3 Comments:

This truly saddens me. I am a big Vonnegut fan and spent many hours during the college years tracking down early editions of his works and pouring through them. It was a culumination of many things; college, working in a library, being at the U and all the politicall things that being a student at the U entails, working along side doctorates, etc. To this day I will always be able to pick up a Vonnegut book and laugh my ass off.

My personal favorite is Bluebeard. I recommend it highly. While Bluebeard never received the attention of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, or Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut's characters and situations in that book are an all too true realism of what happens in life.

If you haven't read Vonnegut before, please, pick up something, anything. All of his work is an easy read, and I don't think you'll be disappointed.

By  Anonymous, at 9:39 AM  

I recall Vonnegut telling the story of how he was one of the first Saab dealers in the US. He had a number of problems making a profit:

1) The phone company wouldn't let him list the business as "Saab Cape Cod" as they had a rule against using a product name as the first word of a listing. He had to use the more pedestrian "Cape Cod Saab." It just didn't sound right.

2) Saab included in their sales literature copious information about how they built airplane engines for the Nazis during WWII, which in post-war America wasn't an ideal sales pitch.

3) Unlike American auto makers, they set a fairly low retail price, and expected consumers to pay that. Americans were used to haggling down from an artificially high sticker price.

So, how did he make a profit? "We screwed them on the radios."

By  Foureyes McFloodpants, at 10:02 AM  

As teh former owner of several Saabs it makes me happy somehow that he sold them ratehr than say Hondas. What did Rabbit Angstrum sell, does anyone remember?

so it goes.

By  Jambo, at 1:47 AM  

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