Send Picture Books, Please

Hey, I was not aware of this, but there’s apparently a blogospheric challenge to read and review 50 books this year.

Heh. The picture book I reviewed yesterday was my 14th of the year.

I am in good shape, but I won’t officially enter into the challenge because I don’t want to advertise that I have no life. As long as I mention it on the blog here, it will remain a well-kept, unread secret.

(Link seen on Signifying Nothing.)

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Special Shout-At

I just want to give a special shout-at to Atari, Bioware, or whatever genius that decided I need to type

90 characters of CD keys

to install Neverwinter Nights.

90 characters, I kid you not. Three lines of six blocks of five characters of nonsense. In one step, in one screen, in small print on the inside of the manual. Ha ha!

I guess I got them all right, since it installed, but maybe I put a 0 instead of an O and the BSA is helicoptering in right now. Given my track record with games, the four or five minutes represents the most fun I will spend on the game, but they got Heather’s thirty bucks, so who cares if they spit on me and exacerbate my mypoia?

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Review: Kittens and Cats In Colour intro by Christine Metcalf (1971)

Well, I’ve explained that sometimes I cut corners to make my annual quota of sixty or seventy books and that I sometimes count pamphlets as books to make sure I stay on pace. So let me expand my repetwa to picture books. This bit of kitty porn contains a rambling introductory essay about cats through history and then 80 pages, in living British colour, of cats and kittens.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, the pictures are colorful and playful and lack inspirational clichés, but I am going to make an admission here that might get me permanently banned from Carnival of the Cats: Pictures of other cats aren’t that inspiring.

Part of my appreciation of cats lies in their dynamism, in their movement, and in their activities and play and moods and the particular facial expressions I’ve grown to know over time. Thirty-some year old stills really aren’t my bag. But I inherited this book from an aunt, the former crazy cat lady of Lemay, and I’ve looked through it and at each of the pictures and will continue to think of her whenever I dust this book on my read shelves. Granted, she only bought it to try to sell on eBay some years ago when I led her down that dark and destructive path, but there you go, and there I go with that damn Robert Crais turn of phrase IN MY HEAD.

Perhaps I am now the crazy cat blogger of Casinoport. Who doesn’t particularly like picture books about cats.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

What’s the Problem?

St. Louis County cuts a program, and the program performs well:

A recent survey of Choices reported that 95 percent of its graduates last year remained out of jail and drug free for at least a year. This is good news for a program that was badly hobbled after St. Louis County reduced its funding from $950,000 to $200,000 last year.

The budget cut forced officials to reduce the number of counselors in the program from eight to two, cut the number of inmates it served from 320 to 147 and shorten the overall program from 120 to 90 days. A midyear grant helped officials add another full-time and part-time counselor.

Sounds like they streamlined the course and targeted those inmates who the program could help. Probably at the expense of people who were looking forward to killing time over the course of 120 days of their sentences and then looked forward to scoring some dope after their sentences were up.

But undoubtedly, this represents a travesty because MORE TAX MONEY COULD BE SPENT!!!! Proponents of spending a million dollars where $200,000 would do have scoured the St. Louis County ordinances to discover that the Law of Diminishing Returns does not apply here.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Hunter S. Thompson Must Have Hated His Wife

It’s one thing to take your life, but this indicates Thompson either hated his wife or didn’t even think of her:

Pitkin County, Colo., Sheriff Bob Braudis said in a brief telephone interview that Thompson was alone in his kitchen of his Woody Creek home when he shot himself with a handgun. His wife was at a gym, Braudis said.

He left her to walk in on his mess. What a jack.

(Link seen on Michelle Malkin.)

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Quiz Time

Free Will links to a quiz called the Moral Matrix.

Here’s how I did:

Apparently, that means:

As a Robert Crais character would say, “There you go.”

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

A Good Idea, But…

Powerline’s Hindrocket suggests:

Leach’s belief that the anti-hunting forces are just getting warmed up is undoubtedly correct; as another hunter quoted by the Times observes, some of the hunting opponents “would protest the opening of a meat pie.”

This is one time when we can say “It can’t happen here,” and really mean it. America’s hunters are too powerful; I suspect they’re also better armed than their English counterparts. I think it’s time for the NRA to open a branch in England.

