Shaq: Uncut... or is he?

I often forget how special Books & Books is.  Every bookstore is not minutes from South Beach or Venetian Pool.  Every bookstore does not get shoppers like Sir Paul McCartney, Michael Moore, and Shakira.  Every book store does not host author appearances with Bill Clinton, Barbara Walters, and Shaquille O'Neal.

Does Clinton do candid shots?  Of course not. . . only if you're Becky Quiroga.

Yet there's a dark side to the celebrity-studded bookselling lifestyle, one you've probably never heard about but which claims the good moods of half a dozen booksellers a month.

Don't see it?  Let's take a closer look.

Yes, that's right: autograph theft.

If Shaq knew people were doing this to his books, he'd go Punisher.

I first came across this phenomenon when Gina and Dann Gershon visited for their book Camp Creepy Time in 2007.  For a few years, selling signed copies online became a lucrative business for us (if you're interested in a signed copy, email me; I'll hook you up).

I can't find my picture of Gina Gershon dressed as a naughty nurse for the appearance, so enjoy this instead.

Apparently, Gina Gershon's autograph is worth money on its own and paying $16.99 for the hardcover children's book would blow the resale margin all to hell.  It's much easier to take a razor and slice her signature out, making the book unsellable and killing our sale in one shot.  Thanks, asshole.

Since then, we've found slashed copies of Jerry Rice's Go Long, Alonzo Mourning's Resilience, Elizabeth Berkley's Ask Elizabeth, and Condoleezza Rice's No Higher Honor.  Apparently, sports figures, people with the last name Rice, and people from the movie Showgirls are high-risk groups.

Why not just steal the book altogether?  Sure, it's easier to sneak a piece of paper out the door but I think the real reason is that the thief likes to rub our faces in it.  There's a place in hell reserved for this perpetrator (perpetrators?) wherein paper-thin slices of skin are removed from portions of his/her body over the course of years.  S/he will plead for death but find none.

But that's just my opinion.  In the meantime, I'd like to catch this asshole in the act.  It would almost be worth him doing it, just to catch that asshole doing it.

How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore?

I’m always amazed when people abandon their book orders.  I don’t mean the folks who buy books and then never pick them up, which happens more often that you’d think; we’ve got shelves of prepaid titles that have been taking up space for years.  We hang on to them because people not only show up years after the purchase, but get livid if their book isn’t waiting for them years after the purchase.  Moral of the story?  Book lovers are special.   

That’s a different kind of person, one who spends so much they have no idea what they’re buying.  I can make that judgment because I’m on a budget.  I don’t care how disorganized or forgetful you are, if you abandon a $25-$35 hardcover - or a stack of them - it’s because you can afford to.Not them, though.  I’m talking about my internet customers.  As I write this, I realize the phenomenon I’m about to explore probably happens because people who are interested in books are primarily (ha-ha) bookish types who'd rather just let things die by ignoring them than confront anything, but I’m going to go right ahead and write about it anyway because it took me a long time to figure out how to get that screen shot.  Check the dates if you don't believe me.

 



Handling internet orders for Books & Books coming up on eight years, it’s always a little hurtful when I find myself begging for communication with people who seem to have ordered something they don’t even want.  I can empathize when people complain about a great date who never called back.  

We're #3! We're #3! We're #3!

The Measure of America is a cool book, if you're into that kind of thing.  Barring taking an actual physical book home, follow the American Human Development Project online.

I have to wonder about the Native figure, and not just because of articles like this.  I read that the average life expectancy of a reservation-based male is 45 years, and a reservation-based female is 48 years.  That could be because the infant mortality rate is 8 times that of whites - Tota died at 93 (depending on the birth certificate), after all - but I don't really know how statistics work.

I also know you can't compare a Pine Ridge with an Akwesasne, that Famous Mistake is always made when discussing Indians.  Lumping us together into one big Native American Population is like equating Italy with Scotland with Poland, but can I expect anything better from people who see the world like this:

Maybe since they're measuring America and the Indians are actually sovereign nations, the reservation folks didn't even factor into that life expectancy chart, who knows.  The good news is, Becky will only be alone for seven years instead of eleven.

