Lance Mannion

Your friendly neighborhood tow truck driver

Updated.

You know, I think that tow truck driver was making a lot of that up.  I’m not saying he was lying.  Just that some of what he told us during the hour when our car was riding on the back of his rig and we were riding with him the eighty-odd miles to the garage near Uncle Merlin’s fell into the category of tall tales, fish stories, and stretchers.

I believe he’s built his own stock car to race from the frame up and out.  I’m not sure about his building three of them that won state championships. And the retired scientist who signed on as a silent partner in his hauling business who committed suicide before the business really took off so the tow truck driver had to go back to working extra shifts for the garage seems a little too good to be true.  The scariest story he told us I hope he was making up---about going to the scenes of two DUI wrecks in a week and finding that the driver of both cars was the same drunk teenager, that one…

Oh. No. This isn’t the same tow truck driver who pulled us off the Jersey Turnpike when we broke down on our way to see the blonde’s folks the weekend before last.

This guy came to get us when our broke down Sunday, the day before yesterday, when our car broke down on Route 84 in Connecticut as we were on our way to visit Uncle Merlin.

Exact same thing happened both times. Car’s rolling along fine. Suddenly engine light comes on. Engine dies. Car won’t start again.

This makes me believe that it didn’t get fixed when it was in New Jersey.

As you can imagine, I’m not in the best of moods over this.  Doesn’t help my mood that my back is killing me.

But Uncle Merlin swears by the mechanics who are looking at it now.  And he’s given me some exercises to do to help my back.  So maybe by this afternoon both the car and my back will be ready to go again.

I’ll let you know as soon as I know.

Updated with what I know: Picked up the car. New fuel filter. It runs. Got us where we needed to get to tonight.

The big news though is that God really is out to get me. See His comment.

Thanks to all of you who’ve helped out over the last week. 

The long story, the even shorter version

Home.  Picked up the car in New Jersey this evening.  Left behind an arm and a leg.

Think it’s going to be a while before I find the humor in this story.

The long story, the short version

On the upside, the wedding we came down here for was very nice and Old Father Blonde enjoyed his birthday party.  And Mother Blonde’s car is running fine after I took it in to Sears Auto yesterday morning for a couple of minor repairs.

The downside is our car died on the drive down.  On the New Jersey Turnpike. It was running fine then the Check Engine light came on and that was all she wrote.  All the work we’ve put in it over the last month and we missed something. Gremlins must have been hiding and waiting.  Car’s sitting now at a Pep Boys in North Brunswyck where it has either been looked at by a mechanic named Raul who is not working today so he wasn’t there to tell me what’s wrong or whoever I talked to invented a mechanic named Raul who is conveniently not there to be asked how things are going when things haven’t been going.

First thing Monday morning, though, I was promised, Raul will call to tell me…

Something.

At any rate, we were able to get here thanks to my sister-in-law who came to our rescue and who will drive us back up there when the car’s fixed.

But as you can imagine I’ve been a bit distracted the last couple of days and that distraction will continue a couple more days. So blogging may be even lighter than usual.

When this is over, though, I will write a funny post about it.

Ha ha ha.

Actually, the name for the kind of person Dustin Hoffman’s good deed makes him is Good Samaritan

From the Department of Overused Words, today’s word “hero”:

A single courageous act doesn’t make you a hero any more than putting a quarter in the March of Dimes card makes you St Francis of Assisi.

A note on comment policy

I need to repost or create a permanent sidebar link to my too long-ago stated policy on comments.  But for now:

1. Comments are moderated, mainly as a defense against spam, but also so I can keep a lid on trolling, flaming, thread hijacking, and just plain meanness.  Sometimes I will edit for length, but that’s rare.  Often I will add a link to a post you quoted or an article or book or movie you referenced.  And regularly I will edit out profanity because my mother reads this blog.  But not as much as I used to because she’s gotten hipper over the years or more resigned.

2. Pseudonyms are fine.  But if you think you’re going to comment in the future, please pick one you really like and stick with it.  This lets other readers get to know you and where you’re coming from, which makes it less likely they will take offense at something you didn’t intend to be offensive and more likely they’ll get it when you’re joking.  It’s also a way of taking responsibility for what you write.

