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The unexpected perks were things like this. When I first became a star I had never learnt to drive so I hired a chauffeur to drive me around. But later I moved with my family to Los Angeles, and everybody drives there so I had to take a test. Before I took it, a man behind a desk informed me, in a prepared speech he had probably given many times, "The person who will perform your test is sitting outside in the car. You will speak to him only to say, 'Good morning.' There will be no normal conversation. He will give you instructions, you will listen and respond. There will be no personal remarks whatsoever."

I said, "Yes, Officer, I understand." I went outside and got into the car.

The guy looked at me and he said, "I loved you in The Man Who Would Be King. You're going to have to be shit to not pass this test." So at the age of fifty that was how I got my first driver's licence.


Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

Two weeks after [Joe] Arpaio was found guilty, Trump started focusing the thoughts of those who would attend his Phoenix rally the next week. It began with an off-air interview with a television pundit working for Fox News, the reliably Trump-supporting cable channel.

"Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe?" Trump asked Fox's Gregg Jarrett. "He has protected people from crimes and saved lives. He doesn't deserve to be treated this way." Jarrett said Trump also told him, "I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio. He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He's a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him."

Not a skeptical word from Jarrett, a lawyer, who on Fox's Sean Hannity show told only part of the story. Jarrett called the case a "political prosecution that began in the Obama administration," speaking more like Arpaio's lawyer than a news analyst.

The case began during the George W. Bush administration and the decision to prosecute for criminal contempt came during the Obama era. It was during the Trump administration that Arpaio was tried for criminal contempt of court and convicted.

That Trump is thinking about using pardons to compromise the Mueller investigation was beyond doubt after the Phoenix rally. While the pardon power appears to have no limits, other than using it to prevent impeachment, Trump's willingness to use it is fraught with peril for himself and the Republic. Using pardons strategically could seriously hamper the Russia and other investigations.

Pardons are for "offenses against the United States." By accepting a pardon, a person admits guilt for committing the crime. Anyone is free to accept or reject a pardon, as a principled person might who believes that he or she was innocent and had been wrongly convicted. There are plenty of examples of people who refused to say they committed a murder, rape, or other crime just to get out of prison, even if it meant staying behind bars until they died.

Anyone who accepts a Trump pardon, including Arpaio, is admitting he committed offenses against the federal government. But there is a way around this. The Constitution also gives the president the power to grant reprieves, such as letting a prisoner get out of jail early, without settling the issue of guilt or innocence. Such clemency is not optional. If the president orders someone freed from prison or otherwise relieved of criminal punishment, that person cannot say no.

Pardons can be issued preemptively, before any criminal charges are brought, as President Gerald Ford did when he relieved Richard Nixon and the country of the prospect of Nixon being tried for a host of felonies, including conspiracy and income tax evasion (for which Nixon's lawyer did go to prison).

That explains why strategically issuing pardons and reprieves would likely occur late, not early, in the Mueller probe and those by House and Senate committees. The problem issuing pardons poses for Trump is that anyone who accepts a pardon loses his or her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. If you have been pardoned, you cannot be tried and therefore must testify in criminal proceedings and before Congress. Lying in such proceedings, including falsely claiming you cannot recall something, subjects you to prosecution for that criminal conduct.

Nothing in the Constitution would prevent Trump from issuing serial pardons, either. Thus, he could pardon someone who had evidence that Trump would not want used against him, and if the person was indicted for refusing to testify, he could, as with Arpaio, pardon them again even before they were found guilty of contempt of court.

Presidential pardons apply only to "offenses against the United States." This means that state prosecutors are free to bring charges for crimes within their jurisdiction, which helps explain why Mueller's team is working with Eric Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general. Should Trump pardon, for example, his sons or his son-in-law, or Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, or others, Schneiderman would be free to bring state-level charges.

David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017

There was one jarring recollection in the generally positive picture painted by Thomas's colleagues in the attorney general's office. According to Andy Rothschild, now an attorney in St. Louis but then a friend and fellow lawyer, Thomas liked to taunt another member of the office, who was prim and painfully shy, by making outrageous, gross, and at times off-color remarks. "Clarence was loud and boisterous, kind of the office clown. He couldn't help himself but to needle the guy - he just liked to get under his skin," Rothschild recalled in an interview.

The target of Thomas's taunting was John C. Ashcroft, who would later replace Danforth as attorney general and eventually become Missouri's governor. A tightly wound, strait-laced teetotaler who was the son of a fundamentalist minister and who was himself a gospel singer and songwriter, Ashcroft was easily flustered by Thomas, according to a second colleague who also remembered such episodes. This apparently encouraged Thomas to goad him further.

[and still later, after the book came out, became a terrible attorney general under bush junior]

Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)

No payments of trinkets or brass wire were enough to make people stay in the flooded forest for days at a time to do work that was so arduous - and physically painful. A gatherer had to dry the syrup-like rubber so that it would coagulate, and often the only way to do so was to spread the substance on his arms, thighs, and chest. "The first few times it is not without pain that the man pulls it off the hairy parts of his body," Louis Chaltin, a Force Publique officer, confided to his journal in 1892. "The native doesn't like making rubber. He must be compelled to do it."

How was he to be compelled? A trickle of news and rumor gradually made its way to Europe. "An example of what is done was told me up the Ubangi [River]," the British vice consul reported in 1899. "This officer['s] method was to arrive in canoes at a village, the inhabitants of which invariably bolted on their arrival; the soldiers were then landed, and commenced looting, taking all the chickens, grain, etc., out of the houses; after this they attacked the natives until able to seize their women; these women were kept as hostages until the Chief of the district brought in the required number of kilogrammes of rubber. The rubber having been brought, the women were sold back to their owners for a couple of goats apiece, and so he continued from village to village until the requisite amount of rubber had been collected."

Sometimes the hostages were women, sometimes children, sometimes elders or chiefs. Every state or company post in the rubber areas had a stockade for hostages. If you were a male villager, resisting the order to gather rubber could mean death for your wife. She might die anyway, for in the stockades food was scarce and conditions were harsh. "The women taken during the last raid at Engwettra are causing me no end of trouble."

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Gambling with Our Lives?

The explosion of H5N1 in early 2004, which led to the deaths of more than 100 million chickens across eight countries in Southeast Asia, was traced to the trade in live birds. The timing and pattern were inconsistent with known migratory bird routes. The initial spread of this disease seems to have been via the railways and highways, not the flyways.

The riskiest segment of trade may be in fighting cocks, transported across borders to be unwilling participants in the high-stakes gambling blood "sport." In cockfighting pits, roosters are set upon one another, often pumped full of steroids and stimulants, with sharpened razors strapped to their legs. The sprays of bloody droplets help ensure that any virus present travels back home after the fights in newly infected birds - or people. A number of cockfighting enthusiasts, and children of cockflghters, have died from H5Nl.

The Thai Department of Disease Control described a case of a young man who had "very close contact to fighting cocks by carrying and helping to clear up the mucus secretion from the throat of the cock during the fighting game by using his mouth." As one leading epidemiologist at the CDC commented dryly, "That was a risk factor for avian flu we hadn't really considered before."

The movement of gaming cocks was directly implicated in the rapid spread of H5Nl. Malaysian government officials blamed cockfighters as the main "culprits" for bringing the disease into their country by taking birds to cockfighting competitions in Thailand and bringing them back intected. Thailand, with an estimated 15 million fighting cocks, was eventually forced to pass a nationwide interim ban on cockfighting. The director of Animal Movement Control and Quarantine within the Thai Department of Livestock Development explained what led to the ban: "When one province that banned cockfights didn't have a second wave outbreak of bird flu and an adjacent province did, it reinforced the belief that the cocks spread disease."

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

I wouldn’t leave my little wooden hut for you
(a music hall song written and composed by Tom Mellor and Chas Collins in 1905)

In between the time that this program is recorded and it is broadcast, my wife and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Our Silver wedding.

Now I don't say that in order for you to send me things. If we get hundred of thousands of silver objects it means cleaning them and things. So please don't bother. Just forget the whole thing.

Gold, of course, doesn't tarnish. Just a thought. Just a thought.

The point is that the twenty-fifth wedding is relevant. Because last night I spent an hour and fifty minutes up in our loft. Most of it was spent was spent wallowing in nostalgia. There was a bust of Lord Robert's with an ear missing, up there. And there was moth-eaten dress-maker's dummy. And suddenly I saw in a corner, wrapped up in faded tatty almost rotted rope, what seemed to be one of those removable bits of a table, a mahogany bit about three foot by eighteen inches with two pegs down one side. A leaf, a removable leaf thing. And that was bound round with a hand-knitted cap thing with a pom-pom on the top. A sort of wooly cap.

And suddenly all came back to me. They were my title possessions when I was married. And I remember the ceremony terribly well. Church of the Holy Redeemer, Chelsea. Standing there and Father Duzumeter who married us at one point in the service, "With all my worldly goods I do thee endow."

And I had to repeat it. And I paused a fraction and thought I haven't GOT any worldly goods to ENDOW this good lady. It is absolutely true. It was just after the war.

I had no clothes of my own. I had my de-mob clothes. I had an open car. A clapped-out open car at the time. You know when you think you drive an sports car that your hair blows back. Marvelous. A terrible thing that you don't realize is that in an open car your hair blows forward and it sort of lashes your eyeballs as you're trying to drive

So I bought this wooly hat and my fiance saw it for the first time and said, "You're never to wear that again. You look like a fur-bearing toffee apple."

And I put it aside.

And the only other thing I possessed was this leaf out of our dining room table at home. My mother had sold the table and forgotten about the leaf. And I thought this was a MARVELOUS thing to have.

So the only two things I took to my wedding were this lump of mahogany and this wooly hat with a pom-pom on it.

And do you know I never did give them to my wife. Somehow they got stuck up in the loft when we moved home.

And my wife said, "What are you doing up there all this time? You're on it like an elderly wallet."

I said, "I have got something to give to you. I've brought them down. They've been twenty-five years coming. But I was supposed to endow you with them twenty-five years ago. but now, here they are. A wooden leaf, my little woolen hat, for you."

