The Dime Novel

242 The Dime Novel

Here’s the ultimate inflation insult: the “dime novel” now costs ten bucks.

It’s not enough that a three cent stamp now costs 41 cents. It’s not enough that a song on a juke box can cost half a buck. It’s not enough that a quarter’s worth of gasoline now costs three bucks. But now, the price of a ten cent book has risen 1000%.

Don’t you love what the publicists tell you? Don’t you love the weasel-worm “justifications” that apologists offer?

Here’s a sample – a made-up one: “You have to understand that the cost of paper and of cover art is always rising. You have to understand we’ve enlarged the page size and the type – so even more paper, plus more ink! And the DISTRIBUTORS!!! Plus no one ever sells these things at sticker price, anyway.”

Oh boy. Put away the magnifying glass. Put away the “Itty Bitty Book Lite,” which never works, anyway, and I’ll put away the reading pillow. A nice chunky dime novel that’s self-illuminating, small enough to carry, but large enough to see is a dandy improvement, even though the recycled paper isn’t as nice as the usual thick newsprint.

Actually, this is all a lie. The book is not ten bucks. It’s $9.99. With the sales tax, it’s $10.58.

“Yes,” says the publicist, “the price will vary. Not every state charges sales tax on books. Right. There’s no tax in Delaware. Four other states have no sales tax, but they do have excise taxes. And almost everything there is a luxury.

So, let’s organize an excursion, an Atlantic City-style bus trip, to Delaware to buy tax free dime novels for a mere $9.99.

It’s been a long time since publishers have demanded big page counts so they can justify charging $28 for a hardcover book. What is truly astonishing is how many books don’t get sold, despite attractive titles, authors, covers and advance payments.

Many go right from the printing press to the “book for a buck” table at Barnes & Nobel. Saves a lot of promotional money, advertising and storage space.

Along with the price inflation, there’s variety inflation. Stuff that no one likes, cares about or will buy rolls out of the binding plants at a rate that would make tree killers like the New York Times and Staples green with envy.

At latest count, there were 24,346 titles that fall under the umbrella “self-help” or get rich quick. “How I made 20 billion dollars refilling Amway boxes” should be on everyone’s library shelf.

There are biographies of 110,238 people you never heard of, don’t need to know about and add nothing to your life. Hot off the press: The Daisy Cruz Story. Who? Exactly.

There are travel books about every possible location (even Delaware!)

And those canny book marketers never miss a trick. Since women writers of fiction sell far more books than men, there’s a (not too) secret push in publishing circles, to raise the cover price of books written by women.

The price of E-books has remained fairly stable. That is for two reasons: (1) No one likes them, and (2) it’s hard to bring your notebook computer or Palm Pilot into the bathroom. Not to mention dangerous.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

Blimplants

241 Blimplants

Is there a way they can do the opposite of those stomach-stapling operations? This is a case of stomach envy. Most of the men around here and many of the women have these immense figures. Those of us who are merely chubby are hurting. We feel out of style, out of fashion, out of sorts and out of not enough of our clothing.

Wasn’t there an outfit that did stomach implants? Was that in “Parade” or “Modern Cyclist?” or “Pro Wrestling Digest,” of Fatty Fashionista Monthly?” And was it an article or was it an ad?

All attempts at acquiring this look naturally have failed. Living at McDonald’s (even though Zagat’s gave Wendy’s a much better rating except for the fries,) stopping all planned exercise, drinking large quantities of bad local beer have not turned the trick.

How many bags of Fritos can you eat and not gain enough weight to make a difference?

The Big Men’s Dept. at Whale-Mart is beckoning, but thus far, the call must go unanswered. It’s a lonely feeling. Said department is a rallying point for all the guys with big bellies.

Some of them are even skinny – except around the middle. This is truly painful. And none will share his or her secret.

Investigators have gone stalking at mealtime, spying on restaurant (especially fast food restaurant) patrons. They’ve done the peeping Tom routine at houses and trailers where the Large People live – especially around dinner time.

There is no way to tell.

The Blimplant is the last hope. A survey of doctors and hospitals typically results in a reaction like “you want to do WHAT? You must be nuts.”

Not even do they get to the very first question in any medical conversation: “Who’s your insurer?” Not with this one. Nope. Just “…you must be nuts.”

This may be barking up the wrong tree. Maybe Blimplants aren’t the answer. Maybe this should be part of the organ donor program.

