Oh, Kramer. *fond headshake*

Stand-Up Comedians and Gangsta Horticulturists

Before Larry David was the writer/producer for Seinfeld, and the star of his own show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, he was a stand-up comic. Unsurprisingly, David was an idiosyncratic one; he didn’t do well with half-wits, hecklers, or the inattentive.

A memorable late 1970s performance of David’s is described in Richard Zoglin’s excellent book, Comedy at the Edge:

One night at Catch [a Rising Star], David came out, silently scanned the audience, muttered, “I don’t think so,” and walked off without saying another word.

Asked to reminisce about the moment today, David simply says, “I just didn’t like what I saw.”

What a mensch.

Along the lines of unfinished business, the Northwest Florida Daily News reports that three men were caught after they'd “attempted” to write an expletive on the road.

As the article diplomatically notes:

The expletive, which normally contains four letters, was missing the last letter — a "k." [A sheriff’s] deputy noted that although…the word was spelled wrong, the suspects will face criminal mischief/graffiti charge due to "the graphic nature of the word attempting to be spelled out."

Is attempted indecency more or less indecent than the regular kind? A wag has pointed out that they may have been a band of gangsta horticulturalists trying to spell “fuchsia.”

I don't think so.

While You're Thinking About That, Think About This

Mr. Bookman, the library cop, was one of my favorite characters from Seinfeld. As played by Philip Baker Hall, Mr. Bookman had a clipped, Joe Friday-esque delivery that was comic gold.


The following dialogue concerning Jerry Seinfeld's overdue (by 20 years!) copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer still makes me smile.

Bookman: You took this book out in 1971.
Seinfeld: Yes, and I returned it in 1971.
Bookman: Yeah, '71… Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards, Abby Hoffman telling everybody to steal books. I don’t judge a man by the length of his hair or the kind of music he listens to. Rock was never my bag. [jabbing his finger at Jerry] But you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the New York Public Library, fella!

Think it's a joke? Think again, fella. Heidi Dalibor of Grafton, Wisconsin, was arrested earlier this month after failing to return two library books. And she was only one year overdue!

But hey, Dalibor was almost asking for trouble. She received four library letters, two phone calls, two official notices, one citation from the police, and a court appearance notice. But she ignored them all.

What was Dalibor thinking? “I said, ‘What could they possibly do? They can’t arrest me for this.’ I was wrong.”

Her wrong-ness and sunny personality led to a strangely cheerful mug shot. To her credit, Dalibor was cool about her overdue infamy. She paid her $170 fine and told reporters, “I completely take responsibility for not paying my fine on time and not going to my court date.”

Good on her. Still, Dalibor isn’t planning on returning the books. Hey, she's paid for them now.

As for the two books that caused all this trouble, they were Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. Hmmm. If you had to go to jail to read a book (or two), what titles would be worthy? (David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn came to mind for me.)

While you're thinking about that, here's a Bookman clip: