This & That

Yesterday I complained about an empty writing desk, one without the usual supplies that make it a warm and comfortable place to sit and ponder and scribble. Well, today the mailman delivered four issues of the Japanese magazine, Stationery Hobby Box, ten fountain pens and forty-one bottles of ink—a sampling of further things to come.

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Steve McQueen was the reigning superstar of my younger years, and I can remember in clear detail the day in 1980 when I heard of his death. I also remember watching him in the TV western, Wanted: Dead or Alive. The other day, at the library I checked out a DVD of the 1972 movie, Jr. Bonner, and as if by plan was browsing in the library today and found a biography of McQueen. Sort of a cheesy book, but what people like to call a “page-turner.” Steve McQueen, King of Cool: Tales of a Lurid Life by Darwin Porter.

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An interesting bit of trivia from The Writer’s Almanac—The story of blue jeans began about 500 years ago in the port city of Genoa, Italy, where a special thick cloth was used to make pants for fishermen and sailors in the Genoese navy. Our term “blue Jeans” comes from a bastardization of the French bleu de Genes, or “blue of Genoa.” (Levi Strauss didn’t begin making blue jeans until 1873.)

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Reading another book now, an action thriller in the Lee Child-Jack Reacher vein. This one by Stephen Hunter is I think, the ninth in his Swagger series—Bob Lee Swagger, lawman, soldier, sniper, patriot and hard-as-nails American hero. The book is called I, Sniper and is about a new state of the art sniper rifle that never misses the target, and is called, you guessed it, iSniper. My take on this one is, Hunter fails to balance story tension with reader’s patience in this one. Find myself mumbling, hurry up already.