1410 Johnny Chips in Gangland Amusement Park

(Moote Point NY) -- Johnny Chips from South Moote Pointe had a lot of Big Ideas, and none of them worked except one which really really worked and for a long time kept him so busy he didn’t have time to come up with anything new and failure- prone.

But today, Johnny’s going to Atlantic City to scout out the turf and see if maybe the one he had the other day can work, and make him even richer.

Of course, given the state of Atlantic City these days, Johnny may not get as far as he’d like, though you’d never know.

One of the Big Ideas that didn’t work was about Cholesterol.  He noticed that there were maybe five or six fast food joints on his street, all in a row, and every day the trucks from United Cholesterol and Cholesterol Partners and FatAmerica came along and delivered liquid cholesterol to each of the joints on the block. (Bet you didn’t know they added the stuff fresh to every bite!)

Johnny Chips figured he could centralize the operation, so he built a great big vat down the street, and strung a polyvinyl chloride pipe from one fast food joint to the next.  Then he offered all the places his pipe passed a discount if they would have their cholesterol piped in instead of trucked.

But there were a couple of things he didn’t count on.  First, everyone had contracts.  Second, the trucks were run by guys who carried .38s as part of their sales kits.

The worst of it was one morning when the polyvinyl chloride pipe sprung a leak all over Burger King’s newly- cut sod lawn, killed all the grass and spilled the cholesterol all over the place.  It was a terrible mess and Johnny was a long time cleaning it up.  Went through thousands of pounds of old newspapers and thousands of rolls of Quicker Picker Upper towels.

And he got really mad at the Home Depot guy who sold him the pipe and told him it would never leak.

So after it’s all cleaned up, Johnny brings the leaky part back to the guy at The Home Depot and says “Thought this stuff never leaked.”

    

And the Home Depot guy takes a look at the hole and says “This was made by a .38.”

The Next Big Idea was the one that worked.  Johnny rents a big empty lot in the neighborhood and he puts up an amusement park and he calls it “Gangland.”

The people come from all over to visit Gangland, where there’s free admission every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 3PM to closing.

You go to the Gangland Social Club, and that’s where you buy your tickets.  For five bucks, you get into a bumper car and try to elude the cops as you tool around the lot, passing stop signs, disobeying the speed limit, making left turns from right lanes, that sort of thing.

For ten, you get a stocking mask, a water pistol and the right to go stick up the fake 7-11.  That’s a popular one.  Everyone wants to stick up a 7-11.

Fifteen bucks gets you a marked deck at the Gangland Casino.  For $20 they bust you for prostitution or counterfeiting, your choice.

But the best one of all Murder Alley, where you can actually fake a murder, be brought to trial and get sentenced to the chair.  This one has a waiting list.

Gangland is so popular, and Johnny Chips gets so rich that he’s got to find another Big Idea, because he just can’t sit still.

So now he’s going to try to convince the gaming commission to let him set up the Big Board Casino in Atlantic City.

No regular games.  No roulette, no slots, no blackjack or craps or any of that stuff.  No. This joint will look like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, except no real stocks.  You buy into fake companies and sell them, and just like in the real world, they go up and down.  Sometimes it’s fixed, sometimes not.

Customer could walk away with a bundle, get the thrill of the trade and still not really lose his shirt.

The Gaming Commission and the Governor probably won’t like it.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

824 Going Buy the Book (store) and Book Look

824 Going Buy the Book (Store) and Book Look

We’re in the Borders on Park Avenue in the 50s with a gift card and a Latte at their coffee and pastry corner. About half way through the shared drink we find something in the cup that wasn’t on the menu: a roach.

They made nice on us after that, refunding our money (thank you,) offering a replacement drink (no, thank you) and willingly cashed out our gift card, a violating company policy. They were as happy to see us go as we were to leave.

That was one of two leading indicators that things were not going perfectly at Borders. The other was their stock. They had more strange and obscure books than any major retailer whose specialty was not strange and obscure books.

It seems their choice was either to imitate Barnes & Noble’s Wal-Martish approach (minus the censorship) or shrink to fit the obscurity market.

They did neither. Chapter Eleven bankruptcy protection is kind of like attempted suicide: If you’re caught in time, you live. Otherwise you die. As part of the filing, the company plans to close about one third of its stores of which there are something over 600. Something like six thousand jobs are going or gone. They’ve piled on $500 million in new loans from GE Capital to keep running while they figure out what else to do.

So what can they do? First, they can get with the Amazon program. The Border website is clunky, their prices are high, their e-readers are inadequate compared to what else is out there.

Amazon and B&N have turned books into a commodity. The only thing Borders can do is become the “important alternative,” the book store for book lovers.


Book Look: Heat & Light: Mike Wallace and Beth Knobel.

CBS’ Mike Wallace, 93, has built himself the best possible kind of monument. “Heat & Light” (Three Rivers Press 2010) is a guide for a future generation of journalists, most of them in great need of guidance, if not therapy.

His co-author, Beth Knobel is a former CBS producer and current professor at Fordham University with a pile of Ivy League sheepskins probably to heavy to carry all at once.

Tips on writing, on video on interview techniques, the law, a reporter-editor’s checklist, the balance between drama and information, and a gazillion good quotes from some heavy industry hitters.

“The Elements of Style” it ain’t. But close. At the end of the book, the authors thank the people who contributed, either gladly or by intimidation. C’mon. What idiot would or could turn down a question from Mike Wallace? And the seven most feared words in any politician’s vocabulary? “Mike Wallace is here to see you.”

===Readometer Key: 1 and 2 It’s already a paperback.
1 - Buy it.
2 - Wait for the paperback.
3 - Take it out of the Library.
4. Flip through it at the book store.
5. Forget it.


Shrapnel (New York Times edition):

--Bernie Madoff’s gave a jailhouse e-interview to the New York Times and said Wall Street “had to know” about his multi-zillion dollar King of the Ponzi schemes. Of course they did. But selective blindness is common on The Street.

--The Times also has reported recently that the NYSE is selling itself to the Frankfurt exchange. Technically, it’s a merger, but there ARE no mergers. Daimler Chrysler all over again.

--Gotta stop reading this paper. Something infuriating every day. Liberal-Shmiberal... The facts alone are enough to inflame.


I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011