To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I have successfully vibe-coded PhrazeMaze into a flavored app, which means I can build them using different themes and strings for puzzles.
So, basically, I can make them faster than people are buying them.
Like so much of what I do.
Buy My Books!
Ah, gentle reader. I seed my stacks with things which will only later become imperative. For example, at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library in autumn 2023, I bought this DVD (and thought it was a documentary). And this year, I read Be Water, My Friend by Bruce’s daughter Shannon, which inspired me to watch the Bruce Lee movies I bought in February 2025 (The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Way of the Dragon, Game of Death, and Game of Death II, the last two completed after he died–and the very last made without any footage that Lee shot for the film). So, when I was rifling through the unwatched videos and came across this disc, oh, yeah, I had to watch it and right now.
Although I thought it was a documentary, it is not. It is a fictionalized account of Bruce Lee’s life. And I watched for what seemed a very long time on Saturday night, and I started to wonder if it was a miniseries. Ah, The Legend of Bruce Lee was a Chinese television series. Which explains why every once and a while the music would swell (the theme song sung by Shannon Lee? I cannot find confirmation or refutation of the thesis, but I’m not going to spend an hour on it for a movie review that three people will read, and two of them are mes of the future) after a bit of a climax, but then we’d get another scene starting somewhere else. The Wikipedia for the television series indicates it had seven segments with numerous episodes per segment–50 in all? So I thought on Sunday night I would have another three hours to go since I was but through the fourth segment (the first four being, according to Wikipedia, “High School in Hong Kong”, “Late Adolescence in America”, “College Years and Opening a Kung Fu School”, and “Oakland”). I expected I would need to get through three segments (“Hollywood”, “Rise to Fame in Hong Kong”, and “International Fame and Death”). Oh, but no: This was but a three-hour feature film cut from the whole television series.
Which explains a lot of jumps in the film. Reading the summary, we get jumps from Hong Kong to Seattle–not much of the late Adolescence or Oakland portions (part 2 and part four) if any. It’s a rather simplified version of his story, or at least the highlights from Be Water, My Friend, although Wikipedia’s entry on Bruce Lee includes details that Shannon Lee’s book did not and which might or might not be true. And in the film I watched, not only are Seattle-Oakland-San Francisco blurred, but the last three sections go by very quickly, too–we go from him beating “Yellow Skin,” a lifetime rival who almost paralyzed Lee after a bout. I thought Be Water, My Friend put it on a weightlifting accident, but which is the real story and which is the legend? And right after the swelling music and advanced cinematography which indicated this was A Moment (and perhaps end of a section), we cut to an ambulance and Bruce Lee’s death, and finis! Wait, what?
As it’s a 21st century work, you still get bits of the China versus the West bits that mar 21st century Chinese martial arts films. Some of it probably are apropos, given that parts of the film took place in Hong Kong and Chinatowns in the middle of the 20th century, but the heavy thumb on the scale undercuts the other, more universal, themes in it, an outsider or a man going against the system and trying to improve himself and the world. One of the things that have made Bruce Lee endure as an icon for a small guy beating great odds.
But, eh, you’re probably better off spending time with the actual Bruce Lee films. Especially as Bruce Lee, the man, has been re-written into Bruce Lee, the legend. Which might or might not be true, and for better or for worse depending upon the needs of the moment. At least with the films, you know they’re fictional.
Buy My Books!
Gas prices soar past $4 on average for gallon of regular, the highest in US since 2022
Here locally, gas yesterday was $2.97, which is down two cents from the day before and down thirty cents from a recent peak.
But, hey, your reality is formed only by the television news or Internet, by all means panic.
Highest since 2022, when it was that high without a war going on. And “average national” includes gas prices from states with far higher tax burdens and other considerations, so maybe everyone should just leave their houses once in a while (he says, but only superiorly because he’s going to take a break from doom scrolling and do the tour which takes him to locations in Republic and Nixa and a nice country drive with the windows down, maybe, this morning).
Buy My Books!
As a reminder, gentle reader, I bought this book in Davenport, Iowa, in 2024, and the book shop owner asked me if I knew the author who used to call the bookshop when he was looking for source material. Last year when I went to the same bookshop, different people we behind the counter, so I don’t know if the book shop was still in the same family as it had been. I’ll have to be sure to look for the founder’s portrait behind the desk as an indicator. Not that it would indicate yea or nay, but if it’s not there, that might indicate nay.
