{"id":254,"date":"2005-11-15T03:39:54","date_gmt":"2005-11-15T08:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/?p=254"},"modified":"2005-11-16T11:43:31","modified_gmt":"2005-11-16T16:43:31","slug":"mankind-is-my-busy-ness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/2005\/11\/15\/mankind-is-my-busy-ness\/","title":{"rendered":"Mankind is my busy-ness."},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps the greatest motion picture ever filmed — outside of “Smokey and the Bandit<\/a>“<\/em> of course — has to be “Scrooge<\/a>“<\/em> featuring Alistair Sim<\/a>. (I like the 1938 Reginal Owen version<\/a>, too, but to me, Alistair Sim is<\/em> Ebenezer Scrooge in the same way Timothy Dalton<\/a> is<\/em> Bond. James Bond.)<\/p>\n

Early enough in the flick, Scrooge comes face to face (sort of) with the ghost of his departed old partner Jacob Marley. In a scene that still sends a shiver up my spine, to answer Scrooge’s suggestion that they were just doing “good business”<\/em> Marley howls a blood-curdling, “Mankind was my business!”<\/em> — only Michael Hordern, the actor playing the par t of Marley, enunciates the word “business”<\/em> as “busy-ness.”<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Over on his blog, MagiCentric, Steve Pellegrino continues the Sankey\/Penguin\/Magic Makers saga, and posts a picture of me on his blackboard as he points and pontificates about how Penguin Magic\/Magic Makers are not the same company; are preferred vendors for L&L Publishing and Michael Ammar; are not Evil Incarnate; and how I’m being petty by addressing Sean by the name he gave the first time I encountered him.<\/p>\n

I’ll state again that Pellegrino is free to have and share whatever opinions he holds, and to associate with whomever he wishes, but let’s remember Pellegrino has a penchant for placing his bet on the wrong horse and having to eat crow as a result. (Pie a la Shell Game<\/em>, anyone?)<\/p>\n

Fellow Louisianian James Carville<\/a> wrote a book a few years ago, partly in an attempt at explaining the unexplainable: his dogged and blind loyalty to certain people in his life. The book was called “Stickin'”<\/em> and was typical Carville. By the end of the book you’ve been served so many side orders of juicy rationalizations<\/a><\/em>, deep fried in the fat of blind loyalty<\/em> that it’s hard to tell when he’s being serious and when his tongue is planted in his cheek. (Actually, he’s being dead serious throughout, which is why the Pellegrino-Stickin’<\/em> association came to mind.)<\/p>\n

I respect loyalty an awful lot. It’s one of two reasons many people prefer dogs to people, the other reason, of course, explained by Mark Twain in this quote:<\/p>\n

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Blind loyalty, on the other hand, is foolish. If I have to explain why, there’s no point to even start.<\/p>\n

In the end, this goes back to the distinction between “ethics”<\/em> and “just business.”<\/em><\/p>\n

But it’s his final punctuation mark at the end of the piece — the part where he states “End of story. The rest of the crap is none of our business.”<\/em> — that’s awfully amusing to read when one considers the source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps the greatest motion picture ever filmed — outside of “Smokey and the Bandit“ of course — has to be “Scrooge“ featuring Alistair Sim. (I like the 1938 Reginal Owen version, too, but to me, Alistair Sim is Ebenezer Scrooge in the same way Timothy Dalton is Bond. James Bond.) Early enough in the flick, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.escamoteurettes.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}