I could have used another week to get ready for my 66-city book tour in my custom camper van. But, most likely, I would have said this no matter how much time I’d had to prepare. As it was, I got on the road after only a few hours’ sleep. Packing everything I might need for a month — into the tiny nooks and cabinets of my camper van — took longer than I had expected, even though I had started packing three days before taking off.

This first leg lasts one month and takes me down to New Orleans and back. Cleo, our basset hound, is with me. She’s such a good sport, always wagging her tail, always ready to hop out and explore. Right now she’s curled up on her bed just outside the van — on the asphalt. We’re parked in a Walmart lot and I’m writing this at the table of my tiny kitchen. It’s 1:00 AM and the lot is all but deserted. In the distance, I can hear the sputter of an RV’s generator. My generator makes no noise because it is solar-powered: four big panels on the roof. I’ll tell you all about the RV Walmart scene at another time.

It’s been a rough first few days because, as I said, I got started without sleep. Then a TV show I had lined up in Charleston changed my appearance date, so I had to drive from Raleigh, NC, to Charleston, SC for a 3-minute TV interview to promote my Thursday appearance in Charleston. Then I drove back to Raleigh for another reading — a seven hour round trip. So, for the second day, I once again got only a few hours of sleep.

I’m not much good when I’m sleepy. This may explain how I came to blow up the water tank under my camper van. The van, by the way, is very cool and everything is working well, except now I have no water — which means I can’t use the toilet. I hate having to hunt for a toilet.

I connected a hose to my water tank in order to fill it for the first time but I forgot to open my faucet, and so the pressure (65 PSI) built up in the tank. Before the tank was 1/4 full, it burst, sounding like the muted blast of a small cannon. Vaporized water drifted like smoke from the tank’s ruptured seams. I was so weary, I reacted with no more than a shrug, as if to say, “Oh, well, I guess I f**ked up.” My welder says he can fix it when I pit-stop in Baltimore at the end of the month.

As for other complications, my May bookings are half-baked because too many of them were late or last-minute due to the fact that, in booking May, we were relying on the book stores to be more responsive. Too many of them were very slow in getting back, which meant we were late getting to the preservation societies, which meant that there was little or no room on propsective supporters’ calendars. Which means that the people who should have and would have come out to see me were not able to. In short, May taught me to by-pass the book stores for subsequent bookings and go straight to the preservation socieites, which are really responsive and eager to support an event like mine.

Delayed bookings put everything behind, which means I didn’t get time to send out e-mail blasts and mine social media. I’ll scramble to do that this week. And what exactly is “an event like mine”? It’s a comic monologue with a slide show. It’s entertaining and of wide appeal. I say that in all modesty. Not only would you like it, but your mother and her friends would like it too.

I should mention that, as I’m traveling to 66 cities in 30 states, I am making a documentary called “Preseving America,” about preservationists and their work. Which means I’m video-interviewing these people. Not that I have time for that. But it does make the trip more interesting.

Finally, my plan to stay at campgrounds will not work, I have discovered, because state and national campgrounds close at night. Did you know this? I mean, they shut their gates at 9:00 PM. That means that, after my reading, I can’t get back to the campground in time, especially when most campgrounds are about 10 miles from town. I could stay in commercial campgrounds but they cost $35-$50. a night. I can’t spend that kind of money to park someplace. So here I am, at Walmart.

Tonight I’m in Charleston. I got good PR here — TV, newspaper, etc. — so it should be interesting to see what the turn-out will be. Should I mention that last night at the Columbia, S.C., Barnes & Noble not a single person showed up?

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For two weeks I’ve been getting emails from a guy named Bob Chen in China. Bob works in the Asian Domain registration department, located in 8/F XiYu building No.52 JinDun Road,QingYang District,Chengdu City, China. In his first email, he wanted to know if I had authorized the "Roris Industrial Co. Ltd" to use my name in a dozen domain names, such as ronaldtanner.asia. My first reaction was, Why would a company named "Roris" use "ronaldtanner" for anything? Well, I’ve seen stranger things and, although I suspected that this might be a scam, I have never been scammed from China. So I gave it a whirl and answered Bob: no, I never authorized anybody to use my name for a domain in China or anywhere else, for that matter.


Bob wrote back and cordially informed me that his office has confirmed that I am indeed the owner of said domain in the U.S. but not in China. He added, "If your company do need to register and protect those domains in China please contact us in time, then we’ll inform you how to register. Or else we think it as your waiver. Thanks for your understanding." So there it was: a pitch to make me pay for registration of a dozen domains that contain my name . . . in China.


Not your typical scam but a scam nonetheless. What makes this one notable is the entreprenuerial spin. Compared to scams coming from Nigeria and the Balkans, this one is subtle insofar as it’s about business, not a million dollar windfall. In fact, it shows much more imagination than those outrageous invitations because it could be legitimate. Do the Chinese register their domains? Does Bob Chen work for a registry?



