Conrad Black media hack

Former newspaper mogul and Canadian native Conrad Black is now a convicted criminal.The United States District Court in Chicago , Illinois and Judge Amy J. St. Eve felt that Mister Black's and his insider gang that committed a thirty two million dollar fraudulent heist of the assets of Hollinger International, was worthy of a six and one half year term for his part , six and one half million , in the plunder. Yet another case of corporate evil in America? Wait a minute , this scoundrel Black is not even an American citizen. Shades of the NatWest Three , see previous post NatWest Three. Fraud and obstructing justice. The obstructing justice part of his conviction resulted from Mister Black's removal of boxes of documents from his Toronto , Ontario office. This caper resulted in the capture of Mister Black on videotape , smile felon! , and resulted in a mere fine of $125,000. Prosecutors had hoped for a sentence of 24 to 30 years for the crimes committed by Mister Black , who will of course appeal this decision. At one time Mister Black's newspaper holdings were the third largest in the world. Moral of this story is trust your local newspaper and it's contents as if a convicted felon was at the helm. In this case Mister Black was , and his felonious behavior gives an already suspect news source a larger ethical black eye. Now Mister Black the media hack will be kept in check by a variety of prison guards referred to in common prison slang as "hacks". .........Might as well enjoy those fine meals that lavish dining via the expense account now provides while you still can. Look for massive layoffs in the financial centers of commerce after the disastrous earnings and under performance of the banks and associated industries. Trim the fat from the fickle corpse of a dying nation of debtors. My pal Slim has the right idea downstate when it comes to setting a table. Pick a long table , set your clients down , and after forging about locally for some prime and affordable victuals , provide them at an affordable price point and prepared just right. The only business that open and close quicker than book stores are restaurants. Put on your thinking cap and let your mind roll back a few years , and you will not be surprised to find that many of your previous favorite nosh spots are caput. This is not news as much as a sad fact of life. Tastes change , and one either adapts to change and survives or perishes while holding forth in an obdurate fashion to the old ways. I will list some old deceased favorites at a later time. Send me yours...... Simple is best , and I will give you a great antidote for the winter blahs that rapidly approach. A unique recipe for split pea soup. Take six quarts of water , and bring to a boil , while adding three pared and cut into pieces of carrots , a hand full of peeled fresh garlic , a few onions peeled and whole , tops of a bunch of celery , fresh parsley , black and white peppercorns and a dried red chili pepper are optional, leeks if available , and some chicken bouillon or Minor's ham or chicken concentrate. If you have fresh stock replace the six quarts of water with the stock. Add two pounds of washed and sorted split peas and one piece of ham hock or smoked pork to the liquid and vegetables and reduce to a strong simmer. The top of the water should ripple about it's contents. Cook this for about two hours or until the peas are cooked , skimming the top of the water and stirring the pot so the peas do not stick. When done , remove from heat and remove the cooked vegetables and ham hock to a bowl. Take the cooked peas and strain them through a fine sieve until you have the essence of legume captured in a bowl or dish. You may wish to chop the carrots fine and add them back to the soup. I usually discard them with the spent vegetables , preferring to add fresh cooked carrots diced fine , and finely chopped well cured Parma style ham along with croutons as garnish. You can use potatoe water and even add a cooked potatoe when putting the peas through the sieve if you care for a richer and denser soup. Feed the scraps of ham hock to your favorite quadraped , a bit strong for bipeds. A sure cure for the cold weather blues. Turn those blues split pea green. Book Selling Time! A nifty volume on fine cooking on the cheap is our offering for the day. ECONOMY GASTRONOMY , A First of its Kind Collection ; A Gourmet Cookbook for the Budget Minded by Sylvia Vaughn Thompson. Not to mention the introduction by Slim's old pal M.F. K. Fisher. Plus the books title closely resembles an early Pink Floyd song if you pronounce it quickly. A free volume of our choice to the first client who can name this Pink Floyd tune correctly and send it via email. Good luck! Best wishes to all my Family and freinds at this festive time of year.

