’t you expect an army, especially an invading/occupying sort of army to have more standard equipment? Nah, I’m just trying to nitpick where none is warranted.
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DeRooneyfication (II)
Sometime early in my marriage, my grandmother gave me a lamp, a nice glass lamp with brass-colored steel trimmings. In our first house in Casinoport, we put this lamp in a place of honor: the floor of the closet in our spare bedroom, the one where we had our weight bench and, later, a number of arcade games.
In our defense, we did not–and still do not–have end tables where one traditionally puts table lamps, and our horizontal surfaces were at a premium. So we stored it, awaiting further accumulation of furniture that would eventually blossom as our marriage passed the cotton, linen, leather, and wood anniversaries.
However, we had a cat who sometimes liked to urinate in dark places. Continue reading “DeRooneyfication (II)”
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DeRooneyfication (I)
This year, I have begun the process of DeRooneyfication.
Sometime when I was reading some of his columns some number of years ago, I related to one of Andy Rooney’s situations. He mentioned going into his basement workshop and finding a number of projects that had been off to the side for a number of years, including a chair that needed fixing and whatnot. Even though I was probably just the long side of thirty at the time, it resonated with me, since I’d been collecting projects and materials for projects since before I got married. Now that I’m just the short side of forty–and soon on its long side–I decided to start finishing some of those projects.
Most of them aren’t long-term, time-consuming projects, either. Most only require that I set aside a couple of minutes on consecutive nights to take the time to complete the steps the project requires. They require that I put all the pieces and material together in one place and get the things done. That’s all.
Why have I decided to do it suddenly in 2012? Perhaps it is that birthday ending with a 0 coming up. Perhaps it is the new multivitamin that I’ve started to take because I bought it some years ago and might as well use (almost a deRooneyfication project of its own). Maybe it’s a function of having cleaned and sorted my garage and finding the projects and the tools and materials to complete them. Regardless, I’ve started completing projects of some procrastination. These are their stories.
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Good Book Hunting: January 18, 2012
Wednesdays can be a dangerous day for me. The younger lad has only a half day of school, so instead of driving into town and then home and then into town and then home in a three hour stretch, I hit the gym for an hour and a half or two hours, but then I have an hour to roam town. A town with many book stores. And on Wednesday, I hit two: Barnes and Noble (to spend a gift card) and The Book Castle.
And I bought a couple books.
I got:
- A copy of Strunk and White for my ha’brother, who is in an MBA program and could use it.
- The American Patriots Almanac, a daily reader of founding documents and founding fathers.
- Evil Dead on VHS. I’ve not seen any of them. What sort of bad Gen X geek does that make me?
- A picture book of Cologne, France. Not cologne.
- A collection of alternate Robin Hood stories where Robin Hood is not in medieval England.
- Blockade Billy, a short hardback (130 pages) by Stephen King that was $5 at Barnes and Noble (on sale). A short, cheap read? What a concept!
- It’s Not Easy Being Green by Jim Henson.
- A stir fry cookbook for my wife.
- A collection of works by Gil Elvgren.
- A collection of presidential papers from 1841-1860 or 1821-1840. Right before the Civil War.
The books from Book Castle were all from its sale shelves and room; I spent $5 and change there. After the $20 gift card from Christmas, I spent $12 at Barnes and Noble. So about $17 total. Not bad for the stack, especially as three of the books are new.
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Graffiti Suspect, 45, Seen Wearing Clown Pants
It’s like the Vanity Fair article says, pop culture has stalled. And this modern graffiti referring to a hit from 1990.
Alternate quip:
20 years later, we reflect upon the successful protests of the 99% who could not touch this that removed the 1% that purportedly could from the pop charts.
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Overlooked GOP Candidate Selection Criterion
Ladies and gentlemen, as the GOP presidential primary and caucus process continues to its conclusion next year and a candidate to challenge Resident Barack Obama in 2012, we’ve been fed a steady diet from the campaigns and the media of white papers, plans with varying numbers of bullet points, and doodyhead/am-not claims. We have focused on issues, and by issues, I mean the aforementioned “doodyhead” considerations, but we have failed to take one important question into account:
Which candidate will make the best giant puppets and effigies for 8 years of protests?
I have to go with Newt Gingrich on this one. Not only is he more easily caricaturable, but there are many, many editorial cartoon artists ready to come out of retirement to lend their expertise to criticizing him.
You don’t want to challenge the protestors too much, do you? They only have masters’ degrees in puppetry and papier-mâché.
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Book Report: The Handle by Richard Stark (1966, 1988)
I bought this book back in November, and I’ve already read it. I do sort of have a last-in-first-out method. The fresher the purchase, the closer I am to the eagerness to read the book that drove me to buy the book.
I’m not sure if this is the first Stark book I’ve read; I don’t have any other book reports on them on the blog here, so I haven’t read one in the last ten years. If I did, it probably came during my high school years, but I don’t remember it. So it’s like going into a series fresh except for knowing what the series character is and seeing a portrayal of it on the big screen (Payback, donchaknow?).
So Parker is an amoral, immoral bad guy who does heists for the Outfit. One or two a year, not enough to get greedy. This time, the Outfit wants him to hit an offshore casino run by a former German officer on an island claimed by Cuba. When the Feds get wind of the operation, they want Parker to grab the man himself and bring him in. So Parker cases the island, builds a team, and executes the plan–which goes awry when a rejected team member tips the casino that the heist is coming.
