Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Doctor Who Eating Reindeer and Chocolate: Christmas Gifts Report

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Recommend Tea for All Reasons to tea lovers.

I suppose I should update you on the food gifts we got for Christmas. I mean, that’s what friends do, right?

My sister-in-law sent us a remarkable ready-to-eat package of salmon, pork, beef, and reindeer from Alaska Sausage and Seafood. Jerky sticks, sausage, and smoked salmon made a few good lunches. We opened the salmon for New Year’s Eve while watching the BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice. Not pretentious food, but it’s not a pretentious show either.

I may not know how to eat meat sticks. Are they just an add-on? It’s not like you can wrap a bun around one or two and call it a sandwich. No one ever calls a hotdog a sandwich but I suppose it is. Speaking of which, this tweet:

Going to start selling “writer’s kits” over the Internet. Based on my current work habits, they’d consist of a small glass of Scotch, a few cubes of cheddar cheese and an Oasis mix CD (and a Twitter login?).

To which, writer Tony Woodlief replied, “Read this as ‘writer’s kilts’ and instinctively reached for my credit card.”

I also received Ghirardelli dark chocolate mint squares and a box of Andies. This has settled me on the only snacking chocolate I care to have year round. Keep your M-Ms, your Reese’s, your Cadbury eggs. I love Andies and these Ghirardelli’s are superb. I could make room for Peppermint Patties.

I gave the family a big bundle of tea from Tea For All Reasons, a company owned by an friend who took it over from her mother. I bought the Doctor Who sampler and the Jane Austen sampler. Some are delicately blended teas, others boldly satisfying. Starry Night in the Doctor Who set is honestly beautiful. It smells wonderful and looks like its name due to the cornflowers and blueberry. If you love tea and want to break away from the typical blends you find in most stores, look through the many options on this site.

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Buster Keaton – The Art of the Gag

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I’ve got a little translating work today, which puts me behind in my reading. So instead of a book review, here’s an analysis of another kind of storytelling — a video on Buster Keaton’s comedy film techniques. I’m a huge fan of Keaton. In my world, Charlie Chaplin is nowhere.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Chain Reaction,’ by Bill Kitson

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After workmen discover a pair of mummified human fingers (female) while remodeling a country hotel, the local police begin a search for some missing person who could possibly belong to them. Meanwhile various prostitutes are disappearing, possible victims of a serial killer.

The timing could have been better for Detective Mike Nash. One of his best team members has just left on vacation (or holiday, as they say over there), and he himself is having trouble handling the absence from his life of the woman he’s fallen in love with. But he’ll need to bring his best game to handle what’s going to be the most horrific case he’s seen in his whole career.

The book is Chain Reaction, by Bill Kitson. I found that I’d already read one of the books in this series. At the time it didn’t impress me enough to continue with the next, but I found Chain Reaction quite enjoyable, after a string of disappointing reads lately. Mike Nash is a relatable cop, and the story was well told, with a nice twist at the end. Too many woman cops in the cast, as is the custom these days, but the book was good.

Recommended. The main cautions are for disturbing themes.

Writing

Resisting the draft

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No review tonight. Instead, a little writing update. I’m sort of at a milestone, having sort of finished the first draft of the next Erling novel, whose name – I think – will be King of Rogaland. I didn’t really want to call it that, having used the word “king” in my last title, but it seems to be what the book wants to be called.

I say the first draft is “sort of” finished because I’ve already identified a major revision I need to make, which will involve ripping up a fair amount of the work I’ve done.

Which is, I keep telling people, precisely the way it’s supposed to be. The first piece of advice I give to young writers is, “Don’t worry about making the first draft perfect. Your first draft is supposed to suck. That’s its function. The first draft is raw material – unshaped clay, unchiseled stone. It’s what you make a real story out of.”

What amazes me is that I don’t follow my own advice. I sit here thinking what a failure the book is, because the first draft is flawed.

It’s like I don’t even listen to myself. Considering all the time and money I’ve spent maintaining this font of wisdom in my life, I don’t even use it.