The book is a history from the first white settlements in the Quad Cities area. The Sac/Sauk are already there, of course, so some of the earliest history deals with establishing trading posts, the Black Hawk War, and the advantage that a man named Davenport had because he was originally from England and had the accent, and the natives in the area had sided with the British in the wars against the Americans.
Settlements came, settlements expanded, and they formed into the communities that became the cities. Each had a certain amount of its own character determined by the people who settled in each–not only by nationalities, but also trades. Davenport became commercial because the traders founded it, and their impact carried on. Moline, from the French for mill, was (and is) heavily industrial, dominated today by John Deere. The actual Rock Island was taken pretty early by the federal government to be an armory, but the city of Rock Island is on the Illinois bank of the river. The book calls it variously the two cities and the Tri-Cities; the fourth of the Quad, Bettendorf, was founded in the 20th century, so one is forgiven for not remembering which is the fourth (Milan and East Moline were formed earlier, but I guess they’re disqualified because they’re not on the river).
You know, I’ve been to Davenport twice, but I did walk around the downtown area a couple of times, so some of the names are a little familiar to me, and I look forward to maybe sharing some of this knowledge with my beautiful wife should we attend a conference there again. And she will undoubtedly wonder how I know such things. Ah, gentle reader, we know: I do my homework on history for places I visit and places where I live for not only the trivia-sharing, but also because I like to know.
Buy My Books!
CU electrical bills are expected to be higher this summer. Here’s why (paywalled article, so I didn’t actually read it.
The first sentence, the teaser that Gannett thinks will get me to sign up for its little four-page broadsheet “newspaper”‘s online version, says higher fuel costs.
Note the story below though: Higher population. One reason.
Another reason: Industrialization of the area and those loverly, loverly LLM-building “data centers” going in everywhere.
Another reason: State constitutional amendments that say that X% of energy generation must come from unreliable and expensive sources like wind and solar. Which means that to keep within the guidelines, power companies have to cut fossil fuel production, the denominator, so that the limited top number meets that constitutional mandate.
So why is it? Let a 23-year-old only writing here for a while and hoping to move up to a real city explain it.
Presumably, somewhere below the fold, we get the Trump and War in Iran. Or maybe I am just cynical.
Buy My Books!
My boys are getting to be adults, and yet…. We have balls scattered around the fields of Nogglestead.
It was worse a couple of weekends ago; they had a friend over and played a variety of lightweight sports in the yard, including football and wiffleball. So I had to bring in a couple of gloves before the rain, and some equipment and/or the lightly-weighted professional folder that the oldest is supposed to be giving away to businesses about the company he is doing business development for…. That might have gotten blown away in the storms.
Ah, someday, and very soon now, they will be gone, and things will be where we leave them, and balls will not inexplicably erupt in various locations.
But, also perhaps soon, grandchildren might have the same effect.
Heaven help me (too late), but I suspect I will be a better grandfather than father. Although if my boys produce girls, who knows? I do not have experience with them.
Buy My Books!
Well, gentle reader, like my sainted mother, I do not like to rush into anything. I started reading this giant Complete Works of William Shakespeare eight years ago, reading The Tempest, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night in 2018 before tabling the book for six years and then reading Much Ado About Nothing in 2024. However, I am determined to start whittling down the stack of thick books that I’ve tabled over the years (and which are largely unchanged from this photo from 2019). This stack includes Pamela, The Life of Greece (only coming up on three years), and, most recently, the complete Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis (currently bogged in the beginning of That Hideous Strength). Ah, gentle reader! I’ve reclaimed a large stack of comic books and comic collections/graphic novels from my youngest son’s room earlier this year, and they now claim the bottom shelf of that chair-side table, but I’ve only read a couple of them. Instead, I’m trying to read something from these longer books interleavened with other books. And so here I am reading, outerleavened, the Shakespeare.
I said this when reporting on Much Ado About Nothing in 2024:
When I mentioned I was reading this play and that I remembered the movie to my beautiful wife, she “remembered” seeing the movie with me as well as the play and the symphony. Which gave me pause: I remember seeing the film with a girl I dated before the woman who would become my wife, and I remembered seeing a play at Washington University with my beautiful then-girlfriend, but a symphony? Ah, she is thinking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Which is the next play in this collection, by the way. Which I will likely read before the 2020s end, but one never knows.
