'Honeys play me close like butter play toast'

In a column titled "The Ideal English Major," U. Virginia professor Mark Edmundson comes to the defense of, and actually advocates for, the English major. He extols, in an entertaining way, the benefits of reading and compliments all types of clever, colorful language.

I love Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Donne. But I like it when a fellow pickup b-ball player points to a nervous guy skittering off to the bathroom just as the game's about to start: "He's taking a chicken pee." Yup — hit it on the head.

This column can be droll in parts, as English majors often can be, but it’s actually very good, and quotes Biggie Smalls, so it’s worth reading. And I think it captures the essence of an English major, at least this one.

We live in the lap of enormous wonder, but how rarely do most of us look up and smile in gratitude and pleasure? The English major does that all the time. 

The English major: in love with language and in love with life — or at least hungry for as much life as he can hold.

 And, in case you weren't a fan, the title of this post comes from The Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie Smalls) hit "Juicy."

The kids' journal ...

One thing I'd highly recommend for any parent is to keep a journal of the little things that happen in your kids' lives. I did it when mine were young, not on an everyday basis, but just often enough to keep track of some the things I would've forgotten, which is a lot.

I ran across it tonight while going through some old papers. It brought a smile to my face - kind of along the lines of Kids Say The Darndest Things. Now, 21 and 19, here are some of the entries I noted when they were ages 2-4.

* Katie and I climbed the lookout tower by Brandon. When we got to the top, Katie said: "Where's the slide?" Now, whenever we go past it, she says: "There's the tower. No slide, just lots of steps.

* We were driving in the car and Katie was looking at the back of a Bugles box. I asked her what it said and she replied: "When empty, go to the store and buy some more."

*Katie had a chair set up a couple feet from the couch and would put her feet on one, hands on the other, and turn around. Every time she did it she would holler: "I won! I'm the greatest!" She did it a few times before falling and got up: "I lost. I'm not the greatest."

* Katie told me in the car: "Mom knows a lot, but she doesn't know tons like you and me." (That's my favorite.)

* Katie, Rylee and I went to a Renner Monarchs game and it got rained out after 1 inning. When we were leaving, Katie said sadly: "But that's my favorite baseball team."

* Katie asked Nancy, regarding me being named editor of the Tri-State Neighbor: "Does that mean Dad can tell the computers what to do?"

* I was at the Sioux Empire Fair for work and twice saw Rylee's daycare class walking around. I stayed back so Rylee wouldn't see me and get upset for not being able to come with me. When I picked her up at daycare, one of her teachers said that when Rylee got on the bus she said: "I saw my Daddy." When we got home Nancy asked her what she saw at the Fair. Rylee said: "Daddy." Then she asked what I was doing and Rylee said: "Hiding."

* Katie gets into watching "ER." One week they had an episode with a baby in the hospital. It continued on tot the next week's episode, and Katie saw it and asked: "Has that baby been in the hospital all week?"

* While sledding with Katie, she flipped over, landed hard, got up and said: "That was a double uff da!"

* Rylee told me: "Daddy, Katie called me a tattle-tale!"

Friday Link-Oh-Rama

Usually I'm pretty fired up about Fridays, but not when they come as the last day of a week of vacation. Oh well, the trout in Montana have 51 weeks now to recover from the beating they took.

Here's some linkage:

*** Argus has a story about one of South Dakota's greatest combat pilots, Cecil Harris. Also with a shout-out to his 93-year-young friend Harold Thune, a man I've had the great pleasure getting to know.

*** Pope Francis is pressing ahead with his efforts to strengthen ties between Muslims and Catholics. His message: Promoting Mutual Respect through Education.

*** Moron of the Month Award goes to ... Robbie Knievel, drinking and driving in my hood and not caring: "I friggin’ drink and ride … that’s my deal.”

