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The egoless among us.

I don’t know how I missed this, a lengthy piece on Elmore Leonard last week in the Wash­Post, pegged to noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar. The writer, Neely Tucker, seems quite taken by the fact Leonard isn’t an asshole:

Walk through his house, a two-story thing on a nice-but-not-ostentatious street in this leafy ‘burb, and you’ll be hard-pressed to know you are in the house of a writer, much less a famous one. He works at a reg­u­lar desk with an IBM Wheel­writer 1000 type­writer at the side. It’s in a nice room with some wooden book­cases and a tele­vi­sion at one end. He doesn’t own a com­puter. Then there’s a fam­ily room with pic­tures of his five kids and 13 grand­kids and three great-grandchildren and a lovely oil por­trait of Chris­tine. The kitchen opens onto a sun­room, and there’s the back yard with 40-foot fir trees and a small swim­ming pool and a ten­nis court with a sag­ging net.

He dri­ves a VW Jetta.

There is no glory wall, no pho­tographs of him with stars in his movies: Chea­dle, Clooney, De Niro, East­wood, J-Lo, New­man, Tra­volta. He doesn’t go to the Oscars. Until you get to the “busi­ness room,” a tiny thing off a hall­way by the garage with a cou­ple of book­cases lined with copies of his books, the only sign he’s in the busi­ness is in a wet bar off the kitchen: the iconic Annie Lei­bovitz pho­to­graph of him on a hard-backed chair on Miami Beach, all in black, wear­ing a beret and typ­ing away.

He looks cooler than you could ever hope to be.

“One time when I was a kid, I picked up the phone. This lady said, ‘I have Clint East­wood call­ing for Mr. Leonard,’ ” says his son Bill, an ad agency exec­u­tive who now lives just a few blocks over. “I said, very calmly, ‘Dad, Clint East­wood is call­ing from Cal­i­for­nia.’ Every­body screamed. We kids ran to the other room and unscrewed the mouth­piece so we could lis­ten in.… He was com­pletely unas­sum­ing about Hol­ly­wood. He’d say, ‘They’re just peo­ple.’ Aero­smith — the whole band — came over to his house a few years ago. They all went swimming.”

This evening, he and Chris­tine go to din­ner a mile or so from his house. He gives the maitre d’ his name for the reser­va­tion. Goes right over the guy’s head. He tells Dutch he’s late and he’s missed his spot and he’ll just have to wait some more. Dutch, who could buy the restau­rant, doesn’t say any­thing. He and Chris­tine just stand there, look­ing like a cou­ple of nice retirees, and then Chris­tine flags a wait­ress she knows, and this lady gets them a booth.

It’s like going out with the ego­less Zen master.

Please don’t mis­con­strue this — I’m as delighted by Leonard’s lack of jerk­i­tude as any per­son should be — but it makes me sad that not going on the mus­cle with restau­rant hosts and not hav­ing a glory wall of pic­tures of one­self mug­ging with J-Lo is some­how more note­wor­thy than doing so.

Every so often I run across the syn­di­cated TV ver­sion of TMZ​.com. Those of you famil­iar with it know their stock in trade — not celebrity news, but celebrity humil­i­a­tion. (There’s a clip today of Andy Dick being car­ried, phys­i­cally car­ried, out of a party, and who­ever put that vomit risk in their car is either a hero or fool.) I’m intrigued by the show’s struc­ture, which is famil­iar to any­one who’s ever sat through a news­room staff meet­ing, because that’s what it is — a bunch of young reporter types pitch their sto­ries to an older edi­tor, who makes notes on a white­board. You get the sense of a pla­toon of spies, out to cap­ture celebri­ties spilling cof­fee, look­ing offen­sively fat/skinny or, of course, being drunk. In that Andy Dick clip, which was filmed from a second-story win­dow look­ing down on the action, you can hear some­one nearby say­ing, “Are you get­ting this?” A man par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Dick-carrying action looks up at the cam­era and cries, “Dlisted!” — another gos­sip blog.

So what we have here is an army of paparazzi, feed­ing a dig­i­tal Fleet Street full of gos­sips, ded­i­cated to the twin propo­si­tions that a) celebri­ties are ass­holes; and b) we must pub­licly denounce them as such, prefer­ably by being ass­holes our­selves (“Court­ney Cosucka”).

I’m glad Elmore Leonard isn’t an ass­hole, but by the time you’re 82, it’s wis­est not to be. Maybe that’s why he’s still doing his best work in his ninth decade.

In the story, Leonard makes the same point he makes with every­one who asks why it took so long for Hol­ly­wood to fig­ure out how to make his books into decent movies:

Barry Son­nen­feld, the first direc­tor to fig­ure out Leonard’s dark humor (“Get Shorty”), says his books are “medium camera-shot” stuff with no close-ups for punch lines, no cues to the audi­ence some­thing funny just happened.

In inter­views, Leonard says this was his advice to Son­nen­feld — no cut­aways for the reaction-mugging. Maybe that’s the secret, but I thought “Get Shorty,” the film, fell about 17.43 per­cent short of the praise heaped upon it. Danny DeVito was all wrong for the part of the jerk movie star (it needed some­one short and clue­less and hand­some, a Tom Cruise) and John Tra­volta — meh. For my money, “Out of Sight” was far supe­rior, and the secret to that wasn’t a lack of close-ups, it was leav­ing the damn dia­logue alone and under­play­ing it. Leonard’s dia­logue is very funny, but it’s dry-as-dust funny — you laugh inside. “Freaky Deaky” opens with a drug dealer being called to the phone in his man­sion, a turn-of-the-century show­piece he’s tricked out with his hideous drug-dealer taste, like a green-striped para­chute over “the Jacuze.” It’s his girl­friend on the phone, who asks if he’s sit­ting down. You have to sit down for this, it’s impor­tant. He sits down in the chair next to the phone (this being pre-wireless days) and she says, “When you get up, what’s left of your ass is gonna go clear through the ceiling.”

See, he’s armed a bomb. It’s a pres­sure switch, and when the pressure’s off, boom. But he has a phone, right? So he calls the police. And the bomb squad shows up, and the bomb expert crawls under the chair and says, yep, that’s a bomb. That’s when it starts to get funny — the dealer starts com­plain­ing that he’s “got to go the toi­let” and the cops just don’t give a shit about his com­fort. He’s a drug dealer, they know it, he knows they know it, and what’s the hurry? Let him suf­fer. They start putting ideas in his head: Now don’t think you can dive into that Jacuzzi and out­run a stick of dyna­mite, you can’t do it. Then they leave the room. A beat, and …boom. Now that’s funny, but it’s not ha-ha funny. It’s the guy sit­ting on a bomb in his man­sion, the con­tempt of the cops, “I got to go the toi­let, bad.” Just copy and paste, Mr. Screen­writer, it’s easy money. That’s what Scott Frank did in “Out of Sight.” And then they got George Clooney, one of the great under­play­ers, and Ving Rhames, another one, and they man­aged to wrap a few steel bands around J-Lo’s ego, and voila. “Out of Sight” is a roman­tic com­edy in which you don’t laugh, only smile.

You’ve heard all this before. I apol­o­gize. Very tired this morn­ing. I had the hockey game on for com­pany while I worked last night and finally had to turn it off — the hys­te­ria in the play-by-play and the des­per­a­tion of the play itself was too much to bear. Dorothy said Pen­guins in six. She may be right. It might be Pen­guins in seven. (Or Wings in six!)

So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Geof­frey Feiger’s been on trial here, for cam­paign finance law vio­la­tions, and a cur­sory look at the facts as pre­sented sug­gest he was guilty, guilty, guilty. Not that it swayed the jury of his peers, who found him not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. (Most of you non-Michiganders prob­a­bly know him as Dr. Kevorkian’s first high-profile lawyer.) I can­not tell a lie: I don’t care. The pros­e­cu­tion was flawed, and the Repub­li­cans (at the state and national level) have been hunt­ing him for too long for me not to be cheered that he gave ‘em the slip. The guy is the stone per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of the slimy lawyer, and yet, he’s eas­ily one of the most amus­ing char­ac­ters in town, and I’m glad he’s going to be in busi­ness a while longer. His TV ads are beyond belief, 30-second gob­lets of smarm talk­ing about our great Amer­i­can jus­tice sys­tem and his pledge to stick up for the lit­tle guy, blah blah blah, always punc­tu­ated by Feiger, his head tilted and eyes twin­kling, smil­ing with the whitest set of teeth this side of Hol­ly­wood. (See here, here and, most spec­tac­u­larly, here.) If I were the direc­tor, I’d add a lit­tle twinkle-sparkle effect in the last sec­ond. In fact, I bet he’s prepar­ing a “thank you, Amer­i­can judi­cial sys­tem” spot as we speak, and I hope it includes it.

And speak­ing of court tri­als, I can­not tell another lie: If I were in a spin­ning class with some­one who yelled, “Good burn!” and “You go, girl!” while the class was ongo­ing, I’d be tempted to dis­mount, pick up his sta­tion­ary bike and slam it down to make my point. So, appar­ently, were mem­bers of this jury, who said as one: NOT GUILTY. Lance Mannion’s wife, the Blonde, and I were in an aer­o­bics class with some­one who did that, but it was a big room and he wasn’t quite that obnox­ious. He was very big on spon­ta­neous whoooos, how­ever. The Blonde and I really hated that.

Finally, guess what’s on top of the NYT most-e-mailed list? This col­umn: Put a lit­tle sci­ence in your life. Enjoy it as I did; I’m off to the gym, where nobody bet­ter mess with me!

Posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:48 am
in Uncategorized.

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37 responses to
“The egoless among us.”

  1. John said on June 3rd, 2008 at 10:03 am

    Dorothy said Pen­guins in six. She may be right.

    Please get more rest. The Red Wings are up 3 — 2.

  2. Dorothy said on June 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 am

    Thanks for the Pens plug, but they can’t win in 6 now, since they lost the first two. But they can still win in 7!! And I’m dressed like a pen­guin today — black and white — and my pen­guin earrings.

  3. moe99 said on June 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 am

    Posted it y’day but has not escaped the moat yet: the inven­tor of the Pringles can had him­self cre­mated and part of his remains went into, yup, a Pringles can.

  4. brian stouder said on June 3rd, 2008 at 10:45 am

    Now THAT’s ego-less

  5. LAMary said on June 3rd, 2008 at 11:08 am

    TMZ is remark­ably obnox­ious. I like the cheesy celebrity gos­sip as much as the next per­son, but that show is really odi­ous. They went on about how nasty is was to watch Jodi Fos­ter shop­ping for under­wear the other day. What is inher­ently nasty about it, we never got to hear. Maybe because she’s prob­a­bly gay? Maybe because she’s not 22 years old? Who knows.

  6. nancy said on June 3rd, 2008 at 11:12 am

    Duh. You’re right.

  7. Sue said on June 3rd, 2008 at 11:20 am

    From “Put a Lit­tle Sci­ence in Your Life”: ‘We must embark on a cul­tural shift that places sci­ence in its right­ful place along­side music, art and lit­er­a­ture as an indis­pens­able part of what makes life worth liv­ing.‘
    Seri­ously? Schools are cut­ting music and art because tax­pay­ers are scream­ing, and lit is some­thing only snobs are inter­ested in, right? And the author thinks sci­ence, which most schools rec­og­nize as more impor­tant than other sub­jects and which most par­ents at least pay lip ser­vice to, is get­ting short shrift? The prob­lem with sci­ence and math teach­ing in schools is not that kids aren’t chal­lenged enough or shown how fas­ci­nat­ing the sub­jects can be, but that no one is allowed to catch up when they fall behind. If you can’t keep up, you have the option of a resource cen­ter staffed by other chil­dren or teach­ers who use the time to grade papers. Beyond that, you’re on your own. I agree that sci­ence should be a big­ger part of our lives, but cur­rent atti­tudes in our coun­try (which have been build­ing for years, even before this admin­is­tra­tion) dis­count edu­ca­tion. If you can’t get it by 18, give it up. At least with music, art and lit­er­a­ture, self-education and com­mu­nity resources can help you pick up what you couldn’t or wouldn’t under­stand in grade school and high school. Sci­ence and math teach­ing in the US sim­ply leaves too many peo­ple at the start­ing gate, and no cul­tural shift can hap­pen until that changes.

  8. brian stouder said on June 3rd, 2008 at 11:41 am

    In The News — Word of the Day: “pivot”

    With the long pri­mary elec­tion cycle end­ing today, and the polit­i­cal machi­na­tions rat­tling to a (pre­sumed) end — my bet is that you will read or hear the word “pivot” approx­i­mately eleventy-seven times before we get to Fri­day (D-Day, as it happens)

  9. John said on June 3rd, 2008 at 11:56 am

    I saw that pic­ture of you yes­ter­day. It may be time for some Ger­i­tol as you were look­ing a tad bit peaked. Maybe all the bike rid­ing has caused an oxy­gen leak.

  10. Sue said on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    I didn’t think you look peaked. I thought you looked “soulful”.