Score one for me on that last point, but it’s true otherwise (I think). We saw Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra…. what, 30 years ago? We were not yet married, and I picked up a Valentine’s Day package that included it probably circa 1998. Yeah, you know, that’s probably actually the year–we were dating, but we were not engaged, so that would be February 14, 1998. And we had the wedding march from that played at our wedding, so…. Also, I recall seeing a performance of the play at Washington University, where the students put on an updated performance where Puck, played by a woman, pretended to ride a motorcycle from scene to scene. My wife thinks she saw that performance with me, and I cannot pinpoint the date–it comes from that very busy couple of years between college and marriage, but if she thinks she saw it, we did.
So: A young woman, Hermia, is promised to a young man, Demetrius, by her father, but she loves Lysander. Helena loves Demetrius, who might have betrothed himself to her before abandoning her for Hermia. Hermia and Lysander want to run away as Helena must marry Demetrius or die. Helena brings Demetrius to the woods where they are to meet to prevent their escape. Meanwhile, the gods Oberon and Titania, married, are feuding over possession of a single waif, and Oberon engages Puck to sprinkle fairy dust on her eyes to make her fall in love with the first thing she sees (Titania’s eyes–Puck is a boy, I think, regardless of if he’s played by a girl or not). Also, Oberon wants Puck to put some dust on the Athenian’s (Demetrius’s) eyes so he will fall in love with the woman who is with him (Helena), but Puck dabs Lysander instead, and Lysander falls in love with Helena and renounces Hermia, and Helena feels like they’re all making mock of her. Hijinks ensue, Titania falls in love with an Athenian peasant out in the woods to practice for a play for the wedding of Theseus, the leader of Athens.
So it’s Much Ado in Midsummer, neh? A serviceable comedy with all of the Shakespeare tropes, again, better experienced live or after six years–we’ve got a play within the play, the love quadrangles, and so on. I’ve a couple of nights after reading this play picked up the next, and starting over the same thing with fairly small print and an interchangeable collection of characters kind of put me off.
A couple of other things this brings to mind:
I suppose I should scour the local universities’ Web sites more to see if they’re making Shakespeare available or to see whatever they’re putting on these days just so maybe the middle part of the 2020s is as packed as the middle 1990s were. Or, I suppose, I could retire to the chair and read.
Buy My Books!
Gentle reader, I have done it: I have read all the Ben Wolf books I already own before I go to Davenport, Iowa, for the cybersecurity convention where he has had a booth for the last couple of years (2024 and 2025). I have previously read:
The above books except for Unlucky are parts of series; this book, apparently, is a one-off as well.
In it, the remnants of humanity huddle together on Antarctica after a war between humans and the Magic Born, another race discovered in Antarctica that used magic. The rich people live in Cypress, which is earth-like; outcasts and lower classes live in The Thaw or The Slab, which are on the outskirts of civilization and are not heated as well. Mankind still has access to magic, and some people can use it a little bit. A Peacekeeper, one of the military law enforcement in the area, is from a good family framed for wrongdoing, and he barely escapes to the thaw alive–but a triple amputee. Another is an amnesiac young woman, perhaps an escapee from a science facility, who can process magic and transfer it to others. A third is the CEO of a medical company whose products will be eclipsed by a competitor who promises magic-based cures. The final one is a loner from outside of civilization who has especial impervious armor and is older than he should be. They band together to go to the lake under Antarctica to use a device the CEO and genius scientist says will end magic once and for all. But that’s not her plan at all.
I think this book is the best of the Ben Wolf books I’ve read, and I think the others helped to leaven the dough. It has an interesting premise, some good world building, and some characterization that differentiates the characters and gives them some depth–but this could be improved a bit with a little more interiority and less bickering (sometimes they go on with their tropes a couple of beats too long or too often). Wolf has his normal things (asking “Crystal?” for a response, not often given, of “Clear.” and “What the frost?”). Although it’s not self-consciously video-game-esque like Rickshaw Riot, I cannot help but think that the writing is still video-game-informed, as though the source material comes from video games and movies rather than other novels as fodder. But that’s my thesis that I’ve banged on while reading Wolf’s books and can retcon into my understanding of a lot of other self-published science fiction.
At any rate, as I mentioned, this is the last of the Wolf books I’ve already boughten, so that means I only have a history of the Quad Cities are and a book about growing up on a farm in Iowa to read before I’m caught up on at least the local interest and local author books, but a collection of Kipling verse and a Hemingway book short of having read all of the books I’ve bought in Davenport–although, to be honest, Kipling and Hemingway sound like some fun (re-)reads, so perhaps I’ll get to them before October.
