Thanks to all who tuned in for my turn in the anchor chair on America's Number One cable show - and, with that, welcome to our regularly scheduled audio Ovaltine twenty minutes before you lower your lamp: it's Episode Sixteen of our summer diversion by Jack London, Burning Daylight.
Thank you for your kind comments about this and other SteynOnline features. We love our First Day Mark Steyn Club members, and we love those members who only joined last week, but we have a special place for prodigal sons who wander away and then return. Eric writes from the Volunteer State:
Mark: my apologies from the hills of Tennessee!
I let my First Weekend Founding Membership lapse as I felt your issues with Katz and other legal entanglements were over. However, over the past two months I found myself increasingly irritated by 'conservative' site paywalls and unending money-grubbing pop-ups, none of which you have on your site.
Indeed, Eric. I've never quite bought into the viability of the "conservative" website business model: "If you enjoyed this analysis of the Iranian nuclear program, you may also enjoy 'Hollywood's Twenty Worst Breast Implants'."
Then it dawned on me—perhaps my bit of annual support helps keep your site so refreshingly free of such garbage...and not to mention that on issues broader than 'what didn't Kamala do this week?', 'how did Joe make an addled fool of himself?' and 'who do you like for 2024, 2034 or whatever?' you still have the best site around. So, abashedly, please count me back in!
Thank you again for all of your work, your experienced insights, your humor, even your occasional gloomy assessments and predictions. My only request would be for some way members who don't haunt the Clubland Q & A queue because they are at work (odd thought these days, I know) to still be able to shoot a question across your cultural bows.
On that last point, Eric. We've been experimenting with moving the Q&A around a bit - 10am Eastern, 4pm, 11am - but, just as it's always five o'clock somewhere, it's always a stinkingly inconvenient three-in-the-morning somewhere. But we'll continue to explore the possibilities. Meanwhile, feel free to fake a sick-note from your doc and tune in to Wednesday's show.
In tonight's episode of Burning Daylight our hero has left the wild north he knows so well and ventured out into the so-called civilized world:
In no blaze of glory did Burning Daylight descend upon San Francisco. Not only had he been forgotten, but the Klondike along with him. The world was interested in other things, and the Alaskan adventure, like the Spanish War, was an old story. Many things had happened since then. Exciting things were happening every day, and the sensation-space of newspapers was limited. The effect of being ignored, however, was an exhilaration. Big man as he had been in the Arctic game, it merely showed how much bigger was this new game, when a man worth eleven millions, and with a history such as his, passed unnoticed.
He settled down in St. Francis Hotel, was interviewed by the cub-reporters on the hotel-run, and received brief paragraphs of notice for twenty-four hours. He grinned to himself, and began to look around and get acquainted with the new order of beings and things... It was another kind of wilderness, that was all; and it was for him to learn the ways of it, the signs and trails and water-holes where good hunting lay, and the bad stretches of field and flood to be avoided.
How far does eleven million bucks go in turn-of-the-century San Francisco? Daylight is about to find out.
If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club you can hear Part Sixteen of our serialization of Burning Daylight simply by clicking here and logging-in. All previous episodes can be found here.
~Membership in The Mark Steyn Club is not for everyone, but, if you've a pal who enjoys classic fiction, we'd love to welcome him or her to our ranks via the birthday present that lasts all year even in lockdown: A gift membership in the Steyn Club, which brings with it access to our full archive of Tales for Our Time, including The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine and The Thirty-Nine Steps.
For more on Steyn Club gift membership, see here. And if you're thinking of joining yourself or (like Eric) re-joining, aside from Tales for Our Time, it does come with a few other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over forty books, CDs and other items in the Steyn store;
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To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and do join me tomorrow for Part Seventeen of Burning Daylight.