*** Get well soon Elmore Leonard!

*** What do biocryptology and Antonio Banderas have in common? They're both at S.D. School of Mines next week.

*** Alex Rodriguez could use the Yankees' former assistant traveling secretary - Seinfeld's George Costanza.

*** Need a song for your baseball workouts? Who doesn't? Rival Sons: Keep On Swinging

*** The NPR fiction paperback best-sellers for last week. Missed it by that much.

*** My random act of kindness for the week: Rob Zombie does We're An American Band

*** Each year Forbes calculates the net worth of the wealthiest characters from novels, movies, television and games, constructing portfolios based on those stories, and valuing them using real-world commodity and share prices. You'll never guess who leads the list.

*** In case you need them: 7 tips for writing an email.

Jerry Seinfeld ...

The 20 greatest Seinfeld quotes of all time.

Friday Link-Oh-Rama

Some good stuff this week on all things interesting - to me:

*** He's baaaaaack: Art Bell, radio's master of the paranormal and outward edges of science, will return to the microphone on Sept. 16 with a new nighttime show on Sirius XM Radio.

*** Colonel Bud Day, RIP stud: “To have known him in prison, confronting our enemies day in and day out, never, ever yielding, defying men who had the power of life and death over us, to witness him sing the national anthem in response to having a rifle pointed at his face, well that was something to behold. Unforgettable. … Bud was the bravest man I ever knew.”

*** It's not just me saying it, though I would've named him No. 1: "There is no question that Prince is one of the best to ever strap on a guitar, to pick up a mic, to perch behind the keys, and so forth. Rolling Stone thinks so too."

** If, like me, Rihanna and Lady Gaga aren't doing it for ya, Holly Williams, the soulful daughter of Hank Williams Jr. will.

*** Worth thinking about anyway: Are you (me?) becoming the dreaded Baseball Dad or Mom?

*** It's always funny when it happens to someone else: Interviewer gets soaked.

Spearfishian channels Calamity Jane

Spearfish author Jeannie Hudson has quite the story to tell. And she also just wrote her fifth novel.

As she told Tom Griffith of the Rapid City Journal:

"Then her agent died, she divorced her husband and the bottom fell out of the publishing industry. Stymied by the dry spell, she accepted a job in cable advertising sales and moved to south central Minnesota, where she would spend the next 15 years in a haze as a “high-functioning alcoholic.”

"She married Tom Dormady in 1990, watched him die of bone cancer in 2005, and suffered through four unsuccessful treatments for alcoholism before the fifth treatment stuck. After meeting her current husband, Adam Hudson, at Dormady’s funeral, she moved to Spearfish, married and resumed writing."

Her book is titled: "“Behold A Lone Horseman,” and is available through Amazon. It "recounts the adventures of 17-year-old Regan Townsend, who accompanies Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Colorado Charlie Utter from Cheyenne to Deadwood in the summer of 1876."

Friday Link-Oh-Rama

Due to sequestration, I haven’t posted in a while, so let’s get this thing re-kicked off with a Link-Oh-Rama:

*** My son will be a sophomore in high school. I just ordered this bit of light reading for his required summer reading list: Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza, who will be in Rapid City this fall.

*** St. Paul author Vince Flynn was working on his 14th Mitch Rapp novel when he died last month. It’s release has been postponed indefinitely. Bummer.

*** As Robert Frost said, good fences make good neighbors. Bad fences make … Funky Zonkeys.

*** So this is the guy, Aaron Gleeman, whose Link-O-Rama this is modeled after. He owns two ties.

*** As The New Yorker explains in “America’s Star System,” it’s good to be king, rock star, business mogul, athlete. Not sure that’s news, but that’s The New Yorker.

*** My Minnesota Twins have a super stud in the making in the minor leagues named Miguel Sano. He’s been benched because he supposedly took too long running around the bases after a home run: 29 seconds. My question is, how would the struggling Twins coaching staff know how long it’s supposed to take?

*** Jacqueline Palfy at the Argus Leader is reading “The Round House” by Louise Erdrich. She loves this, truly loves this.

