Sunday e-mail 10th March

What to expect this week; surprising lessons in life

This week’s newsletter features a terrific tome by one of the world’s craftiest crime writers. Who – you ask -who is this mysterious man? My lips are safely sealed. You’ll need to check in to check him out. Righteous readers will recognise the man by the panting breath of his pulsating prose style, its hip vocab and finger-snapping pulsations. It’s a style as awe-inspiring as it is authentic. It’s out there, outré and obviously outrageous. I’m talking juked up jive talk, a mainline train to the reptile brain.

If you who don’t know who I’m talking about yet - well, you will have to wait for Wednesday! 12pm, meridian, high noon. Be there – the demon dog’s gonna dish dirt then, off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.

If that covers this week’s newsletter, you’ll be wondering, what’s this week’s other hip highlight? What do you have for us this time, Jason, in your bombastic bullet-points? I’m glad you asked. Devoted readers (do we have any other kind?) will know that I decided to devote my own reading this year to the peerlessly pandemonious pulps, but I found time, too, to squeeze in some newsy non-fiction, too. Not too much crime this week, then – instead, let’s see what lessons we’ve learnt in school this year. Some of this is pretty interesting:

·        2014 – a Los Alamos contractor was told to pack barrels of nuclear waste with a substance that may surprise you. The packing-material of choice is kitty litter. Not just any kitty litter, though: only the inorganic kind will do. The contractor misheard and packed them with an organic kitty litter. The clean-up cost no less than $500 million.

·        At the grand old age of 3¹/_2,  the author Norman Mailer (still to produce the majority of his best work) left a note for his mother that ended with the words ‘Goodbye, forever’ and left home. For some reason, I find this irresistibly comical. I think it is the notion of a pint-size Pulitzer-winner, about two feet tall, with a scraggle of bushy hair, Paul-Newman eyes, and pugnacious mouth, toddling determinedly off into the brown maze of Brooklyn, determined never to come back.

·        The Cambridge University Parapsychological Society once decided to see whether they could convince people that ghosts really existed. They dressed in sheets and walked around at night with their arms waggling about in scary fashion. Eighty people saw them; not one gave the specious spooks a second glance. Only the local cows displayed any interest at all. Not easily dismayed, the parapsychologists decided to repeat the trick at a cinema that was showing an X-Rated film (no, really, I’m not making this up). Their reasoning was that no children would be frightened by the ghostly goings-on. No one else was, either. One parapsychologist flitted spookily in front of the screen while an advert was showing. Forty-six per cent of the audience didn’t even notice.

Photo by Reba Spike on Unsplash

·        In 1999, when a tornado hit Oklahoma (world tornado centre) a woman did exactly what the government had advised her to do – sheltered in a bathtub, underneath a mattress. She was killed nevertheless, when a car came through her roof. The lesson here, apparently, is that there is only one thing you can do to protect yourself if you’re in the path of a tornado, and that’s get out of the path of the tornado.

·        Thomas Watson, the scientific associate of no less a personage than Alexander Graham Bell, spent no less than two years of his life under the impression he had a halo. His mother apparently said that ‘it didn’t seem at all strange to her that her son should be so distinguished’. Bell, less diplomatic, told Watson to get his eyes fixed.

That’s all we have time for this week, Crime & Psychology fans! Be sure to pick up your e-mail on Wednesday: you know it’ll be good for you! Meanwhile, be brave: blip, beep, and bop a blue button. Bon soir!