At least, that's what I figure a couple of Philadelphia city officials have. Because I am an optimist and believe in the innate goodness of human beings, I can't see that these people could ever look at themselves in the mirror again. Otherwise, they just might be approaching the event horizon of irredeemability.
A Philly city councilwoman and a functionary with the title "Recorder of Wills" both retired from their jobs last week. No problem, except that their retirement lasted all of one day; they'll be back on the job Monday to start the new year. For that one day of retirement, the city councilwoman will take home $478,000. The irreplaceable Recorder of Wills, who after his one day of retirement decided the city could not do without his services and also returned to the job, pocketed $376,000.
This cash grab was made possible by a retirement system which allows exactly this kind of one-day "retirement" and multi-thousand dollar payout, approved in a bill introduced and voted for by the city councilwoman herself. Philadelphia's mayor vetoed the bill -- he may be one of those rare public officials who has yet to have his shame removed -- but the councilwoman courageously led a fight to overturn the veto.
All this makes me realize my dad is doing it wrong. See, he also went back to work after retiring, but he waited several years and, rather than spend his days figuring out how to put six figures of other people's money into his bank account, he drives around and takes census surveys. I don't know exactly what he clears, but if it's 400 K he must be blowing a lot of it at the track based on what I see around the folks' house.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Double Booked
Malone answers a note from a friend in the intelligence community and finds himself in the middle of an assassination attempt on the president. He foils it but is thought to be involved, so he has to run from the Secret Service. His girfriend, the beautiful and deadly Cassiopeia Vitt, helps him out but also finds herself on the run from the law. Eventually they meet with the president and learn that they're in the middle of a conspiracy with roots that stretch back to the War of Independence. The shadowy Commonwealth, a group of men whose ancestors were privateers and pirates who fought for the United States during the Revolution, are being pressured by the government and they have decided to strike back. We learn they've done this before -- every presidential assassination has happened when the Commonwealth felt threatened. Malone must track down the centuries-old documents that give the Commonwealth their power, but since they have allies in some of the U.S. intelligence services it will not be easy.
Initially The Jefferson Key might seem like a good move for Berry -- rather than some of the historical flights of fancy he's thrown at Malone based on Biblical or medieval texts, here he deals with some fairly straightforward material. The "Key" of the title is an actual cipher device invented by Thomas Jefferson and displayed at Jefferson's home of Monticello, and the code Malone must solve has its roots in an actual code Jefferson invented. But the book is shot full of plot holes and its overall sloppiness send this to near the bottom of the Berry pile. Supposedly brilliant and savvy field operatives do things like neglect to double-check escape routes to see if they've been discovered by enemies or turn on flashlights while wearing night-vision goggles. There are too many similar characters messing around in parallel strands of action to easily keep straight. OK, here's Knox -- wait, is Knox the Commonwealth's quartermaster or enforcer, or was that Hale? No, Hale is one of the Commonwealth's four captains. Now we follow disgraced former agent Wyatt as he battles Knox and a person from one of the intelligence agencies -- I think it's Wyatt, anyway, or is that Knox again?
The other major problem is plausibility. Malone's quest for the documents is urgent because if the Commonwealth finds them, then the "letters of marque" that allow them to act completely on their own against the enemies of the U.S. will be verified and they will be legally untouchable. Yes, the United States government will be powerless against four private citizens because they hold two-hundred-year old agreements with that same government. The sound you hear is every American Indian who's ever lived, laughing.
Berry also uses brief, staccato-like passages when the action heats up, sometimes changing scenes after only four or five lines. The intended effect may be something like a jump-cut in a movie but it feels much more like the shaky-cam that's made Dramamine one of the nation's moviehouses' best sellers. Each passage ends with some cliffhanger-like pause, but the intensity ebbs because so many of those pauses are well-worn cliches -- up to and including that lurching zombie of shots "ringing out."
Whatever skills Berry has brought to earlier books -- narrative flair and a knack for action scenes -- may or may not be here in The Jefferson Key. Its stylistic and storytelling flaws have covered them up well, but we can always hope they haven't erased them entirely.
-----
Val fled sunny Florida when he saw his best friend beaten to death on the orders of drug runner Junior. Now safely living in Los Angeles, he's put his plan into motion to lure Junior out to California so he can have his revenge. But then he meets the beautiful marine biologist Kyle Abbott and wonders if he can still take care of his business with Junior without getting her hurt. That won't be his only problem, though, because Kyle's wealthy family has its own share of issues and one of them is her stepbrother Kilo's involvement with the beautiful but psychotic conwoman Jackie and her partner, the ugly but nearly as demented Gulf War veteran Dekker.