No wonder I never made the bestseller lists.

Now, to take your mind off my miseries, here’s a short film – about a half hour. It’s an adaptation of a Terry Pratchett story (or at least based on his characters; I’ve never read Pratchett). But it impressed me in many ways.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder Revisited,’ by William Coleman

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Jack Mallory is a police detective in (as far as I could tell) an unnamed American city. In William Coleman’s Murder Revisited, first in the series, he is called off the investigation of a murdered young woman when the chief of police (whom he hates, and it’s mutual) orders him to investigate a cold case. 20 years ago, Timothy Waters was convicted of murdering his girlfriend, whose father is now governor of the state. Recently he was released from prison, because all the evidence against him disappeared. Jack is ordered, literally, to find evidence that will send Timothy back to prison, and to look no further. Jack has no intention of railroading anybody, and goes to work doing a real investigation.

Meanwhile, Jack is approached by the cop assigned to assist the detective investigating the first murder – that detective is notoriously lazy and sloppy at his work, and the cop is concerned another miscarriage of justice is coming. So Jack agrees to look into that one too.

Those are just two of the multitudinous plot threads that entwine to make up this unusually complicated story. There were too many coincidences in it for this reader’s taste. Also, author Coleman attempted to make his characters human and complex, but only succeeded (in my perception) in making them one-dimensional in complicated and sometimes contradictory ways.

The chapters were very short, the writing undistinguished. I didn’t care for this book. Maybe smarter people will find it easier to follow along.

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Is the Girl in ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ Dead?

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(Confusion aid: This is not about the recent movie by the same title.) “Wild Mountain Thyme” is a modern Irish song that’s so popular in Scotland most people think it’s a Scottish song. It’s song about plucking flowers from the blooming heather. That’s pretty Scottish, even in Iowa. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I fear for your education. I mean, it’s not like this is a Finnish song.

According to Irish Music Daily, “Wild Mountain Thyme” or “Will You Go, Lassie, Go” was written by William McPeake of Belfast’s McPeake family, who have apparently sustained traditional folk music for the whole of the last century. This song came about in the 50s. It’s been as successful as wild moun–nevermind.

The song seems inspired by an older piece written in thicker brogue, which starts like this:

Let us go, lassie, go
Tae the braes o’ Balquhidder
Whar the blueberries grow
‘Mang the bonnie Hielan’ heather

It’s something of the same song to judge by words alone. Hear the difference here. This older piece is a love song with a lot of flower picking in it, but the new song has an odd twist in the third verse.

To back up, the singer asks his lass to pick wildflowers with him, and that’s the idea of the chorus. In the second verse, he says he will build a bower by a crystal fountain for his true love and pile all the wildflowers he can find on this bower. Then he says, “If my true love she were gone/I would surely find another” among the many wildflower pickers.

Is this short shrift for the one women he loved minutes ago? That would give us an image of love being like a quickly withering wildflower or the lovers being like bees flying from one attraction to another. But because lovers in Irish songs so often die or are separated in some way, I wonder if the third verse gives us the picture of the singer standing beside his true love’s grave, asking, “Will you go pick wildflowers with us again? If you can’t, I can find someone else. I mean, everyone picks flowers on the hillside. But will you go? With me?”

I’m probably just reading into it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Last Lesson,’ by Iain Cameron

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A dog walker finds the corpse of a young woman hidden in the bushes at the edge of a golf course. The girl was a student, beautiful, smart and popular. But Detective Inspector Angus Henderson of the Bristol police learns she had a dark side. She’d been a model and actress for a popular porn site. Not only that, but one of her university instructors was among the site’s owners.

That’s the highly colored premise of One Last Lesson, the first volume in a mystery series starring DI Henderson, a native of Scotland relocated to the south of England. The story follows relatively predictable lines, and the characters never really came to life for this reader. Also, the final resolution kind of came out of left field.

There were hints, however, of relatively conservative views on certain issues on the author’s part. So points for that.

My main problem with the book had to do with punctuation. I’ve seen the same thing in a couple books I’ve read recently – a deficit of commas. I’m not talking about omitting the Oxford Comma (though I have opinions on the subject), but about ordinary commas the kind that separate clauses making it necessary for the reader to read the sentence twice in order to sort the thoughts out. No author should do this. One of the things the reader pays you for is to separate those thoughts out for them.

Verdict: It was OK, but it won’t ease your bereavement over the loss of Colin Dexter.

Fiction, The Press

‘The Girl Who Did Say No,’ by David Handler

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I’m going to do something different tonight, in reviewing David Handler’s short Stewart Hoag mystery, The Girl Who Did Say No. I’m going to give the book a less than enthusiastic recommendation, in spite of my fondness for the series as a whole.

The set-up is pretty standard for the series. Hoagy, one-time literary wunderkind and current ghost-writer to celebrities, gets a high-priced offer to do an editing job. Anna Childress, a legendary Hollywood sex symbol of the 1960s, died recently and left her personal diaries behind. Rumor has it the diaries contain the straight dope on all the film industry’s dirty laundry from the big studio days. Her agent has arranged to have the removal of the diaries from the bank safe deposit box broadcast on national TV. Millions are expected to watch, and the book is a guaranteed monster bestseller.

But when Hoagy arrives in LA, he’s immediately waylaid by the last of the old studio moguls. The studio head is willing to pay him twice his promised fee to just walk away from the project. The industry’s secrets need to remain secret, he says. That’s what people would really want, if they knew what was good for them. Hoagy refuses.

The story worked out in a fairly predictable way, it seemed to me, and was uncharacteristically downbeat for this usually light-hearted series. Plus, I detected at least one political barb. And it seemed to me the price was a little high for a book of this length.

But you might like it better.

Music, Uncategorized

Sea Shanties Are All Over TikTok, and Why Not

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Postman Nathan Evans of Glascow, Scotland has spent several months or more posting music to YouTube and TikTok. He sings some of his own songs, covers of popular songs, and also traditional Scottish folk. On December 27, he posted a video to TikTok with him singing a New Zealand sea shanty called “Wellerman.”

That’s the song that has been copied and harmonized with a thousand times over to make international media outlets write articles on everyone on social media singing sea shanties. It’s incredible. C|Net has a run down of it with some examples.

Evans told them he is as surprised as anyone with his suddenly popularity, and in a TikTok video posted yesterday he reports he has a record deal to release Wellerman as a single.

He has been planning to do more sea shanties. Fans have offered their recommendations. I thought to suggest “Leave Her, Johnny” and “Bully in the Alley,” but I see he has done these already. (Though TikTok folks may want to dwell on Stan Rogers’s version of “Leave Her, Johnny,” for inspiration. Oh, and I see The Longest Johns have already put together social media choir of “Leave Her, Johnny” with a million views since 12/30.)

Stan Rogers wrote “Barrett’s Privateers” himself, as he says in this video. That’s one worthy of taking social media by storm, despite the swearing in the chorus. Another contender would be John Kanaka, as Lars posted earlier. Here’s another that would light some people up, “Bonnie Ship the Diamond,” sung at the pace a Gaelic storm.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fighting Dirty,’ by Blair Denholm

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It’s not often I read a book that I actually dislike. Fighting Dirty, by Blair Denholm, is one of that elite group. I usually drop books that fail to please me, but this one sprung its trap at the end.

Technically, Fighting Dirty is not a book. It’s a short story, a prequel to a series about Jack Lisbon, a London police detective and former boxer who relocates to Australia. In this story we learn how Jack came to make the move.

Jack fixed a case for an old trainer friend, who promised him a large bribe, then failed to pay it. Jack threatens him. His “friend” then retaliates by sending some toughs to beat him up while he’s drunk (which he generally is). Then we see Jack going through recovery, during which time he cleans his act up somewhat. Then he decides to move to Australia, and we see a new, more likeable Jack – until the sucker punch at the end, which turned the tale, for this reader, into a horror story.

Not recommended.