Frank Muir
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While I was waiting for Shirley, who was delayed for a few days, I hung out in the gorgeous airy lobby spotting stars and, to my great pleasure, being spotted right back. Jane Russell, one of Hollywood's biggest and sexiest stars of the 1940S and 1950s, invited me to lunch at the Beverly Wilshire. John "call me Duke" Wayne landed his helicopter in the hotel's gardens before striding into the lobby in full cowboy get-up, telling me I was going to be a star and giving me the advice I opened this book with. "And never wear suede shoes," he added.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because," he said, low and slow, "I was taking a piss the other day and the guy in the next stall recognized me and turned towards me. He said, 'John Wayne - you're my favorite actor,' and pissed all over my suede shoes."

As if that wasn't enough, when Shirley arrived back in Hollywood, this powerful and beloved Hollywood figure pulled out all the stops and threw me the most dazzling and glamorous welcome-to-LA party. There I met icons like Gloria Swanson, Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli, and soon-to-be best friends, like Sidney Poitier - with whom I went on to make two movies - and the Hollywood super-agent and super-host Irving "Swifty" Lazar, so-named because he once put together three movie deals for Humphrey Bogart in a single day. The following night Shirley took me to dinner in Danny Kaye's kitchen, where the other guests were the Duke of Edinburgh and Cary Grant, and the night after that it was just a quiet family dinner - except that her quiet family dinners consisted of her mum, her dad and her brother, Warren Beatty.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

A Christmas tree at the Tennessee Aquarium is plugged into one of the fish - sort of. The tree is situated near the tank of an electric eel named Miguel Wattson. The aquarium says sensors detect Miguel's little jolts of electricity, which then get transferred to the lights on the tree. But this is 2019, so the eel's shock waves also trigger its Twitter account. Recent posts include booyah and zippity-zappity-zoop. He's great at Christmas lights - still working on his Twitter game.

America's poverty "tax"

By Gary Rivlin

(Charging high fees has become a big business in America, with Wall Street financing the firms that make short-term, very high interest loans.)

It's expensive being poor, the writer James Baldwin famously said. Baldwin uttered those words fifty years ago, long before the working poor became a big business - long before the invention of the payday loan, rent-to-own, and a long list of diabolically clever ideas that entrepreneurs have devised to get hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars rich off those with thin wallets.

Call it a poverty tax. It's the hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, in extra fees people making $20,000 or $25,000 or $30,000 a year pay because they have lousy credit or because they have no savings.

Add up all the profits pocketed by all those payday lenders, check cashers, subprime auto lenders, and other Poverty, Inc. enterprises and divide it by the forty million households the Federal Reserve says survive on $30,000 a year or less. That works out to around $2,500 per household, or a poverty tax of around 10 percent.

The corner check casher takes the biggest bite, at least from those fifteen million or so Americans who have no bank account - the so-called unbanked. In the main, these are people who've bounced too many checks or otherwise messed up their relationship with a bank.

How much does the average check-cashing customer fork over?

According to Matt Fellowes, who investigated the high price of being poor as a researcher with the Brookings Institution, the typical unbanked worker bringing home $22,000 a year spends roughly $800 to $900 a year in check-cashing fees. That figure tops $1,000 annually when you include the fees the unbanked pay for money orders and the additional fees check cashers charge (around $2 a check) when you need to pay your bills.

The payday lender - those in the business of making horrifically expensive loans against a person's next paycheck, her social security check, or, increasingly, an unemployment check - takes another big cut of the meager earnings of the working poor. The single mom struggling to get by on $20,000 a year is forever falling a few bucks short before payday, but that's the brilliance of the payday industry, which dates back to the early 1990s. In less than ten minutes, she'll have a few hundred dollars cash in her hands, no questions asked - and then be charged a fee that works out to an annual interest rate of 400 percent.

The average payday customer pays between $600 and $700 a year in fees. More than ten million people avail themselves of a payday lender each year.

The rent-to-own industry draws less than half that many customers but generates around the same revenues as the payday business. The genius of rent-to-own is that its proprietors have figured out how to collect $1,400 in weekly installments on the same child's bedroom set you could pick up for $600 with a credit card. Can't afford a computer for the kids? No problem. The corner rent-to-own store also carries laptops and PCs, along with flat screens, washers and dryers, and living room sets.

The rent-to-own customer, of course, could choose to set aside some money each week until she has saved enough to buy the item in a retail store. She could frequent a secondhand shop. But for essentials there's the risk of being dubbed a negligent parent by the authorities or family, and can you blame the security guard making $25,000 a year or home health aide bringing in $15,000 annually for wanting to come home to a comfortable easy chair and a large flat-screen TV? The point is that the rent-to-own customer is typically paying two and a half times as much as those who have the means to buy retail.

The average rent-to-own customer spends around $1,200 a year.

That means the typical rent-to-own customer pays an extra $700 annually because he or she doesn't have the cash or credit to buy it at a store.

Those living on the bottom of the economic pyramid pay more in a wide array of other ways. The subprime insurance market is its own racket, and even mainstream insurers charge more for auto insurance if you live in an unsafe neighborhood where robberies are more common. Select credit-card companies still cater to those with a subprime credit score of less than 620 - but you'll pay dearly for the privilege of carrying that plastic in your pocket. For instance, there's First Premier, which charges a $95 application fee and both a $45 annual fee and a $6.25 "monthly servicing fee" for a card carrying an APR of 36 percent, which at least is better than the 49.9 percent card it was peddling last year.

And then there's the steep cost of financing your car if you're one of the fifty million or so Americans suffering from a subprime credit score. Rather than a car loan carrying an annual interest rate of around 5 percent, the subprime customer pays interest rates of 18 or 20 or 25 percent a year, if not more.

The person paying 20 percent interest on a $10,000 car loan will pay $900 more each year on a five-year loan compared to the person paying an interest rate of 5 percent on that same loan amount.

Thankfully, a good portion of the working poor never resort to a payday loan. They avoid paying the steep rates charged by the local Rent-A-Center. Plenty of people earning less than $30,000 a year have a checking account and good credit. There's also help on the horizon as the new Consumer Financial Protection Board has singled out payday loans and subprime auto finance as two of its top priorities.

Yet don't underestimate the ingenuity or hunger for profits driving those who the author Mike Hudson dubbed "merchants of misery." A few years back, I attended the annual Check Cashers Convention, where I sat in on a ninety-minute presentation dubbed, "Effective Marketing Strategies to Dominate Your Market." Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd, a consultant named Jim Higgins shared his tips for turning the $l,000-a-year check cashing or payday customer into one worth "$2,000 to $4,000 a year." Pens scribbled furiously as he tossed out ideas: raffle off an iPod. Consider scratch 'n win contests. Institute the kind of customer reward programs that has worked so well for the airlines. And for those who are only semi-regulars, offer a "cash 3, get 1 free" deal. After all, Higgins told the crowd, "These are people not used to getting anything free. These are people not used to getting anything, really."

Adapted from Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.- How the Working Poor Became Big Business.


David Cay Johnston "Divided" (2014)

Reagan was shunning personnel issues, rarely engaging in discussions about congressional strategy, and routinely following his subordinates' advice on media plans. Instead, he mastered the ceremonial and symbolic functions of the office so that he could act presidential even when he wasn't, in the traditional sense, functioning like one.

Reagan's day generally began between 7:00 and 8:00 A. M., when the White House operator would put through a wake-up call. By nine o'clock, after a light breakfast and a glimpse at the morning papers and television news shows, Reagan would ride the elevator downstairs from the second floor of the 132-room residence to the State Floor. There, a cadre of Secret Service agents would escort him out across the flagstone colonnade bordering the Rose Garden, past a well-disguised emergency box containing an extra pistol, and on through the armored door of the Oval Office. His chief of staff would greet him, and they would sit down for his first meeting of the day. If it was cold, the stewards would have a fire blazing; in the summertime, they would have already plumped the pillows on the wrought-iron chaises that graced the patio outside.

By the time he arrived in the Oval Office, Reagan had usually memorized most of the lines he would deliver in his public appearances that day. His nearly photographic recall - sharpened by his training as an actor - was an enormous asset. The night before, at seven, the staff would have sent an usher to the residence with a packet of the next day's instructions - whom he'd be meeting, for how long, and what he was expected to say. On carefully typed index cards, the staff composed most of his remarks, down to the greetings and banter. They wrote out stage directions as well - where to turn and when. (One such cue card was accidentally released publicly, directing Reagan to greet a member of his own cabinet and identifying him as the gentleman sitting under Coolidge's portrait.)

Reagan carried the cards with him when he came into the office in the morning, informing the staff of any changes he thought should be made. The cards were coded by size and filed by color: green for unclassified action, yellow for unclassified information, red for classified information, white for his statements. He had one size for his breast pocket, another, always folded in two, for his outside pocket. Longer remarks were typed in large print on what he called "half sheets." The president used these cards, not only for large meetings, but also for small gatherings of regulars, such as the congressional leaders, whom he usually saw weekly. Frequently he used cards to introduce members of his own cabinet, and, in one instance, he relied on them during a ceremony honoring James Brady, the press secretary wounded beside him in the 1981 assassination attempt. He also had "phone memos," which spelled out what his end of telephone conversations should be and left space for him to jot down what the interlocutor said, so that the staff could keep track. As he moved from one event to another, his staff first gave him a briefing on every move he would make. Over the years, many advisers tried to convince Reagan to dispense with his cue cards, but, conceded Regan, for the president "they were sort of like Linus's blue blanket."

By the standards of most other presidents, Reagan's office hours weren't long. After a 9:00 A.M. meeting with his chief of staff, Reagan attended a nine-thirty national security briefing with his national security adviser, the chief of staff, and frequently the vice president. After that the schedule varied, though usually the staff tried to give the president some private time late in the morning for reading; after lunch, some aides like David Stockman learned to avoid scheduling important business because the president was prone to nodding. off He was often finished for the day by four o'clock, and he usually took both Wednesday and Friday afternoons off. But he was organized and orderly in his habits. He spent about an hour almost every day lifting weights in the private gym - a habit developed under doctor's orders after the 1981 assassination attempt. Where other presidents grew gray in office, Reagan managed to put an inch and a half of muscle on his chest, and he loved to have visitors feel the tone of his biceps. Inside the Oval Office, though, Reagan was formal. He felt awed enough to say "I couldn't take my jacket off in this office," and aides said he never did. They also said he never left at the end of the day without first straightening his desk - a great slab of dark wood as imposing as its donor, Queen Victoria, who had it made for Rutherford B. Hayes from the timbers of the H.M.S. Resolute.

At the end of the day, Reagan usually returned upstairs with paperwork and spent the evening with his wife - both in their pajamas, eating supper from trays in his study, reading, studying the next day's lines, and watching television. Nancy Reagan said her husband generally fell asleep within minutes of going to bed, usually around 11:00 P. M. Just before he did, he would alert the thirty-six-person domestic staff, one of whom would then quietly tum off any remaining lights in the family quarters.

But Reagan was more complicated than liberal caricatures would suggest. He liked to joke about his image, using such lines as: "I hear hard work's never killed anyone, but I figure, why take a chance?" Yet those around him found to their surprise that he could be diligent - even compulsive - in performing the tasks they gave him. He was always immaculately dressed, and he was so punctual that he could time a statement or an appearance down to the second. His delivery and stage presence were honed by years of training. He would follow his daily schedule meticulously, drawing a line through each completed event with an arrow pointing to the next, exactly the way screen actors mark off completed tasks.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

The rain forest bordering the Kasai River was rich in rubber, and William Sheppard and the other American Presbyterians there found themselves in the midst of a cataclysm. The Kasai was also the scene of some of the strongest resistance to Leopold's rule. Armed men of a chief allied with the regime rampaged through the region where Sheppard worked, plundering and burning more than a dozen villages. Floods of desperate refugees sought help at Sheppard's mission station.

In 1899 the reluctant Sheppard was ordered by his superiors to travel into the bush, at some risk to himself, to investigate the source of the fighting. There he found bloodstained ground, destroyed villages, and many bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting flesh. On the day he reached the marauders' camp, his eye was caught by a large number of objects being smoked. The chief "conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands, I counted them, 81 in all," The chief told Sheppard, "See! Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we have killed." He proudly showed Sheppard some of the bodies the hands had come from. The smoking preserved the hands in the hot, moist climate, for it might be days or weeks before the chief could display them to the proper official and receive credit for his kills.

Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold's rubber system. Like the hostage-taking, the severing of hands was deliberate policy, as even high officials would later admit. "During my time in the Congo I was the first commissioner of the Equator district," recalled Charles Lemaire after his retirement. "As soon as it was a question of rubber, I wrote to the government, 'To gather rubber in the district one must cut off hands, noses and ears.' "

If a village refused to submit to the rubber regime, state or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the message. But on such occasions some European officers were mistrustful. For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone, not "wasted" in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. "Sometimes," said one officer to a missionary, soldiers "shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man." In some military units there was even a "keeper of the hands"; his job was the smoking.

Sheppard was not the first foreign witness to see severed hands in the Congo, nor would he be the last. But the articles he wrote for missionary magazines about his grisly find were reprinted and quoted widely, both in Europe and the United States, and it is partly due to him that people overseas began to associate the Congo with severed hands. A half-dozen years after Sheppard's stark discovery, while attacking the expensive public works Leopold was building with his Congo profits, the socialist leader Emile Vandervelde would speak in the Belgian Parliament of "monumental arches which one will someday call the Arches of the Severed Hands." William Sheppard's outspokenness would eventually bring down the wrath of the authorities and one day Vandervelde, an attorney, would find himself defending Sheppard in a Congo courtroom. But that is getting ahead of our story.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

Miami, Fla., is not known for its winter season, but there can be some chilly days. Last night, the National Weather Service called for lows in the 30s and 40s with a chance of falling iguanas. Apparently, the lizards can fall into a deeper slumber in the cold, and it is not uncommon for them to tumble from trees. The advice for you is watch your heads, and don't bug the iguanas after they land. I mean, do you like being bothered when you're just getting up?

The more haste, the less speed
(Proverb)

It's animal week, this week, here on My Word. And it's answer to correspondence week as far as I'm concerned on this side of the house.

Now, as you can probably imagine we get a lot of correspondence in from overseas about this program.

Only about five weeks another air letter poured in. It was from a Mrs. McNamara in Perth, Australia. And Mrs. McNamara reminded me that well over a year ago, about eighteen months ago, I'd explained that our Afghan had had puppies and I'd kept one. And Mrs. McNamara said, "Can you give us a progress report on your puppy? How is it? Are they expensive to keep? How do you manage with the carpets bringing up Afghan puppies?"

So I thought I'd take the next thirty or forty minutes in answering that letter.

The puppy is doing well, two years old last week. Her name is Lady Otterling Mole. In keeping with a name like that, she's two inches taller than her mother. And weighs four and half stone.

She loves her little dog basket. Absolutely adores it. She eats about half an inch of it per night. And she's now completed the second. And we've got her onto a dog nest, which is a kind of bag filled with tiny plastic beads.

I don't know if you know, Mrs. McNamara, Afghans dig. They are diggers. For instance, you'll find no record of an Afghan being kept in Colditz, the reason being that no commandant could keep an Afghan in Colditz long enough to get its name and kennel number. I would give a lazy Afghan thirty-two minutes to dig out of Colditz.

This was borne home on us when the puppy was about a year. Couldn't see it in the garden. Didn't bother, probably harboring under a rose bush.

About late morning, a phone call, "Mr Muir?"

I said, "Yes."

He said, "Are you the owner of a pale gold Afghan dark, mussel and ears?"

I said, "Yes."

"I am the signalman at Egham High level crossing."

I said, "Oh. Have you seen my dog?"

"Yes sir. I'm looking at it now"

I said, "Where is it?"

"Well, sir, it is preceding the 10:40 from Waterloo on the Downe Line."

But there you are. It's sheep-sized. She knows the difference between indoors and outdoors She knows that in one she can dance about, leap about, do whatever she needs to do in privacy. And in the other place, it's the place for being quiet and sleeping. The trouble is she doesn't know which is which.

So on the question of carpets we did have trouble initially. And then, whenever you turned your back there'd be a nine by five inch gray map of Corsica, silently sinking into the pile.

And the curious thing is that once the nine by five inch map of Corsica is there, it's a dog's fervent wish to keep it fresh. And replenish it every hour. And then start a reserve Sardinia by the radiator.

We have a lady who comes in and cleans for us called Mrs. Hays. And she's terrific. Goes through the house like a tornado twice a week.

And Mrs. Hays is particularly proud of the carpet. And when Mrs. Hays went away for three months to visit her son in Australia, there were maps of Corsica all over the carpet.

And when Mrs. Hays came back and started scrubbing and cleaning twice a week, again, the dog wasn't interested. This is quite logical actually, apparently this is sort of a smell thing. They like to return to the depository. It's happier on a previous smell.

So, really we've got it licked now, because Mrs. Hays is back and working away twice a week.

So the answer to your major question, Mrs. McNamara, what about the carpets bringing up an Afghan, as far as our carpets are concerned, the more Hays, the less pee.

Frank 159b

On another occasion, a movie with a stellar cast working at the top of their game was ruined by an illustrious veteran director, who one day openly admitted to me that he was only still directing to fund his very expensive hobby of deep-sea fishing off the coast of California. As soon as the filming was done and he had been paid, off he went. He was at sea and, sadly, so were editing and post-production without him.

The hardest directors to work with - and unfortunately you find them in every workplace, every family, every community of people - are the bullies. My approach with bullies has always been to make it clear from the start that I won't be their victim. When I worked with Otto Preminger on Hurry Sundown in 1966, I knew his reputation as a monstrous tyrant who was happiest when everyone else was miserable. I had heard that he liked to scream at actors and crew alike. So the first day I met him, I told him, "You need to know, Otto, that I'm very sensitive. You mustn't shout at me. If anyone shouts at me when I'm working I burst into tears and I can't work for the rest of the day." Otto stared back at me. He seemed genuinely puzzled. Or perhaps, I thought, he was getting ready for a particularly big scream.

"But why do you think I would do that?" he finally asked.

"Well," I said - I stayed calm, "I have friends who worked with you on Saint Joan and they said you shouted."

"You shouldn't make such friends," said Otto. "I only shout at bad actors. And I would never shout at Alfie."

Whether because he considered me a good actor, because he loved Alfie, or, more likely, because I had made things clear at the start, Otto never shouted at me. He did, though, give everyone else a terrible time, especially my young co-star Faye Dunaway. My little talk hadn't managed to change his personality, only to protect me personally from it. Otto tormented the inexperienced and sweet Faye, who ended up in tears most days. Of course everyone worked in a state of abject terror, which was not only deeply unpleasant, but also did nothing for the quality of the movie, since no one can give their best when they are frigid with fear of doing something wrong and being screamed at. And Faye ended up paying a lot of money to get out of her six-movie contract with Otto, going on to become an enormous star.

Disagreeing with a good director is very different from having to work with a bad one. I adopt a couple of approaches in this situation. If I am convinced the direction I want to take with a particular scene is the right one, I may suggest a compromise. I may propose we try it his way, and try it my way, and then he can decide when he sees the rushes. The director usually agrees - and usually turns out to be right. I've got my point of view, but he has the vision and is seeing the bigger picture. But at least this way I get the chance to see I'm wrong. Then again, sometimes I just tell the director he's right, then go my own way anyway. What I never do is have a stand-up row about it.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

Ross Walsh has found a way to scam scammers. The Irish man received one
of those emails asking for money. He replied and said he was trying to
send it, but somehow, he said, his transfer was not going through. Mr.
Walsh convinced the scammer to send him money instead to verify the
account. He donated the resulting 25 pounds to charity. He told
Ireland's Limerick Leader he's done this before, and it won't be the
last time.

Players could get a Trump Card, become an Island Ambassador at the Sands, or join the Officer's Club at the Showboat.

These frequent-gambler cards carried a magnetic strip on the back, like those used to withdraw cash from bank teller machines. Inserted into a device on a slot machine, the card tracked play. It also triggered an electronic greeting welcoming the player by name. Often this would be followed by congratulations on a wedding anniversary or the arrival of a grandchild or recommending a new kind of slot machine that had been installed since the player last visited.

Simultaneously, a screen would light up just off the casino floor, announcing to the crew of casino hosts, as floor sales agents are called, the player's name, nickname, tidbits like a recent birthday or wedding anniversary, and the player's favorite beverage. A cocktail waitress could be sent to the player's machine with a drink even before the player asked. A casino host could also stroll by and strike up a conversation using her personal knowledge of the player or the information gleaned from the computer. New tidbits collected from these chats would then be added to the computer database so the casino would have fresh material to strengthen its bond with the player on future visits.

