There is a fascinating op-ed piece in today’s NY Post by Kyle Smith: Man of Kneel, commentary on Men on Strike, a book by former feminist Helen Smith, which warns of the rate at which males are going into a sort of isolation. An all-time low of 70% of men are currently working. The author describes many as “Uncle Tims” - “male feminist lapdogs eager to curry favor with their female and feminist masters.” I remember thinking similarly, although not nearly as elegantly, of a member of the band Radiohead, who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with dogma while performing on The Tonight Show.
I know I shouldn’t get a gleeful kick out of green initiatives that fail, but I do. The MTA has been replacing the hybrid engines of city buses with diesel engines. So far 23% have been converted. Curiously, they are running in the outer boroughs, where there are sometimes long stretches between stops, which have proven more damaging to the hybrids. The frequent stops in Manhattan have preserved them. Of course, the union opposes the change, citing danger to public health in the form of greater emissions. Management claims the post-2007 diesels are less toxic to the environment. I suspect the union is more worried about the loss of man hours, overtime, that goes into repairs. The MTA hasn’t bought a hybrid in three years. Each costs $700,000+, while the diesels are $500,000 and are less expensive to repair. And it seems to me that the air in the city is cleaner than it has ever been in my lifetime. Environmentalists did a great job, but their work is done in this regard. Life expectancy is about 80, yet the paranoiacs insist pollution is as hazardous as it was decades ago, and I just don’t see it.
Last night Antenna TV, 114 on Cablevision, ran a triple feature of black and white films: Dead Reckoning (1947), starring Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott; the vastly underrated In a Lonely Place (1950), starring Bogie, as good a performance as he ever gave, and Gloria Grahame; and The Big Heat (1953), starring Glenn Ford, Grahame, and Lee Marvin, which the station had rated, laughably, at two stars, but which is now regarded as one of the top noir classics, rated 8.3 of ten at IMDb. …Lonely Place is rated 8.0, …Reckoning 7.1. Thank you, ATV. Here is a quote from Grahame, one of Hollywood's all-time great femme fatales: “There's always a race against time. I don't think for one moment that life gets better. How can it? One's body starts to fall apart.” She died of cancer at 57.
No luck selling books on the street today. At the half way point of 2013, I've sold 28 of my own books, not counting those that have sold on the web, the exact amount of which I will not know until I receive royalty checks from the publishers.
Vic's 4th Novel: http://tinyurl.com/bszwlxh
Vic's 3rd Novel: http://tinyurl.com/7e9jty3
Vic's Website: http://members.tripod.com/vic_fortezza/Literature/
Vic's Short Story Collection (Print or Kindle): http://www.tiny.cc/Oycgb
Vic's 2nd Novel: http://tinyurl.com/6b86st6
Vic's 1st Novel: http://tiny.cc/94t5h
Vic's Screenplay on Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/cyckn3
No comments:
Post a Comment