But! I have learned from my beautiful wife that our trip to Davenport might not be a set thing for this October. She’s got a lot of other speaking engagements coming up, and there’s always a slight chance that we’ll have, you know, jobs come the autumn. But time will tell, and I will keep you posted, especially if I do buy books up there this October. But if I don’t, well, all might be forgotten.
At any rate, not bad. Almost rises to, say, Alan Dean Foster.
Buy My Books!
I got this film on a spree at Relics three years ago, and looking at the list of films I got, I’m pleased to say that I’ve watched maybe half of the 29 I bought. Which is pretty good for me, but the number of yet-to-watch films atop the cabinets has grown quite a lot despite those efforts.
So: The film’s protagonist, as it were, is Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, a half-Irish kid growing up in the middle fifties in sight of the local mob guy’s restaurant. He starts running errands for him, growing into a hijacker role along with full-Italian Tommy DeVito (not the quarterback) played by Joe Pesci and Jimmy played by Robert DeNiro. The first third tells about how they come up, the second kind of about a big heist they do and its aftermath, and then the final third is Hill going up for something and getting into the drug trade behind bars–and the final climax is a day where it all falls apart for him. Deep in the drug trade–against the wishes of Paulie, the neighborhood mob boss–he is hoping for a big score but the cops bust him, and he turns on and testifies against his former colleagues.
When I bought the film, Friar commented:
Goodfellas is like the anti-Godfather. No romanticized wiseguys, just crooks.
And I kind of agree with it. It looked like Hill might be the conscience of the group, maybe balking at how violent the groups became coming into the 1970s, at odds with his romanticization of them from his youth, but…. Nah. The film starts in media res, with the trio driving and hearing something in the back of the car–the dead body in the trunk wasn’t dead, and Jimmy and Tommy dispatch it further–and the first part is flashback leading up to that moment, and when the film catches up with it, I expected…. I dunno, something other than same old, same old with the latter dipping into the drug trade and then a rather abrupt jump into the passage of time to the final act where Hill has been too much into his own product and is strung out and under heavy suspicion. And then he testifies, and then he’s a schnook like the rest of us. So, ultimately, he is not the conscience of the film.
The film is based on an autobiography or memoir named Wiseguy by a former gangster. The film, of course, could not bear that title because the Ken Wahl television series claimed that title in the middle 1980s–perhaps also inspiried by the book, but more likely the free-flowing mob fascination of the era.
The film has punched above its weight, though, remaining timely at least through the two memes that one sees on the Internet even today. Tommy Gets Whacked and the over-the-top laughing image (although one still hears “Funny? Like a clown?” from the same scene from time-to-time). So people recognize images of it without, perhaps, understanding the context of the images, even now. Like so much of an Internetified education.
It took me two nights to watch the film for the oddest of reasons. Halfway through the movie, the screen went blue, and as my beautiful wife was home from her whatever that night, I didn’t look into it further, but apparently, for some reason, they put half of the movie on the back side of the DVD, so I had to flip it like a flippin’ laser disc. I dunno, maybe this is how media companies mark a serious mob movie–I have a set of The Godfather films which are on two VHS cassettes (because they’re recorded on the slow setting for better fidelity) which I watched almost five years ago and I think I have a two-VHS version of Casino around here somewhere, tentatively scheduled for viewing in 2031 because I go five years between mob movies apparently. But I’ve not seen that on DVDs before.
So: Well, one more down, which leaves only 8 of the 28 films I bought that day atop the cabinet (amidst dozens of others I have bought since then). Which I count as progress. But next month has two book sales, so….
Buy My Books!
Little Missmiss was nothing but a 野良猫, a noraneko, a stray cat on the streets when she was adopted into the International Fly Assassins Organization (IFAO).
There, she endured many years of brutal training montages to hone her skills in leaping, parkour, and swatting before she was ready for her first assignment.
And here it is: She is to rid her new adopted home of all intruding flies.
Help Little Missmiss in her efforts by tapping to leap onto the furniture and to leap to swat the flies in each room.
Jeez, that one was a long time coming, and then a short time realizing.
I had the idea for this game a long time ago–what, a decade? I read about a new platform for building games–GameSalad, which debuted in 2010, and I had this idea–I created an account, and then I got started with animating the cat, and I got…. One or two frames into it and abandoned it.
In 2026, it took about three weeks of prompting LLMs for everything from the graphics to the physics behind leaping and landing and swatting.
At any rate, if you have an iPad or iPhone, it’s under a buck here. It’s rated 13+ because of the cartoonish violence in it–a cartoon cat swatting a cartoon fly. I called that cartoonish violence in the age ratings wizard because I didn’t want to end up in the Hague because some Austrian toddler saw that and started torturing flies like he saw in the game. Where the flies are NOT tortured; they’re merely swatted.
