The head of the General Services Administration, the government agency that helps to manage and support federal agencies, spent most of her time working remotely from Missouri during the year after she ordered employees back to their offices, according to a letter from the agency to Congress.
GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan, an appointee of President Joe Biden, spent 121 weekdays in Missouri and 64 weekdays in Washington from March 2022 through March 2023, GSA Associate Administrator Gianelle E. Rivera informed House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., in a letter on March 31, Axios reported after obtaining the letter Friday.
As you might recollect, gentle reader, I disagreed with Robin Carnahan when she was the Missouri Secretary of State about a decade ago, a little after her father was elected to the United States Senate after he died and her mother was appointed in his stead. Meanwhile, her brother was serving in the House of Representatives from my district.
It’s good to see she’s stayed in the family business. Although, to be honest, I should be a little pleased that she’s working from Missouri and not living the high life in D.C. Although with current crime levels, I’m avoiding cities larger than Springfield myself these days, and I’m a little cautious going to Springfield.
Although after seeing this headline yesterday, I had planned to buy some beef for dinner, but then I remembered that my beautiful wife had mentioned a hankering for pork chops earlier in the week. So I brought home pork chops to grill instead of steaks. But not because a headline steered me away. Because I love to please my wife. And we traditionally have steaks on Fridays.
My current employer has a forum for posting pictures of pets, and I frequently contribute as we have kittens who are still in the doing cute stuff phase.
I have to be very careful about posting photos of the cats on my bookshelves, though, since my library has some titles which are, erm, a little spicy.
For example, I have a photo of Nico looking at either the swords or the Summa Theologiae which I was going to post, but I did not as I looked closer and found The Clitoral Truth on the top shelf. I bought it from a book club probably twenty years ago and tried reading it; the number of paper markers in it indicates I disagreed with a lot of it. Although it bills itself thusly:
The clitoris has been dismissed, undervalued, unexplored, and misunderstood for hundreds of years, but the truth is out there, and internationally celebrated sex educator Rebecca Chalker has found it. In The Clitoral Truth, Chalker offers the only mainstream, in-depth exploration devoted solely to women’s genital anatomy and sexual response. Women readers everywhere–be they straight, gay, or bisexual–will learn about the countless sexual sensations and discover how to enhance their sexual responses in a more concrete way than ever before. Enhanced with personal accounts, comprehensive illustrations, and a thorough appendix of female sexuality resources, this book helps women and their partners understand and expand their sexual potential and work toward becoming independent sexual beings.
It read, from what I recall, more like a feminism or woman’s studies textbook. Given that it now has a marked 2nd Edition, it probably is a textbook at some universities.
So I took a picture yesterday of Nico looking at the games on the wall, cropped it, and posted it without looking too closely at it because The Clitoral Truth is on the end of the other bookshelves, and as we’re finishing up some work at Nogglestead, most of the To-Read shelves are in my office currently. Not only are the books double stacked on the bookshelves, but the bookshelves are currently double-stacked–I have the bookshelves from the hallway outside my office in my office, standing in front of the office bookshelves. So The Clitoral Truth is behind another bookshelf on the other end of the bookshelves.
But I should have looked closer.
If you click it to see it larger, which I hope nobody at the office does, you can see on the top shelf Sexual Revolution which looks to be another textbook from the Modern University which I bought in 2010 but has languished, probably in the back rank, on the bookshelves in the hall for that long.
It’s not that I’ve put the more spicy titles on the top shelves to keep them away from the children. When they first could read and started looking at my bookshelves, I took some of the more, erm, concrete titles off of the bookshelves entirely, but I left the textbookish titles, including Philosophy and Sex (mentioned by name in The Courtship of Barbara Holt) on the shelves.
When we moved the books and bookshelves into my office, the disorder of the books got rearranged, and Sexual Revolution apparently got put on the top shelf. And inadvertently into official corporate communications.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be explaining this to HR and using the words “Sociology textbook.” A lot.
