Rob Sterling

From Ghostbusters, a 1984 movie I assume most readers have seen:

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.

The Venkman closer was meant to be the punchline. But now the unthinkable has come to pass.

I saw in this morning’s Times-Dispatch the celebratory headline that Richmond’s standing in annual crime ratings has improved: City ranks as safer in crime survey. According to the Morgan Quitno Press, we’ve gone from the fifth most dangerous city in America to the 15th. Progress is progress, I suppose. On the other end of the survey, Brick Township, NJ once again has seized the title of safest city in America.

Well, I’ve lived in Richmond for three years now. I lived in Brick Township from 1972 to 1974, and I also lived in Silverton, right next to Brick, from 1994 to 1996. I am very familiar with Brick. The town used to be known as “Bricktown”, and before that “Bricksburg”, both of which have at least a touch of flair - but today it’s just plain “Brick”. It is a colossally uninteresting place - the name alone gives away the game.

Brick is not actually the safest city in America, because it’s not a city. It’s just a sprawling township that has occupied all of its land with low-density residential housing and strip malls.  Compared to other townships in the area (such as Wall, Berkeley or Lacey) Brick is kind of a dump. I moved to Richmond to escape the poor alternatives of suburban vs. urban living in New Jersey - sprawl is no way to live.

Richmond may get a black eye in crime ratings, but it’s a great place to live. Brick does incredibly well in crime ratings, but the mere thought of ever living there again makes my head hurt.

A friend of mine here in Richmond named Ron Klein has done something pretty novel. About two years ago, Ron set out to buy the rights to a book called Turn Your Imagination Into Money, which was first published in 1934. Once he’d acquired the rights, Ron set about preparing a new edition, which has just been released. So Ron has salvaged a bit of lost wisdom, made it available to a new readership, and possibly figured out a way to bring in some nice income for himself.  Not bad.

Reporter Piper Weiss - I love that name - penned an article in today’s New York Daily News titled What a tangled Web we weave: Being Googled can jeopardize your job search. I read the headline and thought that was a pretty obvious thing, but she raised a point I hadn’t thought of before.

Brief tangent - last year, some clown accused me of hacking into his computer after I posted information from a webserver log showing that he’d posted as two different people on a message board. If you know how server logs work, and he did not, you know that stuff like IP address, operating system and version, web browser and some other data are stored whenever you access a web site. I had access to the server log. The guy was pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and when I caught him at it he accused me, on a public message board, of committing a felony to get the data. Which I had not done. That’s defamation of character, which I could have sued him for. (But I didn’t.)

So one thing not mentioned in Weiss’ article is defamation of character, and how that could harm one’s ability to get a job. I think that’s a very real risk. The thing she mentioned that never occurred to me, though, is that a potential employer might mistake me for someone else with the same name. It turns out two other men named “Robert Sterling” have higher Google moxie than me. One of them is the famous actor, who according to IMDB is still alive. The other is a semi-famous leftist conspiracy theorist, which is amusing, but he is not me, either.

3:35pm today:

Cold caller: “Hi, this is Tiffany from Girls Gone Wild. Mr. Sterling, do you watch adult entertainment?”
Me: Ha! How did you get my, ah… I mean, why are you…oh my God! [Deep breath] Look, I really don’t want to be on your call list. Please take my name off it.
Cold caller: No problem. Have a nice day!

Porn telemarketing!? When the hell did that happen!?

Last night I went to Barnes & Noble looking for a book of poems to buy for the son of a friend. Some of my fonder literary recollections from childhood are verses of Ogden Nash, so I figured that was a promising route.

I went to the poetry section, but no Nash was to be found. Then I strolled over to the humor section and ditto. So I went to the Customer Service counter and asked if the store had any of his books in stock. The girl said she’d never heard of him, and I said, “Well, you know some of rhymes, I’m sure,” and then delivered one:

A panther is like a leopard
except it hasn’t been peppered
should you behold a panther crouch
prepare to say ouch
better yet, if called by a panther
don’t anther.

