A Disclaimer up front: This review is NOT going to include any kind of
plot description. The book is in hardback and I have 3 co-workers who
will hurt me if I give away the plot before they get the book.
This is the next installment of the Amelia Peabody series. It’s great. If
you have the cash and can’t get it due to waiting lists in the library, go
and get it. Otherwise, I guess you’ll have to wait for paper.
This is the most recent Amelia Peabody mystery but one, just fresh out in
paperback. Deb English gets them from the library in hardcover, so she
reviewed this one quite some time ago, and I’m afraid I’m too lazy to
look up what she said.
But anyway, I liked it. Parts of it were purely absurd (if very much in
keeping with the traditions of the series), and over all I think it’s the
best of the most recent few episodes. All the familiar players are
there, and there’s considerable obfuscation, and the bad guys get what’s
coming to them, and so forth.
If you’re not familiar with Amelia Peabody, this is not the book to start
with; go to our Elizabeth
Peters page and find out more.
“OH, THE HUMANITY!” Take Two: As everyone knows but me (where
“everyone” means the two people who wrote me), the phrase “Oh, the
humanity!” dates back to at least 1937. Iam Hamet of
Banana Oil put it this way:
The earliest instance of it I ever encountered was the radio broadcast from the
Hindenberg disaster when the commentator, at a loss for words and with genuine
anguish cried out this
very phrase.
His reflexive usage makes me think it was a common phrase at the time.
Thanks also to Lynn Sislo, who’s 99% sure the reporter was Edward R. Murrow.
She’s got a blog called
Reflections in d
minor which
I’ll be taking a look at.
Update: Alas, the 1% case came up. According to Stasia, the
reporter’s name is Herbert Morrison; she cites
this site.
Has anybody tracked how the expression “Oh, the
humanity!” because a cliche cry of horror and dismay? I first heard it,
so far as I can recall, maybe five years ago, and I assumed that it was a
silly riff on “Oh, the inhumanity!” If anybody has any ideas
please e-mail me, as I’ve been curious about this for some time.
But any way, I’m crying “Oh, the humanity!” because Jane’s new computer
arrived today, and naturally it runs Windows XP, and I’m the guy who gets
to set it up.
For the last six or seven years, Jane’s been using a Gateway desktop
machine. It was bought as “our” computer, and was pretty ritzy when it
was new; at that time, it had the best graphics hardware I’d ever seen.
Jane used it for personal finance and her tax accounting work; I used it
for games, digital photography, and programming projects. We both used
it for the Internet. Then I got a laptop and started doing almost
everything but Internet access from it. And then three years later I
replaced it with another laptop, which I now have, and about six months
ago I started doing all of my Internet access from it. Meanwhile, Jane’s
had this crufty old desktop Windows 98 desktop with all sorts of garbage
installed on it, and lots of stability problems.
So, in the interests of conserving space, we ordered her a laptop,
and it arrived today.
Windows XP is better than I feared, in most ways; it’s certainly more
tractable than Windows ME. And the machine’s power blows mine out of the
water; it’s pretty sweet.
But there’s a bad apple in every barrel, and the bad apple showed up when
I started trying a copy my collection of digital photos (family
snapshots, mostly) from my laptop to hers…or, more precisely, from the
backup CDs I’ve been burning to her computer. Every so often it would
find a file on the CD that it simply wasn’t willing to read. I put the
same CD in my old machine, and was able to load the erring files…but the
picture was corrupted in each case. So either the CD was bad to begin
with, or the new laptop’s CD drive was damaging it. The new laptop’s
drive is a CDRW drive, so the latter is possible, but it seems really
unlikely. So I grabbed a couple more CDs I’d burned and checked those;
they had problems too. Ouch.
I ended up copying the pictures from one laptop to the other, 100 MB at a
time, swapping my external Zip drive back and forth.
All this left me with a question: was it the old drive, the new drive, or
the cheap CDR media I’d been using? So I decided on an experiment. I
took an unused CDR from the spindle, and burned a disk full of photos
using the new laptop’s CDRW drive. Then I attempted to copy the contents
back onto the new laptop’s hard disk. It didn’t work! The disk I
had just burned was unreadable. OK, says I; I found an unused
Verbatim-brand CDR I’d gotten ages ago, and tried it again. It got
about a third of the way through the disk, and hung there. I had to
reboot the machine just to extract the bad CD. Interesting, no?
That, by the way, is my primary complaint about the new machine and OS so
far–it doesn’t cope with CD problems very well. Of course, if the CD
drive itself is faulty then it’s not entirely Windows XP’s fault if it
doesn’t behave properly.
Now, the Verbatim discs are pretty old; they are 74 minute discs while the
current standard is 80 minutes; it’s possible (though scary) that they’ve
degraded over time. Also, some peculiar things had happened with the
first disc, and I hadn’t rebooted. I decided, I could easily afford to
destroy another disc, so I rebooted and tried it again.
It recorded just fine, so far as I could tell.
I put the new disc in my old machine, and copied its contents to the hard
disk. No problems–but then, the new machine had been noticing problems
the old one didn’t. So I put the new disc back in the new machine, and
again copied its contents to the hard disk. My hope was that it would
find a bad file, and that checking that file against the copy I’d just
made onto the old machine’s hard disk would reveal that the new laptop’s
drive was eating CDs. Then I’d know where I stood.
It worked perfectly.
So now I don’t know where I stand, and it’s getting late. More tomorrow,
probably.
I like Pratchett’s books. I especially like the Witch series he writes.
They crack me up.
This one has Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax looking for a third witch to
replace Magrat, now Queen of Lancre. It’s the maiden-mother-crone
requirement for having a coven. The most likely candidate for maiden,
Agnes Nitt, who calls herself Perdita because it sounds so much better
than Agnes, has gone to Ankh Morpokh to find herself. After a series of
false starts, she finds herself in the chorus of the Opera. And of
course the Opera house has a ghost with a white mask who unfortunately
has taken to killing folks. And Agnes is extremely, well, large but
sings like a diva, so Pratchett gets to get in all sorts of fat lady
jokes. And then there is the fake Italian Opera Star who eats constantly.
And Nanny Ogg has written a cookbook called “The Joy of Snacks” that
has recipes guaranteed to make your blood boil and other parts heat up
nicely. It’s sold tons of copies with virtually no money coming back to
Nanny Ogg so Granny Weatherwax takes the matter in hand and they go to
see the publisher, in Ankh Morpokh, of course. And they take Nanny’s cat
Greebo along who in times of stress morphs into a man, unfortunately
naked. And there is the delightful scene where Granny plays poker with
Death to save the life of a child and cheats to win. And then does some
chiropractic work on his arm bones that are tired from swinging the
scythe. In order to get Agnes back to Ramtops they have to work out who
the Ghost of the Opera is and why he is killing people. And it goes from
there.
None of that is any kind of order from the book. Pratchett books are
often hilarious vignettes tied together with a funny plot line. This one
was good. Especially the ending. I really liked the ending.
I’ve written a number of short stories over the
past few years, along with a couple of novels. I’ve decided that it’s
time to let them see the light of day, and so I’m going to publish them
here on my website, on a new page called [hlink “Once-Told Tales”].
I’ll be adding them slowly, over time, and as I add each new piece I’ll
announce it here.
The first story is a little tale of revenge called
The Conspiracy. Have fun.
This book, being “The Second Epic Novel” about Captain Underpants,
arrived in my home, along with four or five others, whilst I was in
Australia. I want this to be perfectly clear–my sister is responsible,
not me. Jane read “The First Epic Novel”,
The Adventures of Captain Underpants, to David while I was
gone; I got to read him the concluding chapters of the second volume on
my return.
The series is really about two boys who can’t sit still in class–the
kind who are clever, easily bored, and always able to make their own fun.
In the first book, so I gather, they write a comic book about a character
named Captain Underpants–the first superhero to wear jockey shorts
instead of longjohns. He has “wedgie power”. Along the way, they
hypnotize the school principle, Mr. Krupp, into thinking that he’s
Captain Underpants. When anyone snaps their fingers, Mr. Krupp will
divest himself of his outer clothes and his hair piece, and rush off to
fight evil wearing only his underpants and a cape.
In this volume, our heroes use an old copier revamped as a Science Fair
exhibit to try to make copies of their latest comic book. To their
dismay, the evil beings therein (the Talking Toilets) come to life and
ravage the school, eating all of the students and faculty (including the
delightfully named Miss Anthrope, Ms. Ribble, and Mr. Meaner). They save
the day by feeding the toilets the food from the school cafeteria.
The book is clear aimed at the beginning reader. Above all, it’s short.
The book is short, the chapters are short, and the pages are short.
The writing is breezy and fast-paced, and Dav Pilkey undeniably has a
lock on what small boys find amusing, and he manages to (mildly)
entertain the adult reader as well.
Which is just as well, as I’ve got several more of these in my
future–both David and James were in stitches.
If you’re like most people, you’ve gotten at
least one of those African Scam e-mails. They mostly read like this (I
paraphrase):
Hi, I’m related to somebody who
has been looting my small, underdeveloped nation and stashing the money
abroad, and I want my share; if you’ll just give me information about
your bank account I’ll funnel it through there and leave you a
ridiculously large sum as a gratuity!
This roughly translates as:
Hi, if you’re stupid enough to give me your account
information, I’ll take all your money!
Originally they all seemed to come from Nigeria, but they’ve evolved
since then; now they come from all over Africa and other third-world
locations. But today I got one with features
I’ve never before seen: it’s formatted neatly, with appropriate use of
upper and lower case.
Somebody notify the New York Times.
The Northworld Trilogy is a really weird retelling of ancient
Norse myth, mostly drawn from the Elder Eddas. Though I’m not familiar
with the Elder Eddas myself–it sounds like something from the pages of
H.P. Lovecraft–I’m savvy enough to recognize the most
obvious elements (Chief God with one eye, Valhalla, Valkyries, and so on
and so forth). And indeed, I spotted the Valkyries and a few other
things. But I didn’t really catch on that it was a
retelling of Norse myth until I read the afterword at the end of the first
of the three tales.
The trick is, the trilogy bills itself as science fiction rather than
fantasy. The framing story is straightforward: Northworld is a potential
colony world. A number of expeditions have been sent to explore it and
tame it; all have disappeared. The last expedition reported that the
planet itself had disappeared; and then that expedition disappeared. So
the Powers That Be tapped one Nils Hansen, top cop and extremely
successful troubleshooter, to go to where Northworld is supposed to be
and found out what happened to it. The trilogy is ostensibly about his
mission.
Except that it isn’t, of course; it’s about the various myths that
Drake’s trying to retell, and that’s the problem. He’s bent over
backward to cloak the world of Norse myth with science-fictional
garments, and while the result is interesting, it’s predictably contorted.
It’s an ambitious and valiant effort, but Drake doesn’t quite bring it
off.
The battle suits are cool, though. And I’d sure like to have Nils Hansen
at my back during a fight.
I am selective about the sci-fi I read. It’s not a genre I know my way
around in and I’ve read some that struck me as, well, just silly. But lo,
my son has now grown to the age where he is reading adult fiction and
spends most of his free time with his nose stuck in sci-fi novels.
Robert A. Heinlein is his current passion. Plus, summer is
coming and he’s too young to drive which means he’ll be spending long
hours out here at the farm. I need to have some authors lined up to throw
his way when he gets bored and we’re browsing the library shelves.
And then Will talks about how good Cherryh is. I usually concur with
Will. Not always; it’s highly unlikely that I will ever make it thru the
entire Patrick O’Brian “Jack Aubrey” series though I did give
the first one a go. But usually Will is spot on. So when I saw
Cyteen on
the shelf at the local Large Chain Bookstore, it was a sale, right then
and there.
If you want a good plot summary, go to our C.J. Cherryh page
and read Will’s. He nails it well. I read it in a weekend and wanted more
so I stopped and picked up a few more at the used bookstore on the way
home. 40,000 in Gehenna was there and I opened it thinking it
would be more of the same. Wrong. Nothing like it. Initially, I was
disappointed but as the book progressed, it grew on me.
Gehenna is the name of the planet where 40,000 born-men and clones are
left in an experiment in sociogenesis. The clones are programmed to
reproduce and farm; the born-men are there to administer the society and
fulfill the upper-level functions required. And it goes wrong when
sentient life is discovered in the form of huge lizard-like critters that
build mounds and tunnels in swirl patterns. The book is about the
evolution of the society from one that is structured by off-world
standards to one that has adapted to the environment and has become
viable in its own right. And then the off-planet men come back to check
up on how things are going. And things start going wrong. It’s a theme
that’s been done before. What fascinated me were the lizards, called
calibans. They create the patterns in the dirt and change the
way people communicate. They provide the forms that shape the society.
They create the power structure in the society. I wish she had made the
novel longer and fleshed it out more. Cyteen
detailed everything but we
only get a taste in 40,000 in Gehenna. And that taste left me
wanting more.
The View from the Foothills 