SEEN: “An Evening with Supervisor Ross Mirakimi”
Beyond the false intimacy implied by a throng listening to a city supervisor drone on in a lecture hall, there’s the nagging insinuation that good old Ross is going to honor his audience with a cabaret act. In which case, he’d have our full-fledged support, but only if singing in the style of Burt Bacharach became part of the quorum.
TownOnline: “Literary agents say there is a $5 million advance waiting if she decides to publish her prison memoirs.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
My cellmate Alice finally took my advice about the jumpsuit. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, aside from avoiding the pitfalls of insider trading and never underestimating the value of appearing naked beneath bedsheets, it’s that you can always make your interior space your own — even when you’re confronted with limitations. Alice was able to get an orange scrunchee to match the jumpsuit from Leona, the black marketeer of the penitentiary. Leona demanded four packs of cigarettes for this. I thought this was a high price. But as she explained, “I don’t deal with no friends of gard’nin’ hos!” The scrunchee, which was later confiscated by a guard, helped to bring out the color in Alice’s eyes.
In fact, I think the scrunchee was one of the reasons that Alice stopped beating me up on a nightly basis. Not that I minded. It didn’t cut into my routine too much. Even in the joint, I still slept about four hours a night. And I was just about getting through to Alice. Before the scrunchee incident, she was beginning to try out my bed-making technique.
I talked with the warden about planting some azaleas and daisies in the exercise yard. The warden, who never really liked my television show, told me in an endearing voice, “Get back in line, Prisoner 9927431!” When I pointed out that wearnig a boutonniere might make his uniform less drab and his day more cheerful, he threw me into the hole.
In solitary confinement, I was able to plan out my comeback scheme. The HGTV people were sending me offer letters. And I had already planned out the potential profits in designer anklet bracelets.
I recommend prison to everyone. Everyone should at least try it once. You learn how to be disciplined. You make new friends. And you have a lot of time to think about things.
The United States isn’t the only nation facing school library budget shortfalls. Our friends to the north seem to be having severe problems too. Aside from contending with obsolete books, despite the rise in books checked out by students, there aren’t enough librarians to go around.
George Lucas has announced that the new Star Wars movie is not for kids. Of course not. The new
The Scottish, still reeling from the failed “Edinburgh is the Center of the Literary Universe” campaign, are now planning a Scottish dictionary. Since no one here seems to have the vision of James A.H. Murray and there’s no VC to speak of, “secret scribblings” are being auctioned off instead: a poem by JK Rowling and a draft version of what may or may not be the last Rebus novel. Chris Robinson, the leader of this project, claims that she used “sheer brass neck” to get these drafts. And this might be the problem. Anyone even remotely familiar with the Sunday morning hangover knows about sheer brass necks and how this physical condition often leaves one clamoring out of the bed around noon. Brass balls, on the other hand, go well beyond Alec Baldwin and are generally good when paired up with ambition and a focused plan. Had Robinson offered say a date with Irvine Welsh rather than turgid tetrameter quatrains from Ms. Rowling, we’d be more in her corner.