Nero investigates a hangin'

So I happened to chance across a copy of The Golden Spiders a book by a fellow named Rex Stout that is part of a series of books that chronicle the cases of Nero Wolfe Private Eye. Except Mr. Wolfe is exceptionally private and will very rarely leave his own home where he has quite the orchird collection. The books are written from a Mr. Archie Goodwin's perspective who is NW's helper if you will as he does all the legwork in actually collecting evidence and talking to people. He's sort of a young humphrey bogart type, equally good with the ladies, a line, or a punch to the jaw. My old roomie george introduced me to these books. They are to anyone who likes detective novels, and maybe even to those who don't, quite good, funny and worth reading. I often find myself reading passages from the books wishing that I could write as mr stout does. Anyway in my opinion they are well worth your time to check out. The first one is called fer-de-lance.

I had a little scare last week. I was lifting the garage door on the main workshop here and I saw a pair of pants with boots on the end dangling from the ceiling about 1.5 feet above the ground. My first thought was, "Oh my god Jim (the fellow who works in there) has hung himself!!" However, I continued to lift the door I found, much to my happy surprise, that it just was hanging waders, rather than a hanging corpse. Waders apparently help fisherman by allowing them to immerse themselves, or wade, into the water and cast from there, rather than from on a perfectly sound and dry shore. Anyway caused a little bit of a fright but I'm ok now.

On the internet I recently found the website for a show called comedy college that has 30 min shows about old comics. The show on bob newhart was quite good, I also liked the mel brooks and carl reiner show, and finally the songs of Tom Lehrer a comic for 2 years and a math professor for 40 (I'm really hoping that Jayadev follows that career path), who came up with the following. So let's act with agility / while we still have facility / for we'll soon reach senility / and lose the ability, good advice perhaps not so great pickup line.

Finally I heard on NPR today that the US army has something called the Adam Smith operation going on in iraq. The idea is to teach basic business skills to help the iraqi economy along, and to start a pin factory.