She checked the computer and nothing was in stock. I finally did find six or seven of his rhymes in a compilation book for kids, which I purchased. But the whole thing left me dissatisfied. There was, for instance, a book called “Poems of Emily Dickinson for Children”. Excuse me? Why not just bring in Sylvia Plath while we’re at it, or teach Ethan Frome to kindergarteners?

Nash was best known for silly verses but was well thought of by the literary community during his lifetime. His work has aged well and is very readable - I can’t imagine why he isn’t more popular today than seems to be.

I saw that sac mentioned “Stacy Noblog” in a sort-of recent post and it piqued my curiosity about the durability and spread of the “Stacy Noblog” meme.

Some background, first. “Stacy Noblog” is a monicker crafted by me and Eurotrash a few years ago during a night of drunken excess - the only kind of night you’re likely to have while in the company of Eurotrash - in which Ms. “Noblog” herself partook but did not, naturally, blog. Or at least Eurotrash says I helped come up with the name - I honestly remember very little about that night, and woke up lashed to a piling 40 feet out into the Hudson River, near the Hoboken train station. The name stuck.

The important question: Is She Becoming Famous? Is she on Nick Denton’s speed dial? Does Jason Calacanis know her by sight? Has Jake Dobkin posted unflattering or compromising photos of her to his site? Does Kate Lee take her to lunch? Is she listed on Blogebrity? Those are the things that really matter, after all. The answer? I have no idea.

That does not, however, mean that I can’t massage meaningless data into a semblance of an answer. As you can see from these comparative graphs, despite its more recent vintage, the “Stacy Noblog” phenomenon is making good progress versus “D. B. Cooper”, the nom de non plume of another famous non-blogger. It’s not unreasonable to project that in another 15 years she will overtake “D. B.” and perhaps even serve as the subject of a speculative biopic, The Pursuit of Stacy Noblog. Thus I so project; voila! In her movie I further project that she won’t be played by Tara Reid, despite sac’s likening of Ms. “Noblog” to the actress, because by then Tara Reid will look like Shelly Winters during the underwater scene with Gene Hackman from The Poseidon Adventure, and Stacy won’t.

The bad news is that against a blogger like Lockhart Steele (allegedly his real name) she gets her stealthy little ass totally pwned.

The lesson? To become famous in America today without having to wait until you’re old, you must either blog or hire a publicist. Merely hanging out with bloggers, consuming trendy alcoholic drinks that don’t tase like alcoholic drinks, not-blogging and not-posting-photos is a slow, arduous path to fame. And really, what’s the point of going to all the trouble of not-blogging if second-hand smoke liver damage coprophobia from Eurotrash alone will kill you before your movie is released? Just get a cat, not-clean your toilet on a sporadic basis and drink yourself to death at home; it’ll be cheaper.

There’s a terrific investigative article by Matthew Fleischer in the most recent L.A. Weekly. Called Navahoax, it unmasks the celebrated Navajo author “Nasdijj” as a Michigan-born Anglo named Tim Barrus.

Sherman Alexie is quoted extensively in the article, as probably the first prominent literary figure to realize that Nasdijj was full of crap. The best bit in the article is Alexie’s explanation of why white people seem to be forever impersonating Indians:

My stepfather once told me, if you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you’re Indian. For some reason we are elevated simply because of our race. I’m so popular I could start a cult. I could have 45 German women living with me tomorrow.

The fact of the matter is that Sherman Alexie’s considerable draw is the result of his talent and his body of work, not his ethnic background. I’ve read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and I saw Smoke Signals when it was released, I think at the Angelika in Manhattan. I enjoyed both and I really ought to get around to reading more of Alexie’s short stories and novels. (I’ll skip the poetry.)

…Captain Lou Albano has his very own Wikipedia entry.

OK, I had a high school flashback the other day and remembered what is probably the smartest - or at least the most clever - thing I’ve ever done.

(Continued)