The Roll and ShufflePokerPulse homeTwitter The Roll and Shuffle - the discriminating player's guide to the art of gambling.
LegalAtPokerPulse - A law blog featuring the best links and guides to Internet gambling key challenges plus a You Asked Us forum where experts answer questions from gamblers and would-be online operators worldwide.
The other thing about murderers is that some of them weren't very good at it. If they had been better at it I would probably never have me them, but you must feel some pity for this totally unsuccessful murderer, whose bumbling attempts are chronicled in a local paper:
THE LEAST SUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT TO MURDER A SPOUSE
Dwarfing all known records for matrimonial homicide, Mr Peter Soctt of Soutsea made seven attempts to kill his wife without her once noticing anything wrong. In 1960 he took out an insurance policy on his good lady which would bring him 250,000 in the event of her accidental death. Soon afterwards he placed lethal dose of mercury in her strawberry flan, but it rolled out. Not wishing to waste this deadly substance, he next stuffed her mackerel with the entire contents of the bottle. This time she ate it, but with no side effects whatsoever.
Warming to the task, he then took his better half on holiday to Norway. Recommending the panormic views, he invited her to sit on the edge of a cliff. She declined to do so, prompted by what she later describes as 'some sixth sense.' The same occurred only weeks later, when he urged her to savour the view from Beachy Head.
While his spouse was in bed with chickenpox, he started a fire outside her bedroom door, but some interfering busybody put it out. Undeterred, he started another fire and burnt down the entire flat at Taswell Road, Southsea. The wife of his bosom escaped uninjured.
Another time he asked her to stand in teh middle of the road so that he could drive towards her and check if the brakes were working.
At no time did Mrs Scott feel that th emagic had gone out of their marriage. Since it appeared nothing short of a small nuclear bomb would have alrerted this good woman to her husband's intentions, he eventually gave up and confessed everything to the police. After the case a detective said that Mrs Scott had been 'absolutely shattered' when told of her husband's plot to kill her. She 'had not twigged it at all and was dumbstruck.' (-- pgs. 43-45)
Every true-born Englishman knows that the law is an ass. Rules are better honoured in the breach than the observance. Judges are best represented in a chorus line at the D’Oyly Carte. The English constitution is a vague formulation in someone’s head, and that foundation of English liberties, Magna Carta, is best known for banning eel-traps in the Thames. The firm clip of the law is for the other fellow. Behind the furled umbrellas and decorum, Englishmen are anarchists. Or, as John Mortimer liked to think of them, votaries of “my darling” Prince Kropotkin.
Mr Mortimer’s great service to his country was to sum up in one person both the weight of the law and a sharp, rollicking scepticism of it. He was an eminent lawyer, entering chambers in 1948 and becoming, in time, a Queen’s Counsel and a master of the bar. Few excelled him in cross-examination (the art of which, he liked to say, was “not to examine crossly”). Yet the law was only his day job, giving him the money and the material to write novels. At the bar he dressed scruffily, lest anyone take him for a conventional lawyer. He made fun of the “old sweethearts” on the bench, who would pass a death sentence and then go out for buttered muffins. And as for the law itself, “the great stone column of authority which has been dragged by an adulterous, careless, negligent and half-criminal humanity down the ages”,
[it] is a subject which, I may say, never interested me greatly. People in trouble, yes. Bloodstains and handwriting, certainly…Winning over a jury, fascinating. But law! The only honourable way to pass a law exam is to make a few notes on the cuff and take a quick shufti at them during the occasional visit to the bog.
Those words were not exactly his, but those of Horace Rumpole (seen above right, played by Leo McKern), whose adventures at the criminal bar Mr Mortimer tirelessly depicted in books and TV plays from 1975 onwards. He denied that Rumpole was entirely himself. There was much of his barrister-father in him, especially in his habit of quoting poetry to ward off unwelcome conversation, as well as borrowings from colourful colleagues. Rumpole was a cheroots-and-cheap-claret man (“Pommeroy’s claret keeps me astonishingly regular”), where Mr Mortimer favoured cigars and, at the dawn of the writing day, champagne. He often lost his cases, where Mr Mortimer was notably successful. Home for Rumpole was a mansion flat off Gloucester Road, where he lived in a state of miserable, snappish fidelity to Hilda, “She Who Must be Obeyed”. Mr Mortimer graced the well-heeled, pretty Chilterns near Henley-on-Thames, where children, stepchildren, a love-child, two wives called Penelope and the “Mortimer-ettes”, a claque of intelligent, charmed women, paid court to him and he to them.
Where Rumpole and Mr Mortimer fused together was in their sense of how lawyers should behave. Both were freedom-fighters. They refused to prosecute: their role was to defend the individual against the weight and follies of the law. Rumpole, grubbing round the Old Bailey cells with their “perpetual smell of cooking”, refused to let his clients plead guilty while the smallest doubt remained. He liked to quote Lord Sankey’s words on the presumption of innocence, the “single golden thread” that ran through English law.
Mr Mortimer, also tracing that thread, took on the most celebrated free-speech cases of the 1970s, and won them all. Largely thanks to him, the lord chamberlain’s censoring hand was lifted from the theatre. Thanks to him, Englishmen could read “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Inside Linda Lovelace”, could see Rupert Bear with an erection in Oz magazine, and could endure a Roman soldier’s tryst with the body of Jesus in Gay News. Mr Mortimer hated pornography. But “Liberty is allowing people to do things you disapprove of.”
He took that conviction into politics, too. It led him to support foxhunting and to resume smoking in old age, just to defy the ban. He played the devil’s advocate on behalf of freedom everywhere, from the Oxford Union to the dinner table. Bishops were a favourite target, rapiered for the “absurdity” of life and the worse absurdity of heaven, which had to resemble “the lounge of a Trusthouse Forte hotel”. People, he thought, should be regularly shocked. Offence “makes society move”.
All this, he admitted, came close to anarchism. Yet at its base was something different. He took up the law, which made all else possible, out of obedience to his father. Clifford Mortimer was blinded when John was 13, yet continued his law practice and his life as though nothing had happened. For his son—as he explained in his play, “A Voyage Round My Father”, in 1971—a career at the bar was an extension of all the other duties he assumed for his demanding, unseeing parent, from tying up the dahlias and trapping earwigs to handing him his boiled egg, or his coat.
He walked with his hand on my arm. A small hand, with loose brown skin. From time to time, I had an urge to pull away from him, to run into the trees and hide…But then his hand would tighten on my sleeve…He was very persistent…
The freedom-fighter defied most laws but not this one, family love. (-- p. 94)
One of the ways in which this book differs from many other guides to grammar and usage is in its approach to change in language, and in the degree to which it attempts to resist the assumption that where the English language is concerned, change implies debasement. ...
If Strunk and White are out of date on the particulars, this remains a good example of the wisdom of their advice to writers that one danger of "adopting new coinages too quickly is that they will bedevil one by insinuating themselves wher they do not belong" (75-76). What was a fuzzy and confusing coinage in the 1950s has found a clearly defined place int he language of today. And even conservative arbiters such as Strunk and White recognize that language must change, and that this is not in itself a bad. In the end guides such as this one should continually strive for a balance between the value of continuity in language and in usage, and the value of language as a living thing; without change there can be no life.
***
In one area in particular this guide is not only unresistant to change but embraces change: the move towards bias-free language. ... An increased emphasis on the ways in which language can help or hinder social change of this sort is thus an important part of this book; a discussion of bias-free language forms one of the longer chapters in the book, and provides a much more thoroughgoing treatment of these issues than did the early editions of this book - or than do most other concise guides to usage. (-- pgs. 10-11)
When Milton Friedman died in November 2006, many of the obituaries were imbued with a sense of fear that his death marked the end of an era. ...
(dull Canuck news columnist Terry) Corcoran's assessment did not begin to encompass the state of disarray in which the quest for unfettered capitalism found itself that November. Friedman's intellectual heirs in the United States, the neo-cons who launched the disaster capitalism complex, were at the lowest point in their history. The movement's pinnacle had been the winning of the U.S. Congress by the Republicans in 1994; just nine days before Friedman's death, they lost it again to a Democratic majority. The three key issues that contributed to the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections were political corruption, the mismanagement of the Iraq war and the perception, best articulated by a winning Democratic candidate for the U.S. senate, Jim Webb, that the country had drifted "toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century." In each case, the core tenets of Chicago School economics - privatization, deregulation and cuts to government services - had laid the foundation for the breakdown. ...
... For (Orlando of Chile) Letelier, it was obvious that the dictatorship's "free market" rules were doing exactly what they were designed to do: they were not creating a perfectly harmonious economy but turning the already wealthy into the super-rich and the organized working class into the disposable poor. These patterns of stratification have been repeated everywhere that the Chicago School ideology had triumphed. In China, despite its stunning economic growth, the gap between the incomes of city dwellers and the 800 million rural poor has doubled over the past twenty years. In Argentina, where in 1970 the richest 10 percent of the population earned 12 times as much as the poorest, the rich were by 2002 earning 43 times as much. Chile's "political success" has truly been globalized. In December 2006, a month after Friedman died, a UN study found that "the richest 2 percent of adults int he world own more than half of global household wealth." The shift has been starkest in the U.S., where CEOs earned 411 times as much. For those executives, the counter-revolution that began in the basement of the Social Sciences building in the 1950s has indeed been a success, but the cost of that victory has been the widespread loss of faith in the core free-market promise - that increased wealth will be shared. As Webb said during the midterm campaign, "Trickle-down economics didn't happen."
The hoarding of so much wealth by a tiny minority of the world's population was not a peaceful process, as we have seen, nor, often, was it a legal one. Corcoran was right to question the calibre of the movement's leadership, but the problem was not simply that there were no figureheads of Friedman's stature. It was that many of the men who had been on the the front lines of the international drive to liberate the markets from all restrictions were at that moment caught up in an astonishing array of scandals and criminal proceedings, dating from the earliest laboratories in Latin America to the most recent one in Iraq. Throughout its thirty-five-year history, the Chicago School agenda has advanced through the intimate co-operation of powerful business figures, crusading ideologues and strong-arm political leaders. By 2006, key players from each camp were either in jail or up on charges. (From the chapter, Shock Wears Off, The Rise of People's Reconstruction, Conclusion, pgs. 533-534)
Baby Boomer Retirements and the Workforce Challenge
California and the nation are on the threshold of some of the most rapid social and economic changes in many decades. ... In 2005 there were 9.7 million baby boomers in California between the ages of 40 and 59, accounting for 51.0 % of the prime working-age population. By 2020 they will be 55 to 74 - squarely situated for mass retirement from the workforce. They will be replaced by younger, possiby less-educated workers. ...
How Big Are the Shoes?
The most acute changes will probably unfold just 10 years from now when it proves difficult to fill the shoes of so many retirees. The example that follows is about California, but every state faces similar losses from the reitrement of the baby boomers. Specifically, three million workers from the ababy boom generation will exit the California workforce between 2010 and 2020. (Similar losses will continue between 2020 and 2030.) This workforce loss will stem from all sources, including death and out-migration from the state as well as simple retirement. The departees will be replaced by young adults who are newly entering the labor force. Over four million young workers are expected to join the labor force between 2010 and 2020. Although this number is larger than the number of retirees, it is very deficient compared to previous decades. ...
The anticipated annual losses of the baby boomers fromt he workforce will be most acute in the years between 2015 and 2020 and will drive down annual growth of the labor force to barely 0.6 % per year. As discussed in chapter 3, labor force growth is expected to slow by even more in the United States as a whole to 0.4 % per year - and it could fall to negative rates in some slower-growing states. These growth rates amount to roughly half the already low rates of labor force growth currently experienced in both California and the United States ...
Future Job Skills Requirements
As if the retirement-driven slowdown in overall labor force growth were not a large enough problem, it coincides with a period of expected increase in skill requirements. This is part and parcel of the shift toward a creative, high-tech, and information-based economy. Over the course of recent decades the California economy has steadily shifted toward industries that require higher education, and within those sectors, releance on workers with BAs or more advanced degrees has only intensified. For example, the fastest-growing area of the economy is the broad services sector, in which many of the workers are highly education: in 2002, 25% of workers in this sector held a BA degree, and 15.9% held a more advanced degree. Moreover, skill requirements in this sector have been increasing gradually over time.
Forecasts of economic growth in California call for continued increases in college-educated employment. ... a reasonable conclusion is that the California workforce needs to increase the overall share who are college graduates by about one-quarter by 2020. ...
Will the Workforce Decline in Quality?
... One has to ask if both the United States and California workforces are approaching a point where average skill levels might even decline. This trend is out of sync with the growing demand for higher-skilled workers, and is also out of step with the economic incentives for higher education due to the growing premiums paid to college graduates versus high school graduates.
A major basis for concern is the changing ethnic makeup of the working-age population. ... Census Bureau projections of the population ... demonstrate that the combination of faster-growing ethnic groups with much lower educational attainment will lead to a decline in the overall educational attainment of the workforce in the nation and most individual states. This conclusion is reached if it is assumed that esisting gaps in educational attainment between racial and ethnic groups will persist in the future. ... (From Chapter 10, Growing the New Skilled Workforce and Middle-Class Taxpayer Base, pgs. 204-209)
It's official - British children are the unhappiest in the developed world. One in 10 of our youngsters has been diagnosed with mental problems, fewer than half of them find their school fellows likely to be kind and helpful, and fewer of them sit down to a family meal than anywhere else in Europe. We are better off than we have ever been, and yet we have made the next generation singularly miserable.
The research, carried out by UNICEF, has been highlighted this week by the Conservatives' 'Quality of Life' report and a powerful letter to The Daily Telegraph by 272 leading experts on childhood. Their plea is the need for children's play, and the Tories are asking that we restore balance in our increasingly materialist world. (-- p. 118)
The United States and Britain ranked as the worst places to be a child, according to a UNICEF study of more than 20 developed nations released Wednesday. The Netherlands was the best, it says, followed by Sweden and Denmark. UNICEF's Innocenti Research Center in Italy ranked the countries in six categories: material well-being, health, education, relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's own sense of happiness.
The finding that children in the richest countries are not necessarily the best-off surprised many, said the director of the study, Marta Santos Pais. The Czech Republic, for example, ranked above countries with a higher per capita income, such as Austria, France, the United States and Britain, in part because of a more equitable distribution of wealth and higher relative investment in education and public health.
Some of the wealthier countries' lower rankings were a result of less spending on social programs and "dog-eat-dog" competition in jobs that led to adults spending less time with their children and heightened alienation among peers, one of the report's authors, Jonathan Bradshaw, said at a televised news conference in London. "The findings that we got today are a consequence of long-term underinvestment in children," said Bradshaw, who is also professor of social policy at York University in England.
The highest ranking for the United States was in education, where it placed 12th among the 21 countries. But the U.S. and Britain landed in the lowest third in five of the six categories.
The U.S. was at the bottom of the list in health and safety, mostly because of high rates of child mortality and accidental deaths. It was next to last in family and peer relationships and risk-taking behavior. The U.S. has the highest proportion of children living in single-family homes, which the study defined as an indicator for increased risk of poverty and poor health, though it "may seem unfair and insensitive," it says. The U.S., which ranked 17th in the percentage of children who live in relative poverty, was also close to last when it comes to children eating and talking frequently with their families.
"Ah, yes," say those who are more worried, "but you're looking at a snapshot of today. America's advantages are rapidly eroding as the country loses its scientific and technological base." For some, the decline of science is symptomatic of a larger cultural decay. A country that once adhered to a Puritan ethic of delayed gratification has become one that revels in instant pleasures. We're losing interest in the basics - math, manufacturing, hard work, savings - and becoming a postindustrial society that specializes in consumption and leisure. "More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees," says General Electric's CEO, Jeffrey Immelt. "So, if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we're well on our way." (footnote omitted)
... What hope does the United States have if for every qualified American engineer there are 11 Chinese and Indian ones? For the cost of one chemist or engineer in the United States, the (2005 National Academy of Sciences) report pointed out a company could hire 5 well-trained and eager chemists in China or 11 engineers in India. (-- pgs. 187-188)
Yes, but get this:
Quote:
... A group of professors at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University traveled to China and India to collect data from governmental and nongovernmental sources and interview businessmen and academics. They concluded that eliminating graduates of two-or three-year programs halves the Chinese figure (of engineering grads) ... and even this number is probably significantly inflated by differing definitions of "engineer" that often include auto mechanics and industrial repairmen. ... That means the United States actually trains more engineers per capita than either India or China does. (footnote omitted)
And the numbers don't address the issue of quality. As someone who grew up in India, I have a healthy appreciation for the virtues of its famous engineering academies, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). ... In fact, many of the IITs are decidedly second-rate, with mediocre equipment, indifferent teachers, and unimaginative classwork. Rajiv Sahney, who attended IIT and then went to Caltech, says, "The IITs' core advantage is the entrance exam, which is superbly designed to select extremely intelligent students. In terms of teaching and facilities, they really don't compare with any decent American technical institute." And once you get beyond the IITs and other such elite academies - which graduate under ten thousand students a year - the quality of higher education in and India remains extremely poor, which is why so many students leave those countries to get trained abroad.
... In both India and China, it (McKinsey Global Institute study on emerging global labor market, 2005) noted, beyond the small number of top-tier academies, the quality and quantity of education is low. Only 10 per cent of Indians get any kind of postsecondary education. ... Wages of trained engineers in both countries are rising by 15 per cent a year, a sure sign that demand is outstripping supply. ...
Higher education is America's best industry. There are two rankings of universities worldwide. In one of them, a purely quantitative study done by Chinese researchers, eight of the top ten universities in the world are in the United States. In the other, more qualitative one by London's Times Higher Educational Supplement, it's seven. The numbers flatten out somewhat after that. Of the top twenty, seventeen or eleven are in America; of the top fifty, thirty-eight or twenty-one. Still, the basic story does not change. With 5 per cent of the world's population, the United States absolutely dominates higher education, ...
... In India, universities graduate between 35 and 50 Ph.D.s in computer science each year; in America, the figure is 1,000. ...