“This is Stonewall County Hospital, sir. We have found a donor match for that new stomach and we’d like you to come in for some tests.”

Excellent! Too bad some poor 40 year old fool with a colossal midsection had to be up on that ladder fixing his leaders and gutters during a thunderstorm. Here’s hoping he went easy.

But, do you have any idea how humiliating it is to not be “one of the boys” at this advanced age? How lonely? It’s like being shunned or even excommunicated. Where is Father Damian when you need him? Or the Saranac Lake Sanitarium?

If misery truly DOES love company there should be a place for us.

In the meantime, it’s off to McDonald’s. They have a special today on Big Macs. Buy one, get one free. Probably buy three or four to get six or eight. Plus a large decaf. One can’t be too careful about one’s health, after all.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

Toothbrushes

240 Toothbrushes

So there you are at the dentist and you're all finished up with the exam, and they give you a new toothbrush with their name on it and they tell you go get a few of these... extra soft Dento-World Sure-Grip wavy bristle brushes. So, being the obedient follows-doctor's-orders kind of patient, you zip on down to CVS or Duane's and of course they don't have it.

Neither do any of the other drugstore chains.

You call the doc and he says "try the website." And, sure enough, at dento-world-dot-com you find exactly what you're looking for. Two bucks each and a few bucks shipping. No prob.

You order (securely, on line, of course.) and eight weeks later, come your tooth brushes. Soft Dento-World Sure-Grip wavy bristle brushes.

What happened to extra soft.

"Contact Us."

"Dear Dento-World we ordered some extra soft Dento-World Sure-Grip wavy bristle brushes. But you sent us "soft," not "extra soft" as my dentist recommended."

"Dear Customer, thank you for writing. We are happy to hear from consumers (as opposed to "customers." How do you "consume" a toothbrush, other than burning it?) Unfortunately, we no longer manufacture extra soft Dento-World Sure-Grip wavy bristle brushes. We hope your tooth brushing experience will be a good one. Thanks again for writing and don't hesitate to contact us about our products any time."

So you call the dentist (again) and you tell him that the brushes he gives away and recommends are no longer being made, and what should you do?

In some cases, the answer is “find another brush.” To which you should reply “okay, but don’t recommend anything. If you do, it’ll vanish from the shelves (if it was ever there in the first place.”)

In others he’ll say “don’t worry about brushing, you won’t have any teeth left to brush the way you’re going.”

If you have a tooth pulled, and want it (there was a necklace like that under construction here, once,) they now tell you it’s medical waste and they have to dispose of it properly. If you’re a long-term patient and they know you’re not a secret spy for the Medical Waste Police” you might be able to talk them into (or out of) a more decorative position.

In the meantime, there is a secret stash of those highly desirable Extra Soft Dento-World Extra Soft Sure Grip Wavy Bristle brushes. But you’d better act fast.

--
http://wessays.blogspot.com
Radio WBLF 970 M-F 3-5PM

239 Tag Teaming

239 Tag Teaming

They had the professional wrestlers here in Moote Pointe the other day. Live and in person. Also on television. The young boys and their fathers by the thousands in a great indoor arena.

The boys came to see the modern-day versions of Hulk Hogan and that crew – people like the normal-looking champion, John Cena. And the history buffs came to see Rick Flair, who might be 100 years old but still performs.

The fathers came to see the women, people whom Aldus Huxley would describe as “pneumatic,” no longer called “lady wrestlers,” but, instead, “Divas.” This was a Diva tag team match, where two women are supposed to be in the ring at a time, and they alternate pretending to do each other bodily harm.

Sometimes at a match, people really DO get hurt. There was one popular guy, once, who fell from some kind of rope arrangement suspended from the ceiling. Only it wasn’t suspended all that well, and the poor guy crashed to the ground and died.

But mostly, no one gets hurt.

The Divas weren’t the only tag team match here that day, though. There was another one playing out in court about ten miles up the road.

Here, you had a kid charged with a minor crime, held in the kind of bail usually reserved for the CEOs of crooked energy traders or international terrorists or suspected serial killers.

There’s a bail hearing. Everyone’s in court. The solemn and stately judge sits there and listens to witnesses for the defense, then witnesses for the prosecution. The witnesses for the prosecution are late-teen women who speak copspeak, which means someone’s told them what to say.

After the witnesses are finished telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth that they have “sworn or affirmed” to do, “so help them, God.” Judge Solemn looks down at the paperwork and notices that the original bail (Gotti paid less,) was set by another judge with whom he’s familiar: his son.

Yes, a father and son judicial tag team.

So after all of three seconds of contemplation, he denies the bail reduction motion and everyone goes home or to lunch. Except the defendant, who now has waited behind bars for almost as long as the sentence for his crime. Seventeen days.

No foul, no harm?

Nah. No one gets hurt. But Stonewall County doesn’t get its Kenneth Lay sized bail money, either, because only guys like Kenny Boy have that kind of money.

The show was pretty much the same in the ring and in the courtroom. The outcome was decided well in advance.

Except the bikini Divas dress better.

You wouldn’t want to see the father/son tag team in outfits like that.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

Dead Presidents/Bonaparte's Retreat

238 Dead Presidents or Bonaparte’s Retreat

It’s a song, not a fact of history.

It should be the song of the current White House, where the draft-dodging, drunken Chief-in-Chief always speaks in tones formerly reserved for anonymous dirty phone calls at three o’clock in the morning.

They’re getting ready to “cut and run,” as they like to say about those of us who oppose the imbecile war in Iraq.

They’ve got Howlin’ Wolfowitz, Rasputin Rove and “You can call me Al” Gonzo Gonzales one notch away from the firing squad. But they don’t have Osama anywhere near one.

They’ve got Bill Casey wannabe Dick “Buckshot” Cheney. They’ve got Condi (I’m proof ANYONE can get an advanced degree) Rice.

They’ve put their churches in charge of your health and welfare,

They’ve made moving targets of your sons and daughters. They’ve made stationary targets of every office building over 10 stories.

And now, they’re in stall mode until they can hightail it back to Texas and California and all those fields of poisoned soil that sprung ‘em.

And look at the glorious choices they have left behind. Rudy and Mitt and John, Fred, Tommy. Makes you long for Bobdole Bobdole, doesn’t it?

That rock of journalism, the “Globe” is reporting that Bush has been kanoodling with Condi, that he’s in full-drunk mode, and that first lady Laura is living in a hotel, and will walk out on the Prez six months after the end of his term.

Another retreat.

But it’s not just war and imposing their religion on the rest of us the Bushies are leaving behind. They’re leaving behind an economic mess of monumental size.

The derivative markets (and please run at top speed from anyone who tells you he understands them,) are going to implode.

The stock market is WAY overheated. The infrastructure is crumbling, as is the country’s information and data system. Underemployment is the new unemployment. Education is eating its young. And the remedy for these afflictions? More of the same toxic waste that caused them.

There’s more deregulation coming (we haven’t learned a thing.)

And lovers of compound interest, welcome to compound gloom. The other side of the aisle is no help. Look at who we’re asked to choose among: Hillary, whom no one likes, not even the people who agree with all of her positions (whatever they may be today,) Barak, who says nothing at all, Hairdo Edwards and a bunch of equally unimpressive Democrats.

If we draft Mike Bloomberg and by some off chance he wins, we’ll all have to get microchips implanted in our heads so he can keep track of us. But at least the speeches will be short and you’ll understand them, if they don’t put you to sleep. And at least the guy wears a flight suit because he has a pilot’s license, not to show off on an aircraft carrier.

Is there anything in the Constitution that says we have to choose a President from among the living?

If not, Norman Thomas, Roosevelt(s – any of the three of them whose names you know) call home.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

The Wallaby Street Journal

237 The Wallaby Street Journal

“No worries, mate. We’ll preserve the integrity of the Wall St. Journal,” says Australian-born Rupert “Murder” Murdoch, who became an American citizen to circumvent the law barring foreign nationals from securing broadcast licenses. Sure he’ll preserve things . Just like he did at the London Times, the New York Post, Channel Five in New York and countless other properties that his News Corp. has gobbled up in the last 20 or 25 years.

If Murder gets to buy the paper and its subsidiaries (which doesn’t exactly look like a sure thing in early May of 2007, ) you can bank on changes. It won’t be the London Sun, which has naked women on page three of every edition. No, this time it’ll be those tasteful Journal sketches – of nude brokers, analysts, executive types and high ranking government officials.

The NY Post’s most famous headline “Headless Body In Topless Bar” probably wouldn’t fly, either. unless they’re writing about a vacancy in the lawyers’ trade association.

But you can expect a livelier Journal. Probably a circulation war with USA Today and the New York Times (including a year of newsstand price cuts,) and a leaking of the paper’s right wing editorial pages into the news columns.

It won’t be as brazen as Murder’s TV network, Fox. But it’ll be there.

Then, there’s gossip. All of Murder’s properties do gossip. Cindy Adams will be writing about the latest overheard at the famed watering holes and boom-boom-rooms of Wall Street. We can hardly wait.

(note: the Journal has already done an expose on the gay blade who ran British Petroleum into the ground, so what Murder’s editors and reporters do won’t be THAT far over the top.)

Up until now, the staid old Journal was a mouthpiece for conservatives who weren’t God-crazed neo-cons. Look for that to change. Barney Killgore is whirling in his grave. So, for that matter, is Chucky Dow.

What will the non-religious, conservative business men and women do to learn what they think? They’ll have to turn to Forbes Magazine. Oh. Wait. U-2’s Bono is a partner in an investment company that recently bought 40% of that company. Probably they’ll drift leftward.

The National Review? Already populated by the nut-case school of conservative thinking. Bill Buckley would be rotating in HIS grave, if he were dead.

There is an upside for a small group of people, though: the editors of other financial information publications and data providers, most of whom have spent their entire careers suffering from Journal Envy. There won’t be much left to envy.

The Bankroft family, about 35 surviving members, has owned the paper and Barron’s and a few other things they have in their shop since 1902. They’ve rejected offers before. And they have rejected the initial overture from Murder.

But they did it in such a way that suggests if they got more than the offered $60 a share, or about five billion dollars, they’d sell.

Maybe OWN is too strong a word. They OWN 25%. But they control 60 percent of the votes. And they don’t all get on with one another that well. So, the logical strategy is increase the offer and divide and conquer.

Rupert’s good at both.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR

(note: a shorter version of this was broadcast on my radio program several days in advance of this publication. WJR.)

The Best Journalist You Probably Never Heard Of

236 The Best Journalist You Probably Never Heard Of

This could never happen today. Not with a bunch of instant news networks and the internet. But in 1963 things went slower. And often more thoughtfully.

The Saturday Evening Post, already ancient and tattered and beset by a deadly combination of dullness and constant search for an identity had one glorious moment. The editor was a guy named Clay Blair, Jr. He had been a reporter and would write a novel about his 15 minutes of fame at the Post and some interesting stuff about submarine warfare in World War II.

But Blair put together what probably is the best on-the-spot overview of the assassination of President Kennedy of its time. It was all wrong and it was all right.

All wrong? Sure. A black cover. Unheard of. The 1960s equivalent of focus groups proved it. Norman Rockwell portrait of JFK on the cover. Put a dead guy on the cover? Never. Bad policy.

Assembled on the fly, there were articles by former President Eisenhower about succession. Biographies of the President, his family, about President Johnson (including a Stewart Alsop interview.) There were large photo spreads about Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. A mountain of material, impossible to compile today using writers and editors who spoke with measured and dignified yet colorful and forceful tone.

This issue, cover date December 14, 1963 was Blair’s and the Post’s one shot at greatness. It hit the bull’s eye then, and it still does.

Strolling through an antique store in a small town months ago, there was the issue. Cover price 20 cents. Sticker price ten bucks. It stayed there when the visitor left. But several visits later, it remained and so got bought. And read. And read again. 1963 isn’t exactly antique. But like most concepts today, this one has been diluted.

You find all kinds of junk in antique stores, things you threw out that you now realize you could have sold and least for small money. Tinker toys and Barbie dolls, Erector sets and Formica-topped kitchen tables, autoharps and trombones, sewing machines and signs advertising Ipana Toothpaste or LaSalle autos.

To a guy who was a young reporter in the early 1960s, when this issue came out, a young reporter who marginally covered the story in a very indirect and small-scale way, this issue of this magazine still resonates.

It was the Post’s first hurrah. And it was the Post’s last hurrah. After that one, it went bi-weekly and became purely a nostalgia book for people who wanted the America of their childhood dreams – an America that never really existed.

Curtis Publishing started the Post, claiming it descended from Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, though its first issue didn’t appear until well after Franklin’s death. And today it exists in name only as a medical magazine that almost no one reads and even fewer buy.

But for one glorious issue, Clay Blair made us think and feel and reason. And things like that don’t happen today.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR