Banks and Gristhorpe hunt a psychopath.

Peter Robinson. Wednesday’s Child (1996) An early DCI Banks tale. A child goes missing, a gruesomely killed corpse is found above the town, DCI Banks and Supt Gristhorpe split the load, but the two cases converge (of course). The perp is a text-book psychopath. Robinson’s plotting is near immaculate.
     I find these books a good read. Robinson’s ability to invest even secondary characters with enough suggestive detail for realism, and his leisurely but steady narrative pace make for a better than average entertainment. He keeps the gore to a minimum, sets the scenes well, and traces the twisting and turning and occasionally dead-ended path of the investigation clearly. Recommended, as is the TV series. ***

Rumpole's Swan Song

 

 John Mortimer. Rumpole and the Primrose Path (2003) The last collection of short stories. Rumpole has recovered from his heart attack, but it takes some time for his career to restart. These tales show him in all his glory, objecting to and fighting against the inevitable miscarriages of justice caused by police tunnel vision and occasional corruption, presumptions of guilt by respectable lawyers who should be assuming the opposite, and biased judges. The impression that Mortimer is using Rumpole to vent his flustration at the misnamed justice system is stronger than ever. I won’t spoil you pleasure by recounting any of the tales. Buy or borrow the book, and enjoy finding out for yourself. For more information, check Wikipedia. Four novels were published after this last series of short stories.

Recommended ****

Spike Milligan at War

 

 

Spike Milligan. Adolf Hitler, My Part in His Downfall (1971), Rommel: Gunner Who? (1975), Monty, His Part in My Victory (1976), Mussolini, His Part in My Downfall (1978). Milligan’s “war biography”. There were three more books, which I haven’t found yet. Milligan was drafted into the Royal Artillery, rose to the rank of Lance Bombardier (corporal), and in Italy was demoted by a career martinet of a Major. He also suffered shell shock. The last book ends with his spending time in a psychiatric ward.
     The first volume has a good deal of The Goon Show in it, but as time and the war progress the tone becomes more realistic and darker. Milligan still attempts humour, but it feels more and more like a defence against the madness that surrounds him and that begins to affect his psyche. He suffered from bipolar disorder for the rest of his life; there is some evidence that the war either triggered or worsened it.
As records of how the war felt to a fighting soldier, these books are priceless. I read them compulsively. My uncle served with the Warwickshire Mounted Infantry in North Africa. Milligan’s book gave me some taste of what it was like for him, too. Recommended. ****

Covid-19 denial by people who have it:

 

An ER nurse in South Dakota tweeted about some of her patients who deny they have covid-19.: 

How does one react to this report? I can see that some people would deny their peril in any case. We don't want to face  the near-certainty of death. But I suspect that most such denials would be versions of hope, a clinging to the near-zero chance of recovery. What this nurse reports is something else: denial triggered by politics, by ideological poison, by delusions promoted by a demagogue. What's worst about is that it prevents the comfort of family connection, of seeing and talking with loved ones.

Update: On reflection, I think that in these cases politics and ideology complicate what is a normal human reaction to the prospect of imminent death. I don' t think it's common, though.

Update 2021-09-09: I've now read stories about the Delta variant surge in Oregon and other places. The anecdotes are heartbreaking. Yet vaccine-denial and covid-denial continue, even in those places hardest hit by the latest surge in infections and death. The sad fact is that an unvaccinated person admitted to ICU has a less than 50% chance of surviving.

 

Middle school kid adapts to real life: Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't

 Judy Blume Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (1971). Judy Blume annoyed a lot of people who believed that children’s and young people’s literature should present severely filtered versions of the real world. Why some adults think that protecting their offspring from reality will somehow help them is puzzle to me. Not that I want to push children into the dark, but when they encounter it, I want them to have some defences. Stories that acknowledge the dark, and show their protagonists as dealing with it, provide just such defences. That’s what this page-turner of a book does.
    Thirteen-year-old Tony Miglione’s father sells an invention to an entrepreneur, which means the family can move to Rosemont, and live in a big house, with a maid and such. The neighbours’ son Joel and Tony become friends, Tony develops a crush on Joel’s sister Lisa, Grandma is banished from the kitchen, and so on. Joel doesn’t know how to handle the stress of seeing the changes in his family, Joel’s shop-lifting, and the physiological and psychological effects of puberty. But he survives the year, and while there are no earth-shaking developments in his life, Tony realises that life is improving for him. The book ends on a note of “to be continued”, which may not be so for the book, but will certainly be so for Tony.
    Blume seems to have invented the “young adult” genre. This now almost 50-year-old book still reads well. Recommended ****

 

Comment on anti-vaxxers (updated)

I've updated the post. Click on this one.

Long Covid

Comment on a report in New Scientist, October 31-November 6, 2020, pp. 10-13.

