A Congressional hearing found bipartisan agreement in denouncing social media. I am not the first to point out that while conservatives are willing to say that Facebook kills children, they do not believe that guns do. They are consistent, however, in not doing anything about either problem.
He started at my end of the partially filled subway car asking for money. Occasionally I give panhandlers some money, but for reasons I can’t articulate, almost never on the subway. I, as did the man sitting opposite me, slightly shook our heads indicating no. The beggar moved on, but he may have forgotten that he had already tried his pitch where I sat. He came back. I had my head down reading Dirty Money by Richard Stark. As he approached, he said, “Sir. I don’t mean to disturb your reading. After all, reading is fundamental.” I found myself smiling.
The news feed offered me a story: “Celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser: The No. 1 reason people get divorced.” I didn’t read it. I already know that reason is marriage.
“I know only one thing for sure. Marriage is definitely the chief cause of divorce.” Kathy Lette.
I just finished reading Dirty Money by Richard Stark. The cover tells me that is “A Parker Novel.” It is the only Stark book I have read, and it was different from other crime books. It is not a mystery story centered on a detective or a police officer. The main character is not a Robin Hood criminal like Lupin. Instead, Parker is bad guy criminal. He robs and kills. In this book he is trying to dispose of marked money after blowing up an armored car. Other bad guys try to take the money away from him and his accomplices. Parker kills one of the others after they had tortured one of his henchmen. Parker assists his confederate to bed and trusses up one of the other interlopers. Parker is about to leave when the guy on the floor begs not to be left there because, he maintains, Parker’s friend will kill him the morning. The book ends in great hardboiled fashion: “Parker looked at him. ‘So you’ve still got tonight,’ he said.”
A few weeks before Dirty Money I finished The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler. This, the cover told me, was a Christopher Marlowe Cobb thriller. It was the first in this series. I was not previously aware of it or Butler. However, when I did my extensive Wikipedia research, I found that Butler had won the Pulitzer prize in 1993 for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a short story collection which I plan to read soon. I was intrigued by Butler’s personal life. The seventy-nine-year-old has been married six times. The last marriage will be two years old this June. The other five all ended in divorce. The penultimate marriage was to a “trans non binary poet.”
In the early days of football, players had names that exuded toughness. From his name you knew how rugged Bronco Nagurski or Johnny Blood was. Or they had nicknames that helped us see them run down the field, such as the Galloping Ghost or the Gray Ghost of Gonzaga. Or they had a nickname that indicated their broad shoulders and bulging biceps came not out of a posh gym but from manly work, such as the Wheaton Iceman. Or their names conjured black-smudged faces having a shot and a beer in the neighborhood tavern after their coalfield shift ended, men like Ray Nitschke, Mike Ditka, or Chuck Bednarik. And what do we have now? Brock Purdy.
