Saturday Morning News And Links

Active rigs: 189 (no change)

WSJ Links

It must be a 100 degrees already here north of Dallas as I walk from the new apartment complex to Starbucks, my wi-fi source until I get connected at home. I will put that off for awhile because I will be traveling again.

As I was saying: it's hot. So the photo of the ice drink in today's WSJ was inviting. It seems a bit complicated to make; I'll stick with rum and Diet Coke. But with that, I will move on. The Off Duty section just doesn't excite me like it once did.

On to Review. And what a way to start: a review of Outlaw, by Michael Stressguth, 297-page biography of the outlaws: Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. An excerpt of the review:

The musical influence of the Lone Star State, and the rebellious spirit of the 1960s counterculture, play lead roles in "Outlaw," a riveting look at how three Texans joined forces to liberate Nashville from its company-town ways in the 1970s. It is a small group portrait, tightly focused and well told by Michael Streissguth. The so-called Outlaw movement made Waylon and Willie into household names and put country music in the fast lane.

By the late 1960s, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, as well as Kris Kristofferson—the third member of Mr. Streissguth's trio—had reached middle age with only limited success in Music City, where rhinestone cowboys and hayseed crooners purveyed the slick Nashville Sound. Veterans on the RCA label, Waylon and Willie were stifled by the era's assembly-line methods. Producers chose the songs and arrangements for studio musicians, a far cry from the days when Hank Williams recorded his lovesick blues with the Drifting Cowboys, the same tightknit group that he toured with.

And then another biography: this time of Count Dracula, Who Was Dracula, by Jim Steinmeyer, 319 pages. It would have been nice to see a snappier title to this book, perhaps the County of Whitby. An excerpt:

Speculation about possible sources for "Dracula" is equally inviting because there are relatively few on record. The Dublin-born Stoker wrote the novel—his fifth—while managing London's Lyceum Theatre, which was owned at the time by the fêted actor Henry Irving.

Fiction was strictly a sideline for Stoker, whose working days were dedicated to realizing Irving's flamboyant ideas for productions in which to showcase his talent. Irving could be demanding, as well as arch and imperious, and although Mr Steinmeyer does not quite say so, it's tempting to wonder if Stoker based Dracula's rather camp courtly mannerisms—not to mention his knack of draining his underlings of their vitality—on his employer.

Work on the novel, which began in 1890, was necessarily slow. Stoker did most of his research and writing while on holiday, holed up in the public library at the Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby. The thin historical background to the character appears to have been stitched together from a handful of references. From an article on Transylvanian superstitions, Stoker took both his setting and various details of vampire lore, including the tradition that the creatures are best killed with a stake through the heart. He invented other tropes, not least the inability of a vampire to cause a reflection, cross water or endure sunlight.

Business & Finance leads off with this: investors dump RIM shares, and asks the question, "is this the end of the PlayBook Tablet?

I can think of several comments here, but I will simply note the headline, and link it: Japanese toilet maker Lixil buys American Standard.

Finally: the Pentagon is considering delaying Lockheed's F-35 program. Wow. I never saw that coming. Section A.

Originally designed to be a low-cost plane costing about $40 million a copy, costs have grown to about $122 million each for the Air Force version. The Pentagon estimates that the unit cost eventually will decline to $92 million.

But some officials worry that any cuts to the size of the program, or too long a delay, will drive up those unit costs, putting the entire program in danger.

The plane has encountered cost overruns, developmental delays and questions about the reliability of its technology.

There are a lot of great Opinion pieces today. I have time to link one: the climate speech Obama didn't give, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.