. . . Remember Wacky Packs?

Stories I wrote today while I was supposed to be writing ads about my hometown ...
(I have to say, I do feel some bitterness about my hometown)

I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV. Mother said it wasn’t realistic.
But she couldn’t stop my radio listening, and I had an aural memory for songs, and was fascinated by some things: Revlon told me "The world is your pearl!"
I couldn’t wait to get there.
Another time I saw a billboard that said "Living Well is the Best Revenge." There was a Crown Royal bottle.
"Thank you, Crown Royal, I’ll keep that under my hat!" I thought to myself.
And so I waited, for a time when I was no longer a child, and could apply my own actions to my own benefit.


The only magazines we subscribed to were Reader’s Digest and Pennsylvania Game News, which came with my dad’s hunting license. I memorized the stories month to month.
On Sundays, sometimes, the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer landed at the bottom of our driveway. It was a five-pound package of absolute exotica. Rolled tightly, it could burn in the fireplace for half an hour, but unfurled, it burns in my mind even today.
Drawings of glamorous ladies in giant hats and tall shoes, for Wanamaker’s Department Store. Pictures of tall buildings and bridges and makeup counters at Strawbridge and Clothier’s.
What a word, "Clothier’s!"
I kept some colored pages from the Parade magazine under the rug, until my mother found them.


I never had any heroes. "Aw, he’s nothing special," is what I heard if I ever expressed admiration for anyone. We didn’t follow any sports. We didn’t collect baseball cards.
But there was this kind of card we collected, when we could get them. They were Topp’s "Wacky Packs." They were spoofs on ads, product names and packaging, and they were hilarious. "Log Cave-In Syrup," "Head and Boulders," "Vicejoy," "Chock full O Bolts." There were a lot of things we couldn’t laugh about in our lives, but we could laugh at these!
Har har har! No one could tell if I was laughing with admiration because I thought it was clever or laughing with derision.
I could make up all the clever things I wanted, and as long as there was the requisite derision, it was accepted.

about The Illusionist

I dismissed the flashback solution the inspector was thinking at the train station as wishful thinking for a man he did truly admire.

I had a hard time believing, when he finally did his second investigation of the stall, that it was the inspector's first inkling that the prince could be so corrupt -- there was a look on his face, not so obvious as the look at the station -- of sudden recognition/an overthrow of his previously-held view of the prince. At one point Eisenheim asks the inspector, "Are you totally corrupt?" and the look on the inspector's face seems to indicate no knowledge of the accusations that have been made against Leopold over time.

Actually, I had a hard time believing the inspector would have any business walking out the front gate of the presumed palace (where he was handed the folio on the Orange Tree trick) in business attire after the prince's suicide; I didn't think his career would survive his change of mind. Giamatti's inspector had a guileless demeanor unlikely for an inspector, yet he wasn't bumbling; he was kind of an anti-Clouseau, or, a reverse Clouseau.
I liked the themes of power, the follies of challenging power with nothing to gain but exposure of the truth, AND of blindly going along, the endurance of love.