I went to elementary, middle and high school in Mumbai, at an excellent institution, the Cathedral and John Connon School. Its approach (30 years ago) reflected the teaching methods often described as "Asian," in which the premium is placed on memorization and constant testing. This is actually the old British, and European, pedagogical method, one that now gets described as Asian. I recall memorizing vast quantities of material, regurgitating it for exams, and then promptly forgetting it. When I went to college in the United States, I encountered a different world. While the American system is too lax on rigor and memorization - whether in math or poetry - it is much better at developing the critical faculties of the mind, which is what you need to succeed in life. Other educational systems teach you to take tests; the American system teaches you to think.
It is surely this quality that goes some way in explaining why America produces so many entrepreneurs, inventors, and risk takers. In America, people are allowed to be bold, challenge authority, fail, and pick themselves up. It's America, not Japan, that produces dozens of Nobel Prize winners. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, until recently Singapore's minister of education, explains the difference between his country's system and America's. "We both have meritocracies," Shanmurgaratnam says. "Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people's talents to the fullest. ..." (-- pgs. 188-193)
Why America and Europe both need LOTS of immigrants:
Quote:
The native-born, white American population has the same low fertility rates as Europe's. Without immigration, U.S. GDP growth over the last quarter century would have been the same as Europe's. America's edge in innovation is overwhelmingly a product of immigration. Foreign students and immigrants account for 50 per cent of the science researchers in the country and, in 2006, received 40 per cent of the doctorates in science and engineering and 65 per cent of the doctorates in computer science. By 2010, foreign students will get more than 50 per cent of all Ph.D.s awarded in every subject in the United States. In the sciences, that figure will be closer to 75 per cent. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. America's potential new burst of pruductivity, its edge in nanotechnology, biotechnology, its ability to invent the future - all rest on its immigration policies. If America can keep the people it educates int he country, the innovation will happen here. If they go back home, the innovation will travel with them.
Immigration also gives America a quality rare for a rich country - hunger and energy. As countries become wealthy, the drive to move up and succeed weakens. But America has found a way to keep itself constantly revitalized by streams of people who are looking to make a new life in a new world. These are the people who work long hours picking fruit in searing heat, washing dishes, building houses, working night shifts, and cleaning waste dumps. They come to the United States under terrible conditions, leave family and community, only because they want to work and get ahead in life. Americans have almost always worried about such immigrants - whether from Ireland or Italy, China or Mexico. But these immigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. America has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers,a dn move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other historical examples of great economic powers that grow fat and lazy and slip behind as they face the rise of leaner, hungrier nations. (-- pgs. 198-199)
Changing on the Fly The Best Lyric Poems of George Bowering
Paperback
Quote:
JUST AS WE LOSE
Just as we lose the last innocence
one comes to tell us there's more;
her date of birth is unimaginable,
no one has seen her before.
Goodness and mercy are such temptations,
love is a bear in the street;
all our old friends are resting their angers,
shuffling their cards and their feet,
shuffling their hands and their feet -
calling off war with the last of our innocence
one swaggers down to defeat.
(-- p. 82)
Quote:
... When you are a young poet you might not be clear about what a lyric poem is, except that it has something to do with sounding good accompanied by the poet's fingers on a lyre. M.H. Abrams, who assigned himself the task of defining literary terms for undergrads, said that a lyric poem is "any short poem presenting a single speaker (not necessarily the poet himself) who expresses a state of mind involving thought and feeling." That's not bad for a description that values a combination of terseness and clarity. In fact, I would argue only with the very "expresses." I hold to the ancient fancy that my poems are permitted from elsewhere, not squeezed from inside.
So here follows a collection of my lyric poems. They have dates on them - that's how it works. Time receives our signatures, and leaves its own on us and our work. These were occasions, as Rilke put it, when the poet was lucky enough to see the visible and the invisible at once.
George Bowering, 2004 (From Preface: Years of Lyrics)
New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Questions for Dambisa Moyo The Anti-Bono The economist talks about why we should stop sending aid to Africa, why no one feels sorry for the Chinese and the trouble with relying on celebrities.
By Deborah Solomon
April 22/09
You argue in your book that Western aid to Africa has not only perpetuated poverty but also worsened it, and you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years. Think about it this way — China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live like us, if you will, with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.
Maybe that’s because they have so much money that we here in the U.S. are begging the Chinese for loans. Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.
What do you think has held back Africans? I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty — and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.
If people want to help out, what do you think they should do with their money if not make donations? Microfinance. Give people jobs.
But what if you just want to donate, say, $25? Go to the Internet and type in Kiva.org, where you can make a loan to an African entrepreneur.
Do you have a financial interest in Kiva? No, except that I’ve made loans through the system. I don’t own a share of Kiva. ...
What do your parents do? My mother is chairman of a bank called the Indo-Zambia Bank. It’s a joint venture between Zambia and India. My father runs Integrity Foundation, an anticorruption organization.
For all your belief in the potential of capitalism, the free market is now in free fall and everyone is questioning the supposed wonders of the unregulated market. I wish we questioned the aid model as much as we are questioning the capitalism model. Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is just say no. (-- p. 11)
Prohibition threatened to disrupt the operation of nightlife. Drink fueled the cabaret by blotting out the routine world and loosening constraints. When drink was threatened, so were the profits of the old-style restaurants. Many old-style lobster palaces had to choose between breaking the law or going broke. Thomas Shanley of Shanley's explained that "eating places pay, of course," but they were "not what I call a restaurant, where a man or a woman can get the best of food and the best of wines, a cocktail and a liqueur." In sum, he observed, "We can't go on at a profit on soft drinks. We obey the law and lose money, and we can't afford that." Some places tried to make a profit on soft drinks and other soda fountain delights, and others became cheap dance halls to fill empty coffers in the troublesome years of 1920 through 1922. It was clear that alcohol was necessary for profits and the style of the cabarets. Those who continued selling liquor were brought low by the padlock, a costly matter because the fine and loss of income added to the amount of fixed rent that had to be paid.
...
The danger of raids made expensive decorations and elaborate surroundings unwise, and it also drove down the cost of opening nightclubs. With the exit of old cabaret operators, many with roots in restaurants rather than entertainment, many small businessmen entered the field, and nightlife became competitive. While the early 1920s was a period of relative slump because of the aid local New York City police gave federal Volstead agents, the period after 1924 witnessed a new blossoming, and New York voted to abandon local enforcement; only a small federal force was left to monitor Manhattan. Because of the fear of raids, however, these clubs often sought the relative anonymity of cellars, basements, and backrooms of brownstones in the sidestreets of the forties and fifties. There, with membership cards to elude curfew and speakeasy mannerisms to elude officials, the nightclub emerged as a cheaper place, with a few drapes, some silk splashed on the walls, and a tentlike effect over the dance floor. Everything was portable after a raid. The reduced costs necessary to compete opened the door to marginal businessmen, who with a few partners concentrated on the relative profit-making aspects of nightclubs: entertainment for the draw and liquor for the bank. In this highly competitive atmosphere, redolent of all small business, operators who could find the right atmosphere, could appeal to the customers' wants directly, and could supply the best entertainment and atmosphere, could perhaps out-survive their competitors for a season or two. (From Into the Jazz Age, pgs. 238-239)
In those late years, there was no praising her - her life had failed, and so her work had failed, and it was equally the case that the work of all her early colleagues (Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Marc Connelly, Donald Ogden Stewart) must also be seen to have failed. ...
If it was true, for example, that she had been hailed as one of the leading lights in the literary world of New York in those far-off days, people like me should remember that it hadn't been a world at all - it had been only a province, or maybe no more than a parish, made up largely of second- and third-raters. To be a leading light under such consitions it would have sufficed to be a glowworm. None of the major American writers of the period had been members of a set; they had lived and worked far from the coterie of self-promoters who gathered at the Algonquin Hotel. Hemingway, Faulkner, Lardner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Cather, Crane, and O'Neill were not to be found cracking jokes and singing each other's praises or taunting each other into tantrums on West Forty-fourth Street. ...
Parker was one of the wittiest people in the world and one of the saddest; if even now we go on laughing at something she happened to say very late at night in some long-since-vanished bar, we do so at our peril. Man is the animal that knows he dies, and the death's-head grinning in the mirror back of all those lighted bottles is our own. There is nothing good in life, Parker held, that will not be taken away. One of the things she admired most in Hemingway was how he had struggled to face this problem both in his life and in his writing. He had been so sure in youth that he would not choose his father's way out of life, by suicide, and Parker had been so sure in youth that she could find no other other means of dealing with the pain of being; and so Hemingway had killed himself and she had lived on, and toward the end there were only ghosts in the corners of the hotel room, silently reproaching her for having had the cowardice to live. It was no use asking them when she had ever claimed to be brave. If, as she said, she had always been the greatest little hoper in the world, she had known that hope was a form of folly and had nothing to do with courage or wisdom. "People ought to be one of two things, young or old," she had written. "No; what's the use of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead." ...
Even in death that doom may be said to have prevailed; the messiness that characterized her life was manifested in the circumstances of her cremation. ... Afterward, it was unclear what disposition should be made of Parker's ashes. ... they were mailed to the law firm of O'Dwyer and Bernstein, which had drawn her will and which represented her sole heir, Martin Luther King, Jr., as trustee for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Parker's estate amounted to approximately $20,000, which the NAACP was surprised and delighted to receive.