It’s a quick, pulp read. It’s just a little off in that some of the detail and description in the beginning is, I don’t know, a little overdone, a little out of the pace of a proper pulp novel. From the front matter of this book, I see that Stark is a pen name of Donald Westlake. You know, Westlake is an author of whom I’ve read a couple of books, but not someone I’ve rushed out to read all. I wonder if the poor pacing in the beginnings is what does it. I don’t know.
This volume is a LARGE PRINT EDITION from 1988, which is 22 years after the initial publication date. Man, those pulp books could stay in print, couldn’t they? Aside from some of the huge bestsellers today, what do you think will still be in print in 2034? Not a whole lot, probably, with the industry changing as it is. I mean, if you look at the sales stats today, the more modern edition I’ve linked to is still in the top 100,000 books sold on Amazon. So it’s got longevity that even my torpid review won’t dent.
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Book Report: Woman in Mind by Alan Ayckbourn (1986)
As you probably don’t know, I like Alan Ayckbourn ever since I saw his plays The Norman Conquests when the Rep in Milwaukee was putting all three of the plays on, rotating which play was showing nightly, so that viewers could see all three. Even though I was a hardscrabble working college senior, I managed to see all three–and with three different women (and Table Manners twice due to a scheduling error). Norman would have approved.
This book is a single full evening play. Within it, a woman who is hit on the head gets some attention from a doctor as she comes around. As he goes to get some tea for her, her loving family, clad in tennis apparel, checks on her. She’s a successful historical novelist with a doting husband, an attentive daughter, and a protective brother. But as the doctor returns, they fade away, and her family is really an uncommunicative and distant son and a parson who’s estranged from his wife. As the play goes on, the family visits intersperse, and her doctor tells her she’s suffering from hallucinations related to the head injury.
So as I’m reading, I’m interested to see how this will resolve and somehow hope that she’s really suffering from hallucinations of the bad family and root for a twist where she’s really the successful woman hallucinating a poor existence, but we end with a penultimate scene where the faux daughter is at her wedding, but it’s really a horse race where she’s a horse, and it gets surreal (obviously) and the play resolves where the woman with the head trauma has imagined all of it and is in an ambulance right after the head trauma.
So it disappointed me, ultimately, because I like my plays to veer a little less into the surreal. I mean, I can read a surreal play and know what I’m getting into (The Balcony) and even enjoy it (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). But when a play leads me to believe some surreality is going to resolve but ends up more surreal and unresolved, well, meh.
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A Plea For Attention, Or Something More Sinister?
Spotted on my to-read shelves:
I don’t remember purchasing My Book of Leaves.
Do you think my son put that book on my bookshelves because he desperately wants me to notice his work and/or to read to him, or was it just something he could do since Daddy had a little stepping stool in the office?
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Book Report: Acapulco Rampage by Don Pendleton (1976)
This book is not one of the strongest in the Executioner series. In it, Mack Bolan travels to the Mexican resort to keep the Mafia from getting a stronger grip on the criminal warlord currently running the rackets there. After he kills a frontman and contact point for the bad guys, Bolan takes in the man’s secretary and traveling companion who claims to be innocent. He gets on-the-scene help from a washed-up actor that had been a front man for prostitution and white slavery as Bolan tries to find a solution that will keep the Mafia out of Acapulco.
Sadly, although its plot like the others differs from boilerplate, this book ends rather abruptly with a twist for a twists’ sake.
Not one of the better ones in the series, but still a quick and interesting enough read.
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Thanks, I Know
Tonight’s referrer list:
Here’s the photo they’re looking for:
Originally posted Sunday, October 12, 2003.
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Pointless Speculation of the Day
If 21st century gun laws had been in place in the 1980s, how much simpler would Donkey Kong have been if Mario had owned a Desert Eagle?
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And On That Note
At the end of the aforementioned Scooby Doo, Cartoon Network’s The Hub plays an anti-bullying PSA (embedding disabled by request, because if there’s one thing you want to upload onto the torrents, it’s an anti-bullying PSA) with Tom and Jerry shorts:
I gotta ask you, which message do you think resonates with young viewers?
Frankly, I think the PSA is like one of the adult gags in the cartoons that the kids don’t get yet. It does, however, sound the proper notes to today’s concerned parents.
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Generational Skipping Stones
In the other room, my children are watching an episode of The New Scooby Doo Movies with Davy Jones in it.
The program originally aired on December 2, 1972, so I probably didn’t see it when it ran first. A couple years later, I watched it with my mother and brother, and I remember distinctly the joke that Davy Jones makes “I’ve never sung for frogs before, just monkeys.” She explained that he used to belong to a band called the Monkees.
Of course, the Monkees were most active between 1966 and 1968, when the television show appeared, but a decade later when I watched the cartoon, Davy Jones was a has-been, if a little boy thought of such things. Regardless, he was off my cultural radar, if I had such a thing at about 10.
Of course, a couple years after that, in 1985, MTV started airing the television program and brought about a brief Monkees revival. The shows played on MTV and Nickolodeon, the band toured, and I even ended up with a greatest hits album.
When the children heard that Scooby Doo was meeting Davy Jones, their only knowledge was of the guy with the locker. Although this reference precedes any of the pop-culture musings above since it’s a nautical term for the undersea place where drowned sailors go, the boys only know of it from what they’ve heard about the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series.
That’s a lot of generational history wrapped into a single episode of a forty-year-old cartoon.
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