Bearing Witness to Global Warming

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed adding polar bears to the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, acknowledging for the first time that global warming is largely to blame for an animal’s possible extinction. If the polar bear is listed as endangered, then the government would be legally bound to protect it, possibly by imposing mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It could also throw a monkey wrench into oil companies’ efforts to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Could this be a prelude to a huge shift in Bush administration policy on global warming and oil drilling in the ANWR? (Do polar bears have wings?)

I suppose I should at least wait and see what happens to the proposal before I get too cynical.

A Year to Forget in Publishing

This has been a rough year for the publishing industry. Accusations that James Frey made up a lot of his memoir, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES; charges of plagiarism against a young Harvard novelist; the revelation that a bestselling author thought to be an HIV-positive teenage prostitute was actually a 40-year-old San Francisco woman–these are just some of the PR hits the industry took in ‘06. The scandals continued, right up to year’s end when celebrity publisher Judith Regan was fired for allegedly making anti-Semitic comments after her proposed O.J. Simpson confessional book-TV deal got canned. As if the notion of the proposed book itself, IF I DID IT, wasn’t outrageous enough.

Despite all this, people have continued to buy books. Book sales may be flat, but people still like to read (thank God!) and publishers are trying to expand their customer base by placing books in new retail outlets, such as Starbucks and other venues. So I feel reasonably sure the publishing industry will survive. And the honest, hard-working authors will continue to struggle along as best they can, too.

Pot Shop Weeded Out by its Own Success

California may have approved marijuana for medical use, but that hasn’t made it any easier to run a storefront cannabis shop. This story about Green Cross, a San Francisco cannabis club, is a case in point.

Green Cross was doing a thriving business in affordable weed. A bit too thriving, perhaps. While many in the neighborhood supported the concept of medicinal marijuana, they objected to the noise, traffic and crime Green Cross was attracting. “It is an unfortunate fact,” one mother of three testified at a Board of Appeals hearing, “that a percentage of Green Cross patrons are criminals” who intend to resell the product.

Forced by the board to relocate, but unable to find a friendly new place to open shop (an attempt to move near Fisherman’s Wharf was met with almost unanimous neighborhood opposition), the Green Cross closed its doors for good. But the owner, Kevin Reed, says he has a new plan–avoid the problems of storefront sales by starting a medical marijuana delivery business. Reed is seeking a refund of $10,000 in permit fees he paid during his legal fight to keep the club open, to use as seed money (I kid you not) for his new venture.

Mosley Does Existential Erotica

Walter Mosley, one of my favorite writers, has not been shy about branching out into new genres and forms. While he may be best known for his Easy Rawlins mystery series, Mosley has also written science fiction, mainstream fiction and young adult fiction. He has written novels and short stories, as well as nonfiction books and articles. Now, in his latest novel, KILLING JOHNNY FRY, he’s tried his hand at what he calls “sexistential noir,” a highly erotic form of noir from what he says in this interview.

I’ve heard Mosley speak on several occasions, and one of the things I admire most about him is his frankness. Well, believe me, this interview does not disappoint in that regard.

Getting a Handle on Runoff

Urban and agricultural runoff are huge sources of ocean pollution. With the help of scientific studies, government and industry officials can now identify the many sources of runoff or “non-point source” pollution (as opposed to point source pollution, which comes from one readily identifiable source, such as a factory’s discharge pipe). The executive vice president of the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC, says we even have the tools to fix the problem, “but need the political will to get it done.”

Santa Monica is trying to do its part, with the Santa Monica Urban Runoff Recycling Facility, or SMURRF, which keeps 350,000 gallons of urban runoff out of the Pacific every day. But Santa Monica is just one small community, and its contribution a mere drop in the bucket, so to speak.

SMURFF started five years ago and is showing results. Meanwhile, dozens of cities are spending big bucks to fight compliance requirements, while failing to use some of the easiest and cheapest clean-up methods.

This article discusses the runoff problem and some of the solutions. The last two pages have a list of things individuals can do to help out.

Embrace Your Inner Oscar Madison

Neatness and organization. Such overrated virtues, but they’ve provided the basis for a whole home and office organization industry. January has been dubbed Get Organized Month, thanks to the efforts of the National Association of Professional Organizers. Enough I say! As a card-carrying slob (“organizationally-challenged” to use the PC term), I’m pleased to read of the emergence of an anti-anticlutter movement.