Gentle reader, my journey with eyeglasses began early. When I was five years old, I had eye surgery to correct a lazy eye (my kindergarten teacher visited me in the hospital!). I was issued eyeglasses shortly thereafter, and my parents (I had two in those days, gentle reader, a halycon era I can scarcely recall except that my kindergarten teacher visited me in the hospital, and a boy in the next bed had action figures that you could take apart and reassemble differently, and he let me play with them a bit) had me wear an athletic strap to keep them on my head. And after a while, the strap was painfully tight, so I took off the glasses for good.
Well, not so good. When I got to sixth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Pickering (who had no cause to visit me in a hospital, but I remember her name just the same) brought up during parent-teacher conferences that I was a smart boy, but I was bombing all my vocabulary quizzes. Turns out that she wrote the vocabulary words on the board for us to fill in the blanks on the quizzes, and so I could not see them. So I got a pair of glasses again, big 80s glasses, and we soon moved to the trailer park where I would be a nerd at the bottom of the social ladder. I didn’t have a regular eye doctor, much like I didn’t have a regular any sort of doctor or dentist at the time. The young optometrist I saw my freshman year determined that I needed bifocals. As I started high school. Extra nerd on that scrawny little me of 1980-something. Thick, thick glasses to correct raging astigmatism.
My sainted mother sprung for gas permeable contact lenses for me sometime in my sophomore year, so I wore them through the rest of high school and through college and into the start of my working life and then into my career. But sometime around the turn of the century, I got tired of them and went back to glasses.
In 200…6? I got LASIK surgery because, if civilization collapsed (it’s been on my mind a while), I didn’t want to be one set of eyeglasses from crawling around like Velma or looking at the Nogglestead library like Burgess Meredith at the end of the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last”:
I was a bit disappointed with the result. LASIK only corrected my vision to where my glasses did. Which is normal vision. I had wanted to have eyes like a hawk, but I just had eyes like me without eight to ten ounces of plastic on my nose.
Fast forward a couple of decades years, and I started to wonder about my vision. In church, the face of the pastor is not quite clear to me, but I do sit in the back row, chief of sinners that I be. And I sometimes cannot pick out small text on signs as I’m driving by. So I went to the local LASIK outfit to see about a touch-up which I understand one needs after a couple of years.
The LASIK guy said that with a, erm, distinguished gentleman like me, the eyes are not as adaptable or good candidates for additional work, so he wrote me a prescription for eyeglasses to help with my distance vision. I took it to a shop across from the mall and paid too much to order a set of glasses that I thought looked good on me but are not the prevailing style. Only later did I realize that the eyeglass frames matched the style that my brother has worn for years–so when it came to picking something out, I picked out something that looked familiar.
I waited a couple of days for my sets of glasses to arrive–I got a pair of sunglasses, too. When they did, I popped them on, looked at the sign across the street, and….
That’s it?
The larger signs were just a touch sharper, but I couldn’t see anything with the glasses that I could without.
That was a year or so back, and every once and again, I think I should try them again. This weekend, we went to see Charlie Berens at a local theatre, and we sat in the back (cheapest of the sinners that I be). The comedian did not look as sharp as he does on YouTube, fourteen inches away. So I got them out again on Sunday and brought them to church. I did some A/B testing, or “1 or 2″ testing, by putting on the glasses and then taking them off to see how much earlier I could read street signs or to see how much clearer the pastor was when I had them on, and….
Not much. A little, but not worth the hassle of the logistics of putting the glasses on for driving or shows or church and making sure I have a glasses case (with glasses) and…. To be honest, not worth the hit to the vanity of going back from being a distinguished-looking fellow to the 5″ 6” eighty pound nerd. Which, of course, I am not, but I don’t wonder if I would not feel that way again. Also, I don’t want to become dependent on glasses. I don’t know if the science backs this up, but in my previous experience, one’s eyes behind glasses do not tend to hold steady. I always needed new, stronger glasses every eye appointment.
So I’ll put the glasses back in the drawer for another time.
You know, I’ve done something similar with my beautiful wife’s reading glasses. Sometimes, when I’m reading alone and nobody can see me, I will slip on a pair of her reading glasses to see what effect they have on my close vision and…. Not much.
