It's Monday afternoon. I'm taking the opportunity to update the Notebook page while I wait for the tech bugs to be worked out at the new publishing site (oh, I've been hired as a section editor at a new publishing site - more details when it launches in the next few days).

Another day, another jerk at the grocery store. This was a woman who was pushing her cart along the aisles at the speed of, oh, say, Richard Petty in the 200th lap of the Daytona. And she pushed it with a strange impatience that just screamed "idiot." Oh, maybe I'm being too harsh. Strike that. I'm not being harsh enough. She was looking for paper plates and other items, and couldn't seem to find them, so she asked her husband to look around while she asked one of the stockboys to help her. She sighed a lot (see last week's notebook for more on this), and finally decided to (get this) LEAVE HER CART AT THE END OF THE AISLE AND WALK AROUND THE STORE LOOKING FOR HER ITEMS!

There it was, in the way of everyone and everything, she just left it there, like someone leaving their broken-down car parked across both lanes of a highway. I was tempted to not just push the cart out of the way but to actually take it and put it at the other end of the store, maybe behind the potatoes that are stacked high. Or, better yet, behind the "employees only" door behind the meat section. And I know I wasn't the only customer who thought that as they tried to get around the cart.

I'm reading The Funnies, by J. Robert Lennon. It's about a veteran cartoonist who dies, and his will stipulates that one of his sons, an artist who never got his dad's approval on his career choice, can reap the benefits of the money the strip generates if he takes over the strip and keeps it going. It's an irresistible plot, and I grabbed the book after just reading the back of the book and the book's blurbs.

I wish I were a cartoonist. But I draw as well as a drunken monkey wearing mittens. Even my stick figures are bizarre.

Speaking of blurbs, the back of the new much talked about novel "House Of Leaves" features a blurb by Jonathen Lethem, where he mentions something about being "reduced in size like Vincent Price in The Fly." Why do so many people get this wrong? It was David (Al) Hedison who was the fly, not Price! That blurb bothers me.

Not as much as that lady at the store, but still...

Back to Bob Sassone Online