That death of the kid in suburban Orlando by the "neighborhood watch" guy has left me stunned, and speechless.

Until now.

Nod to Ron White.


Oops.

Speechless again.

Almost.

It looks pretty good I might be moving with my wife to a State where I can carry a concealed weapon, and I know the responsibility and handling of such, and my wife wants me to teach her to shoot, too.

As God is My Witness, I will not teach my wife how to shoot anything other than a sawed off shotgun with the thought she would be assured of at least inflicting partial pain on any of the group of perps.

What she does in her free time with regard to learning how to shoot anything else is what she does in her free time.

Well hopefully our ole pal Charlie is having a great time with his cowgirl. In the meantime I can make stupid comments about people dying in 3's without him giving me crap.

And speaking of old pals who have taken a sabbatical, we rented a cabin in the mountains outside Bozeman, MT again this past weekend. I was there Thursday thru Sunday. One day I did make a trek downtown and was happy to see the bookstore still kicking.

I wasn't sure why JC (RR) took off for a while but hoped it wasn't anything to do with hitting hard times. You never know with the toll that the mega bookstores takes on the mom & pops and with the crappy economy. So was glad to see his business still apparently plugging along.

I guess I can't say fer sure cause I didn't stop in this time. He apparently wants his privacy so I respected that. But looks like he's still plugging along.

BTW, Cali, if your wife wants any tips on handguns feel free to give me a yell. I have went through quite a few pistols and revolvers in recent years and went through a little trial and error with my wife before settling on a pistol she is very comfortable shooting.

Also, we have a couple friends here in town that are shooting enthusiasts. Between our group of friends, 3 couples, we have a wide array of guns and I can offer feedback on quite a bit of the choices on the market today. (not to mention I often swap around guns with other guys at the range. We gun nuts never want to pass up on the chance to shoot something new)

BTW 2 ... I keep a tactical shotgun in the house for home protection. I often get snobby gun guys asking me what the hell I have that for. I usually respond, "for whatever I want."

You can hunt anything from birds to deer. If someone breaks in your house anybody who grabs it can't miss. And if nothing else, there is not much more fun at the range or much better way of blowing off steam then shooting a watermelon with a shotgun. It's a hundred dollars of fun for waterever the price of a watermelon is.

Here's to Cremora, whatever that stuff really is.

I'll tell you what it really is: it's Hernandez and its shelf life just got three years shorter.

I am of Italian origin and like this

Also good for Soprano fans needing a fix

http://www.jest.com/e/153248

Hillbilly wrote:BTW, Cali, if your wife wants any tips on handguns feel free to give me a yell. I have went through quite a few pistols and revolvers in recent years and went through a little trial and error with my wife before settling on a pistol she is very comfortable shooting.

My reluctance on teaching my wife to shoot has a whole lot to do with self preservation....

VT'er wrote:

Here's to Cremora, whatever that stuff really is.

I'll tell you what it really is: it's Hernandez and its shelf life just got three years shorter.

I had to percolate on that one.

loufla wrote:I am of Italian origin and like this

Also good for Soprano fans needing a fix

http://www.jest.com/e/153248

THAT'S definitely worth a click.

Hillbilly wrote:
I wasn't sure why JC (RR) took off for a while but hoped it wasn't anything to do with hitting hard times. You never know with the toll that the mega bookstores takes on the mom & pops and with the crappy economy. So was glad to see his business still apparently plugging along.

I guess I can't say fer sure cause I didn't stop in this time. He apparently wants his privacy so I respected that. But looks like he's still plugging along.

Bozeman seems like a very good place for an independent bookstore.

Of course as I type that, I realize I am rarely found with printed ink in my hands these days, and haven't been for well over a decade.

No worries about JC.

He road the Magic Bus, and I believe he'll be just fine.

Bumbles bounce.

I'm looking forward to Spanking the Monkey.

IFC, at 7:15PDT.

Jeremy Davies and Alberta Watson. I almost always bite on a description of "dark comedy."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111252/

I'm looking forward to Spanking the Monkey.


Spanking the Monkey was OK. It dealt with taboo subjects, as well the subject of young adults who do not feel appreciated by parents, accurate or not.

I really cannot recommend going out of the way to partake of "Spanking the Monkey."

GREATEST CARD TRICK EVER

http://www.youtube.com/v/Uh0CMcLiRkw%26feature%3dshare

Hemingway shows soft side in newly public letters


Associated Press

By BRIDGET MURPHY | Associated Press – 4 hrs ago




This black and white photo from the mid-1900's, released by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on Wednesday, March 28, 2012, shows Ernest Hemingway, second from right, and Gianfranco Ivancich, right, dining with an unidentified woman, left, wife Mary Hemingway, second from left, and Juan "Sinsky" Dunabeitia, center at Hemingway's villa Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. The museum made public on Wednesday a dozen previously unpublished letters Hemingway wrote to Ivancich. Experts say the letters demonstrate tenderness in Hemingway’s character that wasn’t necessarily part of his public persona. (AP Photo/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)


BOSTON (AP) — Ernest Hemingway shows a tenderness that wasn't part of his usual macho persona in a dozen unpublished letters that became publicly available Wednesday in a collection of the author's papers at the Kennedy presidential library.

In a letter to his friend Gianfranco Ivancich written in Cuba and dated February 1953, Hemingway wrote of euthanizing his cat "Uncle Willie" after it was hit by a car.

"Certainly missed you. Miss Uncle Willie. Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years," the author wrote. "Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs."

The letters span from 1953 to 1960, a year before the prize-winning writer's suicide. Whether typed or written in his curly script, some of the dispatches arrived on personalized, onionskin stationery from his Cuban villa Finca Vigia.

The author also wrote from Europe, while on safari in Africa, and from his home in Idaho.

The two men met in a Venice hotel bar in 1949, bonding despite a two-decade age difference because they'd both suffered leg wounds in war.

"I wish I could write you good letters the way you do," Hemingway wrote in a January 1958 letter from Cuba. "Maybe it is because I write myself out in the other writing."

Experts say the letters demonstrate a side to Hemingway that wasn't part of his persona as an author whose subjects included war, bullfighting, fishing and hunting.

The Kennedy library foundation bought the letters from Ivancich in November, and Hemingway Collection curator Susan Wrynn met the now-elderly gentleman in Italy.

"He still writes every morning," she said Wednesday. "Hemingway encouraged him to."

The letters, as a whole, show the author had a gentle side, and was someone who made time to be fatherly and nurturing to a younger friend, said Susan Beegel, editor of scholarly journal The Hemingway Review.

Hemingway's letter about his cat's death also showed the author's struggle to separate his private and public lives. Hemingway told how a group of tourists arrived at his villa that day.

"I still had the rifle and I explained to them they had come at a bad time and to please understand and go away," he wrote.

But one wasn't deterred, according to the letter, saying, "We have come at a most interesting time. Just in time to see the great Hemingway cry because he has to kill a cat."

In multiple letters, Hemingway also asks about his friend's sister Adriana Ivancich.

The young Italian socialite became a muse for the writer after they met at a duck-shooting outing in Italy. The woman was the model for the female lead in Hemingway's novel "Across the River and into the Trees," Beegel said.

Experts say Hemingway credited her visit to Cuba in 1950 with inspiring him as he crafted the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Old Man and the Sea." He wrote of the literary award in a June 1953 letter to his friend, saying, "The book is back on the Best Seller lists due to the ig-noble Prize," a line Beegel sees as self-deprecating humor.

Hemingway went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature the next year.

___

RIP Earl Scruggs

http://youtu.be/icMTVV5Lwaw

There has been some discussion about JC/ROCKY lately. Hope he's OK!

Independent Booksellers Stand Strong as Industry Changes
Borders and Joseph-Beth Books left the market, e-books dominate and bookstores adjust.

Independent booksellers like Suzanne DeGaetano didn’t exactly do a jig when larger competitors left the market twice in the past year and a half.

DeGaetano’s Cleveland Heights-based Mac’s Backs gained customers following the closures of Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lyndhurst and a Borders location in Beachwood, but the avid reader and business supporter in her couldn’t allow the co-owner to rejoice.

