The Great Disconnect.

Alert visitors to this site (they're the ones walking around the room and talking and not slumped against the wall texting) will notice that I have added a feed/link to my latest web adventure, The Great Disconnect, in the column at the right.

I am moving the bulk of my political commentary over there, effective immediately (the site sort launched itself while I was getting prepare to do so). I'm sure there will be some crossover and the bit of snark here that I just can't hold back, but the idea is to do what I said I was going to do several times in the past, make Mermaids an "everything else" site (with the exception, of course, of beer, which I devote my attention to at Jack Curtin's Liquid Diet).

Just below the Great Disconnect link is one to Outside Looking In, the cartoon website done by artist Rob Davis and me. That too will be mostly political and updated with a new cartoon several times a month. You can access the latest cartoon by clicking on the date shown in the link or the entire page by clicking on the link title.

More to come. Those "changes coming next week" that I promised at the Curtin's Corner site way back in August will actually happen in November.

I hope.

Pohl on Asimov.

[Originally posted at Curtin's Corner, Jan 21]

Frederik Pohl, whose The Way the Future Blogs is a site any SF fan should have
bookmarked, has recently begun a series devoted to his boyhood pal and SF legend Isaac Asimov. The first installment is here, the second here.

Go. Read. Thank me later.

The Spot.

[Originally posted at Curtin's Corner, Jan 23]

When I moved into this apartment over three years ago and the Girl Dogs, Fergie & Di, were still alive, I could leave them alone here for hours with no fear of any problems. And when I"d return, I'd open the front door and find Fergie sitting roughly 15 feet in front of me in the center of the hall. Always.* Sometimes Di was right behind her, sometimes she was lying further back in the middle of the living room. Fergie was always the alpha dog of the pair and so it was not surprising that, after she left us, Di moved up and took over The Spot.

High Maintenance Buddy, on the other hand, earned those adjectives in large part because of his deep separation anxiety, a not unusual characteristic for a rescue dog. The result has been that I take him with me whenever the situation is right and leave him in a crate when I have to go without him, generally cutting things short to get back as soon as I can because he is given to constant barking and the last thing I need is trouble with the neighbors. To be honest, though, most of them, after they meet him, assure me that anything he wants to do is fine with them and isn't he so cute. Man, I haven't been able to pull that off myself in decades now.

Of late, when I've left him for brief stints, no more than 10-15 minutes, I've come back and heard no barking as I approached the door. There he was, in The Spot. Last night, with the apartment in front of me empty and the guy upstairs away, I took the big leap and left him here for a couple of hours while I did the Robbie Burns thing, the longest stretch ever. Damned if it didn't work. In the spot, on the spot, when I got back, smiling happily.

Whether this is a long-term breakthrough will be determined as we do it several more times, but I sure wish I knew what it was about that spot on the rug. If I could bottle and market it, I'd be a rich man.

* Requisite disclosure: once during Fergie's last year, I went out the front and snuck around the building and in the rear door and saw her up by the door I'd left through, standing and staring at it. I assume this was her behavior in the period right after I would leave and that she would then move back to The Spot, so there's some sort of timing factor involved in all this mysterious doggie lore.

Interviewing Robert B. Parker, 1984.

[Originally posted at Curtin's Corner, Jan 20]

I've been immersed in all sorts of things the last few days, catching up from last week's devotion to wiping out some late deadlines and prepared for deadlines on the near horizon, and somehow missed until this morning news of the death of Robert B. Parker, the prolific creator of Boston PI Spenser (no first name ever revealed) and other memorable characters, at his desk, writing, on Monday.

Here is the New York Times obituary, but for a real in-depth look at this very popular writer and his work, I commend to you this posting at J. Kinston Pierce's Rap Sheet, an excellent blog devoted to crime and mystery fiction. The piece includes a good selection of links to other commentary.

I own every Spenser novel ever published, (38 of them to date, with another two at least still in the pipeline), plus all the Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall books which he introduced in more recent times. I actually became somewhat disenchanted with the Spenser stories for a bit in the middle of the long run, but I still bought and read every one and slipped easily back into the fold as Parker, Spenser and I all grew older. Each new one was ordered immediately, devoured upon receipt---if they had a serious flaw it was that they were so easy to read, so fast to finish. Like any great writer, Bob Parker always left you satisfied and at the same time craving more.

Parker gave me permission to call him "Bob" and did me a grand and wonderful favor back in 1984, just as his latest in the series, Valediction, was being published. He was on a book tour in May and coming to Philadelphia for a signing at the center city Encore Books. I was trying to put together a public access cable show (bearing the same name as this blog now does) and contacted his publisher about doing an interview for my first episode; I was told his schedule was too tight.

Then, the morning of his visit to town, I got a call. The person handling the author's travels said they could free an hour for me if I could get to Encore at, I think, three that afternoon. I called the cable company I was working with, got a cameraman scheduled to meet me there, showered, shaved, wished I'd gotten a haircut and headed downtown, trying to formulate my questions on the fly.

We did the interview in a room not much larger than a closet, barely space for the two of us to sit facing one another, with the cameraman shooting from the open doorway. After Parker left, we had to shoot a series of "back shots" In which I faced the camera and tried to recreate what I'd said at certain points so that the finished tape could periodically cut away to my face. He was witty, gracious and, while he was known not to suffer fools gladly, kind enough to treat me gently when, revealing that desperate and all-too brief preparation of mine on the train, I stumbled a bit here and there.