And our .8s match, isn't that cute?

if we want hell then hell is what we'll have

And I would turn on the TV

But it's so embarrassing

To see all the other people

I don't even know what they mean

And it was magic at first

But let everyone down

And now this world is gonna hurt

You better turn it around

Turn it around

- Jack Johnson, Cookie Jar

While researching stupid criminals on which to base the crime spree of Betty Corona and Eric Clueless, I came across a great deal of crime which is the opposite of funny.  In the glut of horror which news channels drool over in the pursuit of ratings, three stand out.

First, there’s one I’ve heard many people talking about, the 17-year-old whose parents wouldn’t let him have a house party.  He decided the thing to do was beat them to death with a hammer and throw a party anyway, with their murdered corpses locked in their bedroom.  He told a friend about it during the party, and the friend called 911.

Maybe the murderous teen used the same tone another teen at a different party might use to confide a venial sin; dude, I raided my parent’s liquor cabinet for this; they’re so gonna kill me.  Maybe he was bragging.  We don’t know yet.  He’s not cute like that girl who killed her baby and got away with it, so the spotlight only flickers over him.  You can read about his crime and watch videos on websites which make snide comments like it’s more “news of the weird,” the same websites which invite you to vote on celebrity hotness and rate fad diets.

The next is also getting a lot of play, the California woman who cut off her estranged husband’s penis and threw it down a garbage disposal.  I was in college when Lorena Bobbit created a national punch line by cutting off John Wayne Bobbit’s penis.  He was abusive, beating and raping her over the course of their six-year marriage.  On the night in question, he came home drunk, raped her, passed out, and she reacted violently.    

By contrast, the California woman drugged her ex, tied him up, waited for him to regain consciousness, then cut his penis off.  People seem to be taking this one much more seriously.  In 1993, there were a few pundits who did not see the funny.  They asked readers to imagine if the roles were reversed; would anyone be laughing if some husband waited for his wife to pass out, then cut her breasts off / sewed her vagina shut / cut her nose off?  These few were a minority.  Even they conceded that while the reverse was horrific, there was nothing on a woman’s body that had achieved the symbolic status of masculinity (and even abuse) as the penis.  

There was no way to prove abuse beyond Lorena’s word, but Bobbit has abused the two wives he’s had since so I think we can agree that Lorena didn’t make it up to avoid conviction.  Since we couldn’t be clear on the couple’s dark history, at the time the general reaction was, Hey, the penis got sewn back on - no harm, no foul.  Folks want the California woman locked up for life for various offenses, including torture.  We don’t know what the history is with the California couple beyond the woman’s curt declaration to the cop who picked her up; “He deserved it.”

Then there was a squib I haven’t heard anyone talking about.  A couple of California meth addicts attempted to sell their 6-month-old baby outside of a Walmart for $25.  It’s the type of awful crime, the loveless, soulless, everyday atrocity so senseless and terrible you know it will never make a Leno monologue.

Except it does.  Snarky bloggers use the $25 dollar Walmart baby as a punchline about rock-bottom pricing.  You can envision a world, years from now, so lacking in empathy, so inured to cruelty, that crimes like these become fodder not for anonymous bloggers but are exploited on network TV by beloved comedians.  It’s no world you want to be a part of, but you are.  You are living in this world, this country, day by day, and every day we lose a little empathy toward our fellow man, every day the collective “norm” takes another step toward a national pychopathy.  

Is the world getting worse?  In the early 20th century, a woman used a cutting board and a kitchen knife to behead her baby because “I always thought there was something wrong with him.”  Now we have Casey Anthony.  As far as I can see, atrocity has always been with us.  It’s the way we act about it that’s getting me down.

“The way we act, or rather don’t act.”  That’s what I wanted to like to write.  But we’re beyond not acting.  Our attention feeds the machine.  By enjoying the 24-hour news coverage - even if your enjoyment is rooting against the criminal, or hoping to see justice done, or marveling at where we stand as a society, you are enjoying the broadcast - we are complicit.