McHuston Booksellers

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Tag: Claremore (Page 109 of 115)

A reach? Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher.

July 3, 2012 /

I don’t know what to think.

Under the headline on the internet news story, it says: In other Cruise news, the first photos are out of Tom Cruise as the title character in the December-release film: Jack Reacher.

The character – Jack Reacher – is the renegade, justice-dealing, ex-military creation of novelist Lee Child, and having read most of the titles in the series I can tell you, Tom Cruise never once came to mind.

Maybe on screen Cruise is larger than life, but you’ve seen his actual size I’m sure. Jack Reacher is supposed to be a bear of a man. Or maybe I just read that into his description, because he is definitely one to avoid becoming crosswise with. Jack Reacher mustered out of the US Army and began traveling around the country, looking for things he had missed during his upbringing and later military life abroad.

Trouble always finds him.

Jack Reacher is such a character that I’ve recommended him to both men and women and – to date – I’ve only had a single fellow say he probably didn’t need to read any more of the series. To the rest of the many, many readers who have taken up my suggestion the books are addictive, to the point that they can’t be read quickly enough.

It is said that women want to date Jack Reacher, and men want to be him.

The author, Lee Child, writes in a visual style that makes reading the books almost the equivalent of watching a movie. Hopefully, the film will be able to capture that energy as well as Child does.

Most of the Tom Cruise movies have been entertaining to me, and if asked, I suppose I’d answer, Sure, I like Tom Cruise.

As Jack Reacher?

I’ll have to wait and see, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt at this point.

Check out the latest Jack Reacher novel The Affair, but you know – of course, you can find it at McHuston Booksellers, your Main Street book store in Broken Arrow, OK.

Something new under the sun.

June 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

It is certainly hard to miss now, at least if you are driving down Main Street in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Them’s some big letters.

The first bit of official advertising for the new location is courtesy of an alteration to the storefront awning.

I’ve been asked why I didn’t put the name up there instead of Books & Bistro. There’s a pretty simple answer: When someone says “I’m going to McDonald’s,” there is no question about what they’re after. I don’t anticipate ever getting to that degree of notoriety, so I figured it would make more sense to describe what is inside the store rather than who owns it.

Besides – when paying by the letter, “McHuston Booksellers & Irish Bistro” adds up to a pretty penny.

As for the looks, I could not be happier. The letters are larger than I had imagined they would be, a pleasing surprise, and already someone has come in after parking to check out the inside of the place.

Sometimes I ask how a customer found the store and sometimes I don’t, but I know from visitors at the old location that the sign out front was my best advertising expenditure. Compare to the sign expense, I paid a lot more for newspaper ads over the five years at Oak Crest shopping center, but it might have been a better idea to just put that money toward a newer, bigger sign.

Did you ever spot one of the newspaper ads?

Goes to show ya.

I am in hopes that the awning will do the same thing toward drawing in customers as the vinyl lettered plywood sign did. (That’s now parked at the back door, slightly faded, but doing what it can from that vantage point.)

Maybe I’ll take down the HP printer paper sign that I taped up to the inside of the glass, the one that inspired a woman to tell me, “It looks like it was made on a computer.”

The lettering on the awning, on the other hand, looks pretty official.

Turn on the waterworks.

June 25, 2012 /

I’m a word nut.

There. I’ve admitted it. There is probably a group with ten steps for people like me, those of us who hate the idea of losing great words to non-usage, words like obstreperous and vexed.

It vexes me greatly when the boys grow obstreperous over their videogames at two in the morning, when I’m sleeping.

Sometimes even a word hound gets thrown for a loop. Then, there is that occasion when word-ists get incensed at the misusage of common terms, and it turns out to be regularly found – simply confined to another part of the country.

Back before the internet (back before me, as a matter of fact), a fellow from North Carolina named William Edgerton wrote a paper on the usage of the words spigot and spicket. In his very simplistic unscientific survey, he asked his college-aged students to report what words were used in their childhood home to describe that device that released water from the pipes into the kitchen sink.

The results?

His students were nearly unanimous in submitting the term – spicket.

I did not grow up in North Carolina, although my distant ancestors lived in the very area in which Mr. Edgerton conducted his study. Many terms in the vocabulary I learned at home had been handed down over the generations, words like “fix” to describe the assembling of a sandwich, as in: Will you fix me a sandwich?

In fact, I was called out on that one in Rhode Island, when the fellow at the deli counter replied, “No, I can’t fix something that isn’t broken.” It took me a second or two to understand what he was talking about. I had used the word in that context my entire life and assumed it to be universal rather than regional. I discovered much later that the usage in that context was a crude translation from Gaelic, in which no single word could adequately express the same intention. Because of the distinct settlement patterns of the early Scots-Irish, the term became a regionalism.

Spicket?

I’ve never heard it said that way, despite Mr. Edgerton’s survey results. It was spigot, with a G, when it was ever heard, although I grew up with the term “faucet.” Turn on the faucet and brush your teeth. Turn on the tap?

Never.

Apparently a lot of others across the US had something different in their houses, because I’ve never seen a spicket once, that I know of. But enough of that. I need to fix a sandwich.

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