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Of knives and other sharp items

Water in Lake Erie recedes. Giving away ground. As well the declining corporate music business , and it's bosom friend in the soft entertainment industry , your basic dead tree and typeset companions in the publishing fields of books , slick magazines , tabloids , and the doubtful American daily newspaper are going the way of the model t ford. And this is the dire news that is never really told by the twin industries that spin their fortunes from nickels , dimes , and bold faced lies. Fiscal bad news is perceived as not fit to print , lest it mess up the hair of it's financial agents and investors , or wake up further the smoldering public sentiment for fairness and honesty in reporting which is immediate , free , and far more interesting to consume today in the streaming on line sphere that many of our lives are lived within today.///////// Suffering double digit fiscal erosion every year the recorded music end of the entertainment industry is in a free fall. Technological savvy Internet users and a diminishing market are the one - two combination that stagger the kneecaps , causing audible knocking under it's hood and the dead timber bunch sent head over heals to oblivion and beyond. All right, I did not go for the obvious play on words , dead timbre , though I sneak it in 'hear' for my own amusement. As for the temporary reprieve granted the contemporary version of the daily newspaper , most will be but a printed dead tree memories in the scant space of a few years to come. It is an impossible task to read the local version of newspaper mediocrity , the plain dealer , and derive anything of intellectual value or stimulation . No candor , wit , or objectivity spring forth from the keypads of it's " writers" , these days. A dumbed down amateur air seems to be the flavor of it's style book , the lack of any in depth reporting is painfully obvious , daily, weekly , and monthly , year in year out. I do like the editorial cartoonist who works on the p.d. op-ed page , Egan the fishing and racetrack writer on the sports page as well, Photographer Lynne Ischaey , and some others employed are talented in the limited aesthetic fashion of news gathering and it's dissemination conspired by the business and political goals of the cleveland plain dealer and it's companion lower tier newspapers that dot the print journalism landscape of a USA today universe. Even if you posses meager artistic talents , as most of us do, you are apt never to have a means of using them to anywhere near potential while employed by a contemporary news or media concern such as the Cleveland plain dealer. Pathetic. The syndicated news efforts are far better than the locally gathered variety. I prefer to read quality 'stringers' such as Christopher Maag , write about Cleveland , Ohio news via the pages of The New York Times , than the Cleveland plain dealer version. In the New York Times a higher level of authentic news and opine appear in a news article , and a better " style book" demands better writing and reporting of news. On the positive side , today's online edition of the plain dealer featured a one minute streaming video news clip of chef Michael Symon's coronation as iron chef. A tip of the high white hat to Michael , and in the realm of Cleveland plain dealer front pages news for the past two days which I did not read , proved all I needed to view and understand of this culinary circus event. Perfect! This clip from the plain dealer online version is a good example of why modern streaming news is today's authentic news , and these clips will only get shorter and more pared down as the attention spans and demands upon future humans space available within their collective minds is an issue to chew upon. Minimal perfection of the light weight news of the passing hour , minute , second , fractional seconds. With the advent of the hand held video and photography devices , add stroke of a keypad , upload and bingo instant news. The textual efforts in the online plain dealer proved succinct but unreadable as news , so minute in content or news value as if to make television news appear to contain more viable content. A universal law should exist prohibiting the use of the words television and news in the same sentence . Yet the plain dealer online " breaking news" reads as if the news offered was compressed and composed for the eyes of a third grade child. Leaving the classified ads section as the only reason to purchase the plain dealer and I would have nothing to do with the p.d. at all if it were not for this advertising section . Far better to spend the extra .075 cents daily and buy the New York Times . Possessing a nose for news and a more discerning pall ate , the New York Times , International Herald Tribune , or any other well written and edited newspaper left standing in the world today printed in the English language is more to my taste . The New York Times , though not without many faults and biases , provides a more discerning and erudite printed news flavor , and is closer in aroma and strength to the coffee I imbibe every morning . Few and far between these days these newspapers of worthy note , and the p.d. is merely a near extinct old species fish , washing up on a dying lakes shore in a diminishing market of readers and consumers , and now is forced to compete a little leaner every year in terms of it's new hires , and looks to it's corpulent staff of writers for meat and is given cheap hamburger in it's printed place. The politics of this newspaper are well documented by my old Friend