First Looks category archive

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.

The Seattle Time’s Danny Westneat writes that, for him at least, the honeymoon with working from home is over. A snippet:

The findings (in surveys of workers-from-home–ed.) are wide-ranging, with pros and cons, but one main take-away jumped out at me: The workweek got longer, by about three to four hours per week.

(snip)

The reality of remote work seems, to me, kind of like when people got smart home devices like Alexa in order to access the internet, but it turned out it was the device that was accessing them. Who is it really benefiting?

Kings, Queens, and Pawns, the Librivox audio book recording of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s memoir of her experiences as a war correspondent for The Saturday Evening Post on the Belgian front during World War I.

Remember, if you are reading it on a computer screen, it might not be what it says it is.

Be careful what you look for . . . .

Listening to The Daffodil Mystery by Edgar Wallace (for whom the Edgar Awards are named) with VLC on Ubuntu MATE under the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection.

At the Hartford Courant, James Rosen discusses the Republican Party’s path from being a political party to being, well, a nihilist gang. Here’s a bit:

The stubborn belief that Trump remade the party is based on a misunderstanding of a fundamental dynamic that has shaped Washington politics for more than a quarter-century since I arrived to cover the national capital in September 1994.

(snip)

And so, back in Washington, over the coming months I covered the Republicans’ increasingly radical attempts to cripple the federal government. Intoxicated by his newfound power as House speaker, Gingrich’s ambitions extended far beyond the modest reforms in the “Contract with America,” his savvy campaign-marketing ploy. His acolytes, many of them political outsiders with ignorance of government (something that would become a hallmark of Trumpism), followed his dictates with fanatical fervor (another trait of the ex-president’s current congressional enablers).

He makes persuasive arguments, but I think he’s made one fundamental error.

The transformation began almost three decades earlier with Richard Nixon’s odious “southern strategy,” which paved the way for Gingrich.

Via C&L.

Trumpette lawyer Sidney Powells “Kraken” election law suit is crackin’ up on the rocks of reality.

Jason Blazakis warns that Q believers are behaving like cultists, and, like cultists, when a prophecy does not come true, their faith is unshaken. Rather than question their idol, they double-down on it. A snippet:

For example, after one of the co-founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult died, the other began preaching about taking followers to the “Next Level,” a science-fiction version of the afterlife. To explain the unexpected death of his co-founder, he began sermonizing that his followers’ bodies were unimportant vessels that they would shed upon reaching their final destination. He blended aspects of New Age science and evangelical Christianity to persuade them to go on one final trip, which ended with a mass suicide by 39 cult members in 1997.

Like the Heaven’s Gate cult, the QAnon community brandishes religious imagery and repurposes theories to fit new truths. Q’s theory about an impending storm where global elites are vanquished is a recurring end-times scenario in many religions, including Christianity. The predicted storm is still coming, they now say, when Trump retakes power March 4.

One of the most venal efforts of the previous federal administrator was attempting to turn public servants into his private minions.

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Just when you thought “social” media couldn’t get more vapid . . . .

Via Job’s Anger.

A History of China, by Wolfram Eberhard.

As one who trained as an historian, I believe that the past illuminates the present. Knowing China’s past will help you understand the China we deal with today. I commend this book to your attention.