“It’s really kind of a tragedy when a big room of books is no longer there,” she said. “We know people in the publishing industry, and it’s bad for them because a lot of people got their jobs cut. A lot of books aren’t being sold now.”

Borders, once the country’s second-largest bookseller, closed last summer. It employed about 10,700 people. At the end of the prior year, Joseph-Beth closed several stores across the country.

Without the presence of inventory-rich competitors, it became clear to DeGaetano that readers had been habitually going to places like Borders without giving the smaller guy a chance. DeGaetano, whose store has been in business for 30 years, said the impact has been undeniable.

“We spent most of our time as a bookstore making ends meet,” she said. “The last year, really, is the first time in a long time that I can really pay my vendors on time.

“That’s a direct result from there being more people in the store. I can’t tell you what a great feeling that is to not always have to be making excuses: ‘It’s coming, it’s in the mail.’”

In Mentor, Joe Vento of Mosack’s Church Goods and Religious Gifts says book sales comprise about one-fourth of their sales. The store’s niche has been advantageous but doesn’t guarantee book sales. Vento said offerings and in-store experience are the biggest factors in ensuring purchases.

“I tend to think that book readers are impulse buyers, and I’m one of them,” Joe Vento said. “I think it’s incumbent on our part to keep the right selection of books and have those books properly merchandised in order to catch the interest of that reader and stimulate the impulse buy.”

E-sales

Few customers have mentioned e-books to the Ventos, but Mosack’s is open to offering them if the demand increases. If their customer base begins following national trends, that shift could happen sooner than later. The Association of American Publishers earlier this year said digital books sales grew by 117 percent in 2011, while all print segments of book sales dropped.

Powered by devices like Amazon’s Kindle, e-books would seem to cut into the profits of brick-and-mortar shops. That’s why Mac’s Backs began offering them in October. The sales have been modest, but DeGaetano said it was important to tap into that market in order to maintain relevancy.

“I’m excited by the technology, too,” she said. “I’m just like everybody else … It’s a new thing, and I wanted to bring that excitement to our store.”

While DeGaetano discussed what she deems an industry “constantly in flux and constantly adjusting,” Collinwood resident Keith Yurgionas perused her poetry section. As a former employee of the coffee shop that was housed in the Beachwood Borders, he’s just glad there are other places for people to congregate, chat and flip pages. He said most of his thoughts were better articulated by Cleveland Heights resident Joseph Zitt, a former Borders employee who wrote about the closings in his book, “19th Nervous Breakdown: Making Human Connections in the Landscape of Commerce.”

“(Zitt) always emphasized the social aspect of a book store,” Yurgionas said. “If you remove the coffee shop element, the actual place where people can get together, then where are we going as a society?”

A small surge?

DeGaetano isn’t worried about communication hubs giving way to e-readers or any other to-be-developed technology. She says she and other independent bookstore owners were surging during the holiday season, or the same nine-week period when Amazon sold three times the amount of Kindle devices consumers bought a year earlier.

“This was the first holiday season that (Borders and Joseph-Beth) were gone, so that’s why the small stores did way better,” DeGaetano said. “Around the country, any place that had a Borders, I think, had that surge.”

The nationwide pitch for consumers to shop local didn’t hurt either, she said.

Jason Merlene, owner of Last Exit Books in Kent, finds it a bit difficult to tell whether “mom and pop” bookstores are experiencing a boost. His own sales have been up ever since his store expanded in late 2010, seemingly in conjunction with more development around Kent State University. Also, his proximity to the college affords him a built-in customer base that other independent stores don’t experience.

Merlene is split regarding the long-term impact e-books will have on brick-and-mortar book businesses. For every consumer who gives up paperbacks in favor of a tablet, another comes to Last Exit partially to rebel against e-readers. It’s not unlike his vinyl purchasers who don’t care much for mp3s, Merlene said.

“I know somebody who sold me all their books because they got a Kindle for Christmas,” he said.

“Then, they hated it so much, they gave it to their friend and came back trying to find all the books he sold me.”