Bowling, Dot.con, LA weekly

I escorted my son to Diego’s bowling birthday party yesterday. The ten kids loved it. I haven’t been in a bowling alley since 1991. In a stroke a genius, the bowling industry has added kid-friendly gutter guards that steer the ball out of the gutter and into the pins. In this gutterless world, velocity wins: the high scorers (avg 72) threw a little harder than the laggards (avg 65) and also finished earlier.

I also finished Ken Layne’s Dot.con this weekend. Layne has concocted a unique cocktail of Ian Fleming’s suave and bruised hero, John Kennedy Toole‘s conspiring idiots and Evelyn Waugh’s disgust for mediocre sycophantic journalists. The roast of San Fran culture also excels.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait to read the book in e-book format, since Ken is all sold out and US publishers haven’t bitten. As I said the other day — why hasn’t this been made into a movie? Yes, the book probably is mistaken as “another dot.com bubble” book. Too few publishers understand that Jesus Ramirez is the future of journalism and not a confused millennial blip. It also may be that Ken’s book will get “rediscovered” in ten years. Books like The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby that were published ten years after the era they chronicle a) look like the result of lots of hard work and b) benefit from mild nostalgia.

Speaking of secret agents, now the LA newpaper plot is public!