Some aspects of a good crime noir novel are clockwork, and the skillful Ferrigno knows what to wind up and let go, as well as where to both weave his own touch into that rhythm and how to interrupt it with unexpected twists in the story. His dialogue is witty and profane, and he does an excellent job of painting Val as the tarnished hero who's seen too much to have faith in right and wrong but who somehow can't seem to quit doing so, no matter what it might wind up costing him.
Ferrigno doesn't write with the terse economy of Robert Parker or the lighter touch of Robert Crais but his works are well worth the read, and mistaking him for one of the other crime-'ritin' Roberts will turn out to be no mistake at all.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Ongawa!
Cheetah-Mike, a chimpanzee who was believed to have played Cheetah in
some of Johnny Weissmuller's earlier Tarzan movies, died
on Christmas Eve of kidney failure. He was thought to be about 80.
Since chimps in the wild usually live to be about 35 or 40,
Cheetah-Mike's equivalent in human terms would probably have been
something like 150. Either way, he was one old chimp.
Anyone who's read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels knows there's no such thing as Cheetah. There's also no such thing as swinging on a vine through the trees, at least not for full-sized human beings, but a combination of physics, tensile strength of jungle vines and the average person's weight clue us in on that without any assist from ERB. Burroughs gave Tarzan a companion monkey named Nkima -- a vain, selfish and fearful but loyal sidekick who offered some comic relief and a sometimes-reliable method of transporting messages from Tarzan to his friends.
The moviemakers probably decided that trying to work with a monkey would be tougher than working with a chimp, since chimps tend to be quite a bit smarter than monkeys, and thus Cheetah was born. He also offered some comic relief and served as Weissmuller's message delivery service on occasion. I imagine he offered a pretty good hook for critics to use when bashing the Tarzan movies, too, since they could compare his acting to that of the movie's leads, Olympic swimmer Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane. That's probably accurate in Weissmuller's case but not so much in O'Sullivan's as she had a varied and well-respected career before, after and during her six Tarzan movies. But to be fair to Weissmuller, he was apparently a pretty good fellow and respected by his co-workers, and his "Tarzan yell," carried on today by comedienne Carol Burnett, is as much a part of modern pop culture as Superman's cape.
The Tarzan movies are silly fun, transforming Burroughs' lost English lord into a verb and adjective deficient Saturday afternoon serial character for kids -- although O'Sullivan's high-cut loincloth two-piece in her first movie might have drawn attention from a few dads as well and mom probably didn't hate a couple minutes of watching the broad Weissmuller shoulders and chest. They made some excellent diverting entertainment for a nation in the middle of the great depression and during the early, uncertain years of World War II, but their endurance probably owes more to nostalgia than to appreciation of their cinematic quality. Which is just fine by me, especially if it's Saturday afternoon during the era of six or seven channels and it's too cruddy to be outside and the family room reverberates to the ululating call of the Lord of the Jungle.
Cheetah-Mike was the last remaining major cast member of the Weissmuller-era Tarzan films. Weissmuller passed away in 1984, O'Sullivan in 1998 and Johnny Sheffield, who played "Boy," in 2010.
Update -- Three Associated Press reporters who don't have enough to do have filed this item calling into question whether Cheetah-Mike was indeed one of the chimps who played in the Tarzan movies. Looming economic crisis, unrest in Iraq, potential nuclear weapons in Iran, European monetary woes -- nah, let's not dig into those. Let's get some grind with his own horn to toot to say that the chimp in question was a hoax used to drum up business and use three reporters to file it.
Anyone who's read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels knows there's no such thing as Cheetah. There's also no such thing as swinging on a vine through the trees, at least not for full-sized human beings, but a combination of physics, tensile strength of jungle vines and the average person's weight clue us in on that without any assist from ERB. Burroughs gave Tarzan a companion monkey named Nkima -- a vain, selfish and fearful but loyal sidekick who offered some comic relief and a sometimes-reliable method of transporting messages from Tarzan to his friends.
The moviemakers probably decided that trying to work with a monkey would be tougher than working with a chimp, since chimps tend to be quite a bit smarter than monkeys, and thus Cheetah was born. He also offered some comic relief and served as Weissmuller's message delivery service on occasion. I imagine he offered a pretty good hook for critics to use when bashing the Tarzan movies, too, since they could compare his acting to that of the movie's leads, Olympic swimmer Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane. That's probably accurate in Weissmuller's case but not so much in O'Sullivan's as she had a varied and well-respected career before, after and during her six Tarzan movies. But to be fair to Weissmuller, he was apparently a pretty good fellow and respected by his co-workers, and his "Tarzan yell," carried on today by comedienne Carol Burnett, is as much a part of modern pop culture as Superman's cape.
