The Writer's Life 3/27 - Bonus, Russian, French, Fired

According to an article in the NY Post, Wall Street bonuses average $184,620 in 2017. No doubt leftists will be infuriated, even though the payouts are heavily taxed. The largest I ever received in my days at the Commodity Exchange was in excess $4000. Almost half was taken by Uncle Scam.

How will the mainstream media spin President Trump's expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats - as a cover up of collusion, an effort to distract from it?

In another Post article, a Canadian waiter who was fired for being aggressive and disrespectful to colleagues has come up with a novel defense - he's not rude, simply French. This immediately had me recalling a brief dynamite bit on restaurant service the late Robin Williams did on David Letterman's show. In an accent and in the exaggerated pantomime of the self absorbed, he said: "There - there is your food. I can't stand you." Unfortunately, I was unable to find a concise snippet of it on the web. Conan O'Brien had a great line way back in the mid '90's when Genevieve Bujold quit her role as the Captain of Star Trek Voyager almost immediately after being hired. It went something like: "This proves that even in the 23rd century the French will remain obnoxious." The word "stereotype" doesn't exist without reason.

I've said it so many times - coaching is a tough business. The University of Texas-Arlington has fired its basketball coach, Scott Cross, the most successful in school history, for not winning enough. In his twelve seasons the Mavericks won 225 games, lost 161. In the past three they averaged 24 wins. Under Cross' guidance they won the conference championship twice and qualified for the post season five times, going to the big show in 2008. In the 46 years prior to his arrival, the team had qualified only once for post season play. And to top it all off - he's an alumnus of the school. On the bright side, he should have no trouble landing another job.

My thanks to the kind folks who bought books today. Here's what sold: two thrillers in Russian, travel books on London and Paris, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Sandra Brown's Play Dirty and Nicholas Sparks' A Bend in the Road, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night. A blurb at Amazon describes the latter author, who died in 1961, as a French writer and doctor whose novels are anti-heroic visions of human suffering.

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