  11. brian stouder said on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:09 pm

    With all the thun­der­storms cross­ing Indi­ana and Illi­nois right now, I think later this after­noon most of the folks in D-Town will look like that (at least in flashes)

  12. colleen said on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    “Dick car­ry­ing action”

    Look for an increase in your hits from that lit­tle phrase.…

  13. coozledad said on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    Eight years of this admin­is­tra­tion finally got me to throw in the towel, as regards per­sonal appear­ance. I’m fre­quently half clothed, here on the farm. I’ve taken to eat­ing entire pack­ages of cheese as a between-meal snack. When I go to town, I have to hunt up a pair of “pre­sentable” cov­er­alls and flip-flops. I stopped shav­ing as a sort of joke, and real­ized it’s the next best thing to a chin pros­the­sis. For a while, my wife said it made me look more dig­ni­fied; but I kept going with it, and now I’ve strayed into Abbie Hoff­man ter­ri­tory. I have a feel­ing my new look will not be com­plete until I start walk­ing around with a spit-cup.
    Does any­one have any rec­om­men­da­tions for smoke­less tobacco?

  14. nancy said on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    What­ever brand you choose, make sure a lit­tle juice drips into your beard. That’s what com­pletes the look.

  15. Jolene said on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    I liked yesterday’s self-portrait. What soft­ware is it that allows you to do that? Very cool effect.

  16. beb said on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 pm

    It was dur­ing Britney’s very pub­lic melt­down that I noticed to what extent she was being fol­lowed by pho­tog­ra­phers, 20 – 30 of them all snap­ping pic­tures as if their life depended on it. If it had been five or ten pho­tog­ra­phers I wouldn’t have been shocked but the 20 – 30? That is so exces­sive. And the con­stantly glare of flash­bulbs. If life were defined as mov­ing in and around such hordes of voyeurs I know I’d go crazy.

    Then I read Rolling Stones arti­cle about Brit­ney which sug­gested that she kind of makes a point of going out for milk, gas, a big gulp, what­ever just so she can lead a posse of twenty cars (filled with pho­togs) around town. So is Brit­ney a vic­tim of exces­sive gos­sip mag voyeurism or is she an attention-addict who can’t live with­out being in the spotlight?

    It’s because peo­ple like Brit­ney are con­sid­ered nor­mal that gen­uinely mod­est peo­ple like Elmore Leonard are con­sid­erd so exotic.

    I’m glad Geof­frey Fieger bet the rap because while he may be a slimey lawyer (some are not, of course) the peo­ple who have been try­ing to nail him have been pos­i­tively skanky.

  17. nancy said on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:58 pm

    Jolene, that’s Photo Booth, which comes bun­dled with all newer Macs. My Mac­Book has a built-in cam­era, and PB works just like old-style pho­to­booths. Strike a pose, click, count­down 3 – 2-1 and snap. There are two pages of dig­i­tal effects you can add; “ther­mal cam­era” is but one.

  18. john c said on June 3rd, 2008 at 1:03 pm

    My kids LOVE Photo booth …

  19. John said on June 3rd, 2008 at 1:16 pm

    Coo­zledad,

    Don’t for­get to start work­ing on your cope ring.

  20. Hattie said on June 3rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    My friend who grew up around movie peo­ple says that the really pow­er­ful peo­ple in Hol­ly­wood are exter­mely staid and conservative.

  21. Jolene said on June 3rd, 2008 at 1:58 pm

    Photo Booth sounds like fun!