3.  I don’t need to know your name but I would appreciate it if you included a working email address. Email addresses are never, ever made public.  The reason I’d prefer you to use working one is that I may need to contact you to clarify something you put in a comment. It’s also another way of taking responsibility for your comments.

4.  If you use a Typepad, Facebook, or other service’s profile, please give yourself at least a pseudonym and make sure there’s actually a way to contact you through it. And again, please use the same one every time.  Be a person, in other words.

5. Please, always feel free to puff your own blog if you have one.  Include your URL in the window provided.   If you’ve written on the topic at hand yourself, tell us and provide the link.

6.  Notice and try to remember the names/handles of other commenters.  I’m lucky in having a number of regular commenters who have stuck with the blog for years and years.  They make this a more interesting and smarter place to hang out.  They’re good folks and when you get to know them I’m sure you’ll like them.  The point is, though, if you make a habit of reading LanceMannion.com you’re going to bump into a lot of the same people again and again and just as in the analog world it’s a good policy to remember that people have lives of their own and their rhymes and their reasons.  Treat them accordingly, that is, as individuals.

7.  Proceed from the assumption that others have read what you’ve read and have thought about the things you’ve thought about and care about the things you care about, it just might have slipped their minds at the moment or they came to other conclusions or that they have other things worrying them. 

8.  Be civil, be polite, be understanding.  Remember that most people cannot hear the sound of their own writing in their heads and make allowances.  Remember that most comments are written on the fly by people who don’t have time to craft a little essay.  Assume whatever makes you mad is the result of a mistake on the commenter’s part or on your own.  People get things wrong and it’s ok to point it out, but keep in mind they don’t mean to be wrong, they don’t like to be wrong, and they’re usually not happy to find out that they’re wrong.  In short, be kind and be gentle and be graceful.

9. You should feel free to tell me when I’m all wet, but there’s no reason for you to take it personally that I liked a movie you hated or hated a book you loved or that I don’t think the world is going to hell in a handcart for the exact same reasons you think it is.  Everything I write here is just my opinion, so what do you care?  I’m like Zaphod Beeblebrox.  I’m just some guy, you know?

10. If you’re going to enjoy this blog you should know who Zaphod Beeblebrox is. Also, Sam Vimes, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Kilgore Trout, Newman Noggs, Sebastian Moran, and Stephanie Plum.  And that the Duke of Oxford did not write Hamlet or any of the other plays.

11.  Please read the whole post before commenting and try not to skim.  I know time’s an issue and the intertubes encourage it, but I put a lot of time and thought and effort and care into my writing and I get really ticked off when I’m accused of saying something I didn’t say or told I should have made a point I did in fact make.

Welcome to all new readers!  Thanks for stopping by. And thanks to all of you for reading the blog.

Sick leave

The doctor says it’s nothing.  The blonde thinks I have a bit of a cold.  I know for a fact I have double pneumonia plus a trace of malaria plus a rare bronchial disorder that medical researchers will someday name in my memory.

But please keep checking back in. I may survive to blog again. 

The Mannionville Daily Gazette Monthly Round-up: October 2011

Lot of you in the Northeast were probably in the same situation we were in the last few days, without heat and electricity thanks to Saturday’s snowstorm.  We lost power Saturday afternoon and it didn’t come back on until yesterday.  We muddled through, suffering some inconvenience but no serious damage, and I hope you can all report the same.  But no power = no internet, and that explains why no posts since Saturday.  That doesn’t mean that no blogging occurred.

Our intrepid staff of ace reporters, hard-nosed editors, and crackerjack researchers remained at their posts, 24/7.  Huddled under blankets in the dark, working by flashlights and candles, they scribbled away furiously in notebooks, the result being a big batch of posts waiting to be typed up and published.  For example:  we’ll have a couple of book reviews for you, one of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean and, for all you Terry Pratchett fans, a review of Sir Terry’s latest Discworld novel, Snuff!

There’ll be something up every day through the weekend---some days, there’ll be two somethings, so stay tuned.  Meanwhile, if you’re inclined, you can catch up with posts from October you might have missed.

A good chunk of the month was taken up with reports from the day I helped occupy Wall Street with members of Teamsters Local 455.  All the posts are collected here.  But a few of the highlights include my encounters with some of the hippie weirdos who make up the Occupy movement: an ironworker from California who’d come to New York for a job and wound up occupying Wall Street, a half-dozen or so ministers and priests, and a pair of elderly but enthusiastic Michael Moore fans, retired union members and products of Catholic schools who love Moore because, as they said, he listened and took to heart what the nuns taught him.