*** I’m not pro-jewel thievery, but I am pro-fiction-becoming-fact. The Pink Panther jewel thief has escaped from a Swiss prison. He is the third member of the gang to escape, reinforcing my lack of faith in Swiss prisons.

*** Finally, this week's nominee to just go away.

Mike Rowe, Popular Mechanics & Robert Frost

Not being very mechanical, nor very popular, it’s probably surprising that one of the more enjoyable websites I frequent is that of Popular Mechanics.

They have lots of interesting stuff other than the motor-head kind of things I expected. Currently, Popular Mechanics is running stories leading up to Father’s Day from people of note and “What My Father Taught Me.” Mike Rowe’s is a particularly good one.

And any column that starts like this has to be good: 

When I was 14, I woke up one Saturday morning to see my father standing at the foot of my bed, sharpening a double-sided ax.

School news ...

** 30 Bits of Commencement Wisdom for the Class of 2013. 

Here are a couple of my faves from Jon Lovett (Television Writer) at Pitzer College:

“You are smart, talented, educated, conscientious, untainted by the mistakes and conventional wisdom of the past. But you are also very annoying. Because there is a lot that you don't know that you don't know. Your parents are nodding. You've been annoying them for years. Why do you think they paid for college? So that you might finally, at long last, annoy someone else. And now your professors are nodding.”

“There are moments when you'll have a different point of view because you're a fresh set of eyes; because you don't care how it's been done before; because you're sharp and creative; because there is another way, a better way. But there will also be moments when you have a different point of view because you're wrong, because you're 23 and you should shut up and listen to somebody who's been around the block.”

** Schools treat 5-year-olds like hardened criminals. It smacks of fanaticism. 

By Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

For a while, I've been wondering if it's parental malpractice to put your kids in public schools. More and more, it's gone beyond wondering. For example, last week the Washington Post reported a nasty case of abusive behavior by school officials in Calvert County, Maryland: A five-year-old who brought a cowboy-style cap pistol on a school bus -- orange-tipped, and something that no one could possibly mistake for a real gun -- was interrogated for two hours (an interrogation that was so long, or so stressful, that he wet his pants) and then suspended for 10 days. Who treats a five-year-old that way?

Jorge Luis Borges

I believe it was a recent Dean Koontz novel that I was reading which mentioned Mr. Borges, so I made note to check out the dude.

Sources said Borges "is the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes." So, jeesh, who could overlook that? And I bought the Deluxe Edition of his collected fictions because it was described as: "A marvelous new collection of stories by one of the most remarkable writers of our century." So, again, jeesh! Pretty lofty words for ol' JLB.

I'm about five short stories into it, and I've got to say I'm impressed. I can't really put a finger on why, but he's just different. For instance, I've done a lot of reading on Billy the Kid and seen the television shows and bios, but Borges' four-page essay "The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan" encapsulated the life of Billy the Kid better than all the rest combined. And in four pages! So, yeah, the guy is good.

I'm looking forward to reading the other 96 short stories in the collection.

Ace reviews The Monster of Florence

Ace of Spades has a review of a book he’s halfway through (funny to review a book before done, but Ace is a funny guy). Since I’m a fan of murder-mystery-psychopathic-serial-killer fiction and non-fiction, I’m thinking I may have to pick it up: The Monster of Florence.

And then there's the weird subcultures. Here's an example: When I first started reading I wondered, "How the heck can he find so many people (he killed 14, seven different couples) having sex in cars?" Well, there's an answer to that. In Florence, children -- adult children, I mean -- continue living with their parents until they're married. And they marry late. So there is a long period, say from age 17 to 27, when adults have no place of their own, and no sexual privacy, but are still, as you'd imagine, having sex. So it's a widespread tradition that dates -- even among engaged persons -- will end parking on country roads and having sex.

