I haven’t quite decided what to make of this book. For a story so
deceptively simple, the more I think about it, the more complex it becomes.

On the one hand you can read it as a very simple children’s fairy tale with
giants and good guys and pirates and bad guys and, of course, The Girl Who
Need Rescuing. But Goldman then goes and sticks all those personal comments
in about himself and the original manuscript and his first experience of the
story and things just get more and more murky. And interesting.

I have to read it again when I have time to think about it more as I’m
reading and not just to get the plot down. In the meantime, if anyone cares
to enlighten me on what to look for, I would be appreciative.

Now, I read Soul Music so I could go on and read this one.

As you’ll recall, Susan Sto Helit is Death’s granddaughter. She’s also
the Duchess of Sto Helit, but as she has philosophical problems with
being a non-working drone she’s currently supporting herself at the only
job deemed appropriate for young unmarried gently-born ladies–that is,
she’s a governess. And she has a problem. Her predecessor was a
believer in the “bogeyman” school of discipline, i.e., “If you don’t stay
in bed, the bogeyman will do thus and such!” Reality is thin on the
Discworld, and the result is that after dark the nursery is regularly
infested with one kind of bogeyman or another.

But Susan copes admirably and dispassionately; as a believer in the “iron
rod” school of discipline she simply applies an iron rod–specifically,
the fireplace poker–to all and sundry bogeymen….and then lets them go,
to spread the word that her nursery is To Be Avoided.

Meanwhile, for reasons I refuse to explain, Death is standing in for the
Hogfather this year. The Hogfather? You know–the Hogfather. Jolly old
fellow in a red suit, says “Ho, Ho, Ho,” rides in a sleigh pulled by four
giant pigs, and fills stalkings with sausages and blood pudding and toys
every Hogswatchnight. Him. For good and sufficient reasons, Death is
filling in for him this year. Consequently he’s having to shirk his
usual duties, and so Susan gets pulled in to take care of them–and Susan
Is Not Amused.

This is a book that answers a great many interesting questions, including
one great and abiding mystery: just what does the Tooth Fairy do with
all those teeth?

I’ve just released a new stable version of Notebook, V2.0.3. This one has lots of new stuff over the last stable version, V1.1, so go and check it out. It’s at
the Notebook Home Page.

I picked this book up for two reasons. One is that having read a great deal
of the literature from the Victorian period in British history, I have never
read anything about the actual monarch who lent her name to it. The other is
that I spent an entire summer reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf once and
Lytton Strachey figures prominently in the Bloomsbury group she was part of.
His writing piqued my curiosity.

This is a nice little précis of the life of Victoria. It dwells on the
personal side of her life and touches on the political less than I could
have wished but all in all I found it enlightening. He also brings to the
front the importance of Albert in British foreign policy and suggests that
had he not died just on the eve of the American Civil War, the British
policy towards the war may have been significantly different. His emphasis
on the personal loneliness of Albert, an intellectual man married to a
non-intellectual woman who adores him was also new to me. I had never given much
thought to Albert as more than the man Victoria mourned for over half her
life.

The book read well also. I was surprised at that since my take on the whole
Bloomsbury group is that they were well above the general level of rest of
us and wrote for themselves and Art as an abstract rather than for general
consumption. To find a little gem like this was a treat. Now I have to go
find a biography of Strachey to find out more about him than Virginia
Woolf’s sometimes catty observations in her diary.

So suppose you’d really like to do some stop motion animation, a la Wallis and Grommit. You’ve got the clay; you’ve got the camera; you’ve even got the necessary modelling skills. But how do you keep Wallis from falling over while he’s stand off-balance on one leg, arms waving madly? Simple! Just give some money to these guys!

Take a look at what this guy has had to go through.

Here’s a summary of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King for the non-humor impaired. Favorite line: “Bad steward. No cookie.”

This site went down some time today; I’m not sure when. I noticed it this evening about 8PM–I couldn’t access Movable Type, and the entire site appeared to be gone.

My web hosting service is DreamHost.com. I went right to their support page, and submitted a problem report.

Around 8:30 I checked my e-mail, hoping that I might at least have gotten some kind of automated message saying that they were going to look into my problem. Instead, I got an e-mail message from a real person saying that they had just fixed my problem. And indeed, they had.