Well, they do magnify the text, but if I hold my book at regular reading distance (regular because that’s where the focal point is the best–I do read best at a particular distance–is that normal?), the text is just slightly less sharp, maybe.
But a slight improvement, maybe, is not yet worth the cost.
One day, too soon, I will turn that corner. And I will suddenly need bifocals again. But it doesn’t seem to be today.
Old movies had Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn or Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr or Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. The (early) 21st century had this film bring together two attractive and popular stars–Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie–for what they might have hoped would be similar chemistry. I guess it kind of worked–this film broke up Brad Pitt’s first marriage and led to his relationship and eventual marriage to Jolie (which also ended in ongoing acrimony).
Pitt plays John Smith, an assassin for a government agency of some sort, who has a cover of a construction engineer who has to travel to various projects. Jolie plays an assassin for a different agency whom he marries after meeting her in Bogotá after one of them–or both, or neither–has done a job (the flashback is ambiguous). Five or six years into their marriage, they’ve settled into a routine that has led them to counseling (the counseling bit is a frame story that begins and ends the movie). They’re both tasked by their agencies to take out a prisoner during some sort of exchange, and each approaches the job in their own way. Mrs. Smith has a tech trap set up, and Mr. Smith comes at it from a more hands-on approach. But they interfere with each other’s attempt and vow to eliminate their rival–only to eventually discover it’s the spouse. So they come together to grab the prisoner from a super-secure facility and discover that he’s bait in trying to get the Smiths to kill each other which leads to a shoot-em-up climax and finis!
I guess Pitt and Jolie might have some chemistry here, but it’s not developed as in an old movie. This is an actioner, so it’s a series of set pieces with practical effects and it looks to be some wire work. So it doesn’t look quite as video-gamey as today’s fare but is does employ on some video-gamey camera work. One wonders if what it would look like if made today–probably Mr. Smith would be a punchline and not an equal to his wife, although when they have a long hand-to-hand combat sequence that destroys their house, Mrs. Smith equals her husband already for drama’s sake which is, erm, stylized? Idealized? A physical confrontation like that would only take place in a movie. In real life, it would be a lot shorter and likely less favorably for Mrs. Smith.
At any rate, not a bad film. A product of its time. Which is a bit now, but mostly then.
Gentle reader, I have successfully triumphed over a small broken appliance with a successful hack.
A couple of years ago, we bought a little cordless handheld vacuum commonly known as a Dust Buster no matter who makes them, although ours does happen to be a dustbuster® by Black + Decker. I used it to vacuum up the little bits of wood that shook off of firewood on the bricks before my fireplace every day. It’s the kind where you have to hold the power button to make it work. And it worked for about a year when it suddenly stopped. Pushing the button would not engage the motor and the suction even after charging the device for a long time.
So it languished on a side desk in my office for over a year, as things do (as you know, gentle reader!) until I recently cleared off that desk–well, I didn’t clear it, but I did remove the dustbuster® and a flashlight that’s not working–and took the things to my workbench. Which has had a blocker project on it for a couple of months. The blocker project is not the lamp–I’ve moved that, yet incomplete five years later, to a different desk in the garage. It’s a bed tray that I was hoping to do some découpage with, but I ran into a little snag painting it and just… left it there for later, which is even later from now.
With a little time to kill available to me on a Sunday afternoon, so I set aside the blocker project (perhaps for five years or more) and opened the device up to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.
When I opened the shell, I could see it was a simple device. A battery, a charging plug, a pressure switch, and a simple motor turning a plastic rotor.
Given that it was a power switch required pressure to keep it on, I thought perhaps the external switch was not contacting the internal switch, so I pressed it tighter, and the motor ran.
I did, however, see a little spark at the top of the battery from time to time, and my original theory proved incorrect. Essentially, the little bit of metal attached to the top of the battery had come loose. When the dustbuster® lie on its back and when I pressed on it, I guess the battery was close enough that it touched or the electricity could jump the gap, but it was definitely broken apart. The battery was not in a housing where you could swap them out. It was hard-wired into the system. Or it should have been.
