Opening Night (Book review)

     Ngaio Marsh Opening Night (1951) The old Unicorn theatre has been reborn as the Vulcan. We’re back in familiar territory: the great actor-manager, the leading lady, a number of skilled actors doing a professional job of the secondary characters, assorted theatre staff and stage crew, and the look, sound, and smell of a working theatre. The twist: a New Zealander, remote cousin of the actor-manager, ends up at the theatre after failing to get any work anywhere else. She starts as the star’s dresser, then becomes the understudy of the crucial second lead, played by the niece of the star’s husband, who plays the hero’s antagonist, and is the victim of a murder dressed up as suicide. There are assorted other relationships, past, present, and developing, that interfere with the investigation of the crime, but Alleyn and Fox and the rest of the team solve the riddle in a night of hard work.
     This book feels painted by the numbers: the puzzle takes center stage, in part because it echoes the earlier murder. Marsh is too good a writer to give us merely 2D characters, but most of this lot are only 2½D. **

Steampunk Nintendo case (link)

A story via Boing Boing about a nice uncle who made a steampunk case for an old Nintendo unit:
http://boingboing.net/2012/09/27/steampunk-nintendo-casemod.html
Hey, that's what uncles are for!


Steampunk is an art movement that uses faux-Victorian design and engineering styles to create an alternative-universe of technology. Lovely stuff purely as art, wonderful as fantasy, and inspiring for those who want to think about how the world might have evolved if tipping-point events had happened sooner (or later) than they did in our history. More at:
http://www.steampunk.com/

Help Kickstart a mod to Alien Swarm (link)

Check out this if you like games. Check it out if you like supporting struggling artists. My friend (and former student, so I know he's good) Tim Carter looking for support to develop a new campaign for Alien Swarm:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/70691618/reduction-the-bug-war-on-earth-sci-fi-game-campaig

It works as posted, I've tested it.

UPDATE: The campaign is now over. Unfortunately, only about 10%of the needed funds were promised.

Swing, Brother, Swing (Book review)

Ngaio Marsh Swing, Brother, Swing (1949) Lord Pastern, an eccentric peer, develops a passion for drumming and persuades Breezy Bellair to let him play with his band. His stepdaughter Felicity falls for Rivera, the oleaginous accordion player and drug dealer. Rivera is murdered during a performance at the Metronome in full view of the audience, which includes the peer’s family, all of whom detest Rivera. Alleyn and Troy happen to be present also, which makes Alleyn a witness in his own case.
      The puzzle is more ingenious than usual, mostly because Lord Pastern, an egocentric clever idiot, attempts to misdirect the police: he wants to produce the correct solution when the police have given up.
     But as usual it’s the characters that fascinate. I came across an interview on New Zealand radio, in which Marsh said she started composition of her crime stories with a group of people, not a puzzle. She claimed not to be very good at inventing a puzzles, an observation confirmed by some of her readers. Her focus on character explains the charm of her books, at least for me. The Golden Age of detective fiction is stuffed with books and stories that are little more than abstract puzzles, like word problems concocted for algebra class, but with the characters given names rather than letters.
     Marsh is very good at using dialogue to show how people can be their own worst enemies, frustrating their chances at happiness, delaying the police in their inquiries, and causing present hurts and preventing past hurts from healing. It’s odd but true that Alleyn and Fox are usually the most colourless and least imposing characters in the room. This follows partly from their technique of cool but ruthless pursuit of facts, and partly from their role as investigators. We want to know the facts, but we also want to know about the investigator. This creates a tension, a division of interest, which creates a narrative problem. Marsh solves it by asides, scenes interposed that show Alleyn and Troy, or Alleyn and Fox alone. These advance the back story: we find out that Troy is pregnant, and that Fox will be godfather.
     One of Marsh’s best. ***½

Bonk! (Book Review)

Mary Roach Bonk! (2008) The subtitle, “The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex” both describes the book and sets the tone. It’s a history of scientific research into sex, research
made very difficult by the fact that humans are the only mammals who feel squeamish about coupling in public. The result is both a compendium of well-established facts and more or less dubious speculations,  many of which are still circulated in school playgrounds, sex-ed classes, and doctor’s offices.
     It’s clear that Roach likes sex, but likes research and reporting even more. She has a mordant wit, exhibited in asides and footnotes that demonstrate that she pays attention not only to the facts, but also the subjects’ feelings. She likes puns, too, a weakness I share. Our embarrassment about sex promotes euphemism, arch allusion, and jokes, a fact that Freud misinterpreted to mean that all humour is sexual. Recommended as an addition to one’s knowledge of both history and sex. I’m sure that the book could help relieve the anxieties of the naive and untutored. ***

Dugald Train Disaster (Book review)

The Springfield Women’s Institute Dugald Train Disaster, Memories from 1947 (n. d., internal evidence indicates 2006 or 2007) 55 years ago, a train carrying people returning from the cottage country of Minaki to Winnipeg failed to take the siding at Dugald and crashed head-on into the eastbound Continental that was waiting for it there. The subsequent inquiry found that the Minaki special had been running too fast, and that the signals had been functioning, hence the engine crew were to blame. But a few details recalled by the survivors suggest that it was at least partly mechanical failure that caused the collision. 31 people, including the engineer and fireman on the Minaki special, are known to have died; some of the people quoted in this book think there were more.  The wooden coaches of the Minaki special burned; 23 people could not be identified and were buried in a mass grave, now marked by a cairn.
     The effect of these memoirs is heart breaking. The stories are factual accounts, with no or very little embellishment of the kind some writers use to generate horror. People are simply telling their stories, many of which sound as if they were transcribed from speech. It’s the omission of details and emotions that make these stories so effective. I have the impression that these survivors have lived with horror and grief for many years, and have coped with it by reducing their memories to as purely objective factual accounts as they could. That leaves the reader to imagine how it must have felt. It’s what we imagine of the scene at the time, and the aftermath of recalled horror, that makes us grieve, too. The sub-text throughout is that of a the happy ending of a carefree weekend turned into mutilation and death.
     The booklet bears all the evidence of an amateur production, but that makes it even more affecting. The Dugald disaster has been the background of daily life in that farming community for over 50 years. Not an easy collective memory to live with. ***

More Losers (Book review)

Ben Wicks More Losers (1982) A collection of weird news, accompanied by Wicks’ charming cartoons. Wicks does not, like Chuck Shepherd, guarantee factuality, but none of the reported incidents are obvious urban legends. One can read the book in about half an hour; it’s a pleasant way to spend 30 minutes. It’s also fun to dip into again.
    And while there are a plethora of losers, there are also some winners: “Calvin Coolidge was once approached by a young girl who excitedly gushed, “Oh, Mr. President, Poppa says if I can get three words out of you he will buy me a fur coat.” The president snapped back, “Father wins.” **