The assistant editor of Fox's Views page was searching the Web for his favorite band, Carter USM, and found the column I wrote about band names that begins with the sentence: "As a fiftyish lady, I am a little embarrassed to admit to liking Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine." The assistant editor stuck around to read a few more columns, liked them, offered me a stint as a guest columnist, and then he and the editor decided to keep me.
As to how I came to have a column on the Web in the first place,
in 1995 I won a competition to be the American correspondent for
the London Mall magazine. I wrote for them every week until they
came under new management, which did not realize I was working
for them (nor were they all that excited when I told them, either).
I was invited by the Rock Island Argus/Moline Dispatch to move
it to their Web site, Quad Cities Online, where it has been ever
since.
All the traffic stays on five main streets, making the rest of the streets lovely leafy neighborhoods, with lots of flowers and greenery, and streets where kids can play ball and practice inline skating. I can bike or walk to work every day.
The schools are wonderful. There's "culture" available--a local symphony, a good dinner-theater, an excellent 10,000 seat arena that hosts good concerts, a theater that hosts traveling Broadway shows. And if you drive an hour to Iowa City, there's a lot more doing there. But the big attraction of my town is that it's friendly, quiet and easygoing. (For more detail, read "We're Number 300!" )
I make it a point not to attend faculty meetings because I wish to continue to respect our professors.
I've attended enough faculty meetings to attest that the subject that arouses the most passion is faculty parking.
Doug Marlette's book, “In Your Face.”
In part, it's his life story--how a good Southern Baptist boy became a big bad liberal, and how he began as a kid sitting in class drawing evil caricatures of his teachers, and ended up as a Pulitzer-prize winning political cartoonist.
But it's also about the day-to-day life of a political cartoonist--how he gets his ideas, how he works them through, how he fends off the people who want him to draw THEIR cartoons.
Since I love political cartoonists, and I love the kind of snarky,
all-attitude kid he never really stopped being, naturally I loved
this book (which is profusely illustrated with his political cartoons
and selections from his comic strip Kudzu).
I would have problems with some of those books that explain in detail how to commit murder and leave no trace, or how to stick it to your wife in a divorce settlement (I believe that one's called “Screw the Bitch”).
I wouldn't burn them, but I wouldn't order them for my library either. Of course I work in an academic library, and it's hard to say what curriculum need these books would meet in any case.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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