Now I suppose, gentle reader, I could have soldered the lead back onto the battery. One of the pyrography tools I have, the nicer one, has a soldering tip and came with some solder–and I might have another kit somewhere–but I have never soldered anything in my life, successfully or no, and I didn’t want to try and to fail on a Sunday afternoon with what would be the defining moment or capstone of my weekend.
So, instead, I got a couple of rubber bands, and….
Well, I make that sound so easy: I grabbed a couple of rubber bands, as though Nogglestead has a drawer full of them. Now, you might think this is the case, and it might well be–I have not opened some drawers in years, and I am not sure I would have noticed rubber bands on instances where I have opened some of the more esoteric drawers looking for a luggage tag or the driver’s side mirror of a 1986 Geo Storm. I mean, it’s not like the collection of 3.5″ discs from my first 286 circa 1991. I know which drawer holds those.
So I went looking for rubber bands. We don’t get nor use rubber bands a lot here at Nogglestead. It’s not like we’ve had need to buy a bag of them. Mostly, they come to us on rare occasions when the postal service sees fit to put a rubber band around a stack of our mail. Or our accountant will sometimes band our files or filings together. But we’re getting only a single hands’ counting of rubber bands annually. I put them in the little box of paper clips, which I also glean from filings our accountants sends us, but I recently discarded several as my beautiful wife was concerned the kittens might take them from the box and choke on them. But I found a rubber band under the paper clips, and I started back out to the garage with it, when the rubber band of unknown provenance and age broke. I went back to my office and found two more which appeared more supple. I know I am running on, but I want to give you a sense of how much actual moving back and forth from the actual opposite ends of my home I had to do to to acomplish this simple repair.
Where was I? Probably going up and down the stairs.
So I looped the rubber bands around the battery to ensure that the lead remains in contact with the battery. As I mounted it into its the plastic body, I had to re-weave the rubber bands a bit, but it held. And when I got the screws in and pressed the power switch, it worked.
So I have a working dustbuster® again. At least until the rubber bands snap or until I jostle it so that the lead is no longer in contact with the battery. But I feel clever for an afternoon.
Also, I am now thinking about how easy it would be to unscrew the housing and reverse the rotor on the motor so that the dustbuster® blows instead of sucks. But I don’t have many friends in real life to whom I could try this. Just a coincidence, I suppose.
Also, sorry I don’t have pictures like a proper Internet how-to, but I was eager to try it out (it worked! as I mentioned) but then I am too afraid that if I open it up again to see the magnificent harp of Icantsolder will lose its magic.
As I read the first in this series, Star Rebel, earlier this month, of course I picked it up right away. I figure if I did not, I might not pick it up and “complete” the series for a couple of years–witness how long it’s been since I picked up Iroshi by Cary Osborn–five years–without picking the second book in the trilogy there because I was unimpressed with the first book in it.
Joe at Glorious Trash has completed Busby’s The Demu Trilogy, and he was unimpressed. But I think this book was okay–as I’ve mentioned, it’s been a few years since I read The Demu Trilogy, but I think I am coming to understand F.M. Busby’s writing: He’s more of a short story writer stringing together incidents and episodes, perhaps with some idea where they’re going but perhaps not.
This book picks up where the last left off. Bran Tregare, a member, but of an outcast branch, of a wealthy Earthborn concern has survived the UET military academy, survived serving his first tour aboard a ship with The Butcher, a captain known for throwing cadets out of the airlock for minor infractions, and he has participated in a mutiny that liberates an armed UET ship for him to command. His situational brutality, however, has caused his lover to have second thoughts about him, so she has left him. And we start this book….
Well, the book is basically a series of episodes where Tregare and his crew travel to different planets and meet different people. He buys a load of slave women from a captain who was treating them humanely; he picks up a new second, a black woman who was captured from a Earthen gang; and so on. They’re episodic in the way that, say, Star Trek was: The ship goes somewhere, something happens/they do something, and they move on in the next chapter. Some characters are introduced, some leave the main story line, and then we get to an end where Tregare marries an agent of his family’s organization, a woman from another of Busby’s series and they deal with a family of assassins on the Hulzein outcasts’ new world. But the book leaves off with him preparing to assemble his fleet of ships to take first Stronghold and then, presumably, Earth–or maybe the other way around.