  22. coozledad said on June 3rd, 2008 at 3:19 pm

    Nancy, John: I’ll try not to go to seed half-assed, but I don’t think I’ll spring for the tatoo on the nape of the neck.
    If Obama wins, though, I may take up run­ning again.
    Elmore Leonard got me think­ing about the mid to late 70’s in my home­town of Durham NC, when the Hell’s Angels merged with the Vice Squad to stream­line their drug and pros­ti­tu­tion oper­a­tions. I always thought it was funny that on the heels of white flight, the white sub­urbs in the North­ern area of town became, as a cousin of mine (a detec­tive from a nearby town)
    said, “a fuck­ing pit, a god­damned hell­hole.“
    The police and fire depart­ments had been merged into a crea­ture called the Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safety. I don’t know what hap­pened to the Inter­nal Affairs peo­ple, unless they were the ones who shopped drugs con­fis­cated from the Out­laws motor­cy­cle gang back to the Angels. It was way out of con­trol. One bar owner was killed by a bomb placed under his car-seat. There was an auto­matic weapons pipeline from Durham to NYC. One of the Durham cops was inter­viewed by SCREW mag­a­zine, and he boasted about how much pussy he got because “chicks love that uni­form, and that gun”.
    They even­tu­ally ditched the whole Pub­lic Safety thing after the Vice Squad got busted by the Feds, and at least one of the Hell’s Angels lia­sons was killed assassination-style by the new police depart­ment. He was a twenty-something badass who was known to have killed sev­eral peo­ple. I knew a girl who rebuffed him at a bar once. He waited for her to leave and broke her nose with his fist. Her father decided he’d kill him him­self, so I told my cousin (the detec­tive) about it. He told me to tell the girl’s father “Don’t fuck with him.He’ll kill you and your whole fuck­ing fam­ily. We can’t do a god­damned thing with him right now.” But even­tu­ally they did. About six guys, backed up by off-duty offi­cers, lured him to a house and shot him many, many times when he walked through the front door.
    No one did time for that one.

  23. Sue said on June 3rd, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    Brian S com­mented on yesterday’s entry about the awful bike/car acci­dent in Mex­ico. If you want to see where I go when I’m not read­ing all you high-falutin’ guys and your upscale top­ics (colonoscopy preps, tobacco juice), check out the com­ment sec­tion for “What Can You Say Here Except “Holy Crap”, at Dead​spin​.com. Yes. I am a bad person.

  24. MaryC said on June 3rd, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    Re the restau­rant scene, my thoughts were yours — also that the writer called the maitre d’ a doo­fus for not rec­og­niz­ing Mr. Rich & Famous Writer so that he could send some nice retiree cou­ple to the end of the line and give Mr. R&FW their table. But then what else are maitre d’s for, I suppose.

    It was dur­ing Britney’s very pub­lic melt­down that I noticed to what extent she was being fol­lowed by pho­tog­ra­phers, 20 – 30 of them all snap­ping pic­tures as if their life depended on it.

    For years I saw pho­tos of Princess Di walk­ing down the street or get­ting into her car with­out think­ing much about it. Then I saw a doc­u­men­tary on her life in the fish­bowl, when the cam­era pulled back and there were 20 pho­tog­ra­phers right in her face get­ting those shots we saw. Every pub­lic moment those guys were invad­ing her space. I don’t know how she stood it but it’s been said that at some level she loved it and encour­aged it and would pose for the paparazzi.

  25. nancy said on June 3rd, 2008 at 5:22 pm

    Brit­ney is also said to like the pho­tog­ra­phers’ atten­tion. I was told — by a pap pho­tog­ra­pher him­self, so take that how­ever you will — that she would call them to brief them on her schedule.

    A very strange and sad girl, that one.

    The bike-accident photo is so awful I have to keep my eyes squinted. That is, quite lit­er­ally, my second-worst night­mare. (In the worst, Kate is on one of the bikes.)

  26. Sue said on June 3rd, 2008 at 5:31 pm

    I think Diana’s court­ing of atten­tion is pretty well-documented. Also a very strange and sad girl, described as a bor­der­line per­son­al­ity. If only she were really what we all wanted her to be.

  27. Dexter said on June 3rd, 2008 at 6:08 pm

    Andy Dick. I caught his bit on the Pam Ander­son roast, about the vilest thing I have ever seen on TV. (Com­edy Cen­tral) Dick ran over to Tommy Lee and gave him a faux blow-job. Oh…Pam said her great­est assets were “Pan­cho and Lefty here”, as she fon­dled her chest.
    You know how Com­edy Cen­tral heav­ily cen­sors Jon and Stephen? They cen­sor noth­ing after a cer­tain hour…the roast­ers were way off the charts with the vulgarity…I am no prude, but to call some­body stuff like juicy cunt face? And it got worse.

  28. nancy said on June 3rd, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    Andy Dick is pretty loath­some, and the CC roasts are vile. It’s inter­est­ing to com­pare them to the Fri­ars’ Club roasts, which are every bit as filthy, but are some­how actu­ally funny. The New York Observer used to send some­one to file a report, and I was always amazed both at how blue they got and how much I was laughing.

    Best one was Hugh Hefner, held three weeks after 9/11. That’s where Gilbert Got­tfried told the aris­to­crats joke. Fun­ni­est bit ever was Hef sit­ting there like a lox, while 7/8 of the jokes flew nine miles over his empty head.

  29. Dexter said on June 3rd, 2008 at 6:17 pm

    nance…lohan does the same thing with the pho­togs.…~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    …and I’m sur­fac­ing into the 21st century…I took my first cell phone pic­tures today. Hey! Maybe some­day I’ll get a hi-def TV so I can enjoy hockey more…NBC’s cov­er­age is hor­ri­ble com­pared to the Red Wings reg­u­lar tele­casts. Last night, the PA was totally over­rid­ing the commentators…the whole game, when a song played “…born and raised in SOUTH DEE-TROIT!!!” (for Rafal­ski) , as an exam­ple, there were delays of up to 30 sec­onds before the words came through…Pierre lost an entire seg because of this…POOR POOR POOR tele­vi­sion work.

  30. Dexter said on June 3rd, 2008 at 6:22 pm

    the aris­to­crats joke…that makes me cringe worse than any­thing ever, if it’s done right. That’s one joke that has poten­tial to make peo­ple puke, turn green, and just up-and-leave in total shock and dis­gust. I couldn’t believe the twists and turns it took the first time I heard it.

  31. john c said on June 3rd, 2008 at 7:07 pm

    I remem­ber feel­ing a bit defen­sive when Diana died and every­one was rag­ging on the press. No dis­re­spect to the woman, but it occurred to me at the time that she was, quite lit­er­ally, a pure celebrity. Other than the fact that the British Royal fam­ily owns a boat­load of things and is very rich, they are pure and offi­cially sanc­tioned celebri­ties for no appar­ent rea­son. In other words, if peo­ple stopped fol­low­ing her around and mak­ing a big fuss, what would she have been, other than rich?

  32. coozledad said on June 3rd, 2008 at 7:37 pm

    john c: Adam Mars-Jones wrote a short comic piece about the Roy­alty back in the early eight­ies that dis­cussed how the job of being a Royal screws up the being wealthy part. You belong to the Brits to the point it infringes on your abil­ity to func­tion sanely. In the story, the Queen catches rabies from one of her cor­gies, and nobody notices until she begins bat­ter­ing some­one in a receiv­ing line with her purse.
    The title of the col­lec­tion of short sto­ries is “Fabrications”.

  33. Terry WAlter said on June 4th, 2008 at 8:57 am

    Feiger was just denied a license to prac­tice law in Indi­ana for lying on his appli­ca­tion. And, yes, more sci­ence in our lives would be a good thing. That way, the pub­lic couldn’t be led around by the nose by Al Gore and the other char­la­tans about ‘global warm­ing’. The Peti­tion Project now has over 31,000 sig­na­tures of U.S. sci­en­tists, includ­ing over 9,000 Ph.Ds, that aren’t into role play­ing as use­ful idiots.
    I’m vot­ing for HILLARY. Hillary Will, that is. Yes, the fine young lady just won her first national event, dri­ving her 8,000 horsepower,320 MPH top fuel drag­ster. Ahhhh, I love the smell of nitromethane in the after­noon. Owned by Kalitta Fly­ing Ser­vice, one of the few remain­ing busi­nesses still oper­at­ing in Michi­gan. Meanwhile,I’ll go put on my SFI 3A-2/5 fire jacket so I’ll be ready for the warmth of all your love wash­ing over me. Later, gotta go Prius shop­ping. Or Not.

  34. del said on June 4th, 2008 at 1:41 pm

    Terry, Fieger did not lie on his appli­ca­tion to prac­tice law in Indi­ana. He added a qual­i­fy­ing word to the form he was required to fill out. No lie.

  35. Randy said on June 4th, 2008 at 4:35 pm

    Leav­ing Leonard’s dia­logue alone also works for his ear­lier, slightly darker stuff. The film ver­sion of 52 Pickup with Roy Schei­der, Ann-Margret and John Glover is under­rated, but works just right.

  36. nancy said on June 4th, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    I’m so glad some­one else rec­og­nizes “52 Pickup” as an unpol­ished gem. As I recall, the movie relo­cates the action to Cal­i­for­nia, a huge mis­take — it’s one of his best Detroit books, and the main char­ac­ter is Detroit through and through.

  37. When “other” isn’t an acceptable choice « The Mississippifarian said on June 5th, 2008 at 9:42 am

    […] got sto­ries from the big book con­ven­tion in L.A. You might also want to read this great Elmore Leonard post from Nancy […]

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