30 September - Dime Novels


The Brand of Cain or The Wandering Jew of the Plains

Wonderful stuff at Stanford U's

Am updating our editorial library catalog. WHEE. I find myself reading snippets of each book as I log it in. Many of these don't belong in our editorial library, but we keep 'em because they're sent by overly-ambitious publicists and no one here felt like yoinking them. And I am philosophically opposed to throwing away books.

But seriously, we have... Animals Aloft (pictures of dogs in biplanes, that entertained me for a good quarter-hour)...

27 September - Book Bargain


Misfire the kitten, from Animals Aloft

Here's a bargain - Starr Books in Cambridge, Mass,

25 September - What a Friend We Have in Janus



The good god Janus is invoked in a brief but powerfully moving scene from the HBO series Rome. According to

24 September - Annals of Marketing


Photograph by Winthrop P.,

So when I suggested to the marketing geniuses that some classy Animals Aloft merchandise might be a good idea, it was entirely for the good of the project. I was thinking calendars, tee shirts, maybe some cute stuffed animals from the book like Gilmore the lion or Kiddo the airship cat or Tailwind the tragic woodchuck. When I heard that the marketing geniuses had decided to sell a ballcap (or a prole cap, if you prefer), I'm like, OK, that's a start - the kids love the ballcaps nowadays. I could wear a cap that says "Animals Aloft" on it - that'd be fun, and stuff. So a sample cap arrives today - Gus models it in the picture above as Cat Leroy recoils in disgust from the aroma of Gus' Lucifer Stencho cigar. And, see, it doesn't have the book title on it - too, too obvious; it's got the ISBN, the International Standard Book Number finely embroidered on it. Swell, just swell. That ought to sell a boatload of books. Not that I care, I really really don't.

link   home

21 September - The Reason Why



I'm sure that, like me, you sometimes wonder why these kids wear their damn ballcaps backwards. Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory and Thank God for the Atom Bomb, explains it cogently in Class, his witty guide to the American status system:

Proles take to visor caps instintively, which accounts for the vast popularity among them of what we must call simply the prole cap. This is the "baseball" cap made largely of plastic meshwork in primary colors (red, blue, yellow) with, in the rear, an open space crossed by a strap for self-adjustment: "One Size Fits All [Proles]." ... The little strap at the rear is the significant prole feature in that it demeans the buyer and user, making him do the work formerly thought the obligation of the seller, who used to have to stock numerous sizes... To achieve even greater ugliness, the prole will sometimes wear his cap back to front. This places the strap in full view transecting the wearer's forehead, as if pride in the one-size-fits-all gadget were motivating him to display the cap's "technology" and his own command of it.

Excellent book; charming illustrations, like the one above, by Martim de Avillez. Buy Class

20 September - Flyleaf Rage


Gus Norbeck (right), posing as "Allan Janus", with Gilmore the Lion.
Photograph by Eric Long, National Air and Space Museum.

I really wonder why a guy would write a book when he can just jump off a bridge, instead - I really do.

18 September - Squid Cinema


A tender moment from The Calamari Wrestler

The Calamari Wrestler (Ika Resuraa) is not your typical Girl Meets Squid flick - think of a sort of cephalopod Rocky - Yojimbo mashup with bonus squid ink jokes and you're on the right track. A famous wrestler is reborn as a squid and attempts to revive his career, and also get his relationship with his girlfriend restarted. Can he withstand the cynical manipulations of Japanese wrestling management? Can he survive the vicious pummeling of his archenemy, a giant boxing shrimp? And just how does a squid make it with a human-type girl? Plus, a bonus music video. Don't miss it.

17 September - Hitler, the Green Fuhrer



It's well known that Hitler, despite his many grievous faults, did have a couple of more admirable traits - he was a vegetarian (though there is

There was an Egyptian plague of mosquitoes in the marshy east, and we were not spared in Rastenburg [Hitler's east front headquarters, also known as Wolfsschanze, the Wolf's Lair]. It was so bad that our sentries wore mosquito nets covering their faces. In addition to the mosquitoes, there were large numbers of frogs, too, and every night they would give tremendous concerts. But then one evening they were silent. It was a day or two before Hitler noticed it, but then he inquired the reason.

It appeared that some department or other had started a campaign against the mosquitoes by pouring hundreds of gallons of petrol into their pools. No doubt that destroyed many larvae which would afterwards have become mosquitoes, but there were more than enough left; in fact so many still that you hardly noticed any difference. But the effect on the frogs had been devastating; they had been wiped out altogether - hence the dead silence at nights, broken only by the whine of mosquitoes. Hitler was furious.

"Did you ever know such idiots!" he exclaimed. "They set out to kill mosquitoes, but instead they kill all the frogs, which feed on thousands of mosquitoes daily."

After that the ponds and pools had to be cleaned out, and the frogs reintroduced.

17 September - The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Catbox


Yuri Kuklachev, Moscow Cats Theatre, with Cat.
Photograph by Sara Krulwich, New York Times

The New York Times reports

The story of "Queen of the Cats" is a kind of allegory, Mr. Kuklachev explained. He plays a painter who goes to sleep and dreams that aliens arrive from outer space in a U.F.O. and try to steal his cats.

At one point, one of the cats stands on a mirrored ball that looks as if it has been borrowed from "Saturday Night Fever." She is emitting "rays of goodness," he said, spreading kindness throughout the world.

15 September - More Light



A beautiful but sinister light prevailed in the Washington Grove environs last evening, reminiscent of

14 September - On Velvet


Memento Mori et Tiki, from Flickr

Here's an excellent

9 September - Book Forthcoming

9 September - Gulf War III


Via

To use a fine Southern word, it's tacky to start playing the blame game before the dead are even counted. It is not too soon, however, to make a point that needs to be hammered home again and again, and that is that government policies have real consequences in people's lives.

This is not "just politics" or blaming for political advantage. This is about the real consequences of what governments do and do not do about their responsibilities. And about who winds up paying the price for those policies...

4 September - Kittens of Washington Grove



This is Dylan, another

3 September


AP Photo

Here's

2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."

Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You would think we would get maximum consideration... This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."

June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay."

June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell.