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| Raymond Chandler |
The blog postings have proved a far better medium for collecting these out takes. I can add photos, and can share thoughts with whomever is part of my small but select readership. Maybe even get comments, proving someone read what I wrote. The Blogspot platform collects some basic statistics, and I rarely get double digits reads beyond 20.
When I tried to further expand who might read my racing postings through Twitter they suspended my Twitter account for a few days for Tweeting the same thing. Can you imagine? I get censored, but the bad actors can continue with fake news. Oh well, I don't make any money off of this.
I once had a an email from Walter Zinsser who commended me for just writing for the sake of writing. If you don't remember Mr. Zinsser, I add a link to the posting I wrote about him and his family business making the best stain cover product there is. Also shellac. I still have cans in the garage workshop. Mr. Zinsser was also a longtime journalist who passed away not all that long ago. I loved the comment.
The blog postings are now my way of riffing on things I read that hold a place in my mind. The only end to them will be will I'm unable to post them.
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Pete Gray, who became a major league outfielder despite the loss of his right arm in a childhood accident, appearing with the St. Louid Browns for a single season during World War ii, died Sunday at a nursing home in Sheatown, Pa. He was 87.
Gray had 51 hits in 234 at-bats for the Browns, including six doubles and two triples. He drove in 13 runs, scored 26 runs and stole 5 bases. A high point came at Yankee Stadium, when he was cheered by a crowd of 36,000 as he took his spot in the outfield.
Gray was once asked how good he might have been if he had not lost an arm.
“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe I wouldn’t have done so well. I probably wouldn’t have been as determined.”
--NYT Obituary, by Richard Goldstein, July 2, 2002
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When asked how she came to write mysteries, P.D. James has a ready answer. As a child she wondered about Humpty Dumpty: “Did he fall or was he pushed?”
--NYT, Mel Gussow, January 10, 2004
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David Brinkley, the wry reporter and commentator whose NBC broadcasts with Chet Huntley from 1956 to 1970 helped to define and popularize television news in America, died on Wednesday night at his home in Houston. He was 82.
Over the years, Mr. Brinkley’s commentaries remained consistently tart. He often railed at what he saw as the incompetence of big government. He came to think that Congress had dangerously isolated itself from the rest of the country.
John J. O’Connor, reviewing this phase of his career for The Times, called Mr. Brinkley “one of the more articulate and persuasive practitioners” of television news reporting.
“The only way to do news on television is not to be terrified of it,” Mr. Brinkley said. “Most of the news isn’t very important. In fact, very little of it is.”
—NYT, Obituary, by Richard Severo, June 13, 2003.
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“I’m old enough to know better, but too old to care.”
–Anonymous
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Every street in New York ends in a river.
–Opening line to William Wyler’s 1937 movie, Dead End.
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Everyone with hometown memories carries around a double vision of the place of origin: the way it used to be when it seemed endless and eternal, and the smaller, transitory way it seems later. Despite logical evidence, that eternal home often looms as a place more glowing and alive way back then than it is now.
–Stephen Holden, NYT, lead to a review on a film retrospective, Where Manhattan Meets the Water, February 27, 2004.
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Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad1, and that was his only patrimony.
–Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche [1921], ch. I
Inscribed over a door in the Hall of Graduate studies, Yale University.
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“The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
–President George Bush, through a bullhorn, September 14, 2001, at the WTC site.
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We have not forgotten the victims of September 11th, the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.
–President George Bush, April 30, 2004, address to the nation, announcing the end of major combat operations in Iraq.
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Mrs. Grayle and I held our glasses. Mrs. Grayle crossed her legs, a little carelessly.
She nodded her golden gleaming head. “Yes. You know there was something rather funny about that holdup. They gave me back one of my rings, rather a nice one, too.”
“He told me that.”
“Then again I hardly ever wore the jade. After all, it’s a museum piece, probably not many like it in the world, a very rare type pf jade. Yet they snapped at it. I wouldn’t expect them to think it had any value much, would you?”
“They’d know you wouldn’t wear it otherwise. Who knew about its value?”
She thought. It was nice to watch her thinking. She still had her legs crossed, and still carelessly.
“All sorts of people, I suppose.”
“But they didn’t know you would be wearing it that night? Who knew that?”
She shrugged her pale blue shoulders. I tried to keep my eyes where they belonged.
–Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
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