More for the guy who has everything.

Attention georgeha infidel: A summer day's project

Psmith in the City by PG Wodehouse

[amazon] [MBLN]

Both Psmith and Mike Jackson are forced to find work to support themselves and end up working in "The City" (London’s name for their financial district) at the New Asian Bank. Mike would rather be playing cricket, Psmith would rather be doing, well, no one is quite sure.

This was a little hard to get into. I mean, all the great Wodehouse effects are the, particularly in dialog, but even though this is only the second of the Psmith books, I felt as if I were expected to know who all the characters were. Now with Wooster and Jeeves, and with the crew at Blandings, I do know who they all are, but not here. I also got lost several times when the characters went into heavy l33t 5p33k about cricket. If you know the game, I sure it was uproarious, but I don’t, so I didn’t. Entirely my problem, though, and I admit it.

Two things struck me in reading this one. Douglas Adams must have been a huge Wodehouse fan. The timbre of the sentence is eerily similar (Adams’ "They hang in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t" could easily have come from this book.) The other thing that struck me is how uncannily similar Psmith is, in personality, to Ignatius J Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. Psmith is certainly smarter and far more of a dandy, but the self centered egotism is spot on, eh wot?

Psmith’s manipulations of the bank personell from his lowly position as, basically, mail boy, and Reilly’s mischief in the Levy Pants factory (or even selling hot dogs) are one in the same. Certainly they both have the same result.

A very good read.

I got three books at the IP depository last time around. The Psmith one, above. A Scanner Darkly by PK Dick, and Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, another Wodehouse.

The Dick book has the first ten pages missing.

I've got a book that's a collection of five Jeeves stories, so I have trouble remember which ones I've read, but I've never heard of this title so I was confident that I haven't read it. That is until I got home and read the tiny print on the title page that says "Originally published in the USA under the title Bertie Wooster Sees It Through. That, of course, is in the collection. Ugh. I thought it looked familiar when I started it, but sometimes it's hard to tell whether I've actually read it or whether I've seen the dramatization (comedyization?) with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry.

Guess it's a trip back to the depository today.

OTOH, I've only got a couple of days to go before the trip, so maybe I should not bother. I should be cleaning the house for impending parental arrival, which is tomorrow. Then again, more t-storms are expected, so who knows when they'll actually get here.

Chiropractor visit at 4:30 this afternoon. I sure hope it does some good. I'm having serious doubts about whether I can complete the ride in this condition. I'm sure I can start and probably do the first two days since they're so flat, but the minute the road starts to pitch up, I'm not sure I'll be able to get any leverage. I will have probably irritated my nerve or whatever it is and send me back to the heating pad.

Shakespeare on the Common has been announced. Taming of the Shrew. Any Husians interested in a night out? Lawn chairs and popcorn?

I'm not quite sure what to think of this latest disaster. All the pols are out there yelling about how they're going to get to the bottom of this and make sure nothing like this ever happens again. Just like they did last time. And the time before that.

It would be "nice" if this were an isolated incident. It's not. It's repeated over and over. The one difference this time is that someone got killed. Well, unless you count 9/11 when 3,000 people were killed as a result of the same sort of incompetent, nepotistic, patronage and payola responsible for this.

What will the end result of this be? My prediction: the records are so muddled no one will be able to fix blame or responsibility anywhere except the usual "systemic failure' and "procedures are now in place to insure this never happens again."

Amarello needs to go and he needs to go now. The single right thing he did was go to the husband's house personally. Romney, OTOH, hasn't even made a phone call, AFAIK (and he certainly would have put out a press release as soon as it happened if he had). Yet he waited exactly 88 seconds before he politicized the whole thing.

I say that's a safe prediction.

It's what's happened on almost every major public works project of the last 30 years.
UMass/Boston campusindictments)
Orange Line relocation
Boston City Hall ("the ugliest public space in the world")
and that's only three.

I'm just glad I never use the tunnels. One thing about being sans car and living in town is that I use the subway tunnel to get to the airport which has been operating without major incident since 1908. It's that route I'll be using tomorrow night when I pick the parents up at the airport.

Who needs terrorists when you could just put a Massachusetts politician in charge and get the same result?