Wilbur

The film Jacob's Ladder left me with terrible feelings of horror and sadness and despair. It is a really well-made film with excellent performances, and Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 stars out of four, but what an intense aura of sorrow. I was not at all surprised when the local theater took it out of rotation after a single week - who was going to go back and watch that a second time?

My request queue pulled up another book by Vincent B. Davis II, The Noise of War, which is an historical re-telling / historical fiction of the life of Quintus Sertorius, including the period from the disastrous Battle of Arausio through the reforms of Marius, the Battle of Aquae Sextiae and climaxes at the Battle of Vercellae, when Rome vanquished the demons of all the defeats at the hands of the Cimbri. Davis is clearly a fine writer, and the audiobook read by Joshua Saxon is very good. If you enjoyed Miles Cameron / Christian Cameron's books, then this might be right on target for you. Davis is a little more interested in the effects of war on the soldiers who do the fighting, and the story spends quite a bit of time exploring Survivor's Guilt and the way PTSD would have worked itself out in the ranks and minor officers of the late Republican and early Marian army. ASIOAF fans will also enjoy the political maneuvering that is shown to go on in the background, along with an unreliable narrator who is clearly still naive in this key facet of life. The protagonist's Stoic religious leanings allow modern readers to identify with him easily, as he expresses views moderns would applaud, such as abhorring slavery. Drawbacks to enjoying the story include the fact that the narrator has PTSD and survivor's guilt, and no one will really enjoy living in the head of someone suffering from these ills. On the positive side, the character works his way through these difficulties, and the development is satisfying as a result. Secondly, this book includes the current trope of the Inappropriate Beneficial Jewish Side Character, who appears in the story to dole out anachronistic psychotherapy and plot-driving utilities to the protagonist, disappears when unneeded, and then re-appears to applaud the protagonist in the denouement. I don't understand why editors aren't chopping indulgent nonsense like this latter item out of works published today - it injures the suspension of disbelief. Davis walks the line between immersing the reader in the world of the late Republic and moving the story along at a brisk pace with great success. I could very easily have withstood more information about the process of adopting a dead brother's children, or the trade in horses and slaves in the wake of Roman victory, or the settlement of the Po valley by Roman veterans. But I also appreciate the way the story makes its way efficiently between these key battles that settled the form of the later Roman Empire and the usages of the Roman Army and at the same time the home life and political life of the denizens of the Italian cities. This isn't a giant book, but the reader gets enough insight to empathize with a number of different people living various lives of the time. Despite the rawness of the PTSD and the annoyance of the persistent trope, the story works successfully to draw the reader into the time and place and concerns of the time, covers the political disturbances that would shortly end the Republic, and gives the reader a look into the life of the Germanic nomads who threatened the existence of Rome for so long. I will now intentionally and actively seek out more of Vincent B. Davis II's works.

An interesting motivation for France to more strongly support Ukraine is the way that Russia has supplanted the France neo-colonies in the Sahel across Africa.

Vinge had actual experience in physical science labs at San Diego State, and it showed in his Reality War / Across Realtime novels. The Motorola Physical Science Labs and Digital DNA Labs in both Tempe, AZ and Mesa, AZ had numerous scientific instrumentation servers named after his characters and locations from these and True Names. His portrayal of such environments was the best and most realistic one I ever read until Walter Jon Williams' Days of Atonement.

Lewin Day talks about how the Aussie GP showed that the rejection of Andretti was a crock. Don't Tell Me Andretti Isn't Good Enough For F1 When Williams Can't Even Field Two Cars - The Autopian

It just shows how unserious these clowns are as politicians that one likely result of filing a motion to vacate could be that the Democratic leader becomes speaker. The only way they stop shooting themselves in the feet is when they pause to reload. Also, how far out in the distant political-spectrum boonies is MTG when she is attacking a Culture War Rightist like Johnson?

Here is RLL's video on the naval conflict in the Black Sea.

The trailers for the Mad Max film look bad, very CGI, on my computer. But in the theater, the trailers look amazing. Anyone know why?

We had our Presidential Preference election here in Arizona yesterday, with the generally expected outcomes. I volunteered as a Maricopa County polling station clerk, and the systems and processes all worked smoothly, incorporating a number of marginal improvements over the last operation. The voting apparatus worked well, with only a single re-start required in the 13-hour open polling hours - one of the LexMark ballot printers. In general voters came with sufficient voter ID, and the SiteBooks have several different ways for us to process the various combos or identification Arizona state law requires. We had a fairly steady trickle of voters, despite the fact that the competitors from both parties are already clear. The judges alerted everyone to the two first-time voters, one a recently naturalized immigrant and one an 18-year-old girl with her dad, and we gave them both a big cheer. The voters were generally orderly and cordial. A small minority had passive-aggressive comments regarding various conspiracy theories, and one or two were unruly and uncivil in minor ways. A new local district GOP party chair (and Trump nut) came in and wasted everyone's time by objecting to the language on the signature screen, requiring some calls to the county HQ, but eventually she voted and left. I am not really sure what she expected to prove, since she clearly came geared up to fight over it without understanding the processes used to deal with the situation. Even the GOP monitor grew bored and went back to her seat and rolled her eyes after ten minutes or so of it. After the marshal closed the polls, it took us less than two hours to collect, count, document, seal and lock the various types of ballots, control slips, affidavits, spoiled ballots, tabulator paper reports, unused ballot paper stock, envelopes, etc. from our polling location. The electronic voting information had, of course, already been transmitted to the HQ, but we had about two-thirds of the voters bring their mail-in ballot and deposit it in the ballot drop box. Again, the training the county required us to take, the comprehensive manuals and checklists, etc. were all quite good. It was an interesting, if long and tiring, experience. Everyone should volunteer to work on a poll at least once to exercise your civic muscles.