Buy My Books!
Springfield lodging tax increase once again on the ballot to fund convention center
It has not been six months since the last time rejected this same proposal.
The vested interests who will benefit from this source of public funding will not be denied. And presumably the longer it takes to get the funding improved, the more money they will need to recoup in their investment in getting it passed.
Buy My Books!
According to The Daily Mail:
The Arsenio Hall Show ran for five years between 1989 and 1994 and featured hundreds of celebrities in what Hall hoped would be a house party on TV every night.
Hall made his show the home of hip-hop and helped break rappers like Snoop Dogg, Tupac and Ice Cube while musical guests included James Brown, Whitney Houston, and Luther Vandross.
The show would win two Emmys and lead Hall to star in hit movies like 1988 comedy, Coming to America, alongside Murphy.
Incredible! His show from 1989-1994 lead him to star in a hit movie in 1988! Time travel is real, sheeple!
Also, this photo caption should have alt-text that says, “Explain to me how you’re 23 years old and never say Delirous or Raw“:
Hall became known for his on-screen collaboration with Eddie Murphy, but recalls a boozy, drug-fueled night with the comedian despite the star’s clean-cut image at the time
Ay, child. Explain to me how it was in times I lived in and you did not.
(Link via Ed Driscoll on Instapundit.)
Buy My Books!
Pretty girls in movie poses with swords. Okay. Feeling empowered because they move like action heroes do in the movies.
I’m no EMEA expert, but I have fenced a little bit in my time, and I’ve fought in some broadsword bouts, and they were over pretty quick and did not involve spinning the blade. Or moving it far out of a guard position.
Buy My Books!
This morning, Pixy slugged a story thusly:
Trapped in a
closetself-driving taxi withVanna Whitea screaming homicidal leftist lunatic outside. (Seattle Times)
Ah, gentle reader, was he alluding to the original song by “Weird Al” Yankovic?
Or the recent(ish) remake by Electric Six?
Given that he has “senior” or “staff” somewhere in his title and he’s in Australia, probably “Weird Al.”
But it has reminded me that I am way behind on my Electric Six collection.
Buy My Books!
Chuck Norris has passed away after MfBJN has mentioned him twice this year: Someone’s Trying To Be A Chuck Norris Superfan in January and a review of Way of the Dragon, the Bruce Lee film that got Chuck Norris, 7 time American Karate champion, into films, earlier this month. The film still from the above article is from Way of the Dragon. The eulogies all mention that he was in Walker, Texas Ranger most likely because those were in syndication when the journalists were growing up two years ago.
Don’t let MfBJN happen to you.
As a reminder, actor Robert Blake and author Larry McMurtry passed away after a mention on this blog. Someone stay with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who costarred in Lee’s Game of Death and maybe Dick Van Dyke since I read a Diagnosis Murder book recently.
And let it be known it was Friar who mentioned Susanna Hoffs in a comment; I did not mention her by name on the blog. Oh, no. What have I done?
Buy My Books!
ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — Neighbors along Kingston Drive are calling for changes after a crash sent a car into a front porch, marking the latest in a series of crashes along the busy stretch.
St. Louis County Police said since 2025, there have been 22 crashes on Kingston Drive. Of those, nine involved injuries, totaling 14 people hurt, and one crash was fatal.
That deadly crash happened last month when a man was killed, and police said it was the result of speeding.
In 2023, one woman was killed after her car crashed into a home near the intersection of Kingston Drive and Telegraph Road. At the time, police said the vehicle was traveling southbound on Kingston Drive toward Telegraph Road at an “extremely high rate of speed.” However, police explained that it may have been due to a medical emergency.
That’s just down the road from here because Telegraph Road ran between Jefferson Barracks (and beyond) in the St. Louis area and Fort Smith, Arkansas. However, down here, it’s called Old Wire Road, and when it was a contiguous route beside the telegraph wire poles, it ran through my neighbor’s yard.
I used to live up there in Lemay, where this story takes place. My sainted mother died in a house a couple of blocks away. And my favorite aunt owned two different houses in the area, including the one I lived in with my mother for a time.
The roads have been what they are for a long time. What’s different now is the people driving on them.
Buy My Books!
US drivers see gas prices jump to their highest level since 2023 as Iran conflict drags on
Oh, I see. So: Gas prices are climbing to a level not seen since the last administration, where they got there somehow on their own without a conflict, and as the conflict drags on which means the conflict has lasted longer than the TikTok videos AP journalists train themselves on, I guess.