Frequent-gambler cards allowed Harrah's to keep a perfect record of how much each player bet, on what kinds of machines, how fast he or she played, the total amount wagered and how much the player had won or lost. In this way Harrah's could grade its players into profitability categories without the uncertainty and errors formerly made when casino hosts rated players by recording their guesstimates on slips of paper. These precise records allowed Harrah's to calculate exactly how much to reward each player with comps, which is gamblerese for complimentary meals, drinks and rooms and, for really big players, gifts of jewelry, cars, even trips around the world.

Comping was a huge factor in the Atlantic City casino business, unlike Las Vegas, where only the biggest players received comps. In 1991, Atlantic City gamblers collected $488.6 million in comps. The casinos gave away another $247.7 million in coins and coupons to bus riders, in all enough to pave the entire New Jersey Turnpike, Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway with quarters.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

He could forget whether the U.S nuclear advantage was on land or sea, but he remembered to take care of the White House squirrels, filling his pockets", with acorns collected for them at Camp David. He didn't like to impose. And he worried about the inconvenience his every move became for the staff. He once refused to go along with a stunt that called for him to dump confetti on a visiting athlete's head because he didn't want anyone to have to pick It up. (Aides settled on popcorn for the outdoor event, so that the birds could do the cleanup.)

The danger was that left to his own good intentions, the president would confuse the human interest with the national interest, mistaking gestures for policies, romantic themes for strategy, and immediate emotional gratification for long-term strategic gains. There was no clearer example of this danger than in his approach to the hostages. But those around him should have seen plenty of warnings in the unique way in which Reagan turned the presidency into a case-by-case philanthropic pursuit - seemingly disconnected from his own broad policies.

Reagan's view of himself as First Caseworker of the Land was institutionalized in the White House Correspondence Office, a little-known but extraordinary shop in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, a few hundred yards from the West Wing. It was a sprawling empire managed by an energtic blonde named Anne Higgins, who liked to turn up the volume on the office tape to the Simon and Garfunkel song "Bridge Over Troubled Water" which expressed how she saw her mission. As anyone who worked closely with the president must have realized, it was Reagan's sentimental view of his own role too.

In a rare lapse from good Samaritanism, Higgins once described the office as the Schlock Capital of the World, buried as it was in needlepoint inspirational sayings, stained-glass doodads, and other offerings Americans felt compelled to share with their commander in chief. During Reagan's tenure, it employed a staff of 130 people and 500 part-time volunteers to handle as many as twenty thousand letters and packages a day - much more mail than any other president had ever received. While most presidents had dismissed the public mail as a nuisance, Higgins said of Reagan, "It's hard to believe When you get that much mail, but he actually likes it."

Every week Higgins selected thirty representative letters for the president to read, many of them appeals for help or tales of heartache, and just about every Friday afternoon he took the time to answer them in longhand on sheets of yellow legal paper. It was a habit he had picked up in Hollywood, where he had often answered his own fan mail. Some aides snickered privately at the amount of time and energy Reagan gave to this epistolary pursuit. George Shultz had had to fight strenuously to get two half-hour meetings a week with the president, but if Reagan spent only five minutes on each letter, he was still devoting more than twice as much time to strangers' letters as to his secretary of state. When a program to adopt a school-aged pen pal was introduced, Reagan was the only senior official who took it seriously, corresponding through much of his tenure with Rudy Hines, a young black boy from Washington's Southeast slums. But Higgins observed, "I think it's one of the keys to his success as a man in public life: he doesn't take the average person lightly."

Frequently, though, this empathy seemed to place Reagan at odds with his own policies in the White House, just as it had in Sacramento. This conflict between the particular and the abstract was endemic to the correspondence unit, which was, after all, a central switching point between the presidential cocoon and the real world outside. Thus, while Reagan was moved by one letter to make a televised appeal for a liver donor for an eleven-month-old girl in Texas, his administration pushed to eliminate spending for a new national computer network designed to match organ donors with patients in need of transplants. In another such case found by Higgins's office, Reagan ensured that a young girl in Hawaii get a waiver from his administration's own toughened eligibility requirements for welfare benefits because she had won a new automobile, which put her family over the new $1,700 limit for possessions. (The White House helped the girl's family sell the car and place her prize money in a trust - thus resorting to the kind of dodge Reagan had accused "welfare cheats" of doing for so many years.) One member of the correspondence unit, Sally Kelley, said, "He loves having that stuff done, especially when it's a deserving youngster against the huge bureaucracy" - no matter that the bureaucracy was now his own.

Aides who knew Reagan well recognized that his episodic sentimentality left him open to manipulation. Some realized that if they could harness it, they could alter whole policies. In the summer of 1982, when Israel's air force was bombing residential neighborhoods in Beirut, killing hundreds of civilians, Reagan's deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, took action. Deaver had no experience or responsibility in the area of foreign affairs, but he didn't like the civilian casualties, and he knew that the Israeli attacks using U.S. weapons were potentially harmful to Reagan's image at home. Reagan, in contrast, hadn't reacted much to the air strikes, but he generally supported Menachem Begin's government.

In the middle of August, after an especially bloody raid, Deaver reached his limit. He stormed into the Oval Office by himself and declared emotionally, "I can't stay here any longer."

"What are you talking about?" the president asked.