For 20 years the Parker ashes remained in a filing cabinet in the offices of O'Dwyer and Bernstein. ... the Algonquin ... declined to accept them. So did The New Yorker .... In the fall of 1988, the NAACP headquarters in Atlanta agreed to accept the ashes and secure for them an honored place in an agreeable setting. One of Parker's early witticisms had been that she wished the epitaph on her tombstone to read "Excuse my dust." As usual, the note of mingled apology and mockery had proved accurate. (From Dorothy Parker, pgs. 146-150)
'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Not a word was spoke between us, there was little risk involved
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
Try imagining a place where it's always safe and warm.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail,
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Suddenly I turned around and she was standin' there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Now there's a wall between us, somethin' there's been lost
I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed.
Just to think that it all began on a long-forgotten morn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Well, the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
I've heard newborn babies wailin' like a mournin' dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love.
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation an' they gave me a lethal dose.
I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Well, I'm livin' in a foreign country but I'm bound to cross the line
Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."
Exploring New York's underground brings many surprises. One is that the hidden areas beneath the streets can be strangely peaceful and welcoming. It is specifically in its subterranean realms that this often chaotic metropolis becomes approachable; the secre3t spaces of the underground, desolate and beautiful, are the intimate surfaces of this gargantuan city. Above ground, New York treats its abandoned structures like seeds stuck between its teeth; well-meaning forces jab at them, hoping to reintegrate them into usefulness, yet eventually they are crushed or absorbed. In losing its ruins, the city is giving up a part of its soul. Only beneath its streets do the dark places linger; here are remnants from past centuries that haven't been renovated or modernized, structures that have been left to age alone in the dark. ...
Getting to the bottom of these mysteries, however, has become virtually impossible in recent years, as the shadow of the terror attacks on 9/11 has spread into all manner of subterranean spaces. The creative anarchy of earlier times has largely dissipated as security has tightened. The attacks have had a profound effect on New York's underworld, an area that now seems rife with threats. Here, in an uninhabited realm, dark and unfamiliar to most New Yorkers, the city appears particularly vulnerable.
In response, the underground is being policed like never before. Hatches have been sealed, subaquatic tunnels are guarded, and cameras have been installed. Information is disappearing off Web sites, archives are closing to the public, and photographers of infrastructure are increasingly met with suspicion. I was lucky to have discovered nearly all of the spaces in this book before the terror attacks and to have found a few kindred spirits among those who work below the streets, since it is now a bad idea to venture into the city's tunnels. Yet, my desire to transform a few of those areas into playgrounds for the imagination has not left. ...(From the Introduction, pgs. 6-7)
Quote:
At night, however, this territory (the Freedom Tunnel) is particularly sketchy, not so much because of the trains, which barrel to and from Penn Station at long intervals, but because the tunnel is still populated with occasional residents and other visitors. The community of people who had made their homes here, documented most extensively in Marc Singer's film Dark Days and Margaret Morton's photo book The Tunnel, no longer exists to such an organized degree. When the train service was temporarily discontinued through this tunnel in 1980, the homeless settled in abandoned maintenance shacks, constructed rooms out of plywood, and refurbished the large stairwells. The estimates of the amount of people living down here until 1995 range from fifty to several hundered.
In 1995, however, the fire department ordered the destruction of the makeshift homes. For the next two years, the worker houses and shacks were torn down, and the homeless dispersed. ... (From Chapter 16, The Freedom Tunnel, p. 143)
Quote:
Dark Days
DVD
The Tunnel Architecture of Despair
Hardcover
By Margaret Morton
I was sent home on Klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug I’d been on forever, as well as a duet of pills — Remeron and Effexor — that were referred to as California rocket fuel for its presumed igniting effect. As it turned out, the combo wasn’t destined to work on me. At home, I was gripped again by thoughts of suicide and clung to my bed, afraid to go out even on a walk around the block with my daughter. When I wasn’t asleep, I stared into space, lost in the terrors of the far-off past, which had become the terrors of the present. It was decided that I shouldn’t be left alone, so my sister and my good friend took turns staying with me. But it was clear this arrangement was short term, and by the end of the weekend, after phone calls to various doctors, it was agreed that I would go back into the hospital to try ECT.
And then, the Sunday afternoon before I planned to return to 4 Center, something shifted ever so slightly in my mind. I had gone off the Remeron and started a new drug, Abilify. I was feeling a bit calmer, and my bedroom didn’t seem like such an alien place anymore. Maybe it was the fear of ECT, or perhaps the tweaked medication had kicked in, or maybe the depression had finally taken its course and was beginning to lift. I had — and still have — no real idea what did it. For a brief interval, no one was home, and I decided to get up and go outside. I stopped at Food Emporium and studied the cereal section, as amazed at the array as if I had just emerged from the gulag. I bought some paper towels and strawberries, and then I walked home and got back into bed. It wasn’t a trip to the Yucatan, but it was a start. I didn’t check into the hospital the next day and instead passed the rest of the summer slowly reinhabiting my life, coaxing myself along. I spent time with people I trusted, with whom I didn’t have to pretend.
