Saturday, March 11, 2017

a criminal defense

A Criminal DefenseA Criminal Defense by William L. Myers Jr.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Well-written and interesting, but ultimately preposterous. Much too convoluted and contrived and too many things had to fall perfectly into place for the resolution to work. But it’s well-written and it kept me reading because I wanted to see how it all resolved.

posted by lee on 03/11/17 at 10:31 AM

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Wednesday, March 08, 2017

planet earth 2

Flamingoes - San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, BBC America Planet Earth 2
Flamingoes,San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, Justin Anderson (click to see it big!)

We’ve been watching Planet Earth II—and it’s just as beautiful as Planet Earth, first aired back in March 2007 in the United States.

My only quibble is sometimes the music gets twee—I loathe that. I like David Attenborough fine as the narrator, though I would be just as happy with Sigourney Weaver as narrator as she was in the 2007 US version of Planet Earth. I also like that they are pointing out the effects of climate change and encroaching development on the habitats.

In the first episode, Islands, the flight of the baby marine iguanas in Fernandina, Galápagoes to reach their parents without being eaten by waiting racer snakes was very exciting—better than a car chase by far. And in episode 2, Mountains, the flamingoes in the Atacama Desert was my favorite part. In the most recent episode, Jungles, I loved the Wilson bird of paradise mating ritual in West Papua, Indonesia. I’m looking forward to the next episode, Deserts, on Saturday.

posted by lee on 03/08/17 at 01:00 AM

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Saturday, March 04, 2017

the sleepwalker

The Sleepwalker (Sleepwalker, #1)The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Sleepwalker a really good read Probably 4.5 stars. An interesting mystery centered around a disorder I knew almost nothing about. I really liked the characters, the pacing, the layering on of clue after clue.

My only quibble is probably unfair as I wanted to know more about what happened afterwards, details and not just broad strokes. I won’t say any more as I don’t want to inadvertently spoil it for other readers.

posted by lee on 03/04/17 at 10:19 AM

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Tuesday, January 24, 2017

the circle (the book)

The CircleThe Circle by Dave Eggers

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Interminable. This took sooo loong to get through—it’s like reading a series of press releases. Raised a lot of interesting ideas, to be sure, but damn it’s a repulsive book with an even more repulsive “heroine.” Technology as psychopathy. The problem is Eggers beats you over the head with it, with a really stupid ending. The worst part is the premise is not that far-fetched.

posted by lee on 01/24/17 at 10:36 AM

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Wednesday, December 14, 2016

a death in sweden

A Death in SwedenA Death in Sweden by Kevin Wignall

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Very enjoyable reading despite a number of flaws.

It’s hard to root for the Good Guy when you understand his profession, which is someone who works for intelligence agencies and governments to find people and send them off to one of those secret CIA prisons or two whatever venue his boss desires. For a lot of money.

The flaws are things like dialogue: it’s difficult to figure out who’s speaking as the punctuation is so badly done. There are rules for punctuating dialogue and they’re used for a reason.

And flaw of the premise: the Bad Guy, some Berlin-based station chief for the CIA, is systematically having former freelancers who worked for the CIA killed for no apparent reason. All of Good Guy’s friends, and of course, he is on the list. He has to figure out how to get off the list—which is one thread of the story. Bad Guy has to keep hiring freelancers because so many are getting killed—seems like kind of a bad policy for getting things done—I mean, sooner or later the pool of available hit men is going to dry up when it shakes out of the grapevine that if you work for Bad Guy, you’ll get murdered.

The other thread is that Good Guy is sent to Sweden to investigate the death of a guy in a bus crash. Turns out this guy wasn’t who everyone claimed he was. He was hiding in the woods of Sweden for years, and part of the plot of this story is to find out who he really was, why he was hiding, what he was doing—and finding this all out, solving the mystery of why he was doing it. Which is fine—this is the interesting part.

There is, of course, a Swedish bombshell involved (I guess a Good Guy would only fall for a bombshell, not a non-bombshell but intelligent woman, or maybe only bombshells work for the Swedish version of the CIA or whatever it’s supposed to be. Such a cliche—getting really tired of it.)

Just wonder, too, why bodies dropping all over Europe, cars being blown up, etc., never seem to get the attention of the local cops or newspapers. Also, there is no apparent rationale for several of the murders done by our Good Guy. And there is his current boss, Patrick, not sure at all where he fit in or what his company initials stand for. Best I could tell is he’s the placement guy for the Mercenary Spy Temp Agency.

I won’t go into much more about it, but I just wonder if some of the people in this story never heard of the internet or YouTube. You will figure out the answer to the mystery—that too is a bit of a cliche.

This is not to say I didn’t enjoy reading this—I did. It was well-written enough for me to really get into it, and I will probably read more by Kevin Wignall.

posted by lee on 12/14/16 at 10:45 AM

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Monday, November 28, 2016

another one, from flickerembed

Created with flickr embed.

posted by lee on 11/28/16 at 11:50 PM

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016

testing continued -slide awsome

posted by lee on 11/15/16 at 01:42 PM

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Wednesday, November 02, 2016

my friend is moved in to her new apartment

image
Pepper in the window, November 2, 2016

I am completely exhausted, my legs hurt—but it’s done. We managed to move our friend from her deathtrap apartment to her clean, nice, safe, quiet apartment. It took days, but Stanley, her son-in-law, and I got her moved. It would’ve been a lot easier and faster if her granddaughters had shown up to help at least a bit, but they were nowhere to be seen. Allegedly they will help her unpack, according to their father. I hope so.

One thing this whole process has done is convince me that I am not nuts—I want to cull and declutter this house now, even if moving is a long time in the future if at all. We have too much stuff. It’s oppressing me, overwhelming me. If we had to move fast, for whatever reason, we couldn’t. And that scares me.

posted by lee on 11/02/16 at 09:30 PM

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Wednesday, September 28, 2016

some light got in

After watching the political scene and the overwhelming disappearance of basic civility, I’d just about given up hope that things might get better.

But today, a ray of sunshine: a boy headed home from the middle school next door to us spotted a dollar in our driveway and went out of his way to tell us that he found it. I thanked him for his honesty and told him to keep it.

Made my week much better.

image
Slink and Pepper getting along for a change. (click to see it big!)

posted by lee on 09/28/16 at 10:14 PM

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Tuesday, September 20, 2016

moved. at last.

It took a while for me to figure it out, but finally, I did, and moved this site to our new webserver. Rah. Just 40+ more to go.

slink says feed me feed me feed me
Slink wants me to pay attention to him. With food and a good scratch. (click to see it big!)

posted by lee on 09/20/16 at 11:19 AM

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