To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Robert B. Parker’s "blog" on Amazon.com.
One post with 61 comments from readers. I cannot fault him for not keeping up with it; blogs are facile mechanisms for writers who aren’t doing five pages a day, no more, no less, for profit.
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When improvising a lullaby for your newborn, it is perfectly acceptable to rhyme baby with astrolabe. The kid will not call you on it.
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How can we feel national pride in our deadly heat waves?
At least six deaths have been blamed on the heat, and the weather was suspected in at least three others.
Compare to the more nuanced, reasonable, and thoroughly progressive, socialist-minded continent, as demonstrated by France:
The death toll in France from August’s [2003] blistering heat wave has reached nearly 15,000, according to a government-commissioned report released Thursday, surpassing a prior tally by more than 3,000.
Scientists at INSERM, the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, deduced the toll by determining that France had experienced 14,802 more deaths than expected for the month of August.
Hopefully, government intervention, regulation, and meddling can solve the crisis we’re having in the lack of actual deaths in our deadly heat wave.
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The words: the "market." The you: The Brookings Institution:
Low-income residents of 13 cities across the nation pay extra for many everyday services, sometimes thousands of dollars more over a whole year, a study to be released today shows.
By taking out higher-interest mortgages, shopping at rent-to-own furniture stores, using check-cashing businesses instead of banks and buying groceries at convenience stores, the nation’s working poor households pay much more than moderate- and high-income households for life’s essentials, says the Brookings Institution study, which analyzed services in San Francisco, Oakland and 11 other cities.
The report — “From Poverty, Opportunity: Putting the Market to Work for Lower-Income Families” — calls on government officials to create laws to curb services that gouge low-income consumers, and it proposes reproducing fledgling programs the authors found across the country.
No word on whether how the Brookings Institution wants businesses to recoup their losses on the higher default rates of those in poverty. Perhaps the government should just create laws to curb poverty, risk, and rain on days you wanted to go for a bike ride since it’s that easy.
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Oh, sorry, I guess it’s not really Satanism, just a prosecutor using a law targeting Satanism creatively to punish someone who abused her child:
Boone County Circuit Judge Gary Oxenhandler sentenced Erma McKinney on Monday to 21 years for assault, 10 years for child abuse, eight years for child endangerment, and seven years for child endangerment in a ritual or ceremony. McKinney will serve the first three sentences concurrently and the last one consecutively.
McKinney was convicted in May.
The ritual or ceremony charge was brought because McKinney told police she punished her son with a hot shower more than once.
I demand my legislators do something! and make sure that assault with an active shower head is an additional felony, because 30 years just ain’t enough.
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You know, the St. Louis Reperatory Theatre put on this play last year, and I didn’t have the inkling to go. I mean, face it, I hear Steven Woolf on the radio hawking the shows, and his forced enthusiasm kills any I might feel about a play. I mean, this one is a musical, and everybody knows how I feel about musicals (hint). So I didn’t go, and reading the book, I’m sorry I didn’t.
I picked this book club edition for a couple bucks at one of the book fairs I attended this summer. I think it was St. Charles, but come on, St. Charles, St. Louis, Kirkwood, Belleville, Webster Groves….they’re all beginning to blend together. I’m not reading the books fast enough to keep their origins fresh.
Aside from that, let’s dwell on the fact that this is a book club edition. Now, I’ve done my turns with the Book of the Month Club and the Quality Paperback Club (and the Writers’ Digest Book Club) beginning in the 1990s, but they didn’t offer contemporary plays. Is there a Broadway Book Club out there, or is this disappearance representative of the death of middlebrow culture? I mean, not to put too fine of a point on it, where has drama-loving middlebrow culture gone? In the olden days, plays and theatre were cheap and popular entertainment, with stars accountable to their audiences both in their performance and their lifestyles. Now, our popular entertainment is phoned in from somewhere else, delivered via unresponsive screening technologies by stars who don’t know their ultimate audiences, but feel contempt for them. What happened? Oh, yeah, theatre tickets stopped selling for a penny and snotty little English and Drama majors started getting uppity, using the rarification of their academic experience to distance themselves from the dirty, unthinking (or wrong thinking) plebes. Probably more of the former than the latter.
This particular work breaks down the fourth wall in a rather interesting fashion. It does the normal play-within-the-play thing as well; the story revolves around the last, unfinished work of Charles Dickens as presented by a turn-of-the-century British troupe. Ergo, all actors are playing actors playing characters in the play. Throughout, the Edwin Drood action stops as the drama personnel of the British troupe make asides, discuss their parts, and so on. Ultimately, the British troupe asks the audience to help finish off the play, as Dickens died before revealing the Solution of Edwin Drood.
