Random Notes Triggered by The Worst Marketing Email Ever (Penzeys Spices)

This is going to be one of those posts where I bore you with a few random thoughts. It's just turned out to be that kind of day, as I wait to leave for my regular appointment with the retina specialist who monitors my macular degeneration "progress." 

But what really put me in a bad mood this morning - other than the already scheduled doctor-visit - is the email from Penzeys Spices I found in my inbox. We have been buying Penzeys spices for years, depending on our local Houston store for shopping until we recently took to buying the spices over the internet because of all the COVID-19 restrictions. Not once in all those years did I wonder about the political views of the people who run/own the company; I simply did not care in the least.

Then today, there's an email in my inbox marketing some special deals on a few interesting spices. It was only when I opened the email and read the body of it that I discovered a rant berating the "stupidity" of Republicans and EVERYTHING about them and their "misguided" conservatism. There was bullying, name-calling, and derision all wrapped up in one condescending, self-righteous rant that was semi-disguised as a "humorous" sales pitch. I cannot understand why a company that depends on a loyal customer base for its very survival (especially right now) would ever take such an approach? And now, Bill Penzeys is going to have to find someone to replace the sales he will no longer make to me...after all these years. Good luck to him, because "marketing genius," is a title he will never be able to claim after this fiasco.

I try really hard to ignore political differences and just get on with my life. But people and companies, like Bill Penzeys and the little spice company he runs, that work so hard to divide us for their own personal profit do not deserve a place in my life. And Mr. Bill no longer has one. "Oh, no!" Mr. Bill.

On a happier note, I'm doing a lot of reading right now even though I'm not finishing many books. A quick check this morning tells me that I'm well over halfway through several books, but I still keep dipping into the rather high stack of physical books on my desk to start new ones. That happens to me at least once a year, so I'm not surprised, but I think it's time to re-focus on two or three of them before starting another new one (something that is easier said than done when I'm in this mood). 

Among the books I'm particularly enjoying right now is Anne Hillerman's Spider Woman's Daughter, which is I believe the book in which she took over her father's long-running Joe Leaphorn series. Anne cleverly has Leaphorn shot in the head and hospitalized at the very beginning of the novel so that she can focus more on Cree and Bernie Manuelito (husband and wife Navajo cops) as they try to catch Leaphorn's would-be assassin. Hillerman revisits the Leaphorn "legend" in conversation as others work the case on his behalf.

Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule, a man who grew up in the shadow that Lee still casts in the old South, makes a compelling case that the South lost America's Civil War, but that it won the subsequent peace.  Siedle believes it is time to set the record straight about what he calls "the myth of the Lost Cause" and why the war was all about slavery and nothing else. I didn't grow up in the old South like Seidule, but I did grow up in a Confederate state, so I understand how difficult writing a book like this one must have been for its author. 

The Likeness is Tana French's second Murder Squad book and the third of her books that I'm now familiar with. This one has a highly unlikely premise that I'm willing to play along with, but it takes French just over 100 pages of set-up finally to start the plot moving in the direction promised on the book jacket. I can imagine that many readers give up well before French finally remembers that she is writing a crime novel and not a character study of the book's three main good-guy characters. Whew...

In addition to these three, I'm still reading short stories from the Wastelands compilation (9 of the 34 stories still to go), and dipping in and out of others like:

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina. I can't even remember how or where I heard about this one, but it is one I just couldn't resist, especially after seeing this  cover. The jacket explains the book's goal this way: "The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to reevaluate how we interact with animals...ultimately a graceful examination of humanity's place in the world." I can't wait to get deeper into this one.

I've also started listening to the audiobook version of Bill O'Reilly's Killing Crazy Horse while dipping back in to Leslie-Ann Jones's John Lennon biography, The Search for John Lennon, and wondering how in the world I can work in Val McDermid's The Skeleton Road and S.A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears before they are due back in the library on August 20. And, of course, I've read the prologues or first chapters of several of the books on Native Americans that I gathered up on the trip and from the library when I got home last week. Those keep calling me to pick them up.

This is not necessarily one of those cases of "too much of a good thing," but it is getting dangerously close to being one. Now I just need to READ...