Toward the end of August I went out for a few days to the rented Southampton house of my friend Elizabeth. It was just her, me and her three annoying dogs. I had brought a novel along, “The Gathering,” by Anne Enright, the sort of book about incomplete people and unhappy families that has always spoken to me. It was the first book to absorb me — the first I could read at all — since before I went into the hospital. I came to the last page on the third afternoon of my visit. It was about 4:30, the time of day that, by mid-August, brings with it a whiff of summer’s end. I looked up into the startlingly blue sky; one of the dogs was sitting at my side, her warm body against my leg, drying me off after the swim I had recently taken. I could begin to see the curve of fall up ahead. There would be new books to read, new films to see and new restaurants to try. I envisioned myself writing again, and it didn’t seem like a totally preposterous idea. I had things I wanted to say.
Everything felt fragile and freshly come upon, but for now, at least, my depression had stepped back, giving me room to move forward. I had forgotten what it was like to be without it, and for a moment I floundered, wondering how I would recognize myself. I knew for certain it would return, sneaking up on me when I wasn’t looking, but meanwhile there were bound to be glimpses of light if only I stayed around and held fast to the long perspective. It was a chance that seemed worth taking. (emphasis added) (-- p. 48)
O Donal Oge, if you go across the sea,
Bring myself with you and do not forget it;
And you will have a sweetheart for fair days and market days,
And the daughter of the King of Greece beside you at night.
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
The snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
And that you may be without a mate until you find me.
You promised me, and you said a lie to me,
That you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;
I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,
And I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.
You promised me a thing that was hard for you,
A ship of gold under a silver mast;
Twelve towns with a market in all of them,
And a fine white court by the side of the sea.
You promised me a thing that is not possible,
That you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish;
That you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird;
And a suit of the dearest in Ireland.
O Donal Oge, it is I would be better to you
Than a high, proud, spendthrift lady:
I would milk the cow; I would bring help to you;
And if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you.
O, ochone, and it's not with hunger
Or with wanting food, or drink, or sleep,
That I am growing thin, and my life is shortened;
But it is the love of a young man has withered me away.
It is early in the morning that I saw him coming,
Going along the road on the back of a horse;
He did not come to me; he made nothing of me;
And it is on my way home that I cried my fill.
When i go by myself to the Well of Loneliness,
I sit down and I go through my trouble;
When I see the world and do not see my boyt,
He that has an amber shade in his hair.
It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you;
The Sunday that is last before Easter Sunday.
And myself on my knees reading the Passion;
And my two eyes giving love to you fore ever.
O, aya! my mother, give myself to him;
And give him all that have in the world;
Get out yourself to ask for alms,
And do not come back and forward looking for me.
My mother said to me not to be talking with you, to-day,
Or to-morrow, or on Sunday;
It was a bad time she took for telling me that;
It was shutting the door after the house was robbed.
My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
Or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge;
Or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
It was you put that darkness over my life.
You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me,
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me,
And my fear is great that you have taken God from me!
(From the section entitled, The Female, pgs. 187-189)
Listen:
Ramble Away Al O'Donnell
2 Audio CDs
Featuring Donal Og
While goin' the road to sweet Athy, hurroo, hurroo
While goin' the road to sweet Athy, hurroo, hurroo
While goin' the road to sweet Athy
A stick in me hand and a drop in me eye
A doleful damsel I heard cry,
Johnny I hardly knew ye.
With your drums and guns and drums and guns, hurroo, hurroo
With your drums and guns and drums and guns, hurroo, hurroo
With your drums and guns and drums and guns
The enemy nearly slew ye
Oh my darling dear, Ye look so queer
Johnny I hardly knew ye.
Where are your eyes that were so mild, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your eyes that were so mild, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your eyes that were so mild
When my heart you so beguiled
Why did ye run from me and the child
Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye.
Where are your legs that used to run, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your legs that used to run, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your legs that used to run
When you went for to carry a gun
Indeed your dancing days are done
Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye.
I'm happy for to see ye home, hurroo, hurroo
I'm happy for to see ye home, hurroo, hurroo
I'm happy for to see ye home
All from the island of Sulloon
So low in flesh, so high in bone
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg
Ye're an armless, boneless, chickenless egg
* Ye'll have to be put with a bowl out to beg
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.
They're rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They're rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They're rolling out the guns again
But they never will take our sons again
No they never will take our sons again
Johnny I'm swearing to ye.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
FAQ 
Search 
Memberlist 
Usergroups
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