Historia Civilis is back in the game.

Another outcome as a result of Trump's overthrow of the National Party apparatus: "Christina Bobb has been named the Republican National Committee’s senior counsel for election integrity." She was the lawyer who asserted to the Feds in writing that Trump had no classified documents at Mar-A-Lago. I am not sure how she still has her legal license after that one. And she was the "reporter" and at the same time the go-between for the CyberNinjas and the Arizona State Senate Republicans (ie. crazy Trump people). In this role, "...among other things, Bobb advised Logan not to tell audit workers that he was running out of money and not to tell donors about the audit’s shortcomings. (One of those shortcomings would later turn out to be his admission that he couldn't tally the ballots he'd spent months hand counting.)" Herp a derp.

Last quarter Fragile Bird reviewed a Josephine Tey mystery, and this inspired me to pick out one of her books that I had never read before, The Franchise Affair. The audiobook read by Karen Cass is a top quality production, but I prefer the older one read by Carol Boyd. The Boyd version I preferred was a copy of the books-on-cassette model, so the sound is marginal, but Boyd is a great reader. Tey is a smooth, sophisticated writer who has a great deal of sympathy for all of her characters, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. I would say that she is the most compassionate of all the golden age mystery writers, and while her protagonist may not be as charismatic as those of Allingham, Christie, or Sayers, the rest of the characters in her books receive a more humanistic treatment. In this particular book, Tey writes a compelling mystery set after World War 2 that is post-War Britain without the whining, and with a surprising amount of romance. Georgette Heyer or Lois McMaster Bujold would be proud to have written this book, in which the events of the crime and the slow discovery of the solution ease a comfortable country solicitor out of his pleasant daily routine and propel him into something more. One of the best features of the story is the sense of inclusion that the characters have, and how that inclusion spreads to embrace more of the characters as the story unfolds. This is set in the world of Tey's main detective, Inspector Grant, but he only features in a cameo role. As a result, the story and the main characters both have room to breathe in a way that the stories of protagonist-centric detective heroes of Allingham, Christie and Sayers never really do. Highly recommended.

With the last decade's increasing tempo of attacks on American democracy, I find that my interest in the political struggles that surrounded the death of the Roman Republic is strongly increased. Vincent B. Davis II's novella Son of Mars, a brief telling of the return of Gaius Marius to Rome, and his interactions with the popular and noble factions, is a strong entry to this sort of historical fiction. Read by Joshua Saxon, the audiobook does a good job of portraying how a political party can discard principals in pursuit of power with the belief that the end justifies the means. The story illustrates how a group of politicians, their minds target-fixated on a particular political aim that they see as the strongest need for their society, can be willing to throw off the constraints of normal political processes, and in doing so, destroy those political processes and prepare the ground for the rise of authoritarians.

I have been a little surprised that the Ukrainian drone attacks to date have not been focused on the cracking installations, since they are indeed far more difficult to repair or replace than simple storage facilities. Perhaps the Ukrainian drone accuracy and control is improving to the point where they have increased confidence in hitting the FCC units themselves.

Michael Shea is an excellent choice for this list. He was the anointed successor to Jack Vance to continue the story of Cugel the Clever and his misadventures with The Quest for Simbilis, and his further stories along the same vein improved upon it. While Vance would have written a book with funnier dialogue and more hilariously awkward situations, Shea engaged Cugel's various inherent abilities to advance the plot and extract the characters from the predicaments in which they became entangled. He also raised the moral peril, with Actual Hell as a valid endpoint for the protagonists! Furthermore, his two novels The Extra (2010) and Assault on Sunrise (2013) both could easily have taken place in the universe of Dagmar Shaw or Caine Black Knife.

I agree that owning multiple English, British, or even European clubs is a terrible idea for exactly the reason you describe. I wonder, however, if having ownership of something like an NASL club wouldn't be beneficial all around. The Tricky Reds get a feeder / loaner / development club in the US, and the US get some useful guidance at the NASL level, as those guys got the shaft from the MSL.

Yes, if the MotM wasn't Mac, then it was Endo, and vice versa.

Is the idea of ranked choice becoming an item of discussion in the nation's political circles? The reason I ask is that my local district (4) GOP leadership has turned over completely to Trumpists, and they have sent out a text blast to all the Republican party voters on the LD4 rolls last week. The text is pretty amateur hour, as it doesn't call for action, it doesn't ask for donations, and it doesn't recommend voting for a specific candidate. It just complains about ranked choice voting. I can't find any sort of proposed legislation in the Arizona house or senate related to ranked choice, it isn't a topic on our Maricopa County elections volunteer forum, and I haven't read any media talking about it outside occasional mentions in this thread. The only place I had heard about it was this tantrum of a text last week, which provided me with my daily recommended allowance of exclamation marks for the rest of the year.

Kevin Dotson being re-signed in LA is a big win for everyone concerned. He was a road grader in Pittsburgh, and it was a shame the Steelers' OC and OL coach could not figure out how to play him.

Ha - you have to space your series out with something completely different in between each book, not Bogart the whole series in one go! Seriously, though, if you had to wait several years to get through the whole bunch, it eases back on those sorts of problems, which are very real for me also when I do a straight run. I think the same thing about those other two negatives, and it may be that WJW planned to deal with them later, but then went and wrote the really excellent Dagmar Shaw short stories, novellas and novels since then. Also, if you like WJW's style and have already read Dagmar Shaw, I strongly recommend his Days of Atonement. No one has written as accurate and engaging story of real-world physical science research since Vernor Vinge, and it might be a good palate cleanser from the too-clever-by-half character you mentioned. The protagonist of DoA is definitely human.

Danny Sullivan ranks the Dune books by un-filmability: https://defector.com/dune-novels-ranked-by-unfilmability

That certainly makes it an intriguing entertainment option. The trailer looked good, but science fiction as well? Count me in.

One thing that the USN had better be on top of is the way that the Ukrainians have been so successful in attacking naval resources without any real Navy of their own. Drone attacks on Russian Black Sea elements could very easily be replicated on American ships off Yemen pretty shortly, given how Ukraine has shown the world how to do it.

Who is the Russian propaganda supposed to influence? I can't imagine any Americans giving a damn if the Ukrainians turn the Kerch Bridge into metallic fragments. Do Europeans care? Why?

I derived a lot of pleasure from reading Vonda N. McIntyre's Dreamsnake for the first time a few weeks ago, so I picked up another audio version of one of her books, Superluminal. This audiobook was read by the consistent Rachel Evans. Both of these books impress me with McIntyre's skill as a writer, although Superluminal is a very different kind of work. In it, McIntyre combines several different flavors of science fiction, gathering some high-quality threads from Golden Age, New Wave, Hard, and even some feeling of proto-cyberpunk and definite early eco-SciFi. I have no idea (other than some truly terrible book covers) why I have never read any of her work previously. In Superluminal, she introduces a character who engages in the sort of meandering exploration of a very far future human society in the vein of a Jack Vance To Live Forever or Maske: Thaery sort of culture. Another character is also introduced, and they form a relationship within the weird society, and the first ten percent of the novel is this growing relationship and unhurriedly exploring the culture that the two characters inhabit. Then the book introduces a third character in a sort of ecological warfare SciFi situation for another 5% of the plot, and we explore that world. Although I can't put my finger on why, this section brings to mind the sensibility of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood in a positive sense. So 15% of the book is taken up with this sort of conversation and world-building, but nothing really seems to be happening and who the protagonist is and what he or she wants is unclear, so I am wondering whether I should continue with it. The writing is good, however, and the setting has some strong cyberpunk political undertones, so I stick with it. Then all three characters suddenly get their marching orders and travel separately and then together, and the plot is both Golden Age space exploration and New Wave navel-gazing and some hard science mathematics all mixed together, and the Action quotient fires way up there, in a very James Blish-writes-a-Star-Trek-novel sort of fashion. I am not sure what the stakes really are, because the brief New Wave-style navel-gazing is hard for me to keep in focus, but the characters have agency and are truly likeable or dislikeable as necessary for the plot to work. And now they all have a sense of urgency and take action to get to where they think they need to be. (Trying to write this without spoilers.) Now, reading the previous three paragraphs, you wouldn't think that this novel could be wrapped up in a satisfactory manner than makes the reader happy to have spent that effort, particularly in the first portion of the book. But Vonda McIntyre does indeed bring the book to a climax that makes sense and is satisfying. And once again, she leaves the reader with a sense of wanting to know more about the world and the people she writes about. These books are tricky to report on without spoiling future first-time readers, so let's say that some hidden and unexpected gems do appear to reward the careful reader. I had to go back and re-listen to a specific chapter again. This is another book where McIntyre deals with human sexuality in an extremely mature fashion, much more so than the New Wave authors had done in the decade prior. You can see why Robert Heinlein dedicated Friday to her (among others), as he probably wished that he could deal with sexuality in his books with as much forthrightness and in such an open manner. Maybe most men are just too prone to engage in wish-fulfillment when they address sex in their stories. For McIntyre, though, sex is portrayed a valuable thing, not the motivator for the characters, but as a means of communication and intimacy. Very positive stuff, and not cringey. Vonda McIntyre was a writer worthy of her Hugo and Nebula awards based on these two books.