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Update

Sorry I’ve been outta the loop, dear reader. I was just in one of those not-writing-so-much phases. I can’t afford to get caught in that for long, since I’ve gotta write profiles on the top 20 pharma & top 10 biopharma companies this month.

I’ve also been reading that Robert Moses biography pretty devotedly. Since it’s insanely long, I’ve been a little afraid of putting it down for a few days and losing my steam. It’s a phenomenal story, and the author’s just reached the point where all of Moses’ bridges and parkways are managing to create more traffic. The crux of the problem — Moses’ power-thirstiness — appears to be explained as a function of RM’s domineering mother and grandmother, which just sounds kinda boring. I’m hoping that Caro’s interpretation of RM’s personality gets a little more intricate, otherwise I’m afraid that NYC really is just a twisted child’s vision.

In other news, we went to a surprise 40th birthday party for my “big sister” (next-door neighbors who are more family to me than just about anyone beyond my immediate relations) on Saturday night. It was good to catch up with some of them, since we never get together, even though I still live next door to their house (where their mom lives). Just about all my “brothers and sisters” have kids now, so the evening was spent making sure they stayed out of trouble, got enough attention, and didn’t hear my gin-lubricated sailor-speaking mouth. It was good times.

We also discovered a good restaurant earlier in the day, while looking for a birthday present. It’s right across the street from one of the finest pizzerias in NJ, which I had to stare at while eating my rogan josh. It’s a tough life.

On the plus side, official VM buddy (and nearly VM wedding-officiant) Tom Spurgeon is coming to visit this week. We’ll watch the first game of the NBA finals Thursday night, maybe get to the Belmont (if he’s got an extra ticket for me) on Saturday, hit the MoCCA Art Festival on Sunday, and generally shoot the breeze, which I find to be a delightful and worthwhile pursuit.

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Scan and Pan

Continuing that series of posts and links about contemporary fiction, here’s a piece in Slate about how book sales are measured and ignored:

[Using Bookscan to garner sales numbers] has become popular for a few reasons having to do with the culture of journalism and publishing. In general, the publishing world treats money the way old-line WASPs once did—as a subject that genteel people simply don’t discuss. The only question considered to be more indelicate than how much one was paid to write a book is how many copies it has sold.

Enjoy.

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XLR8

The Instapundit rhapsodizes the Xcelerator hand-dryer in his new column. The official VM wife and I have used Xcelerators at the Palisades Mall restrooms for a while now, and they’re a hoot. You really do get the “rippling skin”/skydiving visual from them. And if you leave your hands stationary under the vent, they’ll be sore for the rest of the day.

We’ve been waiting to hear stories about, um, other parts put under the vent from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but no dice so far. They’ve been too busy taking chemistry sets out of the hands of potential meth-making bombers or something.

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Hot ticket

Here’s an article from Forbes about the roots of corrupt behavior. It explores the matter via the parking tickets unpaid by UN diplomats in NYC:

Scandinavian countries, which perennially rank among the least corrupt in the corruption index, had the fewest unpaid tickets [between 1998 and 2005]. There were just 12 from the 66 diplomats from Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Almost all of these tickets went to one bad Finn.

Chad and Bangladesh, at the bottom of the corruption index, were among the worst scofflaws. They shirked 1,243 and 1,319 tickets, respectively, in spite of the fact that their UN missions were many times smaller than those of the Scandinavians.

The last time I heard about Chad and cars was when they fought with Libya and used Toyota pickups instead of tanks or APCs.

Find out what Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer decided to do about the problem.

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X(cavate)-Men

Oh, sure: Amy & I could have spent Memorial Day at a nice party at Breezy Point, in Brooklyn. But wouldn’t we have even more fun if I spent a second straight day excavating a portion of my backyard? In 88-degree weather?

Okay, we wouldn’t, especially since Amy stayed inside and degreased the stove/grill in the kitchen. But stay home we did, and I actually accomplished my goal of clearing a chunk of land on the corner of our backyard.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any “Before” pictures, largely because I was convinced I would never finish the job. But I found reservoirs of will to go along with my reservoirs of Patrick Ewing-like sweat. So, all you get are a couple of “After” pictures, here and here.

Doesn’t look like much? Well, it measured out to 23 feet by 24 feet, which comes out to about 550 square feet of yard that hadn’t been cleaned in more than 15 years. The thick layer of rotting leaves was a mixed blessing: a lot of the weeds hadn’t laid down deep roots, but those leaves get awfully heavy when they’ve been left for that long and that much rain.

Then there were the rocks, which sure made things difficult. My idea for this patch is to turn it into some sorta garden or zen-palace, so hauling out a bunch of those suckers is necessary. It wasn’t as bad as some of the small trees I had to rip up, since they did lay down some significant roots.

But you guys know I wouldn’t write about this sort of thing unless something funny happened, or if an ex-girlfriend was involved. Fortunately, it’s the former.

See, my father is genetically incapable of disposing of anything in the conventional manner. A few years ago, when he replaced his water-heater, he called me and said, “We can dump it behind the bank building in Ramsey tonight when it’s closed!” I told him that I’d gotten out of the dump-and-run business, and that we should see when bulk-trash day is in his neighborhood. It turned out to be the next day. We still had fun trying to roll the water-heater down his sloped driveway, nearly losing control of it, which would’ve led to the heater bounding across the street and into the neighbors’ front yard.

Which is to say, I had some trepidation about digging up that section of the backyard. This trepidation was warranted. Over the years, it seems Dad dumped a bunch of crap in that relatively small patch of land.

Airplane cables (from our dog’s run when we were kids), metal pipes and tubing from his old HAM radio tower in the backyard, flowerpots, a Sundae Smiley Saucer from McDonalds, cables, rope, shards of glass, and what appears to be a fuel-tank that was filled with rocks.

You read that last one right. I had to get all the rocks, dirt and rust out before I could haul the tank up to the pile o’ junk.

Now, you’d think that a fuel-tank full of rocks would be the piece de resistance for my excavation, but it’s not. No, that honor goes to this:

What’s that? Oh, it’s a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi from about 18 logos ago. If you check out the back of the bottle, you’ll notice it’s still two-thirds filled.

I hope everyone else had a good Memorial Day. I know I’ll remember this one for quite a while, especially if I get tetanus from that damned fuel-tank. . .

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Ghost boat

Creepy story about a boat washing up in Barbados, filled with mummified corpses of African immigrants. Some of the passengers wrote goodbye notes which, as you’d expect, are the saddest things in the world:

I would like to send to my family in Bassada [a town in the interior of Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye. This is the end of my life in this big Moroccan sea.