smacky and bucky

I passed! That's what I feel like screaming when the dentist says he sees no cavities and let's me go for another six months. I feel like I need to make an awards show speech. In and out in less than half an hour, and dental insurance covered it all. Yay!

I'm reading I, the Jury now. See previous post on Mickey Spillane. I found a cheap paperback copy in a used bookstore. It was the only book of his they had. The cover boasted "Over 82 million copies of Mickey Spillane's books have been sold!"

My first thought: Holy crap, that's a lot of books!

My second thought: Why can't I find any used copies then???

It appears that in Mickey Spillane's heyday, people bought the cheap paperbacks for a quarter, or 35 cents, read them, and dumped them in the trash. Bummer. If you see any cheap copies of his books in paperback, shoot me a comment, okay? Amazon lists a ton of options, but spending over $3 on shipping negates the joy of any deal. I know if I stumble across the right used bookstore, I'll find them all for $1 each. I just have to be patient.

I watched a show on A&E last night on the last hour of flight 11 (the first plane to hit one of the towers). It included a number of facts I had not known. The next program was a TV movie about flight 93 (the one that crashed in Pennsylvania). Forgive me if I'm getting these flight numbers wrong. I'm bad with numbers (and names too, but that's another story). I watched the first minute of that one and turned it off. The facts of that day are dramatic enough. I don't think we need to dramatize the events. Why? To make it more emotional? How could it get MORE emotional? I understand that humans use drama (semi-fictional recreations) in order to cope with events, to sort them out, to give them meaning. Maybe in another 5 or 10 years we'll need it, to show a new generation what happened. But even then, I think the truth is always going to be more powerful than actors playing the parts (in the case of the events of that particular day).