Category: Listen up

Bill and Steve and the Wall Street Journal’s bad grammar

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that Messrs. Gates and Jobs joked about the famous Apple commercials showing a boring P.C. suit and an eternally nerdy Mac user at a Carlsbad, California D: All Things Digital conference.

“The art of those commercial is not to be mean. It’s for the guys to like each other,” Mr. Jobs said, looking at a disbelieving Mr. Gates who shifted in his chair and scratched his chin.

“PC guy is great,” Mr. Jobs said.

“His mother loves him,” Mr. Gates said.

Incredible the ungrammatical Jobs or the unproofread text of the Wall Street Journal. Moreso in light of the fact that the WSJ organized and filmed this event, which it then wrote up and publicized via email through its Technology Alerts to thousands of subscribers. A pity. RBR will be tracking the Journal’s grammar and spelling and syntactical mistakes, against the price of it’s stock. Let’s see how much a missing letter costs.

Fresh Disasters by Stuart Woods read by Tony Roberts

It is truly comforting to hear good old Tony Roberts playing good old Stone Barrington sitting at good old Elaine’s on 88th and Second, looking at the girls again, working another case. Stone is hungry. Hungrier than usual,  for a rare hamburger, cooked for lawyers, not by lawyers.  And for the kind of money that can only be milked from a very good divorce.

Stealing with Style by Emyl Jenkins read by Linda Stephens

Constructed as a series of letters to a slightly fay, newly divorced, 45 year old antiques expert, this whodunit offers criminality inset in decorating news and auction house frippery. Mrs. Sterling Glass is keeping her ex-husband’s last name because “who would give up the name Kennedy in favor of O’Riley?”. There is an analogy here somewhere.Mrs. Glass answers letters to Dear Antiques Expert written by readers of the local newspaper, such as

Dear Antiques Expert:

We were recently broken into and we lost silver and jewelry and some antique prints… The burglars were caught but when the cases came to trial they got off with really light sentences… How can that be?

Mrs. Sterling Glass responds:

…you have to expose law enforcements officers to the arts so they will have an understanding of the seriousness of personal property theft involving art and antiques. Unfortunately even today not enough police officers know enough about art and antiques and their historical and monetary value to make a strong case against the thiefs.

The civilizing process must involve the education of the senses, which is the basis of aesthetic judgements. The United States are, in this regard, uncivilized. But Mrs. Glass is here to remedy this situation.

Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani read by Adriana Trigiani

Daughter of an Italian beauty who somehow wandered into the wrong mountains, Ave Maria is still considered a ‘forner’, despite spending 35 years in Big Stone Gap, driving the volunteer Rescue Squad truck, and directing the annual town play. Charming, stubborn, hot tempered Ave loves theatre in all it’s forms. Especially the drama that can be overheard and observed from above, from her perch in the pharmacy, where she slowly grows into role of the town spinster.

Ave has real friends, wonderful friends. Iva Lou, who drives the bookmobile, gives her the best advise about men, clothes, makeup, and sex. Frieda, her down to earth perpetually retiring 55 year old employee, gives her the local gossip. Theodore, a pretty boy, director of the high school band and fellow forner, gives her verbal comfort, companionship and culture. But Ave has learned most of what she knows from books, specifically, the Chinese Art of Face Reading which helps her decode the illegible faces of the miners and families of miners that populate the Appalachians.

Ave Maria’s persona is so operatic,  so heavy with the pathos of each and every mood, so out of proportion to the somber sensibilities of the mountain folk, that it is difficult to imagine her as inside the skin of a couple.  Indeed, even in love, and then in marriage, and then in motherhood, Ave Maria sticks out.

David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable

Grass soup is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a recipe for food of last resort that my father has apparently squirrelled away somewhere. I have never actually seen this recipe but it was referred to fairly often when I was a child. Should everything else turn to shit, we could always derive sustenance from nutritious grass soup… At heart, it’s an anxious romantic fantasy that disaster and total financial ruin lurk just around the corner. But when they do come, they will have all the stark beauty and domestic fine feeling of a Dickens novel….

Hide by Lisa Gardner read by Maggie-Meg Reed

A family is a system. For Annabelle, aka Tanya, aka Sienna aka Sophia, it is a rigorously cheerful, rigorously protective, rigorously mobile system. It packs up and moves every 18 months. Until Kansas City, when the system’s mother drinks herself to death, and the rules are preserved by the father and the daughter.

The 32 year old remains of the system is now a woman, who wants to live in the suburbs,  plant roses, and forbid her husband to buy suitcases.

Firewatch by Nelson DeMille read by Scott Brick

Yes, we know that it is very important for there to be a gun on the table and a timer, clicking down, on the first page of the story. Someone is murdered, and by the end of the story someone else is found culpable. Someone is training, and by the end of the story there is a mission that takes advantage of this training, flawlessly. Some  gun nuts   make themselves into a group, which by the end of the story, activates a perfect plan to deceive and betray mankind, more or less.

Scott Brick has lost his whine and tells this story straight from the hip. de Mille tries to do the same old trick with the suspect and the detective  jerking each other off…. but it doesn’t really work. What does work are the emotional configurations between husband, wife, cop and friend, subject and country….

Try it.