The Tarzan movies are silly fun, transforming Burroughs' lost English lord into a verb and adjective deficient Saturday afternoon serial character for kids -- although O'Sullivan's high-cut loincloth two-piece in her first movie might have drawn attention from a few dads as well and mom probably didn't hate a couple minutes of watching the broad Weissmuller shoulders and chest. They made some excellent diverting entertainment for a nation in the middle of the great depression and during the early, uncertain years of World War II, but their endurance probably owes more to nostalgia than to appreciation of their cinematic quality. Which is just fine by me, especially if it's Saturday afternoon during the era of six or seven channels and it's too cruddy to be outside and the family room reverberates to the ululating call of the Lord of the Jungle.
Cheetah-Mike was the last remaining major cast member of the Weissmuller-era Tarzan films. Weissmuller passed away in 1984, O'Sullivan in 1998 and Johnny Sheffield, who played "Boy," in 2010.
Update -- Three Associated Press reporters who don't have enough to do have filed this item calling into question whether Cheetah-Mike was indeed one of the chimps who played in the Tarzan movies. Looming economic crisis, unrest in Iraq, potential nuclear weapons in Iran, European monetary woes -- nah, let's not dig into those. Let's get some grind with his own horn to toot to say that the chimp in question was a hoax used to drum up business and use three reporters to file it.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
No Reductions
Nice holiday with the family, but over too quickly. The drive home along a major turnpike featured a construction zone that stretched a 15-mile section of the trip into better than 30 minutes. This is not really a problem; I like it when the state resurfaces, repairs or expands the highways.
Of course, the fact that the turnpike toll was exactly the same as it would have been if I had been able to take advantage of its supposedly speedier travel kind of rankles a little bit, but I'm cheap like that.
Of course, the fact that the turnpike toll was exactly the same as it would have been if I had been able to take advantage of its supposedly speedier travel kind of rankles a little bit, but I'm cheap like that.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Honor Amongst Whom?
I'm not a big online game player -- Words With Friends is about it, and I'm not nearly as hung up on it as Alec Baldwin is -- but this article is interesting when it talks about people who cheat while playing online games.
Gaming communities will spot and label cheaters. These could be people who use some sort of programming shortcut in a game, like the old keystroke combinations from Doom! that would let you have a chainsaw whenever you wanted (answer: All the time!), as well as walk through walls or be invulnerable. Or they could take advantage of some kind of computer assistance, like people who will play Words With Friends via a program that will automatically calculate the best words and positions to play them.
These are only a couple of the ways people cheat, but what happens in the different gaming communities is that those folks may or may not be banned from playing the game -- but they are identified and might find themselves shunned. "Join a game with these folks at your own risk," is the unofficial warning.
Some folks in one gaming community tracked some statistics about the cheaters among their members. They tended to congregate in the same games or on the same forums, apparently, which made me wonder what a game would be like if nobody followed the rules. A friend suggested maybe like "Calvinball," but Calvinball has rules. They're made up on the spot and they change from one second to the next, but they do indeed exist. You never break a rule in Calvinball, you just make up a new rule that gives you the advantage you seek.
Also cheating seemed to be contagious. People who weren't identified cheaters but who were linked with the cheaters were more likely to be labeled as cheaters or to start cheating on their own. But people who were indentified as cheaters starting upping their privacy settings and cutting themselves off from their networks within the gaming community.
So catching the games' cheaters is like a game of its own. I expect an Xbox version any day now.
Gaming communities will spot and label cheaters. These could be people who use some sort of programming shortcut in a game, like the old keystroke combinations from Doom! that would let you have a chainsaw whenever you wanted (answer: All the time!), as well as walk through walls or be invulnerable. Or they could take advantage of some kind of computer assistance, like people who will play Words With Friends via a program that will automatically calculate the best words and positions to play them.
These are only a couple of the ways people cheat, but what happens in the different gaming communities is that those folks may or may not be banned from playing the game -- but they are identified and might find themselves shunned. "Join a game with these folks at your own risk," is the unofficial warning.
Some folks in one gaming community tracked some statistics about the cheaters among their members. They tended to congregate in the same games or on the same forums, apparently, which made me wonder what a game would be like if nobody followed the rules. A friend suggested maybe like "Calvinball," but Calvinball has rules. They're made up on the spot and they change from one second to the next, but they do indeed exist. You never break a rule in Calvinball, you just make up a new rule that gives you the advantage you seek.
Also cheating seemed to be contagious. People who weren't identified cheaters but who were linked with the cheaters were more likely to be labeled as cheaters or to start cheating on their own. But people who were indentified as cheaters starting upping their privacy settings and cutting themselves off from their networks within the gaming community.
So catching the games' cheaters is like a game of its own. I expect an Xbox version any day now.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Paging Mr. Kafka...
... Mr. Franz Kafka. Please call your office...ah, nevermind. Even you wouldn't believe this one.
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