Yep.  The conservative concern trolls are right.  These are exactly the sort of people Democrats should distance themselves from.

The only disorderly conduct I witnessed while there was a temper tantrum thrown by a limo driver who’d just missed running down a bicycle and my own accidental visit to a strip club---all I wanted was a sandwich, I swear!

What else?  Oh, yeah.  I saw three very good movies:  Moneyball, The Ides of March, and my favorite, the Irish comic thriller, The Guard.

And I discovered that the painter Marc Chagall spent a couple of idyllic years in this area, an episode in his life that his widow did her best to keep unmentioned to the point of having it practically erased from the story of his life.  She was helped by the fact that few of Chagall’s neighbors during those years knew he was there or even who he was.

Ok, time to get typing.  A heads up, though.  As I warned back in the spring, November’s Fundraising Month. I’ll try not to be too pushy about it, but the donation button will be at the top of the page most days, so, if you enjoy what goes on here and would like to help keep the blog going strong and you can swing it, please consider making a donation.  It’d be much appreciated.

Thank you for your support and thank you for reading the blog.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette Monthly Round-up: September 2011

Felt like I was sloughing off all September, but looking back over the archives it turns out I managed to get a few posts written.

The big deal of the month was the two days I spent at the Clinton Global Initiative, where, among other things, I got a kick out of watching Two tall Presidents, but did not get to discuss comic books with the Big Dawg, and tried, unsuccessfully, to get an argument going over rehabilitating the word stewardess.

Over the course of the month I managed to review three movies: X-Men: First Class, the bleak comedy Everything Must Go starring Will Ferrell, and Robert Redford’s historical drama about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, The Conspirator.

And I reviewed a book, Ernest Cline’s cyberpunkish, 80s nostalgia tripping Ready Player One.

On the social and political front?  Let’s see. I started the month bragging about the one and only way I am a better person that Barack Obama and ended it by pretty much telling Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York to go to H-E-Double hockey sticks.

In between my nine year old self explained to Governor Rick Perry what he doesn’t understand about Superman and my present day self tried to explain to cyber-utopians why I don’t use the automatic checkout lanes at the supermarket.

Guess I’ve had less productive months.  Thanks to all of you for reading.  Hope you stick around what’s coming up in October.

__________________________

If you enjoy what goes on around here and would like to help keep things humming along, and you can swing it, please consider making a donation.  It'd be much appreciated.

 

An apple a day

Macintoshes.  Tantillo’s Farm.  Gardiner, New York. Saturday.  September 17, 2011.

We went apple picking a couple weeks ago and I’ve been enjoying the, ahem, fruit of our labors every day since.  An apple a day.  And you know what?  It’s true.  An apple a day does keep the doctor away.

Quack hasn’t been able to get near our house for fourteen days.  He tries.  But he just gets stopped at the top of the street.  It’s like there’s an invisible fence.

He’s up there right now.  Pacing back and forth with his black bag, occasionally shaking his fist in this direction.

Bit damp around here

Rain and more rain, washing out roads, closing schools.  Our backyard’s a swamp. Won’t say our street’s swimmable, but ducks and geese are gathering on the lawns with expectant looks in their eyes.  More water in our basement than we had during the hurricane.  Pulling on the waders and donning storm gear, preparing to go down there.  Might have to inflate the rubber raft.  If I’m not back and blogging in a hour, alert the Coast Guard.

Aftermath

Greetings from the Barnes & Noble near the old Mannion Homestead where we’ve been visiting with Mom and Pop Mannion.  Power went out yesterday and is still not back on.  But that was the worst of it for us.  I hope those of you who were in Irene’s path weathered it as well as we did with as little damage to property, limb, nerves, and peace of mind.

We’re heading back to Mannionville this afternoon where, we’re told, the power stayed on through the worst of it.  Regular blogging should resume tomorrow then.

Photo taken Sunday afternoon.

Twitter retreat

Unfollowed a well-known political reporter on Twitter this morning.  He was twittering about what would happen if the GOP Presidential campaign came down a contest between Rick Perry and Sarah Palin.  I swear, if these people were sportswriters they’d be covering their own fantasy football leagues.

