My brush with greatness

Jimmy Starr was a Hollywood figure from the 1920s through the '60s, with a string of careers as a screenwriter, gossip columnist, publicist, and press agent. He also wrote some crime fiction in the 1940s.

In 1926, he wrote a book of short stories entitled 365 Nights in Hollywood. He self-published the book in an edition of 1000, with each copy signed (I think).

I had never read any of the stories, but I was intrigued by the idea of a collection of insider tales about Hollywood written in the 1920s, so I took the plunge and bought a copy.

I've read one of the stories (plus a little introductory piece), and it's very odd and not so good. The prose is overwrought, and unless the story's two primary characters return later in the book, I have no idea what the point of the whole thing was.

But there are little etched color graphics throughout the book that are quite lovely, and the book is signed to Louise Keaton.

Who was Louise Keaton? Why, none other than Buster Keaton's sister, that's who (she also had a minor acting career of her own).

Brutal truth, plainly spoken

From Senator Jim Webb's rebuttal to Dubya's State of the Union blather tonight:

When one looks at the health of our economy, it's almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it's nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day. [emphasis added]

Bingo. That says it all.

Words, words, words

I came across something interesting the other day, but it's entirely possible I'm just the last to figure it out.

It concerns the word "longshoreman," the origin of which I've had occasion to wonder about once or twice over the years.

The "shoreman" part was easy enough to pin down, of course, but I've sometimes idly wondered about the "long" in front of it -- until the other day, that is, when, while reading something published 1905, I came across this slightly different spelling of the word:

'longshoreman

That apostrophe leads me to wonder, was the word originally "alongshoreman," in reference to men who work along the shore?