"I don't want to be part of this," replied Deaver. "You sit here and listen to these guys, and you don't know what they're talking about. And you let Begin bomb Beirut every day, and they're your bombs. And the result of that is children without arms." Deaver was referring to a horrifying news photograph showing a Lebanese baby bound in gauze from the shoulders down, the caption explaining that both arms had been severed by an Israeli bomb.

"For what?" stormed Deaver. "Just to make the Israelis happy? It hasn't got anything to do with anything else. And you are sitting here, the only man on the face of the earth that can stop it, and you won't do it. I can't stay any longer and be part of it."

The president looked at his distraught aide for a moment and then asked bewilderedly, "How do I stop this?"

"You pick up the phone and call Menachem Begin," Deaver replied.

"And," Deaver said later, "he did." Within twenty minutes, Begin called back to say that a cease-fire had been imposed. Reagan then put down the phone and said, "It's over with." Two and a half years into his presidency, he then looked at his longtime aide and said, "Gosh! I didn't realize I had that kind of power."

It later turned out that the caption under the UPI photograph had been mistaken. Israeli authorities went to the trouble of finding the injured child, who had indeed been hurt, but not by Israeli bombs, and who under the bandages still had the use of both arms. Yet, as was so often true with Reagan, the facts didn't matter as much as the emotional impact.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

Stanislas Lefranc, a devout Catholic and monarchist, was a Belgian prosecutor who had come to the Congo to work as a magistrate. Early one Sunday morning in Leopoldville, he heard the sound of many children screaming desperately.

On tracing the howls to their source, Lefranc found "some thirty urchins, of whom several were seven or eight years old, lined up and waiting their turn, watching, terrified, their companions being flogged. Most of the urchins, in a paroxysm of grief ... kicked so frightfully that the soldiers ordered to hold them by the hands and feet had to lift them off the ground ... 25 times the whip slashed down on each of the children." The evening before, Lefranc learned, several children had laughed in the presence of a white man, who then ordered that all the servant boys in town be given fifty lashes. The second installment of twenty-five lashes was due at six o'clock the next morning. Lefranc managed to get these stopped, but was told not to make any more protests that interfered with discipline.

Lefranc was seeing in use a central tool of Leopold's Congo, which in the minds of the territory's people, soon became as closely identified with white rule as the steamboat or the rifle. It was the chicotte - a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim's bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more - not an uncommon punishment - were often fatal.

Lefranc was to see many more chicotte beatings, although his descriptions of them, in pamphlets and newspaper articles he published in Belgium, provoked little reaction.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

April in Paris
(Vernon Duke and E Y Harburg, 1932 song)

I'm not likely to forget it. I'd like to use the opportunity afforded by this quotation to make an urgent recommendation to the authorities responsible for running the London Zoo in Regents Park.

Gentlemen, did you happen to see a program that was on television called Animal Courtship?

There was one scene showing a couple of black cat yowls perpetuating their species. And the reason why that stuck in my mind, I never realized that they did while actually up in the air in flight.

It made me revise my whole opinion about a certain story that an Alitalia pilot I know tells about one of his air hostesses.

Anyway, Gentlemen of the London Zoo. Let me tell you the reason why I'm drawing this program to your attention. What happened was instead of the program being put out at its scheduled time of Sunday afternoon, its transmission was switched to 9:25 at night. Why? So that children wouldn't see all the goings-on among the animals.

Now , gentlemen of the London Zoo, does that give you food for thought. Because I can tell you this. It certainly should. And I speak as one who recently, fool that I am, thought I'd give my two twelve-year-old nephews an educational afternoon by taking them round your zoo on a warm spring day.

And I very quickly learned something. You know how films have to be labeled in categories ranging from suitable for all the family to no children allowed to see it under any circumstances? Well, so should those pages of yours and your animals.

If the giraffes and the penguins can be described as Mary Poppins, I'll tell you this. That monkey house is Last Tango in Paris.

I'm particularly thinking, or trying not to think, about those apes of yours. If apes ARE the species that Tarzan grew up with, it's no wonder he turned out to be a swinger.

I don't know what the spectacle did to those two twelve-year-old nephews of mine, but if their wisdom teeth aren't through now, they never will be.

So, gentlemen of the London Zoo, my recommendation is that at your entry gate, you henceforth issue a small booklet to any adult going in with children, a book that would categorize each group of your inhabitants according to their embarrassment quotient.

From my own experiences of the various species, I can make just three suggestions to start you off: giraffe will delight, penguin will enchant, and here I draw on Mr. Vernon's Duke's melody, ape will embarrass.

Dennis norden159a

At two hours long, The Other Man was ITV's longest ever TV play. There was a cast of two hundred, sixty of whom had speaking parts, a twenty-minute stop for the news and several commercial breaks. And, yes, again, to top it all off, the play was broadcast live.

The exposure was high-stakes and the circumstances could hardly have been tougher but my co-star Sian Phillips was a wonderful actress, which helped, and I swear I didn't forget one line. (A couple of people did, but fortunately for them we had a high-tech solution in the form of a lady with a button on a wire and a script, who followed whoever was speaking around the set. If someone dried up, she would push the button, sound transmission would be cut and she would read the actor the line. I imagined people all over Britain banging their silent TVs and cursing in unison.)

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)