Monthly Archives: January 2024

Fortunately, the Internet Has Everything You Need

People always say to me Hey, Luvgood, you’re one cool dude. How can I be as cool as you? So I tell them: create a blog. And they respond Whoa, now. Shouldn’t I learn to walk before I try to run? And they have a valid point. Creating a blog isn’t easy.  It takes hours. 

Fortunately, the internet has everything you need.  Several vendors will happily provide you with dozens of templates for a fee.  It’s like the Bible says:  if you have a dream and the money to pay for it, the internet will provide. 

Once you’ve selected the best template you can afford, you need to choose a jarring background hue to emphasize a scalding letter color.  Whenever WordPress allows it, I go for angry red letters on a white background. The red represents the rage that can be found everywhere these days. 

All that’s left is choosing the font and font size.  Font is essential.  It says everything about your blog’s personality.  Are you old fashioned like The New York Times?  Choose Plantagenet Cherokee.  Are you a prig like The New Republic?  Choose Garamond.  Are you a pompous snob like the New Yorker?  Choose Franklin Gothic Book.  If you’re cool and approachable, choose the font I use. It’s the one mandated by WordPress. That just leaves font size, and here it really doesn’t matter what you pick, because no one reads blogs.

Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief    

Nefertiti N.Y.C.

Crook Manifesto is the follow up to Colson Whitehead’s splendid Harlem Shuffle, but the 1960s are now in the Wayback Machine. This is New York City in the 1970s. Harlem is still Harlem, but the rest of the city is following its faltering lead. ”You knew the city was going to hell if the Upper East Side was starting to look like crap, too.” As always, the city is in transition. In one neighborhood it’s “Jews and Italians out, blacks in” and in another it’s the Spanish replacing the Germans and Irish.

Fortunately, Ray Carney is still around, but he has transitioned too. He’s focused on his Harlem furniture business. He no longer fences jewelry. But “crooked stays crooked,” and it’s not long before Carney returns to his side hustle. ”What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?”

The story is divided into three loosely-connected parts. The first one opens in 1971. Carney has promised his teenage daughter tickets to the sold-out Jackson 5 show. But Carney knows a guy – a crooked white cop – who supposedly has tickets and will give them to Carney if he helps the cop run some “errands,” a euphemism for robbing everyone the cop can think of, because he’s being investigated for corruption and he’s about to leave town.

Part 2 takes place in 1973. Carney is an investor in a Blaxploitation film wonderfully called Nefertiti T.N.T. There’s a problem. The female lead has disappeared. ”They were making a movie about dirty Harlem and then the real thing came up and bit them in the ass.” To the reader’s delight, this brings Pepper back. Pepper is Carney’s mentor, a father figure who (sometimes) protects Carney from himself and other criminals. Pepper knows what he’s doing, and he’s hired to find the actress. 

In Part 3, it’s 1976. The bicentennial is being celebrated with the crass commercialism New York City excels at. Harlem’s criminal gangs have transitioned in the intervening five years as well. Carney and Pepper have inadvertently contributed to some of those changes. When a flippant remark from an old rival pisses Carney off, he lights a match causing a conflagration that burns what’s left of old Harlem to the ground.

Carney is immensely likeable and relatable. He’s a family man. Sure, he’s also a part-time criminal, but he lives by a code. ”A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches.” He’s the thread that successfully pulls the novel’s three parts together, but let’s be clear: The novel’s glue is New York City, and it steals every scene.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Get Me the Slow Horses

If you like spy novels and you’re not reading Mick Herron’s Slough House series, what’s wrong with you? Are you consumed with self-loathing? Are you mean to children? Not obnoxious children. I have no problem with that. I’m referring to nice children. Do you enjoy treating nice children badly?

This isn’t me asking. It’s my neighbor. She loves this series, and she has excellent taste. I love the series too, but my taste is suspect.

Spook Street is the fourth installment in the series. It brings back Jackson Lamb, the delightfully acerbic and misanthropic head of the slow horses, a group of British MI5 spies who’ve fairly or unfairly been relegated to Slough House because they’re misfits, losers, or nuisances. Slough House is “where they sent you when they wanted you to go away, but didn’t want to sack you in case you got litigious about it.” When there’s an emergency and national security is at risk, no one yells “Get me the slow horses.”

Still, national emergencies happen in Britain and somehow the slow horse get tangled up in them. Much to the reader’s relief, that’s what happens once again in Spook Street. The story opens with a bomb going off in a London mall on January 1st. Forty people are killed including the suicide bomber. It should be a straightforward investigation for the real spies at MI5, but it looks like a group secretly funded by a MI5 legend, who’s now retired and has dementia, might be involved. Slough House is pulled in because the MI5 legend is the grandfather of a slow horse.

The slow horses are now on Spook Street, and “When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret.” These are things the slow horses aren’t good at, and MI5 desperately wants to keep all of this a secret. But here’s the “First law of Spook Street. Secrets don’t stay secret.”

Spook Street is another fast paced installment in the Slough House series, and it’s a pleasure to read. But beware, these stories have a body count, and Mick Herron has no problem sending slow horses out to pasture with a bullet.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

About the College – Updated to Include Vital Information About Barnacles

Hello!

As CEO of Pungent Sound Technical College of Technology, I can tell you we are proud to be a for-profit school.  In fact, it’s an honor to wake up every morning, see our students’ smiling faces on video, and know that we are exclusively devoted to serving our shareholders.

The college is currently located on the tranquil waters of Pungent Sound.  It’s romantic, but don’t let the setting fool you.  The college is very difficult to get into.  Not in the academic sense – if you can pay the tuition, you’re in.  It’s difficult to get into physically, because the college is on a barge, which enables us to move whenever we find it necessary to do so.  But that shouldn’t concern our students, because we offer a virtual education; so if you have a computer, you have a virtual college.

Are you looking for the best education we can offer?  Then you’ve found the right school!  But wait, there’s more.  We can help you secure a loan to pay your tuition.  Our staff is motivated to assist you because they work on commission. 

So why haven’t you applied!?!  Be a Barnacle.  That’s our school mascot, because barnacles have astonishingly long penises; eight times longer than the rest of their bodies, and they reproduce by ejaculating into the ocean.  So dive in and take a swim at Pungent Sound Technical College for Technology.  And remember, I’m not only the CEO; I’m a shareholder. 

Titmouse Beak, CEO of Pungent Sound Technical College of Technology