None of these sausages were smoked while suspended from coathangers, because it looks like there's a prospective shortage of coathangers — and it's not just a supply-chain thing.
- <SARCASM> Yes, aspiring censors, some books really are poisonous. But it's not the content that's dangerous. </SARCASM> Generations of law students who've purchased W___ hornbooks — my old copy of White & Summers is nestled right next to an old copy of Prosser & Keeton — should think very carefully indeed about the implications. And their own safety.
Interestingly enough, things didn't get better for green books when binders moved away from arsenic-based dyes; there's a continuing meme that green-dominant illustrated covers sell poorly. (The number of battles fought at cover meetings…) That problem is also due to dye chemistry, and fluorescent lighting, and different fading and reflectivity of dyes under different kinds of store lights that make 1950s-60s jackets look mottled, and therefore shopworn.
- But then, some publishers are poisonous, too. Or, at minimum, some publishing deals. It's a rather different take on the outsourcing/expanded-services debate… that in publishing, has been going on (in English, it's more complicated in the rest of Europe and indeed the rest of the world) since the late 1680s, because the default "traditional publishing" deal is actually a vanity-publishing arrangement; just ask Jane Austen.
- It could be worse than just economic exploitation and fraud. It could be the music industry (and based on what I know, Rahmann is rather tastefully understating matters).
- Unfortunately, one of the problems with better geriatric medical care is that sleazebuckets remain active longer and take longer to die. And tend to get crankier and less open to changing contexts as they do so. (Exhibit A: A certain news organization. No, not that one. Not that one either. That one.) Anyone who knows diddly-squat about the history of science, though, already knows that.