Books For Sale

Today is the day above all days in the year that I look forward to. . .

No, it's not Christmas.

It's not my birthday.

And, it's not "Judgment Day."

Did Van Winkle "sleep" through this?

Yes, we were one of the lucky thousands of cities to be graced with a billboard declaring that the world as we know it was ending in May. The merry month of May came and went. Nothing seems to have happened. No Rapture. No Tribulation. No Mark of the Beast. No nothing.

Or am I mistaken because of my Van Winkle Project vow not to follow the news for just a while longer?

Did I miss Judgment Day?

Whatever the case, the day I most anticipate has managed to roll around again. This marks the 13th year I've been able to attend, spend an hour or so blissing out, then write a check and walk out the door, a satisfied man.

With both hands gripping bags of books purchased for pennies on the dollar.

The Reading Generation
One of the more interesting facts about the city I live in is that it has more than its share of retired folks. Many of them grew up here. They either never left or they moved back to spend their golden years stretching their twig-like limbs beneath the familiar hot sun.

The older folks are attracted by the relatively hospitable cost of living (you can still by a perfectly adequate used home for under $100,000), the low crime rate, the many churches, the patriotism (we are home to a major Air Force base), and the cultural life spawned by three major universities, including free concerts and lectures.

1998 Buick Park Avenue: the Septuagenarian's choice
to drive slower than the speed limit.

Whenever I go out I can spot the old people quite easily. 

I come upon a car going down a straight, otherwise empty street and it's moving along slower than the speed limit. The car is almost always a 10-year-old Buick. Yep, that's one of them behind the wheel.

Or they're the gray or silver or bald heads that are already in their seats at the movie or theater twenty minutes before the show begins. It's a senior paradox: they like to be on time so they always make sure they arrive early.

But, "bless their hearts" (a Southern politeness phrase I've learned is used to mask what actually amounts to a sharp criticism) these old people have one especially favorable characteristic as far as I'm concerned.


Call me crazy, but I smile
whenever I see an old person reading.


They were part of a generation that reached adulthood before the arrival of television. Much more than the people who would be born after them, they always knew how to make their own entertainment.

They played  cards. They knitted. They collected coins and stamps. Another manifestation of this pre-TV/computer screen DIY mentality toward leisure?

They've always been readers.

Think of the implications... As the rigors of aging require them to move into smaller houses or assisted living or nursing homes or, worse case, settle into the turf beneath Forest Lawn, they have to unencumber themselves of some of their possessions. You've probably guessed what they are casting aside at a prodigious rate.

Their books. Lifetime collections of books.

This is why the annual Friends of the Library Book Sale is a bibliophile's dream.

At 9:55 the line is almost out the door...

The Hunt Is On
I walk into the Civic Center downtown and elbow my way past the crowds toward the long rows of tables groaning beneath the weight of "Fiction."

I'm always excited about what I might find in hardback. Give me a nice stiff spine. Un-yellowed pages. Perhaps a dust jacket that is still intact. I'll pick up a copy for $1.75. As I said, pennies on the dollar.

And children's books? They go for $1 an inch. Your purchase is measured with a ruler at check-out. What a deal!

As I browse these tables crammed with the castoffs of someone else's cultural life, I notice that most of what was purchased came from the bestseller list. It's interesting to see how quickly these authors sank from sight. Does anyone talk anymore about Sidney Sheldon? Rebecca West? Frank G. Slaughter? Whatever happened to Arthur Hailey who wrote about the perils and loves in a different industry in each of his novels? Airport, The Moneychangers, Hotel. Did Mr. Hailey ever write about steel? Silicon? Wal-mart?

I  begin in my favorite section - fiction.



Look at all these hardbacks...

 I keep searching, hoping to find my version of treasure. Like the year I picked up a hardbound copy of The Writer's Chapbook, a collection of writers' advice on their craft, edited by George Plimpton. It turned out to be signed by Mr. Plimpton, himself--famous writer, founder and editor of the Paris Review, and affable host of America's most celebrated late-20th Century literary salon.

Or our son found on the special items table (i.e., $5/book) a hardbound tribute to the Wallace and Gromet movies signed by their creator, Nick Parks.

What "treasure" might be lurking in one of these rows, I wonder.

And even without an author signature it was nice to pick up hardbound copies of Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, Truman Capote's Music for Chameleons, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest, and any book by my favorite, Mr. Kurt Vonnegut.

What an upgrade! This moving from paperback to hardcover is like trading in T-shirt and jeans for a nice Italian suit!

Today's Finds
So I walked away with fewer books than some years, but there was still enough to please. Such as the first really LONG book I ever read from beginning to end. That honor goes to A Thousand Days by Arthur Schlesinger who told the story of JFK's abbreviated presidency in this book. I read it in fifth grade and wrote a book report. I was so impressed with myself! A Thousand Days was 1027 pages long!



I'm also happy to have picked up the only novel written by F. X. Toole who spent most of his life as a cornerman for a succession of boxers. As anyone knows whose read his short story collection that gave Clint Eastwood the material for the film Million Dollar Baby, nobody has ever written with more authority about punching the speedbag, climbing into the ring, or hitting the canvas.

And a first edition Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is not too shabby of an acquisition either.

I also had another bit of good fortune...


I found all three of Cormac McCarthy's novels that are part of his "Border Trilogy," I now have a nice uniform edition of some of the best work of the best living American writer.

But there's still one more book I have to show off. It wins the prize for the "Most Unexpected" volume.

Did you know that Charles Lindbergh wrote a lengthy book recounting his adventures in aviation up to and including his historic crossing of the Atlantic?

As I could tell from the price listed on the dust jacket, this book came out in the 1950s. What was most surprising, though, was that the entire memoir is written in present tense. Who was writing nonfiction in present tense back then? I can't think of anyone. Yet it's a wonderful gamble on the part of the writer. All of those present tense verbs can make us feel we are climbing into the cockpit with Lucky Lindy.

So I walked out of the Civic Center without anything by Kurt Vonnegut this year, but I still feel fine. In fact, I strongly suspect that there may have been a book or two by Kurt and I just overlooked them among the thousands of competing volumes. Oh well, my loss can be someone else's gain. And there's always next year - V.W.



Nine Men on a Roof

It began with the seriously grim clouds that moved in like an invading army on Easter afternoon.

Soon hail was bouncing off roofs and lawns and piling up in the street. The hail started out dime size. Then it grew. By the end, some of what was falling was the size of baseballs.

At NOAA.gov they show how hail is formed.

The hail pelted a wide area for more than an hour, but it only took a few minutes for it to change economic realities in these parts.

Once hail reaches quarter size the damage is assured. No prophet was needed to predict what would happen next.

Money would flow from insurance companies to thousands of other people.

Until the clouds came that afternoon, many of these people had been sitting around under-employed or unemployed.

Now they were dialing numbers on cell phones and looking around in the garage for their tool belts.

Millions of dollars' worth of roofs would have to be replaced in our fair city, including my own.

The roofers were about to arrive.

Rhythm of the Roof
Last week nine men came at 8 a.m., unloaded ladders, and started in. They removed all the old shingles. They nailed down a new under layer and they covered that with a sort of foil wrapper. On the second day they nailed down the new shingles. Not with pneumatic or electric nail guns, but the old-fashioned way. With arms and hammers.

During this time the temperature hovered near 100 degrees with not a cloud in sight. The shingles they were putting down were black. Can you imagine how hot it was up on the roof?

My wife and son and I were inside the house. We listened to the rhythm that had begun to take over the neighborhood. From early in the morning until near sunset somewhere there was the sound of...

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

The ceilings vibrated as the roofers walked around above us and dropped new stacks of shingles on the roofing deck. We shrugged it off. Since moving to what I sometimes call the Apocalyptic Plains, this was the third roof we had replaced after a hailstorm. Three roofs in 14 years! Think how upset they must be at the insurance company.

Overhead
My roofers took breaks in the shade every couple of hours. They drank lots of water. Most of them were Latino, but it wasn't true that none of them spoke English. A polite, brown skinned man knocked on the front door and asked me to unlock the gate to the backyard so he could collect debris being pushed off the roof. He didn't say "por favor"; he said "please."

I found myself thinking about these men and how this might be their chance to make good money until, finally, the last roof gets replaced, probably sometime in the fall. It's steady employment, six days a week.

At the same time I'm guessing that relatively speaking the money isn't exactly staggering, only a fraction of the substantial amount the insurance company is paying out for the roof. There's the cost of the materials and the money the roofing company is going to take. After that the rest of the money is divided nine ways. How much does each man get for two 12-hour days of work? I'd guess $200.

Then I was thinking of how much money those of us make who have college education and never work with our hands. We usually have a pretty good health plan, too.

My thoughts led me face to face with a well known paradox: the worse the job and the harder it is to do, the less it pays. Examples: coal mining, garbage collecting, putting on roofs.

The better the job and the easier it is to do, the better it pays. Ask most managers, accountants, and college professors.

There are some exceptions. Doctors make excellent money, but many of them work ferociously hard. And there are some unionized factory workers who draw high wages that somewhat compensate them for how hard and mind numbing is their work.

But still it's odd how humans things arrange themselves economically in a way that might seem to be counter intuitive. I remember as a kid thinking that the hardest, nastiest jobs surely had to pay the most.

A roofer, for example, ought to receive an annual salary decent enough that he could live in a house like the one whose roof he's putting on instead of renting an apartment or living in a fallen down two-bedroom bungalow.

And you would think anyone who is lucky enough to indulge in the pure pleasure of playing football or basketball or hitting a golf ball for a few months out of the year, and is compensated further with the adulation of adoring fans, wouldn't need to draw a mind boggling salary in the multi-millions on top of that.

That's not how it goes.

Why My Father Always Said, "Go to College, Son!"
I listened to the hammer blows coming through the ceiling above. I watched sweaty men coming down the ladder smiling. I saw them sacked out in the shade for a mid-afternoon siesta. I heard them the next morning singing songs as they started to work at 7:30. 

There was time enough to compare the roofing crew to myself sitting in my bathrobe, punching some keys or reading some books, or driving over to campus to sit around a table and say a few words in a meeting.

I was glad that the men didn't seem to detest their work. At the same time what I felt was the farthest thing from envy.

As the years go by, if all continues as is, each month lots of money will flow into my bank account. A much lesser amount will be deposited into those men's accounts (if they even have bank accounts). I'll sleep well at night while their bodies will ache. I'll stay employed even if the skies are always sunny. To add to it all, I'll probably live longer than them because my semi-protected lifestyle and access to extravagant medical care is amenable to longevity.

I and millions of others who proudly button the white collar are, in a sense, gaming the system, a system that quite often pays a person more to do less. How did we manage it? I'd say the key factor is that we got college degrees. This allowed us to turn our backs forever on crap jobs that pay crap wages.

But getting a college degree isn't an easy proposition. Never mind getting good enough grades and test scores to be admitted and all the studying once you're enrolled, college is an expensive undertaking. The university where I teach is like others--it raises its tuition every year at least 7%, even during a recession. Students grumble, pay up, incur more debt, and keep on enrolling. Why? Well, I now have a more vivid way of thinking about this economic outrageousness.

As is often stated, the cost of college these days is a trade-off. It's a matter of enduring steep financial pain in the short term so as to reap larger rewards, in the form of higher income, later. But I appreciate more than ever that it's not just about the money. A B.A. or B.S. degree is a form of bulleltproof vest. It also allows one to avoid certain kinds of lifetime pain--the body and soul-grinding forms.

College tuition is the price you pay not to go to work every morning in a crowded white panel van. It's the price you pay not to have callouses on your palms. It's the price you pay not to pee in  a can during the day. It's the price you pay not to come home filthy sometime after 8 p.m. every night.

It's the price you pay to stay off my roof.

So the next time it rains and my ceiling doesn't leak, I'm going to sing the praises of these most worthy of men. Those roofers, working class heroes who climb up and down the steep hot slopes most of us will never know. - V.W.

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Under 100 Days to Go!

I've been waiting for this.

Yes, that was me, day by day keeping an eye on the counter over on the right-hand side of this page with the intensity of a gambler staring at a spinning roulette wheel or a slot machine.

The counter has paid off.

Finally, I'm entering the home stretch of The Van Winkle Project. Soon I'll be able to watch TV again. Go to movies. Stop blushing like a shy bride every time I almost glimpse a newspaper headline.

What Keeps Me Going
Why am I so keen to get to the end? The truth is I've grown weary of my regimen. In fact, a couple of days ago I thought, "Why not quit not right now?"

I thought of how people had been dropping hints that I'd missed some REALLY MAJOR STUFF during the first five months of 2011. If that were true, then there was nothing left to prove. I had already made myself one of the least informed, most ignorant people on the planet. Mission accomplished.

Then I thought of the magic "100." With that number about to topple it seemed possible that I could stick this thing out until Sept. 11, 2011, as I promised in the first place...

There was another reason I focused on "100." It reminds me of a day back in November when I posted with some excitement that my first 100 days of the project had passed. Back then I compared my own landmark to the first 100 days of the U.S. presidency, a time when political pundits and prognosticators sit down and analyze just what the president has accomplished in that relatively short time span and predict what lies ahead.

Another reason to continue? Visits to this blog have trended up,
way up, in 2011...

The last 100 days in office of a president don't have quite the same significance. We call the resident of the Oval Office a "lame duck." The new president has already been elected and is waiting in the wings to be inaugurated in January, which makes the current president seem almost irrelevant. The president might as well relax, plan retirement, and gather materials for the inevitable presidential memoir.

I'd like to relax, too, knowing that I don't have that far to go, but I think it's wise not to. It's still too easy to lapse and almost involuntarily violate the terms of this project.

Confessions of a "Wait" Watcher
When I began the Van Winkle Project last fall some people congratulated me on undertaking what they called a "media fast." They said that they've considered a media fast for themselves. They thought media fasts were admirable. They hoped my media fast turned out well.

Wait a minute. Hold on. What's a media fast? Is what I've been doing for 265+ days been a "fast"?

After all this time to think about it, I think I'd like to tweak the metaphor a bit...

When I decided to give up all news, entertainment, sports and weather for a year, it wasn't really a fast from all electronic and print media. It's true I haven't read the news on-line or in newspapers or watched it on TV. Ditto for sporting events, new movies, and the national weather outlook. But it's not been a "fast" because I've still allowed myself plentiful portions of the following:

• Watch as many movies as I wish if they were released before my project began.
• Watch TV reruns and old shows.
• Listen to my old CDs and LPs
• Read books as long as they're not recently released.
• Read and send emails.

That's not exactly a fast.

I think a fast would be someone doing what's referred to as "living off the grid." If you have no electricity and you don't get any mail, then I think that's as close to a media "fast" as I'd want to contemplate. But no one should ever mistake Van Winkle for such an off-the-grid person. I'm not that ambitious or stalwart.

This project has been a bit like banning all traditional
forms of PROTEIN from my diet...

I think what I've been doing is more like a diet.

By giving up key elements of what goes into forming one's personal fabric of memory, social interaction, and conversation—but keeping everything else—I resemble somebody who has sworn off, say, protein derived from animals. They can have all the carbs they wish in the form of pasta, bread, pancakes, fruit, etc., but all meat and eggs and cheese are out.

News, entertainment, sports, and weather are the protein I'm depriving myself of. And sometimes this analogy feels apt. If a person doesn't get protein in some form (e.g., the legumes and tofu that vegetarians make sure to consume), then your body will weaken. Not knowing the following things makes me feel weak and feeble:

• How bad the natural disasters of 2011 have been.
• Why gas prices were going up then seem to have stopped.
• How the economy is doing.
• What's happening between Congress and the President
• What decisions the Supreme Court has issued.
• What's been happening in the Middle East.
• Who won Oscars at the Academy Awards this year.

These are not simply take 'em or leave 'em "desserts"; they're main course items, as far as I'm concerned. I feel semi-deprived and hungry. I'm a "Wait Watcher." I have to wait until I can "watch" again, and like people enrolled in the real "Weight Watchers," it can make a guy a bit grumpy at times.

But, thank heavens, it seems like an end is in sight. I just hope I don't get too big of a stomachache when in about 98 days they feed me the answers to all the questions I have. - V.W.

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This Weather: Feel the Heat

Open the door. Peer out from the front porch and...ugh!
You can feel it.

There's only one way to phrase this properly.

It was hotter than you know what out there.

Heading into the Memorial Day weekend, I knew about the heat without bothering to venture far outdoors.

Inside the house, the air conditioning seemed to be running all the time.

My current project of cleaning out the garage had to be abandoned as sweat streaked my face and stung my eyes. The garage felt like living inside an oven.

The indoor/outdoor thermometer placed to the right of the kitchen sink told the story in numbers.

And that was the temperature at 7 p.m.! Earlier in the day we had hit a high of 107 F. degrees (41.6 degrees if you're a Celsius fan).

This was news that unfortunately this Van Winkle couldn't avoid by closing his eyes or stopping his ears. And it was pretty clear. There was more to come.

It made no sense.

A Brief History of Our Weather

Downtown we have this longtime business,
but do we really need them to supply MORE sun?

Where we live in the western mesquite plains is no stranger to high temperatures, but the inferno-like days normally arrive toward the halfway point of summer. The heat lasts into August and early September. We aren't supposed to be sizzling in May.

But in 2011 our weather has been fouled up and fouled up good.

It began with March and April when the normal springtime once-a-week thunderstorms failed to arrive. No thunder and no lightning and no rain. Just hot winds which fanned wildfires...

Finally we had a major downpour on Easter. We also received baseball size hail. Then we returned to the new norm.

Windy and hot.

So when I got up on Saturday morning at 6 a.m. and the thermometer already showed 79, I knew what was to come. Rather than complain about it, I enlisted our son to make a contest of it.

We would try to wish the temperature to go as high as possible. Hotter than anything we'd ever felt before.

A Festival of Heat
Around 4 p.m. I told our son, "This is it. It probably won't get any hotter." We had a plan. We would document this hottest day ever.

We drove downtown and parked in front of the restored Paramount Theater which shows classic films. Our son held up the thermometer. I snapped the picture. It was a juxtaposition I couldn't resist. And it was NOT Photoshopped!



Shucks! Why couldn't we get to 112 degrees?


 
Move Over Mythbusters
The other idea we had was to find out how hot the sidewalk was. Just trying putting your palm on it and keep it there. Ouch!
We had a more traditional experiment in mind, sort of our own episode of Mythbusters.

Could we fry an egg on a sidewalk while the outdoor temperature was hovering around 112?

I should tell you that the heat was accompanied by a fierce wind. Gusts up to 30 mph. This actually made it less horrible to be outdoors than if there had been no air circulation. But the wind also affected our first attempt to get a picture of the egg before I cracked it. We suddenly had an impromptu post-Easter egg roll.

Come back! The wind sends our egg
rolling away...

I chased down the egg and we started over.

With the temperature now down to a balmy 109 degrees, we stared at the puddle of ooze for a minute. Another minute. Another.

Not exactly summer blockbuster reading; it's more
like a summer block of a book on my end table.

Nothing happened. Our son suggested we drive over to the library (where air conditioning awaited us) and browse some books and then come back in half an hour.

To the library we went. I acquired a copy of a 900-page biography of Dostoevsky. Our son found out that Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman was, alas, checked out.

It was time to return to our sidewalk egg and see if it had achieved the state of sunny side up.

Well, the edges had cooked a little. And, funny thing, touching the surface revealed that the transparent part had morphed into a semi-hardened, rubbery consistency.

But the myth seemed to be busted. You could not fully cook an egg on the sidewalk on a hot day. But who would want to anyway? Maybe the experiment should be updated to something people might actually desire.

Next time we could try thawing out a frozen microwave dinner on the sidewalk. Or a frozen pizza. A half hour beneath ol' sol and it would be party time.

Final Confession
Throughout The Van Winkle Project I've been candid whenever there have been news leaks that have sullied my desired state of pristine ignorance. I'll admit just such right now.

From accidentally overheard conversations, I know that the weather in major portions of the U.S. has been bonkers for at least a month now. I've heard mention of monster tornadoes, killer tornadoes, tornado clusters, deluges and floods.

Given my overall lack of information, including any details, the weather in my not so fair city has me concerned. What if  it's part of some larger degenerate meteorological pattern hostile to bipedal life?
As always, the less one knows the more opportunity there is for fear. And perhaps this is the ultimate fear, when the enemy is nothing less than the blue, blue, relentlessly blue sky. But I can't stop looking up at the sky. I'm hoping for clouds and that thing they used to call "rain." - V.W.

Not raw egg, not cooked egg, but something mysterious
and in-between...

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Men's Neckties: The Trial

Father's Day is less than a month away.
Of course, a traditional gesture for that occasion is to gift Dad with...a tie.

Here at The Van Winkle Project we are sharing the following in the hopes that it might be received in time to prove helpful to our readers. And maybe to some dads...

Ties - Guilty or Innocent?
I was cleaning out my closet the other day, getting rid of shirts and pants that I seldom wear.

I noticed a row of ties, That's when a little fantasy popped into my head...

Suddenly, in Kafka-like fashion, I was transported to the inside of a courtroom where a trial was being held. A male lawyer was standing before the jury box and making his opening statement. Except this man didn't look like the lawyers one sees, on TV, for instance, on Law and Order. He wore a suit, but it was paired with a white T-shirt, and no tie.

 The lawyer looked kind of like this...



Meet my dream lawyer...
sans tie!

 And the lawyer was saying:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me begin by asserting that the accused--these neckties--have caused years of damage to the plaintiffs in this case, Mr. Van Winkle and other men around the globe. They have grasped men's necks in a choke hold and brought undue distress to their persons.

What have the neckties offered in return? Very little. As the evidence will show, these neckties are guilty of being dangerous, superfluous affectations. They should be found guilty and condemned to be banished from closets forever!


The lawyer presented evidence in the form of two photos he passed to the jury. Since I was the representative plaintiff in this fantasy class-action lawsuit, the photos documented how my parents had their three sons dress up every time we traveled on a train or an airplane. In the parents' minds there was some kind of strict etiquette. Perhaps they had inherited their sensibilities from olden times. They believed that if people are going to see you, you need to put on your Sunday best.


Placed in Evidence:

Photo No. 1 - Family is traveling by ferry. Suits, ties for the boys!

Placed in Evidence:

Photo No. 2 - Family in the nation's capital. Suits, ties for the boys!

The laywer continued:

How do you think having to dress in this manner made my client feel? I will tell you. He felt uncomfortable and dorky! You can see it in these pictures. Is he smiling? I don't think so!

But I want you to realize that it is NOT Mr. Van Winkle's parents who are on trial today. It is the very idea of a man's tie. What is the point, I ask you? A dangling little piece of cloth that is supposed to provide a slash of color, you say? It is a traditional fashion accessory like a woman's scarf?

All right, but at what cost? A HIGH cost, I say. Have you priced ties? Let me present you some more evidence and ask: Are any of the following worth $35 to $85? A price that is as much or more as the cost of a men's pair of khakis?

TIE NO. 1 - $35

TIE NO. 2 (from the Jerry Garcia Collection) - $55

TIE NO. 3 - $85

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I leave the final decision in your intelligent hands, mixed metaphor and all. For the sake of comfort and economics, the silly fashion of men's ties must finally be banished for all male persons. I am sure you will do the just thing.

The Verdict
Well, the fantasy trial ended at that point. Without a verdict, I began thinking of how our 13-year old son loves suits and he has no problem wearing a tie either. It his personal counter-reaction to an American culture where a vast number of people dress in a way that in the past would have been called "sloppy." They delight in making themselves appear to be wrinkled, untucked, baggy peasantry fit only for strolling in Wal-Mart or drinking beer on the patio. Or so would say any fashion snob worth his/her salt...

But I'm not one to react against "casual." Having grown up with a sport jacket and tie as required attire every Sunday when we went to church, I've had my fill of formality. A suit, a tie? They don't make me feel well dressed so much as constrained.


It's all context-sensistive, I suppose. I have to say those NBA coaches in their suits on the sidelines look dynamite. So do most politicians. And I wouldn't want to be represented by a lawyer who dressed in glad rags like a tattooed Johnny  Depp.

But as I stand at the threshold of my closet and I'm left with the echoes of the mock trial, I bring down the gavel and I decide. I am keeping exactly one tie. It will be for weddings and funerals. May there be many of the former and few of the latter--until they hold the biggest funeral of all. For the tie. - V.W.



BONUS FEATURE: The real purpose of a tie revealed!

State and Main (2000) is a film written and directed by David Mamet. The movie tells what happens when a Hollywood film crew comes to a small Vermont town to shoot a movie.

The story reveals how the Norman Rockwellish townspeople aren't really much different than the Hollywood folks. Everyone is interested in making a buck and bending the rules to suit themselves.

Even the old, venerable town doctor who walks down the street carrying a alligator valise as if he still makes house calls is a bit of lush and he has a tart tongue. At one point he waxes eloquent about why a bow tie is inferior to the other kind.

               DOC WILSON
               It's the truth that you should never
               trust anybody, wears a bowtie.  Cravat's
               sposed to point down to accentuate the
               genitals, why'd you wanna trust somebody,
               s'tie points out to accentuate his
               ears...?


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