I decided to unfollow every journalist and pundit who tweets banal and vacuous insiderisms and horse race stuff.

Problem is, if I unfollow all the journalists tweeting banal and vacuous insiderisms, then I might as well unfollow everybody who tweets to complain about the banal and vacuous insiderisms these people tweet.

But that would include me!

How do you unfollow yourself?

Know what ticks me off about the President going to Martha’s Vineyard for his vacation?

He’s not taking me with him.

Bet he forgets to bring me back a T-shirt too.

Island universe

Eleven-twenty. Out on the porch looking up towards where I think Andromeda is and enjoying the view 2.5 million years back in time.

Bet I could see 2.8 million years back if I put on my glasses.

Damn kids

You know who aren't as cute as they think they are?

Drunk twenty-year old women.

You know who aren't as funny as they think they are?

Drunk twenty-year old men.

You know who isn't as smart and superior as he thinks he is?

The grumpy middle-aged man stuck in line behind them at the convenience store.

I married a cougar

Found out last night that a 20-something hit on the blonde when she was out at a bar with friends last week. I'm not jealous because the same thing happened to me recently.

I wonder if it was the same guy.

Why you should consider carrying a lower deductable

If you're in NYC and you've parked in a garage, and the attendant in the booth has the Yankee game on, and the Yankees are losing, and the attendant is looking glum about it because he's rooting for the Yanks, and you're a Red Sox fan, you don't say to the guy who has the keys to your car, "ALL RIGHT!" and do a fist pump.

Caught myself just in time.

The convenience store clerk uncertainty principle

First rule: At any store that employs a clerk you look forward to having wait on you and a clerk you dread having to deal with, the second clerk will work a schedule such that he or she is behind the counter six times out of ten when you have to shop at that store while the first clerk works a schedule such that you three out of the four times he or she is on duty when you step up to the counter he or she will either be waiting on someone else, get called away by the manager just before it’s your turn, or is going off shift.

Second rule:  The first clerk will always leave to take another job first.  He or she will be replaced by another clerk you enjoy having wait on you who will work the same schedule as the previous clerk.

Refrigerator physics

Based on the most recent observations, made within the last half hour during a detailed cleaning of the interior of a typical Kenmore refrigerator, it’s clear that certain items stored in a refrigerator will, while unobserved, cause themselves to leak and even spill and those spills can defy gravity and flow upwards.

Losing my touch

For a guy who made money for college painting houses, I sure am doing one lousy job on the window trim.

A stranger to myself

Eight-thirty a.m. Was about to make another pot of coffee, then I thought to myself, “Nah, I don’t need any more coffee this morning.”  Then I thought, “Who is this person?”

Coffee’s brewing.

Old rule

Never assume that a politician/celebrity/sports figure didn’t do the stupid thing he’s just denied he did.

Book review report

I expect to finish Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life tonight and post my review Friday.  If all goes according to plan, my review of The Mad Bomber of New York: The Extraordinary True Story of the Manhunt That Paralyzed a City by Michael M. Greenberg will be up some time tomorrow.

Not sure what I’ll review next after McClure’s book but it’ll be something.  And I’ve been invited to review another play down in New York.  That’ll be later in the month.

I hope you’re enjoying these reviews because I’d really like to keep them a regular feature.  The trouble with theater and book reviews, though, is that they’re not conducive to interactivity.  That is, the odds that enough of you will have already read a particular book or seen the play to get a comment thread going aren’t good.  I’m trying to think of what to do about this.  If you’ve got any ideas or think I even need to do something about it, please let me now.

Here are some of the books I have in the hopper:

My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir by Dick Van Dyke.

The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge by T.J. English.

In the Rooms a novel by Tom Shone.

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life by Bettany Hughes.

When the Thrill Is Gone, the new Leonid McGill mystery by Walter Mosley.

Let me know if there's one in particular you'd like me to tackle next.

All of them are available for your kindle, in case you have one and were wondering.

And please visit The Mannionville Daily Gazette Review of Books on Facebook.

Simple pleasures

Looking at the items the woman ahead of me at the convenience store has put on the counter, I’m thinking, “You know, there are times when I wish all it took to make my day a good one was a pack of cigarettes and a Red Bull.”

Then, thinking over what I’m thinking, I think, “God, what kind of life is it when the making of your day is a pack of cigarettes and a Red Bull?”