There are even studies out there showing that “messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds,” they make more money than people with neat offices and “messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts.” Obsessively neat folks are, quoting the article, “humorless and inflexible prigs” with “way too much time on their hands.”

Well, I didn’t need a study to tell me that, but thank you so much for providing the scientific evidence to appease any doubters out there.

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?” Einstein said it. I believe it. Say yes to mess.

And Another One Bites the Dust

More bad news on the indie bookstore front. Dutton’s, an independent bookstore in Beverly Hills, is closing at the end of the year. In 2004, Beverly Hills allowed Dutton to rent city-owned space at below-market rates, but that was  “a different mayor and a different council,” says Dutton. Now the city won’t renegotiate the lease, demanding the store to pay the full freight or leave. Kind of an ugly way to end things. However, the original Dutton’s in Brentwood is still open and some of the Beverly Hills books and author events will be moved there.

Still, with everything else Beverly Hills has, you’d think they’d be willing to cut a struggling indie bookseller some slack.

Death of a Mystery Bookstore

Oh, no–not another one! The NY Times reports that Manhattan mystery bookstore Murder Ink is closing after 34 years in business, joining legions of independent and specialty bookstores that have been forced by various market pressures to close their doors. In the DC area, we’ve seen two independent mystery bookstores close over the last several years–MysteryBooks in DuPont Circle and Mystery Bookshop in Bethesda. Mystery Loves Company, I’m happy to report, continues to soldier on up in Baltimore and has even opened a new location in Oxford, Md. However, they seem to be part of an ever-diminishing breed. In 1993, there were 4,700 independent bookstores in the United States. Only 13 years later, the number has dropped to 2,500. As if it weren’t hard enough for authors who haven’t cracked the bestseller list to get their books into stores. Now there’s one less place for them to do it. Sad, sad, sad . . .

Hiaasen Makes a Splash With ‘Skinny Dip’

Carl Hiaasen can not only write funny, but he excels at creating some of the sleaziest characters you’d ever want to read about, then having them suffer mightily for their sins in the end. In SKINNY DIP, his main sleazoid is Dr. Charles “Chaz” Perrone, whose first act in the book is to toss his beautiful wife, Joey, over the side of a cruise ship out at sea.

Chaz, a so-called biologist whose Ph.D. was obtained through a combination of good luck, bad schools and support from friends in low places, thinks Joey has become wise to a certain environmental scam he’s part of and tries to kill her by tossing her into the drink. But you don’t kill a champion swimmer that way. No, Joey lives, catching a ride on a floating bale of Jamaican pot and drifting into Mick Stranahan’s life. (Hiaasen fans will remember Stranahan, the multi-divorced loner with a classic rock fixation, from SKIN TIGHT.)

From there, the story could basically be re-titled “Joey’s Revenge.” The cast of characters includes Red Hammernut, a politically-connected, morally bankrupt kind of guy (i.e., a stock Hiaasen character) whose agribusiness (with Chaz’s help) is turning the Everglades into “God’s septic tank” and a huge, hairy Neanderthal of a fellow named Tool, who works for Hammernut but turns out to have a heart somewhere beneath his furry chest. Between Joey and Mick’s scheming and the relentless probing of a python-loving police detective, Chaz has his hands full pretending to be the grieving widower while keeping his dealings with Hammernut and his extra-marital affair with a hapless hairdresser a secret.

The result is Hiaasen’s usual great combination of satirical humor and environmental awareness. It’s easy, fun reading, apart from one small section near the end where Hiaasen brings the story to a crashing halt with a mini-dissertation on Everglades ecology. But that’s okay–the story’s great otherwise, especially since another recurring character named for a certain lizard makes a couple of cameo appearances.

Hollywood Banks on More of the Same

Hollywood has found its answer to box office slump in the sequel. The notion that if people liked it the first time, surely they’ll go for it again and again and again, seems to be panning out. The LA Times reports that six of the past year’s 12 biggest movies were sequels and more sequels are on the horizon, with new installments of “Spider-Man,” “Shrek,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and, of course, “Harry Potter,” to name just a few.

I’ve got nothing against sequels per se. They can be very good (or extraordinarily lame) and are a time-honored way to squeeze extra bucks out of a premise. But between remakes, sequels and sequels of remakes, like “Mission Impossible” and “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Thirteen,” I find myself longing, as the Python boys would say, for something completely different.