. . . repackage it as sleaze:
“Years ago, a PI out of Chicago brought justice to a dirty town. Now he’s going to pay,” trumpets the cover copy for US publisher Hard Case Crime’s new take on the classic novel, which it will release in December. “The man needs the help of a great detective … but could even Sherlock Holmes save him now?” The cover shows a scantily clad, backlit blond, reacting in terror to a muscled man showing off a brand on his forearm. Arthur Conan Doyle becomes AC Doyle, “bestselling author of The Lost World”, while the reader is further enticed by the tagline that “They All Answered to… The BODYMASTER!”
Publisher Charles Ardai said he had been looking for a classic novel to “playfully repackage” in Hard Case Crime’s pulp style since he launched the press five years ago, keen to follow in the footsteps of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw a cleavage-revealing cover dreamed up for 1984 (“Forbidden love … Fear … Betrayal”), and a “bosomy lipsticked redhead” on the cover of Frankenstein. “This is the tradition we wanted to revive with our edition of The Valley of Fear — presenting something ‘good for you’ in ‘bad for you’ garb,” he said.
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As soon as the money being discussed passes a billion dollars, for most people it might as well be imaginary . . . here’s a bit of perspective:
To put some context on a new estimate that puts this year’s federal deficit at $1.8 trillion, consider this: That amount had never been spent by the federal government in a single year until 2000, let alone borrowed.
That’s right. As the decade began, the US government spent $1.8 trillion in a year for the first time. Now it’s poised to spend that much in excess of its tax revenues.
The Treasury released the latest figures Wednesday, showing spending of about $3 trillion in the past 10 months, and revenues of only $1.74 trillion.
With two months to go in the fiscal calendar, the Obama administration is projecting that the imbalance will end up totaling $1.84 trillion, more than four times last year’s record-high. The monthly deficit for July, also reported this week, came in a bit above what economists had expected.
Now all the talk about replacing the US dollar with some other currency as the international reserve makes rather more sense. The US government is going to be a long, long time paying off all that new debt . . . or repudiating it and triggering a world-wide financial melt-down. Either way, prudent investors will be looking at non-US investments for future attention. This will make it that much harder for the US economy to grow its way out of debt.
It will take a lot of political courage to stay the course, pay down the accumulated debt and avoid going for what the domestic audience will see as the easy option (declaring national bankruptcy). It’s hard to imagine any current American politician with the fortitude to take the hard option (cutting government spending and paying off the debt).
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My new host had some problems with the database connections this morning, resulting in a loss of access to the blog (both for you and for me . . . I couldn’t get access on the admin side either). Service appears to be back to normal now.
If you didn’t notice a problem, feel free to ignore this post.
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