When tomorrow comes you'll be thinking of yesterday

The book you hold cannot be praised too highly, unless you are standing on tippy-toes and might fall over. Nevertheless, let us try, making sure we aren't on the top steps of a ladder or mountain range, which is a different kind of steppe anyway, and we'll just make use of a jaunty hop if we need to praise it more highly.

The author begins with a moving portrait of the last days of a dying industry, which assures us we don't have to worry about this sort of thing going on any more and we don't need to feel guilty that it used to.

Before this manuscript I had never wondered whether left-handed people put belts on so the buckle would be on the left or the right and the strip coming around from the right or the left, or whether they might do things the other or ``wrong'' way because of their left-handedness. I started looking closely at the belts of people, which you might guess provoked a number of awkward conversations. In fact, it provoked three fewer awkward conversations than you guessed.

It makes me long for a book which addresses the whole belt orientation question. Wouldn't you be interested in something like that, at least for the length of an article? Exactly. I can't figure how it didn't rate an appearance here. Maybe the author's ambidextrous and so can't wear belts.

It would be wholly unfair to the reader and two-thirds unfair to the author if I failed to praise the section running, according to the proofs I printed, from page number (illegible blot where the printer got jammed) through page (accidentally put the paper in upside-down so I can't read the printing without holding it up to a mirror, which I keep forgetting to do), with a startling theory for just why the Seventies turned out like they did aesthetically. The old theories of the Sixties being used up and the Eighties not being ready yet will not be taken seriously following this analysis. Indeed, now I doubt the old theories were ever taken seriously. Perhaps we never worried about it.

In the second part we come finally see laid clear who is to blame for Saturday. Most people would never have thought of attaching blame for the day to anyone in particular, so this shows the author as a free-spirited sort of person who's probably never invited to the neighborhood block party, which may account for the need to account for the need for someone to blame for the Saturday-ness of Saturdays.

There is a saying that the measure a book's greatness is in how it changes the reader. I have never heard this saying, nor read it, so I cannot say whether it is true. I can say its unique blend of mutagens and the unstoppable cyborg pop-up plastic surgeon hidden in --- well, saying which chapter would be a spoiler --- certainly will change the reader, not to mention bystanders and small pets within the robo-surgeon's operational range, which is limited by the length of the extension cord. You might want to hide the cord in the attic before continuing, then, depending on how big it is. If you have no attic arrange to have your house read the book first and perhaps that's how it will be changed. Perhaps not; I haven't gotten to that chapter yet.

This book reminds me of a goat which wandered off my grandfather's farm in 1943. I imagine by now the goat must have gotten wherever he was hoping to go; at least, we've stopped hearing about him. It wasn't even my grandfather's goat. It was all part, the goat said, of overcoming the post-war housing crisis, a claim our family has always viewed skeptically because the war the goat claimed it was part of the post-war housing crisis of was the Korean war, which anyone could tell you was not technically a war at all, because the paperwork to file the war was lost behind the drywall for over forty years and only rediscovered during renovations.

That's the sort of book we need.

Trivia: Charles Lindbergh did not eat the first of the sandwiches he brought on his trans-Atlantic flight until after he was over French territory. Source: Famous Flights That Changed History; Sixteen Dramatic Adventures, Lowell Thomas, Lowell Thomas Jr. (The Lowell Thomases say he brought five sandwiches, although a bit of prodding around finds while many sources say five, some say four, some six, and some just say it's an indefinite yet small number. There's also surprising disagreement about what kind of sandwiches they were.)

Currently Reading: For The Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago, Simon Baatz. (/me checks the calendar ... uh ... huh. Well, guess that'll happen sometimes.) And boy, for such supposed super-geniuses carrying out the perfect crime they came pretty close to the land-speed record for incompetently carried out crimes, pre-Virgil Starkwell era.