Now, that’s service. 30 minutes from problem reported to problem solved, at 8PM at night–for a tiny little customer like me.

I signed up with Dreamhost three years ago; I heard about the company through a banner ad at Slashdot–the only time I’ve ever responded to a banner ad. I’ve never regretted choosing them.

When I first signed up with Dreamhost, they offered to host my domain for $9.95 a month–a price they promised would never increase. It hasn’t. For that price, they would host my domain, host a website at my domain, give me reasonable amounts of disk space and bandwidth, and redirect e-mail. Since that time, they’ve added many new services. I now have full shell access, CGI-scripting, MySQL databases, mailing list administration, and a bunch of other services I’ve not even used yet. And I’m still paying just $9.95 a month.

In all that time, I’ve only had my site go down twice (that I’m aware of). The second time was tonight; the first time was due to a credit-card/billing screwup which was entirely my fault. In both cases, the problem was resolved quickly and painlessly as soon as I noticed it.

Every so often I read about people having trouble with their ISPs or hosting services, and I just smile.

This is one of several books I read before Christmas that got put aside and
forgotten for a time. Mysteries are the type of book I read but don’t retain
well which means if they aren’t reviewed quickly, they get passed over for
more recent fare. This one, however, stuck.

It takes place in a small village in England. Years before the neighboring
village had been evacuated and abandoned because a dam had been built, after
much local political wrangling, and the village was on the site of the
reservoir below it. Just before the villagers leave, little girls begin
disappearing. The bodies are never found and the snatchings stop when the
village is drowned. The police, including a young Dalziel, never catch the
kidnapper though the main suspect is thought to be a slightly touched boy
from the village who also disappears after the village is flooded. Then,
after years of relative calm, the snatchings begin again. And an older,
wiser Dalziel and his partner, Pascoe, are brought in to try to figure out
who and why.

There were several things that interested me about the book. One was the
mystery within the mystery. In order to figure out the modern crimes,
Dalziel must recreate and solve the old crime. The major characters from the
previous crime scenes have either died or grown up or moved away and he is
working against time and lack of evidence to figure out the mystery. Not to
mention that the crime scenes have been under water for years.

The other is the use of diary entries by a young women from the village
interspersed into the narrative action. Her story becomes a secondary plot
line that weaves it’s way into the main criminal investigation. And in the
end, how she figures in the whole situation was a complete surprise to me. I
didn’t see it coming, at all.

It’s always a delight to find a new author who writes mysteries with the
emphasis on the detection and the puzzle and not on the gory details of the
crime. This is one of the latest ones Hill has written and I am doubly
delighted to have more to look forward to. I gather there is a long history
of cooperation and partnership between the two detectives, Dalziel and
Pascoe, that has developed as the books were published. Hopefully, they are
all still in print.

I didn’t really want to read this book, except that I wanted to read
Hogfather, and I needed to refresh my memory.

But first, some history. Way back when, in the fourth Discworld book,
Death took an apprentice named Mort, who eventually married Death’s
adopted daughter, Isabelle. (Trust me, it all made sense at the time.)

In this book, we meet Mort and Isabelle’s only daughter Susan. Susan’s a
strange child, as befits Death’s granddaughter. She has little patience
for fools (they suffer her, rather than vice versa), and she has a
tends to be hard to see when she wants to be left alone. And when Death
takes a holiday, as he is occasionally wont to do, it’s Susan who must
pick up the slack. Susan plays a major role in Hogfather,
which is why I needed to re-read this one first.

But that’s another review. So what’s this one about?

Death, and Rock-and-Roll. You can be the greatest musician in the world,
one that they’ll talk about forever, but there’s a price–you have to
live fast, and die young….

So why didn’t I want to read it again at the moment?

The wonder of the Discworld is that it’s a whole world; Pratchett can
satirize anything he likes, and make it work on the Discworld. But
Rock-and-Roll just doesn’t seem to fit quite right, just as Hollywood
didn’t seem to fit quite right in the earlier Discworld book
Moving Pictures. Also, there’s a bunch of foolishness with
the faculty of Unseen University that seems to be neither here nor there
so far as the plot is concerned. It’s filler.

But hey, I enjoyed the book anyway.