So the play, this play, the Mystery of Edwin Drood, offers a novel and amusing presentation of several conventions and must be very interesting to see in performance, except now I know all possible endings. It’s like watching Clue: The Movie over and over again even when the mystery is gone. Come to think of it, I do that, too, so I guess I’d go see a production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood if I got the chance.
As far as the St. Louis Reperatory Theatre goes, I guess I’ll make my way over there, too, and give Steven Woolf the benefit of the doubt. Especially since we’ve moved to Old Trees, Missouri, and now we’re so close to it that I sometimes bang my shin into Loretto-Hilton Center when trying to find the bathroom in the dark.
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Who’s the number one Google hit for "anti robot bigotry"?
MfBJN, of course.
The number 2 hit? Some obscure academic’s Web site.
I bet I beat him for Samus Aran naked, too.
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As jets soar, so does temperature:
The National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for the Milwaukee area today, cautioning residents – who sweated through highs in the mid-90s on Saturday – to prepare for even higher temperatures and humidity.
The advisory, the first of its kind this year, is expected to be in effect until Monday morning.
Darrin Hansing, a meteorologist with the weather service in Sullivan, advised residents to stay indoors and drink plenty of fluids.
“Heat exhaustion and heatstroke are very possible in these types of situations if people don’t take the proper precautions,” he said.
Little relief is in sight until the end of the week.
The weather service predicts a hot and humid day today, with highs in the upper 90s. Residents can expect 90-degree days until Thursday afternoon, said Peter Speicher, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sullivan.
“There’s a front coming in from the northwest,” he said.
Milwaukee hit a high of 94 on Saturday.
Temperatures in Fond du Lac climbed to 95 and reached a high of 91 in Lone Rock. It was 97 in Sheboygan and 93 in Madison, Kenosha and Racine.
No, wait, somewhere around paragraph 24, after all the normal admonishments to turn on your air conditioners, you freaking northerners, and don’t put the pets in the sweat lodge, we get the tie to the weekend air show:
The Milwaukee Fire Department also set up three sprinkler tents around the Veterans Park area for the TCF Bank Air Expo on Saturday, Lt. Tim Halbur said.
We then get a couple short paragraphs about the air show and how people coped with the French-killing temperatures at the air show. I guess that’s where the Journal-Sentinel sent its photographers to cover the heat wave, or maybe it couldn’t afford to take pictures of and write stories about both the heat wave and the air show, so the paper did its part in conserving energy by combining the two stories in a surprising and haphazard way.
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Drives me as mad as anything, that companies tack on service charges and other means of bleeding you after hooking you in with a low price or rate. Economists are making their theories, and Christopher Shea reviews.
Bottom line, it helps the savvy consumer by soaking most idiots.
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You know, M*A*S*H isn’t as funny now, realizing that 50 years after the war and 25 years after the television show we’d still deal with the unspoken geopolitical implications behind the hijinks.
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Apparently, the producers of Channel4.com have blotted the movie Dirty Dancing from their minds; otherwise, how could they call Eric Carmen a one-hit wonder for his song “All By Myself”?
Oh, they’re British.
As if that’s some excuse they didn’t spend much of the late 1980s suffering through “Make Me Lose Control” on the radio.
My psychiatrist appreciates the difference and is glad I was not born in Leeds.
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Inspiration here: Don’t gobble up slick tricks — get Fido a pro: It takes more than fake certifications to make a pet sitter:
So how can you find this trustworthy soul? It makes sense to start with a referral from someone you know and respect, like a friend or veterinarian, preferably someone who has actually used this sitter’s services.
You can also look in the phone book under “Pet Sitting Services” or check with an organization such as the Humane Society, or a local shelter or rescue group. I found a wonderful sitter for my greyhound, Elvis, through the referral program of Golden State Greyhound Adoption. My sole concern has been that sometimes I suspect he prefers her to me.
No doubt the government-solves-everything crowd and the organized pet sitters with organizations and whatnot know that their preferred solution is a license.
Author of the piece identifies some handy due dilligence for selecting a pet sitter in a free marketplace, but caveat emptor can always be solved when you knock out that damn laissez-faire. Both are foreign words anyway, too good for us Americans.
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Why did a hottie take up with a down-on-his-English-degree printing press operator like me?
Because chicks dig sardonic humor and classical allusions, apparently.
Remember, Googlers, when you’re trying to figure out how to attract hot women, the answer is read more Shakespeare.
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I picked this book up at the Kirkwood Book Fair because I recognized the local author’s name from the Big Sleep Books, and this book was a First Edition/First Printing. For a dollar. You cannot do wrong, can you?
Well, it’s a child snatch book, and although it’s not Nightmare in Manhattan, I didn’t care for it that much. I’m just not big on that particular plot thing. Perhaps I just don’t have the same nightmares as most parents, but I don’t have an automatic investment in child snatch books, even if there’s the scandalous confrontation of child molestation! It hearkens me back to my single visit to a starting writers’ group in my former suburb, where it was me, a couple of “poets,” and a number of old ladies all writing books on child molestation. It creeped me out, I kid you not.
The book is a serviceable genre piece, though, and worth a buck if you can find it. It did, however, alert me to Mayhaven Publishing and its annual novel competition. Boy, novel competitions are starting to look good to me as far as publishing my last novel are concerned.
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That is, the number of Maxim magazine’s 12 Worst Comedians of All Time whose books I have read in the last year (Sinbad and Judy Tenuta).
Of course, now if I see the others’ books at book fairs and I remember, I’ll probably pick them up so I can complete the set.
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Althouse likes it, but come on. The new Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ad has the title America Needs a New Direction, but its premise is that it’s about turning America around, and the only speaker in the ad is Bill Clinton.
Somehow, Bill Clinton does not represent a new direction, merely a reprise of a time when the world was rosier for Democrats, and they briefly controlled the presidency and the Congress. Before the country began its true change in a new direction (which sort of diverged, but turned parallel, sadly).
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Bush jawbones Hezbollah on Mideast peace issue
Unless he slew them with the jawbone of an ass, I don’t see how this verb fits into the characterization of presidential behavior.
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On Sunday, I reviewed Stanley Bing’s novel Lloyd: What Happened. Today, I got several Google hits for the book title.
It’s because CNN is running a piece on him in support of his new nonfiction book 100 Bull—- Jobs … And How to Get Them.
None of those cheapskates used the Amazon link to buy the novel, though. However will I top my quarterly record of $.08 without the help from some hapless Internet searchers?
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Somehow, I’m not sure whether the government should be in the business of determining whether cows are happy enough:
Fears that big operations will muscle out family farms have produced a backlash, including a boycott by the Organic Consumers Association against the country’s biggest organic milk brand, Horizon Organic.
Organic farmers and consumer groups hope the Agriculture Department will level the field. The agency is considering whether to mandate that milk bearing the “USDA Organic” seal come from cows that have significant access to pasture, a move smaller producers say would give them the protection they need.
The whole marketing story used to be that organic junk was better for the consumer, healthier and all that. One would think that corporate economies of scale applied to organics, yielding more healthy consumers, would be a good thing. But not if corporations are involved; then the marketing story switches to more green, cow happiness (which corporations cannot/do not provide):
Chris Hoffman drank Horizon milk until she learned about the dispute and switched brands.
The resident of Sherburne, N.Y., said she’d thought she was buying milk from “family farms with happy cows.” To her, feedlot milk does not follow the spirit of organic farming.
“I just think it’s patently dishonest. And it just really ticked me off,” she said.
The spirit of organic farming, apparently, is protectionism, anti-marketism and anti-consumerism, and creation of artificial price floors to support people who thought that working in a niche market with a pricing minimum would pay off and later discovered, to their own financial (greed!) horror, that when their niche became mainstream, it proved to be less lucrative.
It’s not about the cows, it’s about the cash cows.
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Rail manufacturers, tar producers, and chicken plucking futures have just gone up! Explosion injures two Mallinckrodt workers:
Two employees of Mallinckrodt Inc. suffered minor injuries this morning in a flash fire that occurred while one of them was mixing chemicals.
St. Louis Fire Department Capt. Steve Simpson said the explosion occurred when dust was ignited, possibly from static electricity. It happened at Building 235 at the Mallinckrodt complex at 3700 N. Broadway at about 10:20 a.m.
Those of us who watched the Praxair accident aftermath (my coverage here, here, and here) have to wonder if Mallinckrodt will suffer the same banishment for the industrial accident, or if there are other criteria which a company meet to draw the ire of the government of the city of St. Louis, such as:
Either way, if the city doesn’t punish the company, it will demonstrate once again the fickle nature of our governments and prove that businesses and citizens exist, live, and do business at the leisure of the regal ruling class.
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