Way back in the haze of an old blogger's memory — with the mention of real manhunts — thoughts turn to an Amarillo pill-pusher who climbed the greasy pole of Dumbo success until he was appointed to the Texas Board of Criminal Justice (overseeing the Lone Star public prison system). While on the Board, the Pill-Pusher, aka Jerry Hodge, took advantage of his lofty position to play a wonderful game with Texas prison inmates. Selected inmates were given a one-hour head-start and then the Pill-Pusher and his chums would mount up and unleash the dogs. Tally ho! Armed with paintball rifles, the "hunters" would track down the inmate and compete for the first "kill-shot." Suffice it to say, outcry over the "game" brought the Pill-Pusher's tenure on the Board to an end. Of course, the Pill-Pusher used his contacts to become the sole supplier of prescription medicines to the State Prison system. Now, the Pill-Pusher's pharmaceutical operation provides medicines to state prison systems throughout the United States. The irony in all of this is that when T-Bonehead skulked out of Amarillo with the demise of Mesa Petroleum, the Mesa corporate headquarters in downtown Amarillo became the headquarters of Maxor National Pharmacy Services Corporation (the Pill-Pusher started out as Maxor Drugs). One scoundrel/Mesa out, another skunk/Maxor in. If this is a (fair & balanced) sleazeball-Dumbo revolving-door, so be it.
[x Wikipedia]
"The Most Dangerous Game", also known as "The Hounds of Zaroff", is a short story by Richard Connell. It was published in Collier's Weekly on January 19, 1924. ["The Most Dangerous Game" won the O. Henry Award in 1924.] Widely anthologized, and the author's best-known work, "The Most Dangerous Game" features as its main character a big-game hunter (Sanger Rainsford) from New York, who falls off a yacht and swims to an isolated island in the Caribbean, and is hunted by a Russian aristocrat (General Zaroff). The story is an inversion of the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s. ...The story has been adapted for film numerous times. [The most recent is]... "Surviving The Game" (1994).
[x Salon]
This Modern World — "The Dickster's Most Dangerous Game"
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)
[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.
Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.
When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]
Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