The latest data show that symptoms of covid-19 persist for up to four months in some people. Probably longer, as the study stopped at that point. The symptoms range from fatigue through “brain-fog” and memory loss through problems breathing. Blood clots threaten to provoke strokes. Headaches are common. Damage to heart, lungs, and other organs has been observed. Hospitalised people appear most likely to suffer these symptoms. The data are incomplete, but it’s likely that around 5% of people who recover from covid-19 will experience more or less serious symptoms two months or more after the onset of the infection.

I think that somewhere between one and five percent will suffer from “long covid”, defined as debilitating symptoms for two months or longer. That’s a serious consequence, since these people will need some continuing care, and/or accommodation at work. The more severe cases will be unable to work at all. The economic losses will be high, combining lost productivity and cost of care. Or, to put it another way: a significant proportion of human and other resources will be diverted from the usual economic activities.

Unanswered questions: Who is most likely to be affected, and why? What kinds of treatment will mitigate long covid? How long will it actually last?

Model Railroad Building tips

 

 Jeff Wilson. Basic Structure Modeling (2005) A well-done overview of the craft, with good co-ordination of text and photos. In the Olden Days, the photos would have been line-drawings. Each chapter deals with one main aspect (plastic kits, roofs, painting, etc). Wilson writes clearly, adding significant detail and tips in the right places, and cross-references to other chapters when the current topic skims over some important content.
     Like any such book, best suited to the reader who has tried the craft and realises they need to know more. Wilson could have emphasised a couple of points, such as the need for painting both sides of wooden (and card) parts. I found it a welcome reminder and organiser of what I already knew, which added up to inspiration for building a couple more small cabins. Just need to decide on the colour first.... ***

Photography for Modellers

 

Mark Hembree, ed. A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos (1991) An odd duck of a book. Four skilled photographers of model railroads (Dave Frary, Malcolm Furlow, John Olson, Paul Scoles) write about how they do it. Beautifully printed, deftly organised text, diagrams, and photos, a pleasure to look at, and to read if you want some insight and instruction. But the puzzle is, Who is the intended audience?  Photographers who want to specialise in scale models? Scale modellers who want to take better photos?
     The four photographers write well. They use 35 and large-format film cameras, hence the emphasis on lighting, exposure, and film choice. Anyone who took photography even semi-seriously in the pre-digital age will feel a few twinges of nostalgia reading about main and fill lights, daylight filters, four-minute exposures and the problems of reciprocity. The advice about lighting, focus, and depth of field is still relevant, and the photos repay study for angle, composition, and so on. The photographers were better known as modellers. That’s why this book is a puzzle: model railroaders looking at layout photos don’t think of them as photographs, but as documents, and inspiration.
     A good book. ***

Pain in Poems: Spike Milligan's Open Heart Surgey

 

Spike Milligan. Open Heart Surgery. (1979) A book published to cash in on the spike in Goon Show popularity in the 1970s/80s. A few of the verses are worth reading twice. Most are diary entries, of interest only to Spike and those who care about him. I like the Goon Show, and love Milligan’s off-kilter squint at the world. But these verses don’t do it for me. Reading them, I feel like a voyeur. The decorations by Laura Milligan relate to the companion verses in their expressions of similar hurts. *1/2

Conan Doyle's Father

 

Michael Baker. The Doyle Diary (1978) Reproduction of one of Charles Altamont Doyle’s sketchbooks, made while he was at Sunnyside, a lunatic asylum in which he spent most of the last years of his life. He was Arthur Conan Doyle’s father. Arthur in his early reminiscences dealt harshly with his father, who was not the financial success he could perhaps have been. Later, Arthur mellowed, perhaps because both his medical and his personal experience showed him that Charles was a sick man, badly treated. Baker tells the story at length, not easy to do, because there is little documentary evidence of Charles life, and partly because there was a good deal of reticence about the details of his ill health. Baker concludes that Charles suffered from epilepsy made worse by alcoholism. Charles was not a pushy man, he lacked his older brothers’ ambition and energy. Dicky Doyle had a successful career as a cartoonist for Punch, for example. Perhaps alcohol was self-medication for his sense of failure.
     The drawings and text of Charles sketchbook show us a man of gentle feelings and sometimes mischievous humour. He describes himself as a “harmless old gentleman”, which on the evidence he was, He certainly wasn’t a lunatic, even by the vague standards of the time. Long-term care homes existed, but were little more than hotels with some medical services, so the asylum was the only place to tend him when he became unable to care for himself and his family.
     I don’t recall where I found this book, or when. And addition to a collection of Holmesiana, and a document relevant to the study of our treatment of the harmless ones among us. **½

Learning to See in the Dark (poems by Lorraine Janzen)

 

 