Roldo Bartimole in his well written , Point Of View columns over the past forty years , and it is due to Roldo's fine and dogged efforts to keep the politics and goals of the "pee dee " as actual news and under public scrutiny that I have an appreciation for the low aims and skulduggery that the current plain dealer represents in Cleveland , Ohio. ///////// File transfers and digital downloads are the death knoll for the recorded music business , or a return to it's budget origins . What once was a physical salable product in the form of a vinyl record album , compact disc , or magnetic tape of recorded music is now a .99 cent musical download and the equivalent of a Internet jukebox that allows the dollar to spit back to the user a metaphorical penny to be chalked up against the .098 cents due for the tune purchased and downloaded. The recorded music industry started over a century ago , selling single tune cylinder recordings and then .78 r.p.m. recorded discs for dimes to dollars, and this same music business in one hundred years time has returned to it's low rent origins in a modern 21st century market that demands custom designed immediate gratification via it's fickle custom blending digital consumers. ///////////////////// Factor in the effects of the hyperbole merchants employed by these industries in public relations , advertising , and the business of ballyhoo, vitriol , and blather created by the newspaper and entertainment industries . No wonder today's critical , picky youngsters will have nothing much to do with this coven of bad actors and professional liars. Witching hour approaches for these flawed and vulnerable industries and those employed by them. Heads are rolling wholesale , and add to this fray a National writer's strike , and let those left standing sort events out. The media ship is lilting in it's traditional safe harbor waters , and taking on water fast. The propaganda newspaper merchants and electrical entertainment peddlers will be moving in together on some low rent flop where their .99 cent and .50 cent products will die a lonely corporate death. Good riddance! BOOK SELLING TIME! Ernest Hemingway FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS . First American edition. Eleven eleven is the chosen day to celebrate Veteran's Day in the United States Of America. I am old enough to remember the hoards of street seller's with pin on red poppies for sale , to benefit the less than fortunate homeless or otherwise suffering veterans of previous American wars , and all news sources that disclose that a significant number of homeless men in these United States of America today are veterans of the Vietnam War. As a nation we treat our pets better than our less than fortunate veterans and homeless human beings. Many others homeless in America are either mentally ill , handicapped or crippled in some fashion. Find space in your life for these fallen fellow humans. The season is upon us to find space in our collective and individual hearts for others not as fortunate. Spend some of our most precious commodity , time , in your busy life to help provide some basic needs and attention to one who is less fortunate. Take a tip from my pal John , who sent me a pair of boat sized tennis shoes for my old baseball pal James to wear. A random act of kindness , that will be appreciated by this still worthy human life that deserves better than he receives , and does not complain . You will not have to look far these days. Poverty is a scourge upon this land , and the mounting fiscal woes that foreclosures and a society that chooses to live in great collective denial,debt , and fiscal peril occurs will certainly produce more casualties , not to mention the impending shake out in the entertainment and dead tree industries. We here at Old Erie Street Bookstore soldier on selling books the best we can in a world market where demand is far out stripped by supply , and the pressure price wise is downward not up. A second hand player in the entertainment and dead tree industry , I give book selling another decade or so prior to it's extinction, save some unique printed items that might appeal to antiquarians and art mavens. The Hemingway offered is without a dust jacket and not a top collector's grade edition , though I expect it has good value based on the prices of comparable new volumes of fiction or literature today. That we will sell this volume prior to the Year's impending calendar end is likely. Be the first on your block to take a Ernest Hemingway first edition as your office party or retirement gift for than newly unemployed person in the entertainment or news industry.////////// Culinary Bites! My old pal and original skillet man Slim , who burns porcine hash and slings root beverages at his public chowhouse and science project down Kentucky way , aptly named SLIM'S, and just a tad North of the queen city of the South and I both agreed , Michael Symon is the new iron chef. News only because we both figured it out well before it was filmed ,Slim and I both concurred at the announcement of the series some months back that Michael was to win.Results are in and no place to place a bet! Sounds like a new sports book with all the odds and evens factored in , should be established for the outcome of future culinary match ups for those who wish to wager on such competitions.Make note , I only mention this culinary crowning of the victor in the name of a sports championship coming to Cleveland. Cleveland beats New Orleans in the culinary world series . " Hey Rube!". " That's Entertainment".

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