The back of the book says:
REBEL’S QUEST is the final chapter in the Hulzein Chronicles, bringing this monumental saga to a resounding conclusion.
Uh, this is the second book of what looks to be (now that I looked it up) a four-book series. So I guess it makes sense that it ends with threads unresolved.
I don’t know if Busby was padding this out to be a four-book deal, or a trilogy, but this book does not advance the main story arc a whole lot. Instead of padding, though, I think Busby probably just liked the character and wanted to throw him into some adventures.
But my previous sentiment continues to hold true: Pretty lightweight rocket jockey stuff with a lot of sex thrown in. Not graphic sex, but Tregare gets his share, from the black warrior woman to the wild child of a backslid culture whose colony returned to wild when the last ship to visit could not lift again and other encounters that are described as occuring, but not too graphic.
So if I fall over other books in the series for fifty cents each, I’ll pick them up. I don’t know that I will look for them in used book stores, but now that I said I won’t, I probably will.
What role did crystal meth and other previously underreported factors play in the brutal murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard? The Book of Matt is a page-turning cautionary tale that humanizes and de-mythologizes Matthew while following the evidence where it leads, without regard to the politics that have long attended this American tragedy.
Meanwhile, in Springfield, we get Considering Matthew Shepard. Odds are pretty good it does not mention meth.
When the legend becomes fact, sing the legend, I guess.
(Link to the Hot Air piece and book via Instapundit.)
So you might have expected that I would have picked this book right up right after I bought it. Well, gentle reader, two things impacted that.
First, I must have bought the book in the St. Louis area before I really enumerated the books I bought each week in Good Book Hunting posts (which go back not quite two decades).
Second:
Well, it was not quite forty years. The memory came up on the Recycler Tour just a day or so before we had to move all of those bookshelves for some work to be done on our lower level, and I grabbed the book. And, of course, I had to read it to prove the prophet, in this case me twelve years ago, mistaken.
At any rate, what of the book?
Well, it’s an interesting artifact. Number 15 in the NFL Punt, Pass, and Kick Library. A hardback with a binding suitable for libraries, it has a cover sticker which prices it at $2.50 in 1971, so it might have been priced for the tax write-off when donating to libraries in that era. $2.50 is pricey for a kid’s book then, and this did not come out of a school book order, brah.
The book basically covers a number of running backs from the NFL and the AFL with small bios of several (Floyd Little, Leroy Kelly, Dick Bass, O.J. Simpson, Alvin Haymond, Ron Johnson) in individual chapters and then groups a couple sets of other running backs (Gale Sayers, Mel Farr, Dick Post, Mike Garrett, Donny Anderson, and MacArthur Lane are “The Breakaway Artists”; Jim Nance, Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, Hewritt Dixon, Ken Willard, and Mat Snell are “The Workhorses”, and Calvin Hill and Duane Thomas played on the same team).
Given how few of the names resonate now, fifty-some years later (Gale Sayers, Larry Csonka, and O.J. Simpson for non-football reasons from thirty years ago), the book really highlights how ephemeral the position really is. A number of these guys are very young, and they’ve already been injured a number of times. Running backs tend to have a couple of really good years, and then they fade except for rare exceptions (and only a couple of the guys in this book are exceptions). I mean, if you look back at the Green Bay Packers running backs of recent note (and of course you do because you’re a Green Bay Packers fan, aren’t you?), you see Ahman Green, who I nicknamed “The Bowler” because he fumbled a bunch, sometimes forward for extra yards. Ahman Green is the Packers’ leading rusher of all time. You see Samkon Gado, who spelled Green when he was hurt, had a couple of good games and maybe a season, but who is most notable for finishing his studies to become an ENT (Ears, Nose, and Throat) doctor–that’s his current career. You might think of Eddie Lacy, who was good for a couple of years until injuries caught up with him. You might think of Aaron Jones, who had a couple of really good seasons but is getting slowed by injuries…. So, yeah, these guys will also be forgotten in fifty years along with so many of us.
This book is also a product of its time in that many of the subjects are black, and they come from poor neighborhoods. Back in my day, we called it the ghetto (as did Bob Gibson, as did the other neighbors of the projects where I lived, as did Robert B. Parker in a number of his books). But that term has fallen out of fashion in a way that barrio has not. Or has it? I dunno. But, still. Notable.
So an interesting read even though it’s a kids book because of the historical information and perspective it provides.
Now, I would say that I’m going to look for the other titles in the series, but I rarely get to the kids’ section in the library book sales I go to, and the titles are too old for the garage sales, even the church garage sales, that I go to. Maybe I’ll stumble on one at one of my rare trips to estate sales these days, but probably not. These books and those like them have already probably passed through the cat litter factory.
My beautiful wife gave me the first season of the original Twilight Zone series, probably not long after I read The Twilight Zone Encycolopedia. I don’t know if she’d forgotten that, but she got me a couple of these individual DVDs with four episodes per for another gifting opportunity this year. So instead of figuring where I’d left off on the first season of the program, I popped in this DVD when I wanted to watch some shorter bits of television.
I definitely got the sense from watching that these episodes were chosen from a later season. I seem to recall from the book that the show had an auspicious beginning, but that the powers that be cut its budget and messed with its formula in later seasons (of course, I could be thinking of Star Trek based on Star Trek Memories). Maybe that was just the way back in those days. But the episodes on this disc really had a low budget feel to them, the kind of thing I associate a lot with the black-and-white speculative digest programs (I guess my other experience back in the day was with The Outer Limits).
The DVD includes:
“The Passersby”, wherein Civil War soldiers pass an old derelict plantation house whose owner sits on the porch and watches them go by. One soldier stops and asks for a drink of water, which leads them to discover–they’re in The Twilight Zone! DUN DUN DUN!
“The Grave”, wherein a villain is gunned down by the townspeople of his home town. When another gunman comes to town, one that the townspeople hired to track and kill the badman, he is challenged to visit the villain’s grave. DUN DUN DUN!
“Deaths-Head Revisited”, wherein a former Nazi camp commandant stops in a small town and discovers it is the place where his camp was–so he revisits the camp and enjoys some good memories until the ghosts of the dead return to put him on trial. DUN DUN DUN!
“The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, wherein a young man climbs out of the coffin at his funeral and tries to convince the suspicious townsfolk that he is not a threat to them. But is he? DUN DUN DUN!
So we’ve got four period pieces which can reuse sets from the Western television shows (“The Grave”, “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, “The Passersby”) with stories that thematically deal with the evils of war (“Deaths-Head Revisited”, “The Passersby”). They’re so themeatically similar and so aesthetically similar that they really didn’t provide the same sense of wonder nor the same inspiration to write other stories. And even though they’re still only 30 minute episodes–actually 25 minutes or so–they can seem a little longer than they needed to be, particularly “The Grave”.
I have a couple more of these four-episode collections, and I will undoubtedly get to them by and by, but I was disappointed with this one to say the least.
Your mileage may vary, of course. At least “The Grave” had Lee Marvin in it.
Somebody that we used to know posted this on Facebook:
Ya know, that’s never been the problem here. When we have gone through phases of banana-eating here and then the phase ends, leaving us with bananas that go to baking-ripe, I’ve often made banana bread. Chocolate banana bread, no less.
The problem is that few of us will eat it.
I don’t know if it’s because we’re all lazy, and cutting off a piece is too difficult for us. Speaking for myself, I don’t tend to like sweet breads in the middle of the day. I’m okay with a doughnut in the morning, but sometime after that, I’m onto non-sweet breads. Bagels, and sweet non-breads, but not sweet breads.
In the olden days, we could take baked goods in for the teachers at their Lutheran school, but now they’re at the big impersonal public high school, that would be weird.
So we don’t throw the bananas away. We add some ingredients and invest some time in baking, and then we throw the result away.
See also Brian J.’s experiments with bread pudding circa 2008-2009.