 Lorraine Janzen. Learning to see in the dark (2003) Janzen was teaching at Nipissing University when she published this book of poems. She is now professor emerita at Ryerson, and has earned a reputation as a pioneer in studying the relationship between text and image in illustrated books.
These poems are readable, and collectively show us a persona that’s sensitive to her world, and not quite sure how to reconcile the light and the dark. The title suggests a method, but there’s no guarantee it will work. As poems, they show a nice talent. Her ability to make something with words isn’t always as strong as her ability to imagine something worth making.
Nevertheless, here are some random lines that made me read twice:

Shuffling the leaves of past and present
I see footsteps everywhere
shadows so deep
you could disappear forever.
...
There’s a ghost
in my mother’s typewriter

It eats the endings of her words
...
There’s a hole in my heart
where you passed through

I’ve kept the bullet
wrapped in burlap

In the spring
I’ll plant it in my garden.

Most of Janzen’s verse is discursive, it’s rhetoric written line-wise to guide the voice into its meaning. You discover a mind alert to memory and meaning, even if not always sure of its insights. A good read for anyone who likes poetry, and certainly, I think, a souvenir for anyone who knows her personally. **½

Plagues and the Fall of Empires

 

 Plague in Marseilles, 1720

Yesterday (November 2nd), I read an article in Junior Skeptic (included in Skeptic Magazine). It told the history of plagues, of epidemics, of pandemics. How an unknown disease killed upwards of 20% of the population of Athens (404 BCE). How a plague during Marcus Aurelius’s reign (161-180 CE) killed 20% or more of the citizens of Rome. How the first wave of bubonic plague killed somewhere between 25 and 50 million people in Europe (it reached Constantinople in 542). The second plague pandemic killed about 1/3rd of the European population, and some settlements were wiped out completely. (The last plague epidemics occurred in the 1600s and 1700s.) How smallpox ravaged Europe. How the Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas, killing up to 90% of indigenous populations.

In every case, major political and economic change followed. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War. Rome became weak, and finally lost its hegemony a couple of centuries later. The bubonic plague finished off the western Roman Empire. And so on. A little extra research showed that the second and third waves of bubonic plague caused Europe-wide wars and re-arranged the remnants of the Roman Empire. Even the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 caused disruption: the Roaring 20s were as much a reaction to it as to the Great War.

And generally speaking, people forgot the great plagues almost as soon as they fizzled out. School histories tend to ignore them. In fact, I didn’t know about the Athenian epidemic until I read this article; and I thought I had learned a pretty good overview of ancient Greek history.

We don’t want to be reminded that we are subject to the random appearance of pathogens. Even now, when SARS-COV-2 is infecting people, there are many who claim it’s a hoax, or no worse than the flu, or caused by G5 phone towers, or whatever. Anything, it seems, rather than face up to the terrifying truth: we have no defences against new pathogens. And another, much less convenient, truth: that these new pathogens transfer from animals to us. Which means that as climate change alters ecosystems, it also alters the interactions between humans and other animals, and so increases the odds that a new pathogen will emerge.

One of the factors in today’s US presidential election is covid-19. Mr Trump persists in downplaying its severity and perils. Mr Biden persists in using covid-19 as a symbol for Mr Trump’s failures as a President.

We shall see what happens. But in any case, the American Empire has begun its downward trajectory.

See Wiki’s article on SARS-COV-2

Pandemic statistics: bad news, good news.

Katharine Cove, Lake Superior, 2001

 

This morning's US covid-19 death count is 231,566. Canada stands 10,262. See Johns Hopkins Covid-19 Dashboard for more. That's the bad news. The good news is that the case-fatality rate is decreasing: fewer infected people are dying. The reason is a mix of good and bad news: In both countries the infection rate of younger people has gone up. Older people die at ten times the rate (or more) of younger people. So there's what at first glance looks like a paradox: much higher daily case numbers, not many more daily deaths.

Other considerations: 

a) Younger people tend to be the wage earners, so their higher case numbers affects the labour market, which is already a mess because the pandemic has reduced demand, and so reduced the need for labour.

b) The long-term effects of covid-19 range from longish recovery times to varying degrees of physiological and cognitive damage. The data suggest that 5% or so of covid-19 recover with such in long-term effects. In the long run, that could have worse effects than the present infection rates.

c) The economy is in serious trouble, because too many people are still thinking in terms of getting back to normal. The pandemic has shown that a very large segment of our economy has relied on discretionary spending, aka as whim and desire. This segment will not return to its former profitability.

d) We hear a lot about anti-mask demonstrations, but in general, most people do wear masks, which I think means that we are generally more aware of our connections to the larger community. Which brings me to that last comment for today:

e) Most of us have found that we haven't taken the casual daily contacts, the greetings, and chats etc seriously enough. We need social connection, we need face-to-face connection. Screens and tinny voices coming from inadequate speakers aren't enough.