Then, thinking that over, I think, “Remember, Lance.  Some days all it took to make your grandmother happy was a pack of Winstons and a glass of Genessee Cream Ale.”

The moral of this little tale I take to be, “Pay for your gas and your loaf of bread and go on about your business and leave other people to go on about theirs."

Liver-eatin’ Mannion

Somebody out there keeps signing me up for newsletters from websites devoted to hunting and guns.

Got one today.

It was Bliss Creek Outfitters alerting me to the fact that the state of Wyoming has held a drawing for elk hunting licenses for non-state residents.

They also want me to know they have only two openings left for their spring bear hunts.

I appreciate the heads up.  Wish I knew who to thank.

I’d like to think it’s some well-wisher who’s intuited my inner Jeremiah Johnson.

But maybe it’s a friend who thinks he’s being funny.

But a friend would know I’d only be mildly perplexed by these sites not amused.  He’d know I have nothing against hunters or hunting (I don’t count drunk amateurs as hunters or what they do as hunting) and I’m not a gun control absolutist.  So he’d know that the joke wouldn’t be on me and he’d know I wouldn’t think it was on the people who visit those websites on purpose.

Well, except maybe this one.

Actually, that one’s a little scary.

So maybe a reader who wanted to warn me about all the nuts with guns who think they’re soldiers who are out there signed me up for that one.

I got Storm Mountain’s newsletter back in December.  It began “Happy Holidays.”

Obviously these nuts with guns are liberals or they’d have written “Merry Christmas.”

I suspect, though, that I’m on these mailing lists thanks to some conservative reader who thinks he’s getting me good.  He’s thinking, “Boy, this one will make that candy-ass liberal Mannion’s head explode!”

I’m pretty sure I know who it is too.  There’s a character who swings by every now and then, skims a sentence or two of a post in which I’ve said something mean about conservatives, blows a fuse, and then gets himself all worked up in comments that I don’t post because, well, they’re usually just nasty.

But from his comments it’s clear he is sure he knows me like a book.

The Communist Manifesto, I think.

What he thinks is that I am his nightmare of a liberal.  The living incarnation of a caricature out of Mallard Fillmore.

I should post a picture of me in my motorcycle leathers.

This guy thinks Nancy Nall is the female counterpart to this caricature which I guess means he thinks she’s gay.  I don’t know what he makes of Nance’s constant references to her husband.

Probably thinks Alan’s a wimp.

Alan should challenge him to a duel.

Weapons of choice:  Power tools.

Whoever does the best job of residing a house in a day wins.

Conservative wuss doesn’t stand a chance.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure this guy doesn’t actually read anything Nance or I write.  He feels he doesn’t have to.  He knows us, knows what we think. When he opens his browser and calls up our webpages, he sees nothing except the caricatures he expects to see.

So, if it is him signing me up for these newsletters, I imagine he’s doing it because he gets a kick out of imagining how I’ll go all woozy and nose-bleedy at the idea of manly men and womanly women and their guns.

Now, liberals can get in the habit of thinking of conservatives and Right Wingers as caricatures too.  The thing is our caricatures of them are actually scary.  We tend to picture mean and angry types, whether they belong to evil corporations or Tea Party mobs, with the power to act on their anger and hatred.  They’ve either got the money to buy and bully the rest of us with or they carry, well, you know, guns.

But their caricatures of us portray us all as essentially weak.

Weak and ineffectual.

This image is so powerful and so persuasive in their own minds that they can look at President Obama, who is responsible for killing lots of the brown-skinned, Allah-praising people they want killed every single day, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and now Libya, and still call him weak and timid.

It’s central to their definition of liberal.  Liberals don’t have the guts to use force.  Hit us and we won’t hit back.  We’ll just curl up in a little ball and sob out an apology for America’s greatness.

So of course the idea of shooting a rifle at Bambi’s going to upset me, right?

I’m a liberal.

Liberals get all squooshy at the the thought of violence of any kind.

But if that’s how we are, if that’s what we are, why do they get so upset at the thought of us?  Why worry about us?  Why get so angry?

What can we do to them?

Sign them up for the Whole Foods newsletter?

It’s like we scare them.

Relax, dude.

I’m a liberal.

Liberals don’t have the guts.

Unless our women nag us into it.

Oh, wait.

I get it now.

You’re scared of our girls.