First Looks category archive

A well-turned phrase, from The Eye of Osiris, by R. Austin Freeman:

. . . wiping his hands off, with an air of finality, on the posterior aspect of his trousers.

Badtux has a theory why, after many persons have been productively working from home for the past year, corporate managements are pushing for a return to the office (for example). He suggests that much of middle management fears being revealed as–er–less than relevant.

Having spent my career in corporate America, methinks he may be onto something.

Hal Crother struggles to understand the recent surge in violence against persons of Asian descent.

And cannot.

Here’s a bit from his article:

What in hell were they (the persons doing the violence–ed.) thinking? Once again we encounter a wall of stupidity that’s much too high to scale. And we experience the same panic that seized us on Jan. 6. They CAN’T think! They are cognitively disconnected. Reality, for them, is like a distant star on a cloudy night, a light that never enters their field of vision. Yet they vote, they poke at their cellphones—-they reproduce, God help us. And one major political party not only embraces and encourages them, but depends on them, shapes its rhetoric to suit them, and shrinks to an electorally impotent size without them.

I’m listening to The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart, sometimes referred to as “America’s Agatha Christie,” though, truly, she predated Christie by a generation.

I got the audiobook from Librivox.org, one of the two most worthwhile projects on the interwebs (the other is Project Gutenberg). Librivox audiobooks are read by volunteers (some of whom read better than others; indeed there is one I cannot bear to listen to).

For the person who is reading my current chapter of The Circular Staircase, English is clearly a second language. I can’t quite figure out from her accent what her primary language may be, but my guess would be French.

Oh, her English is quite good, but there are tiny little giveaways. For example, the last name of the heroine (and amateur detective and narrator) is “Innes,” which said reader pronounces as “Ins.”

It’s actually rather charming.

Bob Molinaro is somewhat taken aback.

Nervous Nellies: First it was people hoarding toilet paper. Now gas. It’s embarrassing how panicky Americans can be.

I inadvertently scheduled two QOTDs for today, so I rescheduled one of them.

(This happens from time to time, but I usually catch it before embarrassing myself in public.)

Ashley Parker takes a long look at the implications of Republicans’ willingness to fall for the made-up story that President Biden was going to take away their hamburgers. A snippet (emphasis added):

But the not-quite-red-meat attack also offers a case study in how a falsehood can rapidly metastasize among Republicans — pushed not only by the party’s fringe but also by more mainstream voices, like former South Carolina governor and potential 2024 hopeful Nikki Haley. The argument dovetails with a common claim on the right that Democrats are out to ban meat-eating, whether for reasons of health or climate.

And the episode underscores how the shadow of Donald Trump’s presidency — rife with misinformation and mistruths and lies — still lingers, providing Republicans with a mendacious road map for demonizing a political rival. The nation experienced 30,573 false or misleading claims over Trump’s four years in office, according to The Washington Post Fact Checker — culminating in the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, which ultimately help provoke the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Aside:

Methinks “still lingers” is a phrase too weak to describe the poisonous legacy of government by con.

Via C&L.

Thom Hartmann calls out the con.

In reality, Republicans have spent the better part of the last 60 years doing their best to cancel everything in America that isn’t white, male or associated with a gun.

Follow the link for the evidence.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Thomas Henricks explores why some persons are susceptible to conspiracy theories. Here’s a bit of one factor he discusses; follow the link for the full article.

Participation in virtual worlds is another form of this self-chosen commitment. In that light, New York Times technology writer Kevin Roose compares involvement in online conspiracy theories to play in massive multiplayer online games. Conspiracy sites invite people to co-create and sustain a shared, alternative reality. Featured there are recurring characters ? heroes, villains, and fools ? for the viewer to savor. Storylines ebb and flow. There are challenges to decode messages and solve mysteries. Participants seek to be “in the know” and to pass on, via social media, their insights to others. Strangers get to know and trust one another, albeit through the safety of distanced communication. Players sense that they are part of something much bigger, and more daring, than the circumstances of their ordinary lives.

Caroline Graham’s Inspector Barnaby novels.

As my two or three regular readers know, I’m a mystery buff and have been since I first read A Study in Scarlet while recovering from having two impacted wisdom teeth extracted when I was a teenager.

I delight in the television show Midsomer Murders and watch it whenever I can; I’ve seen most of the episodes several times.

Graham’s novels led to the Midsomer Murders television series, which has now entered its third decade. The first episodes were adapted from the first six novels in the series. As John Nettles points out in his introduction to a recent edition of Death of a Hollow Man, in order to adapt the stories to television, it was necessary to abridge them (think, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books). The original novels are much richer than the Midsomer Murders versions, which are rich and complex in themselves. The novels have even more characters and even more complex plots.

Reading the originals while trying to relate them to the shows I’ve watched with so much enjoyment has been a delight. And it’s also a learning experience: Caroline Graham’s terminology and references have me turning to my favorite search engine (not, by the way, Google or–retch–Bing) to look up cultural references and English slang.

Read them in order. You won’t regret it.

Frankly (I do everything frankly), I would be quite happy if Delta moved its hub somewhere else. I have long said that, if you die and go to hell on Delta, you would have to change in Atlanta.

Wolfram Eberhard’s A History of China.

Understanding China’s past gives some context to China’s present.

The Librivox audiobook recording of The Red Thumb Mark, by R. Austin Freeman.

R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. John Thorndyke was fiction’s first forensic detective.