I just pulled out that old tape for the first time in more than 20 years (the show ran for six episodes and then graciously slipped away into history) and was, I must admit, impressed. I asked a lot of the right questions, touching on aspects of his work still being mentioned now in various obituaries and reminiscences, and he revealed some interesting aspects of his creative process and how he saw Spenser who, we both agreed then and everybody agrees now, was a far cry from the traditional hard-boiled private eye he had been in the first books.

I wish I had the skills or capability to post that tape on YouTube since it's a bit of history that few have ever seen and I'd love to have it on the record. But I don't and can't, so anybody who's really interested will just have to come over to my place.

Photo acquired from this obituary

Woe Is I.

 [Originally posted at Curtin's Corner, Jan 18]

Following a recent back-and-forth on a private email list with my friend Lew Bryson (he appears more often than is probably wise in the tales I weave over here; note that there is some evidence that he is merely a figment of my imagination), I became somewhat uncomfortable.

No, not from talking with Bryson---I have pills for that---but with my feeling that, during our exchange which touched on such arcane aspects of acceptable grammar as the proper use of possessive pronouns with non-determinate antecedents and the confusion caused by dangling participles, I had perhaps become what I never planned to be, a hide-bound old fogey.

Thus, when I came across a review of the book whose title graces this posting in the morning paper, I checked it out and read this in the Publisher's Notes:

Former New York Times Book Review editor and linguistic expert O'Conner (Words Fail Me, You Send Me) updates her bestselling guide to grammar, an invigorating and entertaining dissection of our ever-evolving language. In this third edition, O'Conner guides readers through conversational conundrums with aplomb, filling in not only the logic behind the appropriate choice for, say, possessives, but also explaining such oddities as the spelling of restaurateur (instead of a "restauranteur"), the proper pronunciation of prix fix ("pree feeks") and a slew of mnemonic devices to help amateur grammarians keep ifs, ands and buts in check. It's these small digressions that make the book so readable, even for those with a deep-seated hatred for grammatical do-goodery. O'Conner gleefully eviscerates poor sentence construction and dangling participles, soothes verb tension and debunks the frequently intimidating semicolon with finesse. Tempered with a heavy dose of wit (reaching its nadir in her chapter on clichés), O'Conner's lively treatise is as vital as a dictionary for those who wish to be taken seriously in speech, in print or on Facebook.

I have now ordered a copy of same and will likely be discussing it here in due time.

While I understand that the intricacies of grammar and the question of how the evolution of language in an era of diminished standards might hinder or even render useless the meaning of words is not what you signed up for here, everything does come with a price.

Besides, there is the Great Mystery which you may get to help unravel...

Lew Bryson, Real or Imaginary?

Also, don't head for the exits. We locked the doors.

I Knew This Was Going To Happen.

[Originally posted at Curtin's Corner, 5 Jan]

I have spent the day talking to a brewer who succeeded against what appeared to be overwhelming odds, another brewer who was more worried about his colleagues' beer samples he was carrying than his own welfare when he was in an automobile accident and getting the story behind the story about a potential brewery scandal here in the Philadelphia region.

All good things for a professional beer writer to be doing.

And yet, taking the longer view, I once again reach the inevitable conclusion: my struggle for supremacy with the dog creature known as HMB is the great story in my life at present.

Today's installment: Way back when HMB arrived on the scene (a year ago next month), I knew that he had an allergic skin condition. A lot of time, effort and money has been expended into dealing with that, to point where, a couple of months ago, I would have told you that I figured we had it as under control as it was going to get.

In recent weeks, the struggle has gotten more difficult. I'm not sure yet, but I think this has to do with my relaxing the rules and allowing him to accept treats at the bank drive-in window, the drug store drive-in window and other places where his innate cuteness causes people to want to reward him. He really enjoys this---thinks it is only his due, to be truthful---and I don't want to crush his spirit.

So today, god help me, when I went to the bank to make a deposit, I squirreled away one of his approved treat biscuits in my pocket. He caught the scent faintly and prowled around the back seat anxiously, but didn't go absolutely crazy. When I got the window, I passed in the biscuit along with my deposit and asked the teller to overcome her need to make him love her and substitute it for the doggie bone she would normally add to the returning deposit slip. She did that, I make sure she got full credit and we were on our way.

So, summing up: my life is now reduced to tricking or out-smarting my dog.

And people wonder why I drink.

Them Winds Sure Do Blow Cold...

   [Originally posted at Curtin's Corner, Jan. 3]

..up here on Orchard Hill, just a mile or so west of lovely downtown Pottstown. It be fierce cold out there and, as luck would have it, Buddy has discovered his inner St. Bernard and feels the need to pop out and enjoy the bluster on a regular basis. Between eager barks, soulful looks or his signature move of running around the room like a mad dog, he do get his way more often than not.

Longtime readers may recall that when HMB* first arrived on the scene just about a year ago, I commented that I did not "walk" him, but rather "run" him, as he took off at a dead run as soon as we got out of the door. That appears to be his winter thing and has re-occurred. That we run at high speed through these outings is a Good Thing because, as I said...

Them winds do blow hard.

* For Newcomers: this stands for "His Majesty Buddy" or "High Mantenance Buddy," depending on whether you take his viewpoint or mine.