The truth of the world market right now is that China makes EVERYTHING and, thanks to a humiliating trade imbalance, that nation more or less owns ours.. So, now, as the Chinese burn their four-billion carbon footprints into the earth as they scramble to get all the goodies we got, it seems prudent to pay attention when they drop us an email.


On Friday, Bob sent me an ultimatum: "if your company does not register these domain names and Network Brand, we will finish aforesaid company’s registration within 2 workdays. Roris Industrial Co. Ltd will become the legal owner of these domain names in the world."

Wow, the world.


Maybe Bob will look up my other seven websites and duplicate those domains by the dozen and send me more global threats. More likely, he’ll move on to another business that feels it might have a stake in that roiling, far-easteern, gold-rush frontier.


Until the Chinese get theirs, we’re going to see more of this. But we may take solace in the fact that one day soon Bob Chen will be getting an email query from a domain registry in India, asking if he wants to safeguard his internet rights in the world’s next fastest growing economy.

Read more about Chinese domain name scams here.

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My photographer friend Vinny brought his Marathon cab over today. I’ve always liked the Marathon. It’s a tank of a vehicle, the boxiest, most spacious car you’ll ever find. It has big bench seats and enough leg room to accommodate a Great Dane. The dash is metal, of course, and the bumpers are formidable enough to be on a garbage truck. The Maraton was built as a taxi and it was, in fact, the classic Yellow Checker Cab — unchanged in design since it was first produced in 1960. They stopped making them in 1982.

The Marathon’s charm is its simplicity. As Vinny puts it: “It’s the kind of design you’d get from a child’s drawing of a car.” The first time I saw one, I wanted it. I’m a sucker for vintage cars. The last one I owned was a 1966 Plymouth Valiant station wagon. It had the legendary slant-6 engine, which was supposed to live forever. Just my luck, my slant-six happened to be a lemon. It threw a rod twice and was never right. A bad car is like a bad house — a money pit. And the problem is that, if you put too much in, it seems you can’t give up because you’ll never recoup your loss. So you keep dumping more into it.

The fun part of owning an old car isn’t the engine work — not for me, any way — it’s the cosmetics, fixing up the interior, putting in custom touches, and then, of course, savoring the time machine pleasure of driving it. Old cars look the way it seems cars should look: charmingly boxy outside and living-room spacious inside. New cars, with their squashed backsides and narrow windows and flimsy plastic trim, look like fancy athletic shoes. I understand why they must look that way; it’s all about aerodynamics and gas mileage. But, man, are they ugly.

When I sit in Vinny’s Marathon I feel transported to a time when construction mattered and things were built to last and that meant that the builders took great pride in what they did. I know this is a nostalgic cliche but there it is: being in a well-kept old car makes me feel like the world is better place

Vinny has put about $20K into his Marathon. If you’re going to bring back an old car, you can’t go halfway. After the hard time I had with my ‘66 Valiant, I vowed never to get another old car. But recently, I bought a used Sprinter van for my 66-city Animal House book tour and have been going through the entire old car rehab routine to makle it into a custom camper: body work, paint, interior renovation, the works. It’s been like taking on a huge old house project.


The satisfaction of a car rehab is that you get it exactly the way you want it. Fixing up the Sprinter reminds me of fixing up the old Volkswagen van I had in college. I love the idea of begin wholly self-contained in a tiny house on wheels. But, really, I never thought I’d be doing it again. Our new old van will have just about everything, including a toilet. I’m amazed that so small a vehicle can hold and do so much. When it’s done, I’ll show it to you right here.

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I solved a musical mystery today. The mystery was this: every time I visited a certain bathroom at my place of work, I would leave humming Black Cow by Steely Dan. About the third time it happened, I stopped dead in my tracks and said, What the hell? If it weren’t so funny, it might have freaked me out. When it kept happening, I figured it was just me, not the mystery bathroom. For some reason known only to the deepest recesses of my psyche, that bathroom was always going to be my Steely Dan Black Cow trigger. But this morning I was in this same bathroom and then, when I reached for the automatic paper towel dispenser, I heard it: the dispenser whined the first two notes of Black Cow’s distinctive opening.

I was relieved about this (no pun). I like to know where my music comes from. My head is always filled with music. I mean, I have a sound track playing all the time. And it’s a good one, though limited to the music I’ve heard most often. Although I don’t have perfect pitch, I have a sharp ear for sounds and, as a result, I hear tunes exactly as they sound on the radio or an MP3 player. This may explain why I don’t walk around listening to an MP3 player.

In elementary school music class, which met once a week, I was made aware of my sensitivity to sound when we were told to listen to recorded instruments and guess what they were. After our initial introduction to each instrument — everything from oboe to mouth harp — I never guessed wrong. Even when listening to a symphony, I could pick out which instrument was playing each part. Had I been given some encouragement, I might have played an instrument other than the drums. But our music teacher, the notorious child-hating Mr. Harvey, encouraged nobody to do anything.