What we should think: Trump bad. Never mind that in 2023, gas prices were high for some reason which was not Trump. Maybe the threat of Trump? Go with that.
Buy My Books!
I probably have a little Irish blood in me, much like every other scalawag race in Europe, so please enjoy some traditional Irish music this St. Patrick’s Day:
Buy My Books!
Technically this is not a movie; it’s a 30 minute short which would have played part of a whole package including a main feature (or two!) in the theaters during the Great Depression. I bought it last August, and it kinda filled that spot where I kinda wanted to watch a film in the evening and kinda wanted to read. I could watch this (and have material for a blog post) and read after. Which I did!
You know, when I was a kid in the 1970s, Laurel and Hardy shorts and movies were still on television. And some people did not lose anything in watching it because secondary televisions (and sometimes even then primary televisions–we were not middle class in the suburbs somewhere where color television was guaranteed). But when I was under 10 years old, I lacked the patience to watch these older films (which includes the other pairings like Abbott and Costello, Ma and Pa Kettle, or groups like the Marx Brothers). But now that I am an old man and have more patience but less actual time to just zone out in front of the television, I often pick these old movies. Perhaps to capture a little flavor of my youth or something.
At any rate, this film, as I mentioned, is 30 minutes long. Laurel and Hardy and their wives are about to take a trip to Atlantic City for the weekend, but just as they are leaving, one of the guys at the lodge calls and tells Hardy about the party they’re throwing that evening. So Hardy fakes an illness and gets Laurel to take care of him for the weekend so they can go to the party. The wives go away, and then Laurel and Hardy try to dress in their lodge gear (which looks like jockey outfits), but Hardy has trouble with his boot, and discovers it’s Laurel’s boot, and a full half of the run time is slapstick of trying to get the boot on and then the boot off. The wives miss the last train to Atlantic City and decide to return, and they discover the ruse.
That’s it. A bunch of slapstick, tripping, walking into walls, and a little slapping/pushing of Laurel. A little of Laurel doing the whimpering that must have inspired Beaker on The Muppet Show. The boot gag probably went on too long, but it was the 30s, man. Sensibilities must have been different.
Buy My Books!
This is actually only the second of the Diagnosis Murder paperbacks that I bought in Berryville, Arkansas, five years ago (The Silent Partner was the first in 2022). Which is kind of odd, really, and I like the books by Lee Goldberg which I have read in this and the series tied in to the television series Monk. So I spend some time gutting out long books that I think I should read or that I’ve started reading and have started putting off finishing, suddenly I read a couple of books that I rather enjoy in the evenings. Which is why the stack of books beside the chair tends toward the thicker books, and I’m just reading everything else while I’m still working on them…..
At any rate, this book has almost two stories in it. A murdered woman dressed as a mermaid washes up on the beach outside Dr. Sloan’s house, and it might be related to his first case in 1962. So the book flashes back to that case when Sloan was just a resident at the hospital, when his son the police office was a baby, and his wife was still alive. Sloan uncovers a series of murders of young nursing students who were moonlighting as babysitters–and maybe prostitutes. This flashback comprises much of the story, and when it is resolved, it doesn’t help Sloan with the contemporary (20 year ago now, though, old man) murder, which turns into murders, of course, until he finally gets the picture–and almost becomes the contemporary murderer’s next victim–and the resolution parallels the one in the past.
At any rate, the pacing moves the reader along, the writing has enough depth to be interesting, and the characterization has enough flourish to not overwhelm, but to give you a sense of who the players even if you haven’t seen the show (as I mentioned previously, I only caught bits of it when visiting my sainted mother). There are touches of humor–it was a Dick Van Dyke show, after all–and some in jokes that are there for real fans (at one point, Dr. Sloan thinks about what it would have been like to go into show business in 1962 and expected he would only merit a half hour sitcom–which Dick Van Dyke did have with The Dick Van Dyke Show).
So I enjoyed it, and maybe I will have enjoyed it enough to pick up others I have, which are stacked on the broken bookshelf (unfixed in 12 years, so don’t expect it to be replaced or fixed soon). So I know where they are. However: You can’t have yer pudding if you don’t eat yer meat. How can you have yer pudding if you don’t eat your meat? I think I would read books much faster if I didn’t feel the need to live up to my English and Philosophy degree and did not innundate myself with audio courses exciting me about the source materials.
Buy My Books!