Longmire author to be in Custer

Next Saturday I’ll be tossing my younger daughter’s dorm junk into my old Dodge pickup and heading back west with SDSU in my rear-view mirror and hoping to make the 5 p.m. appearance of Craig Johnson at the Custer Library.

Johnson is the author of the Longmire series of books, now made into a television series on A&E. Honestly, I haven’t read any of his books, but I intend to. I have, however, watched the television shows and enjoyed them.

People who know that kind of stuff tell me the shows are good, yes, but the books are even better. So I hope to have an opinion on that soon.

And I think it’s cool he’s going to be in Custer. He probably heard about my book-signing in Sturgis and had to be a one-upper. Having his own television series wasn’t enough. Next thing you know he’ll have his own website with his own name as the web address. Yep, nailed it.

Good day in the Badlands

The breaking news of the day is that I finally met author/buffalo rancher Dan O’Brien today. It’s odd we haven’t met before, since he lives just a few miles down the highway and we share some mutual interests. But it finally happened, and we had a nice chat out in the snow-covered Badlands while visiting the Kudrna Ranch and the century-old sod hut on their place. 

Mr. O'Brien mentioned his next book is coming out Aug. 1. Be sure to check that one out and some of his others while you are waiting.

In other news ...

*** The ol’ alma mater, Augustana College, is hosting the 45th Annual Dakota Conference on Saturday, April 27. It will include a panel discussion titled: “The First Draft of History” at 8 a.m.

Panelists will include: Chet Brokaw of AP; Noel Hamiel of Yankton and Mitchell papers; Tom Lawrence of Argus, RC and Mitchell papers and formerly of my fantasy baseball league back when stats were kept on paper instead of via computer; and Kevin Woster of the RC Journal.

The ad for this lovefest offers this: History and historians are highly dependent upon the stories filed by the newspaper reporters of a previous era. It is commonly said that the news reports in newspapers are the “first draft of history” because they have such a strong influence on the later interpretation of events. During this panel discussion, four long-serving South Dakota political reporters will each reflect on their more than three decades in the front-line trenches of newspaper reporting and discuss how the profession functioned when they launched their careers, how the industry has evolved, how it has been affected by the internet, and how their output can and should be used to craft successive interpretations of the historical record.

*** This is interesting, from the NYT: Amazon Kindle Singles is a hybrid. First, it is a store within the megastore of Amazon.com, offering a showcase of carefully selected original works of 5,000 to 30,000 words that come from an array of outside publishers as well as from in-house. Most sell for less than $2, and Mr. Blum is the final arbiter of what goes up for sale.

*** Reportedly, this is the Amazon wish list of the one of the BM Bombers.

*** Get ready for 896 glorious pages on the Madame Thatcher.

HaugeNote ...

From the NYT: When the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author David Mamet released his last book, “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture,” with the Sentinel publishing house in 2011, it sold well enough to make the New York Times best-seller list.

This year, when Mr. Mamet set out to publish his next one, a novella and two short stories about war, he decided to take a very different path: he will self-publish.

Read it here.

Bombers could learn from boxers

One of the troubles with being a terrorist bomber is you don't get to choose your own nickname. The media or law enforcement do it for you.

In past years we've had the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber. This past few hours it's been the "Number 2 Bomber" we've been hearing about. I've also heard him called the "BM Bomber." Both sound like he did something in the bathroom.

That had to bug ol' No. 2 a little, while he was cowering in the boat, bleeding, waiting for a Boston cop to pop a 9 mil in his forehead. He'll go down in history as the weasely punk loser who killed an 8-year-old child and two young women and, to top it all off, now has the nickname of a bowel movement.

Seems if you're going to be a bomber, you should leave a note or a manifesto, and give yourself a nickname like boxers do to avoid just that kind of embarrassing situation.

So these idiots could have been Tamerlan "Sweet Pea" Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar "Money" Tsarnaev. But I guess they were too busy building bombs, reading Jihadi websites and hating people to worry about marketing. Besides, I'm thinking "BM Bomber" is very appropriate. In fact, it's way too nice.

Read this and you'll be wiser

I'm kind of a big fan of the new guy, so found this in the Wall Street Journal especially interesting: Fifteen Days in Rome: How the Pope Was Picked - The inside story: From the Red Room where Bergoglio's name was first dropped to a faithful night on Rome's Piazza Navona

"We've been arguing intra-ecclesia," Cardinal Cipriani Thorne said. Cardinal Bergoglio's speech was a call to stop "messing around" and "get to the point: It's Jesus."

The essay in the WSJ is an excerpt from the new e-book "Pope Francis: From the End of the Earth to Rome," available at PopeFrancisTheBook.com.

HaugeNote ...

I'm told by a guy who knows this kind of stuff that The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity is a "great, great book."

'3rd Bullet' hit low with a 6 rating

Finished Stephen Hunter's The Third Bullet last night, and it was a struggle.

I don't mean struggle in the sense that I didn't enjoy the book. In fact, when I finish a tougher read, I often ask myself if the book was worth it. Was it worth the time spent? Would I have enjoyed watching Seinfeld reruns better? With The Third Bullet, I'm glad I spent the time reading it.

The struggle came in the details. Hunter is a guns and ammo nut. You can tell he's an expert in that, and he expounds on his interest in the afterword to the book. Me, while I enjoy my guns, about all I know is the difference between a .22 short and .22 long, that you can get them in hollow point, and that 12-gauge shells are bigger than 20-gauge shells. So I got a little bored with the guns-n-ammo over-kill. But I know a lot of gun people, and probably most Hunter fans, do enjoy that. So they'll love this.

Others who would enjoy it are people like my late father, who was a JFK assassination nut. I have probably 15 of his tomes on the JFK shooting. I think it was a generational thing - how, obviously, JFK touched a lot of people (and not just hotties in the White House). In this book, Hunter took the Warren Commission Report and made his conspiracy theory fit within the bounds of the facts presented there. That's probably the most impressive thing about the book - how he made that work.

One negative: I can't say I particularly like Bob Lee Swagger getting old. I think he's 65 in the book, getting slow, getting cranky. Some of the "swagger" was missing from this book.

All told, if you are a gun nut, JFK nut or Swagger nut, you should read the book. Just be prepared for some heavy lifting.

I forgot to update blog - big surprise

A friend gave me Robert B. Parker’s “Bad Business” a while back and I just finished it. I loved the detective, Spenser, and while familiar with Parker I didn’t think I’d read any of his books before. So I was pleased when I saw on the inside back page that “Parker has written over 40 novels.” Cool, plenty to read.

So I filled out my nerdy index card, gave the book a relatively lofty 7-plus rating and went to put it in my distinguished literary storage box (plastic recipe card holder). There, low and behold, was an index card for a Robert Parker novel I read back in 2003, also with a 7-plus rating! I love coincidence like that.

What I don’t love so much is the ol' memory that isn't what it used to be.

While I finish up Dean Koontz's amazing novel Breathless, here are some notes to consider:

** Suddenly, I don’t feel so bad … My Amazon bestseller made me nothing

** I kind of like this idea of a “bite me” coalition.

** A little creepy, a little funny, but mostly funny: Oakland University student booted over ‘Hot for Teacher’ essay is now suing.

** Tell me something I don't know. And now trending on Amazon: I Would Die 4U: Why Prince Became an Icon

Which reminds me of one of my favorite trivia questions you can use to stump your friends:

In 1984, Tipper Gore heard her 12-year-old daughter listening to a song that prompted her to found the Parents Music Resource Center advocating warning labels on records unsuitable for minors.

In 2006, that same singer performed a song for the hit animated penguin film “Happy Feet.”

Name the two songs and the singer.

Drum roll please ...

“Darling Nikki” and “The Song of the Heart” – by Prince