Huh, too bad they don’t have a second amendment to defend in England.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Subsidy Sense Tingling

It starts with an anecdote:

Lou Emery used to sell donuts and bus rides out of town until a company man came by this month to tell her the Greyhound had made its last stop here.

He broke the news gently to Emery and the rest of the crew at Daylight Donuts on Interstate 44, about 65 miles southwest of St. Louis. The man gathered up Greyhound’s equipment and apologized for shutting down the service. He left the slightly rusted bus sign in the parking lot.

Now the bus doesn’t stop anywhere around Sullivan for miles. And most residents didn’t even hear about it.

“It was never in the local paper or anything that we had lost it,” Emery said.

The whole story has the tone of a prelude. These people can no longer get transportation! Greyhound is losing $140 million a year! States have tax money or the ability to get tax money! Certainly, states should support this piece of Americana that allows dozens of people to travel every day!

Stories like this, and the inevitable calls for tax money to help a relatively few people make relatively few trips, confuse an offered service with a duty. If private business won’t lose money providing something, the government should. That’s asinine, and perhaps it’s even a straw man, but isn’t that the sense you get?

You know what the government can do to improve Greyhound’s business? Stop propping up airlines. When airline ticket prices go up, Greyhound will once again become the idolized piece of Americana because it will compete with train service for people who cannot afford to pay as much for a airline ticket as it actually costs to ferry the person there.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Nothing from Nothing Leaves State Taxpayers Paying More

The Montana legislature has a really bad idea: setting a retail minimum wage at $22,000 a year. Friends, Montanans, and countrymen, that’s a $10 an hour minimum wage. Rationalizing:

Wal-Mart pays its workers such low wages that they qualify for state welfare benefits subsidized by Montana taxpayers, people told a Senate committee Tuesday.

As an incentive for these “big box stores” to pay a living wage to their workers, Sen. Ken Toole’s Senate Bill 272 would impose a gross proceeds tax on these companies. They would be exempt from the tax if they paid their employees an entry level wage of at least $22,000 a year, counting both pay and benefits and if less than half of their workers were part-time.

Because legislators would prefer that the workers receive only state welfare benefits, which is the choice that legislators are making.

The socialists chirp:

“State taxpayers are subsidizing Wal-Mart’s payroll,” said Kim Abbott, lobbyist for Working for Equality and Economic Liberation, a low-income advocacy group. “It’s ridiculous.”

and:

Gene Fenderson of the Montana Progressive Labor Caucus agreed, saying “The Wal-Marts, Targets, Home Depots are not paying their fair share of taxes for the amount of wealth they extract from our states and the services they demand.”

Because business is the chupacabra of society, and the government and the ‘progressives’ who want to forcibly redistribute wealth according to their whims are doing good.

This bill, should it pass, would yet again prove that the government is a Keynesian flat tire, loudly slowing economic progress.

(Link seen on Rocket Jones.)

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Ne’er The Twain Shall Meet

The St. Louis Post Dispatch suffers from cognitive dissonance. Every once in a while, they post stories about companies leaving St. Louis, such as this analysis piece from February 5: Does loss of company HQs hurt St. Louis?:

St. Louis lost yet another homegrown corporate headquarters last week with the announced buyout of Pulitzer Inc.

And if the swirling rumors about a buyout of May Department Stores Co. are to be believed, an even larger corporate base could quickly follow Pulitzer out the door.

But while the region’s business leaders grit their teeth, they must ponder this question: Job loss aside, does it really matter if a corporation no longer calls your city home?

So they gnash their teeth for a bit, but then they jump on the bandwagon for the local labor whenever a local union strikes. Oddly enough, the Post-Dispatch cheerleads local labor strife and at any given time, the Post-Dispatch has at least one high profile dispute to rah-rah. Why, in 2004, we had:

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

Auto dealer mechanics

Newspaper Guild (oddly enough, since that union struck against the Post-Dispatch, the paper was less eager to stick it to The Man)

Boeing Machinists

SBC

Grocery workers (end of 2003, I know, but it doesn’t seem that long ago)

So why would a corporation come to or stay in St. Louis, a labor-friendly town that supports entire workforces stopping work for days, weeks, or months on end? Perhaps the tax incentives that the local and state governments favor and the Post-Dispatch lauds.

The climate for business, particularly the manufacturing and blue collar businesses whose employees the Post-Dispatch champions, is difficult, murky, and prone to the whims of organized labor and government largesse. Why would a corporation base its business here?

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

The Other Lost Season

This looks a lot like the NHL, but it’s the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra:

Musicians refuse to vote on latest offer

When music returns to Powell Hall, will the players be around to play?

How come no one’s floating the idea of a salary cap or tying the musicians’ salaries to revenues? Because they’re artists? They’re artists for a starting salary of $70,000 a year in a break-even or worse venture often propped up by public funds.

Perhaps the musicians’ union bosses are onto something. It’s just like sports, and perhaps the musicians should be paid accordingly.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: Demolition Angel by Robert Crais (2000)

There you go. It’s remarkable how, if you read enough of an author, particularly if you read them consecutively, you can pick up on the author’s particular speech habits and how they translate into the author’s work so that many different characters say the same thing. Robert B. Parker fans know about his particular tics, which are almost inside jokes after thirty years. “There you go” represents Robert Crais’s tic. Elvis Cole says it, and in Demolition Angel, a non-Cole character says it, so I expect Crais says it himself.

This book centers on a former bomb-squad detective investigating a case wherein a nationwide hit bomber has struck–or has he? The detective has issues of her own, as she’s not been the same since nearly dying in a bomb blast. When an ATF agent comes to help with the investigation, he’s not what he seems; when the bomber-for-hire comes to town, his motives are surprising and his relationship with the detective is not too thrilling.

It’s a good change of pace from the Elvis Cole novels; although Heather informs me that the characters reappear, the book represents a self-contained entity. Although technical information and extra flourishes of insanity bog the book down, it’s not as bad as complete chapters which detract from the central storyline. So I like it better than the last Elvis Cole novel.

I look forward to finishing the remaining three Crais novels so I can get on with the rest of my life.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Think of It as Invoicing for the Service of Silence

Longtime reader, friend, and now cash cow Cagey writes in:

I was doing a Google Image search on the simple topic “legs” and there on page 6 of the results was your lovely wife. Looks like she was dusting the hood or something…

Heather had mentioned getting a large number of hits from this particular Google image search, and we speculated about the type of person who would just search for legs and go through lots of pages of hits. Apparently, the answer is a happily-married person with a lucrative engineering career who can afford some hush money if he doesn’t want his wife to know what kind of image searches he does.

Now excuse me while I investigate PayPal’s policies regarding receiving payment for silence services rendered.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

They’ll Get Action, All Right

Pay floor boost goes to council: Supporters say move will prompt state action:

A Milwaukee Common Council committee voted 4-0 Thursday to support an increase in the city’s minimum wage, a move that advocates hope will pressure state lawmakers to OK a statewide increase.

The measure, which goes to the full council Tuesday, would raise the minimum wage in the city in two steps, first from $5.15 an hour to $5.70 an hour as of Oct. 1. A year later, it would rise to $6.50 an hour.

The steps are the same as those proposed in March by a bipartisan commission appointed by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. That group’s recommendations, based on a compromise among business and labor groups, have been stalled in the Republican-controlled Legislature, as GOP leaders have said the proposed increase is too high.

Critics said the city would be foolish to increase its minimum wage when surrounding communities have the lower state wage. They argued that it would cause some businesses to look elsewhere.

I’m with the critics. You know what’s going to happen? Let’s examine the unintended consequences:

  • Service will suffer in all city businesses, from restaurants to the Grand Avenue Mall shops, as employers will stretch existing employees to cover more tables, more hours, more customers. How do you think customers will react? There’s an Applebee’s in West Allis, and if there’s not, one’s looking for space right now.
  • Young people who might have taken summer jobs to silence their parents will have excuses to not find jobs (which don’t exist) and will have to amuse themselves, possibly by participating in the bash mob fad.
  • People who want or need these jobs, whether as primary jobs or second jobs, will have to commute to the suburbs, spending twenty five minutes in an unsafe beater car like my brothers immortal Frankencar (no relation to Al) or ride the White and Green Limosine (the MCTS buses, now celebrating its first homicide ever) for an hour. Either one wastes time better spent on reading, spending time with children, or preparing a meal that doesn’t come from a box or a window.

I think the politicos achieve their goals with the boost, though: currently employed people get more money for no more effort, and the politicos get more votes for spending someone else’s money.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories