I started this post a week ago

I. Jenny D on her new feline: "His name is Max, and he used to frequent a fruit stall in Brighton Beach."

II. Speaking of which: Over Xmas I reread—quite at random!—A Cricket in Times Square...and I just saw David Ulin's appreciation of it at the L.A. Times. I didn't know it was the book's 50th anniversary!

All in all, I enjoyed revisiting the book—though I did raise my eyebrows during the Chinatown scenes...

III. Dogs in New York: The New Yorker
on the NYC cult, ca. , around Charles Portis's great novel The Dog of the South

IV. Speaking of Portis: My friend in Little Rock, John Moran, alerted me to this tidbit in a local paper: one of its bloggers noticed that the film version of Portis's first novel, Norwood, is now streaming on Netflix!

Joe Namath and Dom DeLuise are in it...

Here's what I said about it in a footnote to my 2003 Portis piece in The Believer:

If the film of True Grit somewhat revises the book, the less-known screen adaptation of Norwood (Jack Haley, Jr., 1970), also scripted by Marguerite Roberts, scrambles both Norwood and True Grit. Glen Campbell (Grit’s LaBoeuf) here plays Norwood, and Kim Darby (Mattie) is Rita Lee Chipman; Mattie’s unacknowledged teenage longing for LaBoeuf (“If he is still alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be happy to hear from him,” Mattie writes at the novel’s close) becomes consummated in Norwood, or just about. Roberts’s Grit script shunted Mattie in favor of the bigger-than-life Rooster; for this film the screenwriter dilutes some of Norwood’s cool by revealing that Rita Lee has been made pregnant by another man before they meet—a significant, possibly feminist tweak of the original plot. (Incidentally, the contra-hippie theme that runs through Portis, made more explicit in Gringos, is elaborated in this film, most notably when Campbell-as-Norwood takes the stage after a numbing sitar exhibition. He sings a good-timey country number presciently called “Repo Man” to the uncomprehending, wigged-out crowd, until a more lysergically inclined combo unseats him.) As it’s unlikely I’ll ever have the chance to write about this film again, let it be noted that the date of Norwood’s theatrical release, a year after Midnight Cowboy won the Academy Award for Best Picture, lends Campbell-as-Norwood a certain Voightian frisson during the scenes in New York, where he sticks out like a Stetsoned sore thumb. Which makes the bit in Cowboy where Voight regards himself in the mirror and says approvingly, “John Wayne,” a sort of anticipatory gloss on Wayne co-star Campbell’s future appearance in Gotham. (The celluloid True Grit also spawned a 1975 sequel, Rooster Cogburn, starring Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.)

V. Speaking of New York: Doree Shafrir put together a list of her favorite New York fiction...Personal Days is in there between Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Richard Price's Lush Life!

Four for Wodehouse

I. "DID Bertie Wooster mean to harm Barbara Geltosky in September 2008? The evidence against him is damning. For instance, the hole that Bertie, Ms. Geltosky’s 5-year-old Norwegian elkhound, dug in the garden was 12 inches across and 12 inches deep — the perfect size for a human foot." —NYT

II. From David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, we learn that David Foster Wallace had a dog named Jeeves and a dog named Drone.

III. "Mr. [Harry Stephen] Keeler is infinitely plausible at infinite speed. He is a serious Wooster of the thrills." —Daily Telegraph.

IV. Annals of Facial Hair

"I have come to a decision Mrs Twemlow."
"What about?"
"Ever since his lordship srted to grow it I have seen the writing on the wall plainer and plainer, and now I have made up my mind. The moment his lordship returns from London, I tender my resignation. Eighteen years have I served in his lordship's household, commencing as under-footman and rising to my present position, but now the end has come."
"You don't mean you're going just because his lordship has grown a beard?"
"It is the only way, Mrs Twemlow. That beard is weakening his lordship's position throughout the entire country-side. Are you aware that at the recent Sunday school treat I heard cries of 'Beaver!'?"
"No!"

—Wodehouse, "Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best," Blandings Castle

Dogville

(From Karolina)

Hoof to paw

Take a good look, America...take a good look, world.



See esp. around 2:09.

(From Arlo)

Pryor arrests

This is not an Ouroboros, but should be:

PRYOR, Okla. – A dog waiting in a car while at a car wash slipped the vehicle into gear and drove in a loop before the car came to a stop. Pryor police officer Brent Crittenden said the dog's owner was washing the vehicle when the 70-pound pit bull jumped on the dash and somehow shifted the car into reverse.

(Via Jane)

HEY WAIT—

YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE BLOGGING....?

I know! But I came across/heard some HUGE NUMBERS yesterday — first about Leona Helmsley's infamous will (earmarked for dogs)("dogearmarked"?):

Even if the resulting total is at the low end of the estimate — $5 billion or so — the trust will be worth almost 10 times the combined assets of all 7,381 animal-related nonprofit groups reporting to the Internal Revenue Service in 2005.

But a story on the radio about Zimbabwean inflation was even more alarming. From a June 26 article in The Register-Guard:

Zimbabwe is believed to be the only country in the world that now carries out routine financial transactions in dizzying sets of quadrillions — one quadrillion is a 1 with 15 zeros behind it, or 1,000,000,000,000,000.

Here's more:

Bread has disappeared from stores. Previously, a loaf in a supermarket cost 2 billion Zimbabwe dollars (20 U.S. cents at the official exchange rate), or 15 billion Zimbabwe dollars ($1.50 U.S.) on the black market, where prices of scarce items can vary up to 10 times higher.

A shopper lucky enough to find milk will spend 3 billion dollars (30 U.S. cents) for about 1 pint. A tray of 30 eggs, also scarce, can bought in a store for 45 billion dollars ($4.50 U.S.).

Butter is hard to find, but 17½ ounces of margarine will cost 25 billion dollars ($2.50 U.S.) and a pack of 10 cookies costs 19 billion dollars ($1.90 U.S.).

Some more dizzying figures can be found at the Christian Science Monitor.

I ran across a third thing having to do with large numbers, but I forgot what it was.