My head is full of hymns too. These are Protestant hymns from my childhood. They come to me unbidden and, really, I don’t mind them. One from my recent playlist is “My Father’s World.” Its lyrics are fitted to a traditional English tune. The age of the tune probably accounts for its strength. Here’s a traditional example, if you care to listen. And here’s Christian pop star Amy Grant’s version.

I have long assumed that everybody has a non-stop music player in his or her head. But is this true? Maybe you have something different. I can’t really turn mine off. It’s just there, ever playing. I can change the selection but not always, like the other day when the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing” was stuck in there for too long. Sometimes I have to give in and sing the song — loudly. The good thing is that I can update my selections. One of my favorite fairly recent additions is Nada Surf’s “Always Love.”

I should add that my internal player is no match for the real thing. By “real,” I mean full spectrum sound that comes from a CD on a good stereo system. I recall the days when my friends and I would simply sit for hours and listen to music on the stereo. It was our work, actually — what you were supposed to do as a teenager. I’m not sure what youngsters do nowadays. That is, I don’t imagine they gather to listen to music like this because nowadays each is in his or her own pod. Is that a good thing?

My parents didn’t listen to music, though my mother played piano and has a lovely singing voice. I got the impression that, once you were a grown-up, you were supposed to give up music. We Baby Boomers defide that rule. I still buy CDs to support the bands I like. And I compress them for portable play too, though I don’t like the MP3 format. I’m happy to say that, when I’m listening to music outside my head, the player inside goes silent.

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It’s a good word. By “good,” I mean a word that does the work it’s made for. If you believe in progress, you should conclude that f**k — the expletive — is the product of arduous field-testing and development. Centuries of testing. No other English word comes close to expressing abject outrage and frustration. I use it whenever my work around the house goes awry. I start with “Oh my f**king God!” then end with “Oh just f**k me!” This may go on for a while. It’s quite therapeutic.


If we didn’t have f**k, we’d have to invent it. Therein lies the irony of every objection to the word. Saying “snap!” or “fudgedragon!” just isn’t going to cut it. Any honest person will admit as much. For all their good intentions, those who prefer a substitute are playing a fool’s game: in saying “fudge,” the speaker derives satisfaction not from voicing the innocuous replacement but, rather, from thinking of the real word, f**k, and then reveling in the fact that he/she hasn’t said it aloud. Fudge is to f**k what methadone is to heroin. You’re still using an expletive; it’s just not a very good one.


All of this came to mind recently when Jill and I watched the first few episodes of the HBO series, “Boardwalk Empire.” The show features Steve Buschemi as an Atlantic City crime boss in the 1920s. It has a good cast, lavish sets, and producer Martin Scorcese. But, by the third episode, I tired of the show for two reasons: I didn’t really care about the characters (I need somebody to root for) and everybody was saying f**k a lot. I mean a lot. This struck me as wholly unrealistic.

Granted, gangster types nowadays say f**k in every sentence. But do you really think that 1920s-era gangsters did this? No doubt they enjoyed saying f**k, but society and its constraints were such that one f**k went a long way. When 1920s-era gangsters said f**k, they probably said it only when it really meant something. On “Boardwalk Empire,” they say it with every breath: “I don’t fucking know, but I think he’s fucking making a mistake. Right? Let’s fucking get out of here.”



I remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s when stand-up comedians started saying f**k a lot in their monologues. A typical opening would go something like this: “I was fucking sleeping, okay? And then I woke up and fucking thought, ‘What the fuck?’ I found myself in a fucking Dumpster, fucking reeking of puke and pee….” It got old fast because f**k became a kind of bad-ass place holder instead of a powerful expletive. And its overuse suggested that this new generation of comics lacked the confidence to sail solo. They needed to say f**k a lot to keep their audience off guard.


That’s the problem with “Boardwalk Empire”: the actors seem unsure of their dialogue and so, to make it stick, they keep saying f**k, as if this anachronistic over-usage would jar us into thinking we’re in the company of some really bad-ass 1920s-era gangsters. But, actually, f**k’s overuse only makes me feel that I’m in the company of writers who have little imagination.


I didn’t start saying f**k until I was eighteen. That’s how I was brought up. But, man, when I finally started using the word, I felt its power and used it accordingly. Which is to say: I used it when it really meant something. In short, I won’t overuse because I respect the word for the good work it does. There’s still a certain novelty to hearing a child say f**k, but it seems it won’t be novel for long because f**k is becoming as common among youngsters as crap was in my day. So, yes, I worry about the demise of this formidable word, even as I acknowledge that it is probably too late to wonder, Are we wearing out f**k?

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