I just picked this chapbook up in April, so reading it in October represents reading it right away at Nogglestead. As you know, gentle reader, over the years, my autumn reading has drifted toward poetry chapbooks and art monographs that I can browse during football games. However, this year, we have opted out of the NFL Sunday Ticket package because it’s on YouTube TV. Instead, I have gotten the NFL+ package, but due to the scraps of streaming rights that the NFL swept up after making big deals elsewhere, I can only get games that appear in the local market and only on hand-held devices. So it’s hard to hold a book while one holds an iPad and struggles with the deficiencies of the NFL app (stopping it, restarting it every couple of minutes when it bogs down). Which is just as well as I have not collected a bunch of monographs recently. So I have been reading chapbooks recently by themselves.
Now, this book must come with an interesting story. It is a chapbook copyright 2013, but the copyright page indicates that some of the poems within it were published in the mid 1990s. Which would seem to indicate that the poet took almost thirty years to come up with a chapbook’s worth of material. Gentle reader, my first chapbooks appeared in 1994 and 1995. It did take me almost thirty years to work up a full length collection, though. Well, not exactly–most of the material in Coffee House Memories comes from the middle 1990s. It just took me thirty years to get up the desire to enbooklenate the poems. And it might be another decade at my current pace to cough up enough for another chapbook. I have to wonder if the poet here experienced something similar. Or maybe it took thirty years to save enough money or for the cost in rights for a Peter Sellers movie still on the cover.
And the poetry? Overall, pretty good. A couple of them are meta poems about poets writing poetry, a couple of reflections on other works (including a Peter Sellers movie moment), but the lines are long enough to convey meaning, and the poems rely on images although sometimes a bit obscure. Still, leaps and bounds above most of the things I read.
This is her first chapbook, but Finishing Line Press has a number of later ones listed. I will keep an eye out for them.
Legislation to expand the rights of homeless people — including a provision exempting them from the city’s law against urinating and defecating in public — was introduced Friday at the Board of Aldermen.
The sponsor, Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier of Tower Grove East, and Aldermanic President Megan Green asserted that the exemption was needed because police had targeted the unhoused with selective enforcement.
Undoubtedly, they only enforced the law against those violating it.
This film comes from the early middle 1980s, and it’s definitely a product of its time.
Eddie Murphy was beginning his ascent to being a box office superstar–he’d done 48 Hours the year before, and Beverly Hills Cop was a year in the future. Wait, then it was Coming to America in 1987, but The Golden Child in between, and maybe that was it–Boomerang and The Distinguished Gentleman and Vampire in Brooklyn were kinda flops, so aside from a couple of sequels which did okay, it was onto the silly family movies and remakes in the middle 1990s. Maybe Eddie Murphy’s heydey coincided with my youth and watching Raw and The Golden Child over and over on Showtime whilst in the trailer.
Still, one detects a certain theme in Murphy’s works: The fish out of water. The con out of jail. The Detroit cop in California. The PI in Tibet.
And, in this film, a con man swept up into a life of luxury. Dan Ackroyd, who is also in this film (I say that a bit facetiously–both he and Murphy star in the film and have equal billing), plays a commodities trader named Louis Winthrope who aspires to be respected by the old money men, played by Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy. They, on the other hand, don’t think much of him. And when one of them reads an article about Nature vs. Nurture, he thinks that any man in the commodity trader’s environment would thrive, and that if Winthrop were out of his environment, he would not thrive. So they make a wager on it and they turn Winthrope out and replace him with Billy Ray Valentine (Murphy), a con man arrested after bumping into Winthrop outside the club. When Winthrop and Valentine learn of the scheme, they set about to reverse their fortunes and to bankrupt the Duke boys. That is, the old money brothers, not the Dukes of Hazzard.
Maybe I just haven’t watched enough period pieces set in the 18th or 19th century or much of recent times, but something about the club and the snooty people there and the social circles and the locations smack of the 1980s. One could almost imagine Judge Smalls from Caddyshack in the film. But unlike perhaps some recent things, it does not depict commodities trading or making fortunes as evil in and of themselves. Thematically, that will change, and by 1983, probably already is.
An amusing film which stands the test of time if you’re of a certain age. Undoubtedly, younger people might find it an anachronism. But maybe not–I caught my oldest re-watching The Secret of My Success. Maybe kids these days can appreciate aspirational comedies.
Oh, and the film also had Jamie Lee Curtis as a financially savvy prostitute. But, to be honest, I’ve never found Jamie Lee Curtis all that. Maybe it’s the short haircuts. But Kristin Holby, on the other hand, plays Winthrope’s fiance who abandons him in his time of need. She, I like, although she’s made up in this film to be a caricature of a shallow society girl. Continue reading “Movie Report: Trading Places (1983)”→
A book review of F.M. Busby’s Cage A Man, the first part of the Demu Trilogy, prompted me to pick up this book (as I prophesied a couple weeks ago). It’s the first half of a two-book set which I purchased in 2011. So it’s been, um, a couple of years since I read the Demu Trilogy in my early adulthood.
This book takes place in a far future world where near faster-than-light travel exists, possibly stolen from an alien race. A corporation has taken control of the Earth and its outworld colonies and looks to eliminate its rival corporations and foundations on Earth. Members of one such rival foundation get their young son into a military service academy under faked papers to keep him safe, but he endures hardships in the brutal training academy. He shows aptitude in ship piloting and fighting, though, so he graduates despite two stints in the special torture cell used as punishment. He gets posted as a cadet to a ship whose captain notoriously “spaces” cadets, throwing them out of the airlock for small offenses. Bran survives and thrives in his next posting.
He learns that mutiny is not uncommon, and that after mutiny, the mutineers rename their ships and head for Hidden worlds–worlds that the corporation does not know about but whose locations are shared by the Escaped captains. When the captain decides to punish Tregare’s friend and lover for an infraction, he triggers a mutiny that liberates a ship. A counter-mutiny by captured corporation loyalists elevates Tregare from third in command to captain of his own ship, and he vows revenge upon the corporation and hopes to build a wider rebellion.
Part of the world-building going on is that the spacers, who travel at near light speeds, take the Long View because their calendar time differs from the experience of time for residents on planets they visit. We don’t see much of this in the books as most of the books and characters are on the same ship, but although it tries to handle this, it’s a little wonky. The personal calendars of individuals are going to differ based on how long they travel at near-light speeds and how long they spend on planets. Forget the people on the planets, who are going to age decades for every couple of months that the spacefarers travel–the other space farers are going to age at different rates as well, but this book kind of overlooks that. And the trade–basically, the ship is going to load up 40 or 50 years before it will reach its destination in real time. What goods and services will those planets need in a hundred of their years? The book is vague on the trade goods, but one wonders how that would work. It’s a shame to introduce the Long View when it’s not all worked out, but I guess it added a touch of novelty and verite to the book in 1984.
It’s not bad for rocket jockey kinds of science fiction. However, unlike some of the juvie stuff, the books contain sex–not especially graphic, but it’s there, so if you’re put off by that, the book might put you off. But not bad for its time.
YouTube suggested a Peter Zeihan video (Don’t Be Surprised by China’s Collapse) when I was just looking for a Johnny “Guitar” Walker song (“Ain’t That A Bitch“) because I haven’t cleared my cookies often enough in my main browser.
And I look at his backdrop:
And my conspiracy lobe started throbbing.
Given that the continents of “Earth” are all in a semi-circle on this map, what, exactly, is on the southern hemisphere of this planet?
Understand, gentle reader, that the conspiracy lobe of my brain is equal parts my creativity for fiction, the things that gave me the willies when I was younger, and my rational concerns based on lived experience (well, with projection from some individuals to the behavior of groups).
Old movies had 
As I read the first in this series, 
Gentle reader, you might know I am a sucker for children’s books on celebrities or sports figures. For example:
My beautiful wife gave me the first season of the original Twilight Zone series, probably not long after I read 
I just picked this chapbook up 
This film comes from the early middle 1980s, and it’s definitely a product of its time. 
A book review of F.M. Busby’s Cage A Man, the first part of the Demu Trilogy, prompted me to pick up this book (as 