Japanese timing. B-ball dreams. Subjects and predicates. Catch-22. Storm troopers. Jazz Bowman. Joseph Epstein. Edward Shils. Disinterested?

Success, any one? In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, her book about Japan written for the U.S. government during World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict cites a Japanese peculiarity which is probably an asset -- Japanese people spend less time on the toilet than other people, performing their devoir with dispatch. She saw it as a distinct trait without saying it was good or bad. I say it's quite good and have to wonder if it is related, before or after the fact, to Japanese business success.

It would work this way: give me a people who do not linger at the task in question, and I have a people efficient in many things, including business. The Japanese succeed in business, trying very hard, but with a leg up on the rest of us, you might say, because their bathrooms are not reading rooms. Think on it.

Hoop dreams: Athletes talk funny, Frederick C. Klein pointed out in his "On Sports" column in the Wall St. Journal, including the newly drafted Georgia Tech freshman whom the Minn. Timberwolves were clearly prepared to pay a king's ransom. Choking back tears of joy, the young man said he had dreamed of this for 20 years, though he had just turned 19.

Literary criticism: A recent speaker to the (since disbanded ) Midwest Writers Assn. said her Medill (Northwestern) public relations students can't write. They can't spell or make subjects and predicates agree, etc. One said she doesn't think it's necessary because she's to be a consultant.

The literacy problem arises in lots of places. A few years ago, a Tribune editor garbled a guest column of mine, thinking Heller's Catch-22 was about the Viet Nam war. She apparently hadn't even seen the movie. Her assistant got very quiet when I pointed this out to her. It was news to the assistant too.

Movies matter. Recently I complained to the Wed. Kernel [Oak Park Wed. Journal] about a "storm troopers" caption for a snow-covered soldier-sailor-airman monument in our central park. At first incensed at their insensitivity, I later realized they didn't think of Nazi bully boys when they heard storm trooper.

Neither did at least one reasonably educated and well-read 50-year-old I know, I learned yet later. A 25-year-old, on the other hand, knew the Nazi part but thought first of "Star Wars" -- which I have never seen. Then I thought some and decided I probably knew the Nazi part from movies I saw as a kid in the '40s. Ah, Hollywood.

All this jazz: Telemarketer catches me at home, 8:30 a.m.: "Hello, Jazz?"

"Who do you want?"

"Jazz. Jazz Bowman?"

"Nobody here by that name. What number you calling?"

Click.

I'm on a list as Jas. (for James) Bowman. He was asking for "Jas." Next on his list? Maybe "Thos" or "Dannl."

Interested?: Students lacking interest in school work are called disinterested in a newspaper account. It should be "uninterested," I said. To be disinterested is to be impartial -- free of bias and self-interest.

So Joseph Epstein (Chicago Trib Magazine) praises the late Edward Shils as disinterested. As a polymath and great if not gray eminence at the U. of Chicago for decades, Shils was anything but lacking in interest. But he did call them as he saw them, moving from a solid moral center partly of his own devising over many decades of reading, writing, thinking, discussing, says Epstein.

It's important to be disinterested. But the word has come to be used as "uninterested," or "having lost interest," despite fussbudget objections from the likes of me. As people say with nothing more to say, "Whatever."

— It is good to remind readers that this and other posts are very often lightly edited versions of something written decades ago. —